Every quarter someone asks us our rate per word. We do not have one. The honest answer is that the most valuable line we have ever written for a client was four words long, and the agency that charged €0.40 per word would have made €1.60 from it.
Per-word pricing was invented for journalism, where length is a coarse proxy for effort and where editors trim ruthlessly. It survived into copywriting for one reason — it lets clients pretend they know what they are buying. Three thousand words at thirty cents each feels comfortable on a procurement form. The problem is that nobody in the chain has any incentive to make it shorter.
When we price a brief, we price it against the outcome we are responsible for. A landing page that does its job is worth a known number; the same page bloated to three thousand words is worth less. So we charge for the work, not the word count, and we agree the deliverable in writing before we start. If we get faster at it over time, the saved hours go back into the next draft, not into a quote.
There is a small implementation point underneath all of this. When you charge per brief, your client trusts you to cut. When you charge per word, they don't — and their copy gets worse for it.
Words come last. Everything before them is research.
Filed under Pricing · TextImpactForge Issue Nº 042. Back to all pieces →