Someone from my writers group is a self-published author through a vanity publisher ie one who will publish your book for high fees.

When he’d finished his latest novel and needed it formatted, he was quoted $600 and a turnaround of two weeks.

He emails me to say he’ll pay me $300 if I can do it in a week. He suggests watching YouTube videos to teach me how to format his 110,000 word novel, which I “should be able to do in an afternoon”.

(To format a book, professionals use Adobe, which I don’t have, never used, and is a paid subscription. Formatting a book involves making the words sit nicely on a page ie having margins, all the words sitting in a block, no words alone on a line, no one sentence alone on a page etc. Improves readability and makes it look nice.)

My answer was, $1200 plus subscription fees as it’s a rush job. Funnily enough, he didn’t accept 🤷🏻‍♀️

Edit: happened a few years ago before AI was widely available.

I feel absolute sympathy about the situation w/ the dogs, but this lady can’t afford her own housing for her, her child and her dog. Yet she is trying to take responsibility for 8 animals by asking strangers to buy her a house, insisting it’s for the dogs, including very sad stories about the dogs and forgetting her dog & changing the GFM to include her own dog.

I couldn’t fit the long GFM in slides so I just added pertinent slides. The full GFM is in the link below.

https://imgur.com/a/bnAOhd6

EDIT: OOP provided an updated comment. She has an autistic daughter and she’s homeless. One’s dog’s meds are $2K/mo so that’s why she can’t take on a mortgage. Sure, I believe that she’s paying $2K/mo for the dog’s meds while she and her daughter are homeless so she would prefer to “buy the house upfront” w/ community help.

https://imgur.com/a/2KVShuj