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.

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!

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

Any experience with that working? It seems like the folks that won’t pay you probably don’t care about copyright anyway.

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.

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.

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.

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?

Excellent suggestion for new clients or small jobs!!

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!

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!!!

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.