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Can't have word count >50k words


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I proofread and edit, primarily book manuscripts. Recently my sales tanked, and I discovered that Fiverr turned my gig into the packages format – and while trying to deal with that, I discovered that it’s no longer possible to enter a word count higher than 50,000. If I try, it lowers itself to 50k. Most books are longer than this.

Alarmed, I checked the gigs of some other editors. They, too, can no longer accept word counts above 50k. I guess this is a new universal limitation? Or something?

I can only think of two approaches, and they both stink.

1.) Tell everyone to message me their word count for a custom offer. New clients don’t like to do that, in my experience. I suspect most people would simply wander off rather than message a stranger just for an estimate.
2.) Have the second and third tier be like “enter your word count minus 50,000” and “enter your word count minus 100,000.” This requires people to do math, which is hard and scary, and (again) I think most potential buyers would wander off elsewhere.

Am I missing something? Is there still a way to accept book-length manuscripts?

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Definitely not 2). Never, ever. There is a reason why warning labels like these exist:

warning-fails-15.jpg.62caeb8b7ba52032b1ea8dc965c7e323.jpg

Personally, I would write on the very first line, in highlighted text, “For jobs in excess of 50,000 words, please contact me.”

I don’t know about you, but in like 90% of the cases where jobs are larger than 10,000 words or so, customers already contact me anyway before ordering, even if it is to ask “Hi, translator. I see you translate things. Will you translate my thing? It needs translating.” Really, they need that reassurance if they are going to spend ‘big bucks’, and I totally understand and support it.

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Definitely not 2). Never, ever. There is a reason why warning labels like these exist:

06c4c047f3cd97bbb2fffce193eed083a59f72d2.jpg

Personally, I would write on the very first line, in highlighted text, “For jobs in excess of 50,000 words, please contact me.”

I don’t know about you, but in like 90% of the cases where jobs are larger than 10,000 words or so, customers already contact me anyway before ordering, even if it is to ask “Hi, translator. I see you translate things. Will you translate my thing? It needs translating.” Really, they need that reassurance if they are going to spend ‘big bucks’, and I totally understand and support it.

“Hi, translator. I see you translate things. Will you translate my thing? It needs translating.”

LOL! Good one.

I’m totally fine with people messaging me for custom offers, and many already do. It’s not 90% for me, though – more like 70%, when only new clients are considered.

I like the idea of highlighting it and putting it on the first line. Maybe something like

Please note: The Fiverr system won’t accept a word count higher than 50,000. If your work is longer than 50,000 words, please message me for a custom offer.

I think it helps, psychologically, to make it clear that it’s “the system” and not me who is adding the extra step.

I’m still weirded out that this happened at all. How on Earth does this new limit benefit Fiverr?

Maybe it’s a glitch and will be fixed soon? I can hope, anyway. I’d rather not burden potential buyers with an extra step if they’re prepared to order.

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Under your Extras, perhaps you can have something like, “Extra words” and then price for however many, say, $— for every additional 10,000 words, though I’m not quite sure that would work if they needed several tens of thousands more than that.

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Under your Extras, perhaps you can have something like, “Extra words” and then price for however many, say, $— for every additional 10,000 words, though I’m not quite sure that would work if they needed several tens of thousands more than that.

Yeah, that leaves them calculating how many copies of the extras to purchase.

When manto2112 suggested it, I was sort of imagining tiered extras – one is 10k extra words and one is 20k extra words and so forth. That still makes people do more work than just checking the word count in their word processors, though. It seems clumsy at best, and potentially confusing.

My business was trundling along, growing nicely, and then Fiverr went and made this change. It’s always something, isn’t it? 😐

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Yeah, that leaves them calculating how many copies of the extras to purchase.

When manto2112 suggested it, I was sort of imagining tiered extras – one is 10k extra words and one is 20k extra words and so forth. That still makes people do more work than just checking the word count in their word processors, though. It seems clumsy at best, and potentially confusing.

My business was trundling along, growing nicely, and then Fiverr went and made this change. It’s always something, isn’t it? 😐

It does seem odd but I guess they decided there needed to be a limit somewhere otherwise people could order huge amounts with too short delivery times. I did see a buyer complaining about not being able to find anyone who could cope with their large documents - it was either the forum or buyer requests (its difficult to tell the difference sometimes)

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Not having any writing/translating gigs, I obviously don’t know how it’s set up, but one of MY extras does allow three “tiers”; I’m including a pic of what I mean (it’s under “Additional Recording Time”). If you have something like that, perhaps you can have three sections, one for maybe 10K extra words, one for 25k extra words, one for 50k extra words, for instance.

1243451845_Gigeditpage.png.ca4ec887707975aa7166dd127c50a026.png
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Not having any writing/translating gigs, I obviously don’t know how it’s set up, but one of MY extras does allow three “tiers”; I’m including a pic of what I mean (it’s under “Additional Recording Time”). If you have something like that, perhaps you can have three sections, one for maybe 10K extra words, one for 25k extra words, one for 50k extra words, for instance.

The only thing like that is the “additional words” feature, and it doesn’t take anything over 50k as an input value. That’s exactly what I’m griping about. 🙂

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The only thing like that is the “additional words” feature, and it doesn’t take anything over 50k as an input value. That’s exactly what I’m griping about. 🙂

Ah. Understood… Yeah, it doesn’t seem there’s an ideal solution, here…Though I will say that if the job’s important enough to a buyer, I don’t know that one extra step should be enough to turn them off. Plus, since it’s like that for EVERYone here, it’s not like they could find someone else without that same issue…

I suppose if you try to put in “50k” rather than “50,000”, there’s an error for incorrect syntax?

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Ah. Understood… Yeah, it doesn’t seem there’s an ideal solution, here…Though I will say that if the job’s important enough to a buyer, I don’t know that one extra step should be enough to turn them off. Plus, since it’s like that for EVERYone here, it’s not like they could find someone else without that same issue…

I suppose if you try to put in “50k” rather than “50,000”, there’s an error for incorrect syntax?

Well, that’s a good point. If nobody can take longer MSS without the extra step, perhaps the buyers will bite the bullet and do it.

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It does seem odd but I guess they decided there needed to be a limit somewhere otherwise people could order huge amounts with too short delivery times. I did see a buyer complaining about not being able to find anyone who could cope with their large documents - it was either the forum or buyer requests (its difficult to tell the difference sometimes)

It does seem odd but I guess they decided there needed to be a limit somewhere otherwise people could order huge amounts with too short delivery times.

I managed this by setting the default delivery time to the maximum of 29 days. It’s been working okay so far.

Oh well. There may be other buyers and sellers who like it this way.

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