The Repeat Customer

As a freelancer, I generally prefer repeat customers, and I am sure many other freelancers would agree with me. A repeat customer means they are happy with your work. It also means you know what to expect and they know what to expect. I love repeat customers that come back every few months or so with a new project for me. I especially love it if these projects are diverse and interesting, but I am even okay with general repeat business of the same type.

There is one sort of repeat customer I am not particularly fond of. One of these was Tommy. Now, Tommy was a nice guy who paid me to write something up for him and paid me well. He was very easy to get along with, and I had no complaints. However, after I wrote out a brief story for him and finished the job, he returned two years later. This time, he told me he had made a few changes and he wanted me to edit it. I agreed, of course, but the thought of working on the same project again did not appeal to me. I like lists. I like to check things off my lists. I don't like those things to reappear on my lists. However, I knew Tommy, and I knew he was a good client, so I accepted.

I also once had a house that I bought from a repo bank sale. I scrubbed and repaired and got that house beautiful and sold it. Three years later, I was looking for a house and that one was on the market, so we went and looked at it. Never do this. The people who had it last had completely destroyed everything I did and made the home worse than when I first moved in. I wanted to cry.

Along the same lines, it is always a challenge to accept the same work that a client has "changed" after you had it. My Mona Lisa was now covered in graffiti--and I couldn't, of course, change it back to my story. I wanted to be sick. Needless to say, the next time he asked if I could help him with it, I had to decline. I couldn't bear doing it again. 

Don't do this to a writer. If you hire someone to write your book because you recognize that you are not skilled enough to do it yourself--don't make changes to it when they are done, and if you do--don't hire them to edit it again. There are plenty of freelancers in this world who will tell you what you want and give you whatever garbage you want them to spit out. In short--hire someone who doesn't care about the final project. If you want a good product, pass it off between three or four different good freelancers. If they all agree and you don't, they are probably right.

There are some people who return with the same project and who have not destroyed it. In this case, these are what I call hangers on. You have finished a project gone through multiple editing stages, and they come back three years later and ask you to do another editing pass. There is nothing really wrong with this (unless you aren't going to pay them additional money for the extra pass), but at some point, as a writer, you just want to yell: "Let it go!" You can always polish more, but you have to realize when you are spending 6 hours to find the one remaining typo, that is not the best use of your time.