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Thank you for your reply, Celeste. I considered the possibility of the requester suggesting payment of $50-$100 for all 30 'fillers', but having gone back in and looked it over, several times, it does state they want 30 articles, payment per article. Is there anyway of having this explained a little better? Or of someone contacting the requester for clarification? I don't want to send 30 little 30 word articles, and have them rejected, nor do I want to send a 300 word article, and have it rejected, if that is not what the requester is asking for. Everything else is so straight forward. I am really confused by this one.

Here's what the request says:

Description

I need about 50-70 short, interesting anecdotes for a military stories site


Additional Details

Request Date: 2011-07-31 19:05:29

Number of Documents: 30

Subjects: Military, Funny, Heroic, Inspiring

Extra Notes:

Price Per Article: $50-100

Length of Article: 30

Categories: Arts & Culture

Under the price per article and length per article sections, this information comes from fields that the customer has to fill in. For price, customers have about five dropdown choices. It's not unusual for these answers to not make complete sense for all types of content, so you have to look at the description for clarification. Since the customer says, "I need about 50-70 short, interesting anecdotes for a military stories site," we know that these are going to be short little blurbs probably similar to Readers Digest type anecdotes. I doubt he's expecting each one to be 30 words long exactly, but that does give us an idea that a sentence or two is probably fine. I don't believe the '30' is a typo for '300' because 300 words, while sort of short, isn't really all that short.

SInce it's not practical to upload 50 or 70 short anecdotes individually, it's fine to bundle them. I believe the customer is willing to pay $100-150 for the entire project, not per blurb. Now, that doesn't mean you have to commit to doing 50 or 70. Quick calculation in my head tells me that the per blurb price should be $2 or so. You could write up ten blurbs at a time and charge $20 for each batch. This way, your first submission is less risky and the customer can potentially give you feedback or ask you to submit more. If you do smaller batches, make sure to put a note in the short summary that makes it clear that there are 10 blurbs -- or title the article 10 Military Blurbs.

Hope that helps!

So glad you can't see my red face and sheepish grin. The word 'anecdote' says it all. THANK YOU, Celeste, for all of your hard work, and in answering my dumb question. It pays to read the fine print... a fact I have been aware of for many, many years. I'm chalking this up to the summer heat... this time. I'm certain my next excuse for asking a stupid question will be just as equally lame.

Don't be embarassed. Some of these requests are so vague it takes a team to figure out what the customer's asking for