You might remember back during the heatwave that baked L.A. at the end of August/beginning of September on a half-assed whim I risked my aged laptop and digital camera putting them up on the roof of the house under the full day’s unrelenting sun and triple digit temps and came away with a pretty cool timelapse video of the clouds building up out beyond the Verdugos that I posted up on YouTube.
Low and behold, three weeks later I get an email from a senior editor at an international educational publishing company in the UK who tells me that the author of a book and companion interactive CD called “Longman Physics For Caribbean Secondary Schools ” saw the clip and wants to include it on the disc, and if I was interested to include copyright line and fee information at my earliest convenience.
I replied indeed that I would be interests, provided a copyright line and pegged my fee at a negotiable $600 all the while my shields were up and I didn’t really expect a reply or if I did get one that it would devolve into some sort of scam.
I’m skeptical like that.
Well I got a reply pretty quick. And though the editor regretted not being able to cover my admittedly lofty asking price she said the company would be willing to pay me half and I was fine with that figuring half of something is better than all of nothing.
Last I heard from her she’s told me to hang tight and will tell me what she needs from me in order to process payment. I’m still not entirely convinced the other shoe ain’t gonna drop, but when I googled variations of the company’s name and the word “scam” the only thing that came up was a book slated to be published by the company next year on avoiding scams.
At this point I’m thinking it’s a legit situation, but I could wrong. If so, oh well. And if not, then cool: Aalittle rooftop experiment that I did on a lark and just for fun is bringing me in some entirely unexpected green and the end result will be used as an international educational tool.