How to not make friend or influence people on Freelancer
As part of a recent project for a group I volunteer for, I posted a job on Freelancer for a writer. (While I tackle many of the writing jobs for the group, I’m loaded up on paying jobs at the moment and suggested that we could pay an external writer). The job was not overly technical and essentially looked to craft some written material based on the regular phone conversations we have with parents.
Our group helps parents of children with gender issues. With a lot of the recent press on transgender issues we have been getting a lot of phone calls from parents who are worried about their 3 and 4 year old children trying on their siblings underwear, swimming clothes, costumes etc. We try to reassure them and let them know that this is very normal. Many transgendered folks know from a very early age that they are trans, other children experiment with pretending they are a different gender at times as well as play acting as animals and superheroes. Essentially all we recommend is to love the kids, be open to the kid’s information about themselves and give it some time. We don’t have the capacity to help parents in this stage as we are more focused on older kids so we wanted to give parents some written material with our message. We also thought it could be useful for people in allied roles (teachers, nurses, etc) and something we might publish via kindle for other parents as a kindle sing.
I got some crazy high quotes on freelancer.com, which is fine and I just ignored them as I’m not looking to get a freelancer to write the next autobiography of a celebrity and some crazy low quotes from people with a limited grasp on English.
Where the crazy seemed to come in was with the writers with the midrange quotes. I’ve written online for the last 5 years so I have a pretty decent idea of a what a reasonable rate is per word. I had people accept the job and then tell me they were only willing to do a quarter of the work for that rate. I also had someone send me messages for 3 days telling me that they deserved more money than they initially quoted because they were able to produce great quality work. I had writers go radio silent after giving them the job. I’m kind of bummed about the whole experience as I wanted to directly employ a writer rather than go through an agency or mill, as I wanted the writer to get the whole fee, but the act of management just seemed too hard so I’ve had to park the project.
If you are a writer who wants to move away from the content mills/agency model it can be useful to think about customer interaction as a valuable part of your job. Read the job specification carefully and think if you can do this kind of work. And if you don’t get the job, just walk away. There is a lid for every pot and haranguing a client is not useful.
(If the project sounds interesting to you, hit me up with a price per word quote by email. Extra points given for writing experience and familiarity with trans issues and/or parenting).
