If you are a freelance writer or editor, it’s vital to know how much you are earning per job and per hour worked. You need these figures to work out your budget and billing rates – and to figure out which jobs just aren’t worth the effort.
The best way to work out your words written or edited per hour is to keep an accurate time-sheet of your work.
In fact, the best way is to keep several; different jobs take different amounts of time and effort. This is especially true if you do both writing and editing jobs; or offer several levels of editing (e.g. proofreading, line-editing, structural edits).
I’ve embedded a sample time-sheet on this page. Have a look and make your own copy (link below) if you like. You’ll want to mess around with it so it works for your contracts.
The orange-bordered cells are for you to fill in yourself – the rest should automatically calculate from that input.