INTRODUCTION

If you are considering setting up your own editorial freelance business, this guide is for you. It has been written for those with no publishing background or prior editorial experience – the completely new entrant to the field.

While there are many distinct functions to editorial freelancing – project management, indexing, rewriting, fact checking, language localization, translation, copywriting, editing and proofreading – for simplicity, this guide refers primarily to editing and proofreading, since they are two of the most common points of entry.

Creating a business plan before you do anything else will help you to make the right decisions. Too often I receive cries for help from people saying they’ve ‘gone freelance’ but desperately need to work out how to acquire clients, or they’re wondering about what training is necessary to get them started. I firmly believe that these issues (and others) need to be addressed before you embark on your business, not after. If you’re not convinced, let me share the words of one of the case study freelancers featured in Chapter 10: ‘If I did it all over again, I’d do all the business planning and courses before … I was doing my editorial training, not after. I think this would have given me more confidence in the beginning and prepared me for the reality.’

This guide offers one way of thinking about the steps you need to take to build your editorial freelance business. Your business plan may look very different and that’s absolutely fine; after all, people order their thoughts and ideas in different ways. The point, though, is to ask the necessary questions at the beginning, to focus your thoughts strategically, and to think about substantive ways in which you will get your business off the ground. There is too much competition out there to risk not doing so.

Business owner first, freelancer second

It’s difficult to imagine a bank, venture capitalist or other financier agreeing to support a business start-up if there’s no business plan. The information in the plan demonstrates that the business owner has researched their market, is qualified to offer the service(s) they’re selling, has developed a set of realistic financial projections, and understands what tools and skills will be required. This information gives the financier confidence that the business owner knows what they are doing before any capital is invested. It helps them assess risk.

The good news is that setting up an editorial business is unlikely to require external assistance – you will be your own financier. This doesn’t mean the approach should be any different, though. Instead, you need to have confidence in you; you need to do your own risk assessment.

Think about the business professionals you have contact with: the electrician, the plumber, the window cleaner. Perhaps you know someone who owns a publishing company, a shop, a mobile hairdressing business, or offers bookkeeping and accountancy services. Like you, they have decided to work for themselves. But do any of them refer to themselves as freelancers? To my knowledge, they don’t. Creating a business plan puts your head in the space of business owner first and freelancer second.

Editorial freelancing and beyond

There’s nothing wrong with the term ‘freelance’ as long as you are clear about what level of business acumen is required to run an editorial freelancing company, even if you are the only employee. It’s not just an ability to make sound judgements and take the right decisions, but also about embedding a business culture in your way of thinking. If you don’t think of yourself as a professional business owner first and foremost, you could be in danger of not acting like one. And if you don’t act like one, why would anyone else think to treat you as one?

Being an editorial business owner is more than just being a proofreader or copy-editor. Business owners take care of their own accounts; we have a solid understanding of the market in which we are competing and the methods we are going to use to get noticed in order to generate business leads and paid work; we do our own financial forecasting; we organize all of our training and continued professional development (CPD) to keep our skills up to date; and we take responsibility for our tax and National Insurance liabilities to ensure legal, healthcare and pension provisions are met.

In short, we are the owners, marketing directors, sales managers, web development officers, training coordinators, distribution managers, IT executives and financial controllers. And after all of that’s sorted out, we do some proofreading, copy-editing, project managing or indexing, too!

Writing a business plan is therefore the way in which we prepare ourselves for the many hats we have to wear.

Structure of the guide

This guide is structured as follows:

~ what a business plan is and why you should create one;

~ the many worlds of editorial freelancing;

~ getting yourself ready for market with training;

~ client focus;

~ getting experience;

~ financial assessment;

~ getting noticed – promotion;

~ networking;

~ the practicalities (hardware, software and tools for the job); and

~ case studies: three relatively recent entrants to the field share their editorial business-building stories.

Each chapter begins with a task and a learning goal. These aim to focus your attention on the actions you need to take and the desired outcome. Additional features include:

Practitioner Focus: real-world examples that enable you to see how practising editorial freelancers have applied the learning goal(s) discussed.

Top Tips: useful ideas, resources and tools for you to consider when planning your business.

Key Points: provided at the end of each chapter to highlight core messages for you to consider at planning stage.

Resources: lists of organizations, social media networks, tools, books, online materials and training providers.

Meet the practitioners

In addition to sharing my own experiences, I’ve also drawn on those of some of my editorial friends/colleagues for the material in the Practitioner Focus boxes. Between us we have a range of educational and career backgrounds, and we specialize in a number of different client types and subject/genre specialisms.

Top left to right: Kate Haigh. Louise Harnby and Liz Jones; centre right: Nick Jones; bottom left to right: Janet MacMillan, Anna Sharman and Marcus Trower.

Kate Haigh is the owner of Kateproof. With previous in-house experience managing production (including copy-editing and proofreading) of magazines, she started her freelance business specializing in proofreading for corporate clients, students and academics, though now works for a variety of publishers as well.

Louise Harnby is the owner of Louise Harnby | Proofreader. She specializes in proofreading social science and humanities books for academic presses, and fiction and commercial non-fiction for trade publishers. Formerly a senior marketing manager at SAGE Publications, she has over twenty years’ experience of working in the publishing industry.

Liz Jones owns Liz Jones Editorial Solutions. She has worked as an editor since 1998, and has been freelance since 2008, carrying out all kinds of editorial tasks from project management to proofreading. She specializes in non-fiction trade and educational publishing, with an emphasis on design-led titles, and also works for non-publishers.

Nick Jones owns Full Proof. He started out as an in-house proofreader for Yell in 2004 and built his own freelance business up in his spare time. He left Yell in 2010 to concentrate on Full Proof. He specializes in proofreading for academic and corporate clients. He also provides copywriting services to businesses.

Janet MacMillan is the owner of Janet MacMillan Wordsmith | Editor | Proofreader | Researcher. Having been a practising lawyer for twenty years she offers specialist legal editing services for publishers, law firms and academics. In addition, she specializes in editing and proofreading social sciences, humanities and business books, articles and conference papers for academic presses, researchers, NGOs and think tanks.

Anna Sharman owns Anna Sharman Editorial Services. She specializes in biomedical science journal papers, offering editing, proofreading and editorial consultancy for publishers and independent researchers. Following a PhD and postdoctoral research in developmental/evolutionary biology, she was a journal editor on three different journals before setting up her own business.

Marcus Trower is the owner of Marcus Trower Editorial. He specializes in editing genre fiction for independent authors and publishers, including 47North and Thomas & Mercer. Formerly he was a journalist, writing and sub-editing for magazines and national press.