I thought this was interesting and a bit funny, and worthy of a post. It's interesting because it helps explain a lot of the horrible-quality poker ebooks that pollute the landscape (and a lot of the ****ty books in general really).

I just recently joined the freelance site Upwork (formerly Odesk I think). I saw this post about a guy wanting to outsource a 10,000-word poker book for $150. I thought it was comical, but not really that surprising considering 90% of the jobs you see on these sites are completely ridiculous. Mainly interesting/surprising because it was poker-related and you'd think someone's standards would be a bit higher in that area.

I posted the job posting on social media then forgot about it. Then I received an invite to apply for the job, so I couldn't resist trolling him. The convo I had with him is below, and I think it's an interesting insight into the kinds of books that are being produced these days, and the kind of mentality a lot of people have with regards to making money.

I left out his last name as he is someone easily searchable and I thought that'd be mean. I have nothing really against him, as I think you get what you pay for; mainly find the whole thing comical and educational.

I took the job ftw, please buy a copy on your Kindles in the upcoming weeks. $150 was enough for me.

Kinda funny, kinda sad. The publishing world is weird.

Amen to that. I write reviews and game articles for a gaming (RPG) comic.

The publishing rates for per word content haven't gone up since the internet boom.

Probably short sighted but I blame the internet.

Wow, thanks for the lol

you should have trolled harder with a pseudo-screen name

hah? Am I getting this right? He wants to pay someone a single payment of 150$ to write a whole book? And maybe own the whole rights to it after publishing? wtf ?

To be fair, 7000 words is only 20 or so pages. Could prob bang that out in 8 hours and not be too bad off.

unfortunately, this extends beyond poker books. Because of the growth of online books, it is now an industry to ghost write books for a quick buck.

I think some of these guys are outsourcing to India and the Philippines for cheap labour as well.

I was thinking the same thing. like a large magazine feature

I'd also add a couple of things:

I'd be perfectly happy to do something like this for free for 2P2 or someone similar with lots of exposure... An extreme example would be NEw Yorker or something like that... If they can do something for you, the $$$ is largely irrelevant... This situation probably isn't it, but $400 and it's your 1st published piece would be great...

Amazon is awash in small $0.99 to $2.99 books and frankly they are often pretty good

100% agree....

There are IT consultant types who have as many as 4 or 5 full-time "from home" jobs and outsource them to India.... Very very bad when you are supposed to be full-time employee