Korean Job Discussion Forums

[yakey]

A Korean publisher was talking to me about editing a 200-page book.

What do you think would be a proper fee for editing a 200-page book?

[tob55]

Choose either a piece rate or by the hour fee, but all in all you should be charging the equivalent of about $45 per hour which would account for your time and expertise. Having done some editing back in the States, once upon a time, a 200 page book was worth about 12 hours of my time to edit and make recommended corrections. Do the math, then decide for yourself what your time is worth.

[poet13]

It also depends on the subject matter, and the quality of the writing in the book. I have a friend who agreed to edit a textbook. I think he agreed on a million won. He figured 25-30hours. Turned out the book was a disaster and took him more than 100 hours. He's refused since then.

[Juregen]

He could ask for some pages to check out the quality and then determine a fixed price for the rest of the book.

[Netz]

On translations, we always do it per word. Count the a average number of words in a sentence, multiplied by the number of lines per page, to come up with a "rough" word count.

You should be able to get a "feel" for the amount of time it will take to do the job, and adjust your per word from there. Also any modifications would be considered additional "words" regardless of redundancy.

I should say, that's they way we did it at the multinational translation agency I worked at in the US. I will admit, it's hard to get the Koreans to do this sometimes, as they know full well it's to their advantage to negotiate a fixed price for the entire project, usually requesting endless modifications afterwards too.

Simple solution.

I just don't work with those people.

Period.

[weatherman]

editing work in korea can be taxing. trying to decipher what the author wrote and change it into polished English isn't that much fun. see the quality, as somebody already said before you set your rate. 20,000 to 30,000 per page isn't that too bad of a rate if it is changing it from konglish to English.

[yakey]

I just want everybody to know what happened.

A Korean Prof. at my school has a "good friend" who owns a book publishing company and he asked me to edit a 200-page book. He talked to my Korean wife on the phone and they negotiated a 700,000 won price on the phone.

I was OK with that, thought it was a tad low, but did it to help somebody at my school.

My wife drove an hour to pick it up, and a few days later I waited two hours on a bitter cold day for one of those motorcycle quick pick-up guys to meet me north of Seoul, so not only did we edit the book, we went the extra mile for this guy.

Anyway, the next day I get a bank transfer of 300,000, 400,000 short of the negotiated price. I let the Prof. know, but he swears up and down what a super guy this publisher is. Still, he said he'd talk to the guy and then he apoplogized to me, which I answered by saying, "You didn't do anything wrong."

Some of the business people in this community you just have to be careful about. Of course, now the guy swears up and down he agreed to 300,000 with my wife, not 700,000. Everybody from here to Dokdo knows that's too low for a pro with a Ph.d. And since he's the buddy of my colleagues, I don't want to start anything else with this guy. He's constantly calling my wife's phone like a mad dog, but we've agreed that if she were to talk to him he'll probably make up some more stuff, so she's not answering. Isn't that harrassment?

I guess I don't have much recourse here, but I just thought I'd post what happened.

Be careful everybody. The money's not yours until it's in your hands unfortunately, in some cases, even though you kept your word and did an honest day's work. I've worked for many honest people in this country, but there are some others, like in any country, that you really have to be careful about.

[Mi Yum mi]

You do a guy a favor and he rips you off. classy. What's type of book is it? Give us the title. I'll make sure I never use/buy that book.

[SuperHero]

Always get a written contract.

[cmr]

[Kimchieluver]

Transfer the money back and forget about it.

[sistersarah]

I sign a contract before editing or writing begins. Then, at least it's there, on paper.

And it all depends on font size, margins, quality. Most recently I edited a document for a largeish company, signed a contract, thought everything would be cool because it was a reputable company, but opened the document and saw so much text it made my eyes hurt ... size 8 font and margins stretched to the max.

shady.

so, since you got punked, what was the name of the company? haha

[PGF]

[yakey]

I think there's something to be learned from what everyone posted here. Thank you all so much. Sometimes posts get so far off the subject, but everybody has really helped me to analyze this issue.

[sistersarah]