Don’t be afraid to ask for help, but…

Kristen King

www.inkthinkerblog.com — …please do a little research too if you can. The reason I bring this up is that I got the weirdest phone call today from a freelancer looking for advice from an “expert.” I get these calls all the time, so it’s not a big deal or even all that unusual. This particular call kind of threw me for a loop.

The caller, who I’ll refer to as the gender nonspecific “Pat,” has been freelancing for a while, but I’m not sure on what kinds of projects or for exactly how long. The project in discussion currently is ghostwriting a book about the life of a former professional athlete who is now pursuing a very different career path. Pat has never written a book before and didn’t know where to start. Okay, sure, no problem. I started asking some of the standard questions, but got only as far as “Is the client trying to go the traditional publishing route, or will the book be self-published?” What stopped me is that Pat didn’t know what these terms meant and, as it turns out, didn’t know anything about the publishing process, the cost of ghostwriting, editing, and self-publishing, and the amount of time and type of work involved.

My feeling is this: We all started somewhere, and we’re all born knowing nothing. There is absolutely no shame in not knowing something, nor in asking for help. However, if you’re going to be in this business, you owe it to yourself to learn about it. Pat was smart to ask for help from someone with more experience. However, Pat would have gotten a lot more from a conversation with a more experienced colleague if some preliminary research had taken place before the phone call.

I briefly explained that the difference between traditional publishing and self-publishing is that in the former, they pay you, and in the latter, you pay them. I suggested that the client may wish to save some money by writing the book without a ghostwriter and then hiring an editor/coach to make it publishable rather than hiring someone to do all of the work. I also suggested that perhaps someone with more experience in the field would be a better person to guide the client through the process than Pat, who has some writing experience but no experience in this area. I gave Pat permission to give the client my contact info.

Pat then asked me about writing in another field. I suggested checking out the Writer’s Market for that specific genre and then learned that Pat had never heard of Writer’s Market. I suggested that Writer’s Market and any books near it in the bookstore or library would be the best place to start with those kinds of questions.

Then Pat asked me if I would review some drafts of other projects and “Tell me if I’ve got what it takes.” I explained that this is something I charge for that that I would look at one piece and say either “Yes, go for it,” or “No, back to the drawing board” via e-mail, but any more feedback or more than one piece and I would be charging for it because that’s billable time I would be taking away from paying clients. Pat closed the conversation by thanking me profusely for my help and my time.

The thing is, if Pat found me on the Internet, surely Pat could have found the answers to the these questions on the Internet as well. Pat could also have found local and/or online critique groups, which I know for a fact exist in Pat’s locality, to review drafts for feedback. Not taking advantage of those resources doesn’t make Pat a bad person or a fool or anything like that, but it did waste 20 minutes of my time, and I’m glad that I was the person Pat called and not one of my less patient colleagues (no implication about present company or any specific person intended) who may not have been as kind as I was.

The bottom line is this: Don’t be afraid to ask for help, but do take advantage of your resources, and don’t waste a professional freelancer or anyone else’s valuable (and billable) time with asking for information you could easily have found on your own through a Google search. If you find information and don’t know what to do with it, or if you simply can’t find the information you need, that’s the time to call in for reinforcements–not before you’ve even tried. To do otherwise is unprofessional, and disrespectful to the person/people you’re asking for help.

And on a related note, don’t be afraid to try new projects and genres, but know when you’re in over your head and when accepting the project means that you’d be doing the client more of a disservice than a service.

Kristen

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Talk is cheap. Good writing is priceless.