For my fellow editors out there...
The Wordsmith and the Plot Dude share their secrets of success
Wordsmith Writing Coaches' team of associates has been growing slowly over the years, and I've done a better job of mentoring some of them than I have with others. I've been wanting to put together some kind of comprehensive editor training-and-encouragement program for a long time, something that would focus on business practices and building relationships, not the act of editing text.
Finally, I have done it. Or begun it, with style. But I will not do it alone!
This is a joint effort with Troy Lambert, The Plot Dude, a friend and equally successful freelance editor. Each of us have not just paid our bills but padded our retirement as freelance literary editors. Each of us has been doing this full-time for decades now, and as we compared notes, it was fascinating how different our paths had been, and yet we had independently discovered very similar strategies and tactics for success.
One glaring similarity of both our paths to profitability was how they were paved with pain, with trial and error. Both of us learned the business of freelance editing, not from other editors, but from other businesses we had run in the past, or different jobs we had held— there was nothing out there in print or in the community of the publishing industry to help us figure things out when we were getting started. Or help us overcome business crises, or reach the next level when we could see the damn thing right there above us, for that matter… and there still isn’t.
Sure, we had help, but our breakthrough insights came from friends who owned completely unrelated small businesses, or later, “authorpreneurs” in the publishing industry. We had to translate their principles and practices into our own unique freelance-editor context.
So yeah, Troy and I have done a lot of that. A lot. As the years ran into decades and the publishing world changed around us, we adapted; some tools and practices became obsolete (or simply less effective), others proved reliably evergreen. We have begun collecting and sorting and closely examining these evergreen practices and reliable principles so that we can share our decades of experience with up-and-coming editors who are still having to figure everything out via trial and error. Just like we did, too slowly and painfully, ages ago.
It’s time to change this.
We want to help you surmount every obstacle that stands in the way of your editorial success.
We’re happy to mentor you personally, but we’d like to make this more of a community thing, affordable to everyone and available even when we aren’t. (We are working editors and writing coaches, after all!) Instead of just writing a book or creating another online course, we decided to kick this off with something big1:
Build Your Editing Business
We're calling this first event BYEB (Building Your Editing Business). It is a five-day intensive training and mentoring workshop, made up of:
Daily livestream sessions beginning at 9:00AM Pacific / noon Eastern Time, followed by…
BeHuman discussion lounge and breakout rooms, and…
ad-hoc Zoom meetings as the occasion arises, plus…
emails with interesting, fun, and helpful content: might be a video, might be a collection of links, might be an article or an in-depth answer to a question that came up earlier in the BYEB.
other stuff as we come up with it, together. Hey, this is for you. We’ll adapt the experience to your2 needs.
There will be a ton of stuff in those five days that will help you find better clients, fight the feast-and-famine cycle, set prices wisely, brand & market yourself naturally, and create systems and structures that serve your sanity and your bottom line.3
As part of all this, you'll meet other interesting freelance editors from all sorts of backgrounds, and might hit it off with some of them. It's always good to know more colleagues. We have Things To Say about mentoring, co-mentoring, peer mentoring, etc.
But it isn't just for newbies, and it isn't just me and Troy answering all the questions. I've learned a lot while planning it with Troy, so there is much for seasoned practitioners to discover and discuss. We'd love to have your voice join this conversation!
The public rate for this 5-day experience is $99, and if you want to add a couple of hours of one-on-one business coaching to follow up BYEB, click on the $199 “VIP Admission” button instead. (Our normal hourly rates for this sort of coaching are significantly more than just $50 per hour. On the other hand, if we all do this crazy thing right, you’ll get free ongoing peer mentoring and will only need occasional email conversations with me and Troy… if that!)
Sign up for more info on our landing page and tell me what you think about our free lead magnet! ;-) We are always open for suggestions for free-but-super-valuable ebooks that we can share with our fellow editors.
If you’re an editor or want to become one (i.e. freelancing part-time or full-time), I hope to see you at BYEB next week!
If you’re not an editor but you know one, either personally or by reputation, pass this along to them!
Until next time, write well and publish wisely.
Well, biggish. A truly “big” event would involve travel and lodging hassles, venue complications, and much higher cost. By “big” we mean “months of preparation, focused but full-orbed content, and five entire days set aside to serve you, however many persons participate.” We hope there won’t be too many of you or we’ll have to upgrade our BeHuman license. ;-)
This is a plural second-person pronoun. If there’s widespread interest in something (like, oh, a tour of a whiskey distillery or a deep dive into typeface choices for editorial efficiency or whatever), we’ll work it into the week somehow. If you’re the only person looking for factory-sourced yellow duckies by the pallet, we can’t help you, David Hankins.
Should I have made that a bulleted list too? Maybe. Except I heard last week that an overabundance of bulleted lists is a hallmark of chatbot-authored crap, and I didn’t want you to suspect such a thing. Especially because I have actually not benefited from any AI help with this at all. Behold, for better or worse, a 100% human-crafted pitch…
I hope this event went well enough that you guys are considering hosting it again! I really wanted to attend, but didn't have the funds at the time, unfortunately. Next time, though... :)
#HatTip to the man who gives us a little rubber duckie every time we run into him... https://www.facebook.com/DavidHankins.Author