A Way for Freelance Writers to Report Deadbeat Clients

During the course of my freelance writing career, I've come across several deadbeat clients - those who never paid at all, those who did not pay the agreed upon amount, those who paid later than promised, and of course those who requested sample articles and then stole them for their own use. I've never had any real way of collecting what was owed to me.

Today, that has changed to some degree.

At Beacon Reader, there is a section entitled Please Pay Me, where you can report clients who have failed to pay you as agreed. You can post the clients name or company name (Media Outlet), your name (optional), a description of the work you were hired to do, the total that is owed to you, and the number of days the client is late paying you.

This of course does not guarantee that you will get paid, but it may give your deadbeat client more incentive to pay up. Warn the client that you will be reporting him, along with a link to the site. Let him know that you will be reporting him there in 48 hours if you have not received your payment. If you do not receive the payment within the allotted time, fill out a report, and let the client know that you have done so.

Wait a day or so, and if payment has not been received, let the whole world know about it. Link to your report at "Please Pay Me" on your Facebook, your blog, the forums that you participate in, and on the discussion lists you are a member of.

If your client has any business sense, and wants to protect his reputation, he or she will take paying you what is owed more seriously.

There is Writing and then there is Writing

Not everyone who thinks that they can write can write well enough to truly call themselves a professional writer. Sadly, those who think they can write, but really can't, insist on calling themselves professional writers anyway. It's even more unfortunate that this fact actually has a negative effect on those of us who actually are professional web content writers.

How does this affect us? You may think that this means that there is less competition if another person cannot write well, but that isn't true at all. You see, if they are willing to get all of the facts written down on any given topic, regardless of spelling and grammar errors, and offer that to content buyers at a very low, cut throat rate, the buyer will buy it - especially since it is sold as a full rights license piece.

When a buyer has full rights, he or she can do whatever they want with the written work. Because the work is factual, but shoddy in terms of grammar, spelling, or sentence structure, the buyer is going to do one of two things with it. The first option is to load it up into MS Word, and run the grammar and spell check on it, simply clicking the mouse to make corrections, and ending up with a decent article that they can use. The second option that they may choose, or even incorporate with the first option, is to go over to any number of freelance sites and hire another writer, or so-called writer - to rewrite the original article, or the corrected article.

Fresh or original articles always cost more than rewritten articles. The research is done, and there are countless writers who will happily rewrite articles all day long for bottom of the barrel rates. So, in the end, the buyer not only gets a half decent article, but overall, he or she probably only paid five or ten bucks total for that article...if that much.

This is how it affects us. Those low rates and the content buyers willingness, patience and ability to make something out of complete garbage in order to get even lower rates. Unfortunately, the only thing that good writers can do about this is to continue to write quality content, with the knowledge that there are still content buyers out there who care about the content that they are using on their sites. Sadly, those particular content buyers are a dying breed.