Publishing is a unique industry in the way that all skills are useful – and necessary to have represented. Creative, structured and technical (ok, let’s call them/us nerdy) people are all needed. In publishing there are so many interesting things to work with. This means that we often through ourselves into too many projects – and get overwhelmed.
To get more bang for the buck (‘buck’ is time in this case), we can outsource. One easy-to-use online service is Fiverr.com. Here you can hire people to do something within their expertise – prices starting at $5.
Tasks we have successfully outsource to Fiverr:
1. Webdesign. Landing page or poster. For example this Power Point / Key note poster to fit into a marketing slide show. I send the text and some guidelines and got this back within a day.
2. Webprogramming. Wordpress or other common platforms are well represented here. I have fixed a ton of website errors this way.
A free online tool here is the Awesome Screenshot extension to the Chrome browser. This little tool let’s you choose an area of your screen to make a screen shot of and then you can make arrows etc. to explain something. When you’re ready, you click and get a link to that picture that is now accessible online. With most other screen shot tools you need first to save the image on your harddisk and from there upload to your Fiverr message. With the Awesome Screenshot you just send a link along your text and voila, visual explanation made easy!
An example could look like this:
3. Vector graphics and image recreation. We did some biblical maps this way. Send the scanning / photo to a graphic designer on Fiverr, who then vectorizes the whole thing and make all text editable (and sharp).
Auditions – testing to find the right people
Not all people on Fiverr will deliver top quality as promised. But don’t be discouraged if your first encounter is not fantastic.
You need to find those who really lifts you up to a higher level in your work and you are on the same page with. And like any other hiring, we need to set aside some time for it to work out. But once we have good people, it’s such a blessing – and a time saving one as well. So, like with the Pareto principle, the time used in preparing is given back many times in the outcome.
One efficient way to find the good people is to make an audition – send the same task to 5-10 people and see who’s best. This is possible since the cost is only $5 per nose. And once the task is prepared and described for one possible supplier at Fiverr, it’s easily copied to others. Then you spend some time back and forth afterwards and most likely end up with one or more long term contacts that will be able to proform a certain task for you for many years ahead.
The downside to fiverr
- Upfront investment of time. As mentioned earlier, it takes time to find the right people – and this often make us postpone these kind of platforms for too long – we just don’t feel like we have the time.
- You can only communicate via Fiverr. When using Fiverr, it becomes clear that the admin is extremely focused at keeting all trafic (and payments) betweek the parties on the Fiverr platform. It’s not allowed to exchange e-mail addresses or Skype accounts, which would actually be very helpful at times.
- High admin fee. Furthermore, the gig-owner (the one who offers the service) actually only gets $4 of the $5 – so that’s a 20% fee and a quite high one. From a buyer standpoint that’s irrelevant though – if people want to offer, that’s their issue.