Parrot Time Magazine

Ever wanted to get a cover made for your newly completed ebook? Or how about having a logo designed for your new blog?

If you aren't graphically literate or perhaps just want something more "professional" than you feel you could make, you will be turning to the internet to see who might help you with these and other jobs. One of the biggest and most popular places to look is Fiverr.

Fiverr is essentially a small jobs marketplace where people are offering their skills, be it with graphics, music, video making, speaking, writing, or even being a digital assistant, to clients in the form of small work units, called "gigs".

(This is an English slang term that normally refers to a small job and is most commonly used with a band referring to a chance for them to play to an audience. It has nothing to do with the numerical "gig", as in "gigabyte".)

For example, you might need that great cover for your ebook. So you search on Fiverr for a book cover designer. You will find a variety of sellers, each with their own profiles and offerings. You find one that looks good, who will make you a cover for $5. He has other "gigs" he could do as well, like proofread your book, format it, or even write a review of it, and each of those could also cost $5.

As you may have concluded by now, the site is called "Fiverr" because the most basic job will cost you $5. A gig could cost more, like $10, $15, etc., as long as it is some increment of five. Many, as I did, falsely believed by the name that all jobs were just $5, but I've seen gigs as high as $135.

My First Encounter

So, a few years ago, I had completed my first ebook and designed my own cover for it. When I asked a group of people about how the cover looked, they let me know! I ended up completely redoing the cover with their advice and had the book published on Amazon. It did moderate sales for a while, then stopped.

Now, if you have ever asked someone what you could do to improve sales of your book, your probably know their immediate response, without even looking at it, will be "change the cover" or even "pay someone to make a cover" (the last being an insult if you made your own). I ignored that and decided to try using my original cover instead.

After that, I sold a few more copies, but then nothing again. Frustrated, I decided I should do what people say and go to Fiverr to find someone to make me a cover.

At this point in time, I had discovered CreateSpace, which is a self-published division of Amazon. You create a PDF of your book, including title and copyright pages, and a PDF cover, submit them, and they get sold as printed books. When someone orders one from Amazon, it is printed by CreateSpace and sent to the person, and you make a commission.

After I had made some books with CreateSpace, I figured I would sell my ebook as a printed book too, and I would need the cover to match the ebook one. This is what I was looking for on Fiverr: someone who could make a cover for both ebook and printed.

Having no experience at all, I contacted one of the first sellers I found offering to make book covers.

I asked her about making a book cover, for both ebook and CreateSpace, as well as a "3D" version, which is a picture of the cover made to look like a real book (a common practice among ebook people, since their books have no physical form, you want to give the illusion it does when marketing).

She replied that her normal rates are 3 possible covers, at $10 each, another $10 for the 3D version, and a final $10 for the CreateSpace cover. Fifty dollars! I was shocked, but like I said, I was new to this and didn't know what to expect, so I went along with this and paid the money. Then I sent the information I knew she would need: title and author for basic cover, dimensions and number of pages along with back cover text for the CreateSpace cover (which are very picky, since you are creating the front, back and spine of a book).

She came back in a few days with 3 possible ebook covers. They were good, but nothing I couldn't do on my own. I picked one and asked for a "revision", which is Fiverr lingo for "change". Some sellers offer unlimited revisions, some limited, some none. I asked for a single font change to the subtitle, to make it the same as my name on the book. She did that but also moved the subtitle to a different place. That was my first sign that things might not go right.

Before she did the revision, she had made a 3D version, so that no longer matched the final version, rendering it pretty much useless. Then she gave her CreateSpace version, which was just the cover with the background colour extended a few hundred pixels to the left and a line from what I had giver her randomly slapped on it. It was completely unusable and I realized she had no idea what was required and could not fulfil my request.

Now, if I had more experience with Fiverr at that point or less experience with making my covers, I may have pressed the situation. Instead, I decided to cut my losses and make do with what I had.

At this point, you accept the Seller completed the job, and you are asked to leave a rating and a review. My seller begged me for a good rating and I gave her now, even if she messed up half the stuff. Then you are asked if you want to tip the seller and leave a personal message with them. At this point, I had already spent over $50, so I had no desire to tip, especially for unfinished work.

Try Again

Now, I didn't tell you all that to complain about the Seller, but rather to show that if you don't have some idea of how things are done, you can easily get trapped in a bad transaction.

That experience left a bad taste in my mind regarding Fiverr, and so I put it behind me. However, a few months later, I realized I really wanted to have a graphic artist design for me a good logo for the parent company of this magazine, Scriveremo Publishing. This time, I was a little more picky and looked through people's work before deciding on an artist. I found one who would do it for $10, so I paid and waited for the results.

Two things about payment. First, the main method is Paypal, so you should have a Paypal account to use the system. Second of all, each time you make a payment, you have to pay $1 extra. This goes to Fiverr, which is one of the ways they make money off hosting all of this. So not only are Fiverr gigs not just five dollars each, but they aren't even five.

Within a few days, this seller came back with 4 beautiful logos. With some difficulty, I selected one and asked for a few changes. She had no problem making the revisions and I ended up with a wonderful new logo. After that, I was able to leave a tip gladly with a promise that I would come back to her for more work. And indeed, I have, twice, and might a few more times.

So it is possible as well to find exactly what you want for a good price on Fiverr. It really depends on finding a good Seller and some luck.

What About Languages?

Fair enough question. I had been needing to have a large number of basic words / items (almost one thousand) translated into different languages along with their parts of speech (masculine, feminine, adjective, verb, etc. as abbreviations) and definite articles (when applicable) proofread. Up until that time, I had been begging others to help, which severally limited me. Suddenly, one day, it struck me that I could not only get the list proofread by natives through Fiverr, I could get my basic list of words translated from scratch!

From the two previous interactions, you can guess that the results for getting people to help with languages were going to be rather hit-or-miss, and it was. If I were to explain each encounter, this article would go on for a few more pages, so I will try to condense the experience into easier general observations with anecdotes.

The Ones that Worked

Right off, I can assure you that it is possible to get good translations from natives on Fiverr. I have no idea what the normal translation rates are among translators, but those don't matter because everyone on Fiverr is free to set their own. The Sellers usually offered a few different gigs with a certain number of words being the limit. Like if I wanted some Spanish translated, one Seller might have three gigs: one for $5 and doing 200 words, the second for $10 and offering 500 words, the third for $15 and doing 1000 words. A second Seller might offer a single gig for $5 to do 500 words, and each additional $5 gig would be another 500 words. In other words, you needed to shop around. There were no fixed prices or rules.

For what I was asking, I got several lists proofread or translated on a budget of $5 or $10 dollars with no problems. A few times, the person didn't quite understand about the parts of speech, since I am sure that is not something they normally get asked for, but they were able to accommodate my request.

When I requested a list for Danish, the Seller could not understand when I talked about common or neuter nouns for the parts of speech. He had never heard of those terms before but asked if it was related to adding "en" or "et" to the nouns. Once that was cleared up, he was able to do the translation easily.

There was one Seller, however, who simply could not understand my request. I had put in my list to be translated into Latin. She took a few days, gave me the list, but it didn't have the parts of speech. After a few more back and forths, she finally gave me a completed list, with parts of speech for English. Then she started nitpicking the wording of the initial order and I knew it was time to cut my losses and accept the job as completed.

The Ones that Didn't

A fair number of my requests failed, sadly. Some people looked at the number of words and said they would not do it for what I was asking and wanted much more money. That is perfectly fair; this is an open market and we are free to haggle and look for other sellers. In some cases, one seller would say the job couldn't be done for less than $25 only to have the next Seller I ask say he could easily do it for $5, no problem.

One of the early jobs I tried to get done had me request of a Seller if proofreading the list of English and another language could be done. When starting any gig, you have the option of simply submitting the work requirements to a specific gig and paying for it or you can contact the person first. Because of the strange nature of my request, I always contact the Seller first and politely ask if they can do it for the budget I propose. Then they can politely turn it down rather than initiating some kind of dispute through the Fiverr system.

This Seller said it could, no problem, but would take several days. A few days passed and I heard nothing, then one day I got heated message from him, accusing me of misrepresenting the job. He said there were over 4000 words to translate. I looked again at my list to see how he got that number. I figured out he had run a "word count" check on the entire document, which would have counted all the words, in both languages, all parts of speech and all definite articles. It also counted every equal sign (=) as a separate word. That was a particular problem since I used multiple equal signs to make dividing lines in the text.

I told him that his count was off, so he started complaining about my usage of the word "word".

Now, I don't know how translators define it, but there are in the world things which require two or three written words to describe. In American English we have things like "living room", "salad bowl", and "garbage can". These might be a single word in another language, like Italian, where they are "soggiorno", "salatiera", and "pattumiera", respectively. Conversely, we have Italian "stanza de bagno" for English "bathroom". So it is easy to dicker over how many "words" one has to translate.

I pointed out that he had agreed to do the job at the rate, and if he couldn't, then why did he take it. He countered that he had trusted my accuracy with the description.

By now, I knew he just wanted me to pay more or get out of it. If I paid more, the job would have been done in bad blood, since I would have felt like I was being extorted. So I agreed that we just cancel the job. He gave me a bad review as a Buyer and I gave him a bad review as a Seller.

Lesson there: when a Seller starts complaining about the clarity of instructions after they have taken on the job and been working on it, that means they don't want to do it and want out without looking like they were the problem. Basically, trying to make it look like you violated the contract, not them.

No Words

Then I had some that, for some reason, refuse to or just couldn't complete the translations into their supposedly native language because "words didn't exist". Now, I would expect that kind of complaint from a "dead" language like Latin, but in any language, if new things are created and require a word, then the language either takes a loan word or creates a new one. That is the only way for the people to talk about it. Even if it is some weird combination, like "box with sound" or "stick to make markings".

So when I asked for something I didn't think was too exotic, Tagalog, I got the job mostly completed, but about 100 words left blank, with the Seller claiming "they didn't exist in Tagalog". These were words like "curtain", "owl", "swimming pool", and "species".

This gave me a particular problem. If the Selller claims they don't exist, then she obviously can't give me them, so there is nothing more I can get out of her. So I had to accept the incomplete job. I could look up the remaining words and hope I got the right ones, but I couldn't be sure then, so I would need to find someone to proofread them, taking me back to Fiverr.

So I gave the list to another Seller to translate into Tagalog, and she came back with the same claim, but mostly on different words!. So I took both lists and combined them to fill in most of the gaps, but now I was even more fearful that they contained errors if both Sellers were this incompetant.

Then I tried Swahili, and that Seller had the same excuse!

Machine Translations

The biggest problem and fear with working with anyone on translations, through Fiverr or some other business, is whether they are really capable or are using some kind of software to do a machine translation, like Google Translate. It is not hard to translate my list through Google Translate, and in fact, I often do to get a baseline of possibilities, then go through each one with online dictionaries to proof things. That is, I do what when I can't get a natives help.

As you can guess, some of the translators on Fiverr are doing just that. One list I got translated had a few oddities in it which I noticed (having used GT a number of times) and so I tested it. Sure enough, the Seller had simply passed it through that. When I pointed out that I need the parts of speech, the Seller got defensive, saying they couldn't do that. Gee, I wonder why.

Even stranger, some promote that they will be doing a "straight forward machine translation". In other words, you are paying them to pass your stuff through GT. That is insane, to me. But then again, so is paying someone to use a Facebook group, which is free.

Other Jobs

My luck with doing other jobs was also a mix of good and bad. Going back to the Seller who did my new logo, I also got her to do a mascot (drawn character used in promoting) for my book series and a new logo for my main site. Both of those came out wonderfully. I got a mascot for another series done by another Seller and those also came out beautifully.

Taking my first logo, I had it turned into an intro animation for videos. Five, actually, so we have a choice as to which to use. Loved those! On the not so great, I had a video ad made for one of my books and it was obviously made with some automated program for the Seller had little control over the appearance and it came out awkward. I also paid people to promote my books and while they seem to have posted them in many places, I saw no resulting rise in sales. Take that as you will.

Conclusion

Fiverr is good for getting extra work done from other people, especially things you can't do for yourself. But there are no guarantees that you will get what is advertised or what you paid for, so be prepared for some frustration as well. Some Sellers really want to help, some are incompetent, and some are just out to scam you. I have noticed a rather high turn over rate, however, so I don't think the scamming ones stay long.

Good luck on your own projects.