Today, an editor paid for my tank of gas.

Or did they? Also: A tough business lesson.

Okay, my editor didn’t exactly pay for a tank of gas. I’m not above using a clickbait headline. But my editor sorta-paid for a tank of gas… and I learned a very important lesson on running my business today.

This morning, I received payment from a new-to-me publication. $.50 US a word, 1,200 words. For anyone not Canadian, $600 US is about a zillion Canadian dollars these days. So you can imagine my great surprise and dismay when the payment was short $100. Uh, what’s going on here? That $100 US could probably pay for, like, a yacht or something, provided I could nab one before tariffs hit us all.

It turns out that my editor had marked me down as doing 1,000 words at $.50 a word, not 1,200. I recorded the word count and rate in my notes as we talked. I handed in a draft that was 1,200 words. After lots of tough but fair edits, the final piece was similarly close to 1,200 words. The invoice I sent in December (which they didn’t technically need since they have their own system, but I always send them all the same) specified 1,200 words. But we never hammered out the details over email, instead meeting over a video call to chat about the piece this past fall and their notes from the conversation said 1,000 words. I pushed back.