FOR EDITORS, PROOFREADERS AND WRITERS

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.

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.

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?

​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.

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.
​
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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Audio content has never been more popular. Publishers recognize this; so do independent authors. Here’s a list of tips and tools for freelance editors and proofreaders who’d like to introduce audio content into their business workflow and amplify their editorial voices – literally!

Here are my top 5 reasons why I think audio is a superb tool for the editor or proofreader who wants to use audio as a marketing and business tool.

1. Audio takes up less bandwidth than video. It’s therefore more stable during recording and less likely to buffer during playback.
2. Audio files are smaller than video. When hosted natively, they’re less likely to slow down our websites.
3. Our voices are unique brand identifiers that give listeners a sense of who we are beyond the words we write and edit.
4. Not everyone can see. Audio is therefore another accessibility tool that allows us to communicate with a diverse audience.
5. No one will know if we’re creating it in our pyjamas. That makes it a less intimidating option for editors who want to make a personal connection but who fear video.

Contrary to what a lot of people think, you don't need a lot of expensive and difficult-to-use kit. Assuming you already have a computer, here's what you'll need to get hold of.

1. Headset (mic and headphones). Something along the lines of Microsoft’s LifeChat series will likely suffice. I use the 6000, which retails for around $70.
2. Courage. This is free though it can be hard to summon for the beginner!

Recording audio content needn't cost you a single penny. Here are three resources you can use. You might even have two of them already.

1. Audacity: Free open-source recording and editing software.
2. Zoom: Free online audio-conferencing platform.
3. Skype: Free ​online audio-conferencing platform.

Here are three hosting options to consider. There's something for everyone – whether you want to keep your costs down while you experiment or you want to go full on in to audio content creation.

1. Your website: Either upload the audio files (native hosting) or embed the source code from another platform.
2. Specialist audio distribution platform: Paid options include Libsyn and Captivate. These are ideal for editors who are committed to regular broadcasting. SoundCloud offers three free hours of audio content.
3. YouTube: Upload to your existing channel.

One of the reasons why I love audio is that it's versatile. If marketing makes you nervous, think of how you might use your voice as a business or educational tool. Below are six things you could try.

1. To share knowledge: Editors who solve clients’ problems get attention and build trust. We can use audio to answer the questions they’re asking, just as we do in our blogs. We can even repurpose existing blog content in audio form.
2. To welcome: Audio allows us to introduce ourselves to our website visitors using our unique voices — just like we’d do if we met someone on the street. It’s a personal and engaging way to say hello.
3. To educate: What editors do is sometimes misunderstood and undervalued. We can use audio to explain what we do and how it will help potential clients, thereby raising the profile of the profession.
4. To consolidate: A client who’s been staring at a screen all day might enjoy hearing our voice while we narrate an editorial report or critique.
5. To promote: We can make our editorial businesses more visible by sharing our audio content on social media. As with GIFs and videos, it’s something a little different that gets us noticed.
6. To assist: Do people stumble over how to pronounce your name? In July 2020, LinkedIn solved this problem with a new feature that allows users to upload short audio clips via its Android and iOS apps.

Here are five ideas to help you add a cherry on your audio cake! None of them will cost you a bean!

1. Use images: If you’re hosting the audio content on your website, link the file to an image that includes a headline explaining the nature of the content. Canva is your friend.
2. Include a call to action: Website visitors are more likely to listen if you tell them to.
3. Add music: Incompetech, for example, provides free snippets from a range of genres under creative commons licences. Just remember to credit.
4. Include a transcript: even though audio is compelling, sometimes people want to read.
5. Create video from audio: Use an app like Headliner to create audiograms that are animated with wave forms. Audiograms make your audio content more appealing to YouTube and social media audiences.

Audio content is now showing up in search engines. Editors and proofreaders who use it to solve problems and engage with clients and colleagues will increase awareness about themselves and the profession they love.

[An earlier version of this post was originally published on The Editors’ Weekly, the official blog of Canada’s national editorial association.]

• 5 ways to use audio for book marketing and reader engagement
• Beyond editing qualifications: Gaining author trust
• Branding for editors and proofreaders – beyond me-me-me
• How to become a better editor while secretly promoting your business
• How to go mobile with audio: Book-editor podcasting on the go
• Marketing Your Editing and Proofreading Business
• Overcoming marketing paralysis: How to turn overwhelm into action
• The Editing Podcast

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

It's perfectly okay to start a sentence with ‘And’ or ‘But’ in crime fiction writing ... in any fiction writing, in fact. Doing so can enrich the narrative and dialogue, and inflect the prose with voice, mood and intention. The key is to make sure those conjunctions are being used purposefully and logically. This post shows you how.

Here's what two industry-recognized style guides have to say on the matter.

New Hart’s Rules (Oxford University Press): 

Chicago Manual of Style Online, 5.203 (Chicago University Press): ​

Great! We have the go-ahead from a couple of big hitters to use our two conjunctions at the beginning of a sentence. Now let’s dig a little deeper into why doing so can make fiction more effective. Here are my top six reasons:

• To serve natural speech
• To shorten narrative distance
• To introduce tension and suspense
• To add drama
• To emphasize the unexpected
• To make contrast explicit

When we speak in real life, conjunctions are often the first things out of our mouths. So it should be in novels that want to render speech authentically.

Fictional dialogue doesn’t replicate real-life speech completely – that would mean including a lot of boring stuff that one might hear at the bus stop. Rather, it’s a sort of hybrid that has the essence of reality but with the mundanity judiciously removed. It might sound like a cheat but readers thank authors who don’t bore them!

Small nudges towards reality help with the authenticity goal, which is where our conjunctions come in handy. Here are a few examples for you:

Dialogue gives us the character’s speech; narrative gives us the character’s experience. When that’s a first-person narrative, it’s easy to feel close to the narrator. With a third-person narration, the reader can feel separated from the character, as if they’re on the outside looking in.

Authors who want to reduce that space between the reader and the character – called narrative distance or psychic distance – can experiment with a narration style that sounds like natural speech even though it’s not dialogue.
​
Here’s a lovely example from Blake Crouch’s Recursion (p. 182). 

Notice how the narration style is third person, though it doesn’t feel like it. Instead, we’re right inside the viewpoint character’s head.
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The position of the conjunction in this example isn’t the sole reason why the narrative distance feels short – the free indirect speech above and beneath plays a huge part – but it certainly helps to give us a sense of the character’s mentally working out a problem.

Take a look at this excerpt from p. 21 of The Matlock Paper by Robert Ludlum.

With that one word – the conjunction – Ludlum stops us in our tracks. Yes, we’re thinking, the town’s neat, it’s clean. All well and good. But then we realize that there’s more to it, for beneath the pruned trees lies a dark underbelly.

The ‘And’, positioned right up front, forces us to pay attention to it. It’s not any old conjunction. Rather, it’s loaded with suspense that drives the reader to ask a question that isn’t explicitly answered: What else is that ‘something’?

In this excerpt from Parting Shot (p. 433), the author uses the conjunction at the beginning of the sentence to inject drama into a scene.

The new line makes the rhythm of the prose more staccato, but the ‘And’ at the beginning of the final line is what really packs a punch.

The viewpoint character, Cory, is a killer. He ponders almost matter-of-factly who the threats are, and reaches his conclusion as he closes in on the cabin.

If Linwood Barclay had omitted the conjunction, he’d have introduced a separation between two ideas: realizing what needs to be done, and when the killer is going to do it. Yet these two ideas are very much connected. The ‘And’ therefore fulfils its purpose as a conjunction – a joining word.

But there’s more. If he’d run the two ideas together with a conjunction between (‘It seemed clear what he had to do, and he'd have to do it fast.’), the line would have lost its wallop. The staccato rhythm (one that mirrors the cold calculation taking place in Cory’s head) is gone. Instead, the prose has flatlined; it seems almost mundane, like a stroll in the park rather than the planning of a murder.

However, the ‘And’ reinforces this extra information – the deed must be done fast. The emphasis adds drama to the line. The final line is still connected to the clause it’s related to, but the mood-rich rhythm, and the drama that comes with it, is intact.

An up-front ‘But’ is perfect for the author who want to emphasize the unexpected, surprise or absurdity. Take a look at this excerpt from Terry Pratchett’s Dodger (p. 170).

It’s true that omitting the ‘But’ would leave the meaning intact. However, adding the conjunction reinforces the Dodger’s emotional response to the boy’s suggestion – he’s taken by surprise because in times past, asking a peeler was exactly what he’d have done, without question, without fear.

And so that ‘But’ does more than act as a conjunction. With just three letters, we’re shown character mood.

David Rosenfelt’s New Tricks (p. 92) includes a smashing example how the conjunction at the beginning of the sentence reinforces a contrast with what’s gone before.

That contrast is explicit because the ‘But’ acts as an interrupter. We’re deep in the POV character’s head regarding the murder victim, ruminating with our protagonist. The conjunction then shoves us out of that rumination. It’s not gentle; the ‘But’ is a big one – something’s up with Laurie.

Not that we know what. Rosenfelt doesn’t tell us yet. Instead, he makes us ask the question: Why? And with that question, just as with the Ludlum example above, we have suspense.

Feel free to pepper your prose with sentences that begin with ‘And’ and ‘But’. Anyone who tells you you’re on shaky ground grammatically knows less about grammar than you do!

It’s likely that the myth around positioning these conjunctions came about in a bid to nudge people away from stringing together clauses and sentences with no thought to creativity. And while such an intention makes sense, we have to recognize that imposing this zombie rule on writing can actually destroy the magic of prose.

And on that note, I will sign off! (See what I did there?)

• 3 reasons to use free indirect speech
• Author resources library: Booklets, videos, podcasts and articles for authors
• Commas, conjunctions and rhythm
• Coordinating conjunctions
• Editing Fiction at Sentence Level: My flagship line-editing book
• How to write suspenseful chapter endings
• Rules versus preferences
• Sentence length, pace and tension
• Switching to Fiction: Course for new fiction editors
• Transform Your Fiction guides: My fiction editing series for editors and authors

• At Risk, Stella Rimington, Arrow Books, 2004
• Don’t Let Go, Harlan Coben, Arrow Books, 2017
• Dodger, Terry Pratchett, Corgi, 2012
• Recursion, Blake Crouch, Pan Macmillan, 2019
• The Matlock Paper, Robert Ludlum, Orion, 2010
• The Dream Archipelago, Christopher Priest, Gollancz, 2009
• Parting Shot, Linwood Barclay, Orion, 2017
• New Tricks, David Rosenfelt, Grand Central Publishing, 2009

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