17 years making his client $10's of millions... and all he got was this lousy tee shirt

Following is a cautionary little tale of triumph & accomplishment. It’s also a tale of failure & betrayal, too. And I highly suggest reading carefully if you rely on client work. Here’s the story: Back in the mid 1970’s an office ‘gopher’ at Marvel Comics named Chris Claremont was in the right place at the right time for when writer/editor Len Wein of the newly relaunched Uncanny X-Men title realized he couldn’t handle the new load of work, and asked Chris if he wanted it. Of course Chris said “Hell yeah!” And off he went to write stories. Stories that, quite literally, changed not only the comics industry but TV & movies, too. Let’s start with comics. As writer of X-Men during a time when corporate basically ignored the title since it was a low “tier” title, he created or co-created some of the most memorable stories in the industry. He did the Dark Phoenix storyline (which got him a bunch of death threats). He did the Days of Future Past storyline which is probably the single most well-known Marvel storyline ever published, with implications that lasted decades. And he did the now infamous “Mutant Massacre” storyline which, while didn’t get him death threats, did create the particular “head” of the corporate monster that ended up eating 17-years of his work a few years later, and crapping it right out again. Then there was TV. Multiple cartoons were created almost exclusively based on his stories. And, if you liked (or hated) Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer show you can thank Chris. Whedon admitted Claremont’s soap opera-like storytelling was a huge influence on the show. Finally, the movies. They made (so far) two movies about his Dark Phoenix story. (Both of them not even coming close to doing it justice, but still…) They made his Days of Future Past story into a movie. (Highly successful) And, every X-Men movie from the year 2000 on (they consulted with him to get it right back when nobody in Hollywood thought anyone would watch that first movie) has strands of Chris Claremont’s “DNA” in it — with stories he plotted, characters he created, and even line-by-line dialogue he wrote. All of which probably gives him a lot of professional pride. But, in some ways, pisses him off. And you can tell in his interviews. Especially in the documentary “Chris Claremont’s X-Men”. There may even still be a bit of bitterness there. And who could blame him if that is the case? The reason for any potential bitterness: In the last few years of writing he was making more money than he knew how to spend. He literally had an airplane from the royalties (Marvel paid great royalties to the creative teams back then) if that tells you something. And he was one of the guys who would rub it into the faces of DC Comics creators when trying to poach them (Marvel did a lot of that back then) by dropping hundreds on expensive dinners when trying to woo them to work at Marvel instead. But, events turned where he was doing very little “writing.” The editor realized newcomer artist Jim Lee was bringing in all the new readers. The loyal base was still Team Claremont. But the thousands of new readers were Team Lee. So the editor started giving Jim Lee more plotting power. And Jim would sometimes send Chris pages to dialogue literally hours before the deadline, making it so he wasn’t even really writing anything but dialogue (little or no input to plots — including presumably plot lines he started). And so Chris said to hell with it and left, while barely even getting a mention in the letters to the editor section on his way out. Literally seventeen years of his professional life gone. All the characters he created in the hands of inferior writers. All the stories he developed and carefully plotted twisted by greedy editors. And all the years of pouring his life into the title, as well as multiple spin-off titles, to keep his ever-growing corner of the Marvel Comics universe coherent, consistent, and continuity-friendly… gone. Poof! Just like that. Yes, it was his choice. And he admits he might have made a different choice if doing it again. But as he put it in a Wizard Magazine interview less than two years later: “I look at that and I think, this is my entire working life, up until two years ago, and it’s taken them 18 months to gut it like a fish, to trash the characters, to kill off a tremendous amount of the context and cast, and to turn it into, to me, a parody of what it was.” All he has to show for it? A movie cameo, a documentary about his work, and fanboys writing emails like this one. But nothing X-Men-related that he created is his. And, you can see it in the documentary that bites deep. Compared to what he did for the industry — you could probably trace billions to his writing those titles in some ways — he might as well have just gotten a lousy tee shirt and maybe even a gold watch if he was really lucky. But I hear tell Marvel was even too cheap to do tee shirts, believe it or not. That was one of the reasons Todd McFarlane left the Spider-Man title (where he made Marvel tens of millions in sales each year) that he wrote and drew, to go co-found Image Comics. Such is how the corporate beast works. When you work on someone else’s projects it ain’t your work. So it is in direct marketing as well. Take freelance copywriters, for example. You can do a bunch of work for a client over months, years, even decades… and claim credit for a product or company’s success but nobody will consider you as “the” company. You're simply a hired hand. You can lie and say all your client’s sales & successes are purely a direct result of your “copy” (it's not) and a certain number of naive would-be clients and a lot of newbie copywriters and make money online dweebs will even believe you. Frankly, it may not even be a lie, and be more true than not depending on the circumstances. And you can even partner with a client where you do all the copy-related stuff and get a piece of the gross (I’ve done some deals like that, can be very lucrative, or very frustrating). But you’ll never be a full-fledged partner unless you’re listed as an officer in the company. Meaning: You are potentially as expendable as anyone else. This is not an indictment of freelancing. Or even of working for someone else. I know some copywriters who love doing client work, and the thought of doing even a small side project, and having to deal with the headaches of doing their own customer service, content and product creation, mucking around with merchant accounts, the extra tax & bookkeeping, having to generate their own leads & traffic, outsource or hire people, etc makes them want to curl up into a fetal position. So I don’t have any specific solutions here. I just wanted to bat the problem & realities around a bit. All right enough of this. There is one sure-fire way to seize control of your destiny if you’re a freelancer. And that is to sell your own offers too. i.e., you be one of your own clients. To do that, you need only have an email list, grow it, mail it offers, then mail those buyers more offers. Do that long enough to where you can survive without needing any clients, and you will almost certainly become not only a lot more attractive to said clients (since you don’t need them, and obviously know what you’re doing selling your own offers), but probably get paid a lot more too, and get more compliance to boot. First step? Start growing that list. Then start mailing it each day So simple, so pleasant... so rare in 2023. On that note: If you haven't checked out the BerserkerMail YouTube channel you can at the link below. We got all kinds of valuable content on there, all free, including a BerserkerMail demo you can look at if that suits your fancy while you're there. All right, enough, here's the link: [https∶//www.EmailPlayers.com/berserkermailtv]( Ben Settle This email was sent by Ben Settle as owner of Settle, LLC. Copyright © 2023 Settle, LLC. All Rights Reserved. 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