Institute of Professional Editors Limited

Rates revisited
Pamela Hewitt

Seven years ago, I presented a paper to the national conference for indexers and editors held in Canberra. When the Professional Editors’ Association decided to hold a meeting on the topic ‘What are you worth?’ I dug out my old paper to see how much things have changed.

Here, I offer an updated version of what I saw as the situation way back then, with some new ideas for where we might take the debate and the action.

Editors, on the whole, are

• highly skilled, combining generalist and specialist knowledge
• highly qualified, almost always with a first degree, and more often than not with one or more postgraduate qualifications
• highly experienced, often with a track record of many years in the industry
• working in industries at the forefront of technological change, at the very heart of the information revolution.

This is looking promising. Surely here we have the cream of the knowledge society, highly prized specialists for the industries of the future. It should go without saying that, as employees, we should command high salaries, a company car and generous executive packages. As freelancers, the sky should be the limit. What wouldn’t a corporate client pay for the services of such people?

But wait. There are some other characteristics of the editing trade that I haven’t yet mentioned. Consider these

• gaps in national education, training and professional development program
• a predominantly female, underorganised workforce.

Even more damning

• our work is to do with words.

And, difficult as it is to measure, I would suggest that there is another killer factor at play here. As a rule

• we love our work.

We find it stimulating, fulfilling, varied, creative, engrossing.

When all these factors are combined, it turns out that we have a profession where the work is bound to be grossly underpaid.

This doesn’t mean that we should remain underpaid.

There is a range of options that we can explore as individuals and as members of professional associations to improve the standing of the professions in the industry and beyond. These include

• professional association or trade union membership and activism
• improving our technological skills
• promoting educational pathways for initial training and continuing professional development
• showcasing our skills to business, clients and the public through the activities of professional societies, through partnerships with other professionals…

My focus is a little more inward looking. While the activities that I have just outlined are vital, there is also a place for taking a step back and looking at how we think about ourselves. At the risk of sounding overly self-analytical, I suppose I am talking about the importance of professional self-esteem.

It’s my belief that valuing our services will lead to valuing ourselves and, vitally, in others’ valuing our services and us. In order to value ourselves and our services properly, it might be helpful to remind ourselves why our services are valuable.

Why should we value our services?

• You are good at what you do. You have to be. We all know that in the commercial world, you are only as good as your last job. If you are getting work, especially repeat work or work that comes via personal recommendation, then you must be offering a valuable service.
• When we offer our services, we bring our knowledge of the trade. In addition, we often bring
• knowledge of specialist fields (languages, academic disciplines and subject areas, technology)
• knowledge of the publication process
• the ability to meet punishing deadlines
• specific negotiation skills for working with authors, designers, illustrators, printers, typesetters, management or editorial boards…
• high levels of speed and accuracy
• many years’ experience.

Paragons like us would do well not to undersell such virtues.

By this stage, I hope you are all feeling worthy of respect and recognition. But of what practical use is this knowledge, you might ask yourself, if the marketplace holds your skills in low regard. In what follows, I propose some ways that we might put this ‘professional self-esteem’ to use.

Next time you provide a quote, or you find yourself negotiating with a client, think of it also as a platform to demonstrate the calibre of your professional skills. The next time you are working with colleagues, think of these activities as a way of increasing your knowledge of the profession. And if you are pressured to undermine your own worth by selling yourself short, think of the effects on your fellow editors.

Here are five ways to consider as avenues to augment the value you attribute to your own services.

My first proposal for considering the merit of your own work can be summarised by the word solidarity.

This is a quaint old-fashioned word that I think retains contemporary meaning. If I undercut my colleagues, in the long run I undercut myself. If I sell myself short, I sell my colleagues short. If I don’t value my own services, I undervalue the services of my colleagues. I prefer not to do any of these things. I would rather that my colleagues didn’t behave this way towards me. Solidarity forever.

A second way of improving your position in the industry at the same time as providing benefits to others is a simple one—networking.

Networking through professional associations, at conferences and through more informal groups increases your professional awareness and the value of your work. How? You might find out about new technological developments. You could hear about professional opportunities. A well connected editor can direct a client to an appropriate colleague who has specific expertise for a particular job. This might be experience with a certain kind of software, the ability to understand Russian, a background in astrophysics or expertise in literary editing. That colleague could be you, this time or next time.

Most of us have had the experience of people asking us to help find work or to help find someone with the right skills for a particular job. It helps everyone to put the right team together. As well as letting you know about opportunities, networking can also alert you to problems in your local industry. Networking might let you know about a client who pays late or not at all or about the disadvantages of a new contract under offer. Information like this can stop you from wasting your time and help you to target your services, which is another way of valuing your time and effort.

Our professional associations are networks, as are our personal links with other professionals. In addition, there is room for formal and informal groups of editors to join together to put forward tenders requiring specific combinations of skills and also to balance better the times of flood and famine that we often experience. No one wants to recommend a client whose work is not up to scratch and the best way to find out the calibre of your colleagues is to work with them.

Third, knowing your own worth is crucial when you are negotiating.

Your services will be valued and you will be taken more seriously if you start any negotiation from a position of strength. By this I mean working out your bottom line and deciding your position in advance. In the negotiating room, don’t be tempted to shift from this position unless you are offered some additional element that might make a new deal worthwhile. Put simply, this is another way of valuing your services. It means that in any negotiation you are clear about how far you are prepared to go, and it means that you will never walk out of the negotiating room empty handed. Even if you don’t get the contract, you walk out with your professional standards undiminished. You know that you have not undersold yourself (or your colleagues).

This leads me to my fourth area, and it is a vexed issue. People don’t talk about it much, but it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t happen. Can I be the only person who has been asked to lower my rates for some special reason? I’m talking about the dreaded D word, discounting.

I don’t think that bakers or mechanics are routinely asked if they will bake bread or fix cars for less than their advertised prices, but I know that editors are. Clients sometimes ask for discounts, we sometimes give them. In fact I am not opposed to discounting under any circumstances (although I know that some editors are). What I am opposed to is random discounting. An explicit discount for work you consider to be in a good cause or because the job is intrinsically interesting is very different from a discount because the client is trying it on, or because you feel sorry for the person asking for a discount or because you find it hard to say no. If you let clients know that you are providing your services at a discount rate for particular purposes by writing it into your quote, they shouldn’t expect it from you or any other colleague as a matter of course in the future.

If a client genuinely has only so much in the budget for editing, instead of working for less money, it’s often possible to negotiate performing a different service that does not involve underselling your skills. It might be possible to offer a manuscript assessment or a chapter edit, instead of the full edit originally discussed, for example.

Finally, quoting. Quoting is a very public way in which we tell the world what we think we are worth, by offering to do a particular set of tasks for a specific sum.

Many of you will be familiar with the following scenario: your quote for a job is accepted. When you begin, or part of the way through, you find that the specifications have changed. The job is bigger than the one you quoted on or there are endless meetings that you were not told about or you are asked to incorporate author changes that were not part of the original quotation. Bakers are not expected to throw in extra cream buns, much less to double the amount of bread they agreed to bake for a certain price. Mechanics will charge you more if you bring the car back with a new problem. I have known them to charge twice for the same problem! This is not the place for a detailed discussion of quoting protocols. But I would say two things about quotes or tenders if you want others to value your services.

• The first is to make sure your original paperwork is very clear about precisely what your quote covers. This can save a lot of heartache. It clarifies your position in the event of any later differences in interpretation of words and phrases in the written quotation such as ‘proofreading’, ‘editing’ or ‘project management’.
• The second is to suggest that you resist client requests to perform extra tasks for no extra payment. It sounds so simple, and yet if all the editors in Australia did this, we would find we were not taken so much for granted and our services were valued a great deal more. Overnight, perhaps.

When clients place us under pressure to lower our rates, or to do extra work for no extra payment (which comes to the same thing) remember that behind an hourly rate lurk many hidden costs. In particular, remember that a freelance editor is paid by the hour, by the job, by the page, or, the ultimate in piecework, by the word. Time is certainly money, but time is not our only cost. Freelancers are not paid when they are sick, they do not receive superannuation benefits, recreation leave, long service leave, professional development, they are not paid for the time spent in administration, coping with IT problems, preparing quotations, or for the costs of running a car and upgrading equipment or administering the GST on behalf of the government. So when you fail to incorporate those costs in your services, you are giving them away, as well as your time and your skills.

I resist clients’ requests to divulge my hourly rate, preferring to quote on the job. I find this to be an entirely successful work practice. It makes it unlikely that the client will go for the lowest hourly rate on the often mistaken assumption that it is cheaper. An experienced and skilful editor can often quote competitively at a higher hourly rate than a less experienced or skilful one. The quality of the work is a factor that clients would do well to take into account when assessing quotes.
Much of this paper has concentrated on outlining the problems we face in ensuring that our services are adequately valued.
You might ask ‘If it’s all so hard and so poorly recognised, why do it? Why not be a baker or a mechanic?’

It has been said that doing the work you want to do is worth $100,000 a year (a comment attributed to Isaiah Berlin). Add that to whatever you earn, and editing starts to look pretty attractive.

It’s heartening to know that what you do is creative, worthwhile, skilled and absorbing. It’s wonderful indeed to find your work satisfying. It’s great to be happy with your work.

But you might as well be happy and valued.

In preparing my original paper, I tried to get useful data on editors. As I expected, meaningful information was hard to come by. So I conducted a survey, asked editors about their professional priorities, their educational and employment background, their special skills and their current rates. I continued to run the survey at national editing conferences every two years. The captive audience seemed too good an opportunity to miss.

My aim was to provide some useful data for editors to publicise their levels of skill and expertise, and to gather information as a basis for further advocacy work.

The section that most people were interested in was the one on rates. Here is the average taken from the responses to the question about hourly rates, gathered in 2001, 2003, 2005 and 2007:

We know that many editors charge well below that rate. We also know that it is less than a third of the MEAA rate. I therefore proposed that PEA develop a recommended minimum rate, publish it on our website and promulgate it through the industry.

Given that $62 was the average reported rate from the last national conference, I suggested $55 as our starting point. I thought it was an achievable figure for competent editors to charge. Having a minimum recommended rate advertised on the website will help us educate clients about industry standards and as a guideline, individual editors naturally retain the freedom to charge above or below the recommended rate. It also dovetails nicely with the professionalism that will be generated by the national accreditation scheme which will hold its first exam on 18 October 2008.

The meeting at which I presented the proposal went one better and upped the recommended minimum rate to $60 per hour with built in CPI increases. Who am I to argue with my colleagues?

© Pamela Hewitt 2008
www.emendediting.com