In order to attract the right kind of clients for you, you have to understand what indie authors look for in editors. Some authors want you to do all the work. (These are often nonfiction authors, but some novelists do this, too.) If you’ve identified a plot problem, they want you to rewrite the story…
Getting paid to do the work is how we stay in business. It’s very important to be prepared to handle potential client problems with payment. Payment in Full When working with indie authors, I expect full payment in advance, so I don’t have problems with people who don’t make a final payment, but not everyone…
Why should we be informed of some of the common client red flags for freelance editors? Since we want to weed out potentially troublesome clients before they make our lives miserable, or at least I do, it’s a good idea to have some weed-killing processes in place. For example, requiring a nonrefundable deposit means that…
An important decision is that of choosing a niche for freelance editors. Often newer freelancers will come to me saying they’re not sure how to get clients. They’re willing to do just about anything for just about any price to get things rolling, so where can they find someone who needs an editor? The answer…
Once you’ve gotten some experience and are ready to find clients, you need to think about identifying your potential clients. Who is your audience of potential clients? It can’t be everyone who needs an editor because there is no way to find “everyone.” But there is a way to find, say, romance novelists. You can…
I’m often asked, “For beginning editors, do you recommend doing some edits for free to get a start?” To answer, I want to distinguish between a beginning editor who has no idea what they’re doing and needs to learn and a beginning editor who knows what they’re doing but doesn’t have a lot in the…
Setting expectations from the start helps keep the project you’re doing from becoming never-ending. If you agree to do one round of editing, that does not also include three hundred hours of personal coaching while the author is trying to finish the revision. So, you have to define the project parameters clearly. If one round…
Recently, someone asked me a “How do I get my first client?” question, which is one of those questions that can take three hundred pages to answer. But I did want to provide an overview answer to this question. First, I want to distinguish between a beginning editor who has no idea what they’re doing…
A question I’m often asked is, “Authors can be confused by what kind of editing their manuscript needs. How do you handle that? Whenever an author reaches out to me, I ask them a bit about their past experience – have they published before, and if so, did they have a traditional publisher or did…
I’ve heard developmental editors talk about “sensing” that a story isn’t working, even going so far to say that “sensing” problems is their job. And sensing that something is going wrong is a useful skill for a developmental editor to have—all of us do, to one degree or another. But developmental editing isn’t about “sensing”…