Paying a writer half at the half way point for a Business Case Study Style Paper

Hello there, this may be an odd request but I am in desperate need of help with a Business Case Study Paper for my Environmental Business Class, I am taking 20 credits at the moment and have no time at all to do this paper.

it is 5-7 pages I am willing to pay well if you can complete it for me...
I would need updates and Drafts... and Will pay half at the half way point.
Below in the Link I have attached the rubric information that I have but obviously we can discuss in more detail what needs to be done if needed.

I f you could do this it really would be a miracle and so much help for me.
Thank you so much for your time,
Scott--

Generally, experienced writers who aren't hurting for work at the moment will stay very clear from both of those problems. Partial payment in advance for partial delivery of however many pages you want to prepay on much longer projects isn't usually a problem; nor is requesting to review and discuss sections or chapters of dissertations and theses in between those prepaid sections. Paying half only "at the halfway point" would be something that only very desperate writers would accept. However, we don't need "drafts" because a project of this type and length is something we'd normally just write in one sitting, say sometime on Saturday or even Saturday night. There'd be absolutely nothing to "update" you about until we started writing it; and nobody's going to stop while working on a 7-pg project that only requires several hours to write just to contact you to communicate about progress after every page or two. Finally, very few experienced writers ever accept anything other than 100% prepayment before we'd even schedule a project of this length. This kind of request is ripe pickings for scam artists who will agree wholeheartedly to your conditions and then try to find a real writer to trick into providing the first half by posing as a client, pocket whatever you pay for the first half, and then disappear with your money, leaving you and an unpaid writer hanging. Your best bet, in my opinion, is to just try out a specific writer (or company), with a shorter prepaid project if you think 5-7 pages is too big to risk, and see how that goes. Good luck with this one.

FreelanceWriter - is the only real deterrent from a half-now/half-later payment plan (on a relatively short essay) that scammers might get involved? Or is it just not worth the time of more seasoned writers?

Secondly, is there any harm in providing updates/drafts on such a small piece, especially if the client is willing to pay for it? Without knowing a reliable writer, I feel like this is one of the only ways to mitigate the effects of a substandard piece.

vzscott
I am willing to help. You can contact me via gmail or my writer profile. I have enough writing experience and my credentials and work samples are available upon request.

Not at all. Generally, most clients would probably pay after the fact without a problem. However, we cannot afford to absorb the loss or waste time chasing down payments for even a few clients who don't pay up immediately or to make a living getting paid without an issue only "most" of the time. This work is stressful enough with constant overlapping deadlines practically every working day of your life without also having to worry about whether you're even going to get paid for work you just stayed up all night writing or cancelled your non-work plans to squeeze in for someone. Getting stiffed on a payment is also psychologically demoralizing and keeping track of all your deadlines is already enough of a headache without adding more work to keep track of who owes what for work already delivered. Prospective clients at least have some ways to "vet" a new writer who's been in this business for any length of time; as a writer, you can't check out the student the same way and it would waste too much time even if you could.

Furthermore, anybody who's done this for a living for any length of time (whether freelance or for companies) has encountered occasional demands for revisions that are totally ridiculous. For example, demands to add or remove biographical information about a psychological theorist after the work has already been delivered when the only specs were "5 pages on Freud and his theories." If it hasn't been paid, payment can be wrongfully withheld to leverage free revisions that are not fairly owed. Same goes for requests to revise (again, after delivery) based on conversations between the client and the professor occurring after your work was already delivered days earlier, exactly as promised and meeting the specs provided at the time it was ordered. All of that extra work can certainly be negotiated fairly, but if the client hasn't yet paid, you could be fighting just to get what's already owed for your work.


None at all, but usually, they are not "willing to pay for it" (or expecting to pay for it as something extra) when they ask that way. Usually, they just have a very unrealistic student's-eye view of the writing process and imagine that it takes us multiple sittings spread across a week to produce a 5 or 10-page paper. They also don't necessarily realize that their project might be one of a dozen or two-dozen or more projects on your calendar that week or two and that it's not as much on your mind as it is on theirs for that entire time. If they offer to pay for your time or if you're only dabbling in this as a writer and have only one or two projects pending in a given week, I suppose it's totally up to you if you want to engage in a prolonged email exchange and/or multiple phone calls to discuss a project that you really need no assistance to write and about which you have absolutely no questions requiring answers. Typically, you'll be responding to college freshmen wanting to "discuss" points about writing that they've just heard for the first time from their professors that week but that no professional writer needs to spend time discussing, especially for some 5-pg paper that you plan on banging out in an hour or two next week on the day it's scheduled on your calendar to be written and that will probably be an "A" in quality without any discussions about it after you confirm that you have everything you need for it.

Thanks for your reply; it's very helpful. I've written my first essay (so far so good) and used the half-now/half-later plan (successfully), simply because I thought it was the norm for this industry. The business side of freelancing is certainly interesting. I've also been contacted by two potential clients who immediately stopped replying to my emails as soon as I brought up the topic of payment - I think it's possible they thought I was doing this for free. I guess it's a start!

No problem. Good luck to you.

I'd be interested to know how the end result turned out. Did you complete the order and get paid? Have you picked up additional clients and now have a structure for at least half up front?

In my experience, no less than half upfront works and that also depends on the size of the project. For a thesis or dissertation, I am happy to let clients pay for each chapter along the way. That give them the chance to see the work without making the full (and often large) investment. Sure, that does leave the door open for revisions along the way, but (most of the time) I'd rather tweak as I go versus having them come back months later when my mind is not fresh on the subject.

Having said the above, though, some clients with large projects do not realize that future tweaks are part of the process. No one has or will ever turn in the perfect thesis or dissertation the first time. There will always be changes to be made and if the client wants the writer to make those, that's more work and time, and it will cost more. :)

Anyway, let us know how it all turned out and where you are now in your freelancing career.

I was wondering, do you charge for the extra tweaks or do you incorporate that into your final costing as submitted to the client. I find that when I have large paper projects, I often have to tweak the final costing as the client either adds more work, requests for revisions that were not part of the original deal , or just asks that I lessen the pages. In which case I refuse to lower the price as I explain that the cost can be used to pay for future requests and revisions. Have you ever found yourself in a similar situation?

As you mentioned, the students often don't realize that they have to pay extra for unagreed upon or additional requests that further make the paper more difficult to complete or require a changed deadline. While they do get cross, a proper explanation always has them thanking me for accommodating them. I hope it is the same case for you?

I just make that explicitly clear in my FAQs and also in our initial communications before payment for the first project with every new client.

I really depends on what the client is asking. If the "tweak" involve possible corrections (I do make mistakes sometimes), then I make those for free, of course. Overall, it depends on the feedback they've received and how much work is involved. However, with the majority of large projects, the clients generally ask about my revision policy when they receive my quote, and I am able to let them know upfront that feedback received after the project is complete is additional work and will include an additional fee. There's no way to let them know how much the fee will be until I see the feedback.

On occasion, I've had a client seem to be frustrated because I can't give a price on revisions beforehand, but I can't price something that doesn't yet exist. ;) There's really no way to even give a per page rate for possible revisions because many revisions involve tweaks here and there without actually requiring additional pages. I do try to be fair in pricing revisions, taking into consideration that the client has already spent a large amount with me. At the same time, I have to be fair to myself and the time it takes to complete revisions. It's really a case-by-case situation.

Where the revision instructions do not necessarily amount to additional content that I can express in terms of number of pages, I try to estimate the amount of effort I'll have to put in for the revision. I do this estimation in terms of time (number of hours it'll take to complete the revision) sometimes, then work backwards to determine the equivalent number of pages. I have a rough idea of how many pages I can complete within an hour. Admittedly, it's not the easiest thing to do.

My policy in this regard is simple. I never, ever perform work that hasn't been paid. I feel like that is perfectly reasonable. Amazon won't ship me a book until I pay for it; L.L. Bean won't send me a pair of jeans until I pay for it; eBay won't ship that two-pack of humidifier filters until - you guessed it - I pay for it. I think it's just as reasonable that we are paid in advance for our work. Now, I certainly am willing to work out payment plans that divide the work - and the payments - into two or three sections. But again, each payment needs to come first, and then I will write and send that particular section.

When I am hired directly, outside of my company, I give the client one week to complete the payments. I do not even begin working on the paper unless the payment has cleared in my account. I have found that working on a paper per section, as the payments come in, or not do not make for a high quality paper. The best quality paper is the one that is written continuously because the writer is focused on the development of the content. When the writer completes the paper in batches, the fluidity and strength of discussion fluctuates as the writer stopped writing at a certain point. Doing so wrecks the "zone" that writers have to find themselves in to complete the perfect paper. Once the writer is out of the "zone", everything else disappears along with the fluid thought and writing process.