That’s like saying “You can trust me because I raise kittens.” Talk about a non-sequitur!

Consider this: He ran three or four national trade magazines at the time, and at least one was over 20 years old. Each title was about 140 pages (with maybe a 50-50 editorial-ad ratio), so there were a LOT of articles per issue. He didn’t pay well either (I used it as fill-in work), but even at his rates, he would have spent way more than that if he’d always paid his writers. Had he claimed to have paid writers tens of millions of dollars over time, I might have believed him, instead his claim sounded more like an admission of guilt because it made me focus on how much lower his figure was that the cumulative cost of all of those articles should be.

Sounds like you’re moving up the food chain, Mary. These kinds of “clients” tend to disappear when you charge more. Not always, but they don’t exist in huge numbers at the higher end of the pay range.