2 business mindset tips for new editors and proofreaders

Is your editing or proofreading business new? Here are two mindset tips that will help you frame every action you take in terms of multiple goals, and stay positive while you’re waiting for the fruits of your labour to ripen.

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Linear vs holistic thinking: Beyond the to-do list

I love a list! Recording the stuff I need to do helps me organize my thoughts. It also steers me away from procrastination and towards action.

What follows is therefore by no means a call for the abandonment of the to-do list. New starters and old hands alike can benefit from a list of actionable points.

Caution is required though. The to-do list does have the potential to encourage linear thinking, and this can be a hindrance when it comes to the business of editing and proofreading.

Linear thinking can lead us down a road of focusing too heavily on one part of our business in the belief that if we get X just right, everything else will fall into place, or that X is more important than Y and therefore must be completed in full before Y is considered.

Holistic thinking, however, recognizes that X impacts on Y, which impacts on Z, and that – together – X, Y and Z drive success.

Let’s look at what this means for our business practices.

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​A simplified example

Shami is in the process of setting up an editing business. She’s completed a comprehensive training course followed by mentoring. She’s confident in her skills and believes she’s fit for purpose. And she is – from a technical point of view.

However, there’s a potential problem. She’s been so focused on her training that she’s not spent any time considering how she’ll make herself visible to paying clients.

Training was at the top of her list – and while this is certainly no bad thing to be at the top of any freelance business owner’s list, focusing on it alone won’t bring in paying work.

Shami's business to-do list
Shami’s to-do list looks like this:

1. Training – take courses and follow up with mentoring
2. Equipment – buy relevant hardware and software
3. Networking – join an editing society, set up social media accounts, attend conferences
4. Brand awareness – choose a business name, develop a brand identity, create appropriate visuals etc.
5. Launch – register business, inform tax authorities, set up bank account, take out relevant insurance policies
6. Visibility – create website, business cards, leaflets; advertise in directories; buy a custom domain name and email address
7. Pricing – create a fee matrix for different client types
8. Templates – design letterhead, invoices, email signature, postage labels, reports, etc.
9. Schedule – create work schedule to track jobs, payments, time, etc.
10. Business resources – create business-critical resources such as terms and conditions, process documents, contract of services
11. Client acquisition – approach potential clients and pitch for work
12. Learning centre – develop additional resources that solve clients’ problems

​​Shami could do one thing at a time, and tick all those jobs off as she goes. But might she benefit from looking at her editing business in a different way?

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An alternative view: The business wheel

​What if, instead, Shami visualized her business as a wheel rather than a list?

The list and the wheel address the same issues, but the wheel helps Shami to visualize her business holistically; it shows her the interconnectedness of the various elements.

Let’s consider her training in relation to other aspects of business development.

Training and visibility

• Training provides her with skills. But it’s also a valuable message that she could use in her promotion materials to certain types of clients (publishers, for example) and that will make her more interesting to them.

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Training and the learning centre

• Shami should certainly include her qualifications on her website, but an even more effective way to show rather than tell her knowledge is to use what she’s learned via her training to create content that solves problems for her potential clients.
• Solution-based webpages – ones that could only have been written by someone who’s made time for professional training – have powerful SEO benefits that will enhance her visibility. She can also expand her learning centre with this content.

Training and client acquisition

• Her training programme has also instilled in her a desire to provide editing work of the highest quality, and these high standards mean those new clients who discover her will be more likely to retain her and recommend her.
• In the longer term, this means a more consistent work flow and income stream that will give her greater choice as to the work she accepts and the prices she can charge.
• Training is therefore assisting her with client acquisition and retention.

Training and membership upgrades

• Training contributes heavily towards Shami’s application for a higher-level tier of membership in her national editorial society.
• This membership tier will provide her with the right to take an entry in its online directory. She can link her new website to this directory.
• That helps her with professional credibility, brand awareness and visibility.

Training and credibility

• The training organization she worked with might be interested in her contributing to their blog. She could share her experiences of starting her business.
• This will add to her professional credibility, and provide her with an opportunity to create inbound and outbound links between her website and the training organization’s website.
• That helps her with professional credibility, brand awareness and visibility. If she repurposes the blog content as a booklet, she can add it to the bank of content in her learning centre.

​Training and network-building

• The organization has a large following on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook. It will share her guest article with its followers. Some of them will link with Shami, thus expanding her professional community.
• That ticks her training, brand awareness, networking and visibility boxes.

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Other ways to use the business-wheel mindset

I could go on, but you get the point. Training isn’t something you do before marketing. Rather, it’s connected to marketing. They are but two spokes on a wheel, and they link the hub (the business) to the rim (clients and colleagues).

Training gives substance to the marketing message. Marketing generates visibility and, therefore, new clients. New clients become regular clients because of the standards embedded by training. And up and down the spokes and round the rim we go.
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We might carry out a similar exercise when considering the links between pricing, an accounting schedule and stationery; or resource creation and business promotion; or brand awareness, accounting and stationery.

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Taking the long view

Developing a successful editing business doesn’t happen overnight. No matter how good our skills, how creative our marketing, how professional our practice, it takes time.
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• Time to rank in the search engines
• Time to become so discoverable that we’re never without work offers
• Time to build a wait-list
• Time to fill that wait-list with people who trust our skills and judgment, return to us time and again, and pay our price

And, even then, we can’t sit on our heels because our industry, broad as it is, is always changing.

• The technical skills our clients wanted five years ago might not be what they want next year
• The fees our clients were paying five years ago may not be what they’re paying this year (we might even be worse off in real terms).
• The types of clients hiring us five years ago might have become more varied (consider the expansion of the self-publishing market over the years).
• The software or hardware we used five years ago might no longer be fit for the purpose or compatible with what our current potential clients are using and expect us to use.
• Two companies we worked for five years ago might merge tomorrow; or one might acquire the another. This could reduce the number of editorial freelancers hired, and we could end up on the cut list.
• The publisher we work with directly today might outsource its proofreading and editing to a packager in two years’ time. That could affect the rate we’re paid and the security of our freelancing relationship.

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Moving from entitlement to investment

This means that, as business owners, we need to be keeping our ear to the ground so that change is something we embrace, not resent, and something we view as providing opportunity, not marginalization.

When we own our own businesses, we don’t have the luxury of spending time on blaming a lack of success on others who are now doing things in ways that don’t suit us.

When we own our own businesses, we’re not entitled to be paid X by a publisher whose profit margins are being squeezed its own customers. Nor are we entitled to work on paper because that’s the way we prefer it. For example, most independent authors want us to work in Word or on PDF.

Instead, we have to invest in what makes us interesting and discoverable to those we want to work for and who will pay us what we want/need to earn if our businesses are to be profitable.

Whether that means acquiring new skills, learning how to use new tools, changing the way we do our tax returns, targeting new client types, replacing old equipment, or testing and evaluating new and innovative marketing activities that increase customer engagement, the responsibility lies with us, and us alone.

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Time and hard work are part of the deal

We might not see the fruits of our labour for months. None of us can say how long it will take for an individual’s marketing strategy to put them on pages 1–3 of Google. And that’s okay. It’s normal for it not to happen overnight.

None of us can predict whether a favourite publisher client will merge with another press and freeze its freelance rates.

None of us can know whether the skill we learned in 2008 will still be relevant in 2025. When I first started proofreading back in 2006, I was working almost exclusively on paper. At the time of writing in 2020, I edit exclusively in Word.

What we can be sure of is that there are no shortcuts – building an editorial business takes time, effort, and not a little courage because there will be times when we’re pushed out of our comfort zone.

Taking the short view leads to disappointment, frustration and stagnancy:

• Disappointment that the creation of a website alone didn’t generate fifty new leads a month
• Frustration because the client we’ve worked for solidly for six years is now squeezing 200 additional words on a page but still paying us for the same page rate
• Stagnancy because we didn’t keep up to date with new developments and are no longer able to compete with colleagues who are providing a service that we consider unusual but that they consider run-of-the-mill

Embracing that longer timeframe means we’re less likely to feel deflated when our hard work doesn’t give us immediate results. Instead we could do the following:
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• Commit to tracking our webpage metrics and thinking of ways to more ideal clients to our site
• Work regularly on finding new clients so we feel comfortable with ditching the word-count squeezer
• Make technical skills development a part of normal business practice

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Summing up

If you’re the type of person who’s capable of looking at a list without feeling compelled to move through it only from top to bottom, go for it. List away!

However, if you think that your to-do list is leading you into a mode of thinking that ignores the connections between the various aspects of running your business, try redrawing it as a wheel.

It may be just the ticket to seeing your editing or proofreading business in a whole new interconnected light – and focusing your energy accordingly.

And it's okay to set a realistic time frame for getting your editorial business to where you want it to be. The hard work we put in at the beginning doesn’t necessarily generate immediate results. Taking the long view means we give our efforts space to breathe.

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About Louise Harnby

Louise Harnby is a line editor, copyeditor and proofreader who specializes in working with crime, mystery, suspense and thriller writers.

She is an Advanced Professional Member of the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading (CIEP) and co-hosts The Editing Podcast.

• Get in touch: Louise Harnby | Crime Fiction & Thriller Editor
• Connect: X @LouiseHarnby, Facebook and LinkedIn
• Learn: Books and courses
• Discover: Resources for authors and editors

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