5 ways to improve the way you run your editing and proofreading business

Here are 5 things you can do in the year ahead to put a shine on the way you run your editing and proofreading business,

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​1. Be the editor who says, ‘It’s down to me’

Editors who work in-house edit. As for the other stuff, someone else does that for them – marketing, accounting, branding, heating the building, providing a good-quality office chair ... all of it.

Employee editors can say, ‘It’s not my job.’ Independent editors can’t. Most indie editors don’t have assistants, in-house accountants, IT managers, marketing departments or ready-made brand strategies. 

All of those things are down to us. If we don’t make them part of our job, we risk not being able to put food on the table, not paying our bills, breaching our legal responsibilities, working in an environment that’s physically unfit for purpose and, worst of all, having no clients. And we have to buy our own chairs.

Chairs aside, having no clients means we’re not independent business owners. It means we’re unemployed.

There are bits of my job I’d rather not do. You’re probably the same. I happen to love the marketing side of things but I have friends who loathe it. One of my editor pals gets a kick from using gadgets and spreadsheets that help her manage her invoicing; I find it a bore. That’s fine – we’re different. However, we both must find clients and track our financials, whether we struggle with these tasks or relish the challenge.

Being an editor is not enough. Being an editor is the work we do. Everything else is the work we do to get the work we do and operate in a professional manner.
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Editing is only one part of being an editorial business owner. For our businesses to thrive, we must do all the parts. We can’t afford to say, ‘But I don’t like marketing’, ‘I’m not good with spreadsheets’, ‘I’m not interested in the business end of things’, or ‘I don’t have time to learn how to do those things’, because we’re not employees.

​We have to say, ‘It’s down to me.’

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​2. Make changes when necessary

No one gets it perfect right from the get-go. Running a business is about testing and tracking so that we discover what works and what doesn’t. If things aren’t going as we hoped, we need to be ready to invest in change.

• If our schedules have lots of gaps in them, our marketing needs work.
• If we’re not attracting the clients we want to work with, our branding needs attention.
• If we’re not earning enough to make ends meet, we need to find new clients or tweak our fee structure.
• If we’re attracting clients who let us down, we need to tweak our contracts and terms.
• If our scheduling is muddled, our time management needs fixing.

​Easy to say, harder to do, I know. But change we must. The responsibility lies with us.

Example
All businesses change. For example, a publisher might outsource production to another country, squeeze more words on a page, ask freelancers to do more for the same money, or freeze its project fees, all of which have an impact on profitability for the independent editor working for that publisher.

The editor could say that the negative impact on the health of their business is the publisher’s fault, that it's not fair, that it's exploitative. But blaming publishers for taking action to make themselves profitable is not a solution.

‘And it will reduce the quality,’ some editors say. Maybe not, maybe so. That’s not our problem. It’s theirs. They’re business owners and so are we. All of us do what we need to do to make our enterprises successful.
 
If we don’t like the way a client's operating, we should take positive action to find a replacement. It's not the client's job to make another business owner's enterprise successful.

​It can be tempting to use online spaces – Facebook groups, for example – to vent our complaints. However, that’s a waste of precious time that we could be using to locate our new client.

​Action for change trumps blame every time.

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​3. Don't measure your own success against other people’s raw data

Track your own data and use it to assess the health of your editing business. Your colleagues’ metrics don’t matter because those relate to their businesses, not yours.

And there’s another problem – it’s often like comparing apples and oranges. Here are two examples:

• The data picked up by Google Analytics varies from website host to host. That means any comparison of my Weebly site with a colleague’s Wordpress or Wix site is pretty much meaningless.
• Even when you look at your own data, you’ll get different figures depending on the analytics program you’re using. I access analytics data using StatCounter, Google Analytics and Weebly. None of the numbers are the same, and I don't mean a little bit not the same; I mean a lot not the same. It’s not that two of those programs are wrong but that all three are recording different things.

Does that mean you shouldn’t look at analytics? Not at all. But instead of looking at just the raw numbers, think about longer-term patterns in the data and outcomes (bookings/sales).

​How does this financial quarter compare with the previous one, or this year with the previous one? Have you made changes either on your website or elsewhere that might have influenced your analytics?

Example 1
Pattern: 

• Your analytics program tells you the page views on your site have risen from 5,000 per year 2 years ago to 80,000 in the current year. The data reveals that this is down to your blogging. 

Longer-term business outcomes:

• The more important question is whether there’s a correlation between your blog-driven traffic and the number of requests to quote from clients who are offering the kind of work you want to do and are prepared to pay your price.
• That you've increased your traffic to 80,000 in 2 years is irrelevant if you're still not attracting enough paying work from ideal clients.​
• If a blog is generating traffic but that isn't converting into sales, assess whether your content's hitting the mark. In other words, are you solving the right problems?​

​Example 2
Pattern:

• You regularly post on LinkedIn. You’ve built a large number of connections and get strong engagement with your posts. Your analytics data tells you that LI has driven more traffic to your site than any other social media platform in the past 12 months.

Longer-term business outcomes:

• The more important question is whether you can discern a corresponding increase in work leads and sales (even indirectly) and other opportunities that drive your business forward.
• Social media platforms are fantastic content distribution and networking platforms. Still, when it comes to business, we need to use them with purposeful goals in mind. 

Example 3
Pattern:

• You’ve noticed a 20% decrease in views of your contact page in the past three months. You’ve made some big changes to your website this quarter as part of a branding exercise and worry they’ve had a negative effect.​

Longer-term business outcomes:

• The important question to ask is how that corresponds with the number of people asking for quotes, and the number of confirmed bookings.
• Visiting a contact page and getting in contact are two completely different things. If you’re still receiving the same number of requests to quote as in the previous quarter, perhaps you’re appealing to a more targeted client base and are achieving a higher visit:click conversion ratio.
• Even if you’re receiving fewer requests to quote, but more of those have turned into confirmed bookings, that’s a positive outcome, and one to be celebrated, not a negative one! It shows that your branding is working.​

Focus on the goal
​We must keep our attention on the end goal. Visitors, page views, shares, likes, follows, comments, connections etc. are only starting-point visibility indicators.

To be meaningful, they need to be considered over time and evaluated within the context of, and measured against, business goals: e.g. requests to quote, confirmed bookings, quality of clients, income, and the length of your wait-list. Otherwise, they’re nothing more than vanity metrics.

As for other people’s raw stats, they tell you nothing about your own business’s needs and goals. Don't spend valuable time worrying about them.

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​4. Track, plan and schedule

Like all sole traders, independent editors have to do everything themselves, unless they contract out services to, say, a VA, a marketer or an accountant, any of which will incur costs.

We can find ourselves being asked to carry out impossible feats of juggling – too many activities and not enough time to do what must be done. The solution could lie in improved scheduling:

1. Track social media/discussion group time
Track how much time you spend on social media or in discussion forums during work hours, and check that all of it is relevant to your business. Be strict with your social engagement – schedule it, and stick to that plan. You’ll save time and be more productive.

EXAMPLES

• The hive mind is wonderful but there is such a thing as too many cooks in the kitchen. If you’re stuck on an editing conundrum, might you instead raise a query with the client and move on rather than spending half an hour on Facebook garnering opinion from several hundred editors?
• If a job is struggling to hold your attention, could you switch away and do something else for your business such as marketing or invoicing rather than letting off steam on X?
• If you don’t have enough work, how about doing things to find work rather than telling 10,000 colleagues online that you’re having a rough time? Sympathy is not a solution, lovely though it is.

2. Schedule all tasks
Schedule all the stuff you need to do, not just editing. Invoicing, marketing, replying to requests to quote, and dealing with queries can cause problems when they’re not scheduled. If you have 7 hours a day available for work, allot some of that time to stuff that enables you to run your business.

​That might mean you only have 5 hours a day available for editing, not 7, which means you’ll need to assign a longer period of time to complete each project. If you need to shift things around, fine – there’s a big difference between drinking your tea at a different time and forgetting to switch the kettle on.

EXAMPLE
When Denise Cowle and I decided to set up The Editing Podcast, we knew the pre-launch work would have to be squeezed into our already busy business and personal schedules. This was a new venture, one that would run on top of our existing business activities, not instead of them.

​It would have been easy for either of us to say, ‘I don’t have time – let’s do it in the next couple of weeks. I’ll call you when I’m free.’ We knew this would be a disaster, that it would lead to procrastination and delay.

Instead, we scheduled our planning, content-creation and recording sessions months in advance. Work and family commitments intruded, of course, but changes were accommodated with immediate rescheduling.

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​5. Create templates and information resources

Templates make life easier and help editors work faster. They can be customized, of course, but the underlying framework is in place, meaning we can focus on tweaking the nitty-gritty so that what we’re creating is specific to the recipient. The following all lend themselves to templating:

• Style sheets
• Editorial reports
• Replies to requests for information
• Invoices

When we find ourselves explaining the same problem to different clients, it’s time to create a resource that we can use indefinitely.

For example, if you’re a developmental editor you might have written numerous reports and queries in which you describe the fundamentals of narrative point of view. Instead of repeating yourself, create a document that outlines the principles in detail.

The initial work will take you time, but once done you can use it over and over.
You can also place that information on your website and use it as a promotional tool. 

Example 
I’m a specialist sentence-level fiction editor. Many of my clients are first-time authors who struggle to punctuate dialogue, use apostrophes correctly, and render thoughts consistently in their writing.

When I’m creating the handover editorial report, I don’t include long explanations about why and how I fixed these problems. Instead, I alert clients to the issues in brief and link to the relevant resources on my website.
 
I’ve shaved hours off my report-writing time and repurposed the resources for business promotion.

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​Summing up

If you’re looking for ways to make your business life run more smoothly in the next 12 months, perhaps some or all of these 5 tips will help you to save time, increase productivity, and take action.
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There are some free templates and other resources in the Further Reading section below. Help yourself.

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​Further reading

• How to become a better editor while secretly promoting your business (blog post)
• How to increase your productivity ... the AIR way (blog post)
• How to minimize cancellations and non-payment for editing and proofreading services (blog post)
• Invoicing: Excel template (free: scroll through the resource gallery)
• Overcoming marketing paralysis: How to turn overwhelm into action (blog post)
• Free scheduling template
• Free style sheet template
• Marketing and branding courses and books for editors

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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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