My So-Called Freelance Life - Michelle Goodman [55]
stick a note about it in your idea file for future personal projects and carry on with the client project as planned.
deliver two versions of the project: the one the client requested, and your “interpretation” of the assignment. With any luck, you’ll get a bonus for your ingenuity.
chuck the client’s notes and do the project your way. After all, the talent knows best.
Obviously #1 is the way to go. Yet a staggering amount of freelancers try to turn in projects that are the wrong length, size, shape, color, angle, resolution, topic, style, font, or format. How do I know? Not only have I heard many client gripes on the matter, countless freelancers have asked me if loose interpretations of the required word count, subject matter, point of view, number of deliverables, color scheme, or software is okay.
I’m with Woody Allen on this one: Eighty percent of success is just showing up. That doesn’t mean you should do a shoddy job. It means you should do the job—as in, the exact work your client is paying you to do. This includes but is not limited to the following:
• Taking notes so you remember the little details the client specified, like the fact that the bride does not want any photos of Uncle Stan splitting his pants on the dance floor.
• Checking your work for factual, grammatical, formatting, style, and other mistakes.
• Ensuring you don’t leave any of the aforementioned proofing or cleanup work for your client.
“Here it is” are the three little words clients love to hear. No excuses. No caveats.
Capiche?
Can You Hear Me Now?
None of this is to say that clients don’t want to hear from you if you have questions or suggestions, or if you hit any potholes along the way. Lisa Wogan, a former magazine editor in New York and Seattle who spent close to a decade working with freelance writers, copy editors, proof-readers, and photographers, likens freelancers with crappy communication skills to submarines. “You give them an assignment, and then they go deep and they’re gone,” she says. “Almost always, the submarines are the people with problems on their assignments.”
As much as we freelancers like to think of ourselves as superheroes, we’re not mind readers. Your client will appreciate any detective work you do on their products, competition, and corporate MO, but if you still have questions and you aren’t entirely clear on what the client wants, it’s your duty to ask, listen, and furiously note-take at the start of the assignment.
“You don’t have to take a ‘just give them what they want’ approach. In fact, you’re being paid for the skills you have and they don’t,” says Kate Henne, the former corporate marketing manager you met in Chapter 7 who spent fifteen years hiring many a freelance designer, web producer, and editorial type. “But you do need to listen, understand the audience and goals, and show how your work will deliver. Your client will appreciate lots of questions about the finished product, so don’t hesitate to ask.”
If I can’t find a sample on the client’s website of the type of article, white paper, or case study I’ve been hired to write, I’ll ask the client for a link to a comparable piece they (or one of their competitors) published. That way, there’s a road map for us both. Some of my corporate clients even have templates they give their freelancers to follow. And if I’m in uncharted territory (new client, big-ass project, vague directions), I’ll turn in an outline or a writing sample early in the project to make sure I’m on the right track. Same thing applies to editors, illustrators, and programmers: An editor might turn in a few marked up pages, an illustrator a rough sketch, a programmer a few snippets of code.
Don’t underestimate the value of the check-in email. When