Why Hourly Contracts Are An Abomination For Writers

When I was a practicing trial attorney I would get calls from people in a panic because they had too many gin fizzes and crashed into a fountain at 2am, or some other story revolving around a similar natural consequence of bad decisions.  

Over time I learned that the more authority I could project on these calls, the more likely the perturbed caller was to sign on as a client.  This resulted in a canned speech that centered around credentials (former prosecutor) and status (they know who I am at the court where your case is at) with an incredibly high closing rate.  

After many years of taking these types of calls, I also discovered that the fastest way to lose a prospective client was to start talking about the facts of the case itself.  Highly emotional people don’t want to hear about how you get the job done, only that it will be done.  They must be able to say to themselves with a high degree of confidence “So you’re saying there’s a chance!”.  Hiring a person with perceived authority gives them this chance.  I tried hard to address this desire without stoking fear or giving false hope.  

Authority selling works well in the legal field because it is highly rules based and its entire purpose is to resolve conflicts.  Truth be told, this type of selling works in almost any vertical because people are taught from a young age that “authority” is very valuable.  Be warned, however, because something is effective does not automatically mean it is a good idea to do it in your writing as a service business.

Writers Lose When They Sell From Authority

Purveyors of information products across the interweb admonish writers to increase their status and sell from a place of authority.  Unfortunately, the problem of being an authority is that when things go bad everyone blames you. 

Bummer. 

Admittedly, things can fall apart because “mistakes were made”.  There are many instances though where you do exactly what you say you are going to do, you have given everyone the heads up that you do not control the universe, and things still go sideways.  If this happens enough times people start looking for the exits and the process starts anew with a different “authority”, otherwise known as the freelancer circle of life.

Professional sports is a good use case for this.  A kicker misses a field goal to lose a playoff game and in the press conference afterward the coach is expected to say “We wouldn’t be here but for (insert fragile feeling kicker here) and I have to do a better job coaching” and not say “It’s the stupid holders fault. Laces out Dan!”.  After a collection of these press conferences accumulate, the Coach gets fired and a new guy comes in to head the team.  The clock starts ticking anew.

But what if it isn't coaching that is the issue?  What if it’s the owner?  Or the fact that no one wants to play in (insert town you hate) so they don’t get good free agents?  When you take max responsibility for situations that are impossible for you to control you all but guarantee the eventual demise of your authority. 

In the business world, instead of collaboratively and creatively identifying the root problem (or come up with a totally different way of doing things), many successful freelancers keep producing traditional deliverables and engaging in “client control”.

The idea of client control is that you are able to rein in your customer when things go bad by putting whatever just happened into enough perspective so that they calm down and pay you to keep doing what you are doing.  

The fatal flaw of this strategy is that it is deployed after the fact.  If you are a writer who adopts this approach you are always on eggshells for the next eruption of volcanic fire in your business.  This causes anxiety and anxiety makes for bad writing.  Bad writing makes for bad results.  Bad results make clients unhappy.  Unhappy clients need the client control strategy and voila!  You are in a doom loop of sadness wrapped in plant based bacon on a hors d'oeuvres tray as part of a beta outreach program at a Waffle House before the weekly fistfight.

The core misunderstanding that writers and clients alike have about writing as a service is that the deliverable is a commodity in the traditional sense.  Therefore, it can be paid for as such.  It is not and it can’t be.

Writers Are Always On

Prospective clients will inquire as to how much I charge per word or what my hourly rate is.  I try to meet people where they are if it is a project I want to do, so I will take these jobs with the understanding that this type of compensation is more of a probationary period to see if they like working with me.  If the answer becomes yes (which it almost always is) then we will switch over to my normal monthly flat fee.  Any other outcome and the compensation arrangement is patently unfair to me.  Why?

The creative brain leverages many different tools to achieve its goals.  The reason for this is that the act of discovery is unpredictable.  The Understory does not give up her secrets easily, or the same way twice.  Flexibility and taking risks is a requirement to pull gold from the ether.  There are as many ways to do this as there are people.  There is one thing that all creatives have in common whether they know it or not:  The use of the subconscious to organize their observations and pick up metaphysical cues.

This is both a skill and a talent.

When you suddenly solve a particularly hard writing problem as a result of ruminating on which girl you went to a Berlin show with because “It Must Have Been Love” by Roxette randomly came on the radio, that is your subconscious entering the chat.

Your subconscious is more like a crockpot than a computer.  Insights gained through its use are not linear.  It is impossible to tell if it took 4 years, 4 months, or 4 seconds of your brain wandering around the multiverse to figure out that you get one choice, or all of them.  You can only give attribution to the process, not the path.

This also means that you can never turn it off.  It is always “working” so to speak.  The writer can never be compensated for its use properly by traditional means, in the same way a celebrity chef doesn’t charge for their time in culinary school.  It is the sought after breakfast burrito that is valuable, not how long it took to make it or where it was prepared.

The challenge is to get both writers (you) and others (prospective clients) to understand this.  If you fail to do this, or worse sell from your authority or status, you will enter the doom loop of sadness.  The easiest way to avoid this fate is to give up on traditional ideas like status and authority while embracing creative leadership.

Make The Unrelated Relatable

One thing I try to impart to newer writers is that it is their job to be the leader of discovery for their clients.  Writers don’t like to do that because they judge themselves on the same scale that society rates doctors, trash collectors, and assemblers of stone fired pizza ovens. 

This is a hierarchical approach that results in writers agonizing about “imposter syndrome” online.  Trying to battle that will lead you down the wrong path.  The goal is not to cultivate a claimable superiority of a marketable skill that you then monetize.  That can be faked or bought (think credentialism).  It can also be replaced rather easily and there are always people willing to sell their wares for less.  

A better way is the path of the Bard:  The writer who markets, not the marketer who writes.  There is a ginormous dearth of people that are willing to take creative risks, brave souls who understand the price of wandering about in the darkness looking for light and who are also willing to pay it with creative capital.  The challenge is that exactly zero of your prospective clients will know what that means.  

If you want to get paid what you are worth, you must make them understand the value of discovery and the competitive benefits it will confer upon their company over their peers. You have to coach them up on the exponential nature of creation.  In other words, giant amounts of leverage can be created by discovering new ways to do things.  

In the writing realm, it can be as simple as injecting a little levity into their marketing when the rest of their vertical thinks dad jokes are too risque.  I can’t tell you how to do this exactly in every sector, only that it must be done.  When you figure out how to do this the job is not done. The next hurdle is to make the unrelated relatable for prospective clients.  

The easiest way to do this is a case study of where your approach has worked before.  This is the core method of how successful artists get paid what they do.  If you can find one person that will be a patron for your work (the modern equivalent of this is monthly recurring revenue or MRR) then everyone after that will say “They must be worth it because other people are paying it.”  At the very least it gives you the confidence to quote that fee to the market.  This is how you become a niche of one.  It is also how you give yourself a raise.

Naysayers will be tempted to say that the purpose of case studies is to raise your status.  This is dumb.  A case study is specific to how you do things and why you should be paid for them.  It has nothing to do with what anyone else is doing.  You are making your own market.  You are showing your specific creative leverage in a language that normal business people understand.

As long as you can show a direct ROI from what you do (an entirely different but important topic) you are AI resistant, immune to competition, and are the last victim of cost cutting measures.  You cannot be replaced because ROI + creative leverage makes you a niche of one with the eternal promise of another company changing discovery always around the corner.  Position yourself as indispensable without regard to status or authority and you do not have to wear business casual clothes on Zoom calls.

This is not to say that you wont get fired and replaced by AI hucksters or cheap “copywriters”.  This will undoubtedly happen because of short-sighted clients.  When this occurs, look at this as a positive because when the company loses the leverage you bring and goes down in flames, you have another case study titled:  Here is what happens when people don’t listen to me.  Which is nice.

Accept That You Are Not Replaceable 

The veil of familiarity has made you believe that everyone else is like you.  I can assure you, they are not.  The fact that you are reading this newsletter means that you are a fellow traveler in The Understory.  I don’t take that lightly.  You shouldn’t either.

Embrace your creative power.  Don’t sell it for trinkets.

More in a bit . . . Wade, The Understory Bard

PS - James Shrimpton and I recently concluded our live group coaching cohort teaching people how to create a writing as a service business by ghostwriting newsletters. If the reviews are any indication it was a smashing success. One of our students writes:

“I just completed the the Ghostletter Seminar working with James and Wade. All I can say is WOW! This was an incredible course that opened my eyes to the incredible opportunity of email ghostwriting. Wade showed us his incredible method coupled with his writing skills from James. They both delivered so much knowledge and guidance that took me to another level altogether. There was energy and willingness to help the students to be successful over and above the standard cohort courses. No question was too much to answer, these guys laid bare all their experience, knowledge and skills. They earned the 5 stars!!!”

We are going to do it again once the waitlist gets big enough. If you want to be notified when we are going to run the next cohort just click on this link to be added to the waitlist.

Ghostletters Seminar Waitlist

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