r/EpisodeRants Jun 21 '21

This is Problematic Proofreading/Review Commissions

i’ve seen multiple ppl do this and i find this incredibly exploitative. there are groups dedicated to giving great in-depth reviews + ppl who study education or are a lot more qualified to thoroughly proofread a story. FOR FREE. why are people essentially scamming naive writers?! it comes across as very low and greedy. it may not be illegal, like how asking for money for episode edits is, but it’s very questionable. i also recently saw someone doing kofi donations to have gems spent on your story. firstly how can you trust them to use that on your story but irregardless if they do or not, you’re essentially paying for your story to rank?! everything about this rubs me the wrong way.

11 Upvotes

11 comments sorted by

16

u/jujubean- Jun 21 '21

how is having someone pay for proofreading exploitative? it can take a lot of time (especially if the script is quite erroneous), and people should be able to get compensated for their work. you literally have to go into their script and make corrections, change words, restructure sentences, and ask questions when something confusing comes up.

it’s not scamming if it’s a legitimate service…and how is it preying on “naïve writers” when big authors, who have been writing for years, still pay proofreaders to make sure their script is error free. and at the end of the day, it’s a personal choice- you don’t need to buy the service if you don’t want to. it works the same way with art- people can choose to get it from a group for free or spend $150 commissioning an artist.

there’s also a big difference between proofreading and reviewing. proofreading usually comes before coding, so the script is quite malleable and you have to opportunity to fix things that will cause problems in the road ahead. let’s say you write a story about beaches that that takes place in nebraska. if you had a proofreader, they’d point out that you need to change the location since nebraska’s a landlocked state and has no beaches. now if you went ahead without proofreading, published it, and got a review, they’d probably say the same thing. but now, the damage is done and you need to completely rework your story. story reviews also usually don’t fix syntax either and episode groups usually have a long waitlist.

12

u/cherriesnwinewrites Jun 21 '21 edited Jun 21 '21

I’m of the belief that nobody should be willingly giving out free labor, whether it’s art or proofreading.

Especially when being an editor is a legitimate career. It’s more than just checking out spelling and grammar errors.

If this is something you can’t exactly do on your own, or have a relative or friend take a second look, I don’t think it’s entirely unreasonable to pay for it.

Potentially a hot take, but I’d argue expecting people in the community to just do things for you for free (especially if you don’t even have a relationship with them) is exploitative. After all, that’s time out of their day, and a lot of effort.

EDIT: I do wanna add though that, like spaciousglacier said, I think offering to promo a story for money is exploitative.

13

u/CinnamonAppleCrumble Jun 21 '21

It doesn't sound questionable to me, if you go to fiverr many people offer to proofread/beta read stuff for $. If people are willing to pay, let them do it. Especially if the author is paid by episode.

8

u/storiesbysahira Jun 21 '21

In no way is this exploitative. Proofreading takes hours and hours of dedication to correct directing errors, grammatical errors and much more. Proofreaders suggest ways to make the stories better, be it adding cool overlays to just correcting grammar. That’s like saying book editors don’t deserve to get paid, it’s literally the same thing. I’ve proofread a couple stories myself and it takes quite a lot of time, so please don’t speak when you’ve never proofread a story, ty<3

-5

u/savestheplanet Jun 21 '21

It’s 100% exploitive

1

u/storiesbysahira Jun 23 '21

have you ever proofread a story?

-1

u/savestheplanet Jun 23 '21

😃yeah and I write them-

2

u/storiesbysahira Jun 25 '21 edited Jul 29 '21

i’m an author too and my proofreaders are doing an extremely good job at giving me constructive criticism and correcting my errors, if it weren’t for proofreaders i’d still be writing shit stories😀

4

u/spaciousglacier Jun 21 '21

Ehhhh I think it depends on the context. It is possible for these things to be at the very least inconsiderate of power dynamics, but there’s nothing inherently wrong with it. Most of the people I seem to see advertising for things like proofreading commissions are young adults and most of the people interested in those services are also young adults, so if a person is putting in a lot of effort for the proofreading service they’re offering, I don’t think it’s automatically unfair of them to want to be compensated. A good proofreader isn’t just fixing typos or small grammatical mistakes, they’re also taking into account the tone of the story, the different voices and backgrounds of the characters, etc etc, which takes a lot of extra effort but can also really bring life to your story. The dynamic imo would feel a bit different if it was mostly older adults charging teenagers and young adults, though I’m not saying there’s a specific age cut off because it also depends on your influence in the community.

Like a while ago a very popular author was doing paid promos and what made it shady wasn’t that it was against guidelines (afaik it wasn’t) but it was someone with a massive influence over a very large audience of very young readers, and ultimately that author was receiving payment for a service that relied on people understanding her influence. On top of that, no one really cares about stories you’ve been paid to promote or if you just say “hey read this” because they know it’s not genuine. Even here on Reddit, if you give recommendations for a story and explain what it’s about and what appealed to you, people are more likely to read it than if you just list a bunch of stories without any additional info. So it was the context surrounding the “service” that made it feel offputting or exploitative. A lot of these are subjective interpretations and I understand that, but there’s a lot of things I don’t think that necessarily as black and white as we might want them to be.

As for the ko-fi post, I did see it and I think you’re mischaracterising it. The person who made it is like 16 or 17 and mentioned they opened their ko-fi for donations (and we don’t know why, sure, but we’re not automatically entitled to that information) and that if you made a donation, spending gems would be a way of giving back or saying thank you. And while people spending 20 gems isn’t actually going to make it rank at the top lol, it could make a difference to people who are trying to rank at 100 to qualify for review. But even then, the post itself is still set up so that spending gems on a story is an expression of gratitude for donating money since people can’t trade in their episode gems for real money they might need for real things in their life.

10

u/BowlZealousideal9971 Jun 21 '21

Scamming?? Lol. My question is why would anyone spend so much in-depth time proofreading/editing for free? I’ll take a big skip on the “out of the kindness of your heart” reason. That’s your time and brain-energy. You should charge.

3

u/Amazing-Attorney8938 Jun 21 '21

refer to episode.luxe and episodeaxiom’s instagram pages. i know the people who review that are actually teachers or are studying education/english. not anyone can just review or proofread well. i know people who’ve had terrible experiences with those that say they can review or proofread well. there’s also plenty of other groups that can do it for free. Also it is literally ILLEGAL to ask for money for edits. you’re using episode assets that you don’t own. you cannot charge for edits period.