Why I switched from hourly to per-word pricing (and then switched back again)
Update: Since publishing this blog post I have switched back to charging hourly. I thought about deleting this to not confuse designers who may want to hire me, but thought it may be helpful to other tech editors figuring out their prices, so I'll keep it up, and will add an update at the end explaining why it wasn't working and what led me to switch back.
Like most tech editors, for most of my career I’ve charged an hourly rate for my services, until I had the thought a couple of months ago to switch to a per-word rate. I feel like this isn’t a super common pricing structure for tech editing, in fact I’ve never heard of another editor doing it, but surely I can’t be the only one!
I’ve really been enjoying the new structure, and so I thought it would be fun to write a blog post about it to talk through why I made this decision, what the benefits are, and how I came up with the rate I use.
I definitely had a lot of selfish reasons behind this decision, but there are also ways in which it benefits my clients as well, and I’ll start with those first.
Benefits for my clients
No more estimates: I used to receive a pattern, estimate how much I think it will take me to edit it, wait for the client to agree to that, and then start editing. Now I save both myself and the client an email because they can figure out the price on their own because they know my rate.
Predictable costs: Before a client even shares their pattern with me, they’ll know exactly how much the edit will cost. They don’t have to worry that I’ll give them an estimate, then halfway through the edit, turn around and say I need more time.
Benefits for me
I can take my time editing: I have a tendency to over edit patterns, as in I'll do more reviewing than necessary because I'm worried about missing something. I've never known how to factor that in because designers shouldn't really be paying for that time because it's not really a necessary part of the edit. By switching to a per-word rate I can take as long as I want and not feel bad.
I used to underpay myself when I went over my estimate: Whenever I took longer on an edit than I had anticipated, I would just eat that cost rather than bill for higher than I promised before I started the work. On the flip side, I also only billed for the time I actually spent on those occasions I came in under my estimate. So I was already sort of doing flat rate pricing, but without the benefit of edits that take shorter than expected balancing out the edits that take longer than expected. I was doing a lot of work for free, and I’ve got a business to sustain, so I needed to do less of that.
I spend less time on invoicing: Before, when I went to bill for work, I needed to consult with my estimate, the last email with a client when I told them the final time spent, and my time tracking software, and make sure all three lined up. Now I just add the word count to my spreadsheet at the start and it calculates what I need to bill.
How I came up with my rate
Doing a per-word pricing structure is best for an editor who’s edited several patterns already, because that’ll give you the data you need to figure out what you need to charge. I’m planning to add crochet to my tech editing services soon, and when I do that I’ll probably go back to hourly for a bit because I imagine my per word rate will be slightly different for crochet than knitting, so I’ll need to figure out what that number is.
To figure out my rate, I put together a spreadsheet of the patterns I edited in the past two years and listed the word count, the time spent, and the total cost at my regular hourly rate. Then I divided that last number by the word count to come up with the cost per word of each pattern.
Update: Why charging per word didn’t work for me
Flash forward to now and I've decided to stop charging a per word rate, and there are a couple of reasons for that.
I initially came up with my rate earlier this year by adding a bunch of patterns and how long I spent on them to a spreadsheet. Tech editing isn’t my full-time job, so in order to get a good number of patterns to come up with an average from, I pulled data from the previous two years. It’s been almost a year since I did that math, which means some of the patterns were edited nearly three years ago. I opened up my spreadsheet recently and it occurred to me that almost none of my current regular clients are even in there, meaning I’m charging them based on how long it took me to edit other designers’ patterns.
I stopped using time tracking software when I switched from charging hourly, so it’s not like I can just update the spreadsheet with more current data.
Plus, averaging everyone together like this means some clients will spend more on edits than others. Consider this: 2 hats with the same cable pattern, but one designer’s pattern is 1,000 words and the others is 1,500 words. Yes, it's true that me having to read fewer words may result in a shorter edit, but what if that 1,000 word pattern had several errors and the 1,500 word one didn't? The designer that sent me the shorter pattern will pay less even though I spent more time working through errors, while the longer pattern costs more but it may have taken me less time. It feels like I should be rewarding people for sending patterns with fewer errors, not punishing them.
Some clients also write longer patterns than others, which could lead to a large bill even if the edit didn’t take a proportionally long time to review. And because designers are pretty consistent in their individual style, it doesn’t really even out over time for them.
Another factor is that I used to use Google Workspace, but I had to cut back on expenses this year so I canceled my subscription. I used to click on the document preview from Gmail and could easily get the word count, but now I have to download the file and copy+paste the text into Google Docs to get that info. So it’s not even really saving me much time anymore.
So, given all these issues that I discovered over the last year, I realized it’s better to just charge an hourly rate. I get why a per word structure could work for other types of editing, but knitting patterns are just too complicated and variable!
I’m still glad I experimented with it, but am also glad to say goodbye to this pricing structure.
