Back in March 2010, I decided to conduct an experiment: I offered my biographical writing services for $25 a piece. This means that anyone in the world with a Paypal account and a mere 25 US dollars could request a personal biography for use in print (press kits, promo material) or on their website. The offer was aimed primarily at the broke-ass artists I knew, and I encouraged them to tell their friends about it.
$25 is not a lot of money, in general; it’s about the cost of a decent restaurant meal for two. For a solid biography that tells your story for the purposes of:
- Drumming up more business,
- Emphasizing your skills to win you a dream job, or
- Landing a book or record deal,
$25 is actually a very paltry sum indeed, no?
Fast forward to the results of this experiment:
I received a grand total of ONE request for my services.
Shocked? So was I. Why wouldn’t people shell out for such cut rates on such a quality offering? $25 for 500 words—that’s only 5 cents a word, which is well below the average payment of even small community newspapers! Was there something wrong with my pricing?
As the ever-insightful Naomi Dunford of IttyBiz puts it: my pricing is not the problem, it’s people’s perception of the value of my offering (click here for her great post on the subject, entitled “6 Things They Mean When They Say They Have No Money”).
Does this mean my bios suck, and I should charge less for them? Absolutely not. In fact, I should charge much MORE, because they’re worth the price. The fact that people do not perceive this service as being worth $25 doesn’t reflect so much on me as it does on them; I know my work is worth more than $25, and I will even guarantee it by throwing in two free rewrites to make sure you’re happy with the final product. There’s really no question of it turning out awesome, unless you are just the type of person who is never happy with anything—in which case I strongly encourage you to write your own bio and save us both the trouble.
Anyway, my point is that these days, I charge a lot more than $25 for my beautiful bios. And people pay for them. Some still complain that they’re not $25 anymore (even though that was a very limited time offer I put up as an experiment six months ago), and that what I’m charging now is too steep. But I’m not going to change my price for these people just because they’re unhappy about not getting a deal.
My current rates are still insanely cheap, and if you email me at laura@buttontapper.com to ask “How cheap?”, I promise to give you a good deal and excellent results, with two free rewrites included to make sure everything turns out just right. You’ll get a high-quality, custom biography written by a professional writer at a ridiculously affordable price.
So tell me, what could be better than that?
