Pricing of articles - Who is selling for $1 - $5?

[jak]

On the Submit Article page is a link to Typical Prices. I use this for setting Usage prices but decide for myself on the Unique and Full Rights ones. If I have a target customer, it can depend on what I surmise about their budget. Some people price high and use the best Offer facility. Others set a fixed price according to the time it has taken to produce the article and what they want to earn for their time. It's a good idea to keep checking new articles, and how they are priced, as well.

[HayleyWriter]

Hi all,
Glad I am not the only one who thinks that pricing of articles should show our value for our work. It is very disheartening to see some authors continuing to undervalue their work. I think it really is telling the customer what we think our work is worth, and whether it is quality or not. CC markets as quality articles for the customers and should show this by recommending decent prices.

Maybe CC should look at some of the articles that are old, and have been on the site for a long while at extremely low prices. If the author is not currently submitting articles (like hasn't submitted for over 12 months), maybe try to contact the author to get the articles prices changed or deleted. It's also hard because the search engine only shows customers the list from usage ascendant prices, so the cheap articles are shown first. I've tried to get the search engine to show date descendant but it reverts back to usage ascendant only. This means the authors who have written in the early days of the site when pricing was very low get more hits and sales than those writing now for decent prices. Not fair, really!

I'd love for a minimum article fee and I like the email letter to all authors as a way of suggesting the minimum pricing strategy should change. Perhaps a new blog as well?

I haven't sold as much in this month, and am hoping sales will pick up again in January when people want fresh website information for the new year. I have lowered my prices slightly in case the economic crises is affecting prices, but I am still selling for reasonable prices for usage - not less than $15! I just can't afford the time it takes to write decent articles if I don't get a decent amount back on them when they do sell. I know it can take a few weeks or even months to sell articles here sometimes, but at least when they do sell I'll get a decent return then.

Anyway, off the soapbox again!
Hayley

[HayleyWriter]

Hey guys,

Isn't it lovely to see so many articles selling for full rights at very decent prices today! (I just wish just one of them had been mine - I've been sitting on a couple of dollars below the threshhold since the 8th of this month!) Anyway, congratulations to all who sold on the environment issues and the finance ones too. Full rights at decent prices (between $40 and $100 per article) - that makes it worth it for the authors, and gives the rest of us hope again.

Hayley

[Celeste Stewart]

I think that it's just as hard to sell a cheap article as it is to sell one at a nice price, so why not get what your time is worth :) ?

It looks like buyers are looking for environmental, finance, and surviving the economy types of articles right now -- (Hint to everyone wondering what to write about: write about these things.) I sold a $65 usage article on financial resolutions this morning and an $85 full rights article on being frugal a few minutes ago. So out of the blue and what a cool surprise! I noticed lots of other nice articles go through too.

[PhilipYana]

Thanks for the tip on what people seem to be looking for, will give it some thought.

On the subject of pricing, I made a spreadsheet and crunched some numbers. The author gets 65% of gross, and then in my case Paypal will take another few percent on the currency conversion and transaction fees. Then factor in that I'm probably not going to sell everything I write, not by a long way.

So to be earning a decent hourly rate on time spent writing (incl time spent on things that never sell) the gross probably needs to something upwards of $60 per hour of work.

Of course if people are writing for fun, and the money is just a nice little bonus on top, that's not an issue.

And I don't know if things will sell here if priced like that. (Sounds they do for Celesete though!)

But I think I'll be experimenting with pricing to see what happens.

[PhilipYana]

Btw, I pitched my second article (which is still waiting to be reviewed) at $225 use / $295 unique / $375 full rights.

It's 1400 words, over 4 hours of work.

Still not sure is that's too high for the full - or too low for use! But it can always be tweaked.

Always assuming it meets with Ed's approval in the first place of course.

[Celeste Stewart]

Not to be discouraging, but that may be shooting a little on the high side. Though, I'll be happy to be proven wrong ;)

[HayleyWriter]

Hi
You can always try the best offer feature too. Sometimes I have priced my articles high and then used the best offer feature (click the button to tick it just before you press submit). Then the customers can send you an offer for the article for the price they think is reasonable. You can either accept the offer, or decline it. There have been some quirks with this feature, but it works most of the time.

Although I must say, I agree with Celeste and you are probably really pushing the boundaries there - the only articles I have seen sell for usage above $100 were private requests and the same price was offered for unique or full rights and the customer should really have bought one of those licences anyway.

The highest I have sold any articles for have been $120 for full rights and $50 for use, if that is any help. I have not had the pleasure of private requests, so these are articles that have been written "on spec". I could possibly get some more, but I'm quite happy at those rates. I don't think we all want to go overboard and price ourselves out of the market - if all the customers have to pay that for one article, they will probably start looking elsewhere.

On the other hand, I think we do need to say these articles are worth a great deal and have a decent value. I can usually write a 600 - 800 word article in about two hours altogether (with proofreading - although that might be the next day), so $100 is $50 an hour, which is more than I earn in my "day job". I'm pretty happy with $25-$40 an hour overall, so if I have an article that sells twice for usage at even $20 -$25, I have made enough to make it worthwhile writing. You do need to take into account the CC percentage too. Articles that sell for more (or more times for usage) are a bonus. Somewhere between the two extremes of $3 an article for use and $300 is surely about right!

Hope this helps,

Hayley

[PhilipYana]

We'll see what happens. As I said, I'm experimenting! I can always lower it later if that seems like a good idea. I don't really want to sell that one for use anyway.

In this case I also think the content is extremely valuable knowledge, distilled from years of experience and training. So I'm darned if I'm giving that away for a $100. :)

And if all else fails, I'd be proud to have that piece on my own website to illustrate my business expertise.

I think Celeste sells a very high percentage of her work, which helps her get good rate for her writing time without pushing prices too high for the clients.

But if you're pricing equivalent to say $50 per hour of work, and selling only 40% of it, that is in reality $13 return per hour worked. ($50 * 65% * 40%). Actually a little bit less because of Paypal or whatever.

That's probably ok if you're writing for a hobby, or need to make money any which way you can, but not a good rate for skillful professional work.

For Celeste though the equation would probably be more like $50 * 65% * 90%, which is over $29 per hour.

However, I would definitely price lower if CC's cut was lower, which might be a win all round. i.e. Customer gets a more affordable price, I get the hourly rate I'm going for, and CC gets say 20% of say $250 instead of 30% of zilch, because there was no sale.


Maybe you write faster than me as well, which would certanly help! I seem to be doing about 300 words per hour, and that's on subjects that I know and don't have to research.

[BarryDavidson]

It does depend on how fast you write in some cases. I can write three to five 350 to 500 word informational articles and hour on subjects I know. I price tutorials higher, even when I can write two to three of them an hour (500+ words).

When I'm writing in full force (kids not driving me even crazier) I can average 45 to 60 an hour based on the time it took me to write the selling articles. I don't figure the articles which don't sell right away into the equation. When they sell (not if), I'll still be making the same average pay per hour scale.

As for CC's cut of the pie, I don't think it's so bad. If you take the time to snail mail, or even email submissions, you still have to only market an article to one publisher at a time. It can sometimes take months to hear back, and it's not always good news. I won't even go into the time spent searching for publications to submit to.

Today I wrote a small article, and I priced it at 7 dollars (usage only). I didn't do that because I'm undervaluing my work, but because I want to see that article on a few hundred websites. Call it a message I want to share with millions of people.

[PhilipYana]

I don't know what proportion of things will sell. Looking at the top authors who've been here a long time, Celeste is way out in front with maybe 90% of work sold. (I didn't actually do the arithmetic - even I'm not that analytica!)

But the other top authors are way below that. [Thinks, I bet Ed would want me to merge this para with the last... see other topic...]

They're selling 30%, 40%, maybe 50%. Sometimes only 10%.

So my thinking on pricing is, I should pitch it at a level where if I sell 30% - 50%, I'll be ok with the return I'm getting. And if I do reach 70-80%, I'll be a very happy man.


As or CC's cut, it is what it is. I have no issue with it, and it's probably necessary when dealing with a high volume of low priced pieces. Where there might be a better way is with a business model designed around higher priced work. I'd guess CC has to do about the same amount of work for $20 article as a $200 one. On a $20 piece they probably do need to get at least $6-7 to make it viable for them. But on a $200 piece, they perhaps don't need $60-70. And taking some of that off the customer price would most likely be good for sales.

So if I was CC or advising them, I'd suggest looking at something like CC takes 35% for pieces in the $1-$99 range, 25% on $100-199 and 20% on $200 and over pieces. Actually I'd probably say don't even accept work below $10, that's not a market you want to be in. It drives up cost and makes you look cheap at the same time.

Anyway, quite happy to work within the existing model. I don't imagine it'll be changing anytime soon. :)

[HayleyWriter]

Hi all,

I've been looking at the sales this month - wasn't January fantastic! While we have had one or at the most two articles sold on most days for $5 or less, the majority of sales have definitely been in the full rights category, and for very decent rates. Most days there has been at least one or more article sold at full rights for over $70, and a few were up in the $100s to $200. Makes it much easier to make heaps of money selling a few articles at those prices than trying to sell hundreds at the lower prices. Anyone still selling articles for less than $5 should seriously rethink this strategy! The sales prove that customers are willing to pay decent rates for decent articles. Selling cheap means you think your articles are worth less!

Anyway, that is my two cents worth. My strategy has worked, I made over $500 in January alone and I am absolutely thrilled, especially with the current exchange rate!

Hayley

[JoHunley]

Hayley, is it possible to see the sales for the whole month? All I can see is one page of the most recently sold.

[HayleyWriter]

Hi Jo,

No, it is not possible. You can only see the last 20 articles sold. Sometimes the list is replaced several times a day, other days it stays almost the same. I have just gotten into the habit of checking the recently sold list frequently, and noting what has sold for my own benefit. This gives me a good indication of hot topics and what prices customers are willing to pay for articles. I don't see every article sold, especially if there are many sales in one day, as does happen, but I see enough to get a general picture of trends of sales.

Hope this helps!

Hayley

[bwhite]

I sold one full-rights and one use. I'm not happy about what isn't selling but I don't have a large portfolio and, very recently, my PC crashed. I'm using the b/f's 'puter for now and he has MS Works which is a step back for me...LOL I guess I'm going to have to use his system to write and submit unless someone here has a Windows 2000 disk they can loan me so I can fix my system. Stupid file is corrupted and I need the W2K disk to get the file back.
*sighs*
Oh well, I'll have to work twice as hard and get more pieces written to replace the ones that I was in the process of on my system. Two steps forward, three steps back.... :(