A lance for hire

Freelancer, noun ˈfɹiː.lɑːn.sə—a person whose employment is self-generated, someone who works for themselves rather than an organisation, a lance for hire. Etymology: from noun ‘freelance’, attributed to Sir Walter Scott (‘Ivanhoe’ 1920), a portmanteau of ‘free’ + ‘lance’.

We make our own money. We make our own hours. We make our own decisions. We make our own mistakes. We’re unbound by any constraints. We don’t follow the crowd. We’re free. We’re independent.

But we’re also wary. Our world can be a difficult one. Our world doesn’t have the security of others. There are no bank holidays here. There is no holiday pay, no sick leave entitlement. We aren’t paid for coffee breaks. We aren’t paid to sit around and dream.

Time for us is money. But time has a habit of swirling down plugholes. We answer emails. We wrangle with websites. We write newsletters. We do professional development. We apply for opportunities. We make business plans. We file our taxes. These are all things that need to be done, but none of them earn us any actual money.

So, we buckle down. We conjure more hours. We work harder. And our work is still enjoyable. But it can also be tough. We worry about the implications if no one signs up for our courses. We need to make X to break even. We need to make Y to earn a living wage. When we earn Z instead, we turn to new ventures. We diversify. We take risks. We juggle our many hats towards editing work or mentoring work where we worry about the implications if our invoices aren’t paid.

And we buckle down again—what other choice do we have? We conjure more hours. We work harder. And our work is still enjoyable. But sometimes we ask ourselves is it worth it? Are we earning what we’re worth?

Comparative expense

Worth is a difficult concept.

What is a person worth? What is a thing worth? What is a service worth?

When something exceeds what we think it’s worth, we tend to describe it as ‘expensive’ or less politely as a ‘rip-off.’

But ‘expensive’ and ‘rip-off’ aren’t the same thing. It’s easy to look at something we want to buy and moan about it being ‘too expensive.’ But generally what we mean is ‘it’s too expensive for me.’

It’s also easy to compare the cost of that thing to the cost of what it would have been in the past. I have little to no understanding of inflation and why prices go up year after year, but this is an undeniable certainty of how the world works. Prices go up. But our brains don’t always keep track of that, especially when it comes to ‘luxuries’ (like writing courses and editing reports) that aren’t so much a part of our everyday lives.

Another comparison many of us make is comparing one thing against another. How can a two-week writing course cost £105 when your one-month gym membership is only £23? How can it cost £40 for a critique of a 1000-word flash fiction? You could go out for a three-course meal for that much and still have a generous tip for your waiter!

But what we’re doing with this comparison is comparing apples with pears. Or perhaps it’s apples with purple-sprouting broccoli. It seems like a good comparison, but is it really a good comparison? For me, in order to compare the worth of different things, we should be better at digging down into the cost of making those things or providing those services.

So, let’s break that down for me:

1. I’m an editor with over five years’ experience. The professional body for editors in the UK is the CIEP. Most of my work falls under what the CIEP terms ‘substantial editing’ or ‘development editing.’ Their suggested minimum rate for this is £41.10 an hour. They suggest this fee should go up in line with experience. There are no specific guidelines for how much this increase should be, but I’ve seen an hourly fee of £50-£60 suggested for someone of my experience level.

2. I’m also a qualified teacher and the other side of my professional practice involves teaching writing craft, either on courses or workshops, or through mentoring writers on a one-to-one basis. The closest equivalent to this would be a teacher in a university—and the UCU (University and College Union) suggests a comprehensive hourly rate of £44 per hour. Specialist mentors meanwhile generally attract hourly fees of £60-£100.

3. By comparison, my standard hourly rate is currently £32 per hour. But often it’s slightly less than that.

4. For my courses, I spend an average of three hours providing help and feedback per student. 3 x £32 is £96. The additional £9 to make the course fee up to £105 has to cover (a) all the time it took to research and write the course in the first place, and (b) the time it takes to market the course. So, if everyone were to pay £105 (see below), I’d be earning slightly under £32 per hour all things considered.

5. For my editing work, the calculation is slightly simpler. On average, it takes me an hour and a quarter to provide a critique on a 1000-word flash fiction. 1.25 x £32 is £40. So, that’s the price. My other prices are set against the same criteria.

So, there we are. £32 per hour.

And many of you will be thinking how lucky I am. How many people are earning £32 an hour? That’s an amazing rate of pay!!!

But is it actually my rate of pay? Or do I need to take into account all that time that spirals down the sinkhole of answering emails, wrangling websites, and financial accounting? In a good week, I reckon that 70% of my time is spent doing jobs that attract income. The rest is stuff that doesn’t.

So, my hourly rate goes down. My hourly rate is now £22.40.

But what if I factor in everything I’d be entitled to in the UK as a salaried employee? That’s 8 bank holidays and 20 days of holiday leave. I would also be entitled to sick pay and the average UK employee took 4.4 days off sick in 2024. To this calculation, I should also factor in that the average worker spends 30 minutes in a typical 7-hour day making tea or coffee or going to the toilet. They get paid for this time. A freelancer doesn’t.

So, now I’m down to £18.20 per hour.

But then I have to account for transaction fees. On an average transaction, I lose 3.5% of the fee paid by my customer.

So, my hourly income falls again to £17.65.

But I still haven’t factored in my expenses—website costs, email costs, internet, electricity, training courses, memberships, accountancy software etc. I’ve also probably been over-optimistic in how much time I spend on ‘paid’ work and how much time I spend on ‘unpaid’ work. Sometimes, an editing report takes an hour and a half rather than an hour and a quarter. Sometimes, the split of my day is more like fifty-fifty between work that has an income attached and work that doesn’t.

So, it probably isn’t beyond the stretch of realism to suggest that my hourly income is actually around the £16 mark.

And this still isn’t bad. Many people in the UK earn less than that. But it does hopefully highlight how quickly that £32 folds in half once you start to prod it from every angle.