40 Fabulous Faults of Freelance Failures

I’ve been preaching freelance success for a while now. It seems only fair to embrace freelance failure as well, so here are some truly bad habits you can feel free to adopt.

Organization

• Freelance failures don’t sweat time management. It doesn’t matter whether they have too many assignments or too few. What matters is that the Scrubs marathon is on and that J.D. guy is dreamy in a puppy dog kind of way.
• Freelance failures don’t have an office or a workspace. They can work from anywhere equally badly.
• Freelance failures never keep a notebook handy. If an idea is truly good, they’ll remember it later.
• Freelance failures don’t waste time on money management. They spend it when they have it and they just keep hoping more will come.
• Freelance failures never have a backup plan. If Plan A doesn’t work, Plan B probably wouldn’t either.
• Freelance failures don’t treat freelancing as a business. They don’t keep receipts. They don’t manage their spending. They don’t create a business plan. They don’t know how much money they need to avoid starvation. They just don’t bother with those minor details.
• Freelance failures don’t rewrite, reuse or resell. Once they write something, they put it behind them. No use trying to make more money off of that old garbage. Chances are it wasn’t very good the first time.

Marketing

• Freelance failures don’t use Writer’s Market. They whole idea of researching possible markets seems like a lot of pointless work to them.
• Freelance failures love eLance and SoloGig. They can get practically any assignment there, as long as they are the low bidder. Four hundred articles on Bolivian culture for $200 dollars? Hey, if that’s what it takes to get the work then that’s what it takes!
• Freelance failures like to wait. They send out a query letter and wait for an answer. They don’t dare write more queries or more material. They just wait for that good news to come in.
• Freelance failures don’t waste their time on portfolios of their work. It should be enough that they tell an editor they should get the job because they really want to be a good writer and they have three hungry kids to feed.
• Freelance failures don’t advertise. They went into to business to make money, not spend money.
• Freelance failures don’t keep in touch with old clients, unless it’s to call and beg for a job because they’re broke.
• Freelance failures don’t have business cards. They write their information down on a scrap of paper and hand it over. That’s good enough, isn’t it?
• Freelance failures don’t have their own web site. In fact, they’re not quite sure whether or not this whole Internet fad is going to be around much longer.

Client Relations

• Freelance failures don’t bother to listen to their clients or to their editors. They just start working on the assignment. It’s pretty obvious to a freelance failure that their judgment is best. The client’s needs are merely an annoyance to be dealt with.
• Freelance failures don’t like to say no. It’s better to agree to something you can’t deliver than to turn away a potential payday.
• Freelance failures let old debts slide. That client will get around to paying you sooner or later. You don’t want to offend them by asking to get paid.
• Freelance failures can’t tell you why you should hire them. They just know that they want the gig.
• Freelance failures don’t negotiate. More money? More time? You mean you can ask for those things?
• Freelance failures don’t take rejection well. What do you mean this doesn’t suit your needs right now? You hate me don’t you?
• Freelance failures don’t have a billing system. They figure paying them is the client’s job, let them handle it.

Skills

• Freelance failures don’t sweat clarity. It’s clear to them what they wrote. Everybody else is just an idiot.
• Freelance failures don’t sweat editing. That’s the same as proofreading, right? No time for that when you’re writing 250 SEO articles about male pattern baldiness.
• Freelance failures can write equally poorly about anything. It doesn’t matter whether or not they care about a subject or even know a subject. They can fake those things. What matters is that they convinced somebody to pay them.
• Freelance failures don’t work to improve their skills. Why should you get certified when you’re already certifiable?

Research

• Freelance failures don’t make the same mistakes twice; they make them way more often than that.
• Freelance failures get people’s names wrong. Nobody minds being called the wrong name do they?
• Freelance failures don’t do research for their articles. They just assume that whatever they know is close enough.
• Freelance failures steal material. They’ve promised so many things to so many people that they have to rip off other writers just to finish their projects.

Community

• Freelance failures don’t have mentors. They can’t think of anyone they would want to emulate.
• Freelance failures never collaborate. They work alone, or at least they would work alone if they had any work. Working with another writer just means you’ve got to split the rate, and freelance failures can’t afford to take any less money than they already do.
• Freelance failures don’t network. They don’t want to work with other writers. They don’t want to talk to other writers. They sure don’t want to learn from other writers. That’s time better spent trolling Craig’s List for gigs.
• Freelance failures have no idea who their competition is. They don’t monitor their markets. They don’t read other writers. They stay blissfully unaware of the world around them.

Attitude

• Freelance failures don’t really like the idea of making money. They consider themselves to be artists. Success would just mean they’ve sold out.
• Freelance failures get discouraged easily. If they don’t get the sale the first time, they just give up. If something is hard to write, they just don’t write it. Why waste time on improvement when they can just as easily spend that time telling their friends about how unfair the industry is?
• Freelance failures like to save the hard tasks for last. If you put them off long enough, you may not have to do them at all!
• Freelance failures aren’t problem solvers. They’ve never seen an obstacle they couldn’t let stop them.
• Freelance failures know that successful freelance writers are just luckier then they are.
• Freelance failures don’t stay freelance failures forever. They learn and improve. Eventually they get better. If they don’t, they move on to fail at something else.

Demand Studios is NOT Evil

Do you know what I’m sick of reading? I’m sick of reading articles about how freelancers are underpaid. I’m especially sick of reading articles that point a finger at a particular company or website and accuse them of causing the problem. No one caused this. If you want to point a finger at anyone or anything, point it straight at the Internet. The Internet made it possible for anyone who can put a sentence together (and plenty who can’t) to be a writer. Some created their own blogs (like me). Others became freelance writers.

Everyone is a writer

Writing isn’t like engineering or chemistry. Most people know how to write. There are people who write especially well, either because of training or talent, but there are millions of people who can write a basic article or blog post that is good enough for the Internet. Some of those people aren’t out to make a living as a writer. Their day job pays well enough or they have other means of support. They just want to get published. Others realize that they need to become better writers if they want to make a living. They take less money so that they can develop their skills as well as their portfolios. You can complain about these people all you want. It doesn’t matter. They aren’t going anywhere.

Companies are in business to make money — Shocking!

On the flip side there are companies that cater to these writers. Demand Studios is one of those companies. Demand Studios has clients who want articles written for them. Some of those companies are major players, others are small businesses and a few are fly-by-night dreamers. The client tells Demand Studios what kind of article they want written and Demand Studios then finds writers to write the articles. The pay is not high, but it is far from the worst in the industry. One of the key complaints against Demand Studios is that their editors are strict. Writers are frequently told to make rewrites and edits. For some reason, these rewrites are viewed as onerous. The prevailing complaint is that they pay far too little to expect so much. Because of this, many writers refuse to do the rewrites. This is viewed as a fault of the company rather than the writer. The company is too demanding. They should settle for less or they should pay more. Sorry, it doesn’t work that way.

The bottom is where people start

For most writers, especially the inexperienced beginners who are attracted to low-paying assignments, a strict editor is the best thing they can possibly hope for. They need to have someone guiding them. Having a good editor is like having a free writing instructor. The editor isn’t just fixing your article. The editor is teaching to become a better writer. Not all editors are great. Strict doesn’t always mean good. Some Demand Studios editors may suck. The wonderful thing about freelancing is that you don’t have to work for someone you don’t want to work for. If you don’t like writing for someone, stop writing for them.

You choose who you write for

As I said earlier, Demand Studios has many clients, both large and small. They have those clients because they provide quality articles for low prices. If the prices were higher, they might lose clients. If their articles were of lower quality, they might lose clients. This is their business model. I don’t write for Demand Studios. I don’t write for them because I have clients who are willing to pay me substantially more money. I have a high paying specialty (software documentation), fifteen years of experience, a graduate degree and some really terrific contacts in the industry. I don’t need what Demand Studios offers (although I often need a good editor). On the flip side, when I was twenty-two years old and trying to establish myself as a writer, I would have jumped at the chance to write for a company like Demand Studios. I wanted then what they offer now: experience, guidance and money. Unfortunately, that was twenty years ago, and the closest thing I had to the Internet was AOL on a 2400 baud modem.

More skills and experience equals more money

Don’t get me wrong. I would like Demand Studios to pay higher rates. A higher rate would attract (I hope) a higher caliber of writer and help create a better product. I also know that you can go on Elance or Odesk and find plenty of people who pay less than Demand Studios and expect more. That is the nature of the freelance writing world in 2009. The low end is far lower than it used to be, and there is more competition for even those jobs. The good news is that you don’t have to write for anybody you don’t want to write for. You can start your own blog and market yourself from there. I did.

I now have no trouble finding clients who are willing to pay me a substantial rate to write. It isn’t luck that got me there. I struggled for years. I made mistakes. I learned. I now have skills that most of my competitors don’t have. I have a strong resume that gets me interviews and offers. I’ve even gotten smart enough, over the years, to turn down offers when they aren’t right for me.

Move on, move up

If Demand Studios doesn’t feel right for you, don’t write for them. All I ask is that you give up on complaining about them or the people who write for them. Focus your energy on something productive. Go write something.