Starting a very small business-proofreading

[Cooper]

So, I'm going to try and market myself to my fellow college students as someone who is willing to:

Type up papers
Proofread papers
Rewrite papers

With a flat price per page fee for each. As far as I can tell, there is nobody else doing this. My biggest blind spot is, of course, pricing. I often severely underestimate how much people are willing to pay for my work, and was wondering if people here had any ideas, or had done this before.

[Sarlon]

don't know....but I'll be your first customer come the fall when I start college!

[PepperElf]

Be warned... you might end up amazed at how horrible some people's writing is. You may want to determine if you're going to just proofread for spelling & grammar, or are you going to also edit (or make suggestions) to their styles.


I did this a few times at one college. I think what surprised me the most was when people handed me documents where they'd typed up stuff themselves already... Until then, I'd never realized there were people out there who didn't know the difference between "comma" and "apostrophe"

He said, ,,So where are you going?,,

She replied, ,,Oh, I,m going to the store,,

Yeah, stuff like that.

[Tama]

Wish I could do proofreading, but I'm not in college and most of the places online to do that stuff make you pay a portion, ahead of time, of what you'll be earning. College students will be a good market...if you don't get tons of SCs.

[Cooper]

Yeah, in the HS market I've had a few. There was one girl who I told she should consider replacing any use of ellipses, because she wasn't using them correctly.

Her: It's stylistic!
Me: I agree, but I know this teacher, and she won't.
Her: I don't know...
Teacher: Yeah, ellipses are used...

[Seshat]

For both businesses, pricing your ultimate, will-not-go-below-this price goes roughly like this:

* Cost of materials. (I know, minimal for proofreading.) Include cost of time spent sourcing materials.
* Depreciation of equipment. (Your computer, thumb drives, etc. Or sewing machine, pins, etc.)
Calculate depreciation by figuring out how often each item needs replacing, dividing total cost by unit time. That's your depreciation per unit time. Include the cost of your time spent shopping for (including researching) the new unit in the total cost.
* Overhead time. EG, time spent looking for jobs, time spent advertising, time spent calculating taxes, time spent figuring out how much to charge, time spent sending out invoices and paying bills...
* Cost of your time actually spent on the job itself. Make sure you pay yourself what you'd want a boss to pay you! If you pay yourself minimum wage or less, you're severely undervaluing yourself.
* Other costs which I've forgotten. Insurances, paying someone to do your taxes, sick pay for yourself, holiday pay for yourself, other benefits... there'll be online calculators you can use to find a list of these. Our self-employed members may know where to point you to some.

If you're getting 30 hours of jobs a week, and spending 10 hours a week on overhead time, each hour of job needs to pay 20mins of overhead time.


Now that you have your rock-bottom-minimum price - the price below which you're actually LOSING money - take a look at the competition.

If the competition charges less, either find out how to advertise to the premium market and deliver premium service at what the market will consider 'premium prices'; or find a different business to go into.


Edit to add:

Find a gimmick.
My father would stop at one particular roadside seller for flowers for Mum. Why? He was the 'mintie man'. Every day, he bought a mega-pack of minties (a small wrapped candy), and he'd tape one to each bunch of flowers.
He provided good flowers at much the same price as every other roadside seller Dad passed; but he was memorable because of a gimmick that cost him about half a cent for each sale.

So find a gimmick that doesn't cut into your profits in any significant way. (Half a cent per sale does add up - but one extra sale a day more than cancelled it out for the mintie man.)

[Kheldarson]

When I worked as a tutor, I got paid minimum wage for a hour of work (which was around $6 at the time). That was for pretty much anything I did. So you may look at that as a baseline.

I'd also recommend being very, very specific in what service you're providing. There are a number of people who offer similar services supposedly...but they're really just writing the papers for a fee for students.

[Cooper]

Yeah, Kheldarson, I've been thinking about how I should make that clear. I won't write the papers for the students. I'd put too much time into it.

[fireheart]

Yeah, Kheldarson, I've been thinking about how I should make that clear. I won't write the papers for the students. I'd put too much time into it.

Maybe make it clear that you need to see drafts from that person before you write?

Alternately, make it VERY clear on your advertising that you won't collude or plagiarise for students.

[Cooper]

Yeah, I got a draft up of my advertising. I'll add that.

I go way over-the-top in writing stuff. For my New Testament class, I'm discussing biblical apocalypses. So I talk about the current view of the apocalypse, the two big old testament apocalypses (I'll have to look at the Davidic one before I add that), the four gospel's views on it, Paul's views on it, Revelation, and finally, the non-canonical ones.

I think I'll frame it when I'm done. <is such a geek>

[Seshat]

Maybe make it clear that you need to see drafts from that person before you write?

A proofreader shouldn't be writing anyway.

Hmm. Actually, you should make it clear whether you're proofing or editing, Cooper - and what each service actually is.

[Miss Fatale]

Online tutoring gigs tend to pay about $12 an hour for someone with a Bachelor's. Independent tutors around here start at $25, and that's the low end of the scale.

Dealing with this kind of clientele can be grueling (they want you to write the paper, they want you to re-edit a million times, they want it done in an hour, they want to argue every change) so make sure you take your sanity into account.

Good luck!

[BookstoreEscapee]

A proofreader shouldn't be writing anyway.

Hmm. Actually, you should make it clear whether you're proofing or editing, Cooper - and what each service actually is.

Good point. I used to be an editorial assistant, and part of my job was proofreading. Basically I was checking the copy-editor's marked copy against the final draft and making sure all the changes were actually made properly (yes, that meant character-by-character comparison...for academic math journals...fun!*). Occasionally I would find an actual mistake that was missed in earlier rounds of editing, but if that happened too often it meant someone else wasn't doing their job. Though in what you're looking to do "proofreading" would probably mean just looking for typos and other errors.

In college I did an internship for credit through the English department as a "developmental editor" on a textbook being written by one of the psychology professors at my school. That involved actual copyediting - finding typos and other mistakes but also suggesting changes to wording and pointing out where things might need rewriting for clarity and whatnot (she picked me in part because the book was aimed at about a sophomore level general psychology of women class, and since I wasn't a psych major I was in a better position to catch things that might have inadvertently been written to a higher level audience). But that was definitely a different focus than straight proofreading (or perhaps and additional focus; I was also proofreading the text as I went).

*Actually, once I got used to it, it kinda was fun...