I thought I’d get the professional blog going with a post on pricing. Scroll to the end for the short version, especially if you’re looking to get in touch.

As well as income tax and NICs, a freelancer running their own business needs to cover (at least) pension contributions, holiday and sick pay, office expenses, additional energy costs, the ups and downs of not having a fixed monthly income – so when browsing the market, it can help to remember that rates are not directly comparable to the salaries or hourly wages of conventional employment.

Some people may charge less, but I don’t try to compete on those terms. At the risk of stating the obvious, the lowest rates do not necessarily lead to quality results … it is not for me to second-guess the situation of other freelancers, but I am sure that having a reasonable quality of life means I deliver better results than if I were rushing through one text after another in a constant struggle to make ends meet.

I have many years of experience doing this kind of work in what are often highly specialized contexts. From my perspective, clients are paying me to use that expertise and devote to their projects the time needed to do them properly.

In a quiet period, I might well take on an offer of work at relatively low rates that I’d otherwise look to negotiate upward. Conversely, meeting an urgent turnaround deadline generally incurs a surcharge.

At the end of the day, it is a business negotiation. One of the reasons I like to discuss rates directly with clients is to take account of their circumstances – I know that a graduate student paying out of their own pocket, for instance, is in a different position from somebody with a substantial pot of research funding.

The same goes for the nature of each individual job – a ‘language check’ of non-native-speaker English by a real human is different from repairing unusable machine translations from a popular tool with a five-letter name, for example.

Finally, there is often an element of give-and-take in reaching a deal. Thus, part-payment in advance usually means faster completion because I can concentrate on the project – whereas jobs that pay only on completion can take longer because I have to spend time on other work in order to generate an income in the interim.

In practice …

… this all means that the more I know about a project, the easier it is for me to offer a starting point for negotiating a fee that works for both parties. Here are some questions I often ask in response to enquiries on the contact form:

• How long is the text?
• Is there a deadline?
• If it’s not ready yet, what is the schedule?
• What needs to be done?
• Could I see an extract?
• What is the budget/funding situation?

It is entirely possible that I miss out on some business because of this – I won’t quote unrealistically low rates as a blank cheque in order to get work at any cost. But taking a long view, I think developing a relationship with potential clients from the outset is a better way to successful collaborations.