This time, I accepted the job.
It's a publisher I've worked with a couple of times before recently (though a different contact). And, unlike the woefully bad academic treatise I turned down on Monday, this would have been an EFL textbook. Lots of pictures. Quite a few largely blank or wholly blank pages. More than half of the text in Chinese (and so, not my concern - yay!). The English very simple, and often repeated several times.
Yep, this was only a 1,500 RMB fee, and the book was slightly larger than that dratted tourism study in number of pages - but it should be barely a tenth as much text, and much higher quality. Basically just a proof-reading job, no major re-writes. For a job like this, the fee is really not too bad at all.
The girl at the publishing house told me on Tuesday that she'd send the manuscript (it's always hard-copy for proofing here) over to my place by courier on Wednesday. I sent her a text message querying whether the courier company would be coming in the morning or the afternoon (that's as much of a guide as you can get from a Chinese courier company). She didn't respond. I tried phoning her. She didn't answer. She didn't call me back. I stayed in almost all day waiting for the courier - who, of course, never came. I tried phoning the publisher girl again the next day, to see if there had been a change of plan. She's ignoring my calls.
I guess she decided to use someone else. Or maybe she decided the book didn't need proofing. Or maybe she decided that the book probably did need proofing, but that none of her superiors would notice if it wasn't, so there was really no obstacle to her keeping the proof-reading fee for herself.
Probably we shall never know......
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