My grandfather and grandmother were in the New York area during the great stock market crash of 1929. However, they didn’t lose their money in the Great Depression. They had gone broke much earlier. The Great Depression was more like the great leveler–now they just didn’t seem as poor.
Today’s economic crunch does not have to be the only thing that’s burning up your money. Lots of writers have gone broke without the benefit of a stock market collapse. While I may not know all of the ways to lose your shirt writing, I can tell you a few of them. Here goes with my list of 10 Ways to Lose Money as a Writer.
1. Underprice your services to “get your foot in the door.” The problem is that once you’re in, you really will have a very hard time raising the rates.
2. Underprice your services in general–many people have the belief that “good” services cost more than bad services. There is a lot of truth to the old adage that you get what you pay for. If you are the bargain basement writer, people may think you’re not able to command the kind of rates the “real writers” get.
3. Ignore the whole revision issue until it happens. When you write for a business, people will edit your work. Many of them will not know how to write as well as you. You will likely get stuck in an endless round of changes. If you have multiple reviewers, they will contradict each other at times and leave you to sort things out with dozens of phone calls and emails. Decide before you plunge into a business assignment how to handle revisions and discuss it upfront.
4. Don’t set a deadline. Most writers want the client to set a deadline (and many will) but you also need to set deadlines in terms of when you expect to get paid. Here’s a typical business assignment: you write and deliver a very polished draft on a certain date, say June 1. You say that for the next 30 days you’ll revise the article, as required, free, but on June 30, you send a bill. Revisions after June 30 will be charged at an hourly rate. That makes sure the client doesn’t drag a project out. (I’ve had two projects drag out for more than one year.)
5. Write whatever you feel like and let the marketing take care of itself. You can’t expect to sell things that aren’t targeted.
6. Get into the whole flexibility thing and work only when you feel like it. Don’t check your email often. Allow family members, including toddlers and visitors, to answer your phone and take messages from your clients. When you do sit down to work, like 2 a.m. on a Thursday night, feel free to call your business clients. After all, you’re working on their projects, aren’t you?
7. Don’t bother with a website.
8. Don’t keep up with software and technology. Don’t bother to get software to help you make PDF documents or work compatibly with your main type of client. If a client needs you to work in PowerPoint, for instance, let them pay for it. Why should you buy your own software?
9. Make sure you tell every potential client and client who calls how busy you are and all of your various activities. This should never be work related, but should chronicle your latest visits to the movies, vacation plans, and when your sister is coming over and where you’re going to do lunch. It’s very important that you sigh a lot and complain that you are just overwhelmed with activiites.
10. Miss deadlines. Sometimes clients want things on a Wednesday but don’t even look at them to the following Monday. So why not just turn them in Monday? Or even later?
Believe it or not, I’ve done some of these things and in the days when I used to hire writers (I used to work for a business that hired freelance writers on occasion), I’ve had them done unto me. They all turn out badly.
