Many journalists, academics, writers and ghost writers use professional transcribers like me to type up their tapes of interviews into Word documents. A professional transcriber can usually type faster than average, and by outsourcing to someone like me the writer can save their own time (typically it takes me 3 hours to transcribe 1 hour of tape; it often takes non-professional typists a lot longer).

If you are working with a transcriber, here are some top tips to make that transcriber happy. Because you want to keep your transcriber happy, right?

1. Book in advance

If your transcriber is good, they probably get booked up in advance. You’re likely not to be their only customer and they have to juggle their workload. For example, in the autumn of 2018 I was working on one academic project with 50 x 1 hour interviews, two book projects with ghost writers, and various…