How Limiting Revisions Can Actually Help Your Freelance Writing Clients
Setting limits can help not only you, but also your clients
Roughly five years ago — when starting out on my journey as a freelance content marketing writer — I received an unexpected email from a client.
It was regarding a blog post I had written for the princely sum of about $100 roughly three months’ previously. A lot had happened in the intervening period both in my life and in my business. Truth be told, I could barely remember the topic.
After petering its way through the upper echelons of middle management, the blog piece had come back for its third round of feedback marked up with its latest reader’s tracked changes feedback.
The feedback flatly contradicted that which I had received from Manager B in the previous round of revisions.
I bit my lip and made the changes — the only thing you can really do when you haven’t contractually protected yourself from this kind of thing. But needless to say, undoing my own work and throwing another few hours into a project that was already poorly profitable was a frustrating experience.
On the basis of this, I instituted a few changes to my standard operating terms and contract.
Why I Only Offer My Clients One Round Of Revisions
In light of RevisionGate, I instituted a couple of changes to my boilerplate freelance writing client T&Cs:
- You only get one round of revisions.
- You need to communicate that one and only request for revisions within 30 days of receiving the draft (I’ve tweaked both clauses slightly over the years).
I instituted the one revision rule in light of the above and to control scope. If I’m quoting a fixed rate for a project — as I almost always do — I need to know what the rough parameters of the work I’m going to undertake are.
But since instituting it I’ve also come round to the belief that it actually makes the writing workflow work better on the client’s end too.
Revision Addiction Is A Thing
The first reason I’ve found limiting revisions useful is because there are many clients who — if you let them — will keep insisting on tweaking a text until it arrives closer and closer to their version of perfection.
This, I’ve come to realize, is essentially a manifestation of perfectionism and anxiety.
Perfectionism is generally regarded as an unproductive trait. I try to avoid it myself. So why should I enable my clients?
There are times when complicated texts really do have to run up the corporate ladder in order to receive the requisite approvals. In those cases I tend to quote for multiple rounds of revisions up front. Three tends to be the maximum amount of revisioning that I consider reasonable for most documents.
But there are also cases in which clients will continue tweaking a text that was perfectly good the second or third time. This kind of behavior often only contributes to writer frustration and delays the timely production of deliverables.
Finally — to be undiplomatic — there are many middle managers who will leave feedback on a document solely for internal political reasons: to make it obvious to their boss that they’re doing something by reviewing a document. There are times when these unnecessary rounds of revisions actually end up making a document worse.
In some instances, I’ve also got the feeling that leaving revisions is a kind of weird power-play in which the reviewer feels the need to tell the writer that his/her initial work wasn’t (quite) good enough.
Sometimes, clients want to “hop on calls” to communicate comments that could have been communicated much more efficiently through sending a few prescient comments on a document.
When clients know that they have one chance to offer feedback, they realize that they need to make the best use of that moment. I have found that this “rule” cuts down on the volume of “feedback calls” which I have found to often be extremely unproductive.
Unnecessary revisions definitely happen.
Sometimes preventing clients from making them is actually a helpful behavior.
Crossed Wires Are Also A Thing
The other benefit I’ve found from limiting my clients to one round of revisions — unless we agree otherwise — is that it forces the client to bring together their internal stakeholders to review the work in the most efficient manner possible.
As I learned during some of my first projects, layers of management often request contradictory changes to the one document. If you offer unlimited revisions, this can bind you to going through a frustrating process in which you end up writing and un-writing your own work. Not fun!
When I tell my clients that they will only be able to request one revision unless I raise the quote, it forces them to do some thinking and to get organized.
The client needs to bring all the reviewers together and agree upon what feedback to communicate to the writer.
This presents an opportunity for the client to resolve — internally — any differences of opinion that may exist about the document in question.
While I instituted my one revision rule in order to control scope, but I’ve subsequently found that it’s very helpful in helping clients to work as efficiently as possible.
To grossly generalize, startups tend to be the worst offenders when it comes to internal disorganization and excessive revision requesting which sometimes stems from internal miscommunication.
I should also add that I operate this rule with a good measure of discretion. If I sense that a white paper will really need three rounds of good revisions I’ll suggest it and then build it into the quote. But for simpler projects, unless otherwise agreed, I quote, and bill, at one.
