Here are some suggestions that I’ve put together over the years for friends of friends who’ve asked how to get into freelance editing.
Get Ready
Before I became a freelance editor in 1998, I got ready:
After six months, I had enough freelance work that I gave up the part-time job and went freelance full-time. I also promised myself that I would quit freelancing after 12 months if I couldn’t meet my own goal of minimum annual income: the net pay that I’d received at the last full-time job.
What to Expect
As an editor, if you can specialize in math, law, or the sciences, anything other than the liberal arts, you can make a good living. In the liberal arts, you can make a decent living. Publishers — especially academic, legal, and medical publishers — are still in business despite the bad economy. And students will always need help with their papers and dissertations.
From 1998 to 2006, my clients for freelance work included publishing companies, government agencies, individuals, and high-tech companies. I did most of my work for them in Microsoft Word or plain text, sending files back and forth by email and occasionally shipping manuscripts by FedEx or UPS.
One thing I tell people about editing is that it’s solitary work. If being alone with your computer for six to nine hours a day doesn’t sound appealing, this may not be the line for you.
Do Your Research
Begin by looking at the Bay Area Editors’ Forum site and in particular at the definitions of kinds of editing. A developmental editor, for example, helps writers work out what they want to write and how they approach it. A copy editor (like me) works with what the author has already written and tightens up the prose, fixes punctuation, and makes queries about sections that may need rewriting. And there are other types of editors.
A good book to look at is Careers for Writers and Others Who Have a Way with Words, by Robert W. Bly. It has chapters on book publishing, newspaper work, advertising, and other fields, as well as a chapter on freelancing. Each chapter has a section of very good resources.
If you think you’d like to work at copyediting, I highly recommend a correspondence course offered through Editcetera: The ABCs of Copyediting. Teacher Amy Einsohn is careful and patient and has many years’ experience at both editing and teaching. I took this course after freelancing for several years and was amazed at how much I didn’t know. (Note to clients from before that time: I’m very sorry.) She’s also written a terrific book, The Copyeditor’s Handbook: A Guide for Book Publishing and Corporate Communications.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture Graduate School offers distance-learning courses in editing and other publishing duties, as well as in other fields.
You might also want to sign up as a subscriber to copyediting-L, a listserv for copy editors. It’s a very high-volume list (even digests come three and four times a day), so I look at it only on the Web. One fellow editor uses her email program’s message filters to save each day’s messages into a folder, to read later. (Did I mention that honing your computer skills in at least Microsoft Word and a good email program is essential? It is.) The copyediting-L list has thousands of subscribers around the world, and many are very generous with answers if you ask a question.
If you need a few more resources, just search on editing on your favorite search engine.
A great business resource is Working Solo, by Terri Lonier. I found it invaluable for figuring out all kinds of things, from whether to buy a fax machine to how to learn from more experienced people and give them something back. Another useful book is Small-Time Business Operator, by Bernard Kamaroff, CPA. A small business has quirky requirements, and these books can help you figure out how to think about them.
If you’re nervous about making the leap from a regular job to freelance work, you might like the exercises in the book Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway, by Susan Jeffers. The book was a great help to me.
Parting Thoughts
The freelance life can provide you with some freedom and a type of satisfaction that may be difficult to get anywhere else. When you do a freelance job well and get positive comments from clients, you can feel on top of the world. But when a freelance job does not turn out as well as you or, worse, the client had hoped, that is your signal to examine what went wrong and strive to do better on the next job.
I left freelance work in 2006 when this high-tech company offered me a full-time position as a technical editor. But it’s good to know that I will always have the possibility of freelance work if the company’s fortunes change or if I feel the need to do something different.
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