Thinking of Doing Writing Commissions

[powerplantanimations]

Yeah so like... what should I price myself? And where do I go? I've already made my carrd. But it would be nice to figure out what to do in situations like this.

[a.g.meade]

@powerplantanimations This page should help you get an idea of current industry-standard rates (see "Writing Work-For-Hire Only" section). I would suggest that you have both a per-word and hourly rate in mind so you aren't trying to figure that out on the spot.

Editorial Rates - Editorial Freelancers Association

[Katzalcoatl]

Without any idea of what your portfolio looks like. You should probably start with minimum wage per hour on what you should charge.

After that you should create a portfolio with all things you have written. I haven't seen your novels so I will assume you have only written comics. You should take into consideration the limits of your experience.

Soooo yeah. I am making lots of assumptions since I only know you have written your comic but I haven't seen anything else. Writting comics will limit your commission abilities since it is a very narrow specter of what writers do. It would be better to expand your portfolio and experience beyond comics if you want to make a living out of writing.

Considering my lack of information from your experience and capabilities I can only say charge the minimum wage per hour.

[powerplantanimations]

Yeh, I've added the other stuff I've written for. Specifically the HBO Max short I helped out with and some other animation stuff. I was going to do minimum wage though anyway lol.

[Ordinaryaverageguy]

You should probably start with minimum wage per hour on what you should charge.

Hourly rates may not sound like a good bargain to a customer, though. If I contract with you for hourly work, how do I know you did those hours, how can they be documented/verified? And the more an hour costs, the more a customer worries about how hard you're working.

As someone who wants a story or (e.g.) 10K words delivered on a topic by a given date, I'm pretty sure I'd want to pay for the deliverable rather than for the time it took you to get it ready. The delivered product verifies itself vs unseen-by-me hours of maybe brow-sweating labor or maybe half of it spent looking out a window.

I guess it's good to have an hourly rate in hand if someone insisted on paying that way. However, if I were hiring out as a writer, I think I'd discourage a customer from that route. Personally, I think I'd feel better & not be questioning myself about whether I really worked hard enough each hour or not.