What’s your most precious asset as a freelancer or small business owner? I’ll give you some hints. It’s not your qualifications or professional memberships. Up to a point, anybody with enough tenacity and funding can acquire those. It’s also not your website or portfolio. Again, however informative they are and however long they took you to build, there will be many other freelancers out there with credentials that are just as impressive. And it’s not…
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In today’s volatile business world, businesses are increasingly looking for ways to be agile rather than fragile. One way of achieving this is to use freelance talent to quickly source resources when – and only when – they are needed. This model sees groups of people come together to carry out a specific project and then part ways when the project is complete. Businesses need to ask themselves how they can achieve the best version…
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For an editorial project to meet its goals, multiple people (sometimes many) need to work together, but potentially without ever actually communicating with each other. This requires each person to have a clear understanding of their role in the process and the ripples (good or bad) they can create for others in the editorial team. Part I of this article gave some suggestions on how the author, developmental editor and project manager can contribute to…
Read moreWorking in an editorial team Part I: author, developmental or structural editor, and project manager
I almost called this article ‘How to Avoid Screwing Things Up in an Editorial Team’, but the SEO gods said it was too long. However, that’s essentially what this article and its follow-up are about. All editorial projects require collaboration. The simplest might only involve an author and a proofreader, whereas the most complex can involve many more people working together in an editorial team. For any project to turn out well, these people need…
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PMP (Project Management Professional) and PRINCE2 (PRojects IN Controlled Environments) are two of the most popular and highly ranked project management certifications worldwide. But how are they perceived in the editorial and publishing world, and which would be most valuable to an editorial project manager seeking work? I’m planning to complete one of these qualifications over the next year, but I wanted to be sure I was choosing the right one for my industry, where…
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It’s not uncommon to hear editors alluding to what they do as a kind of midwifery. Editors (for which read ‘copyeditors’ and ‘proofreaders’ throughout) help clients to ‘birth’ books – to bring them into the world in the healthiest and best-prepared state they can, with the minimum possible fuss, mess and pain. They support clients (parents), listening carefully to their desires for their book (birth plan) and doing their utmost to make those desires a…
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As we’re all currently discovering, sometimes all the determination, foresight and savvy in the world cannot prevent a project from being brought to its knees – or, far less dramatically, being rendered irrelevant with breathtakingly savage immediacy. But even in these difficult times, many projects are going ahead. And in more normal times too, a less existential but still very serious crisis can threaten to overwhelm a project that might otherwise have been able to…
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Freelancers inhabit a world of paradoxes. These paradoxes show us how when a huge shock hits, we may worry about how we will survive, but in a sense we are already surviving.
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HBR defines psychological safety as allowing for ‘moderate risk-taking, speaking your mind, creativity, and sticking your neck out without fear of having it cut off’. In the professional sphere, it’s about trust, openness and confidence that we will receive a reasonable and proportionate response when we raise questions or concerns with our colleagues. As a project manager, it’s something I try to establish in all my projects. And it’s a concept that I think we…
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