“I’m not teaching the whiners anymore.” A friend of mine who also runs an online education company said this to me a couple of weeks ago when we were talking about the direction we wanted to take our respective businesses. Personally, I don’t get the kind of students you’d call whiners—that is, people who complain…
I’m on LinkedIn quite a bit because it’s a good place to talk about Club Ed. Sometimes on LI people share stories about why they want to quit their jobs. While I am well accustomed to bad boss behavior, this recent one made my jaw drop: “I’m at a funeral and my boss is texting…
Occasionally I hear from editors who’ve gotten stiffed by a new client (and sometimes by a returning client!) and want to know how to avoid it. Because my publisher clients are all reliable, the main thing I do to prevent problems is to expect full payment in advance from indie authors. Not everyone can do…
Newer freelancers sometimes come to me in a panic because a client has approached them to do work that’s outside their typical scope. Commonly this is something like the freelancer offers copyediting and developmental editing but the client wants coaching. What should they do? They don’t know how to coach, they don’t offer coaching services,…
The other day, I reached out to a company that offered a product priced for (a) nonprofit companies and (b) corporations with up to 15,000 employees. As you can imagine, (a) was cheaper than (b) by a significant degree—think $250 versus $2000. As a small business owner who uses a few subcontractors to handle things…
A question I’m commonly asked is “how do I get started in freelancing?” I never answer this question because it’s so complicated whole books have been written on the subject. But today I’m going to answer it because once I’ve done so, I’ll just start sending people the link. Here are the basic steps to…
As the owner of Club Ed, my goal isn’t just to help people learn the craft of editing but to help them learn how to run an editorial freelancing business. Running a freelance business is hard – I’ll be the first to say so. But there are some common reasons people don’t succeed, if we…