Smart Moves and Toilet Brushes

New followers (hi! thanks for reading!) may not be aware that I'm a freelance writer/communications consultant when I'm not hanging around on blogs and trying to become a fiction writer. So there are days when I feel like the sailor from the Yarn of the Nancy Bell:

"Oh, I am a cook and a captain bold,
And the mate of the Nancy brig,
And a bo'sun tight, and a midshipmite,
And the crew of the captain's gig!"

If you haven't read the poem, the joke is that the narrator has eaten all of the other people. I, on the other hand, am an entire crew to myself: marketing manager, business manager, customer relations expert and a number of other things in addition to being the writer around here. So I tend to take note of good business practices.

I was treated to a very smart business move on the part of Amazon today when I received a $70 refund on the Kindle I bought last month. Amazon dropped the price from $265 to $189 a couple of days ago, and I was, understandably, slightly miffed. So I tweeted my miffedness to the world, and received a reply from a Twitter friend that she'd received a refund. I immediately emailed Amazon, and got my refund within a few hours.

YES! Very smart move on Amazon's part. I am happy with them, I'm telling the world about it, and they'll easily recoup all those refunds by keeping their customers loyal.

At one point in the last five years, I worked as a sales associate for a big-box store whose policy was that we cheerfully refunded with no quibbles. It's still one of my favorite stores, by the way; I left because I'd had a really good offer and retail was never a strong focus for me. So one day I was working on the cash register and this very, very old guy came in. He reached into his bag, pulled out a dirty toilet brush (and I mean DIRTY. Go look at your toilet brush right now. Yeah, like that.) and waved it under my nose.

"Look, it's broken" he said. "Can I exchange it for a new one?"

Well, this store empowered us to make our own decisions about these things. So I smiled, transferred it very gingerly to the nearest trash can, and arranged for a new one to be brought to the register. My employer was out a very few bucks (I learned a lot about retail margins in that job) and the ten or so people that saw me do the exchange were likely to buy more in the store that day because they knew they could return ANYTHING.

How do I translate these tales into my own business? By internalizing that being a giver is a win-win scenario. That can be applied in any situation - from being willing to give out free information or tips online that I could easily sell, to ensuring there is some pro bono work in my business (that's easy, there has been since the beginning), to being ready to refund promptly where there's an issue.

Or better still, to avoid issues altogether by passing unsuitable jobs on to someone better able to tackle them. Sometimes, you're just not a good fit with a client and it's better to recognize that at first glance.

Which brings me to the "you" part of this post (yes, there is one!) If you're an independent contractor in a writing, print production or communications field, drop me a comment about the sort of assignment you like to do best of all. For one thing, I'm interested to know how many freelancers are reading this. And second, you just never know when an assignment may come my way that I would rather pass on to someone else. Networking! I love it, and it's the lifeblood of indie workers. I read somewhere that nearly 1/4 of the American workforce is self-employed. So feel free to drop a little self-promotion on this post. Don't overdo it.

Am I Having Too Much Fun?

Here's the thing. I started revising my first novel this week, right on schedule (to my amazement) and decided to kick off by reading the whole thing through and just noting where things need fixing, rather than diving straight into revisions. Incidentally, the Kindle is very useful for this - I loaded the MS on there and have been busy writing notes to myself on it, while I can't actually change it so that takes away the temptation to revise until I've looked at the novel as a whole. Also, on the Kindle it looks like a Real Book - which leads me to predict that self-publishing is going to become HUGE during the next decade.

Anyway, the problem du jour is that I am enjoying reading my own work. And I feel horribly conflicted about that. I'm so used to writers on Twitter moaning about how much they hate their WIP, are scared by it and so on, and all the helpful advice about revising your work until it sweats blood, that I'm now worried I'm not being critical enough.

Of course I'm finding plenty of places where there'll be substantial revisions - I concentrated so much on "showing, not telling" while I was writing the draft that I now realize I do have to put SOME description in here and there, to give the poor reader an idea of where in the world they are. Also, I'm not handling transitions between story and backstory very well, and there are chunks of plotline that went nowhere and need to be cut. And lots and lots of minor edits that I've spotted.

BUT on the whole I'm enjoying reading my story, and yesterday I got through about 40% of it in one sitting! Granted, it's not long - I aimed for 80,000 words (given out by publishing industry folks like Moonrat as a good length for a starter novel) and am hoping to come in somewhere between 80 and 90K in the end. So for a fast reader like me, it's a quick read. But still, I read the equivalent of 80-90 pages in one sitting which is a lot for me.

I mentioned to Felsted that I was worried about enjoying my own work, and he sagely said that it's a good thing as you're supposed to write the sort of book you'd like to read yourself. But shouldn't I be twisted up into agonies of artistic angst? Am I just too darn complacent, smug and comfy in a ghastly middle-class middle-aged chintz-sofa kind of way? Perhaps I should take up smoking cigars or increase my whisky consumption from two a year to five a day. And hang out in biker bars or something. Sell all my possessions and go backpacking in Tibet.

Well, I suppose that if this thing does what most first novels do and sinks without trace, at least I'll have ONE devoted reader. So maybe after my 500th rejection letter I should get a copy self-published for myself, and one day when I'm an old, old lady in a nursing home I will be reading this book and thinking "hmm, quite enjoyable, I wonder who wrote it?"

Bring on the advice, seasoned writers. Do you like reading your own work?