Undress for Success: The Naked Truth about Making Money at Home [Hardcover]

Kate Lister (Author), Tom Harnish (Author), Jack M. Nilles (Foreword)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0470383321 | ISBN-13: 978-0470383322 | Publication Date: March 23, 2009 | Edition: 1

This book is for the bummed out, burned out, and stressed out professional, stay-at-home parent, or retiring boomer who dreams of a home-based job or business, but doesn’t know how to make that dream a reality.

Unlike the many "change-your-life" books that promise much and deliver little—Undress4Success provides expert, practical advice about: 1) what home-based jobs are available, what talents they require, what they pay, who’s hiring, and how to land one; 2) how to use the Web to search for work-at-home jobs and business opportunities without being scammed; 3) how to turn professional talents into a freelance business; and 4) how to convince an employer to adopt a telecommuting program.

Based on interviews with dozens of employers, home-based employees, successful freelancers, and leading telework researchers, this book shows readers the way home.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"...this book will provide useful advice for working at home--avoiding the online scams being peddled..." --Time Magazine, April 2, 2009

Review

"Lister and Harnish are careful to point out that working from home is not for everyone. They interviewed scores of folks who work at home, talking about the challenges they face and how they cope with them. My favorite was easily the approach one programmer named Madison takes to make sure her family knows when she's on the job and has to focus on her work: "To make sure everyone knows when she isn't available, she wears a tiara when she's `at work.'"

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Wiley; 1 edition (March 23, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0470383321
• ISBN-13: 978-0470383322
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.3 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #526,816 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

38 of 40 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A great book if you want to Work From Home!, April 16, 2009

By 

New Guy (Somewhere in the swamps of Jersey) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Undress for Success: The Naked Truth about Making Money at Home (Hardcover)

Finally a work at home book that's written for the 21st century. So much of the other stuff that's out there is pure junk. This book does as the title suggests, tells the truth.

The three sections of the book deal with home jobs, home businesses, and freelancing (which is really a home business but the authors make it a separate section because in it they cover stuff that only pertains to freelancers like which job boards to use when looking for work, how to document your freelance relationships, how to price your services, etc.).

They cover all kinds of stuff I've never seen in another book like what employers hire home-based staff, what they pay, and how to get a job with them. The give specific instructions for how to convince your boss to let you work from home (and offer other special book-buyer-only samples on their web site at http://undress4.success.com). They lay out what ought to be in a freelance contract and how to make sure you get paid for your work. And they offer a neat way of coming up with web-based business ideas and then show you how to go about figuring out if they make sense.

I was so sick of being taken by work at home scams (which they cover in depth in the book) that I was reluctant to buy yet another book about working from home. So I read who some of the people were that gave jacket endorsements and then I went to their web site and saw that they've been quoted in all kind of legit places like the Harvard Business Review, USA Today, Wall Street Journal and lots of other. I concluded that these guys are the real deal and now, having read the book, I can say I was right.

22 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Some thoughts regarding "E-work Options." Not bad, but could have been better., June 3, 2009

By 

Jeff Lippincott "JLIPPIN" (Princeton, NJ USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Undress for Success: The Naked Truth about Making Money at Home (Hardcover)

I liked this book. The title could have been "E-work Options" and I think I would have liked the title better if it had been named as such. Of the 35 chapters in this book 7 of them had the term "e-work" included in their titles. I thought the book was well-written. I thought it could have been organized a bit better - a book with 35 chapters simply cannot be well-organized. It is split into 6 parts, but not well. Parts 5 and 6 only have 1 chapter each. And Part 2 had many chapters.

As I read the book I felt like I was reading a high school research paper written by an honors junior or maybe a senior. I won't say the book is comprehensive, but it does cover a lot of ground. It not only covers working from home as someone else's employee, but also covers self-employment from home, too. It probably would have been a better book if it had limited its scope to either W-2 or self-employment, but not both.

Although in this Internet Age that we live in it is possible to work from home as someone's employee, in reality most employers don't trust letting their workers work at home. And when they do it is usually on an hourly basis where work productivity is fairly easy to monitor. I'm not a fan of virtual assistants (VA). The work those people do is usually worth so much more than what they are paid to do. I always recommend to my SCORE clients to avoid being a VA and instead be an online consultant of some kind. Chapter 14 regarding teaching & tutoring was much more up my alley, but I think the authors were kind of shortsighted. They should have included consulting and coaching in this chapter, too. And Chapter 16 regarding writers was shortsighted, too. Writing as a freelancer is OK. But what about being an infopreneur? Selling information is where it is at today. And creating ebooks and self-publishing is inexpensive and easy now.

So this book has a lot of good content. It could have been better. It could have been made into two books easily. It's definitely worth a read. It's just not a masterpiece. 4 stars!

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars If you want to be a successful teleworker, read this now!, April 23, 2009

By 

Candice P. Taylor "http://MugShots.ExposureMa... (Aledo, Texas) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Undress for Success: The Naked Truth about Making Money at Home (Hardcover)

Delivers even more than expected! In addition to detailed descriptions of actual telework jobs that are interesting and appealing (as opposed to all those MindlessTypingForLittlePay.com types of `jobs' out there), the authors describe how best to format a resume using the most useful keywords so that webcrawlers will be more likely to find it. By adding keywords into the HTML on my small business' website and listing myself on a single social networking site, I was able to move from non-existent on Google's search to items #2 and #3 on page 1 in less than one week! I can't wait to list myself on the freelance sites, so I can see what happens! Thanks so much for all the usable info!!