On charging for writing services…

I took our eldest dog to the vet yesterday for a suspected ear infection. I’m a paranoid owner, and although I was sure there was nothing wrong, I booked her in anyway. I told the vet that my husband and I had both baulked at paying a potential fifty pounds just to feed my neurotic tendencies.

The vet decided as Nietzsche was fine, there would be no charge. Paul and I ‘high fived’ on the way out, feeling like we’d had a great result. The vet was probably fed up that we’d wasted his time. This is not the way for him to conduct a successful business, but it meant a lot to us.

Does anyone else have a real issue when it comes to giving quotes for your services? I find it excruciatingly embarrassing for some reason, as if I were some kind of fraudster on the make. I know this probably taps in to a form of imposter syndrome, but I still can’t work it out.

Here’s the problem. I charge £30 an hour for my services, as a standard rate. I’m very open about it on the website and in all correspondence, but somehow things never seem to work out like that.

And then friends come along and I can’t do it.

And then people ask for set rates with reductions, so I halve my fees.

And then I like people I work with so I decide to do lots of writing for free.

And then I decide that if a new business is starting out, I should be helping them, not making them pay lots of money.

If I were a mechanic, plumber or plasterer, I think things would be easy. I could quote to do a room or fix a bathroom up, and no-one would question it. Perhaps it’s because words are free, and belong to all of us, that writing seems to get a different response when we quote for it? Essentially, all I do is pick words out of the air and put them down in a set order to try and boost sales. When you think about it like that, it seems unfair!

Don’t get me wrong, some jobs (such as writing proposals) are easy to charge for. I sit down in the morning, write all day, count how many hours it takes me, and then invoice.

Other writing such as web copy is much harder. I have a system where I quote up front, and then guarantee that the price won’t change regardless of how many re-workings I have to do. My rationale for this, is that if I was a chef and cooked a meal for a set price, if someone didn’t quite like it I’d cook it again.

The other side of this argument is that lovely quote – ‘if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys’. I know that when I write for a client, it will be original text, on spec., and to a high quality. I shouldn’t feel embarrassed about asking for money for this service. And yet, sometimes (especially when I’m writing something I enjoy), it seems hard to take cash. I wish I had a trade like our vet, who can calculate his time easily to set prices, and bump up the charges when he feels like it by offering some antibiotics!

Does anyone have a solution for this? Let me know as I could do with all the help I can get!