The Copyeditor's Desk

While the Copyeditor’s Desk was down for a few days, a contract from our best client came in. They wanted us to sign a master contract that would govern our relationship in 2009.

At first glance, the contract looked OK. But as I was reading over the three pages of boilerplate, what should I come across but an indemnity clause. These little zingers are common in publishing: it’s a device to transfer the cost of any and all legal action or arbitration from the publishing company to the writer (or, in our case, the editors)—the very parties in the relationship who are least able to bear such expenses.

Usually you’ll see the word “indemnify” in the language. It’s a red flag: any time that word shows up, you should stop right there. This passage, however, was more subtle:

15. ATTORNEY’S FEES: Should Contractor not abide by the terms and conditions set forth in this Agreement and it becomes necessary for the Company to engage the services of an attorney or mediator to resolve any such dispute, Contractor agrees to pay all Company costs associated with this action, including, but not limited to, attorney, mediator, and process server fees. All legal action will be initiated in a Maricopa County, Arizona court.

This is exactly what “indemnify” means: to pay the costs for someone else.

We do not sign contracts like this. It’s far better to forego the work than to end up being rendered penniless by lawyers’ and court fees, regardless of whether you’re at fault. You understand, the language above says that even if a court finds in your favor, you still will have to pay the client’s legal fees, just because they decided to take some action against you.

Many magazine contracts now contain similar clauses. Do not ever sign such a thing!

When I was writing on a freelance basis for magazines and newspapers, I would take a black marker and ink these clauses out. This, however, is risky, because to make it legal, both parties have to initial the change. If your editor refuses to do so or has no authority to alter the contract, the fact that you unilaterally crossed out a paragraph may not change things.

Better to discuss the issue with the client. Often they will delete the offending clause—most of the time, they don’t expect writers to know what an indemnity clause is or to understand its implications. When you let them know you’re wise to that game, they’ll back down. If they refuse to do so, you’re better off not to do business with them. This kind of arrangement is unfair to you and puts you at enormous financial risk.

Some things are worse than not getting an assignment, and this is one of them.

I did let the client know the indemnity clause was unacceptable, and I politely explained why. Before long, I’m pleased to report, along came an answer to the effect that it was a piece of boilerplate they’d swiped off the Web. We should cross out and initial the offending paragraph and they would agree to the deletion.

That’s a relief! We didn’t want to lose the client. But on the other hand…clients are a dime a dozen; life savings are not.

Mrs. Micah, over at Finance for a Freelance Life, offers an interesting rumination on setting fees for freelance writing and technical consulting. She starts at the premise that one will charge an hourly rate and then touches on some signal issues for writers: the question of what your time is really worth and the matter of estimating how much time and energy a project will demand.
written by vh for The Copyeditor’s Desk. © 2008
Meanwhile, at about the same time, veteran editor Katharine O’Moore Klopf posted an article at Editor Mom that touched obliquely on the subject as she made some suggestions for where to find experienced professional editors. Take note, here, of this important statement:

In general, you won’t find the most professional or experienced editorial professionals on Elance.com [or on other sites like it, such as Guru.com], because the way Elance is set up encourages freelancers to outbid one another, to the point of lowballing. Those rates may seem reasonable to you, but they’re starvation pay for freelancers. With the rates that most projects go for on Elance, you’ll often wind up with the inexperienced newbies and the less-talented freelancers whom few other people will hire. You’ll be paying Walmart prices and expecting to get Saks Fifth Avenue work, but guess what you’ll often get instead.

Most writers and editors underestimate the value of their time and skills. It takes real talent to write well. And a editor gets to be good through broad and deep education. Each of these characteristics—talent and education—are worth a great deal, and when they’re combined in one package, they’re worth even more. No one should work for less than a living wage (the federal minimum wage, which is not a living wage, is now pegged at $7.25 an hour).

I’d like to address two facets of this issue: first, how to estimate what you need to earn; and second, how to get it from clients who in fact do think they should pay Walmart prices for Saks Fifth Avenue work.

Valuing Your Time

The first order of business for a freelancer in any business is to figure out how much she or he needs to earn, per hour, to cover living expenses and overhead. To begin, you need to estimate how much net income you will need to keep a roof over your head and food on your table. Elsewhere, I have figured that I would need to net a bare minimum of about $27,800 to maintain a crimped version of my present lifestyle, were I laid off (my current net from a middle-income salary is a little over $39,570).

Starting from your projected net, you need to add the following expenses:

· Taxes (state and federal income taxes; property taxes; vehicle registration fees, etc.)
· Health insurance
· Retirement savings
· Membership in professional and trade organizations
· Computer equipment
· High-speed computer connection
· Office supplies
· Increased utility bills resulting from working at home
· Unreimbursed work-related travel
· Incorporation and other legal and accounting fees

The largest of these will be health insurance and taxes, and unfortunately, they are the two items you can’t omit from your calculations.

For me to net $27,800, I would have to gross about $34,760.

Once you have an idea of how much you want to gross, you need to translate that to a rough hourly rate.

Let’s suppose I put in 40 billable hours a week, 50 weeks a year. Forty hours times 50 weeks gives me 2,000 billable hours; dividing 2,000 hours into $34,760 gives me a rate of $17.38 an hour.

O.K. Now let’s get real: to get a freelance business going and keep it running, you need to sell, sell, sell. A good 40% of your time will be spent on marketing and networking. A far more likely figure for billable hours is something like 20 hours a week, or 1,000 hours a year. That is, to earn $34,760, you’ll need to charge $34.76 an hour.

That represents a very modest income. If you live in a big American city, it will buy a lifestyle best described as “ascetic.” You probably will have to reside in a small town to live comfortably on such an income, especially since you will experience periods when no work comes in. This means that realistically you need to charge a much higher per-hour rate.

I aim for $60 an hour, and I’ve had clients suggest that is too low. Others suggest it’s too high, often by fainting dead away when they hear it.

At $60 an hour, if I worked 20 hours a week and gave myself a two-week vacation, I would earn $60,00 a year. My freelance activities earn nothing of the sort, of course, largely because I don’t work anything like that many hours.

Making Your Charge Palatable to Clients

Few people will pay an English major $60 to an hour, not even one with a Ph.D. The first thing that pops into their minds is that they can’t afford it. Second thing they think is that your highest and best use is teaching high-school or grade-school English for around $24,000 a year, an amount that would net you something like $9.60 an hour on a gross of $12 an hour (figured on a 12-month basis, which is how long you have to make that nine-month pay last). They think, my dears, that you have got your nerve to ask for a living wage.

So, what you  need to do is present your fee in a way that does not readily make your hourly rate clear. How? Translate it to a per-page rate.

How to Calculate a Per-Page Rate

a. For writers

To achieve that and do it fairly for you and for your client, you need to know how long it will take you accomplish one page of work. As an editor, how long will it take you to edit a page of copy? Or, if you’re a writer, how long will it take to write a page?

Obviously, this varies according to the kind of assignment you’re presented with and according to experience and expertise.

I can write and revise a 1,600-word feature article for a magazine or newspaper in two to four hours. But the writing is the easy part: to gather the material to compose such an article, I have to do a lot of research and interview a half-dozen sources. Each of those sources has to be reached on the phone or in person; this generally requires getting past a gatekeeper and then waiting for the person to return a call. It may require going to the person and spending upwards of an hour in a face-to-face interview. Assuming, optimistically, that I spend about 40  minutes tracking down and interviewing each of six subjects, that’s another 4 hours of work time right there…before I locate printed material and read it. Let’s add another 4 hours, then, for reading articles, books, and online materials. A four-hour project has now morphed into a 12-hour project, and that’s a pretty modest estimate. In fact, it’s likely to take much longer.

All of which is to say a simple magazine assignment can be expected, conservatively, to take a day and a half of work time. At $60 an hour, I should get no less than $720. Sixteen hundred words amounts to about 6.4 pages of typed copy. So, dividing 1,600 words by 6.4 pages, I should get $112.50 a page for a simple, straightforward magazine article.

Now, here’s something many beginning writers don’t know: $720 is cheap for a professionally written magazine article. I wouldn’t touch a feature assignment for less than $1,000. It’s just not worth my time to do it for less. Believe me: it will take more than 12 hours to complete.

Why don’t beginning writers know that? Because editors charge what they think they can get away with, and what they can get away with is outrageous!

Why can editors get away with taking outrageous advantage of freelance writers? Because writers don’t know what their time is worth! And because you are competing with people who write for ego gratification, not to make a living. Editors know they can find people who will do the job for the sheer joy of seeing their byline in print, and who will think a $300 fee for a $1,000 job is just pure gravy.

This is why, if you simply must try to be a freelance journalist, you should join an organization such as the American Society of Journalists and Authors, where you can learn from other writers how much they are being paid and what is considered a reasonable rate for a professional job.

It is better, IMHO, to write for businesses, where the custom of paying for value received is more widely  honored than in journalism.

Writing is hard work. That is why my rate for ghost-writing or cowriting a book-length work is $60 a typed, double-spaced page or, for writers who already have a contract, 100% of the author’s advance (minimum $20,000) plus 50% of royalties. This is based on a track record that includes four books published with prominent national presses, one of which was a best-seller. Less experienced writers might charge less, but anything below $30 a page may not pay you for your time. You should get between $10,000 and $20,000 to ghostwrite a book; at $20 a page, a 350-page manuscript would gross a mere $7,000…for what could easily be six months to a year’s worth of full-time work.

In any event, rather than citing a per-hour rate that may scare a client off, consider the nature of the assignment, estimate how long it will take to perform the assignment, multiply that amount of time by your targeted hourly wage, and add 25 to 50 percent for Murphy’s Law. This figure is the amount you should ask the client to pay for a proposed project.

Don’t ever agree to do a writing project on spec. And remember: “pay on publication” often means “pay never.”

b. For Editors

Editing is less difficult, although to do it well requires broad experience and a good education. If anything, the skills required to edit copy are more complex than those needed to write copy, especially if the copy consists of workaday newspaper, magazine, or website content. However, because one usually doesn’t have to spend hours in research and interviews, the immediate job feels less challenging.

At The Copyeditor’s Desk, our fee schedule is based on the estimated time it takes to edit or proofread a standard double-spaced page depending on the difficulty of the copy. The amounts we quote average out to about $50 an hour, which should net the editor $25 to $30 an hour, leaving $20 to $25 an hour to cover overhead. As a practical matter, if you billed 20 hours a week, that would give you an annual gross income of $50,000, from which you would have to pay the extravagant cost of individual health insurance and self-employed FICA (double the amount of FICA you pay as a salaried employee). For anyone living in an American city, that represents a net that’s just in the middle-income range. Remember: your net is 50 to 60 percent of gross.

With this in mind, when a client approaches us, we ask to see ten to twenty pages of the project from more than one section of the copy. (Writers often will start out gangbusters but fade as they plod toward the end, and so material deeper in the document may be significantly harder to edit than the first few pages.) We then sit down and edit the sample copy, timing the process. From there we can extrapolate how difficult the material is and how long it will take us to read it. The harder the copy and the more time it will consume, the higher our per-page rate.

The Advantage of Charging Per Page or Per Project

Experience shows that when you cite an hourly rate to a client, the client is daunted by the uncertainty of how much the final bill will come to. What, really, does $15, $20, $30, $60 an hour mean? The client is right to worry about this.

Even if you give the person an hourly rate with a cap, you still present an ambiguous proposition. So, the client thinks, this project should cost me $850, but I could end up paying less than that? If this person charges the whole $850, do I know whether she really put in that many hours? Additionally, unless you’re dealing with highly paid professionals or business executives, most people don’t earn $60 an hour. Most people don’t even earn $40 an hour—that would be $80,000 a year. Because they don’t have to pay their own overhead—because their employer is paying for their office, matching their 401(k) contribution, and covering a large share of their health insurance premiums—they don’t recognize that what you’re asking is actually about what a person who earns $40,000 or $50,000 a year costs his or her employer. They register a $50- or $60-an-hour fee as exorbitant.

For that reason, a fee that has a predictable bottom line sounds more reasonable, even if it amounts to more than the person would pay if it were prorated out by the hour. So, when you ask for a per-page or per-project fee, you’re more likely to earn what you’re worth.

Simplest answer: Write nonfiction.

Yah, I know: you want to write the Great Novel of the Western World. You want people to read your poetry.

The GNotWW has already been written, and it probably can’t find a publisher. And everyone on the planet wants people to read their poetry…but they don’t want to read anyone else’s.

Publishing is a business. Publishers buy what readers will read. Just now readers are reading nonfiction and genre novels. Precious few genre novels will ever make GNotWW; it’s difficult to get one published (though less so than “mainstream” or literary novels); and when you do, you’ll be lucky if you earn 10 grand on the thing. Ten thousand dollars for a year’s worth of work is not worth the effort. Even if you can crank one in six months, that still gives you a grandiose gross income of $20,000 a year. You can’t live on that. Well, you can, but no one in her right mind would want to.

Nonfiction works have the advantage of being marketable without the aid of an agent. If you have a subject—any subject—that’s useful or interesting to a reasonably large coterie of readers, you can find a publisher on  your own. Or you may be able to self-publish and sell enough of them to make it worth your while. One guy who realized he could write about maintaining his RV discovered he could make a ton of money by marketing a book on that subject through Amazon.com.

Yah, I know: crass. But my dears, business is crass. And publishing is a business.

You can find subjects that make you feel less whorish than some. A friend of mine, for example, a high-school teacher who took up magazine writing as a hobby, wrote a book on how to help your teenager succeed in high school. It was a subject that was right under her  nose: when you write about something related to your job, you are an expert on it. And anything you write that will help people in their lives will sell.

Later she went on to write YA novels. Not GNotWWs, but at least she can say she’s a novelist now.

So, look around you. What do you know, what do you do, what can you share that can make someone else’s life better? There’s your first subject.

My second published book (the first was a rewrite of my dissertation) was a trade book for Columbia, The Essential Feature. It simply described what I did for a living (I was writing for magazines at the time). The target audience was the kind of person who takes community college courses in feature writing out of a desire to become a writer with a capital W. It was not designed for journalism majors, but for people with a laptop on the kitchen table.

You’re listening? Target your book tightly for a specific reader. Tell that person something that matters for him or her.

Visualize the person in your mind and address that reader. Do not write for yourself. Do not write about yourself, except insofar as some experience you’ve had can demonstrably be useful for the reader. Writing is not an ego trip. It’s a business.

Next: Organize your content efficiently and intelligently. With the reader in mind, present the subject in a way he or she can understand easily and access quickly. Map out a rough table of contents before you start writing. You can always change this as you go, but it will serve as a guideline to keep you going in the right general direction from the outset.

Write tight! Get yourself a copy of Strunk and White’s Elements of Style. Read it. Memorize it. Internalize it. Use it!!!!!

When you have a draft, revise and rewrite until you have clean copy that you feel confident actually will work for your target reader.

Edit your  manuscript. Produce clean, grammatically correct, double-spaced copy with correct spelling and consistent style throughout. Follow Chicago style for book manuscripts and Associated Press style for magazine and newspaper copy.

Find a publisher. We’re talking about books here: for periodicals, you must have a contract before you begin writing. Here’s how you find a publisher for a nonfiction book:

1. Go to the library and get a reference worked called Literary Marketplace (LMP). This book, the bible of the American book publishing industry, indexes publishers by the subjects that they publish. It also gives the names and addresses of the relevant editors.

2. Make a list of subject headings and genres relevant to the book you’re writing. For example, if you are writing a book on how to beat alcoholism, look up subjects such as “self-help,” “addiction,” “recovery,” “psychology,” and the like. If you’re writing on how to sew quilts, look up “crafts,” “interior design,” “fabric art,” and such.

3. Look up publishers that say they’re publishing in those subjects and genres. Carefully note down

a. the acquisitions editor’s name (look for titles such as “managing editor,” “nonfiction editor,” or anything that appears relevant to what you’re doing);
b. the person’s correct title;
c. the publisher’s complete address, including the zip code; and
d. the publisher’s telephone number, FAX, website URL, and e-mail address.

4. Double-check to be certain you have spelled all of these things right! The fastest way to put off an editor is to misspell his or her name. The second fastest way is to get the person’s title wrong.

5. Compile a list containing this information for ten or twelve publishers.

6. Write a proposal package (more about which below).

7. Write a cover letter to go with the proposal. Customize it for the first six publishers on your list (i.e., address it to the correct editor and adjust whatever you say in the first paragraph to target that publisher).

8. Mail out a half-dozen proposals at once. (Yah, I know: publishers hate that. Writers hate getting screwed, too.)

9. As each rejection comes in, send another proposal to the next publisher on your list. Always keep your proposal in circulation!

10. In the unlikely event that you go through the whole list without selling your book proposal, go back to the library compile a list of another dozen potential publishers, and repeat the process.

Sooner or later you will find someone who will publish your book. If you don’t, then it’s time to come up with some other subject.

What is a book proposal and how do you write it?

A nonfiction book proposal is simply a description of what you’re writing plus an argument for why it should be published. It consists of these elements:

1. a cover letter stating what the book is about, who will read it and why, what similar works are on the market, and who you are and why you are so eminently qualified to write it;

2. a table of contents;

3. a detailed outline of the book’s contents (i.e., what’s in each chapter); and

4. three sample chapters, or an introduction and two sample chapters.

As you can see, the beauty of this for the wretch who dreams of making a living as a writer is that you need not have completed the book before you present it to publishers. A proposal is just that: a proposal. Once you have a running head start on your  manuscript, you’re ready to start marketing it. If you’re even moderately successful, you should land at least a small advance that will help support you while you’re writing.

Unless you stumble upon a very hot topic, as a beginning writer you can’t expect much in the way of an advance. Once you have a couple of books in print, though, you should be able to command $10,000 or $20,000 for a salable proposal. Maybe.

If you want to earn any more than that—or sell future books to publishers—you’ll need to do most of the marketing yourself. That’s another story.

Just remember: Publishing isn’t art. Publishing is a business.

–vh

When authors approach us with their manuscripts, many are not sure what an editor actually does. We cannot magically force a major publisher to accept your work or convince the masses to drive to the nearest bookstore to purchase it. But, we can take your words and clean them, polish them, and give you new perspective.

In this way, an editor, at least a good one, will aid authors in finding their voices. This is done by ensuring consistency, clarity, and an honest opinion of the possibilty of finding an audience for a specific work. An editor thus works hand-in-hand with an author making suggestions and changes as the work evolves.

A proofreader, on the other hand, is a final set of eyes. A good proofreader is looking more for the ever-present mistakes that happen in the process of transforming an electronic file in to an actual physical object. This process lends to minor errors in spelling, a missed comma here or there, and the typical spacing issues. The proofreader does not communicate with the author (unless a major issue arises), and is employed instead by a publisher that needs a keen, sharp set of eyes.

So, whether you are in need of an editor or proofreader, or are looking to work as an editor or proofreader, be clear that there is a difference. Editing takes a great deal more time and effort, and is thus a more costly service for authors…although we here at The Copyeditor’s Desk believe an editor’s input is worth every penny.

-TM

A young reader not long out of college sent in a query: How do you get started in editorial work, preferably of the freelance variety? Do you need an advanced degree?

If you have a bachelor’s, you probably can get an editorial job. Employers aren’t necessarily looking for degrees; they’re looking for literacy and accuracy. 

In my experience, it’s significantly easier to build a freelance business if you’ve spent some time working on the editorial staff of a magazine or book publisher, or with a public relations firm. I started in a 50% FTE job editing a research newsletter for a university. Didn’t have the faintest idea how to do it—had never heard the term “blueline”—but somehow I managed to land the job anyway. After a couple of years, I had learned as much and done as much as I was going to, absent an infusion of money that the college didn’t have. I left and promptly started getting work as a freelance writer, first for a local business newspaper, then for a city magazine, and before long for regional and national periodicals.

Look for trade groups in your area. By that, I don’t mean groups of would-be writers. I mean organizations such as the Association for Women in Communications, some of whose local chapters still go under the organization’s old name, Women in Communication, Inc., and the  Society for Technical Communication. Both are first-rate networking groups, and local chapters often have job boards that list freelance editing opportunities. Editorial organizations exist in droves. Google editorial + association to find several pages of leads. Probably the most promising for an independent contractor is the Editorial Freelancers Association, which offers job listings and health insurance. IMHO, the only nonfiction writer’s groups worth joining are the Writer’s Guild and the American Society of Journalists and Authors (ASJA). You need a significant track record of publications to get into ASJA, but the Writer’s Guild will take aspiring authors; it also has a health insurance plan.

In addition, seek out trade groups representing your target audience. For instance, if you’re interested in editing legal or medical copy, track down your state and county bar associations and medical societies. Find out if you can advertise in their newsletters or websites, and offer to write an article or column about the importance of well edited copy and how to get it. If you want to edit business documents, consider joining the Chamber of Commerce. Also approach local business weeklies and offer to write an article having to do with what editors can do for corporations.

Another possibility is to go to universities nearby (or not — you can do this all over the country, thanks to the Internet) and get yourself on the graduate schools’ lists of editors. Graduate students, especially foreign students, often need editors to help them with master’s theses and Ph.D. dissertations. Pay isn’t great, but it gets you a track record. 

Look for a state or local association of book publishers and join up. Tina and I have had several promising nibbles from our state book publishers’ association. These usually consist of small publishing houses or even individuals who are busily self-publishing. They often can’t afford to hire a full-time or even part-time editorial assistant, and so they’ll farm out editorial work. Introduce yourself as a person who’s willing to do copyediting and proofreading.

When you’re confident that you’ve developed the skills to edit book-length manuscripts, try contacting local and national trade publishers and university presses. These can be found in Literary Marketplace (LMP), a reference work available at most local libraries. LMP lists hundreds of publishers, with the names and addresses of their managing editors. Apply to these people by name, getting the spelling of their names and their addresses correct; send your resumé, some examples of your work, and a listing of your track record.   

Learn to index books, if you don’t already know how. This can turn into fairly steady freelance work. The American Society for Indexing is a national association. You can buy dedicated indexing software at reasonable prices if you find you are doing a lot of indexing work.

Be sure you know MLA, APA, Chicago, and Associated Press styles through & through. 

It’s not easy. Most of my contract editing work has come to me through word-of-mouth or sheer serendipity. You’re much helped if you can develop a specialty, such as medical, legal, science, textbook, or scholarly editing. None of these are as hard as they sound. We’ve found that editing math copy is actually very easy…much gentler to edit than subjects whose content may contain political viewpoints we disagree with!

I have spoken with self-employed editors who have developed quite specialized practices—particular types of engineering textbooks, for example—who claim to be making a decent living, working on their own schedules and on their own terms. Whether this is true and how these folks define “decent,” I do not know. I’m not quitting my day job, though, until I’m ready to retire with enough pension income to pay for the roof over my head. If you have a working spouse, an independent income, or a job that will support you without exhausting your energy, it’s certainly worth trying to start an editorial business as a sideline and then seeing if you can develop it into a full-time enterprise.

Good luck to you!