Continued from part 2.
Pricing Sample:
An editor I coached needed to make $50,000 a year. She also needed two weeks of vacation, holidays off, and some personal/sick days to take care of her kids. She was also able to work 6 hours a day, although not in a row, and wanted to make sure that her work time was filled at least 80% of the time. Here is the formula we used to determine hours she’s available to work each year:
((6 hours per day * 5 days per week) * 48 weeks per year) * 80% of time busy = 1,152 hours of work
• The 49 weeks allows for two weeks of vacation, one week of personal/sick time, and five holidays.
Next we had to figure out the hourly rate:
$50,000/1,152 hours = $43/hour (Not taking into account overhead, education, etc.)
Since no one wanted to hire her by the hour, she needed to convert the hourly rate into a per page or per word rate. She determined that there are about 150 words per page and it takes her 5, 10, or 20 minutes per page depending on the type of editing she does. So we developed the following two formulas:
$43/(60 minutes/time per page) = per page rate
per page rate/150 words = per word price
She created two versions of the above prices based on the three types of editing she does, which looked like this:
Editing Type A = $3.58/page
Editing Type B = $7.20/page
Editing Type C = $15.00/page
Editing Type A = $0.03/word
Editing Type B = $0.05/word
Editing Type C = $0.10/word
Now when she gets a call from a potential customer, she asks how many words are in the manuscript. If they tell her 77,000 words, she says, “For type A editing, your price will be $2,310.”
Gone are the days of calculating out how many days are left in the month and her workload. She no longer has to review the physical documents for typeset size based on the font used in the manuscript. She just uses a simple multiplier to calculate the answer. All the other background work is done by the previous formulas to free up her quoting process. And, if she’s a bit faster on a job or two, she’ll find a nice bonus at the end of the year.
End of part 3 of 3.
CJ's Corner 