What Riles You As A Freelancer Writer?

By Dan Smith

Two weeks ago I wrote about reflecting on the last 12 months of your freelance writing career.

I mentioned that you should find one positive point from the past year and one negative point or something that you didn’t find particularly enjoyable.

A day or two after the post was published, I started to focus on some of the more minor negative points that I had come across and whether they were things that I’d done or if any of them were due to other people.

Coupled with my post on outsourcing last week, it made me think about the things that other people do that annoy me and what generally riles me as a freelance writer.

Although there are several small points that would make my life as a writer that little bit easier if I could navigate around them (does anyone else get frustrated by little things in Wordpress, such as it not leaving a gap in between bullet points no matter how many times you tell it to?), I found three main points that particularly annoy me.

Changing deadlines

One of my pet hates is poor time management in a business environment.

I’m a particularly laid back guy and in my personal life I take things as they come. If we’re meeting at 7pm and someone’s 15 minutes late, it doesn’t make that much of a difference to me.

When it comes to business, however, I’m a stickler for time.

If a client wants to have a meeting at 10am, I make sure I’m there for 9.50am so we can start at 10am.

If a client wants to me to call and discuss a project at 1pm, I call at 1pm. Not 12.50pm or 1.10pm, 1.00pm.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m flexible with all of my clients, but a bit of structure and rigidity in respect of time is always a good starting point with a new client.

For the most part, this is easy for clients to understand and I find that they prefer it this way, as they know for definite when everything is going to happen.

Why then, do some people think it’s acceptable to set a deadline for a project and then change it as it approaches, either to a few days before or a week or two after?

I take on the project based partially on the deadline — if it’s close and I can fit it in, I know not to take any more clients temporarily. If it’s a few weeks away, I know I can spread the work out over a period of time and take on other clients.

Therefore, when a client comes and changes the deadline, it might not seem like a massive point to them — and I’m well aware in some instances deadlines need to be brought forward or can be put back at the last minute — but if you’ve known about it since the start of the project, why wait until the last few days to tell me?

Not delivering quality work

When I’m swamped with work, often unexpectedly, rather than contact existing clients and explain that I can’t complete their project, I tend to pass the work on to another writer and proof and edit it before sending it to the client.

As I try not to do this a lot, I don’t have a bank of writers that I can call upon, generally taking recommendations or replying to adverts as and when I need someone.

The problem that I’ve found is that it seems a lot of writers will give you their absolute best work as an example — something that they’ve spent a lot of time on — but when you pass on a small project to them based on this single piece, everything they deliver seems to be substandard and doesn’t match their initial piece of writing.

Maybe it’s me being too picky (which is something I actually cover in the point below….gulp!), but I struggle to find a writer who can deliver consistently high work.

I know there are plenty of good writers out there, I’m just pretty sure they must all be asleep when I need a hand!

Unrealistic, high expectations

For every client I work with, I tell them from the outset that if they’re not happy with any piece of my work, all they have to do is let me know and I’ll amend it so that it’s exactly what they’re looking for.

With most of my regular clients, I don’t often get asked to do a rewrite as I’ve come to know what it is that they exactly want and what I should and shouldn’t be including.

I’ve taken on a few one-off clients over the past few months, though and what has started out as a reasonable request for a standard piece of work has ended up leaving me with too low of a rate for the job due to the amount of time I’ve had to spend amending the piece.

Client satisfaction is truly my main focus as a writer, but it gets to a point where a client asks for a piece to be topical or edgy but sends it back time and time again because it’s “too topical” or “not the type of edgy we were thinking of” that you really begin to wonder whether they actually know what they want themselves.

What makes you tick as a freelance writer? Is it just me that’s bugged by these points? Do you have the same views or does something different rile you?