Job Discussion Forums

stephw · Joined: 23 Mar 2004 Posts: 144 Location: xinjiang

Have got a job offer...only part-time from home, but still I'm in Beijing and have a fair bit of ESL teaching, plus syllabus and course design experience, under my belt. They want me to write articles for an English language newspaper and write articles to test Junior High students' English.

Only thing is, I've no idea how much I should be charging...anyone any ideas before I kick myself for being too low?!

Any mistakes here, bite me. I'm on my 4th bottle. Twisted Evil

voodikon · Joined: 23 Sep 2004 Posts: 1363 Location: chengdu

charge what you think your work is worth, and no less. are you charging by the hour or the word, or are you taking a lump sum? in the u.s., article writers usually make anywhere between $.25 and $3 per word or between $15 and $30 an hour.

of course, if this is a chinese employer, you'll have to adjust those rates accordingly. it might be easier to estimate how many hours you'll spend on the project, decide on the hourly rate you want, and then agree on a lump sum.

virago · Posted: Tue Aug 23, 2005 7:36 am Post subject:

I charged 100 RMB an hour for editing at home. The articles were already written and all I had to do was fix the grammar and sentence structure.

If it was complete new work and required research charge alot higher than this - 140-160 RMB an hour.

go_ABs · Joined: 08 Aug 2004 Posts: 507

Actually, it's not uncommon for semi-professional writers to write for US$0.10 per word. Professional (freelance) writers would rarely dip below 50cents per word.

If I were you, I'd do it this way:
Think about how long it'd take you to write something.
Times that by three to allow for editing and communication with the editor, and rewrites.
Work out an hourly rate (maybe 100Yuan per hour).
Divide the total rate (maybe 3 hours times 100 Yuan = 300 Yuan) by the word count (maybe 1,500) to get a per word rate. In my random sample, the rate would be 2jiao a word (300/1500).

Depending on the publication you could look at charging in US dollars. Maybe 15 cents per word. Cheap by Western standards, but good money in China. (They're unlikely to agree to this unless they're international.)

Good luck!