by Rachel Smith
24 June 2015
Here’s a question – once your pitch has been successfully accepted and the editor agrees to commission you (all via email) and you file your story on time, what’s a reasonable time frame to expect the editor to read the story and confirm it will be published? (This is a new editor – so a new relationship.) I don’t like bombarding the editor’s inbox, but I thought a week should be a reasonable enough time frame to hear whether they liked the story, required more info or hated the story! I also want to know if I should send an invoice as the story was ‘commissioned’ but feel I can’t do this until I know it will be published. Would love some expertise on this please. J
Great questions, and I’m just going to tell you how I operate – which may be very difference to other freelancers reading, so hopefully we’ll get a few perspectives in the comments.
Firstly, when filing copy I always send an email that states, ‘Copy for X story attached, as per your commission dated X [or if it’s an editor I always work with, I’ll drop that bit – we both know it was commissioned]. Hope you like it. If you’d like any changes whatsoever please do let me know. Thanks for the work!’
Because, if you’ve been commissioned via email and you’ve filed copy by the due date, all that’s left to do is give yourself a pat on the back and move onto the next thing on your to-do list. It’s not up to you to bombard the editor to ask for feedback or whether they liked it / hated it / needed more info / planned to publish it etc etc. You’re a busy professional, you’ve fulfilled the editor’s brief and that’s that. If the editor wants to get back to you about it, great – but let him/her come to you.
Secondly, I always assume if it’s been commissioned it will be published. It might not be published for a while, but I think most editors (well, you’d hope) would schedule their pages according to pieces they’d commissioned. However, if you have PRs / experts / case studies on your back wanting to know when the piece will run and you don’t know, you can also add this line to your initial email: ‘If you plan to schedule the piece for a certain issue / by a certain date, it’d be great if you could let me know – I have PRs / experts / case studies who’d love to grab a copy / check it out when it runs’. (It’s in the editor’s best interests to give you this information – the more people reading and sharing your story the better!)
Thirdly, while I know a lot of people feel it best to invoice at the same time they submit the copy (and sure, it’s probably handy for the editor if they have your copy and the invoice in the same email) I feel the polite thing to do with invoicing is to give the editor some breathing space of 3-5 days to read the story, digest it and get back to me. If they haven’t in that time, I simply send another email saying, ‘Invoice attached for the copy submitted on X date – hope you received it okay, and please let me know if not. Thanks so much.’
Hope that helps!
Do you do things differently as a freelancer? Please weigh in below.
Generally I like to confirm that there is no more work to be done on the job before invoicing but I do have some clients who prefer being invoiced upon submission. This tends to occur after I’ve worked for them for a while.
There’s no harm in asking what your client/editor prefers or having a policy like: “If there are no edits or revisions requested within # days, I will submit my invoice for the agreed amount.”
Yes – I do sometimes hold off for that reason, because there may be some major changes involved. But in my experience lately, even quite sizeable changes don’t necessarily mean you can invoice for more :-\
In a perfect world editors would give freelancers feedback but the reality is don’t expect it. If they commission you again, they probably like what you’re doing. Also, get the published copy, get your copy and compare them paragraph by paragraph. Has a sub done major editing? If they have then you need to try and understand why. If your copy goes into print hardly being touched and you get commissioned again, that’s a good sign and probably the most you can expect these days.
Great tips Darren. I still compare the cuts the subs have made in my original copy with the printed piece 🙂 #letitgo