Why Freelancers Should Stop Rate Shaming
It’s not helpful or cute. You just make people feel bad.
In a few freelance communities online, I see people balking at “low” rates that are quite decent if not great for others. This happens a lot in the writing world where people won’t work for less than a dollar a word.
I’d love to earn a dollar for every word I wrote. But there’s more to the story than a per-word rate.
Not all freelance work is the same. Some projects take much longer than others and deserve proper compensation. Other projects are easy enough to do in my sleep.
And the thing is, most freelance projects don’t have an hourly rate. I’ve only freelanced for hourly pay as a music teacher. My writing work has been by the word or for a set project rate (except for the writing I do here on Medium, of course).
That makes it hard to determine if a rate is “fair” if you haven’t done that type of work before. After all, writing is so diverse.
You have content writing, copywriting, journalism, press releases…I could go on.
Writing a blog post about how to start a business doesn’t take nearly as much time as writing an in-depth report that requires interviews with experts. So of course the report should have a higher rate, even…
