Danger of Hourly Rates
I'm a big fan of smartly using hourly rates. You must know how much you need to make per hour, and viewing assignments in the light of your hourly minimums can be a good analysis of whether they are economically worth your time.
However, when it comes to financial business planning, looking only at hourly income can be limiting. Many writers grossly under estimate and misattribute the time they spend on assignments. You can't count just the writing. Time includes all the research. Maybe you did some interviews before and you think you can easily spin off another version of a story. The hourly rate on the new version may only seem good because you're pretending that there wasn't time and, so, cost associated with it. Those interviews took time to land, set up, and conduct. To not count that time is to literally subsidize the cost of producing the assignment out of your own pocket.
Another problem with looking only at hourly rates is that you forget that you're interested in making a certain amount of money each month. (You have done your basic financial planning, haven't you?) But if each of the assignments is relatively small, you'll need more volume to reach the income you need. For example, you might argue that 25 cent a word assignments are acceptable because you can do them quickly, making the hourly amount attractive. Yet, if you have to write 6K words at $1 per word to meet your monthly goal, you'd have to churn out 24K words at 25 cents a word - and that's a significant amount of work to nail down and complete in 30 days.
I've found that to do a good job of a given type of article at a certain length takes about the same amount of time, no matter what the pay level is. You could cut corners, but that affects the quality of what you do, which, in turn, affects the chance of your getting into better paying markets, because now your clips won't support what those markets want. Overall, the most efficient way to make more money is to get paid more per assignment, not to add on more assignments.
However, when it comes to financial business planning, looking only at hourly income can be limiting. Many writers grossly under estimate and misattribute the time they spend on assignments. You can't count just the writing. Time includes all the research. Maybe you did some interviews before and you think you can easily spin off another version of a story. The hourly rate on the new version may only seem good because you're pretending that there wasn't time and, so, cost associated with it. Those interviews took time to land, set up, and conduct. To not count that time is to literally subsidize the cost of producing the assignment out of your own pocket.
Another problem with looking only at hourly rates is that you forget that you're interested in making a certain amount of money each month. (You have done your basic financial planning, haven't you?) But if each of the assignments is relatively small, you'll need more volume to reach the income you need. For example, you might argue that 25 cent a word assignments are acceptable because you can do them quickly, making the hourly amount attractive. Yet, if you have to write 6K words at $1 per word to meet your monthly goal, you'd have to churn out 24K words at 25 cents a word - and that's a significant amount of work to nail down and complete in 30 days.
I've found that to do a good job of a given type of article at a certain length takes about the same amount of time, no matter what the pay level is. You could cut corners, but that affects the quality of what you do, which, in turn, affects the chance of your getting into better paying markets, because now your clips won't support what those markets want. Overall, the most efficient way to make more money is to get paid more per assignment, not to add on more assignments.
posted by Erik Sherman | 4:50 AM
1 Comments:
Amen, Erik!
Thanks for the reminder.
Heather
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