Turker transcription book is done! Anyone for a shorter version?

Discussion in 'General' started by naturegirl, Oct 29, 2012.

  1. naturegirl

    naturegirl User

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    Hi, everyone!

    Thank you again to all who provided such great feedback while I was writing my ebook on transcription, in this thread.

    I posted there to say that the book is finished and up on Amazon, and that it incorporates the things you asked for. Again, really appreciated you telling me what would be helpful. Also, thanks to everyone who has purchased it so far! Looking forward to hearing what you think of it.

    I'm starting this thread to try and reduce confusion, since people may think, if I keep posting to that thread, that I'm still writing that book.

    I'm not. :) It's ready! But someone in that other thread did say that they wanted a simple book. Since I loaded this one up with a ton of info, I can't say it's simple, lol. It's everything that I know to help beginning transcribers: tips, tricks, and a bunch of company details and HIT pricing that's specific to transcribing on MTurk (including strategy for making the most money, of course!)

    I never thought to ask if anyone also wanted just a very basic starter guide. One that, unlike this $2.99 book, would be, like, 99 cents and maybe not even 10 pages long (compared to more than 60 pages on the one I wrote and have up on Amazon). Since I already wrote the detailed version, that would not be hard to create.

    Are there some of you to whom that version would be more helpful? You tell me. I'll write it if there's enough demand.
     
  2. Neona

    Neona User

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    you are making it sound like your book is going to give everyone the keys they need to transcribe on here.

    If a person is lacking the basic transcribing skills - spelling, punctucation, grammer, following direction, being able to type while someone is talking, proofreading, etc - no matter what they read about the subject its not going to make them a transcriber.

    I would love to be an engineer but since I dont even have the rudementary skills needed to do that job, I already know not to apply for any job that requires an engineer.
     
  3. naturegirl

    naturegirl User

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    Hi, Neona!

    Great points, thank you. Actually, that's why it took me more than 60 pages and weeks to write. :) I cover everything you mention, and how important each of them is. I give tips for how you can improve all those skills, including online resources. I also talk about how for some people, it just isn't going to work out---and how to tell that, too, because some folks are stubborn and try to stick with things, even when they could make more money elsewhere.

    I didn't want it to be an unrealistic portrayal. That was important to me. So I hope that helps!
     
  4. pieper

    pieper User

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    REVIEW of New Book: "Cashing in on Transcription Turk Style"

    I purchased the book "Cashing In on Transcription Turk Style" by MTurker, NatureGirl. I do not have a Kindle, but was able to download a free Kindle for PC from Amazon, and read the book right at my desk.

    There are many, many resources to be found in this book, including sites to improve your skills at typing speed, tutorials on the basic elements of English, how to create your own "cheat sheets" for each client's Style Guide (for me, one of the MOST intimidating parts of Turk transcription), ten steps for doing a really awesome job (to make even more money), and so much more! The book also contains explanations as to how Turk jobs are divided out (a chunk), as opposed to a "whole" project, and how to deal with plunking down in the middle of transcribing text and get the drift anyway.

    In addition, the author shares her experience with the four major transcription companies on MTurk, how responsive they are to their workers, how much and how fast they pay, and which jobs to choose to make the most money for time spent.

    This book is a "must-have" for anyone starting out in transcription (or considering it); but there are a load of resources for experienced transcribers, as well. I have a lot of transcription experience in my work history and yet I still gleaned many insights and tips to help me do a better job, and make more money doing it!

    A very good investment!
     
  5. naturegirl

    naturegirl User

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    Thanks, Pieper! I really appreciate the good review. It especially makes me happy that an experienced transcriber found it useful, since that isn't the group I originally set out to write the book for!

    (just clarifying for anyone who thinks this thread looks familiar: this one got merged today with another that got a lot of...shall we say spam?)
     
    #5 naturegirl, Nov 4, 2012
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  6. Zenoff64

    Zenoff64 User

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    Good book. For $3 its a steal.
     
  7. naturegirl

    naturegirl User

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    Thanks, Zenoff! I remember you purchasing, and I'm so glad you are finding it worthwhile.
     
  8. naturegirl

    naturegirl User

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    Yay, the book now has two reviews on Amazon! One is from Pieper (thanks, Pieper!).

    The other is from...ah, well, if you saw the thread that this was merged from, you would know the history of the comment.

    I think all I will say about that is that Amazon had good reason to start adding the Verified Purchaser indicator to certain reviews.
     
  9. russ43015

    russ43015 User

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    Just bought your book! I am wanting to make about $30 per day Monday through Friday and don't want to do thousands of hits per day. Even if this information in your book is available for free from other sources, it is great to have it all in one package for a small price. Thank you naturegirl.
     
  10. pieper

    pieper User

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    I absolutely agree russ43015! We can get more work done by not having to do all the research! I'm so happy someone else sees this very important point! $3 was a steal and will make more of an impression on me long-term than that Pumpkin Latte from you-know-where (which costs more too!). LOL
     
  11. naturegirl

    naturegirl User

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    I love your enthusiasm, you guys! And russ43015, you are welcome. I am excited for you, that you have potentially found yourself a way to make that money you wanted to every day. It's true!

    However, it will not be true right away, so I don't want you or anyone to think that you will read this book and immediately be making $30 each day, especially if (as you posted on another thread, russ) you only have about 4 hours to make it per day.

    You will want to *start* slow, partly to be sure you've got the style for each company down---not only in your eyes but in theirs! And you will *be* slow in the beginning, partly because not all your time should be spent doing the actual HITs. To approach it with a little more caution, you may want to invest time in using some of the resources and techniques in the book to practice, so if you've got 4 hours, you wouldn't want to do HITs the whole time. Some of that should be practice time, ideally so that you don't mess up your chances with the requesters you want to stay with.

    But yes, you'll eventually find it quite possible to get to your desired $30 in the limited hours each day that you have. In the future, as I also say in the book, you should be able to do at least that and more, in those same 4 hours, especially if you end up moving to off-MTurk transcription shops. I'll probably say more about all that on my blog soon.
     
    #11 naturegirl, Nov 4, 2012
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  12. naturegirl

    naturegirl User

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    The very long version of why you probably don't want to do the research yourself that I did for the book.

    I'm going to address how easy (or not) it would be to find the information in this book by searching on Google or by searching the forums, because I know some have wondered that. If that is not a question you have, feel free to skip this!

    (You can probably see how long this is! I'm just thinking through the matter here, so I'll have a more condensed version on the book's page at my blog early this week, for those of you who want it less wordy, lol!)

    So, another person who purchased the book told me privately today that "there's no way" that he can imagine actually doing all the research himself that I did for the book. He gave me one big reason, and I thought of another. :)

    His reason: as he said, he doesn't know enough about transcribing on MTurk to figure out which information is useful and which is not, and which is reliable and which is not. So, he said, the important thing isn't just that I collected it but that I know enough to present only the useful stuff out of it. Otherwise, he pointed out, he'd have had to do even more research than I probably had to, just to get educated enough to be able to tell the good info from the bad about MTurk transcription.

    I appreciated his mentioning that! He's right---it's a lot harder for an MTurk transcription newbie to do the same research or do it as effectively.

    My reason: Forget about being able to do the research...I'm pretty sure most people don't *want* to go through the research I did, lol! That's a huge part of why I thought I'd be a good person to write the book.

    For example, I used Google very little, and I didn't use TurkOpticon. TO is not reliable with major transcription requesters because of how many people give bad reviews when they don't understand style rules.

    I used the forums mainly in the sense of the information I had squeezed from them when I was new, which I truly did by reading them until my eyes practically bled. (And btw, extensive forum searching sucks. ;) Nothing's labeled like it should be on any forum, so there's tons of digging through mostly useless threads to get to a gem in the middle. Ask me how many times I did that. No wait, you don't want to know.)

    But more important, I actually got all the quals needed to do all the HITs I talk about in the book. Every one. Some of them are HITs that most Turkers never even see, because they usually disappear so quickly to those who have the right qual. So, getting all those quals would also take a transcription newbie even longer than it took me.

    Let's see, full time, for a fast-learning newbie? Call it 6 weeks of work, minimum---and that's if it was all you did and you had some natural talent for the work. So that would be lots of time on research *before that*, then a lot of that 6 weeks getting up to speed, and none of it making money at your maximum potential.

    In other words, the odds of most people having the obsessiveness and the patience and just the time to spend at not making much money (because of needing to research) are low. So the book has a price on it because of all that time and energy that I spent so you don't have to.

    The price does *not* reflect what I think my time was worth: if it was that, I'd be charging at least double, so that maybe I would make the money back (money I didn't make while working on it) by 6 months from now! It also isn't the price that I'd charge as a scammer ($19.99, of course). It's just the price that I talked with you guys about in the beginning, and I wanted to stick to it because that seemed like a reasonable price to ask Turkers.

    Oh, and sure, you can just research one company and cut that time down. But a major point of the book is, Turkers will actually do a lot better who know when to move from one company to another, based on where their skills are. The pay scales are actually that complicated. You can make much more at the end and much more along the way, by knowing when you need to reshuffle how much you're taking from any particular requester. And you can't know if you don't have full information on all of them.

    So if you're going to do your own research, to substitute for getting the book, it's not impossible. I did it, and you can too. Just know that researching the transcription specialty inside MTurk is unusually time consuming.

    Whew. And if you read through all that, good for you. ;) Hope that answers the questions that some folks have had about the matter!
     
    #12 naturegirl, Nov 4, 2012
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  13. anne53

    anne53 User

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    I do have a question, coming on late here. You did have an attorney go over this and make certain you are not in copyright violation? You wouldn't want to do anything that would reflect badly on you or this forum or Andy. Someone did point out the info is available if one just googles it. A section, if one is needed, could simply be added here, with the links, if it is not here now.
     
  14. naturegirl

    naturegirl User

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    Hi, anne! Nope, no attorney needed. ;) But anyone who copies the book would be in copyright violation, because it's all original material. There is a review up on Amazon that claims that all the material is stolen, but *shrug* it doesn't seem based on knowledge of the book itself, nor does it say where I could have stolen it from (I'd actually love to know!). Also, as I mention earlier in this thread, another thread yesterday was deleted by admin, for cause, and that included the same person's attacks on the idea of the book.

    As I detail in the post above yours, I did original research, and I wrote it all myself. (I know that post of mine is long, but if you read it, you'll see that I barely used Google. In fact, I would encourage anyone to try to find the majority of the book's info on Google. Who else holding nearly every transcription qual offered on MTurk is writing substantially about this online, in any place easy to find? Well...no one. Try it and see!)

    So of course I would not do anything to reflect badly on me, my site, or Andy's site here. :) That's why I didn't, and I haven't. All there is to it.

    All I can do is hope that others notice that the person who wrote the Amazon review has no "Verified Purchaser" notation, while the positive reviews so far both have it. I'm confident that it'd be impossible to actually read the book and conclude, "I easily could have found this all myself!" Maybe you could generate your own version of the whole thing---if you put at least 2 months' time into it (based on starting from scratch with transcription). Again, I explain about that in the prior post.

    But otherwise, no. The readers who are exclaiming about what a time savings it is aren't kidding!

    Hope that helps.
     
    #14 naturegirl, Nov 5, 2012
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  15. clogan98

    clogan98 User

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    Yeah, I commented on that review. It's obvious she just doesn't like you.
     
  16. anne53

    anne53 User

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    "But otherwise, no. The readers who are exclaiming about what a time savings it is aren't kidding!

    Hope that helps. "

    Yep - Thanks for clarifying. I've had too many friendly roundabouts with attorneys in my lifetime to see you get into trouble. I took the book to mean you were working more from experience than something else, but hear too much about attorneys searching the Internet looking for trouble.
     
  17. naturegirl

    naturegirl User

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    Thank you, clogan! Uh-huh, it is, isn't it? :) Or he.

    Hi, anne53...sure! It's nice of you to look out for me. And yes, they can come...but there's nothing to find. I didn't put my name on the cover of someone else's work---plus, Amazon wouldn't allow that, either. They boot authors fast for that kind of thing!

    (It's apparently not illegal to sell public-domain work. But it is illegal not to admit that it's public-domain work. I read Amazon's fine print before I got started with giving them all the info to put the book in their system, so I understand these distinctions. I'm clear that my book is not remotely from or of the public domain! It's all my work.)
     
    #17 naturegirl, Nov 5, 2012
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  18. anne53

    anne53 User

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    Thank you for setting me straight. I haven't tried transcribing. It scares me. But will have to take a look at your book and take a chance.
     
  19. naturegirl

    naturegirl User

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    You're welcome, anne! There has been a lot of misinformation given on the forum (and that trickled over to that one Amazon review) about what the book includes---and about what it is, even. Much of that has been deleted now by admin, but I'm sure others who saw it may have felt confused themselves. I don't think you should feel badly for not being clear about it. That's why I've been so wordy in some of my posts here on it!

    Here's something else you can try, if you like: if you want to PM me about your worries about transcribing, I can try to help. :) It doesn't have to be scary. I included a lot of tips in the book that specifically are designed to make it less scary, actually! Up to you.
     
  20. pieper

    pieper User

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    Heh heh - struck me funny...attorneys used to be called "ambulance chasers" - now they are "Amazon chasers." :)
     

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