The Professional Writer: Part Five - The Bottom Line
To be a professional writer, money needs to be part of the relationship; hopefully, enough money to form part or all of your income. But if you are lucky enough to be able to regularly receive money in return for your writing skill, then you’ve made it.
But keeping an eye on the bottom line is an important part of harnessing your professional career. There are a few things to consider that can make the difference between financial success or ruin, whether you are freelance or whether you are working for someone else. Even when you are an employee, an understanding of the bottom line is crucial to maintaining your role. More than a few writers have lost jobs over the years by not being mindful of how their work affects the company bank account.
If you think it crude of me to mention money in relation to the creative arts, then enjoy your hobby. If you are serious about turning your writing talent into a full time career, then it is all about the money, sad though it may seem. Someone has to pay for the printing or the film production or the distribution or the web hosting. Like it or not, money is at the centre of getting your creative works in front of your readership, and an understanding of this relationship can help you to maximise your effectiveness.
Setting the Price
On that wonderful day when someone offers to buy or commission your work, how much do you ask for? After all, your production costs are limited to some paper and ink and the power to your laptop. How do you adequately value the time and creativity that went into producing the piece?
Whenever I have to create some price guides for the sales team at Netregistry to adequately sell my services, I take great care to research what similar services are charging elsewhere. Many copywriters, and writers in general, vary greatly in price structures. Some charge by the hour, others by the specifics of the job. By getting an understanding of how they arrived at their prices, you can apply the most appropriate method to yours.
Also, you probably have a local Writer’s Guild or union body. These organisations usually have listings of standard industry rates, gained by monitoring sales trends and lobbying business groups. If you are unsure what the going rate is for a first time screenwriter, your guild will know. If you want to set a competitive hourly rate, your guild will know what is normal in your area.
It is worth spending some time researching your prices, as constantly changing prices in the future in response to experience can seem off-putting to clients, particularly if they go up.
How Much is My Time Worth?
Professional writing is a job, just like any other. And like any job, it needs to provide an adequate return for the time you put in.
Most jobs pay on an hourly rate – you work 38 hours a week, you get a set amount. You work less, you get less (unless you have sick leave or other entitlements). But writing doesn’t fit into this structure.
This is why many writers charge an hourly rate rather than a fee per item, ensuring that their time is always adequately rewarded. The downside with hourly rates is that customers want to know they are getting the best value for money. If it appears you take longer to write the piece than the client expected, they may feel they are paying you too much for your slow pace.
Similarly, having a flat rate can backfire as one 3000 word article can be very different to another 3000 word article. The subject matter, required research, density of technical detail are all factors that can transform a simple job into a much larger one, and this needs to be recognised in the fee.
Whatever you decide to do, it is important to remember the structure chosen and plan your time accordingly. If you’ve quoted two hours for the job, you are costing yourself money if it takes you three hours to complete. If you based your 3000 word article fee on the idea that it would take you two days to complete, you are out of pocket if it then takes a week because of the research involved.
It may not seem so at the time, but every job that goes over the hours you quoted is impacting on your bottom line and can be very, very damaging to your career. The professional writer always has one eye on the clock, tracking how long it is taking to complete the task. If you are not 100% happy with the draft you produced after the allotted two hours, it is up to the client to decide whether he wants to pay for further rewrites, as long as what you have completed satisfies the original brief.
Of course, leeway is always needed. Maybe you’re happy to put more time in because this particular piece could lead to further work. Or if you know the piece could be damaging to your reputation in its current form, you ma want to invest the extra time to protect your client relationship. Common sense does prevail, but whatever decision you take, there should always be a reason tied into your bottom line.
Freelance Issues
If working freelance, the fees you charge need to cover more than just the time you put in. You need to also cover the income taxes you need to pay, the materials you use, and also the investments and benefits you would take for granted if you were an employee. Being freelance means you need to plan your own health care, your own retirement fund, etc. Many a freelancer has fallen down when realising the money they have coming in doesn’t cover the broader issues of a working life.
If you do choose to go freelance and earn a living from your writing, factor in all these expenses on top of your hourly rate to produce your figure. And then add even more to cover the hours you won’t be working. Freelance work means not necessarily always having a full dance card. You may not have enough work to cover 38 hours per week. But you still need to be paid as if you were.
This is another reason why a writer charges more per hour than an office worker of cab driver or most professions. That hourly rate is covering a lot more than those other wages and you shouldn’t make the mistake of taking your existing hourly rate and basing your freelance fees on that.
Working for the Man
If you are employed by a company to write, as I am, you should always consider how your work fits into the bigger picture of the company. They are paying wages to receive a certain return on your work. If you were producing toys on the conveyor belt, your wages are covered by the sale of those toys down the line.
In my case, I need to ensure I complete enough copywriting jobs to keep the client money coming in. If I spend too long finessing a client’s website copy or newsletter, the company will still get paid, but at the expense of the extra time and wages paid to me. Therefore, their margin of profit in the bottom line is affected.
If I can do twice as many client jobs in the same time, the profit margin goes up and the bosses love me.
Adding time pressures to the creative process can seem barbaric to some, but it is the reality of the professional world.
Deadlines
I’ve spoken about deadlines elsewhere, but in the context of the bottom line, they serve an even greater importance. For every day that a screenwriter is late on sending in the script rewrites, the studio loses money. Sometimes lots of money. Potentially, more money than you were getting. For every hour the copywriter goes over deadline on the advertising copy, money is lost in company hours and wages and production delays can also cost the client. For every delay in submitting your column to the editor of the magazine, the more money they have to spend in overtime or production costs in completing the magazine. In fact, more often, a missed magazine deadline can see your article binned in favour of a backup piece, because these businesses just can’t afford to wait for you.
Your deadlines are a result of the needs of everyone else involved in the chain of getting your work in front of the right readers. If you disrupt that chain, it isn’t just inconvenient, it is very costly.
Most of all, it can cost you a job. Magazines don’t hire late writers. Movie studios don’t go back to screenwriters who let them down, no matter how much of a masterpiece the final script turned out to be.
The biggest quality business look for in a writer is punctuality. A publisher will always take a mediocre, punctual writer over a brilliant, late one. Every time. Without exception.
The Final Note
This is the last in the five part series on being a professional writer. I wanted to illustrate the skills and priorities that don’t get talked about enough when people talk about their writing. We all enjoy chatting about ideas and creativity, but the day to day grind of working professionally requires a deeper understanding of the business world.
Writers don’t usually make natural business men. If we had our way, we’d stay in our pyjamas all day, write when we feel like it and drink from the carton when no one’s looking. But the professional world requires us to behave differently. We need to enter their world, the world of suits and ties, balance sheets and ledgers, time frames and schedules.
By providing a brief guidebook into the professional world, I hope more of you can plan effective writing careers and successfully live in both worlds – theirs and ours.
All the articles in the series can be found here.
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I think one of the most stressful things about this line of work is having to worry about the bottom line more than others - having little or no job security can be extremely daunting in the face of the rising cost of living. I often find myself wondering if I'm "valuable enough" to to keep getting paid, and while I try to tell myself not to worry about it, the truth is that my boss is worrying about it even if I'm not. It's up to ME to make sure I'm doing work that's worth it - and that's scary.