Make Money Reading Books: How to Start and Operate Your Own Home-Based Freelance Reading Service

by Bruce Fife

Would you like to have a job that pays you to sit back in your own living room to read books, plays, magazine articles, and unpublished manuscripts? If you would, this book will open up a new world of opportunity to you. It explains in detail how you can set up and operate a successful freelance reading service in the comfort of your own home.

There are thousands of businesses and individuals who need and use readers and pay well for their services. In this book you will discover many exciting opportunities available to freelance readers, and how to start your own reading service business. This is not just a "how to" book, it is a "how to make reading a business" book.

Anybody can break into this business. Having a college degree is helpful but not necessary. The ability to read well and a genuine love of reading are the two primary requirements needed to operate a profitable reading service.

The author has factual, firsthand knowledge about reading services. He is an independent book publisher who hires and works with many freelance readers throughout the country.

Genres: Nonfiction, Books About Books, Writing

205 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 1993

Reviews

[Stephanie Dagg · Rating 3 out of 5]

I knew the book was ten years old when I bought it but still expected it to have rather more practical information that it does. It should really be called 'Book Related Jobs' since several of the suggestions - translating, editing and proofreading, for example - can only be carried out by trained professionals and this book is meant to be aimed at the the general book lover who wants to make a little money from the hobby, if possible. And including 'How to become a published author' as one of the chapters is definitely digressing from the book's title. However, on the plus side the book gives a good introduction to the layperson of what's involved in writing and publishing a book. It was well researched and includes concise and useful advice on setting up a business and marketing yourself.
It would be great to see a new edition of this book taking into account the Internet age as much of the current edition's content is outdated.

[Keith · Rating 4 out of 5]

This made its first appearance on my to-read list over a decade ago in a fit of unemployment-induced wishful thinking, under the presumption that, true to the title, it would prove to be utter BS of the get-rich-quick variety. I then mostly forgot about it until last year when, having decided to pivot from software quality testing to editing—or Quality Assurance for Natural Language™ as I now prefer to think of and charge for it—I spotted it in the Small Business section of the library where I was spending my time learning how to effect that transition. A quick scan implied that it was at least as legitimate as anything else I was reviewing, so I checked it out.

Right glad was I to have done so, as this proved to be among the more directly relevant sources available to me. While some of it is a bit outdated, being now 24 years old, the basic coverage of the various fields of endeavor that have reading books (and other material) at their heart appears to remain sound. This includes introductory advice on setting up such a business—material covered in much greater and more timely depth in the 5th Edition of How to Start a Home-Based Writing Business —as well as marketing such services, and a more detailed overview of the major divisions: Book Reviewing, Researching, Translating, Indexing, Literary Representation (e.g., editors and agents), and Manuscript Reading, which is now sadly defunct at the major publishing houses.

So, if you love to read (and why are you on this site if you do not?) and are interested in parlaying that into an income, whether full- or part-time, and you don't mind doing some additional work on top of merely reading, this may well be the best place for you to start exploring what options are of interest and open to you. Many of the additional resources at the back of the book, such as the American Society for Indexing, are still in existence (though URLs generally have shifted where they were available at all in 1993, so check your favorite search engine) and may provide targeted correctives to the more stale information herein.

[Eva North · Rating 3 out of 5]

I finished this awhile ago but it is quite outdated and didn't give me much info for our time.

[Bonnie Jacobs hessler · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's not a bad book, but needs to be updated to include the internet.