If you’re commissioning a writing project and you’re thinking of working with a writer, here are some things you can do to guarantee an unhappy ending.
This comes out of a lecture I did last week for MarketingProfs University and some first hand experience with projects that were set up to fail..
Don’t give a brief. Or a bad one. Or an incomplete one. I’ve said it before, but almost every bad project can be traced back to a bad brief, so this is your go-to screw up if you want to guarantee an epic fail.
Change your mind. Brief one thing and then, after your writer has completed it, change the brief. It’s best to do this with a straight face as if you hadn’t actually changed you mind. Don’t let the writer think you’re human enough to make a mistake or trustworthy enough to admit them.
Insist on insane deadlines. One great way to ensure a bad project is to say ‘we have to have it this week so we’re going to skip the briefing and the research – can you just put something together?’ Deadline panics, all-nighters and weekend work are well-known for improving the quality of a writer’s work.
Rewrite everything (badly). Feedback is essential, of course, but if you really want to demoralise a writer, try rewriting their copy for them and do a lousy job of it. For example, recently, I wrote “Don’t make plans in the dark” and my client rewrote it as “Limits [sic] the requirement to make plans around technology without knowing what changes are due to be made.”
Renegotiate the fee. It’s only happened to me once, but I have had a client commission 8,500 words and then, once they were written, change their mind and decide they wanted 5,000 words and would only pay for that. Getting your contractor on the phone to his lawyers is a fantastic way to bring the relationship to a crashing halt.
Pay late. Nearly all my lovely clients pay me on the nail, but occasionally some of them take three months or more. This is a good way to kill the project before you’ve even begun: ‘Your account’s on hold so I can’t take on your new project.’
So, I’d like to leave you with a positive thought – 11 things to do at the start of a new (business) relationship – and a question: if you wanted to screw up a writing project, what would you do?
Aside from the fee renegotiation, I’ve had all those happen to me at one time or another.
Ultimately, of course, it’s their project to do with as they like. But pay me later than we agreed, or try to pay me less than we agreed, and it’s “Sorry, hon, my dance card is full” next time they come a-courtin’.
Yes, exactly. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
The only other thing I’d add is insisting on crazy deadlines, which you somehow manage to meet. Then when you have flogged yourself to death to deliver the project, the client announces that actually the timeframe has now changed and so you could have had several more months! And that as a result, they won’t now be looking at your work for several weeks.
Oh, totally. And they only tell you that the deadline is extended when you’ve done most of the work so you don’t get the benefit, you have to wait for the feedback and they have even longer to change their mind about what they want. Classic client crisis.