Should I Hire a Freelancer or Agency to Help Create My Ebook?

Introduction

Creating an ebook can be an exciting yet daunting process. As you start planning your ebook, one of the first questions that may come up is whether you should hire a freelancer or work with an agency to help you create it. There are good arguments on both sides of this question, so it’s important to weigh the pros and cons of each option carefully based on your goals, budget, and needs.

In this comprehensive guide, we’ll explore the key differences, considerations, and recommendations to help you decide if hiring a freelancer or agency is the right choice for your ebook project.

Overview of Hiring a Freelancer

Freelancers are self-employed professionals who offer their services on a per-project basis across a wide range of skill sets. Freelancers typically have lower overhead costs than agencies, allowing them to offer more competitive rates.

Here are some of the main benefits and drawbacks of working with a freelancer:

Benefits

Lower Cost: Since they have less overhead expenses, freelancers typically charge less per hour or per project than agencies. Freelancing rates vary greatly though depending on experience, specialization, and portfolio.

Flexibility: Freelancers can usually commit to tight timelines and smaller projects more easily than agencies. This makes them a good option if you only need help with certain aspects of your ebook.

Direct Communication: You’ll be working one-on-one with your freelancer, allowing for better direct communication and oversight throughout the project. This can help streamline decision making.

Specialized Expertise: Freelancers often specialize in one area, like writing, editing, design, or publishing. This specialized expertise can benefit your ebook.

Potential for Ongoing Support: If all goes well, you may be able to establish a long-term working relationship with your freelancer and leverage their services for future ebooks or projects.

Drawbacks

Inconsistent Quality: Since almost anyone can claim to be a freelancer, there can be huge variability in skill level and quality of work. Extensive vetting is essential.

Lack of End-to-End Services: Most freelancers specialize in one service, like writing or editing. Having to source and manage multiple freelancers for an ebook can be challenging.

Training Investment: You’ll likely need to spend quite a bit of time briefing your chosen freelancer on your ebook concept, target audience, voice, etc. This ramp-up can slow initial progress.

Accountability Issues: Without an agency structure or team supporting them, some freelancers struggle with accountability and meeting agreed upon deadlines. Clear contracts help.

Limited Perspective: An individual freelancer brings their own subjective point of view. Without a team to collaborate with, creativity and problem solving can suffer at times.

Loss of Past Work Access: If your freelancer becomes unavailable in the future, you may lose access to your ebook files if responsibilities for hosting/updating weren’t pre-defined.

Overview of Hiring an Agency

Ebook agencies have teams of professionals specializing in ebook content creation, design, publishing, marketing, and more. However, their services come at a higher cost due to greater overhead expenses.

Here is an overview of the main upsides and downsides of hiring an ebook agency:

Benefits

End-to-End Services: Agencies offer a full spectrum of ebook services – writing, editing, illustrations, formatting, publishing, promotion, etc. This saves you from piecing multiple freelancers together.

Accountability: Established agencies provide greater accountability through contracts, dedicated teams, structured processes, quality assurance practices, and direct oversight by a Project Manager.

Specialized Experience: Those who choose to focus full-time on ebook agency work often gain exceptionally deep knowledge of what makes ebook projects successful. They stay on top of ever-evolving best practices.

Broader Perspectives: With diverse staff and collaboration built into their DNA, agencies can typically bring more well-rounded perspective, creativity, and problem solving capabilities to the table.

Ongoing Support: Reputable agencies often provide ongoing post-launch support, updates, and optimization services to help your ebook get maximum visibility and impact over time.

Reliable Hand-Off: If you decide not to continue working with an agency down the road, they should hand-off all necessary files, logins, and key information to empower a smooth transition.

Drawbacks

Higher Costs: Agencies tend to charge higher hourly or project rates due to greater overhead expenses like office space, support staff, management layers, etc. However, you’re paying for an integrated, specialized team.

Less Flexibility: Agencies tend to work best with medium to longer-term projects, as ramp-up time and management coordination overhead make short-term engagements less viable. Rush jobs can cost more.

Account Management Friction: Working through an Account Manager introduces a slight buffer between you and the talent actually creating your ebook. Direct communication may be more limited.

Potential for Churn: Larger agencies can sometimes suffer from higher employee turnover, resulting in team restructures and lost expertise/context about your ebook specifics. Smaller boutiques are often more stable.

Over-Promising: Some agencies are overly optimistic about what they can deliver to win your business. Unrealistic scopes and timelines that ultimately slip can cause friction.

Impersonal Feel: Once you’ve signed on the dotted line, there’s a small risk you may feel like just another client going through the agency machine rather than receiving tailored attention.

Key Factors to Consider

Determining whether to hire freelancers or an agency comes down to weighing your specific priorities, needs, constraints and preferences:

Priorities

Cost: Freelancers almost always represent the cheaper option, often by a significant amount. If budget is very tight, freelancing may fit best. That said, agencies can often fund superior ebook quality through their teams and infrastructure support.

Convenience: If you value fast turnaround times, end-to-end services, and maximum hand-holding under one roof, an agency makes life much simpler at the expense of higher fees.

Control: Freelancers allow clients to drive every aspect of timeline and creative direction very directly hands-on. Agencies require a slight release of control in exchange for access to specialized skills and bandwidth.

Quality: Skill level varies tremendously across individual freelancers. However, reputable agencies boast reliable quality assurance through layered teams, leadership, and systematization. But quality freelancers do exist if you can find them!

Needs

Specialized Skills: Certain aspects of your ebook like illustrations, workbooks, or assessments may require niche expertise best served by a targeted freelancer or niche agency.

Elastic Timeline: Freelancers on flexible contracts can adapt to changing needs and missed launch deadlines without forcing renegotiation of rigid SOWs common with agencies.

Marketing: If you foresee needing substantial post-launch marketing and updates for your ebook, agencies provide integrated teams to support ongoing optimization and refresh efforts over years. Freelancers can help execute marketing tactics.

Hands-on Guidance: First time ebook creators often benefit from plenty of personalized guidance during their maiden voyage. Agencies tier out guidance services by seniority level while freelancers are quite hands-on.

Constraints

Urgent Deadline: Based on portfolio and customer reviews, a freelancer may represent your best shot at meeting a looming deadline that most agencies couldn’t accommodate on short notice.

Early Phase: If you’re still validating your ebook concept and want to start small with a pilot test version, freelancers allow phased ramp-up without long term contracts. You can always enlist an agency later on once traction is proven for scaling efforts.

Niche Topic: For an ebook on a niche technical or industry-specific topic, you may have better luck finding a qualified freelancer with direct subject matter expertise compared to a generalized agency.

Preferences

Customization: Freelancers are often more willing to tweak process and creative liberties to suit each client’s preferences versus agencies that lean towards systemization and best practices.

Cultural Fit: You may simply vibe better with a freelancer’s personality and communication style leading to smoother collaboration. But agency project managers are trained relationship managers.

Risk Tolerance: Utilizing an agency reduces execution risk through accountability and reliability safeguards that freelancers may struggle to match (although the best freelancers mitigate this). Your personal risk tolerance counts.

By methodically reflecting on priorities, needs, constraints and preferences, you can zero in on the hiring approach that strikes the right balance and fit.

Best Practices for Hiring Freelancers

If you decide to hire a freelancer after weighing the considerations above, following some best practices will become extremely important to set your ebook up for success:

Carefully Screen Prospects

Cast a wide net with your job posting to attract plenty of prospects. Thoroughly review portfolios and past work examples relevant to ebook creation. Check reviews and request referrals to vet work quality and reliability. Interview multiple candidates and ask lots of questions to assess capabilities.

Validate Subject Matter Expertise

Ensure candidates possess truly deep knowledge and skill specifically related to ebook topic research, outlining, writing, formatting, graphic design, etc. Surface-level dabblers are quite common. You want niche-focused mastery.

Require Work Samples

Ask prospects to produce a custom short writing or design sample (paid) matching the style you envision for your ebook. This gives you an objective quality check before committing.

Define Milestones stringently

Create a detailed scope of work with strict milestones, deliverable descriptions, due dates and payment amounts tied to each milestone. This keeps projects on track when freelancer accountability can otherwise slip.

Get References

Ask for references you can contact to inquire about the freelancer’s work style, reliability meeting deadlines, commitment to quality, and handling of scope creep or other issues that emerged during past ebook jobs.

Establish Regular Check-ins

Build regular check-in calls or progress report expectations into the contract. Daily or weekly status updates ensure the ebook work stays top of mind and on track for the freelancer amidst their likely competing projects.

Leverage Project Management Tools

Use tools like Trello or Asana to collaborate and keep your freelancer on track with to-do lists, file sharing, comments, reminders, etc. This also provides helpful documentation should any disputes emerge later.

Negotiate Contracts Carefully

Define strict ebook delivery timelines, milestones, quality standards, reporting requirements, communication protocols, and other expectations, backed up by financial penalties if warranted, in a formal contractor agreement.

Structure Payments Strategically

Tie payments directly to milestone achievement written right into the freelancer contract. Backload payments so your freelancer doesn’t get paid in full until after satisfactorily delivering the final ebook files and fulfilling all scoped expectations.

Best Practices for Hiring Agencies

If pursuing help from an ebook agency makes the most sense instead, incorporating best practices into your search and vetting process becomes critical for success:

Validate Experience

Shortlist agencies with substantial published case study examples specifically related to ebooks similar to what you envision creating. Request recent client references to check. Length of time specializing in ebook creation work can serve as a quality indicator.

Interview Multiple Options

Talk to reps from at least 3-5 agencies to evaluate team capabilities, fit, responsiveness, communication styles, vision alignment and more. Explore each agency’s unique processes and how they scope ebook projects to assess differences.

Require a Proposal

Ask agencies on your shortlist to prepare a custom plan and proposal for your specific ebook based on an RFP that outlines your goals, target audience, topics, preferred tone/voice and any other special considerations unique to your project. Compare approach, quality and attention to detail across agency responses.

Validate Accountability Practices

Probe each agency on their team structure, their processes for keeping projects on budget and schedule, software leveraged, contingencies for staff turnover, executive oversight model, key checks and balances in place throughout ebook creation, and overall change management practices.

Ask for Referrals

Secure multiple past client referrals you can contact to better understand how each agency operates behind the scenes. Inquire about upfront goal alignment, day-to-day communications, project management reliability hitting milestones, flexibility accommodating change orders or feedback,inely responsiveness and overall working relationship health.

Clarify Post-Launch Services

Understand what specific post-launch and ongoing optimization services, if any, are bundled into each agency’s proposals. Ensure someone reliable will remain accountable for ebook updates, marketing, traffic monitoring, assessing new promotion opportunities and driving ongoing results post-payment.

Negotiate Transparent Pricing

Get clear rates and payment plans in writing from the start for every expense associated with your ebook project – research, writing, editing, illustrations, formatting, publishing, distribution, marketing, ongoing maintenance. Confirm what precisely is covered for different investment tiers to align budget and value.

Trust but Verify

While critical, vetting and reference checking isn’t foolproof. Once selected, maintain slightly guarded trust until the agency proves themselves through delivered results matching or exceeding expectations across the full ebook production journey.

Key Questions to Ask Prospects

As you evaluate both freelancer and agency prospects, asking probing questions is crucial for determining fit and capabilities. Below are some examples of key questions to incorporate into interviews and written RFPs:

Ebook Creation Experience

• How many ebooks have you published end-to-end for clients previously? Could I review some examples and case studies related to my topic?
• How many years have you been working within the ebook creation industry?
• What ebook topics and audiences have you worked with most extensively?

Process & Approach

• Please walk me through your typical end-to-end process for creating client ebooks.
• How do you ensure ebooks align tightly to client goals and target audience needs at every stage?
• What are your research methods for deeply exploring chosen ebook topics?
• How do you create outlines to translate research into useful, reader-focused ebook content architecture?

Writing & Editing

• What experience do your writing team members have specifically related to ebooks vs. other content formats?
• How many rounds of review and revision are built into your standard process?
• What types of editing (developmental, line editing, copy editing, proofreading) do you include?
• Do you have an external editor review each ebook prior to client review?

Illustration & Formatting

• What types of illustrations and graphical elements do you weave through ebook content by default and why?
• What ebook formatting software, templates and tools do you use to ensure professional, clean layouts?
• How do you optimize formatting to maximize organic traffic and search engine visibility based on target keywords?

Ongoing Marketing

• What specific distribution platforms and channels do you publish ebooks through?
• Do you have existing media relationships or promotion partnerships you can leverage to amplify new ebook launches? Details?
• What additional ebook marketing, traffic generation and lead nurturing tactics are typically included?
• How do you track and report on ebook promotion results over time? KPIs?

Production Timeline

• Walk me through your typical ebook production schedule from kickoff call to publication.
• Where do you see the biggest risk of delays during ebook creation based on past projects?
• How much lead time do you require if hoping to hit a specific launch deadline?

Budgeting

• What factors most directly impact overall ebook production cost and why?
• Does your pricing mainly correlate to page count, word count, complexity, illustrations included, production timeline or other factors?
• What add-on or variable costs could arise that I should plan for in my budget?

Legal & Security

• Who owns the full rights to ebook content you produce for clients?
• How do you ensure content will be original vs. plagiarized? What tools and checks do editors perform?
• For sensitive client information accessed during our engagement, what data security and privacy measures do you have in place?

The more clarity you can gain on these critical areas, the better equipped you’ll be to determine if agencies or freelancers demonstrate superior experience, services, and approach related to your specific ebook goals.

Recommendations for Maximum Success

Regardless of whether you end up working with freelancers or an agency to produce your ebook, adhering to these recommended best practices will help set your project up for the highest likelihood of success:

Invest in Solid Foundational Research

Resist any urge to rush the research phase which sets your entire ebook’s direction. Spend adequate time delving into your target audience’s pains and needs, defining niche topics worth tackling, speaking to industry experts, gathering hard data and compiling competitive analyses to discern potential angles lacking coverage. This ensures you can craft highly reader-centric content with original value right out the gates. Trying to retroactively regain proper positioning after inadequate research leads to preventable rework.

Maintain Laser Focus on Business Goals

At every juncture – during proposal reviews, outline socialization, draft creation, imagery selection, formatting decisions, post go-live promotion plans – continuously re-check that all ebook elements directly ladder up to supporting your core business KPIs like email subscribers gained, revenue generated, leads captured, services sold. Safeguard against scope creep detracting time and focus from activities that most move your business revenue needle.

Carve Out buffers

Even experienced ebook creators face surprises like research Rabbit holes or unexpected editing cycles. Build generous contingency buffers into your schedules, especially regarding any hard deadlines. You’ll likely end up needing more time than initially imagined to produce truly polished, impactful content worth your investment.

Plan for Multiple Versions

Think of your ebook launch as version 1.0 instead of a one-and-done effort. Build volume expectations into your upfront agreements allowing for periodic refreshing of examples, data points, imagery, case studies and exercises.

Key Questions to Ask Prospects

As you evaluate both freelancer and agency prospects, asking probing questions is crucial for determining fit and capabilities. Based on my 15 years working in the ebook production industry, I’ve found these to represent some of the most critical questions to ask:

Ebook Creation Experience

• How many ebooks have you published end-to-end for clients previously? Could I review some examples and case studies related to my topic? In my history, seeing 6-10 case studies relevant to the target reader’s niche increases odds of good content fit.
• How many years have you been working specifically within the ebook creation industry? Prospects with under 5 years focused solely on ebooks pose higher risk.
• What ebook topics and audiences have you worked with most extensively? It’s imperative they have specific alignment.

Process & Approach

• Please walk me through your typical end-to-end process for creating client ebooks. Vetting process details has proven hugely predictive of quality output based on my experience.
• How do you ensure ebooks align tightly to client goals and target audience needs at every stage? Misalignment here contributes to most post-publication rework down the line per what I’ve seen.
• What are your research methods for deeply exploring chosen ebook topics? I’ve learned research rigor sets the ceiling for ebook impact potential.

Writing & Editing

• What experience do your writing team members have specifically related to ebooks vs. other content formats? Writing excellence specifically tied to long-form sales enablement content is vital based on my lessons over the years.
• How many rounds of review and revision are built into your standard process? In my history, at least 3 review cycles are needed to catch most issues.
• What types of editing (developmental, line editing, copy editing, proofreading) do you include? Later stage editing importance cannot be overstated from what I’ve witnessed.
• Do you have an external editor review each ebook prior to client review? Unbiased QC reviewing is arguably when my projects have gained most value.

I aimed to incorporate more direct references to lessons learned over many years along with calling out predictive indicators I’ve correlated to success and risk/failure avoidance across ebook projects. Please let me know if you have any other suggestions for improving the veteran’s point of view!