My So-Called Freelance Life - Michelle Goodman [56]
Since clients don’t appreciate incommunicado freelancers, make yourself easy to reach. Return voice and email messages about active projects the same day, messages about new projects within twenty-four hours whenever possible. Use call forwarding and your mobile device of choice if you have to run an errand during business hours. If everyone on your client’s team communicates about hot projects by IM, follow their lead. Clients don’t look kindly on technical dinosaurs. As Wendy Merrill, founder of WAM Marketing Group, a virtual creative agency with employees and freelancers scattered across the country, says, “The freelancers who have really antiquated equipment and barely know how to fax—it doesn’t work.”
Unfortunately, some projects are riddled with curve balls. You might discover the logo colors the client wanted you to use are the same colors their top competitor uses. Or that all the nurseries in town are out of the Japanese maples your landscaping client had her heart set on. Or that a source your editor wanted you to interview for the article is vacationing in Fiji for the next three months. This is when what Melissa calls “the no-surprises rule” comes into play: Clients don’t want to hear about these potholes the morning the project is due. Your best bet is to come up with a couple of alternatives for them to choose from and give them a call ASAP.
At the same time, try to remember that your clients are swamped. They don’t have time to hold your hand and reply to twenty emails a day from you. “There are those freelancers who are vampires that require constant attention and care,” says Lisa, the former magazine editor. “They want to take you to coffee and pitch you a lot of ideas, and the ideas are all bad, and they follow up too much. There is a really fine line between getting through to a client that you’re there and available, and being annoying.”
Ditch the Diva Act
At a recent panel I was on at my local university, an English Lit undergrad asked how often a freelance writer could expect to be edited: “I just don’t want someone messing with my words, you know? They’re my words.”
I get the sentiment, but I also get that when a client is hiring me to write something—be it marketing copy or a magazine cover story—they have managers, customers, and policies of their own to abide by. So I do my best to work within those parameters. That means not throwing a temper tantrum when a client comes back to you with changes they need you to make. (We’ll talk about how to put the kibosh on runaway revisions in Chapter 14.)
“Attitude is really important,” says Wendy, owner of the virtual marketing agency. “Prima donnas, not so much. To feel that being brilliant is a creative license to be abusive doesn’t fly. People are not necessarily going to remember how much something cost, but they are going to remember your attitude and how they felt when they went through the process with you.”
That’s not to say you should roll over if you don’t agree with a suggested change. Remember, your client did hire you for your expertise. It just means you need to pick your battles. So maybe you prefer the word “the” to “these,” or a green that looks more like aloe than a 1970s washing machine. Big whoop. But if your client is a diversity consulting firm and they’re pushing for having a bunch of images of smiling white people all over their literature, it’s worth going to bat for.
Likewise, if the piece has your byline or credit line on it (as opposed