estherschindler

From 2004, but I think the basics don't change very much.

Asking "how much should I expect to pay for editing, design, and layout" is like asking, "How much should I expect to pay for a software developer?" It depends on the expertise and experience of the person you're apt to hire, the size of the project, and a number of other factors. Not the least of which is "How awful is the text to begin with?" and "How much formatting is necessary?" and "How much of a PITA will this client be?"

That said, I'm a professional editor (as well as writer) who has bid $4,000 or so for a project that sounds similar to what you describe (though that was a full-length book). I'm an eensy bit well-known ::cough:: so I expect you can pay less; depending on the expertise of the book editor, you might need to pay more. (And I'm too busy right now, so that's not an offer of assistance -- just a ballpark number.)

That's great useful advice.

How do you promote your books? And if you're willing to share: How many have you sold?

It's like beta software. Until it ships, the best anyone can say is "It may." When it ships, then they can say, "It does."

I wrote an article last year about the "how to" of making a living writing open source: http://www.itworld.com/open-source/80180/building-your-caree... ...or, actually, a series of articles. Maybe it'll help. (Because it's not just "who's doing it" under consideration, but "how.")

If you read all the way to the end, you'll see that it was a common theme among those early developers.

The article isn't trying to argue the causes of the low female:male ratio. It's just setting a context for why it's necessary for there to be organizations to address the problem.

There are LOTS of articles that try to figure out the cause. This isn't one of them. It's a useful list, instead.

I once got worked up about the subject, enough to write a blog post for CIO.com, back when I still worked there (http://advice.cio.com/esther_schindler/rockstar).

These days, it's a little bit of a turnoff. At a minimum a job ad including "ninja" or "rock star" communicates to me that you can't otherwise quantify what you want, so you use a vague description that doesn't help a prospective candidate judge whether she's suited for your company.

I'd rather see a job ad that's much more explicit in what the company wants, whether that's technically ("5 years of Python"), attitude ("We want someone so passionate about chocolate websites that she'll jump up and down on the conference room table... but please, don't, it cost us a lot of money for that table"), or in visibility ("We expect to recognize your name; this is a job for someone who probably needs no introduction").

The list was compiled in response to a list of tech blogs that OMITTED women, to highlight female geeks (also) worthy of note.

The demo was very good at giving me an immediate experience. Except I never could figure out how to move items around.

I wonder if you might want to include some "below the fold" stuff in the demo, or maybe as its wrapup, that gives me a hint of what else I could do, even if it's not in the demo. I.e. "we won't show you here, but you can also create fancy reports..."?

Out of curiosity -- would you be more willing if it was a chance for a single participant to get $500?

Actually the first two I did took closer to an hour. And neither of the guys were bored.

I did say I was charming... or maybe I just have interesting questions to ask.

There's also an online survey -- THAT we had no trouble filling. You can collect facts in an online survey when you know all reasonable/possible multiple-choice answers ("Which IDE do you use?") but they are useless for asking, "Why?" or "What would make you change your mind?" Those do need a conversation.

I do try to avoid pestering communities, truly I do. Mostly I'm an ordinary participant!

I, for one, miss the social contract. But then I was a CompuServe sysop by 1990, and ran several types of online discussion groups (including ZDNet/AT&T's InterChange, which nobody else remembers). There was incredible value in the people who owned a stake in the forum's success (particularly anything vendor- or company-related) in choosing moderators who knew how to create a balance between being <a href="http://advice.cio.com/esther_schindler/6_stupid_mistakes_com...">both barkeep and bouncer</a>--not the least of which was a sincere welcome to the community.

Even when I haven't been involved in running an online community, I've always been a participant in several of them. And yes, some women need to feel "safe" before they will come out of lurkerMode. (Obviously I am not in that set, but I expect the woman who wrote the blog post to which I linked does count herself among them.) For instance, I'm a member of two women-in-IT tech groups (a general one and one specifically for web designers/developers, and believe me, you can't shut them up). The whole notion of women-in-IT and its reflection in online communities isn't going to go away just because some guys (and some women, too) say, "But really, you don't need a separate space."

(As you can probably tell, this is a topic very close to my heart.)

Oh cool -- I'm glad to be wrong!

In some economic times, surviving is beating a recession.

Interesting... but it's not all that different from indeed.com, is it? Indeed does include jobs from job boards (including relatively obscure ones) but treats them equally to company websites. (They also have some waycool comparison and salary data that's fun to play with.)

Part of what can be annoying about the "rock star" label -- other than that it's a buzzword -- is that it's now a buzzword without a standard definition. At one point it clearly meant "you, o techie, are a recognizable name and thus a brand unto yourself." But in the last few years it's come to mean "miracle worker."

I got so worked up about this, some weeks ago, that I even blogged about it: http://advice.cio.com/esther_schindler/rockstar

Why?

Not disagreeing per se... I'm interested in your reasons.

Incidentally, while the earlier link to the "what do I charge" is a good one, most of the computer consultants' discussion has moved to http://openitforum.yuku.com/ -- nice folks, too.

You can also find more data at Janet Ruhl's realrates.com. It is a database where people share how much they're getting for what kind of work. The home page is no longer updated but the database is live with people adding info.

Absolutely agree on Secrets of Consulting. It was a major revelation to me when I was first starting out.

In addition to what the others mentioned, there's also paperwork (such as my nemesis, filing); the time you spend running to OfficeMax to buy a new chair or a box of paper; the time spent looking for medical insurance (and being aghast at what it costs for an individual); "casual" contacts that sometimes can be transformed into business networking but don't, always; doing your invoicing and bookkeeping (most freelancers I know are terrible at this). And that's just off the top of my head.

I spent years as a sysop of the CompuServe Computer Consultant's forum. I'm kind of familiar with this stuff. <g>

I respectfully disagree.

While I confess that I am an ubernerd (in addition to other fine qualities such as being a well-known chocoholic), I see plenty of people on twitter who are not techie at all.

I follow a few quilters, for example; one of them has a blog with neat how-to videos. And for some reason a lot of real-estate people from Phoenix are on twitter (they follow me, I'm not too interested in them).

I realize that they can be invisible to techies. Like LinkedIn: you only see the people on twitter who you follow personally, so there's a sense that everyone is like yourself. But that's not the case.

In case anybody cares, the article for which this was research is live:

Making Your IT Department More Attractive to Women Want more women on your staff? You need to do more than offer family-friendly employee benefits. Women at every level of the career ladder describe the corporate behavior that can attract them to a company—or chase them away. http://www.cio.com/article/325513

Microsoft already sponsors a lot of user group meetings -- with plenty of free food. Largely pizza.

I briefly wrote for a magazine for professional conference organizers. (Think: the people who run MacWorld or TechEd.) I was told that, despite techie's assumption that we run the universe, the profession responsible for most conference bookings is doctors. Seems that every drug company HAS to do a "full disclosure" meeting for every new medicine. Most of those vendors have more money than tech companies do.

But you note that they don't promise pizza. They may deliver bad rubber chicken, but they can promise a full lunch.

They're standing behind the decision, too: http://www.cio.com/article/170950 After Furor, Network Solutions Stands by Name Policy Network Solutions says it will take steps to better notify customers of its controversial policy of temporarily registering domain name searches.

No. It was actual purchases. This was looking at the e-commerce sales, not the site traffic overall.

There's another bit that I didn't include in the blog post because it was irrelevant to the point... which was that the people running without JavaScript had a high degree of (there's probably a more diplomatic word but what the heck) stupidity. Stuff like adding a "special instruction" to "make sure the book is signed" when the book description says this is a signed copy (and it's priced accordingly).

--Esther

For sheer enjoyment (measured in how many times I've re-read them, at least at various times in my life): Heinlein's _The Door into Summer_. Connie Willis' _Bellwether_ (these can be funny, right?). Ayn Rand's _Atlas Shrugged_ (more in my youth than today, but I can probably still recite passages by heart).

Non-fiction: Gerry Weinberg's _Secrets of Consulting_. Lynn Truss' _Eats Shoots & Leaves_.

Huh? There are three people from Microsoft quoted in the article.

Of course the article has a tilt towards the interests of CIOs and IT managers -- it's on CIO.com. But I'm surprised that you don't recognize that's less about "does this individual really have the ability to predict the future" than "these are the guys building the most commonly used development tools." If a dev tool makes it easy for most developers to do something simply without the need for deep domain knowledge (i.e. follow a wizard), then by golly that'll be something that's commonly done. If the people who control the next round of dev tools think something is unnecessary, it will be left for programmers to do manually, "the hard way."