I was contacted this morning by “PACKT Publishing” to be a technical reviewer for their book on libgdx and whatnot. They want me to look over their book, see what’s wrong, get 2 free copies of it (print or digital) and an extra ebook of any other book free. Not bad!
I asked them for a table of contents (to see what topics they cover).
What should I do? Should I accept it? This is the first time someone’s ever contacted me for this.
I guess the question is: why not?
But I’m usually suspicious of this kind of offer. What’s in it for you? Are they paying you? Are they paying you enough?
Do you feel like you know enough about the topic to do this? Does it sound fun to you? Are they paying you enough to do it?
It sounds like they’re asking you to do a lot of work for not a lot of pay, so I probably wouldn’t do it- unless it sounds really fun to you.
See also: http://shouldiworkforfree.com/
It’s their first offer, probably not their final offer. Do some negotiating, at least $100 should be in it for you. If they refuse, it’s obvious they don’t value your effort.
I am not getting paid, I’m only getting paid in books. Maybe if I take the offer, I might give away the ebook they give me, haha.
I looked up the legal age for work in my province (BC) and they “require written parental permission” if I get paid money (I’m turning 15 in Sept.). So either way, I can’t really be paid.
I just googled “packt publishing scam” and apparently this publisher sends out these kinds of “invitations to review” to a bunch of people, and then they only use the positive reviews.
I don’t want to insult you, but it sounds like you’re not the only person who received this email. They send out spam emails to anybody they can find, then pick and choose from the reviews to put on their website and places like Amazon. A couple free books is nothing to them.
So I wouldn’t take the “offer” very seriously if I were you. It might seem cool that somebody is contacting you, but they’re just trying to get a positive review they can put up on Amazon, and they probably didn’t even seek you out specifically- they probably just used an email scraper.
Just wait until you start putting games and apps out there. You’ll get several emails a day from people who want to “promote” your stuff, or offer “translation services”. It’s all a scam.
Well, if I received that email offering me a couple books in exchange of many hours of work, I’d say no right away. I’m a rather busy person. But you’re 14, it’s an entirely different case.
If you really want to do it, just as an accomplishment, or for the books, or whatever reason, there’s nothing wrong in doing it.
However, make your mind clearly on how many hours you’re willing to invest into this, and once you know it’s going to be X hours, tell them if that is ok. IMHO, you shouldn’t work more than 3-4 hours. If both parties agree, why not doing a reasonable exchange of goods and services.
I did some more googling about them and many people have said they’ve never gotten their books after reviewing the book. I think I’ll ignore the email for now, thanks for your opinions.
KevinWorkman seems to have misunderstood what a technical reviewer is 
Several years ago I coauthored “Learn to Tango with D” for APress and am currently working on a D book for PACKT. A few points from my experience.
The primary role of a technical reviewer is to look over the preliminary draft of each chapter and comment on any coding errors, erroneous descriptions, or any other mistakes related to the technology being covered. They’re also free to make suggestions on how to improve the text.
The author may make recommendations for technical reviewers. I gave PACKT a short list of six guys I know from the D community who are highly knowledgeable in different areas. I don’t know how many people they contacted, but currently I have four technical reviewers, all of them from my shortlist. These guys are professionals who know their stuff.
AFAIK, it’s typical for the publisher to offer books and discounts on purchases of their books. It’s not just PACKT – APress did the same. It may be possible to negotiate a cash payment, but don’t hold your breath.
In working as a technical reviewer, you are then on the publisher’s contact list. That could lead to further, potentially paying, offers in the future. I’ve read on blogs how some tech book authors got book offers after having worked as a TR.
Normally the packt books are ok but not awesome, apart from that, sure why wouldn’t you accept it? Do you see any reason against it? Beside …
If you agree you should really planned the time to do it. They expect opinions and some notes from your side. Just saying “cool, works” is normally not the requested result.
I want to second Riven’s opinion that this should be a paid job. Don’t sell yourself too cheap, otherwise it’ll be hard to get money later on other jobs with the same studion, aka “last time you did it for a free copy”.
Please consult the google search I mentioned. I understand what a technical reviewer is, but it seems this publisher misrepresents what they’re looking for. They say they’re looking for a technical reviewer, when really all they want is some nice-sounding blurbs to put on Amazon.
No offense to OP, but if they were really looking for technical reviewers, why would they be recruiting a 14 year old to do the job? I’m not saying that 14 year olds can’t be technical, but why would a publisher consult them instead of somebody with a little more recognizable expertise?
The answer, of course, is that this is at best a spam email sent out to every email that shows up while scraping the topics of the book, and at worst a scam meant to misrepresent technical books to falsely advertise.
Why would they consult and hire a 14 year old, which has legal problems on top of obvious problems like skill level and lack of experience.
Especially a 14 year old without significant credentials… Anyone doing a technical review would have to have significant credentials. Heck I am 27 and have worked with libgdx for like 5 years and I am NOT qualified for this. You would have to know and be sure of the inner workings and intricacies of most areas of libgdx.
Its absurd.
Plus the wording and the simple idea of this email has scam written all over it… How would they have even learned about you? They wouldn’t, its just a bot searching for email addresses on this forum or something to that effect.
They said they found me through my github profile. I’m guessing they have a bot to comb over some active github profiles and see if any one of the projects has “libgdx” in it. If they did they would request a human to look it over. I don’t have my age on my github profile.
I copied the table of contents they sent over and the pdf of their reviewer information to google drive.
Table of Contents
Reviewer Information
Like I said earlier, I’m not interested in this any more(let alone the time).
and I mean, if one was qualified they really wouldnt consider doing this for free.
A whole book! That’s a lot of goddamn work and time D:
Just to get one or more copies of that book you already read during the review…
Imagine QA staff at a games company just get the games they are bug-testing 