Things I Do For My Clients...That I Don't Tell Them About

I just discovered RogueInk--this blog is absolutely hilarious, and I love the writing style. Perusing the archives, I found this little gem that mentions the crazy things we writers do for our clients--that we generally never tell them about.

This practically made me fall off my chair. I do all kinds of weird things that maybe I should brag about--and maybe I should really never tell anyone. Good judgement aside, here's my confession: five things I do for my clients that I never (except in this post) admit to.

I literally sit down to write at nine A.M., and don't get up until 4 P.M. I am not a workaholic. I am very careful about setting my deadlines so that I have plenty of time to get everything done. Even so, I get really, really involved in what I'm doing--sometimes I forget to eat all day, then look at the clock and realize it's time for dinner. Am I hungry? No. I'm too busy to be hungry. I generally don't include this little fact in my marketing material, because, well...it makes me sound psycho.

I am paranoid about mistakes. I am a total grammar Nazi. Misplaced apostrophes and typos send me into red-faced, muttering rants. I live in terror that the ONE time I forget to spell check, I have a big, fat, glaring error right in the headline of the first draft I'm sending over to a brand-new, high-paying client. So I check everything over five, six, eight times before I send it.

If the job takes longer or is harder than I estimated, I won't bill you or ask for an extension. I am absolutely steadfast about the prices I quote. My view is that if I didn't understand the project at the outset, that's my problem. I will deliver at that price. And I'll meet that deadline too, even if I have to stay up all night for three days straight.

This actually did happen to me once. I made a bid on Elance for a job that sounded like it was nine pages long. The client was actually asking for THREE documents nine pages long. I quoted on the first scenario, then realized I hadn't read closely enough. My bad...I did it anyway, in the four days I'd promised.

I get really nervous every time I send a first draft to someone new. I want them to like it. I really, really want them to like it. In 99.9% of cases, they do. But every time I send something out to a new client, I check my email incessantly every five minutes afterward to see if they responded back. I can't think about anything else until I know that they don't hate the first draft.

I will research for hours to make sure I'm not giving bad info. I have seriously spent Herculean amounts of time on the web looking around for obscure information about fire sprinkler installation, luxury mattresses, and the life cycles of freshwater oysters to ensure what I'm writing about is true. Even for a dinky little keyword article.

And in general, I never tell my clients about any of it. (But just now--I did.)

Okay, so spill it: what do you do for your clients that they never hear about?