Finding Clients Who Pay High(er) Fees

A newer freelance editor reports that she’s having trouble booking clients for developmental editing at the fees she’s asking. She wants my help to figure out what to do next.

The Problem

“Most clients [who decline booking a DE] tell me that the reason is the high fee (for them) for the service. Some of them choose one of my cheaper services and others choose another editor. My question is: How and where can I find my ideal clients who are willing to pay the prices I offer? How can I become more visible to them?” – Sophia (not her real name)

The Complexity of the Question

This is a difficult question to answer in a blog post because of its complexity. People have written entire books on how and where to find one’s ideal clients willing to pay higher fees, and entire books have also been written on how to become more visible to those potential clients. So I can’t tackle all of that in fifteen hundred words.

But I can point out a few lamp posts that might help light the way.

Chart Your Own Path

The reality is that the path to a successful freelance career is different for everyone. So there is no step-by-step roadmap for Sophia, or anyone else, to follow. No one wants to hear that, but it’s true.

For example, when I first started out as a freelance editor, I sent out letters of introduction to a bunch of small- and medium-sized publishers, immediately got work, then spent the next twenty-odd years freelancing mostly for publishers. Over time I moved from smaller publishing companies to larger ones, but that’s pretty much it: I sent out a bunch of letters once and occasionally thereafter I sent out more.

I also, over the years, cultivated a wide network of colleagues, many of whom have referred work to me or pointed me in the direction of opportunities. (And of course I returned the favor.)

But if I say, “Send out a hundred LOIs to publishers,” will Sophia have the same result? Will you? Almost certainly not.

In contrast, I have a colleague who gets most of her work from editor directories. These are often run by editor associations, and people interested in hiring an editor can try to find a match through the directory.

I have been listed in many directories over the years and never, not once, have I gotten a job from a directory listing. Yet I have a colleague who gets 90 percent of her work this way.

I even run my own directory (www.developmentaleditors.com) that editors get work from. Except for me. I haven’t even gotten work from my own directory.

Is that annoying? Yes. Yes, it is.

But the lesson is, you have to find out what works for you.

Listen to Current Clients

Sophia is getting clear feedback from potential clients: her prices are too high.

That doesn’t mean she should lower her prices. It means that these are not the right clients for those prices. That’s disappointing, but it’s good information to know.

It means that her current marketing is not getting her in front of the right kinds of clients—those who will pay the fees she wants to earn.

Where can she find those clients? The problem is, I don’t know. And neither does she. She’ll have to experiment and find out. But what she has learned is that what she’s doing isn’t working. More of the same will probably not improve her position.

Obviously Sophia is doing some things right or she wouldn’t have people asking for quotes. And she wouldn’t be booking the cheaper services if people didn’t trust that she knows what she’s doing. That’s actually a very good starting point: I know some new freelancers who can’t even get someone to ask for a quote.

But from here Sophia is going to have to vary her marketing efforts. I know that Sophia is on some social media platforms. But she’s going to have to decide if they are the right social media platforms. And within those platforms, she has to ask, is she connected to the right people? Is she in the right groups? A conversation with some colleagues might help clarify some other platforms or groups she could be part of.

For example, when I first started Club Ed, I was on Facebook and used it for my social media marketing. But it was a terrible fit for Club Ed. When I shifted my attention to LinkedIn, suddenly I saw results! Tons of new students found Club Ed through LI, because lots of editors and freelancers hang out on LI.

As far as I know, Sophia doesn’t do marketing beyond social media outreach and an occasional newsletter. So, she may have to rethink that approach and consider other marketing efforts, such as doing content marketing to establish expertise and using SEO to attract readers.

Or, she could try sending out LOIs to publishers if she thinks they could pay her fees (here again conversations with colleagues could help her determine what fees publisher typically pay and whether that’s a route she wants to try). Also, traditional publishers aren’t the only ones who hire freelance editors: Several students at Club Ed freelance for hybrid publishers and book packagers.

Conversations with colleagues might help Sophia see some other routes to try. For example, one student at Club Ed works with Reedsy and while I have my reservations about platforms like that (they can be very low-paying), she makes it work for her and earns more than enough to fund her lifestyle.

Finding Your Ideal Clients Is a Process

When I first started out, there weren’t a lot of viable routes for freelance editors to take to get work, as indie author publishing was not nearly as prevalent then as it is now. So, I basically had one route to take, and in many ways that made it easier.

But it also made it harder: what if I hadn’t gotten lucky the way I did? What if my LOIs had received a resounding “meh”? I would have been out of luck. There weren’t really other routes to try. I would have had to get a staff job. (The horror!)

Now, however, there are other routes to try, and that means finding your ideal clients is a process of trial-and-error. If one approach isn’t delivering the clients you want, you have to try another approach.

Leaning Into What Clients Want

Finally, I want to point out that having clients choose cheaper services is okay. As I’ve said, throughout my career, most of my clients have been publishers. But about ten or twelve years ago, I started working with more indie author clients, and the Number 1 service they wanted from me was manuscript evaluation.

This is a high-level, big-picture look at a manuscript, but it is not developmental editing. It’s like … developmental editing lite. It is not as time-intensive, so I can charge a lot less for it.

So I just gave people what they wanted. They wanted manuscript evaluation? Okay, that’s what I marketed. It’s what I talked about, and it’s what I booked.

And that was fine. Because I was charging what I needed to charge, it met my income needs. A DE typically takes me about two weeks to do (though I’m not typically spending an entire 80 hours at it). In the same time, I could do four or even more manuscript evaluations, and make the same amount of money. The only challenge was that I needed more manuscript evaluation clients than I needed DE clients to earn the same income. But manuscript evaluations were easier to book because I was charging a lot less.

I also started working on manuscript evaluation + developmental editing packages. Once clients invested in a manuscript evaluation and saw how much it helped them improve their manuscripts (as well as how it helped them improve their storytelling skills), they were more inclined to then book a developmental edit with me so they could improve even more (and learn even more).

So instead of just doing a manuscript evaluation as a one-off effort, I talked about it as the first step of a journey for serious authors. The manuscript evaluation helped these clients see that my higher-priced services were well worth investing in.

Not every manuscript evaluation client became a developmental editing client but enough of them did for this approach to work well for me.

Eventually Club Ed took off and I stopped working so much with indie authors, but in that period, I tried to lean into what clients were willing to pay for.

I know one editor who catches clients at the start of their writing journey, coaches them through writing their first draft, helps guide their revisions (through a combination of coaching and manuscript evaluation) and then does developmental editing on a later draft that’s ready for it. This process unfolds over a long period of time but because of her early coaching efforts, clients trust her and are willing to invest in her services.

So, if Sophia (or you) wanted to take that approach, what would you do to find clients at the start of their writing journey? What social media platform would you be on? Or would you be working on SEO so that new writers who don’t have a lot of connections already could find you through online search? Or would you give a class at the local arts center or local senior center? Or … ?

While there is no simple answer to finding the clients who can pay your fees, there are steps you can take to find the right path to those better-paying clients.