Dear WordCount:

I applied for a blogging job with a local company. They want to know what I’d want to be paid for posts of 250 to 600 words. Can you give me some idea of the range of going rates?

Signed,

J.B.

Dear J.B.:

Thanks for writing, and congratulations on being approached about the paid blogging gig, that’s huge. A couple thoughts:

I always underestimate how fast I can write posts. When I think I can do something in 30 minutes it takes an hour, and if I plan for an hour it takes two. So, I would add 100 percent to your estimate of how long it will take, if not more. The extra time covers things like phone calls with the boss – or depending on the  situation the editor or site publisher –  to discuss story ideas or other things, your own idea development, research, writing, and if you’re loading posts into their content management system, the time it takes to find and add links, meta tags, graphics, etc.

Fees for blog posts are literally all over the map, from pennies per word to $1 or more. I have no idea what to even suggest. Instead, base the fee you’d like to earn on your preferred hourly rate and a reasonable estimate of the time it will take you to create posts, plus any additional time spent on client management.

I hope you’re getting paid for the sample posts you’re writing. If they’re that interested in you, you shouldn’t have to write posts on spec. Maybe you could work out an arrangement so that if you get the gig, they’ll build the fee for the sample posts into a monthly retainer, and if you don’t, you’ll bill them for an pre-approved flat fee.

Finally, my rule of thumb when negotiating rates is to ask for more than what I’m willing to settle for to leave myself some room to bargain. For example, if you’re willing to write posts for $50 each, start at $100 and see what they say.

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Got a question for Dear WordCount? Submit it at wordcountfreelance@gmail.com.

In Canada, the biggest freelance issue in recent years has been rates.

For decades, the basic fee for the top, most prestigious consumer magazines was roughly $1/word and it has remained, for the most part, at $1/word to the present day.

Very recently, a few senior writers have negotiated up. I mainly write for the largest Canadian magazines and for several years have worked for $1.50/word, and somewhat more in the case of Reader’s Digest. If I were writing for some of the equivalent top magazines in the U.S., with my level of experience and a brace of National Magazine Awards on my resume, I would command anywhere from $2.50 to as high as $5/word. Still, for the most part here in Canada, writers are still being offered, and accepting, $1/word.

According to a 2006 report by the Professional Writers Association of Canada, in 1979 the average annual income for a Canadian freelance writer was $25,000. In 2005, it was $24,035. Yes, it dropped. If you were to take just three examples from 1979 – the cost of office leasing space in downtown Toronto, the price being charged by the better printers, and the salary of a magazine’s advertising sales director – and compare them to 2009, they will have risen exponentially. Not only have writers’ rates remained stagnant, but publishers today are demanding more rights and often taking even longer to pay than they did three decades ago.

With discontent rising amongst the ranks of freelance writers, several years ago a Canadian Freelance Union formed under the umbrella of the large Communications, Energy & Paperworkers union, which unionized much of Canada’s newspaper and broadcast industries. Nothing much seems to have happened with it. However, the mere threat of a union began to create a nervousness among publishers and owners of publications.

Then, just a few weeks ago, Derek Finkle, a freelance writer and former magazine editor, created the Canadian Writers Group, which functions much like the literary agencies many of us are signed to for book work. Its goal is to relieve freelance writers of the responsibility of negotiating their fees – like it or not, many excellent reporters and writers are less than brilliant businesspeople – and seek a more equitable rate structure as well as more favorable rights arrangements.

Some argued that launching the agency in the midst of the worst recession since the Great Depression was a bad idea. But after more than three decades of publishers stubbornly claiming they couldn’t afford to increase writers’ rates even as they found ways to absorb rising prices for every cost associated with their business, many of us thought the momentum happened to build now so the time had come.