John Bear looking for paid helper for degree mill book project

The good news: After six months of trying, my agent finally has an offer for the book on degree mills that Allen Ezell (founder of FBI's dipscam project) and I are planning to do.

The bad news: The publisher wants a bigger book than we had planned (100,000 words), and they want it in just over three months. Possible, but demanding.

The good and bad news: It is a major publisher (not Ten Speed), who knows how to market and promote books. But the advance is minuscule.

If I'm going to get this done, I am going to need a research assistant for a month or perhaps six weeks, part time, to collect, review, combine, and summarize information -- from this forum, other forums, the internet in general, and hundreds of files (electronic and paper) that I have accumulated.

I am quite sure it can all be done at a distance, by Email, mail, fax, and phone.

Proposed pay is embarrassing (see three previous paragraphs re minuscule advance), but it should be interesting and satisfying work, I think, with a bit of 2nd hand glory. Not co-authorship, but at least profuse thanks and acknowledgement in the book, and possibly (but no guarantee) title page credit in the "with the help of..." model that I've done a few times before.

That said, if the notion of spending at least ten and at most 20 hours a week for 4 to 6 weeks (probably starting in a week or two at the most) for ten bucks an hour has possible interest, please communicate privately: [email protected] or fax (510) 528-4254.

(Contract not yet in hand; it's at that sluggish stage where our agent is discussing foreign language rights and second serial rights in Israel and who pays for indexing and suchlike, but it should happen in the next week or 10 days.)

Thanks for your attention.

John