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Smart People Impress Me

by CDarklock
14 replies
I had a Warrior contact me about some proofreading services. A few months ago, I put out some feelers about fixing spelling and grammar for those whose first language wasn't English.

I was advised not to do it, because it was a lot of work and the pay would be far too low. I did it anyway a few times, and it was indeed a lot of work and the pay was low. So I stopped doing it.

But in a moment of weakness, because this Warrior asked nicely, I agreed to provide this service at a specific per-page cost.

So I get the document, and my immediate reaction was that this report was not going to do well because it was such a big wall of text. But I did my job, submitted the finished work with invoice, and moved on.

I just got a PM from this Warrior about what a great job I did. And then he mentioned something that truly impressed me.

He said now all he had to do was put the formatting and screenshots back in.

It doesn't take a genius to figure out that if you use narrow margins with a small font and yank all the screenshots - your page count goes down!

Smart.

I'm betting that when all that goes back in, his page count will double. With a few simple tweaks to his report, he chopped the proofreading invoice in half.

And that's how you run a successful business.
#impress #people #smart
  • Profile picture of the author Diana Lane
    I remember reading somewhere that Kate Anderson does something similar whenever she outsources the creation of an ebook for one of the sites she sells, paying by the page and specifying a small font size, and then reformatting the work afterwards using a larger one.

    Like you say, smart.
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  • Profile picture of the author Mukul Verma
    Yup!!!

    How you run a successful business is create a win-win because I do not think you would do it again, so he loses out
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  • Profile picture of the author GeorgR.
    ah come on...don't you count the words and charge per word?
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    • Profile picture of the author Colin Palfrey
      Originally Posted by GeorgR. View Post

      ah come on...don't you count the words and charge per word?
      I'm guessing he will next time LOL
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    • Profile picture of the author CDarklock
      Originally Posted by GeorgR. View Post

      ah come on...don't you count the words and charge per word?
      For less than one page, yeah.

      The proofreading thing is really not something I want to keep doing on any sort of ongoing basis. In fact, I usually just do it for friends in return for a free copy of the report, and the idea of selling the service was just something I played around with doing. I thought maybe it would be faster and easier, but it's really not.
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      • Profile picture of the author ForeignProfessor
        Proofreading can really really suck. I do quite a lot of it, mostly not by choice. My most recent sucky proofreading+editing experience though was one I agreed to beforehand.

        Myself and 3 co-workers were recently contracted to do some proofreading. It was for the English version of a website of about 600 pages. The largest "pages" being about 1 page of text, and the rest being anywhere from a couple of lines up to about a (paper) page. The payment was agreed at $8 a (web)page (split 4 ways).

        My share would have been about $1,200 for about 8 hours work. I was very happy with this pay. I'd do it all the time in fact if I could get it.

        Until last week. The company called us up and decided they'd changed their minds about how much they were going to pay us. They'd decided that we only deserved 1/4 of what they originally offered since a lot of the pages were not full pages.

        To put this in context, our pay is about $4,000 out of a contract worth $280,000 for the web page. And the company wants to slash our pay to about $1,200 between 4 people. It's a tiny per centage of their budget, but a noticeable amount of money for us. It turns out the whole deal was only agreed through a verbal contract by my co-worker, and nothing formal was signed, so we don't have much recourse either. Sucky.

        Proofreading and editing suck. Steer clear =)
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        • Profile picture of the author Kay King
          Proofing and editing are fine - you didn't have a contract.

          I think expecting $160 an hour for proofing/editing is over the top but perhaps it would be better to bid per 100 words rather than by the page.

          I'm with Bev on word count. If a client specifies 100 pages the final contract always specifies both pages and range for word count just to be clear. The price is based on word count - no matter what size font they want me to use.

          If you are paying per page it's a good idea to specify font size (12 for example) so you don't end up with huge text from a writer trying to fill space.

          kay
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          • Profile picture of the author ForeignProfessor
            Originally Posted by Kay King View Post

            Proofing and editing are fine - you didn't have a contract.

            I think expecting $160 an hour for proofing/editing is over the top but perhaps it would be better to bid per 100 words rather than by the page.

            Oh I agree $160 an hour is pretty damn steep. I wouldn't dare to quote it myself, it's just how much the outside company offered. I wasn't going to turn it down. It's the fact that now the work is completed they only want to pay 1/4 of the pre-agreed price that I'm upset. I would have done the work for 1/4 of the original price happily and not complained since I did all the work during regular office hours anyway. It's the fact they offered and agreed to pay us a hell of a lot more and now they want to reduce it that makes me angry.

            Myself and all my co-workers had kind of made plans for that extra $1k, what with Christmas coming up and various international travel plans lined up. Now it's only about $300 a piece and that's just a night out in the bar instead. Most disappointing.

            I'd MUCH rather write than edit and proofread. Actually my new technique for really badly written stuff is to simply read the original, try and work out what the hell the gist of it was, then retype it myself at 100wpm in understandable English without referring to the original again. This saves a hell of a lot of time when compared to trying to fix each individual sentence and THEN going to look at each paragraph to see whether the newly re-constructed sentences actually fit well together.
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        • Profile picture of the author CDarklock
          Originally Posted by ForeignProfessor View Post

          Until last week. The company called us up and decided they'd changed their minds about how much they were going to pay us.
          Oh, boy, have I seen that one.

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          • Profile picture of the author ForeignProfessor
            Originally Posted by CDarklock View Post

            Oh, boy, have I seen that one.
            Haha. That video was awesome.

            I HAVE to show that to my co-worker next week. Actually my co-worker is Korean, and his job was at least 2x as hard as mine for the proofreading and editing. He had to look at the original Korean AND the English to make sure that the translation was actually what the original document said. I only had to look at the English and make the grammar understandable and the vocabulary not too crazy.

            I hope he likes the video. Sometimes humor doesn't translate well =)
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      • Profile picture of the author GeorgR.
        Originally Posted by CDarklock View Post

        For less than one page, yeah.

        The proofreading thing is really not something I want to keep doing on any sort of ongoing basis. In fact, I usually just do it for friends in return for a free copy of the report, and the idea of selling the service was just something I played around with doing. I thought maybe it would be faster and easier, but it's really not.
        i do translations occasionally (german/english), wife is proof-reading, its horrible. LOTs of work. I am still always amazed that there are texts (scientific ones etc.) where i literally need to loop up every second word first.

        Translation/Proof Reading/Editing ---> yes, can be bad :/
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  • Profile picture of the author Bev Clement
    Whether I'm proofreading or writing I always ask them how many words they are expecting. Too many people ask for fonts and no margins and hope to get 500+ words on a page to cut their costs. We base our pages on the industry standard which is 250 words per page.

    Many of the marketers who reduce the font size to pay less, then increase the font size to say the book is bigger. I have seen books which claim to be 50+ pages but the font is 20 pitch and doubled spaced.
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  • Profile picture of the author Michael Oksa
    Not so smart to tell you about it, though.

    As far as proofreading goes, I was lucky enough to get a really good job. It was a university term paper from someone who used English as a second language. However, the term paper had to be written in English. My first thought was this is not going to be easy. But, her English was pretty good, just a few basic errors of verb/subject agreement, tenses, and misspellings.

    The cool part was I learned about an interesting topic while doing the job.

    The deal was $275 for about 30 pages, but I got a $75 surprise bonus for getting it back to her quickly. And the whole process was thoroughly enjoyable. Too bad all proofreading jobs couldn't be like that.

    All the best,
    Michael
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  • Profile picture of the author Michael Oksa
    Kay's post just reminded me of another method I've used...

    Asking for a copy of the work to be proofread, and then giving a price quote for the job. This way, if you get someone who barely has a grasp of English (this includes native speakers, too) you can set a higher price.

    All the best,
    Michael
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