How to be a trustworthy freelancer

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.…

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Sending difficult feedback on a messy editorial project

A black and white photo of a woman hiding her face behind a piece of paper with a face drawn on it with marker pen. The drawn face is winking and has a wry expression.

At some point (hopefully very rarely), every proofreader and copy-editor will find themselves working on a project where it seems that somebody, somewhere, at some point, dropped the ball in a big way.

As a copy-editor, you might discover that the developmental editor seems to have let through major inconsistencies and that swathes of detail are missing.

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How to use bubble charts to get a snapshot of your clients’ value to your business

Bubble chart snapshot example of how to visualise your clients’ value to your business

If you’re like me, you keep meticulous records of all of your projects, including hours worked, hourly rates, speed of work and so on. It’s easy to quickly rack up a lot of data, but data is no good if it’s not put to practical use. I do various ongoing and yearly analyses of my data, and one of those analyses involves creating a bubble chart to give me a snapshot of my clients’ value to me, both monetarily (the volume of work and how much I get paid for it) and in terms of how much I like working with each client.…

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