From the category archives:

The Business Of The Well Fed Writer

What Would You Do About a Client Like This One?

January 29, 2010

Got a note from a fellow commercial writer recently. She wrote:
I have a client who’ll give me two or three days to write something (when I really need a week), insisting such a tight deadline is necessary, and then take a week to review it, revealing the deadline wasn’t real after all. I know they’re [...]

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“What’s the Current State of Freelancing?” is a Bogus Question…

November 27, 2009

So, about a week ago, I get an email from a good friend and fellow commercial freelancer who’s presenting on an IABC panel on freelancing a few days later. She’s written to me to get my input on an issue of exceptional interest to the many would-be attendees. Her question is:
Can you sum up [...]

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What’s the Right Way to Apologize When You Screw Up?

August 26, 2009

Screw-ups. We all have ‘em. With friends, family, and yes, with our commercial writing clients. But, how you deal with it can be far more important than the screw-up itself. This subject may be a bit off the mainstream of commercial writing, but thought it was worth knocking around, and certainly has relevance for our [...]

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Let Them Keep Thinking Writing is a Dead-End Game (More for Us…)

April 8, 2009

A reader recently sent me a link to an interesting piece in The Week, entitled “Is Writing for the Rich?” It was written by the editor himself, Francis Wilkinson, who concluded that the future of freelance writing is mighty bleak, and that, given the unfortunate current financial calculus of the craft, it’s become a field [...]

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Ever Had a Client Expect You to Take Out an Insurance Policy?

March 11, 2009

Got an interesting though somewhat disturbing email a few days ago from a commercial freelancer. She wrote:
I wanted to get in touch because I have a concern that’s starting to affect my commercial writing business, and others will likely be coming up against this more frequently as well. In the past six weeks, I [...]

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Should We Be “Fee-Flexible” in These Times?

January 12, 2009

So, a few weeks ago, I offered up a competitive bid on a project for a commercial writing client I’d done some good work for some time back. The graphic designer on the project (we’d submitted a “turnkey” project bid) had actually worked for the client for 10 years a while back, had the inside [...]

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