So how do you become a freelance book editor, anyway?
Freelancer advice instead of writing advice today, on how to start making serious money with just a $150 Chromebook and $15 a month to Upwork
Originally published at the Jason Pettus newsletter through Substack on July 23, 2022, and republished here at this website on January 20, 2024.
Although the majority of the subscribers to this newsletter at the moment are authors, a sizeable minority are fellow editors and people who wish to eventually become ones themselves; so instead of offering my usual writing advice, in this issue I thought I'd talk a bit about how I came to become a full-time professional book editor. It involved some strange steps and some dicey days, but my story proves that it doesn't take anything fancy to first get involved, start immediately making money, and use those first profits to build up everything you need afterwards for traditional success.
In my case, the story started with two big failures in the late 2010s—both my small press running out of money and being forced to close, and my big expensive Mac finally biting the bullet and me not having the money to replace it. That had me on only a cheap $150 Chromebook at that point, with a sudden need to pivot financially, and not quite sure how to do so. So at first, I just tried doing as a freelancer what I had been doing professionally before opening my small press, which was office-oriented administrative tasks like being a virtual assistant, or editing memos and website copy. A freelancing website like Upwork.com doesn't require you to have any particular qualifications just to open an account, hang out your shingle, and start hustling for jobs; so that's exactly what I did, filling out my profile as honestly as I could and then just starting to throw myself into as many possible opportunities as I could find.
That's what freelancing is all about, learning to accept and then love all the constant daily hustle that goes into finding more work; you have to shift your mindset and understand that some of these administrative tasks are now part of your "job," and they come every day regardless of how little or how much actual paying work you're happening to be doing that day as well. Basically, clients post job opportunities at websites like Upwork, and then anyone who wants can submit a bid, explaining who they are and why the client should hire them and not the other applicants. So the way you present yourself and the way the client is looking for someone becomes this delicate balancing game; if you're just starting out and haven't built up a pubic reputation at Upwork yet, for example (shown very plainly on your profile whether you want it to or not), you might put in a lower bid in exchange for getting an early testimonial, while for jobs that require a more very specific set of skills that less people overall have, you might feel more comfortable putting in a larger bid but understanding that you may have to do a free sample as part of the interview process, and that it may take longer than normal for them to make a final decision.
For the first several years I was freelancing (part-time at that point, and wishing I could find more work than that), I was literally doing all my work on my $150 Chromebook, editing documents and doing other administrative work through the free online Google Docs, my only expense being the $15 a month I was paying Upwork to have a membership, plus of course the 20 percent of each job's pay they keep as their administrative fee. When I first started freelancing, I was kind of uptight about how large that figure is; but now that I've been freelancing a while, I realize that that fee is paying for an endless series of what in sales they call "hot leads," not just people likely to hire an editor but who specifically need one right that moment, and are literally going out and begging for someone to let them give them money. Hanging out your shingle in the big wide world of the entire internet makes it a lot harder to find these kinds of hot leads; so I've come to appreciate the appropriateness of Upwork keeping their cut as a "finder's fee" for bringing me and the client together. Of course, I didn't actually have to pay any of those fees until after the job was done and the money was earned; so you can see that for the first year or two I was freelancing, I was able to start making tens of thousands of dollars with just a beat-up little $150 Chromebook, free webapp software, and $15 a month to a lead-generation service like Upwork (or Fiverr, or Taskrabbit, or Reedsy, etc. etc.).
It was only a couple of years in, in fact, that I first heard a fellow freelancer tell me that there are actually tons of self-publishing writers out there who need the exact services I used to do for my authors for free as the owner of a small press, basically not just a thorough copy edit of the entire manuscript for what editors call GUPS (grammar, usage, punctuation and spelling), but also big-picture advice on characters, plot, pacing, style, genre tropes, how their universe is holding together, how publishable and commercially enticing it is, and all the other issues that go into publishing a contemporary book, which collectively is known as "developmental editing." If you were to take a pretty decently sized book, and get hired at the typical rate for both a developmental editing and copy editing of it, this person was telling me, you can pretty easily make a couple thousand dollars from just that project, and likely be done with it in just a couple of weeks.
And sure enough, when I looked into it, I discovered that all of this was indeed true, so that quickly and profoundly shifted the kind of freelance work I was both seeking and doing, and I "rebranded" myself at that point as exclusively an experienced veteran of developmental and copy editing for full-length books, who just happens to be able to do corporate editing like memos and website copy too. But what I quickly discovered is that I was only able to secure and then succeed at jobs in this because I had such big numbers behind me as far as experience; at that point I had already edited 40 full-length books over the last 15 years of my life, another 50 short books from the 15 years before that as a slam poet, basement-press employee and self-publisher. That's why my biggest piece of advice to beginning editors is always to go out and actually edit as many manuscripts as you can get your hands on, even if that's for free as favors for friends or by volunteering at a literary journal. There's nothing stopping you from building network connections during these free opportunities, so they're not exactly without any "profit," so to speak; but most importantly, doing it over and over and over within an actual commercial setting will simply teach you all the lessons about doing it right, and getting an intuitive sense of what isn't working in a big-picture way and how to fix it.
One thing to quickly establish is both your hourly rate and your "per word" rate, which is the more common way to express pay expectations in a lot of publishing and editing situations. For example, I could get a job here in Chicago at Whole Foods for $15 an hour (and in fact almost did, back right after my small press closed down), so I thought if I could average a pay rate of $20 an hour as a freelancer, it would officially beat out Whole Foods (or Starbucks for that matter) as something worth my time and effort. So I very carefully timed the first 10 or 20 full-length manuscripts I took on as an editor, and discovered that when they had a whole lot of mistakes, I could edit around 2,500 words per hour; and when they were relatively clean and easy to edit, I could edit around 6,000 to 7,000 words per hour. So if I want to guarantee $20 an hour even at my slowest speed, 2,500 words per hour, that would be a rate of 0.8 cents per word. So that's what I charged! So for a fairly hefty 100,000-word manuscript (like a lot of thrillers and also YA titles are), I earned $800 for a copy edit or developmental edit, $1,600 for both, and I could finish one in two weeks' worth of Mondays through Fridays; so if I could get to a point of never running out of these kinds of jobs, I could make $3,200 a month, way more than I ever made as the owner of a small press. And that's just at the slowest rate; if you mix in easy manuscripts too, that's more like $4,000 a month if you can maintain steady 40-hour-a-week work that never runs out.
Of course, now I started needing things like a standalone copy of Microsoft Word, so I could do all the "track changes" bells and whistles and deal with documents that were strangely sized and the like; and I needed a laptop with a beefier motherboard for the increasing amount of video chats I was having to do with clients. But of course I was making enough money at that point to easily afford now a mid-priced $500 HP Pavilion and $70 a year for Microsoft Office 365 (existing as standalone software for Windows and even now a fully robust online webapp version for Chromebook access on the go, which I have to admit is quite cool). But the trade-off for this additional investment is that starting around spring or summer last year, I started booking enough work to have that fabled 40 hours per week of editing to do, and by this most recent January was turning away enough work that I felt justified in experimenting with a 20 percent pay raise, to a full 1 cent per word for editing, and continued to book 40 hours of work per week even at that rate. Remember, that's $25 an hour just for the slowest, most error-filled manuscripts; for the ones that are pretty clean, I'm now often making up to $70 an hour for editing them, a rate I'm very happy with given that I'm only in year four of trying to freelance for a full-time living.
That's what these next steps are in my freelancing journey, like this free sporadic newsletter I share with a growing circle of clients, friends and fellow professionals; and that's why I recently decided to join the American Copy Editors Society, and go through the certification process they co-run with the Poynter Institute for Media Studies. I edit kind of intuitively at this point, often not knowing the formal rules for why something needs to be done, just naturally sensing that it does because of editing so many hundreds of books now (not just the 90 before becoming a freelancer, but the now 60 additional books I'm editing per year as a freelancer, now halfway through my third year of doing so, for a total of another 150 books now under my belt). But if I can learn the formal rules in a better way, I can take on things like academic papers and traditional journalism, for much higher pay rates since it's all being funded by some grant somewhere. Plus, it will be cool to say that I'm a card-carrying member of the American Copy Editors Society. Well, "cool." Cut a nerd a break.
All of that is coming in the months ahead, capped by finally getting my first-ever standalone website built out for my freelancing services, where you'll be able to book me through automated software just like you currently can at a place like Upwork. (Heads-up, fellow nerds: I'm thinking of creating a smart contract through Ethereum that would work like Upwork's current system, where the money is paid in advance and held in escrow, not released until the client confirms that the work was received and done well.) But in the meanwhile, you continue to be able to hire me exactly the way people have been able to for the last twenty years now, by directly writing to me at ilikejason@gmail.com and letting me know of your interest. As you can see, you can get started as a freelancer with almost nothing but sweat equity (lots and lots of sweat equity), then use the profits of those early jobs fund the additional access and tech you need to eventually grow to a professional full-time level.
This Week's Reviews: JACK DAMN REACHER Edition
It's been another busy few weeks over at Goodreads since my last update. New book reviews to check out include:
The brand-new Tracy Flick Can't Win, the 30-years-later sequel to Election by Tom Perrotta, which I read and enjoyed so much that I went back and read the original Election again as well, which I equally enjoyed the second time.
The latest by the "queen of the summer beach read," The Hotel Nantucket by Elin Hilderbrand, which of course I loved just as much as my other guilty summer reads of hers.
And speaking of guilty annual summer reads: REACHER! JACK DAMN REACHER!!!
Three new slim wellness books, two of which were only so-so (Annabel Streets' 52 Ways to Walk and Thich Nhat Hanh's How to Eat), and one great but only if you're a meditation beginner (Robert Schachter's Mindfulness for Stress Management).
And last and best, Bridget Collins' hard-to-categorize but mesmerizingly dense and poetic New Weird saga The Betrayals, which...uh, takes a lot of unpacking.
And what's going on with YOUR book?
I've got a number of freelance clients right now who are in the last stages of production for their books, and soon will have great things to share here about new titles now available for public consumption at Amazon, Audible, independent bookstores and your local library. Do you have such news to share as well? Let me know at ilikejason@gmail.com, so I can share it here! We're a growing international community of self-publishing authors, indie-press owners, and fellow publishing professionals discussing ideas through this newsletter, and I always love sharing both good news and interesting business plans for how people achieved this good news, especially when it can be directly applicable to another self-publisher's situation. I wish you much luck with your own book, whatever stage of completion it's currently in, and I look forward to speaking with you all again next time.
