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
Letting go of mistakes
Once upon a time, I trained in the martial arts. When I was a brown belt, I hit someone pretty hard and broke his rib. We were supposed to demonstrate excellent physical control, and accidentally breaking someone’s rib does not equal excellent physical control. I felt terrible for causing him pain and for not having…
Doing quick manuscript evaluations
I once had a manuscript land on my desk was written in such an abstract way (“glorious silver moon moments brandish sparkles”) (not a direct quote) that I couldn’t figure out how to begin to edit it. This was for a publisher client who would send projects my way without giving me a chance to…
