Don’t Count Your Cash Before It Arrives
You answer an ad and they respond, telling you they love you and they have a ton of work coming. Visions of dollars dance in your head.
You sign a contract for $x a month, and for the first month or two, payments arrive promptly, and then stop. All your efforts to contact the client end up no where.
You accept a check and when you deposit it, it bounces. Chasing the client gets a partial payment, maybe.
One of the hardest lessons in freelance writing and editing is learning not to count the cash before it arrives or the check clears.
It’s not, I think, that anyone sets off to rip freelance writers and editors off. True scams seem to be of the pay me for a class, course, or for leads variety, and even then people usually don’t start out with the idea of stealing.
People hire writers and editors with all sorts of things in mind, and some of those ideas are poorly thought out or poorly funded. A friend of mine recently had a writing job disappear out from under him through no fault of his own. The magazine he was editing simply ran out of money.
It happens in every other industry as well. So if it happens to you, take heart. It’s not your fault, or not much. Maybe you’ve been a bit guilty of being over-optimistic. Bite the bullet, learn and move on. There’s plenty of paying work out there.
Write well and often,
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POSTED IN: Business of Freelance Writing, Notes from a Writing Coach
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