What It Is (posts below left; rate sheet, client list, other stuff below right)

My name is Bob Land. I am a full-time freelance editor and proofreader, and occasional indexer. This blog is my website.

You'll find my rate sheet and client list here, as well as musings on the life of a freelancer; editing, proofreading, and indexing concerns and issues; my ongoing battles with books and production; and the occasional personal revelation.

Feel free to contact me directly with additional questions: landondemand@gmail.com.

Thanks for visiting. Leave me a comment. Come back often.

Thursday, March 22, 2012

How Not to Do Business


1. Get my name from another freelancer.

2. Call and give me details on a job, and ask me to work up a bid and schedule.

3. Approve the bid and schedule, telling me in no uncertain terms to put the job on my calendar.

4. Email me fifteen minutes later, saying, “Thanks, but your rate is too high. You’d probably do better work than the person we’ll be paying to do it, but we’re going to go with the other person anyway.”

What’s wrong here? If you’re an author or publisher calling around for a variety of bids, that’s fine. Tell me so. And if I don’t get the job, that’s fine, too. Well, it’s not fine, but it’s part of business.

What you don’t do is tell a vendor to ink the job on the schedule, and then cancel. Dont make the original commitment. Your certainty makes you look worse when you backtrack on it. 

Not that it’s a huge deal. It’s just poor form, and my typical conclusion is that an organization which acts this way would likely have created more troubles once the project was in progress.

5 comments:

moi said...

Bad form, indeed. Off with their heads!

(I'm not tolerating much, these days.)

czar said...

Moi: Nor should you.

Anonymous said...

Back at BSL:
I use "grey."
Or, is it, "grey". (?)
Uh, 'grey'?

Uncle an' me onc't had an overrated overpriced lunch at some Big Sur place named Napenthe. None of the waiters wuz feelin' any pain, I assure ya'. Yep, pretty silly--(double dash) But, it wuz, after all, California.

czar said...

Hi, Aunty.

The czarina and I onc't spent a weekend in NoCal. I swear I ordered a supper entree that you could have thrown a postage stamp over. $27. In 1989. I'm the one who needed some nepenthe.

moi said...

@ Aunty: "Grey!"

@Czar: Oh, those crazy days of nouvelle cuisine. Which is why, I believe, everyone in No and So Cal is so skinny.