Monsterbox Productions

I purchased and read the ebook How to Be a Rockstar Freelancer and here are my after thoughts.

Purchasing Process (lightbox kills context)

I was thrown off when I clicked the buy button and a lightbox popped up. 37 signals posted about lightboxes killing context and now I’m thinking they do. Also entering the discount code didn’t work smoothly in the box. I think shopping carts belong on their own page.

After you purchase the ebook you get an e-mail with a link to the download but it expires after 72 hours or downloading the book 5 times. It was a discouraging thought because other books and videos I’ve purchased on-line let me come back anytime to download.

The Testimonials

When I got the discount e-mail they had two testimonials, the first and only ones I’ve seen so far were:

• Jon from FreelanceFolder.com
• Leo from ZenHabits.net

At first glance, I felt tricked by these testimonial web-sites because they looked like FreeLanceSwitch. It made me think its the own authors testimonial. That isn’t the case, but if you haven’t seen these testimonial web-sites before you might think so.

Needs Real Examples (Show instead of Tell)

They have an example of an estimate and for the description of work they put: (the work I did). If they placed real text in such as: “Constructed a simple one page web-site” It then would have shown what a real estimate looked like.

In there logo chapter they could have shown or at least mentioned an example of a good logo. eg. “Take a look at the FedEx logo, focus on letters e and x, do you see the arrow?”.

I think showing is more effective method of teaching the telling.

Quotes (Prove it true)

Once in a while a quote would appear in the book to go along with the chapter. Quotes are great because it proves the content is correct and researching a quote will help you learn more about the chapter. The book only had 16 quotes and I would have liked to seen more.

Typesetting needs to be rethought (Clarity over Cleverness)

I ended up copying the book into a word processor to change the font and layout. The body font was a dark grey and I need it to be readable not fancy. The quote boxes in the book took up half of the page and were dark grey boxes that distracted due to space and contrast.

Generic Information

I thought at one point I was reading something that I read somewhere before, word for word. The information wasn’t new to me but thats not why I’ll buy a book. I’ll buy to validate that I’m on the right track because I’ll feel confidence in what I’m doing.

The bible for Freelancers?

‘Getting Real’ is my bible to productivity. ‘The Portable Film School’ is my bible to storytelling. ‘Practicing the Power of Now’ is my bible to spirituality ‘eqi.org’ is my bible to emotional intelligence

This book isn’t, but could be the bible to freelancing. It just needs some work, but thats what second editions are for right?

Conclusion

On a scale to 1 to 5 I would rate this book a 2. Its better than the other stuff out there on freelancing but I think its too pricey for what you get (unless you got the $10 discount code). This book is better if you haven’t started freelancing.