Hello!
This is Bill Vaz – Randall Wood’s author assistant – as previously announced by Randall.
I’m back from climbing the Mont Everest. It was freezing – in fact, I still have some ice between my fingers as I type this. This will be a follow-up of my previous post, where I talked about how you can feel overwhelmed with all the important tasks you have to, besides writing. This post, however, will be about a nasty word we all know too well: fears.
We all have fears. Some people have fears related to climbing Most Everest. Others might feel fear when they think about hiring an author assistant. Feeling fear is good to protect you, but it’s a bad thing when it stops you from transform your career into a new level; a writing career of a superior level. And, there’s really a necessity to feel fear when thinking about hiring an author assistant?
Yes and no.
Yes, because you don’t know who you are hiring. It might be the next Adolf Hitler or even a ISIS member. Or, even worse, a villain from the Randall Wood’s Jack Randall series. It can be risky, yes, but you can also get hit by a car next time you cross a street. And, will that stop you from crossing the street? Hopefully no, because you are looking forward what’s after you’ve crossed the street. And you need to do the same thing when hiring an author assistant – you need to look to its benefits.
The “no necessity to feel fear” part is about how you can protect yourself. As Randall pointed out, there’s things you can and should do before hiring your author assistant: talk to him is one of them, even if it’s just on a professional level. Get to know him. Learn about his weaknesses and how he deals with them, but also his strong points.
You can also give him a task, to which you can decide if he’ll have to do so pro bono or if you’ll pay to him. Don’t overwhelm him with the most difficult task you can think about, I think, because the author assistant is a human like you. But don’t give him a task a 5-year old could do. You want to test the person you’re hiring, so you learn if they’re worth your time and money.
Once you’ve decided to hire him, you can take safety measures about how you handle your passwords. Let’s face it, you will need to give him some passwords; there’s no way around it, unless you just want him to do Facebook ads for you. And, even with Facebook ads, your assistant will have control about how much you spend on those ads. However, giving him all the passwords right at the start is unnecessary. You can give him passwords as he needs them, and as you monitor how this business relationship goes and act accordingly. Also, most websites – if not all – offer you an option to recover your password through your email. And, here’s the important part: You may choose not to give him the password of your personal email, because you’ll need to use it to recover your password if something bad happens. The only exception here is when you trust your author assistant a lot.
But then again, you should look to what this business relationship is – a relationship between two humans. Just like in any other relationship, if both aren’t looking forwards to success, it will fall sooner or later. So, although there’s risks involved, you need to look to this as a relationship, a partnership.
This is all for today. I trust that I will come back very soon, where we will discuss how specifically your author assistant can help you, once you’ve realized how important one can be for your writing career and once you’ve overcome your fears. I may reveal some of the things I’ve helped Randall with…
You can learn more about Bill Vaz’s author assistant service at his website!