1. It’s easy being a writer, and anyone can do it.
2. It’s extremely difficult to be a writer (or at least to make money as one).

The truth is that both of these things are complete myths. Here’s the reality:

Yes, many people attempt to become professional writers, and some are highly successful. They can make it look it “easy.” At the same time, you have to understand that the majority of “wannabe” writers do not “make it.” If you look specifically at freelance writers, the truth is that most who give it an honest go will fail within their first few years.

It’s starting to sound like #2 above wasn’t a myth after all, right? Well hold on.

It’s true that being a successful professional writer can be very hard work. It takes dedication, and much more than simple writing abilities - you have to be able to market yourself and build a reputation or image around your own name.

At the same time, there are many successful writers out there - whether they be published authors, journalists for major magazines and newspapers, or even Web content writers or ghostwriters who you may not ever know.

All of these writers started from the same place - they all worked to build a writing career for themselves. It takes work, but it can be done!

You need to look at your own situation honestly.

You may want to be a writer, because you figure you can work from home, set your own hours, and have more time off. The reality is that freelancers often have less time off, and work far more than 40 hours per week (especially early on).

Maybe you think you’re an excellent writer, but you simply aren’t. Remember, friends, family, and others who care about you aren’t unbiased sources. You may not be as good as you think you are, or perhaps you just haven’t found the best type of writing for you to pursue yet.

As much as it sounds great to be a writer, many new or aspiring writers have no idea what’s involved beyond the writing itself. This is why many fail. It takes marketing skill (whether trying to write great queries to publications, trying to sell freelance writing services to clients, or trying to pitch a book to publishers). If you don’t have that, be prepared to spend a lot of money for someone to do it for you, or you likely won’t make it. At the same time, writing is a business. Unless you’re working as a writer full-time as an employee of some publication or other company, you’ll have to deal with administrative tasks like filing and bookkeeping. Again, not all writers really want to be bothered with such things, so they either neglect them or start to hate their work when they realize how much time as a writer is spent not writing.

So no - “anyone” cannot become a professional writer. It takes someone with basic writing abilities, marketing skills, an often an entrepreneurial attitude to manage all the elements of a successful writing career. Do you have what it takes? That’s really up to you.

• All Freelance Writing Jobs (associated with eWritingJobs.com)
• About Freelance Writing
  
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• MediaBistro
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Is your favorite site for finding freelance writing jobs not listed here? Feel free to add it to the comments to share it with other freelance writers.

In order to find the best hourly rate for yourself as a freelance writer, you’ll need to understand the difference between working hours and billable hours.

Working hours include every hour you work (assuming a “typical” full-time work week, we’ll say that’s forty hours).

Billable hours, on the other hand, are the number of working hours that you can actually bill out to clients, minus the hours spent marketing and on administrative duties.

Billable hours are often approximately, or a little more than, half of your total working hours if you’re not neglecting anything on the administrative and marketing side of your freelance writing career. To simplify the numbers, let’s round it to exactly half, and say that out of a forty hour work week, you would have twenty billable hours.

What that means is that the average hourly freelance writing rate you would have to charge for clients will be based on twenty hours per week instead of forty hours per week. Let’s look at an example (factoring that you would work eight hours per day, five days per week for around forty-five weeks of the year after accounting for holidays, vacation, and other time off):

If your freelance writing income goal were to earn $50,000 per year, many writers would assume that they would divide their income goal by the number of weeks, and then divide again by the hours worked per week, which would give them an hourly rate of:

$50,000 / 45 weeks / 40 hours per week = $27.78 per hour

The problem with this assumption is that, out of a forty hour work week, it’s not realistic to think that you would bill out all forty hours. As mentioned before, about half of your total working hours should be spent on marketing and administrative duties (especially in the beginning before you have a regular client base).

To get a more realistic average hourly rate to earn this income goal, you would instead base the calculation on billable hours each week, and you would get:

$50,000 / 45 weeks / 20 hours per week = $55.56 per hour

After figuring out a realistic set of freelance writing rates at the hourly level based on billable hours, a freelance writer can estimate the amount of time it takes to complete a certain type of project or to write a certain number of words, which is an effective way to then set per-project or per-word freelance writing fees.

Freelance Writing Rate Structures

• Hourly Fees - With hourly freelance writing fees, you simply bill out your time based on how long a project took to complete.
• Per-Word Fees - With per-word freelance writing rates, you charge a certain amount of money per word written (in many cases, per word published, so never try to add “filler” text to milk a project for more money).
• Per-Project Fees - With per-project freelance writing fees, you have a set rate per type of writing you do. For example, if you’re a Web copywriter, you may have a set fee per page. If you’re a resume writer, you may have a set fee per resume.

The Key to Choosing a Freelance Writing Fee Structure

When deciding on a rate structure, it doesn’t matter what other writers are doing, or what they think of your options. The most important thing to consider is the type of writing rate structure your target market will find most appealing.

As in any other type of business, think about your buyers. Will hourly rates scare them off? What about per-word rates (do you write for an audience with traditionally large pieces, or for a market that might be overly concerned with people adding fluff to up the word count)?

Is there already a standard rate structure in the type of freelance writing you’re pursuing? For example, many larger magazines pay a set per-word rate. Another example would be press releases. Most press release writers charge on a per-release basis. You rarely see them billed out per word.

Setting Your Rates Regardless of Fee Structures

No matter what freelance writing rate structure you ultimately decide on, it’s a good idea to come up with a goal average hourly rate (to do that, make sure you understand the difference between working hours and billable hours when setting freelance writing rates).

After you have an hourly fee average in mind, you can either go with that directly or use it to determine your per-project or per-word rates (by estimating how long certain projects take you to complete, or how many words on average you can writer per hour, including research and editing time).