THE VALUE OF YOUR TIME This is an incredibly important factor for Scribe clients. Like I said, our authors are high-level professionals with high-paying careers. Their time is extremely valuable, so a factor that they must consider is the opportunity cost of their time. Opportunity cost is a concept from microeconomics which says that every action has not just a direct cost to it, but also a cost in terms of the opportunity lost, and you must factor both in when calculating the total cost. Let’s stay with book publishing for an example. If you have a retail job that pays $10 an hour, then the opportunity cost of your time is $10 an hour. But if you have a career that pays you $250,000 a year, given a normal 40-hour workweek, you make $125 an hour. That is the opportunity cost of your time. This difference fundamentally changes the calculation for the true cost of publishing a book. For the sake of example, let’s say you have two options to publish your book. You can do everything related to publishing your book yourself over the course of 100 hours of work, or you can pay someone else to do it for $10,000, and spend no time working on it. For the person making $10 an hour, the choice is clear: 100 hours of work is worth $1,000 to them, which is much cheaper than paying $10,000 to someone else. They should do it themselves. For the person making $250k a year ($125/hr), they should pay $10k. For them, 100 hours of work is worth $12,500, so they actually save $2,500 by hiring someone at $10k. Opportunity cost can be tricky to calculate if you are looking to be precise, but fairly simple to ballpark. The point is not to have 332 · ThE SCriBE METhOD