I get a lot of questions about pricing.

In this episode, I’m going to break down the two most common misconceptions writers have about pricing, and I’m going to give you a framework for pricing your freelance writing services that will maximize your income now AND through the rest of your career.

Listen To The Recording

 

 

Read The Transcript: How To Price Your Freelance Writing Services

Hey guys, welcome to Write Bites, a series of 10-minute episodes on writing, marketing, and freelancing. 

In this episode, we’re going to be talking about pricing. I’m going to be touching on two very common misconceptions that writers—new and old—have about how pricing works and what they should be pricing.

And then I’m also going to be giving you a framework for how to price your services over the course of your career. 

The reason I’ve been thinking about this is I got a few questions from some of my course students over the last month about pricing, and I realized that even though I addressed it in the course, I hadn’t quite gone as in depth as I had originally been intending. 

So, over the last two weeks, I’ve been putting together a brand new, super in-depth, step-by-step lesson on how to price—which just got added to the course earlier this week. 

And while I was doing that, I was thinking, “Hm, you know, I should definitely touch on this in a Write Bites episode as well,” because this isn’t something I typically spend a whole lot of time talking about. Anyway, this is going to be my 10-minute spiel on everything pricing. 

Let’s dive in. 

For starters we need to address two common misconceptions about pricing:

First Misconception

Number one. A lot of new—especially new writers—get super preoccupied with what they charge on their first few projects, or even what they’re charging on their stuff through the first year of their career. 

The thing you need to understand is that it really doesn’t matter what you charge initially.

Really unimportant. 

In fact, if you are not on the clock because of a lost job and a bunch of bills you got to pay, I actually recommend that you undercharge through your first year to try to maximize the workload that you go through. 

The more time you can spend working on real projects and increasing your mastery as fast as possible through that first year—that’s going to pay multiples in the following years in terms of your earning potential, because you’re going to have increased your mastery much quicker than if you’re just chasing higher rates through that first year. I see a lot of writers who are three years in, and they’ve only worked on like 20 projects.

And sure. Maybe they charged a rate on those 20 that the average three-year copywriter would be a little jealous of, but at the end of the day, they made less over the course of three years than other writers who are charging less because they just worked on a massively smaller volume of work. As a result, their mastery curve is way behind than if they had worked on a hundred projects over those three years. 

All that to say: don’t get hung up on what you charge early. What matters is what you charge over the course of years. And the framework I’m going to provide in this episode will help you maximize your earning on that, in that scope of years.

Second Misconception

The second misconception people have is that pricing is directly connected to value. People think that they need to identify the true value of their work and price it around that. But frankly, in a free market system, that’s not true at all. Pricing is not about what it’s worth,