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With all this talk about hourly rates, I wouldn’t be surprised if you overlooked the fact that you can negotiate freelance jobs that are based on larger units or blocks of your time… such as daily, weekly, or more.

Well don’t. I even suggest that you seek these kinds of arrangements and contracts out if you can. The business and financial part of your life will be a tad — maybe even lots — simpler. And that’s a really good thing; more distractions from your writing you do not need.

The easiest way to get clients and prospects to seriously consider the option of contracting you for larger time units, of course, is to discount your hourly rate if they commit to the larger blocks.

It’s up to you, really, how much you want to take off, but the standard procedure is start off with a small discount and work your way up to a larger hourly discount percentage as the time unit gets increases.

For example, let’s say you normally charge $50 an hour. You could then give your client a 5% discount for a daily contract. This means, you would charge $370 for the day instead of the usual $400.

For a weekly deal, however, you could tell your client you’ll give him double that discount (10%). So, instead of $2,000, you’ll go for $1,800.

And so on and so forth.

I have been fairly conservative, actually, with the discount figures above. It’s not unusual at all for freelancers to take off up to 25% or even more for contracts covering larger blocks of time.

Whatever you do, just remember one very important thing: As the unit gets larger, so does the discount.

You’d think that’d be obvious, but apparently not. I kid you not: When I was in college, a Subway foot long meatball sub cost 10 cents more than two six-inchers. So I always ordered the latter (just to be a pain, really), and every single time the Subway employee would ask, “I’ll charge you for the six-inchers, but can I just give you a foot long?”

Then again, it could have been a scheme to move lots of foot-long meatball subs. Hmmmm…

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