Editors marketing their services often hear a lot of guidance about getting clients, some of it . . . well, let’s call it naïve. Just the other day I came across a LinkedIn post on how your first year in business you should give everything away for free and only after that should you start…
Since we want to weed out potentially troublesome clients before they make our lives miserable, it’s a good idea to have some weed-killing processes in place. For example, requiring a nonrefundable deposit means that a client is more committed to the edit (and paying the final invoice) than if you don’t require any upfront investment….
The other day in a writers’ group I belong to we had a conversation about the novels we’re reading now. And the most common description of what the group members were reading included the word slog: “I’m slogging through TITLE.” “I’m reading TITLE but it’s a slog.” “I’ve slogged through fifty pages of TITLE; does it…
To get better at developmental editing you have to do developmental editing! But it’s not always easy to figure out how to go about that. Previously I’ve talked about being a beta reader as a way to gain practice as a DE. And, the self-paced Naked Editing class allows you to follow along as an…
Here are my top tips for an effective manuscript assessment without having to read the entire manuscript to provide a quote. Use these questions to help you assess a manuscript in order to provide an editing quote—without having to read the entire manuscript first. In general, a developmental editor may be able to edit five-to-ten…
In my previous post on setting work priorities, I closed with the point that once you know what’s important, the rest is just getting it done. Of course it’s not that simple. If it were, editors wouldn’t be asking me how to juggle everything. Defining the Tasks The first thing to remember is that there…
