Problem with a commission

[Mouse]

The trouble is that publicity is awfully difficult to make into a stew without a great deal of marinating, and I've never managed to pay a water bill with it

[Meshon]

The trouble is that publicity is awfully difficult to make into a stew without a great deal of marinating, and I've never managed to pay a water bill with it

"Your utilities bill for this month is £37"
"But look, there's a book on Amazon with my name in the credits!"
"That'll be £37 please."

And stew! Mouse, you're a treasure

[DanielHasenbos]

Last year I had a client that kept requesting small changes. I decided to just do it since we hadn't discussed a number of revisions.

Since then I decided to offer my clients 2 revisions: one in the process of creating the map, and one after completion. Any more will cost extra. I also send my clients a list with questions they have to answer so I get a good idea of what they expect of me. I haven't come across any surprises since I started doing that.

[Straf]

The trouble is that publicity is awfully difficult to make into a stew without a great deal of marinating, and I've never managed to pay a water bill with it

From what I've heard you'd think publicity translated directly into cash. I saw an amazing (and quite disgusting) exchange between an artist and a client where the client asked for a commission (this was for a portrait) and the artist replied she wasn't doing any commissions just now as she had quite a backlog to clear. The client then asked when and the conversation got on about money, the client was genuinely expecting the work for free. "I'll post it on my blog and you'll get publicity", because publicity pays bills right? It became very unpleasant very quickly after that as the client started abusing the artist for not doing it now and not doing it for free. Even when the artist pointed out that the reason she wasn't accepting new commissions is because she had a lot of paying customers for the foreseeable and didn't need this guy's work he threatened to destroy her and called her things you shouldn't say in front of your mother!

It's not just art though. I've heard similar (in terms of the publicity instead of payment, not necessarily the abuse) from web developers. A client will approach them and ask for a website. Money isn't discussed until the scale of the job is known but quite often it involves a lot of server side programming. Joe Blogs, CEO of Fresh Air Inc, doesn't understand this and thinks a website is a website, just like every other website and it's just a case of putting their logo on and the money will come rolling in. Then when fees are mentioned...

"Fees?"
"Yes, my normal charge is £350 per day. This will take around 3 months to complete which is around £20000, plus extras. Then there's a retainer for maintenance and security updates."
"I was hoping you'd do it for free. Look when millions of people are visiting the site per day your name will be at the bottom telling them all who built the..."
"Go home dad, you're drunk!"

"Your utilities bill for this month is £37"
"But look, there's a book on Amazon with my name in the credits!"
"That'll be £37 please."

And stew! Mouse, you're a treasure

I'd love to know where I can pay just £37 per month for utilities

[waldronate]

But found myself with little freedom and no clear instructions.

Around here, we call that "a job".

The one bit if pseudo-wisdom that I can offer here is "The worst things about dealing with customers is having to deal with customers." They rarely know what they want, but they always know what they don't want. And they can't find out what they don't want until someone else (you) has done a whole lot of work.