(Image by Kelvin Stuttard from Pixabay)
My rates for editing and proofreading have been static for a lot of years now. And when I started the ghostwriting a year ago, I went in low but towards the top of what I already knew the client paid. After all, I was learning the trade rather than an expert in it.
Since then he’s given me a pay rise.
With all other prices going through the roof now, the time has come for me to also raise my rates. So one of the jobs I’ve done this week is update the price list. I have a price list in British pounds as well as one in US dollars.
This means that the editing and proofreading went up by £5 and $10 per 1,000 words, and my bottom ghostwriting rate went up by 3c per word. This is still low, but the next two tiers are much more like it. (The price list doesn’t actually list the bottom rate. This is purely a private rate.)
That might seem like quite a hike in the US dollar rate. However, the rate of exchange has changed dramatically since I started doing this work and I also needed to reflect that in my own price hike.
I kept my writing rate as it is because there aren’t a lot of markets these days that pay £100/$100 per 1,000 words, and those that do generally pay it anyway, or more if that’s what their rate is.
When I started writing back in 1985 I was getting £100/1,000 and I really think that it should be closer to £500/1,000 by now. But as I say, there are too many markets that either can’t or won’t pay those kind of rates.
This is another reason I’m heading down the indie path. I can earn more by putting my own work out there myself, and I get to keep all of the money and all of my rights. Plus, I can reprint and reuse it to my heart’s content. And this doesn’t even touch the creative control I get to keep.
When I get around to it, I’ll take my old price lists down from the old site and I’ll put the new ones up here. At the moment, however, I have other priorities still.
