Weekend Discussion: When Freelance Writing Doesn’t Pay
April 13, 2007 by Deb
Filed under Freelance Writing
When Freelance Writing Doesn’t Pay
by Jeff Pfaller
There are two kinds of freelancers in this world. Those who have been stiffed, and those that will be.
You sent in the finished work, you sent it on time and you signed a contract. But when it’s pay day, the person cutting the check mysteriously disappears from the face of the earth. What do you do?
Prepare, Prepare, Prepare
- Keep a copy of every single correspondence you have with anyone regarding freelancing. This means emails, contracts and letters.
- If you talk with a client on the phone and agree to something, follow it up with an email confirming the details.
- Blind copy yourself on all outgoing mail. If you have to provide proof of something in an email you sent out, finding it in your “Sent” folder isn’t enough. A copy that has a “Delivered on” stamp and went through an email server somewhere is a must.
Stay Organized
- Keep all your documents in separate project folders – this is a good practice whether you file electronically or by paper.
- If you use Gmail, you can use the “Filters” tab under your settings to automatically send incoming mail to a certain folder. It can be based on the email address, subject line or any words that appear in the body of the email.
Be Professional
You held up your end of the bargain. But now the client you’re expecting a paycheck from either decided you’re not worth paying or is taking an unannounced two-month sabbatical to Africa.
Now is not the time to get confrontational. Things do happen, and there could be a legitimate reason for the delay in payment. Keep your cool, and simply send a follow-up email requesting:
- The pay for the work you agreed to
- The date you agreed to the contract on
- Cite the date you delivered the work (hopefully before the deadline)
- The amount of the pay requesting
- Include a date you want to be paid by
Just because you’re being professional doesn’t mean you have to be a pushover. Don’t be afraid to ask for exactly what you were told you’d receive.
Set Personal Standards
In my opinion, there is no good reason any company shouldn’t be able to cut you a payment in a month from when the work has been deemed acceptable and delivered. Two months in extenuating circumstances.
Personally, I give clients up to three months before I start breaking out the big guns, but I’m hounding them every week, if not more, once they hit the two month mark.
- Don’t let someone string you along with an overdue payment. It’s not worth your time and frankly, it’s unprofessional on their part.
- Don’t be afraid to charge them a late fee.They are causing you more work by not honoring their part of the contract. You should be paid according to such. You met a deadline, why can’t they be accountable for one?
Get Serious
Let’s say you haven’t gotten payment for three months. You clearly aren’t going to get paid anytime soon. You want to move on, but you don’t want to hand someone free work. What do you do?
First, let’s assume you were prepared. You have records of everything. Send the person responsible for paying you a lengthy, detailed note. Make sure it includes:
- The pay for the work you agreed to
- The date you agreed to the contract on
- Cite the date you delivered the work (hopefully before the deadline)
- The amount of the pay you’re owed
- Include a date you want to be paid by
- Dates of your follow up requests for payment
- Deadlines for payment that they failed to meet
- Amount of your late fee (optional)
- Threat of legal action (optional)
Show them you mean business. Don’t be nasty or mean, but make it very clear that this isn’t going to go any further. You will be getting paid, and this is the last chance they have to make good on it. From here, you have two options.
Option 1 – Take Legal Action
Most of the time, the threat of legal action is more effective than actual legal action. A threat of legal action:
- Doesn’t require you to talk to a lawyer
- Costs you nothing
- Only takes you a minute to write – no time in court
You basically state that if you don’t receive a payment by a date you set (make it within a month at the most), you will be contacting a lawyer to settle the matter. A majority of the time, this will be enough to scare most companies or individuals to take action.
If you’ve been prepared, you’ve documented everything and you’ve been professional, it will be made very clear to the person paying you that if they get taken to court, you will win.
That said, make sure you are right. Consult with an experienced lawyer and have them review your case. If there’s a loophole, or there were conditions in the contract that void you getting paid (like missing a deadline), then don’t go further.
One important caveat – Do NOT threaten legal action unless you are prepared to follow through with it
This sends the exact opposite message that you wanted to. If you say “I’ll take you to court” and the other party still does nothing, you better make good on your threat. Otherwise, they’ll think their practice of not paying people for work is O.K. They’ll do it to another writer. If you aren’t prepared to go to the mattresses, don’t threaten it. Go for option 2.
Option 2 – Let it Go
Sometimes, you have to cut your losses. You can’t let one person or company jeopardize your writing career by eating up all your time and resolve by not paying you. It’s not worth it.
You may decide that legal action isn’t worth your time. It might also be too expensive. If you’re only getting a hundred bucks for a writing gig, going to court might not be worth it.
Learn From Your Experience
Don’t let one bad apple wreck your perception of doing freelance work. There are lots of reputable companies who understand that the written word is a valuable commodity. They will pay you on time, and they will be a joy to work with.
If you haven’t been paid by a company or they are constantly giving the run-around when it’s payday, don’t work with them anymore.
I did some work for a company that took nearly a year to pay me. The work was a ton of fun, and the pay was good (once I got it). When the time came to ask me if I was interested in another assignment, I politely turned them down, even though I really wanted to do it. The hassle of not getting paid just wasn’t worth it.
Every situation is different. What works in one case may fall on deaf ears in another. What are your horror stories of not getting paid? How did you deal with deadbeat clients?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
This post sponsored by:
Follow Our Novel’s Progress: “The Mango Tree Café, Loi Kroh Road.” .
Custom labels and stickers – Frontier Label, Inc.
Would you like to sponsor this blog? freelancewritingjobs@gmail.com for details.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Nice posting, Jeff. I especially like your point about deadlines — you’ve met your bargain, they should meet theirs.
I’ve freelanced for the better part of a decade. In that time, I’ve been partially stiffed once. I hope that speaks to the quality of my clients, and also to my stubbornness in getting paid fairly and on time.
I was stiffed on a huge job last June. I was working for a regular client, and he wanted me to rewrite one of his websites, and add new content. The job paid $1,400, and it took an entire month to complete. When payday came around – he bounced. After the entire project was submitted and reviewed, he told me it was perfect and I could expect payment within two weeks. I never heard from him again. Fortunately, I was able to sell most of the content to another website. I recouped a little more than half of the original(expected) pay.
Great advice. I’ve had payment problems and once got to the point where I threatened the publisher of a small newspaper in the pocketbook, where it really hurts. After many months of the the usual runaround, unanswered e-mail and phone calls, I left a message that I would be bringing up the issue with the paper’s advertisers. The check came in the mail a few days later.
I am still a small time freelancer – and my problem is that I run into people who want small time work (less than 100 dollars) and who then fail to pay for it. The problem is that when this happens, there is really nothing anyone can do – there are some good “warning” sites that people can post documented cases of big time publishers that have failed to pay over 100 dollars. However, there really isn’t anywhere that you can look online to find a list of names of people who have failed to pay small amounts. The fact is that a lot of people at the beginning work for small amounts. I do a lot of work per week, and I make decent money, but all of my money is coming in small amounts from no less than 10 different parties each week. If one of them stiffs me, I’m out part of my pay but I can’t really do anything because they’ve only stiffed me 70 dollars or 90. And there are a lot of people who are scammers and who do this – go from writer to writer, getting small jobs, and no one is the wiser.
What we need is a forum or a blog where small time freelance writers can post names and/or email addresses to avoid – no legal action, nothing cut in stone, simply write a post that says “i took 50 articles for “so and so”, and they didn’t pay” and then “so and so” can come to the blog if they want and refute the claim. or, other writers can see that “so and so” has been mentioned many times in many blogs or posts and if “so and so” offers THEM work, they might think again.
People who offer small jobs and don’t pay need to be held accountable too. I’m willing to put up a forum or a blog of some kind, but I don’t know if anyone else is interested or if anyone else cares. Mail me at lizakollman . writer @ gmail.com (without spaces, of course) if you are interested in helping me, or at least in visiting the site if I set it up.
Good post though. Great tips!!!
Excellent post, Jeffrey.
Good comments, all, and very good idea, Liza – I’d visit when I’m looking into a project!
My thoughts on this post were pretty much in line with what Liza was saying about small pay jobs. I do a many small jobs most of the time, and you just can’t recoup enough from most of them to warrant too much of your time and energy going into chasing; legal action, even though you might be in the right, wouldn’t ever pay eneough to bother with. I think Liza is right that that is exactly what some people are counting on.
That being said, I’d be interested to see if people think there is a minimum amount that is worth chasing and what a minimum payment would be that is worth chasing through legal channels.
THanks again for the good advice!
One thing that works for me is to tell them that the copyright remains with me until I have been paid–and they have no right to use the work until then.This seems to intimidate most people. I also highly advise getting half upfront on deposit for website work, etc. The client demonstrates checkwriting ability–and if you get stiffed later you are only half as mad.
“tell them that the copyright remains with me until I have been paid–and they have no right to use the work until then.”
Excellent suggestion for new clients or small jobs!!
How about advice on renegotiating your contract with a long-term client who keeps changes the specs and expects you to work for the same pay or only nominal increases?
Deb:
Normally your posts have a very short half-life. These weekend discussion posts are going to be valuable one month, one year, even ten years from now. They need to be archived.
Is there any way to keep them, when you clean out the job posting listings?
“Blind copy yourself on all outgoing mail. If you have to provide proof of something in an email you sent out, finding it in your “Sent” folder isn’t enough. A copy that has a “Delivered on” stamp and went through an email server somewhere is a must.”
This was among the best advice in your excellent post, Jeff, and it’s what helped me when I had a recent problem getting payment from an educational company I regularly work for on small jobs. I felt bad going after them at first because many educational publishers have very little revenue to begin with. But I was and am under a very elaborate and legal contract, which made me even more irked that they weren’t honoring their own formal documents.
I resorted to sending emails to both my supervisor and the head of the payroll department each and every day with every single prior related message timestamped and properly documented at the bottom. After several weeks, I eventually got what I was owed, plus extra for the “inconvenience.”
Incidentally, I still complete assignments for the company when they ask because they’re local and established. Believe me, though, I was very hesitant to after that nonpayment incident. The most important thing is that my paycheck now arrives like clockwork each pay period, sometimes even early.
Mark – I’m working on archiving them, then I’ll have links to the discussions. I agree, they’re valuable content.
Anons – Even if you weren’t paid much, you can’t allow yourself to be stiffed. If someone requested material from you and failed to pay, Google a few choice lines from each article to see if they were indeed used. If they were, inform the offending party they did not pay for them, and therefore do not have any rights to them. Their options are to:
A: Pay you for your work.
B: Remove them from the website
C: Expect legal action.
If need be, you can find a sample cease and desist online. If you need to go after the website’s hosts, so be it. I once sent a note to a host and the whole website was taken down until they removed the content.
Do what you have to do but you’re only taken advantage of if you allow it to happen.
One thing I’ve found very helpful is, in the original contract, have a “late fee” clause — if payment is not received by the date stated in our contract, I charge a 20% late fee, and every month above that, an additional 20% is added.
After three months, I start legal action.
So far, I’ve never had to take the legal action — and my fees have been paid, including late fees where appropriate. They are usually paid after the first late notice is sent.
Amen. Small jobs, big jobs. I hate to be ripped off, even if it’s $10. I have spent lots of time tracking down scoundrels and recovering what I was due. While it often might seem like a time to cut your losses and move on, unless the website or print publisher went out of business, I pursue the culprit. Just remember that these crooked creeps will be imboldened each time a writer lets them slide. Keep in mind that if we just ignore the “petty thieves”, I may be the victim today, and tomorrow it will be you.
Interesting point on making it clear that you have the sole copyright on the material until they pay for it.
Any experience with that working? It seems like the folks that won’t pay you probably don’t care about copyright anyway.
Jeff, I just want to add that as a former 9-5 commuter, your advice on preparing, EVERY BIT OF IT, is just as important in the 9-5 grind as in the freelancing world. I have worked in many office situations before freelancing where properly preparing was my only way of a nice CYA when the poo-poo hit the fan! This is probably the most basic of information and the most important for all career minded folks but for some reason the most overlooked. In addition to Bcc myself, I would send that Bcc to my home email addy, one the IT department at work couldn’t peek into.
Liza,
Please feel free to post the link here. One caveat: I’d make darn sure a person is a deadbeat before hanging his name up for everyone to see. People don’t take kindly to public accusations and it can open up a giant can of words.
Good luck!
Deb
Jeff thanks for a great post. I would like to add a couple of things.
Always have a contract. I know the small jobs don’t like them, and usually that should be a red flag right there. But have a stock contract of your own and when they say they don’t use contracts, politely tell them, “I will send you one of mine to sign.” If they won’t sign—you run in the other direction immediately!
I don’t wait three months. My invoices clearly state that payment in full is due NET 10. So after 10 days I send a reminder. After 14 days I send the second reminder and after 21 days days I send the third reminder which reiterates the contract terms to remind them of what they signed with me.
I also have the late fee penalty and copyright clause in my contracts. I recently had to go the “threaten” route to collect on a $900.00 job but he paid it quickly once he saw that I cc’d my attorney on the letter.
I do appreciate Jeff’s tip about the BCC. I didn’t realize you needed that as well.
Deb, great weekend discussion!
The website where you can take a look at some of the names of people who have failed to pay other writers is http://writertowriterwarnings.blogspot.com/
First and foremost,I believe that this is a thorough and well-planned article. Kudos.
Secondly, I would greatly enjoy the feedback of anyone with a response to the following quandary:
Is it not entirely out of the ordinary for a person of sixteen years to participate in the act of freelance-writing and turn a profit of some sort?
I am as of such and, though I lack the customary or more commonly accepted age, I lack not elsewhere and am confident in my abilities to more than complete any job assigned, within the deadline given.
It would be most helpful if you would accomodate me in replying.
I thank you and good evening,
Meg Hartline.
No publisher or website owner asks to see your birth certificate before you will be hired. Some want to see a resume. Some want to see links to your work. And if you’ve got nothing to show, you might have to write a sample.
Good luck! And loosen up. Your writing seems a bit rigid and formal.
This is an excellent post. The advice about using BCC is gold — I will surely remember to do this from now on.
I’m currently dealing with a deadbeat for a pretty large amount ($1,310). I gave him two months to pay before I said I would file in small claims and add on late fees. I got a very nasty e-mail back from the client, telling me he “never agreed to late fees” and saying that he never got my invoice and that he’d pay once I sent it to him.
Little did he know that the creative director for his company had sent me copies of all the e-mails he had sent to this client during the course of our project. I had the sent e-mail from January 30 telling the client that my invoice was attached and I ALSO had a copy of the client responding to that e-mail, asking for my address so he could send me a check. Keep in mind the client said he never got the invoice on March 13, over a month after he acknowledged that he received it.
It’s now August and I am waiting for my small claims hearing. This is one slippery client who is not intimidated by legal action in the least.