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: