FOR EDITORS, PROOFREADERS AND WRITERS

Thinking about becoming a proofreader? Here are 12 myths you should be aware of.

None of the following statements is an absolute truth. 

1. You can't get work unless you have contacts in the publishing industry
2. The market is shrinking
3. Training courses are a waste of time and money
4. Training, by itself, is enough to get you work
5. All work goes to former editors and former workmates of publishers
6. All proofreading work is poorly paid
7. It's easy to run a proofreading business
8. There'll be times when you have no work, no matter how experienced you are
9. There's no demand for professional proofreaders because of grammar- and spell-checking technology
10. All proofreading work is done in-house
11. Proofreading means the same thing to all client types
12. Word of mouth is a good enough promotion strategy

In this article, I look at Myths 1–6; in Part 2, I’ll cover Myths 7–12.

Myth 1: You can't get work unless you have contacts in the publishing industry
If you want to proofread for the publishing-industry, it can help if you have a contact. A contact will give you a foot in the door. That’s all it will do, though. Publishers won’t just hand you a book; you’ll most likely have to do a test to prove your competence.

Of course, if you don’t have a contact, you’ll have to make one – you can pick up the phone, write a letter and enclose a CV, or send an email. If you have the skills that publishers are looking for, and you contact them and tell them this, there’s no reason why you can’t acquire work from this sector even if you have no existing in-house friends or colleagues.

Ten years ago, I had one contact in the publishing industry. The rest I acquired through targeted direct marketing – letters, emails and phone calls.

A more significant problem with this myth is its presumption that all self-employed business proofreaders and editors work for publishers, and only for publishers. Publishers are only one type of client.

Ten years ago, 90% of my clients were publishers; these days, 90% of my clients aren’t publishers.

Myth 2: The market is shrinking
The market is not shrinking; it’s changing. It's even expanding in some sectors. Increasing numbers of people are recognizing the benefits of ensuring that their text is professionally presented.

Our world is more public than ever. Anyone with an online presence (e.g. a website, a blog, an online report, an ebook) has a public presence. And if that public presence is represented by words, those words need to be polished. That’s where the editorial professional comes in.

The independent-publishing market is booming, with self-publishers uploading fiction and commercial non-fiction to public spaces on a daily basis. Many of those writers are commissioning proofreaders. So are NGOs, businesses, marketing and communications agencies, packagers, schools, public-sector organizations, students, charities, poets, musicians and traditional publishers.

The challenge lies not in the myth that the market is shrinking, but in the myth that it's easy to be visible in that market. 

Myth 3: Training courses are a waste of time and money
This myth argues that editorial training isn’t worth investing in because the work isn't well paid enough to give you a return on that investment. Some proponents of this myth also state that no one pays attention to editorial qualifications.

• First, it’s not all about the money. Rather, it’s about learning to do the job so that you’re fit for purpose. If you haven’t had any training, you could struggle to fulfil some clients’ requirements (see, for example, Does Training Matter? What Publishers Say about Proofreading & Editing Courses).
• Qualifications are one way (though not the only way) of building trust. I wouldn’t let my hairdresser anywhere near me if she hadn’t learned how to do her job properly. I’d rather pay a decent rate and trust my barnet to a professional. Proofreading’s no different.
• Actually, training to be a professional proofreader is a lot cheaper than training to be a doctor, dentist or electrician. Landing a few book-sized jobs will cover the cost of your initial training, so the no-return-on-investment argument is nonsense.

Myth 4: Training, by itself, is enough to get you work
Having espoused the benefits of training, it’s equally important to debunk the myth that training alone will get you work. It doesn’t matter whether you have distinctions and accreditations coming out of your ears, and lots of real-world experience – if no one knows you exist, they won't be able to be impressed by all your training!

To get work, you must put yourself in front of your clients – that means being visible, which means marketing.

Myth 5: All publisher-based proofreading work goes to former editors and former workmates of publishers
This myth is similar to (1). Yes, it can be an advantage initially, but plenty of people without a publishing background who’ve made the effort to market themselves using a chunky box of promotion tools have been able to secure work.

The governor of the Bank of England knows that you need more than one instrument to stabilize an economy; the business of proofreading is not so different. Proofreaders, too, need more than one instrument to generate a stable client base and income stream.

• You can contact publishers and packagers direct, via email, via letter or via the phone.
• Target those whose publication lists reflect your own knowledge base (e.g. your educational or career background).
• Find out what their requirements are and learn those skills (e.g. use of proof-correction language; familiarity with industry-recognized style guides; ability to mark up PDFs or paper proofs).

Myth 6: All proofreading work is poorly paid
This myth has several problems:
​

• What you consider poorly paid may be rather well paid by someone else’s standards. See Rich Adin's discussion of relative success in The Order of Things (An Occasional Series) I.
• Not all clients pay the same rate. Some publishers pay higher rates than others, and many expect quite different levels of intervention for the fee they're paying. Then there are other clients types, such as businesses, students and independent authors. These non-publisher clients don't set the rate – I do: publishers offer me rates and I accept or decline the job; non-publishers are offered my rates after they've asked for a quote, and they accept or decline. In other words, I make sure that I’m earning a rate that I want to earn and that meets my needs.
• Some organizations will pay premium rates for fast-turnaround work. For example, one of my clients is a greeting-card business who always needs a fast turnaround. Each print run involves printing thousands of sheets, each with 32 cards per sheet. Each print run costs them tens of thousands of pounds. One error on just one of those 32 cards means the entire print run must be junked. It’s not like a miss on a website, which can be amended easily – in this business’s case, there are no second chances. Quibbling over a few hundred quid isn’t what they’re about. It’s all about quality – every time.
• Having a few higher-paying clients gives you the freedom to accept lower-paid work from others, simply because you want to do it.
• Ask yourself what you’re comparing proofreading rates with. Cleaning, stacking shelves in a supermarket, hairdressing, plumbing, farming, carrying out plastic surgery, or being the CEO of Microsoft?
• ‘Poorly paid’ means nothing unless you know what you need to earn in the first place, i.e. it's subjective. If I need to earn £50K per annum as soon as I set up my proofreading business, I’ll be in trouble, but if I need to earn £20K per annum in year 3 and my current job is paying me £12K a year, I could well be in great shape, provided I do what’s necessary to ensure my target clients can find me. 
• It always takes time to set up a new business, and you might decide to accept work from lower-paying clients while you are building your client portfolio (seeI’m a Newbie Proofreader – Should I Charge a Lower Fee? for a discussion of this issue).

​Don't get me wrong – success won't happen overnight. As is the case for any new business owner, it will take time and hard work to build a decent income stream and client base. Work won't just fall into your lap. But if you behave like a professional business owner in terms of quality and visibility, the concept of low pay (however you’re defining it) doesn’t have to define your editorial business.

In Part 2, I’ll bust Myths 7–12.

Useful editorial software, resources and templates
I've expanded my Resources page to provide fellow editors and proofreaders – particularly new entrants to the field – with a one-stop shop for some of the business tools I've created.

I'll keep adding to this editor resource hub as new tools become available. In the meantime, this is a flavour of what's on offer:

• An editorial invoice template (UK version; if you live outside the UK, your tax authority might require the inclusion of different information). The template includes dropdown boxes to speed up invoice-building for regular clients (Excel)
• PDF proofreading stamps
• An editorial accounts-and-scheduling template (Excel)
• An editorial style-sheet template (Word)
• An editorial progressive-pricing-array template (Excel)
• A list of national editing and proofreading societies

Where appropriate, I've included the raw Excel or Word files, rather than PDFs, so that you can amend for your own needs.

Visit the Editor Resources page to access the links.

MultiSwitch is another gem of created by my colleague Paul Beverley. This useful little macro speeds up onscreen editing and proofreading.

The macro is available in his free book, Computer Tools for Editors. In a nutshell, it allows you to switch around a word (or words) with a single keyboard shortcut. I use it to save time with every single Word-based project I work on.

Imagine that you’re editing or proofreading a Word file in which the author repeatedly uses ‘which’ for restrictive relative clauses. You want to change it to ‘that’. This means carrying out three small actions: select, delete and retype.

That’s not a problem if the issue occurs twice in a file, but if it occurs tens or hundreds of times, those seconds are going to add up and eat into your hourly rate. And let’s not get started on the ache in your wrist!
 
Naturally, you might notice that a particular job has a number of similar niggles that you want to attend to, in which case this macro will be even more of a productivity-enhancer.
 
Give it a whirl!

MultiSwitch in action
To run MultiSwitch, you simply place your cursor before or in the word you want to change (in our example here, ‘which’), and hit your keyboard shortcut (I’ve assigned alt-3, but you can choose whatever you like). Then, bingo, the macro amends ‘which’ to ‘that’.

Here's a teeny-tiny video of me using MultiSwitch. This demo aims merely to show you where to place the cursor prior to hitting your assigned shortcut key command, and what you will see on your screen (a little flickering as the macro makes the switch). 

​If you don’t know how to assign a keyboard shortcut, don’t worry – I’ll show you how later in the article. 

The beauty of MultiSwitch is that you need only one keyboard shortcut for a ton of different word switches. Here are a few examples from my switch list: 

• that – which
• which – that
• last – past
• like – such as
• less – fewer
• will not – won't
• is not – isn't
• he is – he's
• they will – they'll

I love this macro for editing fiction because it's so quick to create contractions when I'm helping the author create a more informal narrative, or dialogue that's closer to natural speech.

Further down, I explain how to create your list – it's a doddle. Or, if you'd like to save even more time, grab a free copy of my contraction switch list. You can edit it to include your own word switches.

Installing MultiSwitch
Go to Paul’s website and download Computer Tools for Editors.

Save the zipped folder to your computer and extract three files: one is an overview of the macros – what they are, what they do, how to store them and so on – plus all the programs themselves; another contains just the actual macro programs; a third is called ‘Beginners Start Here’; and the final file is a style sheet. The file you need to open in Word is ‘The Macros’.

Use Word’s navigation menu on a Mac (or Ctrl F on a PC) to open the Find function. Type ‘Sub MultiSwitch’ into the search field and hit ‘Return’ twice. That will take you to the start of the relevant script.

Select and copy the script from ‘Sub MultiSwitch()’ down to ‘End Sub’.

Still working in Word, open the ‘View’ tab and click on the ‘Macros’ icon on the ribbon:  

A new window will open.

If you don’t have any macros already loaded:

• Create a test macro that you can delete later.
  
• First, make sure the ‘Normal.dotm’ template is showing in the ‘Macros in:’ box.
  
• Type ‘TEST’ into the ‘Macro name:’ box.
  
• Click on the ‘Create’ button.
  
• Your TEST macro will now show up. From now on, it’ll be easy as pie to add additional macros.
  

If you already have macros loaded (your TEST macro or any other):

• Click on ‘Edit’.

​​
This will open up another window:

• If necessary, use the scroll bar to take you to the bottom of the text.
• Paste the MultiSwitch script at the end, under ‘End Sub’.

Don’t close this Visual Basic window quite yet – there’s something else you need to do first!

Creating your MultiSwitch list
Now head over to Word. Open a new document and call it zzSwitchList. 

Create your list using the following style:

that
which

which
that

last
past

like
such as

less
fewer

Less
Fewer

it is
it's

Save it somewhere just as meaningful! Mine’s in my Macros folder, but you can save it wherever it suits you. Now close the document.

You can amend this list any time you want to – just add or delete words as you see fit.

Changing the MultiSwitch script
Now you're going to make a small amendment to the macro script so that it's personalized for you, so go back to the window into which you pasted the MultiSwitch script.

At the top of the script, you’ll see the following:

​The text in red shows how I’ve customized the script to suit my needs – you need to put in your own location.

Now you can close the window by clicking on the ‘X’ in the top right-hand corner. Do the same with the general Visual Basic window too. Don’t worry if you get a message about a debugger – just press ‘OK’.

Creating the keyboard shortcut for running MultiSwitch
If you don't know how to create keyboard shortcuts, this section's for you. If you do know how to do this, you don't need to read any further!

I'm working in Word 2016 on a PC. If you are too, the instructions are as follows:

• In Word, select ‘File’, ‘Options’, ‘Customize Ribbon’ (1). 
• Click on ‘Customize’ (2). A new box will open up entitled ‘Customize Keyboard’.
• In the ‘Categories:’ window (3), scroll down and select ‘Macros’.
• In the ‘Macros’ window (4), select ‘MultiSwitch’.
• Finally, choose your preferred keyboard combination by typing it into the ‘Press New Shortcut Key’ window (5).
• Select ‘Assign’ and ‘Close’.

​(If you are working in a different version of Word, see pp. 14–15 of the ‘ComputerTools4Eds’ file in the Macros folder that you've downloaded from Paul’s site in order to install this macro. There, he provides details of the process for different versions of the software.)

The image below shows how I assigned a keyboard shortcut to another macro called ‘UndoHighlight’. The steps are exactly the same.

That's it! I hope this macro saves you as much time as it's saving me!