Quote:
Originally Posted by Hitch
Well, sure, I could close the shop on Saturdays--but the resulting Mondays are bloody awful. As it turns out, in this new age of self-pubbing, most writers are writing in their nights/weekends. And, if my place is anything to go by, they decide to find resources (cover designers, book formatters, et al) on the weekends. When we weren't open on Saturdays, the huge amount of email on Mondays was simply overwhelming; we'd end up working 12-15 hours on Mondays to make our way through the pile.
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I didn't say
which five days should be your work week.
My hours have historically been flexible, and not always Monday through Friday, 9-5. At one employer, they were more like 10-6, because the shop had a night shift, and I was the resident sysadmin/network admin/telecom admin. It was useful to be there during transition to make sure the night crew had everything working as expected.
And calls at home during dinner were not uncommon, nor were calls on weekends. On one notable occasion, I got a call at home during dinner because the supervisors weren't able to get into one of my servers. I could do so from home remote via SSH. Hmmm. Better go down and check. (I lived in walking distance.) I got there to discover
both the Solaris server where 3/4s of the work got done,
and the Novell server for the other 1/4 down. I powered both back up, and my irony meter pegged off scale as I watched the big mutha UPS they were plugged into glitch and put both down again.
Okay. Unplug the servers, find other places to plug them in, take the failed UPS out of service, bring the systems back up, do the cleanup required, and get everyone on line and working. I resumed dinner around 10pm. At 2am, my phone rang. It was the night lead supervisor. She was trying to do her nightly production reports, and couldn't get to the NT server. I blinked sleep from my eyes, mentioned a couple of things she could try, and said "If you still have problems, leave a note on my desk. I'll send the reports for you in the morning." At 2:30am, the phone rang again. It was the night supervisor, who wanted to tell me she was able to send the reprints and I didn't have to be concerned. Er, leave a note on my desk?
The following day, I was in a meeting including the SVP/Operations I reported to. He said "How are you?", and I said "Tired!", and explained why. When I got the the calls at 2am and 2:30am, his eyes got very big and he said "Why is she calling you at those hours over something so
trivial?" "Larry, it's because she doesn't
know it's trivial. She's trying to do her job, and dot the Is and cross the Ts. I respect that, which is why she's still
alive. She needs to be told the sky won't fall if she can't send the reports that night, and yes, I've already had the conversation with her boss." She was later released by the company for reasons I parsed, reading between the lines, as "Too stupid to do the job."
I also didn't take contiguous vacations. My preference was flexible scheduling, and being able to say "I'm taking a long weekend, and will not be in next Friday or Monday." I could tell the employer
well in advance which weekends would be long ones
Quote:
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Our line of work has a very high rate of email, per client. Our average client will email 7-12 times prior to accepting the quote, and 40x more during the 10 days or so that we have the book in the queue. Most of these emails are, quite honestly, utterly unrelated to the actual services that WE provide, and are questions about self-publishing.
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I interact with the self-publishing crowd elsewhere, and am at the point of giving up. There is a simply astonishing level of ignorance and wishful thinking.
My basic response summarizes as "Write because you
have to, and cannot imagine
not writing. Self publish because you
can. Do
not do it expecting to make actual
money, because you
won't! If you can't deal with that, find another hobby."
If I were you, I'd raise prices, look at expanding my product line, and distill the answers to the most common self-publishing questions into a short FAQ that could be attached as a canned response to most of the unrelated to job in progress questions, to cut down the time required to deal with them. I'd also be firmer with problem children about just what I did, when I did it, and what they could expect for what I charged. And at some point, you have to draw a line, because you reach a state where
no amount of money is adequate compensation.
______
Dennis