Condescending feedback. Thoughts?

[aliharvey]

EDIT: Edited for conciseness to avoid TL;DR issues.

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A new client hired me on a temporary basis to do a trial project for them. Their feedback left me feeling a little sore. 

Some of the feedback includes things like:

"your literary skills are very high, but your salesmanship skills to be quite low". 

In general, snotty feedback is what it is. I just deal with it.  So, up to this point, I was prepared to fix it up and move forward.

But then they did this:

"We would also like you to check out our copywriting course on your own time. We will provide free access to it."

So this is where I got offended. Is that valid? I've been doing this for over 10 years. I've had clients not like my style, and that's totally fine—but I've never had one tell me to take a class. 

What should I do about this? What would you do? I'm trying to decide whether I should just suck it up and continue with this well-paying project or professionally close things out. 

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TL:DR: New client told me (10+ yrs experience) to take a copywriting class. Trying to decide if it's worth continuing this relationship. 

[r-milind · Accepted solution]

My suggestion:

Take action at the right time. You have realized that this client might not be a good client in the long run.. It is always good to terminate the contract now before it is too late. I see that you have many good reviews on your recent projects. I am sure you will get good long-term clients in near future.. 

Cheers

[aliharvey]

Fair enough. I was thinking that I would offer to fix what I've done so far, but not accept any more work. Is that what you meant?

[r-milind]

I would suggest not to fix things for which you are not responsible in the first place. If you do so, chances are that the client will take advantage of this and press for more free work.. Avoid such clients.

[gilbert-phyllis]

If a well-paying client offered me free access to a course that might be relevant to my profession, I'd take a look at it to see if I might pick up something useful. Ten years in is when I began to learn how to learn what I didn't already know--and there was plenty, at that stage of my career. It took me a bit longer than that to figure out that riding around on my high horse offers a beguiling view of the world but usually winds up being unnecessarily expensive. 

[aliharvey]

Thank you for your thoughts, Phyllis. I certainly appreciate your perspective. 

I should clarify: I never meant to say that I was "too good" for a free course. I was simply trying to convey that I felt they were offering it to make a rather rude point, rather than trying to be helpful. There have been many occasions where I've accepted training from a client (though, my time was usually compensated), so I am definitely not opposed to learning new things. My main issue here was the tone of the entire message, which was lengthy and filled with what I interpreted as passive aggressive comments.