Ginger, it's an ezine with roughly four segments per edition.

It's in wordpress and I would be doing the layout and graphics.

I've already written the doggy lama segment through May of next year. The company would give me the 3 additional ideas and I would do the writing.

I will contribute ideas as issues arise...goodness knows, we have PLENTY of 'issues' to remind clients about.

The other newsletters she would want me to do are shorter...one is the employee newsletter with timely policy reminders and tips...and one for company-wide stuff. That one doesn't come out often.

Website hired gun hiring question:

If a small press with a small (but fantastic) catalogue and a very tiny budget also has a website which is drab, ugly, full of broken links, rarely updated, and basically a drag on the business, and 2/3 of the staff were firmly in favor of a website overhaul, by brute force if necessary, what would they expect to have to pay to get an outside professional to do the fixing?

It wouldn't be a building-from-scratch job -- the site is already up and running and essentially functional; it's just visually ugly and rarely updated, and I'm pretty sure that its lumpishness has torpedoed us with at least one local bookseller. Assuming we were able to wrest control from the person supposably in charge of it (which will be another monumental task in itself), what would we expect to have to budget to get someone with a formal design background to revamp it?

And how do you deal with a recalcitrant business partner who, however brilliant, is clearly overwhelmed but so far hasn't been willing to cede control of any one task, even to make all the others easier and make the business better, without a battle?

JZ, take a look at Squarespace - they do a really good job of drag'n'drop design for people with no HTML or CSS skills. (And they sponsor at least one of the podcasts I listen to regularly so if you want I can dig up a discount code.)

H'm. They look really polished and pretty reasonably priced (not that a discount code wouldn't hurt -- but not yet, this is just the very beginnings of info-gathering).

And, sigh, I'm sure the Recalcitrant One will have a hundred reasons why it's obviously much better for him to keep doing everything. Which translates into him doing the ten most urgent things on the to-do list while website updates slip to the bottom of the list, as the website is not actually on fire or killing people.

Ok, the current discount code I know of is "TNT11" I think it's 10%.

No comments on the ezine/newsletter pricing?

The subject came up again yesterday and looks to be moving forward in January. I need to come up with a proposal. Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated!

bonny,

I think you should charge (roughly) by time it takes you to do it. If you were being paid to do this elsewhere, how much would you charge?

You may want to give a discount for whatever promotion/additional business it might get you, but I wouldn't discount much. You don't want to do it, so the price should be fair, but factor in a slight "I don't wanna" premium.

My assumption is about $45 per hour for the writing and graphics combined.

Is that reasonable?

others will have to weigh in about that.

Squarespace is some decent templates, and the reviews generally say it's user friendly.

(JZ, insent to your profile address.)

Bonny, that's quite reasonable. It's actually somewhat low for a professional, but prices are all over the map. You may be happier estimating your time and coming up with a project or per-issue price, with a caveat that work beyond the agreed-on scope will be billed hourly at X rate. Sometimes hourly pricing is awkward with someone you work with regularly, because conversations may include a lot of time talking about the newsletter, but it's hard to know how to bill that time.