Bargain copy is no bargain

Expert salesmanship in copy does not come cheap. Still, if you want to grow, it is a reasonable business investment. You’ll reap the profits from your brochure, letter, or website for years.

If you want copy that sells, you must expect to pay for something besides a copywriter’s time or word count. I pour 25 years of professional marketing insight into every project I take on. Yet, you may find that my rates are not much higher than those of a less-experienced writer. With the novice you must cover the cost of wasted time and motion, while I can go straight to work.

You can see my typical copywriting project rates below. However, please feel free to now for a free estimate, with no obligation.

A guide to professional copywriting fees

Many freelance copywriters don't post their prices. They expect you to email them, describe your project in detail, and then wait to find out if they're in your price range.

I respect your time more than that. I estimate and invoice on a project basis, and 25 years of professional experience tells me that most writing projects fall into typical price ranges. Within each range, smaller, simpler projects will settle to the lower end (or even, dare I say, a smidgen below it), and larger, more-complex ones will rise to the upper end.

That said, here's a rough guide to my copywriting rates and fees. Please bear in mind that I am reasonably flexible on pricing, and also have been known to bid less if a project sounds fun. So, for a tighter quote, feel free to now.

Advertising: $1,500-$1,800 per ad for concept and copy
Ad campaign (3 or more ads): $1,200-$1,600 per ad

Brochure copy, small (two- or three-panel): $1,000-$1,800
Brochure copy, full-size (two- or three-panel): $1,500-$4,500
Brochure copy, multi-page (up to 8 pages with cover): $2,000-$6,000
Brochure copy, large (8-16 pages with cover): $4,000-$9,500 and up
Brochure insert copy: $500-$1,800 each

Direct mailer copy: $1,200-$1,800 each
Direct mail postcard: $800-$1,500 each
Direct mail letter: $800-$1,200 each
Direct mail campaign: $600-$1,200 each based on three pieces

Copy editing: Hourly rate of $160/hour, with most jobs taking just 1-3 hours

Email copy: $800-$1,800 each
Email campaign (3 or more): $600-$1,200 each

Folder with three to five single-sheet inserts: $1,800-$4,500

Newsletter articles: $500-$1,250

Press release: $500-$800
Press release, with online distribution: $600-$950

Radio commercial: $1,500-$1,800 per spot for concept and copy
Radio campaign (3 or more): $1,200-$1,600 per spot

Sales letter or email copy: $800-$1,200 each

TV commercial: $1,500-$2,250 per spot for concept and copy
TV campaign (3 or more): $1,200-$1,600 per spot

Website copy: $200-$600 per webpage - most basic websites cost $1,200-$3,000, while larger, more content-rich websites cost $3,500-$6,000 and up

Web content (fresh content every month): $800-$950 per month, for at least six months - for details see my web content package

For a tighter quote, accommodating your specific needs and circumstances, please feel free to now!

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Great quotes about advertising and copywriting

Aristotle: “Character may almost be called the most effective means of persuasion.”
Mary Kay Ash: “Those who are blessed with the most talent don't necessarily outperform everyone else. It’s the people with follow-through who excel.”; “Pretend that every single person you meet has a sign around his or her neck that says, ‘Make me feel important.’”
P.T. Barnum: “Advertising is like learning – a little is a dangerous thing. If a man has not the pluck to keep on advertising, all the money he has already spent is lost.”
Clyde Bedell: “The real advertising writer who is after results makes the reader want something – and then provides what the reader will consider a good excuse for buying it.”
William Bernbach: “Properly practiced creativity can lift your claims out of the swamp of sameness and make them accepted, believed, persuasive, urgent.”; “Let us prove to the world that good taste, good art, good writing can be good selling.”; “The heart of creativity is discipline.”; “The memorable never emerged from a formula.”; “The most powerful element in advertising is the truth.”; “If your advertising goes unnoticed, everything else is academic.”; “Execution isn’t a vehicle for delivering a selling message. It is a selling message.”
Napoleon Bonaparte: “There are two motives to action: self-interest and fear.”
Steuart H. Britt: “Doing business without advertising is like winking at a girl in the dark. You know what you are doing, but nobody else does.”
Charles Browder: “There is no such thing as ‘soft sell’ and ‘hard sell.’ There is only ‘smart sell’ and ‘stupid sell.’ ”
Warren Buffett: “A public-opinion poll is no substitute for thought.”
Jeremy Bullmore: “75% of the benefit of advertising, is that you advertise.”
Leo Burnett: “When you reach for the stars you may not quite get one, but you won’t come up with a handful of mud either.”; “If you can’t turn yourself into a consumer, you probably shouldn’t be in the advertising business at all.”; “A good basic selling idea, involvement and relevancy, of course, are as important as ever, but in the advertising din of today, unless you make yourself noticed and believed, you ain’t got nothin’.”; “Make it simple. Make it memorable. Make it inviting to look at. Make it fun to read.”
Dale Carnegie: “People aren’t interested in you. They’re interested in themselves.”; “When dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but creatures of emotion.”
G.K. Chesterton: “Dickens didn't write what people wanted; he wanted what people wanted.”; “There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person.”
Jay Chiat: “Sometimes the most important job advertising can do, is to clarify the obvious.”
Walter P. Chrysler: “The real secret of success is enthusiasm.”
Winston Churchill: “However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.”
Robert Collier: “We have become so accustomed to hearing everyone claim that his product is the best in the world, or the cheapest, that we take all such statements with a grain of salt.”; “Playing safe is probably the most unsafe thing in the world. You cannot stand still. You must go forward.”; “Any thought that is passed on to the subconscious often enough and convincingly enough is finally accepted.”
Joseph Conrad: “He who wants to persuade should put his trust not in the right argument, but in the right word.”
Dr. W. Edwards Deming: “Profit in business comes from repeat customers, customers that boast about your project or service, and that bring friends with them.”
Thomas A. Edison: “To have a great idea, have a lot of them.”
Albert Einstein: “The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.”
Carly Fiorina: “A required change never has unanimity of support, and by the time it does, it’s usually too late.”
Bernice Fitz-Gibbon: “A good ad should be like a good sermon: It must not only comfort the afflicted, it also must afflict the comfortable.”; “No ad is ever sought out and read by anybody except the person who wrote it or the one who paid for it. It must cut across the reader’s complacency and rivet his attention.”; “A little bad makes the good believable.”; “Creativity often consists of merely turning up what is already there. Did you know that right and left shoes were thought up only a little more than a century ago?”
Paul Gauguin: “Art is either plagiarism or revolution.”
Carlos Ghosn: “We don't want to be something for everybody, we want to be everything for some people.”
Charlotte Perkins Gilman: “A concept is stronger than a fact.”
Howard Gossage: “People don’t read advertising, they read what interests them. Sometimes, it’s an ad.”; “Advertising may seem like shooting fish in a barrel, but there’s some evidence that the fish don’t hold still as well as they used to and are developing armor plate. They have control over what type of ammo you have, when the trigger gets pulled, and how fast your shot moves. Oh, and they’re not all in the same barrel anymore.”; “I don’t know how to speak to everybody, only to somebody.”
Dan Heath: “Explaining makes for lousy marketing.”
Theodore Hesburgh: “You can’t blow an uncertain trumpet.”
Claude Hopkins: “The good salesman does not merely cry a name. He doesn’t say ‘Buy my article.’ He pictures the customer’s side of his service until the natural result is to buy.”
Morris Hite: “Advertising is salesmanship mass produced. No one would bother to use advertising if he could talk to all his prospects face-to-face. But he can’t.”
Lee Iacocca: “In the end, all business operations can be reduced to three words: people, product, and profits. ”
Thomas Jefferson: “Advertisements contain the only truth to be relied on in a newspaper.”
Erica Jong: “If you don't risk anything, you risk even more.”
John E. Kennedy: “Advertising is Salesmanship in Print.”
Milan Kundera: “Business has only two functions – marketing and innovation.”
Ray Kroc: “Creativity is a highfalutin word for the work I have to do between now and Tuesday.”
Estee Lauder: “If you don’t sell, it’s not the product that’s wrong, it’s you.”
Shelly Lazarus: “If you can go from a big idea to a big ideal; if you can tap into a cultural truth; if you can tap into something in which society is wildly interested in at the moment, you have a huge opportunity.”
Jay Conrad Levinson: “If you don’t believe in your product, or if you’re not consistent and regular in the way you promote it, the odds of succeeding go way down.”
George Lois: “Creativity can solve almost any problem.”
Harvey Mackay: “If you wish others to believe in you, you must first convince them that you believe in them.”; “Don't confuse visibility with credibility.”; “The sale begins when the customer says yes.”
Ed McCabe: “Imagination is one of the last remaining legal means you have to gain an unfair advantage over your competition.”
Tom McElligott: “Selling is an art of passion. When you’re passionate about an idea, it shows.”
Marshall McLuhan: “All media are extensions of some human faculty – psychic or physical.”; “The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village.”; “Our official culture is striving to force the new media to do the work of the old.”
Indra Nooyi: “Brands never die. You only stop reinventing them.”
David Ogilvy: “Every advertisement must be considered as a contribution to the complex symbol which is the brand image.”; “The manufacturers who dedicate their advertising to building the most favorable image, the most sharply defined personality for their brands, are the ones who will get the largest share of those markets at the highest profit – in the long run.”; “You cannot bore people into buying your product.”; “The consumer isn't a moron; she is your wife. You insult her intelligence if you assume that a mere slogan and a few vapid adjectives will persuade her to buy anything.”; “Consumers do not buy products. They buy product benefits.”
George Orwell: “The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.”
Harry Overstreet: “The secret of all true persuasion is to induce the person to persuade himself.”
Pablo Picasso: “Good artists copy. Great artists steal.”
Shirley Polykoff: “Copy is a direct conversation with the consumer.”
John E. Powers: “Let’s try honesty.”
Rosser Reeves: “The consumer tends to remember just one thing from advertising – one strong claim, or one strong concept.”; “You must make the product interesting, not just make the ad different. And that’s what too many of the copywriters in the U.S. today don’t yet understand.”; “What do you want from me? Fine writing? Or do you want to see the goddamned sales curve stop moving down and start moving up?”; “Advertising is, actually, a simple phenomenon in terms of economics. It is merely a substitute for a personal sales force – an extension, if you will, of the merchant who cries aloud his wares.”
George P. Rowell: “The mystery of writing advertisements consists mainly in saying in a few plain words exactly what it is desired to say, precisely as it would be written in a letter or told to an acquaintance.”
Raymond Rubicam: “Resist the usual.”; “Mirror the reader to himself and then show him afterward how your product fits his needs.”
Esa Saarinen: “The opposite of creativity is cynicism.”
Dorothy L. Sayers: “It pays to advertise.”
Victor Schwab: “Poor copy cannot overcome faults or gaps in dealer distribution; it cannot even cash in on the finest dealer setups. But good copy can, and does, surmount many dealer difficulties, making them secondary, and selling in spite of them.”; “Advertising is nothing but an expense (not an investment) unless it gets the kind of action desired by the advertiser.”
Daniel Starch: “The attention-value of an advertisement is approximately twice as important as the actual convincingness of the text itself.”
G. Lynn Sumner: “Nothing can take the place of copy for persuasion, for downright selling.”
Albert Szent-Gyorgyi: “Discovery consists in seeing what everyone else has seen and thinking what no one else has thought.”
Margaret Thatcher: “You may have to fight a battle more than once to win it.”; “To me, consensus seems to be the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values, and policies. So it is something in which no one believes, and to which no one objects.”
Robert Townsend: “If you’re not in business for fun or profit, what the hell are you doing there?”
Ted Turner: “Early to bed, early to rise. Work like hell, and advertise.”
Mark Twain: “Many a small thing has been made large by the right kind of advertising.”; “Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please.”
Walter Weir: “Advertising begins and ends with copy – begins with good copy, ends with bad.”; “It is always better to have a few people read your advertisement and buy your product than to have a lot of them read it and do nothing about it.”
Meg Whitman: “For the past 20 years I had thought that great brands were features and functionality – you know, ‘whiter whites’ or ‘cleaner cleans’ – and if you can get the emotional connection then you have a huge winner on your hands.”; “Communications is at the heart of e-commerce and community.”
Helen Woodward: “In writing good advertising it is necessary to put a mood into words and to transfer that mood to the reader.”
Boris Yeltsin: “It is especially important to encourage unorthodox thinking when the situation is critical; at such moments every new word and fresh thought is more precious than gold.”
James Webb Young: “An idea is nothing more or less than a new combination of old elements.”