• Your writing career

    When it’s time to raise your freelancing rates

    Don’t feel as if you’re stuck with your freelancing rates for the rest of your life. There are plenty of situation when it’s perfectly reasonable to raise your rates. Happy New Year! With each year, the price of doing business goes up. You will be feeling it, your clients will be feeling, it, and your local Starbuck’s will be feeling it. Don’t feel guilty or shy about raising your rates.  Or start wondering if your services are “really worth it.”  Yes, they are.  If you’ve worked out your personal rates for the past year and you start noticing this year that you’re struggling to keep up, that means that everyone…

  • Your writing career

    How to calculate your personal freelancing rates

      You don’t have to follow the crowd when setting your freelancing rates. As a matter of fact, the earlier you determine what you need to survive the easier it will be to get comfortable asking for what you think your services are worth.   In the last post in this series, I talked about how you can adopt other writers’ fee schedules to set your freelancing rates. For a beginner, this is often the most comforting, understandable and reasonable way to set your own rates. But it’s not sin to strike out from the beginning and set a rate that works for you and you alone.   Ignore the…

  • Your writing career

    Use other writers’ rates to determine your rates

    How are you going to set your writing rates? If you fail to, you can quickly find yourself accepting bottom of the barrel crap jobs. For a professional freelancer, this is the definition of “career suicide.” Today, I’m going to give the first of two options: adopting someone else’s rates. I know we veteran freelancers tell you that we won’t give you our prices because it locks us into what could eventually become a pitifully low rate (that’s what we really mean when we tell you “No,” but if you’re a total newbie, that’s really not going to help you any. Use someone else’s rates. I have two authoritative places…