All posts with the ‘ communication ’ Tag

R2-D2 and C-3PO are best friends.  They grew up together, went to the same college and for the past few weeks, they’ve been working on a story together.  A friend of a friend of C-3PO’s is an editor and, based on R2 and 3PO’s happy hour accentuated pitch, has agreed to take a look at it.  Unfortunately, the story isn’t done; it’s still in pre-first … Read More

I had a great time at Stumptown Comics Fest this year!  There were tons of cool people, a bunch of great comics and I tricked George Rohac into doing a panel with me.

On the off chance you aren’t familiar with Mr. Rohac, George is the Operations Director at Oni Press & one of the hardest working men in comics.  George has the comics … Read More

You have a client named…Splinter.

Splinter has a new job for you about once every two or three months.  The work tends to be interesting, but not overly taxing, and Splinter generally agrees to a higher hourly rate than many of your other clients.

Splinter is also consistently late.  He’s late to conference calls, passing on specs and worst of all, he’s generally 10-15 days … Read More

Preconceptions suck. They’re usually wrong, for starters, and in the context of a negotiation, they can mean that you waste a lot of time combatting what the other person thinks they know about you rather than dealing with the actual issue. Common preconceptions in negotiating include: women don’t negotiate; artists are bad at business; freelancers make a pile of money because they don’t have overhead expenses; large businesses have a pile of money to spend because they’re large businesses; and the other side is probably hiding something sinister from you. But not matter how unhelpful preconceptions are, they persist. And when you find yourself the victim of one in a negotiation, it can stall or even ruin the deal. Rather than give up and roll over, try these things the next time you think the other side has ass.u.me.ed they know all about you.

Let’s say you’re a single person looking to adopt a French Bulldog. In a bizarre Because This Is A Hypothetical turn of events, there are only two dogs for you to choose from.… Read More

I’m sure you’ve never had this experience: you email something to someone you’re working with, ask them to review it and respond to you with their feedback/answer/opinion.

And they don’t write back.

So you email again.

And they don’t write back.

So you bang your head against the wall and hope it dulls the pain of being ignored.

I found myself in that situation today … Read More

Delivered direct to my inbox this morning was a snippet of an article about envy and negotiating.  And it made me feel very smug.  Because it’s very similar to what we just talked about in the last post.

Turns out, shockingly, that when we envy a counterpart in a negotiation, we’re more likely to hold back information from them. Or even just  flat out lie.… Read More

Perhaps one of the most useful phrases I’ve ever learned is “Yes, and….”

It’s a pretty simple little phrase, and not exactly revolutionary.  I’d probably said it a thousand times before I was taught it.

Because it’s not just the phrase, “yes, and…”, it’s when you use it.

You use it when your negotiation counterpart has just said something you KNOW is ill-informed and if … Read More