What Can You Expect?
You Don’t Have Any Competition
When you start working you get your job by first sending a brochure, then doing a follow–up call, then a thirty–minute interview with the client, then a documentation plan or proposal, then an OK. In effect, a client has hired me because I convinced him or her of the need for my services. But the client didn’t acknowledge the need for a writer before I showed up and thus, in many cases, had not made a prior commitment to the work I proposed to do. The problem with this arrangement is that you can easily be cut. You're expendable. But even more difficult, you don't have the validation of beating someone else out of the position and going through the reality check of that process.
Companies May Not Know How to Manage a Writer
If you go about finding clients in the way I did, you may encounter customers who do not know how to manage a writer. This means that they may not have set schedules for paying a writer or cutting checks for one, and you end up having to bill against a purchase order or something where you forgot to put in milestones in the first place and so have to wait to the end of the project to get paid. In a related area, you can also expect clients not to appreciate how much writing costs. Of course, for some, paying you $35 per hour sounds like a bargain, but others balk at more than $10.00 per page. You can talk yourself blue in the face about the additional costs of your business, but, to many clients, you look expensive.
Draft Work Has a Diminished Status
Oddly, in the business world as I experienced it, the draft of a work has little status. I had difficulties getting clients to look over my rough drafts seriously, although in some cases you do get very thorough and expert technical review that can really help a project. In academia, a draft can get circulated plenty of times, with slight changes, in its progress toward publication. But you may pay a price for showing unfinished work to a client, because the client may mistake the unfinished–ness of the work for poor quality.
You’re an Outsider
Because they have hired you to come in and take on a project, or even to come in for the obligatory times when you need to conduct interviews or work the scanner or copy machine or have a meeting, you do not know and can hardly get a handle on the people you encounter. It is hard to remember names, even if you try. And you do not have the chance to interact. I developed a self–absorbed persona, so that I just focused on the task. Of course, you can not do this all the time, and you relish a chance to get to know someone on the job. You meet interesting people and get to work with neat systems, but in some cases, when you are physically isolated from other employees and do not have clear channels for communication, you can easily not communicate and it can get you in trouble. In some ways, the academic world little prepares us to communicate as much as we really need to in the workplace in order to get the job done.