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.

If you are like most people, you were probably taught in your high school English classes that it is not okay to use the passive voice when writing.

The passive voice is that in which the subject of a sentence receives an action, while in the active voice, the subject performs the action.

An example of the difference between the active and passive voice:

Fred threw a snowball. (active voice)

A snowball was thrown by Fred. (passive voice)

The active voice is usually favored in writing because it is often more concise and requires fewer words. Consider the following example:

I want freedom. (active voice)

Freedom is wanted by me. (passive voice)

You probably wouldn’t shout “Freedom is wanted by me!” at a rally.

So why would anyone write in the passive voice?

In scientific articles, that is how it’s done.

When reporting scientific results, an author wants to distance the work from the people who performed the work. This is professionalism in the scientific world. The author emphasizes the reactants, products, results, and ideas, not their staff who mixed up reagents, cared for lab mice, created line and bar graphs, and typed up the results.

Consider the following paragraph, which is written in the active voice:

“Jamie centrifuged the suspension at 10,000 x g and aspirated the supernatant. Then she resuspended the pellet in phosphate-buffered saline, pH 7.4. Following this, she spread the suspension on an agar plate and put the plate in a 37°C incubator for 16 hours.”

Doesn’t this sound like I am telling a story or writing a novel? It seems like I am writing about Jamie’s life in the lab, not a scientific paper.

Now consider the same paragraph written in the passive voice:

“The suspension was centrifuged at 10,000 x g and the supernatant was aspirated. The pellet was resuspended in phosphate-buffered saline, pH 7.4 and the suspension was spread on an agar plate and incubated at 37°C for 16 hours.”

We don’t know who did this work…and scientists don’t care if it was Jamie or Jessie or Jenny who did. We do know the actions that were performed, and that’s what we are concerned with. Also, in this case, the paragraph written in the passive voice is more concise, which is important in scientific writing.

If you are a scientific editor, do you prefer the passive or active voice?

I specialize in research manuscripts, which I edit in MS Word. However, once a year, I perform a very different kind of editing.

I edit sales catalogs for a teak furniture company for which a friend of mine works.

You might think I edit all the text in the catalog in a Word document, but that is not the case at all. There are many things that are very different when editing one of this company’s catalogs.

The editing is done on PDFs using Adobe Acrobat. In order to do this, I peruse each page and place a comment icon wherever I see an error or other issue. When I do this, a comment list pops up in a narrow pane on the right side of the screen, and my comment appears there while I am writing it. When I have finished, I click the save icon. (I save the PDF after every comment I make, because I am very paranoid about losing my work.)

My editing these catalogs consist of editing the text, verifying the SKU number and dimensions of each furniture item, and verifying each item’s price. This means that I must have the PDF, the company’s website, and an Excel pricing spreadsheet open on my PC and constantly click back and forth between the three of them. This can get very confusing and can test my attention span, but I have become skilled at doing this. After all, I have been editing this company’s sales catalogs since its 2020 edition.

Distraction is my biggest challenge when editing the catalogs. The large photos of the products are absolutely gorgeous—chaises by a swimming pool of aqua-blue water, friendly-looking Adirondack chairs placed in a circle around a fire pit in a beautiful backyard—you can imagine. I sometimes find myself admiring the scenery and thinking, “If I win the lottery, that will be my swimming pool,” or “I would absolutely love for that to be my patio.” Then I quickly smack myself in the figurative face and think, “Okay, we have editing to do.”

Editors, do you do any work in Acrobat? If so, what do you edit?

I would be remiss if I did not brag on myself from time to time.

So, what have I accomplished in the last year?

One really exciting thing I did this year was gain a new client, an accountant whose business website I edited to make the writing perfect. I was referred to him by a good friend and expanded my vocabulary with accounting terms while I edited. The best part was when the client told me, “On a scale of one to ten, your editing was an eleven.”

I recently completed the editing of the 2026 trade catalog for an outdoor furniture company. This company manufactures and sells teak benches, tables, chairs, and such for outdoor use, and the trade catalog I just finished is geared toward designers and those who are in charge of planning the outdoor scenery for universities, hospitals, museums, and other public places. In editing the trade catalog, I verified its text as well as hundreds of SKU numbers, dimensional drawings, and prices, striving for 100 percent accuracy and perfection.

For this same company, I also edited many prelive web pages for its site. These pages covered everything from the company’s privacy and security policies to its shipping and delivery information to a list of questions frequently asked by customers. In my editing for this company, I had a chance to use my skills with Adobe Acrobat, as well as continue with my Word skillset.

I am about to begin working on the company’s 2026 retail catalog, which is geared toward individual consumers and homeowners (this is furniture for their patios or the area around their swimming pools). I will be doing the same thing as I did for the trade catalog, minus verifying the dimensional drawings, which are not found in the retail catalog.

I am also looking forward to more scientific manuscripts, grants, theses, resumés, and cover letters coming my way. If you have one that needs editing, please message me or contact me through my website. I will strive to make it perfect!