A Little Setback

Dec 21, 2004

Yesterday the whole night I worked on an assignment. Somewhat satisfied with my work, I emailed the document to the client at 5:15 in the morning and went to sleep. The next time when I logged in, I received a reply from the client that my writing suggested we won’t be able to work together and he had decided to hire another writer. He offered me a small portion of the fee, which I refused of course.
This was out of the blues and for a little while I was really stumped. At the most the client could have wanted it re-written or suggested changes. He had visited my website. He had mentioned I write a bit differently (I’m not a “hard-seller”, he had noticed) and that’s why he had written to me. We chatted for quite a long time and I thought we both understood each other well. And then this.
I asked him to at least tell me what was so wrong in the copy that he had rejected it downright, and this is what he wrote:

Basically I started going through the text and I was having problems with most of it. To me it didn’t seem like you have the experience writing the kind of copy that I was looking for. I decided that it would take so many rewrites and so much of my time to do this that it isn’t worth it.

I have a different opinion, but I respect his opinion. It wouldn’t have taken as many re-writes as he estimated. I had done the following before actually settling down to write his copy:

Visit websites with similar themes
Note down the kind of language used
Note down the terminologies used
Read about the customers who would like to deal with the client
Read comments in various user groups to get an idea of what is in demand and what is not

After this I wrote his copy.
Well, as my philosophy is, Every experience is a learning experience.