Making Time for Potential Clients
What’s the secret to making time for potential clients, especially if you’re time and energy are already maxed out?
Businesses do many things to reduce friction for customers, such as building automations, writing FAQs, offering a wide variety of payment options, and so on. The idea is that if I want to buy a widget and I can do it without having to interact with a human, that saves me time/hassle and the company money.
Limitations for Freelancers: Making Time for Potential Clients
But as freelance editors, we’re not selling widgets. Sometimes we don’t want to reduce friction. Sometimes we want to increase it.
Editors sometimes report to me that they have difficulty converting prospective clients. I listen to their process and basically it amounts to something like SEO drives the customer to the website, the website answers all the customer’s questions, the customer submits a questionnaire about their ms, and the editor replies with a quote and a booking schedule.
But no one books.
That’s because the prospective client has never actually interacted with the editor, has never gotten a sense of them as a person, and has never had a reason to feel like they’re putting their faith in the right person.
Sometimes, my best piece of advice for an editor is to be less efficient. Let the client acquisition process be a little messier.
What people need to know right up front is
- whether you work in the genre(s) they’re writing,
- whether they have the budget to hire you, and
- what, in general, your credentials are.
That’s it.
The rest – here’s how I work, here’s how to book, here’s my next opening, etc. – can be shared later, once the client has reached out to express interest.
Tips for Editors & Writers
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Helping Authors Strengthen Story Settings
The setting of a novel consists of multiple elements, big and small, that nest inside each other like those little Russian dolls. We might show this hierarchy of settings like so: If you think about it, the micro setting of “the living room of 601 San Mateo Road Apartment 16” implies the existence of all…
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World-building Without Info-Dumping
World-building is often seen as the province of science fiction and fantasy writers who have to convey new-to-us settings and cultures, and occasionally by historical writers who have to convey the feel of an era that a reader may not know much about. But every story takes place somewhere. Even stories set in a contemporary…
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The Connection Between Character and Setting
Authors have a tendency to prefer focusing on character and/or plot at the expense of setting/world-building. (The exception is some SFF writers, who focus on setting and forget about plot and character.) So as editors we will often call that out and say something like, “Add a little description here. Otherwise it’s like Miles and…
