After two weeks of procrastination, I finally sat down and got my Elance.com profile up and running on my account. The number of projects for editing and proofreading is fairly low, especially when considering how many service providers there are for that subcategory. It seems that the number of open bidding sessions is around twenty, maybe less.

For now, I am on the free plan where there are only three connections (basic bids) per month. The next upgrade would be to spend $10/month for a total of 15 connections. Additional connections can be purchased in lots of ten for an additional $5. Any unused connections at the end of the 30-day billing cycle cannot be used for the succeeding month.

So, there was a copyediting gig of around 5700 words (20 pages) on which I bid. All told, there are over 30 total bidders for that small project. There’s a better project for copyediting two DOC files and combining the two onto a PDF. The writer says that they were less than 50 pages each, when in fact the first DOC was 66 pages in length after the ToC was stripped. Apparently, rarely should an editor take the buyers at their word without question because they **KNOW** how long their documents are. OTOH, I didn’t download the second DOC yet. Maybe it’s less than 50 pages. Right!