Freelance non-fiction and technical writers will often be asked by prospective employers to provide quotes on writing projects. This can be hard to do accurately, especially when you’re starting out, because you have to be able to estimate the time it will take to provide the service, which depends not only on how fast you work but on things like the complexity of the task, your familiarity with the material and how much research and interviewing you’ll have to do, additional requirements like layout or editing, and so on.
However, it is very important that you do learn how to do it accurately – if you over-estimate how many hours you need, your quote won’t be competitive and you might not get the job. If you under-estimate how many hours you need, you’ll end up doing part of the project for free (or having to go cap-in-hand to ask for more money, neither outcome being optimal).
I’ve already outlined a way to work out the hourly rate to charge. Now here’s some tips for how to provide an accurate quote.
1. As I said in that prior post, you need to get very good at estimating how long you take to do various types of tasks. The easiest way to do this is to make specific observations: note what time you start a task, and note when you finish it (pause for interruptions). Do this repeatedly for all the types of work you do, until you get an decent average reckoning. Keep an ongoing record so you can compare over time to see if your average remains accurate and/or if practice is making you faster.
2. Consider the resources that will be needed to complete the project. Is your employer providing these, or will you have to use up some of your hours in hunting them out and organising them? Add in hours to cover it.
3. Always look at the project properly. Even when you have worked with an employer repeatedly, do not trust their description of how much work the project will require. They may under-estimate the number of hours needed or forget to account for added complexities. As a simple example, quoting on laying out a document may sound like a low-hours proposition until you open the document and see that it contains 150 inserted pictures that the employer forgot to mention. Always, always, always take the time to properly review the project and its true requirements yourself before deciding on a quote.
4. Consider the minimum level of effort required to do a job. Very simple jobs may only take you a few hours – they earn a pittance and can be irritating to fit into a schedule and complete paperwork for (this often takes just as long as for major jobs that earn ten times as much). Many contractors have a minimum rate that they charge (“I don’t get out of bed for less than…”) that applies to all little jobs.
5. Account for all additional tasks. As with working out an hourly rate, you need to learn to tally up the incidental work required in completing a writing project outside the relatively standard tasks of researching, writing and revising. This may include such simple but time-consuming things as setting up a template or file structure, going back and forth with the employer to clarify requirements, or scanning and taking photographs.
6. Clearly specify for which services your quote is valid for. Nothing sneakier than the employers who like to add in a few extra tasks once you’ve quoted and got underway. It’s not necessarily intentional, but such little ‘by the ways’ do add up. You can specify that you weren’t hired to do that task, provide a separate quote and receive explicit approval, or vary your original quote, again with explicit approval for the variation.
7. Unless you’re in a very tight competitive market, build in a little leeway to the quote. I often add 10% just to give me breathing space in case I misjudged. This might not be practical in all situations.
If, halfway through a project, you realise you did not allow enough hours to finish it, you have several options. Firstly, you can work faster so that you get it done within the rate you quoted. Quotes do have a funny way of dictating how many hours you end up spending on a project…
Secondly, you can ask to vary the quote. The best way to do this is to clearly and calmly list out the factors that require the additional hours/money. With any luck, you will be able to point out complexities or extras that the employer did not mention when they laid out the project for quoting. This doesn’t always work, and it may depend on how many projects you’ve done with the employer.
And lastly, you can suck it up and do the project for the price you quoted even if it cuts down your hourly rate, and write it off as a learning experience. It’ll probably only ever happen once, if you’re a fast learner…
