On pricing.

My current project is a book of personal stories written by women who have suffered miscarriage or stillbirth, or who have struggled to conceive. The book has a coordinator and she's the person I've been dealing with.

I love working on books {although my preference is for fiction}, even though it means a lot of early mornings and late nights. I love the challenge of working in-depth on a project. It can be pretty tiring when you're working full-time and fitting in editing around the job! But I love it, and I'm not going to stop doing it.

This project has been valuable for me because it has made me think about how I price my work. Pricing is a vexed issue for so many freelance editors. I know this because it comes up a lot in the Backroom {the editors' group I belong to on Facebook}. When you're a freelancer you can charge whatever you want; and you can charge however you want - by the hour, the page, the word, the project. There are almost too many options!

I admit I am a little bit squeamish about money. I have a fear of over-charging people. I am, after all, not yet qualified {nearly!} and I don't have years of experience behind me. So when a potential client asks me about my charges I usually tell them a figure that's much lower than I would like. I don't want to scare them off.

I've been charging by the word recently, because I thought that would be appealing to the client - it gives them certainty about the price. But in the case of this current project, it means I will end up working for less than NZ$10 an hour, I expect. And that's not sustainable.

I've decided that beyond this current crop of projects I will start charging by the hour. My hourly rate won't be high, but I won't be squeamish about charging for more hours than I think I need. It means I will need to learn to be savvy about how fast I work so I can work out an accurate rate.