As freelancers, we are not just indexers but business owners—which means we have more responsibilities than just creating indexes. We are responsible for marketing, accounting, technical support, even filing. Even though any or all of this can be outsourced—even indexes can be subcontracted—it all still needs to be managed. You can go with an analog […]
It’s the Experience, Really!
Steve Jobs was right. Give the customer an experience, not just a product. And that applies just as well to those of us providing freelance services in the publishing industry. I see the customer experience as being 50% product quality, 50% customer service. In the end, my job is to service the customer experience. Product […]
Tips for Focusing on a Tight Deadline
While it’s commonplace to hear people say they work best on a tight deadline, it’s something I prefer not to do. However, freelancing means sometimes (often), it’s necessary. So you have a rush job. Tight deadlines happen for lots of reasons. Working with many different clients means you can have overlapping schedules. Often these schedules […]
Finding Your Client Match
I’ve had a couple of jobs recently where I totally miscalculated my suitability to the client’s needs. I lost money because of it, quite a bit for me, because I had to spend way too much time dealing with the client mismatch. There’s scope creep for the job itself (book turns out to be more […]
Beating the Afternoon Slump
The afternoon slump is a tough problem for most of us, and freelancers are no exception. In fact, working from home can have its own post-prandial pitfalls — namely, the sofa. While there’s nothing wrong with catching a quick 20-minute snooze, especially when tight deadlines mean working late into the night, there are a few […]
Preventing and Handling Scope Creep
One of the biggest challenges in indexing services (and editing and proofreading as well, but I’ll focus on indexing for this post) is to accurately estimate the scope of a project in order to provide a flat fee or per-page fee that then translates into a reasonable hourly rate for the indexer. I’ll cover two […]