What to Pay a Writer

What are you worth? What’s the lowest hourly rate that you’d accept to work for? Would you work at $1 an hour? Do you think $15 or even $20 an hour is reasonable? If someone asked you to write for an hour, what would you charge? What’s reasonable?

Did you know there are industry standards for a writer’s pay rate? Writing isn’t any different than any other profession. There are suggested rates of pay for all types of writing. Yet, many people hiring freelance writers have no idea what those rates are.

Words matter. A good writer can boost sales, increase traffic to a website, increase awareness, teach, or deliver an emotional message. Quality writing requires skills, talent, and ability.

Many people believe that because writing is a common skill, anyone can do the job and thus, they offer low pay rates to writers. This is a very poor attitude to have.

Writing is a common skill, yes, but not everyone can write well. To understand the point further, use this analogy: Everyone can run, but not everyone can compete as an Olympic athlete. An acceptable writer pay rate depends on factors such as experience, education, and skill level.

You get what you pay for. I often see projects where buyers state a firm budget price. “My budget is $1 for 1000 words. Don’t bid on my project if your rates are higher than that.” That buyer may think he’s being smart and saving money by weeding out what he believes to be over-charging writers. What he’s actually doing is encouraging sub-standard writers and sabotaging his own business. Smart? Wily? Not at all.

Cheapest isn’t always best. Again, you get what you pay for. Cheap work is just that – cheap work. Choosing the cheapest offer means investing more money down the line to have the cheap writing edited for errors or completely rewritten to make sense. You may even have to hire a new writer because the cheap text you bought was unusable.

If you believe a writer’s rates to be exorbitant, research to see if the writer is within the industry standards. Writers.ca has an excellent breakdown of pay rates per type of writing.

Keep in mind that you don’t need to hire the most expensive writer to have quality content. Writers.ca suggests $60 an hour for website content. Most freelancers are willing to work below that, charging a rate of pay that is realistic and compensates the writer fairly for their time.

Another good way of deciding whether someone’s rates are reasonable is to decide what hourly rate you’d accept for your work. Remember those questions at the beginning of this post? What were your answers? If you wouldn’t work for someone at $1 an hour, what makes you believe it’s right to ask someone else to do just that?

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