Kudos on the honesty (and the good writing! :)).
Perhaps the issue was that you jumped into freelance writing without fully appreciating what you need to do in order to protect yourself. As you unfortunately learned here, you have to have a signed contract with the client that clearly specifies (in no particular order):
- Your rate, which should be high enough to cover any platform fees, etc.; it seems your rate was about $0.012/word or so. It should have been at least $0.50-$1.00/word to be at professional rates range, which would get rid of bad clients. When just breaking into the field, accepting $0.25/word is not crazy, but going below $0.10/word is ill-advised.
- What the client has to provide to you (e.g., all research and background material, feedback on submitted drafts, etc.) and when.
- How many rounds of revisions are included, what constitutes a revision (as opposed to a rewrite) and what the charge is for each additional round.
- Initial payment to cover your effort if the client goes bye-bye in the middle of the project.
- Milestone deliverables with due dates (conditioned on timely response from the client) and with milestone payments (you don’t deliver the next deliverable until the previous one is paid). The first deliverable should usually be an outline, so you have the client’s approval on what you’ll be writing to before you get started actually writing.
- Kill fee — what the client agrees to pay you if s/he decides s/he no longer wants you to complete the project after you got started.
Many online freelance sites have an overwhelming majority of clients I’d never work with. These are “clients” who want an acceptable product at rock bottom prices. Working with them, you’re competing with hordes of third-world writers who have daily expenses that are lower than your by an order of magnitude or even two orders of magnitude.
In the philippines, for example, $2/hour is considered a very nice salary. In many other countries, even $1/hour is a lot. In the US, median salary is about $32.80/hour and the federal minimum wage is $7.25/hour.
You want to work with clients willing to pay professional rates for top-notch work. You want to compete on value, not price. The latter is a sure-fire recipe to get stuck in a race to the bottom, which you cannot win.
You absolutely can become a successful freelance writer, but not by writing (or ghost-writing) for $0.01/word, and not by accepting a job without a strong contract to protect you and ensure that you and your client have matching expectations.
