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NCTechWriter wonders: <<Anybody have any idea what a good rate for pay per
word is? A friend has been offered some work with the pay in this manner.
She has 5 years experience and a master's in technical communications...>>
I'm not familiar with "pay per word" for tech. writing*, since this is
usually an excuse to write many more words than you need to write just to
increase your paycheck and clients are justifiably leery about such
agreements. Pay-per-word is common practice in translation, however. If your
friend wants to figure out a per-word rate for technical writing, ask her to
figure out an hourly rate first (based on where she's working and thus, on
what the market will bear), then figure out how many words she can create
per hour. That tells you the word rate. Add a fudge factor to protect
herself from cases where the writing goes much more slowly than expected,
for rewriting, for expenses, etc. Voila!
*Periodicals usually set a per-word price, but also set a target length.
Check out the Web sites for periodicals that publish material similar to
what your friend will be writing about (or the annual "Writer's Market"
publication) to get an idea of the range. Rates range from pennies per word
for fiction in low-circulation pulp magazines to dollars per word in
high-end, mass market, glossy magazines.
--Geoff Hart, FERIC, Pointe-Claire, Quebec
geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
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