Hey, everyone. I am the Joshua Tallent mentioned earlier in this thread. I have been an eBook developer for more than 6 years, and yes, it is my full-time profession. I manage an eBook conversion department at a software company, run KindleFormatting.com, and provide formatting and conversion advice to publishers, authors, and others. I am also giving a tutorial at the
O'Reilly Tools of Change conference in February about formatting books for the Kindle. So, this is not just a passing interest or something I do periodically.
The amount of work that goes into an eBook conversion varies based on the type of book, size, complexity, number of images, presence of a subject index, and other factors. I have converted books of all types.
What I charge is not necessarily top dollar for the industry. Some eBook conversion houses I know of
spend as much as $60 per hour converting eBooks (that is cost, with no profit). Other services charge more than I do and give you less. For instance, Book Surge charges a
$300 flat fee to convert files for the Kindle, but the quality is sometimes lacking. I work hard to be an affordable option for individual authors and small publishers while still keeping food on the table. $20 per book sounds nice, but that is not enough money to sustain a business, especially when you are doing more than just simple fiction books.
A note on proofreading: I am not a proofreader, and I see that task as completely different from the task of converting a print book into an eBook. I assume when I receive a file from a client that they have done the necessary due diligence in the writing department. My job is to create an eBook from their file. Now, if my process messes something up (and sometimes it does due to conversions from PDF), then it is up to me to fix it. And if I OCR a book, the software I use has built-in tools that help fix errors that happen in that process. Also, I am in a good position to see some things that a book proofreader or layout designer might miss. I commonly catch misnumbered chapters and pages, misspelled words and other issues as I go through books, and I have the opportunity there to give the author some feedback about those issues. In general, though, I am not a proofreader as it is defined above.
- Joshua Tallent
http://kindleformatting.com