One of the biggest challenges of working at home as a freelance editor is finding clients without physically pounding the pavement. How does one pound it virtually?

When you launch your editing business, tell as many friends and as much family about it as possible. If they have ideas or leads, they will let you know and hook you up with a potential client quickly. This is how I got started. As soon as I decided to launch my business, I let many people in my personal network know about it, and one of my good friends suggested that I edit her researcher husband’s latest manuscript. I did, and some time later, my friend suggested that I edit her company’s annual catalog. The rest is history.

Don’t be afraid to reach into your past, either. One thing I did was to contact a faculty member from the university at which I received my MS degree. Although it had been some twenty years since I had talked to that faculty member, she remembered me and hooked me up with the people at the university medical school who provide editors for researchers.

You can also get business by joining editing organizations, such as Editorial Freelancers Association (EFA) and American Copy Editors Society (ACES), both of which I am a member and would recommend. (There are several others, as well.) Soon after I joined EFA, I reached out to my fellow members who live in my state via cold email, and several wrote back and I eventually developed a professional relationship with them. One of them then referred me to an editor she knew, and I got a couple of interesting editing assignments.

Using social media is also a possibility, but it can be tricky. I found out the hard way that Facebook forbids promoting your business; I no longer am on that platform. I use LinkedIn and post regularly and have gathered many connections, but I have yet to see an editing job come from it.

If you are a freelance editor, what methods do you use to find clients?

So the question arises, “What have you accomplished lately?”

A fair amount, actually.

Since no scientific work came my way this spring, I edited several materials for Country Casual Teak, the furniture company for which a good friend of mine works. I don’t often say this, but I do excellent work with websites and retail materials. Perhaps I should say it more often.

The company sent me some prelive web pages to edit, and it wasn’t just the text that I examined fastidiously. Each page had various links and buttons which I checked by clicking on them and making sure they led to the correct page or site. Oftentimes, the photos of the furniture were links themselves, which also required verification.

Some of the prelive pages were to be part of the company’s portfolio, which is very important for showing how good their furniture looks in various settings. Each page showed a country club, school, museum, or other facility and was full of text, links, and buttons to be scrutinized.

I also edited advertising emails, which were sent to clients on the company’s mailing list. These were not time-intensive, but the tricky thing about them was the hover text, which is tiny text that appears when one hovers over a photo. It had better be correct, and it was my responsibility to make sure that it was.

The largest project on which I worked for Country Casual Teak this spring was an eBook that was aimed at trade clients (mostly contractors and designers). The eBook consisted of 195 pages and was made up of some text, many photos, and many dimensional diagrams. Each diagram had a list of dimensions under it, and it was my job (in this case) to verify these dimensions by checking those on each item’s web page. Somewhat tedious, yes, but very necessary for those thinking of purchasing the furniture.

So…lots of exercises in accuracy. And I wouldn’t want it any other way.

I wish I had known how important LinkedIn is to an editing business.

I wish I had known it eight years ago, when I launched Fiedler Editorial LLC. Thank Heaven I found out soon enough, thanks to some of my fellow members of the Editorial Freelancers Association (EFA).

LinkedIn is one way that potential clients learn about you and your editing services. You need to sell yourself on it. This does not mean exaggerating or inflating your accomplishments, but it does mean putting your best foot forward and showing people why they should hire you.

One way I was selling myself short on LinkedIn is that my “Experience” section read like a resume, with bullet points. This may be fine for certain kinds of careers, but for a freelance editor, it turns off potential clients. People will want to see how well you write and edit, so write in paragraph form. For example: “I edited scientific research manuscripts for clarity and correctness in spelling, grammar, and punctuation. The resulting work flowed much more smoothly and was easier to understand. It was published in [name of peer-reviewed journal].” This is more descriptive than bullets.

Another LinkedIn mistake I made before I started my business (and this is worse) was not having a profile picture. Nobody wants to look at a profile with a blank space there, and you are practically guaranteeing that people will click away from your profile if there is no picture there. However (and I made this mistake in the beginning), don’t use a selfie from your phone or a Facebook picture as your LinkedIn profile picture. Instead, get a professional headshot done and use that. LinkedIn is for professionals, so you should look like one. Professional headshots can be a little pricey ($50 at one well-known studio), but they are worth it. I was lucky enough to have a free professional headshot taken during an EFA conference.

What LinkedIn mistakes have you seen, or do you admit to having made in the past?

I love having my editing business. I love taking care of my business finances myself. I love the fact that I can set my own hours and I don’t have to ask for permission to go to a doctor’s appointment or take a day off to help my aging mother. Most of all, I love doing what I do best—editing!

However, when I launched my editing business in 2018, I was ignorant of several things about running an enterprise. Two weeks ago, I blogged about how little I knew about Zoom, how important it turned out to be, and how I became a Zoomer myself. Now, I am going to blog about something we have in my home state of Maryland called DAT.

DAT stands for Department of Assessments and Taxation. You probably felt that sinking feeling in your stomach when you read the word “Taxation,” didn’t you?

It has nothing to do with the IRS or the Office of the Comptroller of Maryland, which govern the income taxes my business pays to Uncle Sam and the state of Maryland, respectively. Frankly, I am not sure what role DAT plays in paying taxes. All I know is, I had better save money to pay the filing fee, which is not cheap.

When I fill out my DAT forms online (which I must do every year before April 15 to keep my business in good standing with the state), the main form I fill out is the Annual Report, in which I report my gross earnings for the year and answer some questions by checking boxes (these questions are not hard). When I get to the question asking if the total value of my business equipment is a certain amount of money or above, I receive a notice stating whether I need to also fill out the Personal Property Tax Return.

Thankfully, I only had to do this once—the first year I was in business. The Personal Property Tax Return is a royal pain in the rear end. A business owner must mentally divide all of their enterprise’s property into given categories, figure out how much the property in each category is worth minus depreciation, and list each amount on a grid by category. Personally, I would not wish this task on anybody.

Fellow independent editors, what kinds of administrative tasks do you despise?

Things I wish I had known at the time I began my editing business, #1: Zoom.

The awful truth is that before late 2018, I had never even heard of the videoconferencing platform known as Zoom. There are other such platforms that exist, such as GoToMeeting and MS Teams, but Zoom was the first one of which I had ever heard.

It was actually quite embarrassing how I first became aware of Zoom.

I had just started my editing business—put in the paperwork with the state, launched a website with the help of a friend—and I needed to network with other editors. I had just joined the Editorial Freelancers Association (EFA) and decided to look at their directory to contact other editors in the state where I live. One editor’s profile looked particularly interesting, and a look at her website told me she really knew what she was doing when it came to editing. I made up my mind that I really wanted to talk to her.

This editor was extremely organized, and in order to speak with her, I was going to have to sign up on her website and get on her schedule. Okay. There was only one problem: She made all her calls via Zoom.

“Zoom?!” I thought. “What the heck is Zoom? Isn’t it a PBS children’s show from the 1970s that I used to watch when I was five years old?” What made matters worse was that Zoom required the use of a webcam and microphone. The old desktop computer I was using at the time had neither. I ended up being able to contact the editor, but I did so over the phone, which was rather embarrassing. I feared that I looked like a backward person who didn’t know the latest technology.

Fast forward seven and a half years: Today I use Zoom on a regular basis to meet with one of my regular clients, and another friend recently showed me how to initiate and host meetings myself. I have gotten pretty good with Zoom. Six years ago, I bought a laptop that had a webcam and microphone (as all of them do now), and I am still using it for Zoom.

Now, if only videoconferencing didn’t remind me so much of the telephone conversations on The Jetsons…

When you hire a professional editor for your written work, there are some things you should expect about the process. You may or may not be aware of these things. However, it definitely helps to be cognizant of them in order to avoid surprises or delays.

One thing many authors don’t know is that a professional editor will want to have a contract, or service agreement (another name for it), which the author will need to sign before editing work can begin. This contract spells out exactly what the author’s deadline is, how the author will deliver the work to the editor, how the editor will deliver the finished work to the author, and other legal items which are meant to settle any disputes which may possibly arise in the editing process. Some authors are not very patient and want the work to start right away without taking the time to read and sign the editor’s contract. Bad idea. If you are an author, please read, understand, and sign the contract, even if you can’t sign electronically and must sign, scan, and send. It may save you a lot of headaches down the road.

Need I mention that a contract prevents an editor against scope creep? Scope creep is what happens when an editor (informally) agrees to do a certain set of tasks, but then the author suddenly asks for another type of work in addition. For example, the editor may have agreed to do a heavy copyedit of a research manuscript, but then after the finished document is returned to the author, the author might ask the editor to cut 100 words to meet the standards of a particular journal.

With a contract that spells out exactly what the editor’s tasks are, the author cannot legally add another, different set of tasks. In the above example, the contract would state that the editor is to do a heavy copyedit of the research manuscript. That’s it. The author cannot ask for anything else unless a new contract is drawn up stating that the editor is to cut 100 words from the manuscript.

If you are an editor, have you found that your clients accept having a contract? Or do they balk at the idea?

Please return to my blog on March 29, when I expect I will post again after recovering from surgery that I had on March 11.