Riptide is hiring paid sensitivity readers. Our SRs will read manuscripts with an eye toward any potentially inaccurate, inauthentic, insulting, misrepresentative, harmful, or *-ist themes, phrases, or actions in the text.
Sensitivity
readers must be a part of the culture(s) or identity/identities they are
reading for. Beyond this and the ability to express your thoughts via
the written word, there are no requirements or prerequisites. You can be living anywhere in the world, and will work from home.
This is an entry-level position with
no developmental editing, line editing, copyediting, or proofreading
involved and thus no experience required in those areas.
Pay is $1.50 per 1000 words. The average SR is able to read and comment as necessary on about 10,000 words per hour, and thus makes about $15 an hour. We recognize that this is not always the case, especially for some neurodivergent or visually impaired readers, so when we hire SRs with those backgrounds, we can individually discuss different methods of calculating pay.
We need readers in all areas of racial, ethnic, and religious diversity, sexual and gender orientation, and mental and physical illnesses and disabilities. However, at the moment, we have specific needs for sensitivity readers for manuscripts that depict the following cultures and/or identities and/or disabilities:
- HIV positive status
- Liver transplant patient
- Little person
- Aboriginal Australian
Please feel free to apply even if you don’t fulfill these specific needs, as our needs are ever-changing. But these specific needs are for manuscripts in production and are our highest priority.
Please send:
- CV
with education and pertinent editorial experience, if any
(we’re
actively seeking to diversify our editing staff and turn to our SR
readers first when hiring in that department, but editing experience is not necessary to become an SR, so don’t worry too much about this part!)
- Statement about all areas of experience and/or identity
- Send to: sarah.lyons@riptidepublishing.com
- Subject Heading: Sensitivity Reader Application
Reblogging because we forgot to mention time commitment. The average manuscript runs about 70,000 words, which means it will take the average SR about 7 hours to complete. (Of course, some mss are much longer or much shorter, but all will fall within the 20,000 to 120,000 word range.) There is no minimum number of manuscripts you need to be available for to apply.
Some SRs may only fit our needs for one manuscript. Some SRs we use over and over again, as their lived experiences match a number of mss we publish each year. How much work we offer you is heavily dependent on the nature of the mss in our pipeline, but how much work you accept is entirely up to you. Turning down a manuscript is totally okay–if you fit the needs of a future ms, we’ll still ask you again :)
So if you know you don’t have a lot of time, but think you might like to work on even just a single manuscript at some point in the future, please go ahead and apply. If you think you’ll want to work on a lot of mss, please definitely apply, but know that this will not be anywhere near steady work (six to eight mss a year is about the maximum we’ve experienced for any one reader so far, and many readers won’t get any work at all for long blocks of time if there are no mss in our pipeline that fit their experiences). Most of our SRs are students or work full time jobs, and do their reads on a free day or evening or weekend. So even if free time is tight and sporadic for you, if you think you’d be interested in this work when you do have free time, write in and tell us about yourself!
We’re still looking for folks!