Part-time and extremely casual editors are the new hopeful movie extras. Instant Editors recently put out a call for hungry and sleepy proofreaders and typographical hammerheads looking to supplement their income with editing projects on the side.
Their standards seem to be pretty skewed to a certain market of individual looking at their services as a means to serve others. Upon visiting the site, prospective editors are asked to fill in a registration form. One that doesn't exist in the usual guise of an actual on-site form. Instead, a method usually at the hands of plagiarists, copying and pasting lines from their site. Then, following the fill, and assuming the prospectives haven't read what they have been filling out, are asked again to flesh out the referees list.
Signing off on the contract gives Instant Editors the okay to slice out a chunk as big as a fifth of possible fees later recouped. Finally comes the section that has worked so well in the past for casting agencies looking at hopefuls in the background of movie and television scenes. An annual registration close to five hundred dollars. A fee that can be avoided if people spam other hopefuls who haven't yet read the message.
For each recipient that is sent the email, a dollar is docked from the necessary fee off the sender's bill. At five hundred unsolicited emails, this would effectively wipe out the first year's registration while at the same time giving Instant Editors a handy army of people doing their advertising.
Written on Friday, 16 April 2004