Attaining perspective with delusional clients
Ghostwriting, editing and coaching jobs can be very hard to define. In the editorial professional’s mind, the job is to create the best possible manuscript. In the client’s mind, the job is to make a book that reflects their brilliance. There’s a huge chasm between the two.
Clients don’t understand how publishing works, what’s allowed in a nonfiction manuscript, how sentences work, how readers respond, who can review manuscripts and when, how those reviews get integrated, how graphics happen, how manuscripts get turned into books, how books get distributed, and how they get paid by publishers. It’s all an arcane set of processes that get further inflamed by well-meaning advice from your aunt who published a romantasy book with dragons and your know-it-all neighbor whose economics textbook sold 40,000 copies in 1988.
No matter how much (typically uncompensated) time you spend explaining things to clients, they tend to have their own ideas and rarely just trust their editors. They’re delusional. So you need to deal with their delusions.
How to deal with delusional clients
When dealing with a client who persists in believing something at odds with editorial reality, you typically have four possible strategies:
- Educate. Take extra time to clearly document the difference between the client’s delusion and reality, so the client can better understand how publishing and books really work.
- Redefine. Add paid “side quests” to deal with the delusions, in essence spinning off a bunch of smaller jobs defined by the new reality that the client is imagining.
- Meter. Run up a bunch of hourly charges accounting for the extra time created by the delusion, then wrangle over the invoice as you try to convince the client that they’re creating waste and needlessly derailing the process.
- Quit. Give up.
In my experience, most veteran editorial professionals will try to choose Educate or Redefine. We chose smart clients and good projects, so we want to believe they’re destined to be successful with enough editorial attention. As a result we always believe we can get the project back on track; we hate to give up or just turn into hourly fee-generators.
But our optimism is our downfall. Sometimes Quit is the right option. To figure out what to do, you need some outside perspective.
The power of the network to add perspective
Every ghostwriter or editor I know has asked themselves from time to time, “Is it me? Is the client right? Maybe I’m just not doing my job as well as I need to for this client.” No matter our level of confidence, we believe in the client, which means we question ourselves.
When this happens, you need a buddy.
I recently was involved in a project that kept going off the rails. The client was brilliant, the content was excellent, but the process was increasingly scrambled. Multiple attempts to redefine the process didn’t converge on a solution. I did what all freelance ghostwriters do when things go wobbly: I complained to my spouse. “What do you think I should do?” I asked her.
“Dump him,” she said.
I was shocked. She tends to stay out of my business and her advice is usually about better ways to manage communication. She’d never before said “Dump him,” when I complained about problematic clients. But after listening to me complain repeatedly, she’d decided I had better not spend any more time being sucked into the delusion.
I didn’t dump him (yet). But I did complain to a couple of other ghosts I know and trust. “You need to stop the project,” they both said. Hmm. Two experienced ghostwriters agreed with my wife. It was time to stop indulging the delusion any further.
I’m no longer on that project. Thanks, friends.
I was recently talking to another writer dealing with a similarly erratic client. Unlike my project, theirs was at the very start of the job, not yet committed. I shared some advice about how to manage the delusional client; my writer friend took careful notes. I think they’ll have some better tools to manage the situation now.
Here’s what I’ve learned: It’s very hard to balance my own optimism about a project and clients’ delusions. Feedback from trusted friends in my network is the missing perspective.
So, editorial professionals, if you’re wondering if you’re crazy or not, ask a trusted friend. They’ll help you find a rational path forward in an emotional business.