KNOW YOUR WORTH
What price for our words, and do we charge enough? Simon Whaley considers how we can value our writing.
Do you suffer from FOOPY: Fear Of Over-Pricing Yourself? Or perhaps you worry about FOUPY: Fear Of Under-Pricing Yourself? We all dread that awkward moment when an editor likes our article pitch and then asks what our rates are. Go too low and we run the risk of underselling ourselves. Go too high and we risk losing the gig completely.
Then there are bigger projects, like non-fiction books and novels. How do we go about valuing them? As any economics student will explain, something is only worth what someone is willing to pay.
What do we cost?
One way of valuing our writing is to calculate how much it costs us to write it. That’s not just incidental costs, like research time, or travel costs. But how much do we need to earn over the next year to survive as a full or parttime writer?
This places a value on our writing time. So, how much do we want to earn from our writing over the coming year? What do we need to earn?
Once we’ve decided, we then need to divide this figure by the number of our writing working days a year. Full- time employees receive, on average, 25 days annual leave, plus 8 bank holidays. That’s a total of 33 days paid leave every year. Assuming we’ll work five days a week as a full-time writer, we’ll have 227 days a year to earn our annual salary (five days a week multiplied by 52 weeks = 260 days, less 33 days of paid leave).