Per-Project Versus Per-Hour Pay
The same kind of logic applies to the question of per-project versus per-hour pay. Normally, as a magazine writer, you will be asked to accept compensation on a per-project, or per-article, basis. An editor will offer you, say, $800 to write a story. You take as much time as you need, get the story done, and collect your paycheck. Case closed. Occasionally, though — primarily at nonconsumer titles and sometimes with custom publishers — an editor may ask you to work on a per-hour basis, perhaps assigning you an article and offering to pay you $20 per hour for the amount of time you need to get it written.
Should you take the hourly pay rate, or negotiate for a per-project fee instead? Nine times out of ten, the latter is the more lucrative answer. Here's why.
Knowing Your Pace
As you get better at the craft of magazine writing, you tend to do it faster. Be it reporting, writing, or self-editing, you will be able to cut to the chase a bit sooner as your career progresses. An article that took you three days to report and write during your first year in the business, for instance, may take you only a day to report and write just a year later. You'll just learn to do things quicker at the same level of quality.
How can you tell what your pace is for writing articles?
Count the number of assignments you completed in the past year and divide that number into the total number of days you worked during the year. If you completed sixty-five articles during 300 days of work, then your pace for writing each article is about four and a half days.
Now, if you can make the same $1,000 for writing an article in one day that it used to take you three days to produce, you're going to be in much better financial shape overall. You can add two more articles to your workload over that same three-day time period, at an additional $1,000 apiece, and triple your income without tripling the amount of time you're working in general.
Making the Most of Your Time
On the other hand, let's say you charged $30 an hour for writing an article. If it took you three days to write the story, working eight-hour days, then you would earn $720 — already less than the going per-project rate of $1,000 in the previous example. And, if you improved your skills enough to write that article in one day, you would actually be decreasing your income to $240 total.
True, you could add two more clients and charge each of them $30 an hour to write two more stories in the same amount of time, but you would still be making that same $720 after three days' worth of work — and you will have done three times the amount of work as if you'd simply asked for the $1,000-per-story fee in the first place.
Do not let editors take advantage of the fact that you are fast on the job. Don't accept comments such as, “It'll take you a day to write, so we'll pay you $250.” Instead, explain that you want a per-story fee of at least $1,000 because that is the going rate for good stories — and the amount of time it takes you to write one is irrelevant.
The Bottom Line
So you see, finding ways to increase your income is as much about setting your own pace and payment terms as it is about landing high-paying assignments. Don't be afraid to negotiate a deal that earns you the most money for your particular set of expertise and skills — and remember to throw in as many little extras as you can to increase your income even more.
