Freelancing “On Spec”

We recently ran into a situation that we suspect was an example of that “big project” scam. The guy said he wanted to see what I would do with a certain topic. It just so happens that I have written and edited a ton of stuff that was on the same topic, so I sent him samples. I had a bit of a “hinky” feeling about it, so I was VERY clear that the samples belonged to someone else and were not available for use. I was not surprised when he came back saying that he needed me to write something exactly to his specifications.

Yeah, right. The fact of the matter is that the samples I provided were not only a great representation of my writing, but they even showed my existing knowledge of the topic at hand. Dude, you can’t get better samples than that.

So, Tamara sent him a very nice, very brief letter explaining that we don’t do spec work. Is anyone here shocked to find out that we never heard another word from him? I’ll go ahead and post the letter here, and you all are absolutely invited to tweak it and use it for your own purposes when someone requests that you write on spec.

For more information on why you should say “no” to spec work, check out this older post on No!Spec.

The letter we used is on the following page. Again, this is just a starting point, but feel free to build on it and use it in whatever way works for your freelancing business.