Just Browsing?

Before I get to today's blog post topic, the big name author was TOTALLY understanding about the problems with the formatting of his ebook. *huge exhale*  He's a college professor who teaches, well, one of those "out there" sciences at a major university, and is smarter than five regular people put together, and gets that this is a new technology and that there are going to be glitches sometimes. Hallelujah, i.e., I'm not in trouble. *whew*

So on to today's blog post.

I've been "wooing" a new author that was handed to me by one of our publishers; she thought the novel was right up my alley, and she's right. I had my fourth in-person meeting with that author yesterday, AND her husband, who has been at every meeting but one, AND who keeps trying to sell me a shake product for weight loss. *sigh* I finally just told him I couldn't afford it. And you know that at some point it would turn into "we'll trade you product for services." Uh, no.

We spoke by phone last week, and I said she and her husband should sit down, crunch the numbers, and figure out what kind of payment plan they could come up with and we would meet this week and draw up a contract. We normally don't do payments, but because this gal is local, and works for a high-profile government office, the level of trust is much higher than it would be for someone over the Internet.

I drove across town--1/4 tank of near $4- a gallon of gas worth, and this is the second time I have, the other two meetings were downtown--again, I've also bought her a lunch at a very nice restaurant. So I'm already losing money. Yes, I can write it off my taxes next year, but right now it's coming straight out of my pocket.

So I drive across town, again, yesterday and they are completely unprepared. They have not talked, they have not crunched numbers, they don't even know what editorial services they want.

???

The husband wanted to know what kind of down payment I was expecting--and we had mentioned 25% before--he wanted to know if "$50- bucks could get it started."  Uh, no. There are a few things we can bill for, but content editing is not one of them.

So, from now on, with this client, meetings are over the phone or email only until they are ready to go. It's like going car shopping without a dime in the bank. Or looking at diamonds or $300- handbags at Coach:  You tell the salesperson, "I'm just browsing." That way, no ones' time get's wasted. Or money.

For crying out loud. Lesson learned.