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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6 Tips for Working with Book Publisher or Packager Clients
I’ve worked with a number of book publisher and book packager clients over the years and I’ve found a few basic rules help ensure that I complete each project satisfactorily. You may find them helpful, too. #1. Understand your role. If an author has asked whether the plot entertains you and you tell them they
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Focusing on What You Can Control
Every now and then a topic comes up that gets a fair amount of discussion in freelance editor groups. One of these is the question of authors thanking their editors in the acknowledgments section of their book. And there are a lot of editors out there trying to convince indie authors that they have to
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How Risky Is Freelancing?
In the interest of full disclosure, I have to point out that I’m the kind of person who has an optimistic view of the nature of risk, which is why I’m not a financial advisor and you wouldn’t want me to be. But I also think we are too certain that some actions are “safe”
