Freelancer Life - How Long Before You Re-Contact Someone? (Patreon)

My Freelancing, Industry Insider, and Business of Games posts are designed to give advice I would have found useful at various points in my 28-year ttRPG career. They are written from my point of view, as a game writer, developer, consultant, and small publisher, but are often applicable to other freelancing work and industries.

My intention is do do these posts about twice a month, unless Patrons ask for a lot more of them. About half of those will be open to all members, and the rest available only to paying Patrons.

Today I tackle the question:

"How long should you wait to re-contact someone if you don't hear back from them."

This assumes you made a professional contact, likely by email, to someone who can reasonable be expected to work with freelancers. In some companies that person will be noted on an "About Us" page of their website, and artists are often expected to send a digital portfolio or link to an online portfolio to some specific email address. In other cases you have to guess, with people listed as publishers, producers, developers, editors, and agents all potential candidates.

So, do your best to check around and make sure you're sending messages to the right people.

But after that, if you send a polite contact message, note you look forward to hearing from them, and you don't... how long do you wait before you send another message.

Well, the general industry standard is: there is no standard.

I've asked this question of mentors, employers, and colleagues a LOT, and they all carefully note that none of the creative industries with heavy freelancer activity have any kind of standard of best-practices answer.

And then RIGHT after saying that, they all give me roughly the same answer. So, I'm calling it. this is the industry standard... until a bunch of developers get annoyed at me and tell me to change it, in which case I will.

So, here's the now-minted standard: Two weeks.

The first time.

If your very FIRST contact doesn't get any reply, wait two weeks, and send a polite follow up. In fact I hope I don't have to say, ALWAYS be polite in contacting people who can give you work. If you are so annoyed with a lack of response you can't be polite, just stop contacting those people.

If you don't hear something after two weeks? Try again four weeks later.

If you don't hear something after four weeks? Try again eight weeks later.

If you don't hear something after eight weeks? Try again six months later.

And then you can send a follow-up note once every 6 months after that until circumstances change.

Some things you SHOULDN'T do include:

Harassing anyone. If they have a professional contact, use it and only it. Do not try to get their home contact info, or use private social media*, or find out where they see movies and wait in the bushes to leap out and ask why they aren't talking to you. And yes, very, very rarely that stuff happens. I once had someone ask if I would sign their Star Wars Roleplaying Game book while I was sitting in a movie theater. (I have witnesses, it was weird.) And, honestly, I was delighted. But if that person had asked me how to get WORK writing for Star Wars, I'd have felt differently.

Also, Social Media can be weird. My general rule is if they present their social media account as a professional entity (such as having it's name be "Blaze Carson, Tabletop Roleplaying Producer and Dimensional Heroine"), AND you don't find an email or similar professional contact for them, it's okay to drop a comment in an appropriate topic and ask how they prefer to be professional contacted. In a pinch, in that case, a DM (direct message) might even be appropriate--but I'd make it a direct message asking if a professional inquiring through DM is okay.

(I, personally, allow DM professional contacts on all my social media, but that is VERY MUCH not universal.)

(A seminar can be another great place to ask "What's the best way to contact you about freelancer work?" but NOT to ask "Why wont you ever reply to me?!")

And basically, that's it. Keep it short for a first contact. Keep it polite. And allow the gaps between contacts to get longer and longer. And naturally if told to stop, STOP. Otherwise, a polite note every 6 months is reasonable.

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