Know Your Hourly Rate

We freelance writers too often focus on the per-word rate our magazine or corporate clients pay us. I know I'm guilty of it.

We assume that to make more money, we need to be earning a higher per-word rate. And all things being equal, moving up the pay ladder from, say, $.40 a word to $.80 a word, or $1.50 a word to $2.50 a word should yield more income. But it's not a given, unfortunately. Sometimes those higher-paying clients actually take more time than the lower-paying gigs and end up eating into our potential income.

A much more accurate way to compare how much money you're earning from each client assignment - whether we're talking a magazine article, book proposal, newspaper piece, or corporate project - is to track your time and calculate your hourly rate.

How much time is it really taking you to write those short FOBs? Are you making more money writing features than shorts? It's impossible to answer these questions unless you've fastidiously been monitoring the time you spend on each project.

Since I tend to forget to write down each and every minute spent on a project, I've found a software program called TraxTime (www.traxtime.com) to be a big help in this regard. TraxTime is a computer-based time keeper that enables you to clock in and clock out of projects, keeping tabs on how much time you're truly investing in each assignment or engagement.

I learned that some trade magazine assignments can be very lucrative for me, whereas other higher-paying projects net me less income because they are so time-consuming. Sometimes I choose to continue to accept those projects for reasons other than money, but TraxTime helps me sort out which assignments are the best for my bottom line.