I Said “No” to a Potential Client

I kind of said “no” to an editing client, and was ok with it!

Being a copy editor isn’t new to me. I’ve been doing it for a number of years. However, offering eBook editing services is a new service that I have recently added to my portfolio.

Accidental book editor

My good friend, Kim Chappell, is about to launch her book “Conquer the Trend Wave”. I met Kim through a couple of Facebook groups we both belong to, and we hit it off. We were both in the middle of launching our new companies, and so it was a great opportunity to hold each other accountable and support each other in our new endeavors.

Kim was in the middle of pulling together her new book, and I offered to take a read of it. Well, ‘reading’ turned in to editing. And a new service was born for The Intentional Marketer.

Along comes ‘Joe’

This story though, was not about me firing Kim. No – we are still working together today! This story is about another client who asked if I could edit his eBook. To protect his identity, let’s call him “Joe”. Joe saw me editing Kim’s book, so he asked if I would also edit his eBook that he was about to launch.

Something in my gut told me that I needed to read the book before letting him know if I could work with him. So I had “Joe” send me a copy of his book. The file was enormous, so I figured I had my work cut out for me, and was expecting to be reading for days.

photos and style

In reality, I read his book in 20 minutes. The “book” was full of enormous photo images, which is why the file was so large. But that wasn’t the worst of the problems. The content was written in a presentation style and was very challenging to follow. If Joe were to present it in person to his audience adding commentary, it would make a little more sense. But as an eBook, it left a lot to interpretation. There was no story to follow – just a lot of random thoughts with large images on pages.

The worst part – I’m pretty sure almost all the photos (except the ones of himself) were infringing on copyright laws. That is an enormous ‘no-no’. He was asking for someone to sue him.

So many things…

It took me a couple of days to work out how I was going to respond to “Joe”. I didn’t want to discourage him from writing, but his eBook needed a lot of work. After a number of deleted email drafts, I finally sent him the following email: