When you begin working as an author, you may promptly decide you need help. Whether you want help with marketing, you hire someone for cover design, or you hire someone to help guide your path and money changes hands, there are some things to take into consideration.

Clearly communicate about roles and expectations.

Different people will offer different things at different price points. Clear communication is vital to any working relationship, but even more in regard to working with an assistant.

Make sure your assistant knows what you’re hiring them to do, and vice versa, make sure you know what support they need to do the job. In the creative fields, especially in the writing field, close collaboration between parties is vital to achieve your goals.

For example, if you’re hiring someone to manage your social media accounts, what are the parameters around that? Do you want them to make posts on your behalf? Or only to schedule what you send them? Do you want to approve the posts they make? Or are you fine trusting them with everything about your online presentation of yourself?

They will need your interaction. They are there to assist you, not necessarily to do everything for you. Be prepared for collaboration.

Working with Freelancers

Most of the people you’ll end up working with will be freelancers. This becomes important around tax time. As a general rule of thumb, if you’re paying an individual (in particular a sole proprietorship or LLC) and not a registered business (C or S Corp), you’ll need to familiarize yourself with the 1099 forms. (There are some tricky rules with LLCs, so talk to the person you hired to see what they’ll need. This is the most important rule of thumb.)

To download copies of these forms and their instructions, visit the IRS website.

There are a few ways freelancers tend to operate. And there are some job types you need to be aware of.

Contract Work

Most of the time, this will be the type of work you’ve hired someone for. It is recommended you have a written agreement outlining expectations, pay, and duration of the job. Are you hiring someone to help you for the three months of your book launch? That falls here. It is work under clear parameters with a set start/end time.

For the most part, when you hire someone to do something for you (design your cover, for example, or layout your book) you’re paying them to make something that you will own. Most often, this falls under Work for Hire.

Work for Hire

If you’re a freelancer under work for hire, anything you create for that job belongs to the person you created it for. Take a book cover, for example. The cover artist no longer has the rights to that compilation. The person who commissioned the art has the rights for that piece. In most cases, that would be the publisher. (Or, if you’re self publishing, you, the author.) The artist may receive credit, but they are not able to sell that artwork to any other authors who want it. 

This can apply to blog posts or articles written by “a company”, books that are ghost written, social media designs not for use or for sale, etc. This model also means that your artist or assistant is not owed royalties or a percentage on success. They receive their pay on delivery (or whatever schedule you and they decide on) and no matter what money you make from the product they designed, you don’t owe them anything else.

Collaborative Work

In collaborative work, the co-creator is also a part owner of the item in question. You see this example in books that are co-authored, or in fashion collaborations (Savage X Fenti comes to mind. Both Savage and Fenti are partial owners of the items. Both gain from success.)

This might come into play if you collaborate with influencers. This often looks like a mutually beneficial situation. On YouTube, you would film two videos together—one for each of your channels in each of your styles. You both gain from the shared audience interest, and the distribution of time is even.

Most author assistant work will not fall into this Collaborative Work category, despite the close collaboration required for them to do the work for you.

Payment Models

There are two main payment models available to you. If you hire someone with multiple clients, they might tell you their normal rate. If you’re hiring your neighbor’s kid, you may be able to make an offer.

Service and Deliverable Based Payment

The model used by Hanna Book Solutions is a service and deliverable based model, in which tasks are assigned monetary value. This ensures costs are constant. If you were to hire me for the Marketing Package, you would pay the set amount for the Marketing Package no matter how long it took me to deliver it.

Hourly Model

Another common model is an hourly payment model at a set rate. In this example, pay might change according to experience and expectations. Someone right out of college looking for work experience may be content with minimum wage or just higher. Someone with industry experience may request a higher rate per hour or per set amount of time. (Legal practices, for example, bill per six minutes because that makes the numbers nice and easy—1/10 of an hour.) In this model you’ll need a time tracking method and a pay period expectation. Will you pay weekly? Biweekly? Monthly? Quarterly?

When it comes down to it, finding a freelancer to assist you in your author career can be one of the most beneficial business decisions you can make. Just make sure you both understand what is expected of each other and have communicated clearly in regards to compensation and work requirements. And always, when possible, get things in writing.

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