Many of my valued clients come to me through my website, bookeditorhauck.com. They live in the United States, North America, Europe, and even the Asia Pacific region. One of the many questions they ask is, “How do I pay you?” There are two ways:

1. Elance.com and/or Guru.com. These are both highly reputable marketplaces for freelance services of all types. Both offer project management services including escrow services. To hire me through Elance or Guru, you need not put your book project out to open bidding; you can hire me privately for a very small fee. The escrow services offered by both Elance and Guru are very user friendly and are fully transparent. You can easily set up, fund, and even change milestones as you go along. When you release the funds to me, your payment appears in my bank account within two business days, and sometimes in one day. In the course of hundreds of jobs, I have never had a problem with either Elance or Guru. The project/escrow fees are about eight percent.

2. PayPal. This reputable service has a sterling reputation. There is no escrow, so I ask my clients to send me a token deposit, usually one hundred dollars. Then I invoice you through PayPal when the milestone or project is delivered. The process is flexible and transparent. Like Elance and Guru, PayPal transfers appear in my bank one or two business days later. The fee is about four percent.

Are there options that are unacceptable? Yes. Recently a valued client asked me to use Escrow.com. I agreed to give it a try. Escrow.com is strictly an online escrow service. They don’t do anything else. You’d think that their user interface would be better than Elance. No, not even close. I found Escrow.com to be opaque, difficult to use, and expensive. They charge a $20 “wire transfer” fee per transfer, which for anything under $500 makes it more expensive than PayPal.

Here’s a true story. My valued client released an Escrow.com milestone of $500 on a Friday. By the following Thursday, the transfer had not yet appeared in my bank account. This is despite the assertion on the Escrow.com website that wire transfers take one day. I had sent emails to Escrow.com on Tuesday and Wednesday asking for an explanation. There was no useful reply. Then on Thursday I called the Escrow.com office in California. To make a long story short, the customer service rep told met that that “funds department” had forgotten to make the transfer. They forgot!

In today’s world of instant digital funds transfer, five business days is atrocious and frankly makes one deeply suspicious of the company. And unlike Elance or PayPal, Escrow.com offers no data on pending transactions. You have no way of knowing where your money is. The Escrow.com user interface is inflexible and frankly infuriating, because to get any information about the transaction you have to contact their help service.

I won’t go so far as to call Escrow.com a scam, but I will state that it ranks dead last in my choice for escrow services. The service is shoddy at best. With all of my valued clients I will make other arrangements, and I hope that Escrow.com gets its act together.

– Thomas Hauck is a professional book editor who works with both emerging and established authors worldwide.

Thomas Hauck, Ghostwriter and Book Editor