Every so often, someone will send me an email asking how much do editors make? or how much do writers make? And most of the time, they’re really just asking what should I charge?
If you’re interested in knowing how much an author makes — in a salary sense — you should go to this post I wrote on Author Earnings.
Everyone else?
You’re probably looking for answers to the following hypotheticals:
- How much does an editor make on a developmental edit?
- What’s the going rate for proofreading my buddy’s brochure?
- How much should I charge for copywriting?
- If I wrote a feature for a magazine, what’s a reasonable price-per-word rate?
- A local company wants to hire me to write a script for their commercial, but I don’t know what’s reasonable — HELP!
And so on. For years, I worked on jobs requiring all of these skills and more, cobbling together freelance work from various sources. I wrote copy, I edited books, I wrote scripts (which I still do), and proofread newsletters. After years of this, I compiled an all-in-one spreadsheet that takes the mystery out of the average national rates for various writing services. I want you to have it.
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