Getting paid enough is one issue, getting paid at all is yet another. Most of the time I was paid enough, but I’ll make that a separate discussion. As to getting paid on time, if I started talking about the times I wasn’t I’d leave the impression that failures to pay were a regular thing. They were hardly that. So, I’ll illustrate. Every dot in the next paragraph signifies an invoice that got paid within a month:
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And every time I’ve had to query the house for a late cheque rates one period:
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And every time I ended up not getting paid at all gets an exclamation mark:
!!
When I’ve had to go to a lawyer to get paid, I count that as not getting paid at all. In my early days, there was one publisher in town who was so reluctant to cut freelancers’ cheques that including work for them on your résumé or c.v. counted as a black mark: either you were desperate for work from anywhere, or you were such a newbie that you weren’t aware of their reputation. At the time I was a desperate newbie. It would have been the biggest project I ever landed up to that point, a textbook that would have paid in the high four figures, and they told me to bring in my first invoice and when I picked up the first batch of chapters. That should have been a tip-off. Also, I should have taken heed that when I handed in that invoice (this was paper days), the ME slid it under the bottom of a stack of papers eighteen inches high.
No sense going through the blow by blow that followed. Several months went by. I phoned, and phoned again. Then I phoned again. After three months, I worked up the nerve to show some anger, and the ME simply hung up. Lord knows I couldn’t afford a lawyer, but in the system we’ve got up here, any lawyer will offer a half-hour consult with no fee attached. So I picked up the phone book (there were phone books back then) and found a lawyer.
I made an appointment and was told the address. It was in the Financial District, in the upper floor of a bank tower, the kind with clouds outside the windows. I still remember how that went. I was waved forward through a double door by a secretary, then another secretary. It seems I’d aimed high, which I hadn’t realized I’d done. Note the corner office the size of a tennis court at the end of a long, oak-panelled hall. He pointed me into a captain’s chair across a rosewood desk and got straight to the questions, jotting my answers down in a daytimer. He grimaced once, though not at me. I got the impression – which I’m pretty sure was accurate – that he was used to dining out, career-wise, at Lutèce and The French Laundry but that sometimes he yearned for a midnight snack, and I was tonight’s celery stalk with peanut butter. He told me to show him the invoice and got a secretary to photocopy it. When I asked him what I should do, he just shook his head: “Nothing.” And shushed me out the door. Two minutes had gone by. The next morning at 9.30, by courier, I had the cheque in hand.
On the other occasion I didn’t get paid, I simply gave up trying and took the bath ($1,500). With this one, by the time she was three months late with the cheque, she was also eight and three-quarter months pregnant, and no, I wasn’t going to start yelling at her. In any case, she was seriously toxic for a string of other reasons that made ditching her worth taking the hit – I wasn’t that desperate for money. I took it as a learning experience. Always money up front from private clients. There’s never a good reason to trust a private client.
Those are the two getting-paid horror stories I’ve got from forty years in the trade. There’s no question that MEs want to see you get paid expeditiously. If you’re an ME, you want to build a stable of trustworthy freelancers, and getting them paid on time is a quick way to ingratiate yourself. How much freelancers are paid is usually out of your hands – and freelancers realize that – but how fast? You usually have some control over that.
And yes, I once gave money back
The mscript was Arab philosophy, for another private client, and I got paid up front – quite well – batch by batch. Smart of me. Sixteen chapters, in batches of four, and it was quite fascinating material, well documented and annotated. He had his PhD and clearly knew his stuff, and I learned a lot, until chapter 16, which was about how homosexuals were perverts who needed to be stoned, and so on. Something about a lake of fire. I did a page count on that chapter, calculated how much it would have paid if I’d completed work on it, returned him that amount by bank transfer, and told him not to mention me in the acknowledgments.