Posts Tagged ‘freelance’
How to hire a freelance editorial project manager
So you need to hire a freelance editorial project manager. Perhaps you have an overspill of work from your in-house editorial team, or perhaps your business needs expert editorial help with a major project (such as the creation of a new website or the ongoing management of a journal). Whatever the case, you may be wondering how best to find a person who will be a good fit for your company and processes.…
Read MoreWhy freelancers should write annual reports
This year, for the first time, I wrote an annual report for my freelance business.
But wait, isn’t that a bit of a paradox – a freelancer writing an annual report? Surely annual reports are designed to be shared with government, shareholders and the media (entities unlikely to have much interest in the average freelance business)?…
Read MoreHow 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.…
Read MorePMP or PRINCE2: which is most valuable as an accreditation for an editorial project manager?
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 I am in my career and my general development goals.…
Read MoreEditorial midwifery: why a love of language is not enough
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 reality.…
Read MoreKeeping projects moving in a crisis by putting people first
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 proceed if some simple people-focused steps had been taken.…
Read MoreDisengage, re-engage: 13 tips for proofreading text you’ve already copy-edited
In the editorial world, it’s generally thought that the person who copy-edited a text shouldn’t also be the person to proofread it.
This is a sound rule to follow wherever possible: a proofreader is often referred to as a ‘fresh pair of eyes’, and this freshness can be invaluable. In the same way that an author can become blind to the errors in their own work through overfamiliarity, a copy-editor tends to lose that ‘edge’ that comes with seeing a text anew.…
Read MoreDifficult feedback: should you send it and, if so, how?
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.
How to use bubble charts to get a snapshot of 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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