The Copyeditor's Desk

A young reader not long out of college sent in a query: How do you get started in editorial work, preferably of the freelance variety? Do you need an advanced degree?

If you have a bachelor’s, you probably can get an editorial job. Employers aren’t necessarily looking for degrees; they’re looking for literacy and accuracy. 

In my experience, it’s significantly easier to build a freelance business if you’ve spent some time working on the editorial staff of a magazine or book publisher, or with a public relations firm. I started in a 50% FTE job editing a research newsletter for a university. Didn’t have the faintest idea how to do it—had never heard the term “blueline”—but somehow I managed to land the job anyway. After a couple of years, I had learned as much and done as much as I was going to, absent an infusion of money that the college didn’t have. I left and promptly started getting work as a freelance writer, first for a local business newspaper, then for a city magazine, and before long for regional and national periodicals.

Look for trade groups in your area. By that, I don’t mean groups of would-be writers. I mean organizations such as the Association for Women in Communications, some of whose local chapters still go under the organization’s old name, Women in Communication, Inc., and the  Society for Technical Communication. Both are first-rate networking groups, and local chapters often have job boards that list freelance editing opportunities. Editorial organizations exist in droves. Google editorial + association to find several pages of leads. Probably the most promising for an independent contractor is the Editorial Freelancers Association, which offers job listings and health insurance. IMHO, the only nonfiction writer’s groups worth joining are the Writer’s Guild and the American Society of Journalists and Authors (ASJA). You need a significant track record of publications to get into ASJA, but the Writer’s Guild will take aspiring authors; it also has a health insurance plan.

In addition, seek out trade groups representing your target audience. For instance, if you’re interested in editing legal or medical copy, track down your state and county bar associations and medical societies. Find out if you can advertise in their newsletters or websites, and offer to write an article or column about the importance of well edited copy and how to get it. If you want to edit business documents, consider joining the Chamber of Commerce. Also approach local business weeklies and offer to write an article having to do with what editors can do for corporations.

Another possibility is to go to universities nearby (or not — you can do this all over the country, thanks to the Internet) and get yourself on the graduate schools’ lists of editors. Graduate students, especially foreign students, often need editors to help them with master’s theses and Ph.D. dissertations. Pay isn’t great, but it gets you a track record. 

Look for a state or local association of book publishers and join up. Tina and I have had several promising nibbles from our state book publishers’ association. These usually consist of small publishing houses or even individuals who are busily self-publishing. They often can’t afford to hire a full-time or even part-time editorial assistant, and so they’ll farm out editorial work. Introduce yourself as a person who’s willing to do copyediting and proofreading.

When you’re confident that you’ve developed the skills to edit book-length manuscripts, try contacting local and national trade publishers and university presses. These can be found in Literary Marketplace (LMP), a reference work available at most local libraries. LMP lists hundreds of publishers, with the names and addresses of their managing editors. Apply to these people by name, getting the spelling of their names and their addresses correct; send your resumé, some examples of your work, and a listing of your track record.   

Learn to index books, if you don’t already know how. This can turn into fairly steady freelance work. The American Society for Indexing is a national association. You can buy dedicated indexing software at reasonable prices if you find you are doing a lot of indexing work.

Be sure you know MLA, APA, Chicago, and Associated Press styles through & through. 

It’s not easy. Most of my contract editing work has come to me through word-of-mouth or sheer serendipity. You’re much helped if you can develop a specialty, such as medical, legal, science, textbook, or scholarly editing. None of these are as hard as they sound. We’ve found that editing math copy is actually very easy…much gentler to edit than subjects whose content may contain political viewpoints we disagree with!

I have spoken with self-employed editors who have developed quite specialized practices—particular types of engineering textbooks, for example—who claim to be making a decent living, working on their own schedules and on their own terms. Whether this is true and how these folks define “decent,” I do not know. I’m not quitting my day job, though, until I’m ready to retire with enough pension income to pay for the roof over my head. If you have a working spouse, an independent income, or a job that will support you without exhausting your energy, it’s certainly worth trying to start an editorial business as a sideline and then seeing if you can develop it into a full-time enterprise.

Good luck to you!

The other day, Garrison Keillor was doing his English major schtick (“You want fries withthat?”) and hilariously suggested that the ideal job for an English graduate is in the food industry, the better to leave time and creative energy for writing novels. Copyediting? No…the best preparation for that, he remarked, is not the humanities but law enforcement (fierce growl: “You call that a gerund?!?”).

Fact of the matter is, though, that those of us who persist in believing higher education should entail education, not vocational training, are presented with many more career choices than teaching or flipping burgers. IMHO, editing is one of the best for people with degrees in the humanities.

No, it’s not likely to make you rich (neither is the classroom or Burger King)—although some editors do make six-figure salaries. They usually live in six-figure cities. Most of us earn enough to support a modestly comfortable lifestyle and—this is important—to live where we choose.

Unless you elect to teach K-12, faculty jobs on the college level are few and hard to land. You have to go where the jobs are; the likelihood that you will find a university or community college teaching job in any humanities discipline where your spouse is working or your family lives is very slim. But editorial work is everywhere.

After I made myself unemployable by finishing a Ph.D. in English, I drifted into journalism, published copiously, and eventually joined the editorial staff of Phoenix Magazine and then of Arizona Highways. Later I returned to academia, where for about ten years I taught writing and editing.

Recently, in connection with a writing project, I had occasion to mull over what I think of as the ideal job.

My ideal job. . .

• Puts my skills and talents to use
• Is somewhat entrepreneurial
• Is always interesting
• Puts me in contact with smart, interesting, and talented people
• Entails little or no office or academic politics
• Allows me to do some work from home
• Ends at the end of the day and does not expand to fill every waking moment
• Is not housed in a cube
• Pays more than just a living wage
• Pays for all the hours one works—in cash, not in comp time
• Offers a full range of health insurance options (i.e., more than just an HMO)
• Provides other benefits generously

My present job pretty much fills that bill.

I direct a university office that does preproduction work for scholarly journals, mostly copyediting. My four assistants and I read articles whose topics range from medieval and Renaissance history to mathematical bioscience. We deal with scholarly editors in a half-dozen disciplines and hundreds of authors who are experts on more subjects that I would care to count. We’re entirely self-starting, and, because we’re very specialized and off in our own corner, we rarely get into the fray of academic in-fighting. As a state job, the position offers excellent health-care benefits and a more than adequate 403b (although other universities offer a larger match). The five-figure salary is exactly at the average four-person family income in our state. We have our own office suite, so that even our most junior staffer has her own office; the ceiling-high windows in my office look out onto an atrium with a fountain and tropical plants. I’m paid to work twelve months a year, not, as when I was teaching, paid for nine months and then expected to spend the summer months working for free. And best of all, when I walk out the door I leave the job behind.

How is it better than owning an incorporated business?

• Someone else copes with the complicated government paperwork.
• I don’t have to deal with involved tax returns.
• I don’t have to buy health insurance on the open market.
• The work comes to me; I don’t chase after the work.
• I’m paid on time, without having to send out invoices and reminders. The university does not welch on its contract.
• I don’t have to wrangle subcontractors and find ways to pay them.
• I don’t have to do business with the government; I am the government.

How is it better than editing a city magazine?

• It offers a health insurance plan.
• It offers a retirement plan.
• Overtime is paid in cash, not in comp time (which you can’t eat)
• Little or no overtime is required—no overnighters!!
• The content of what we read is more sophisticated.
• I never have to rewrite contributors’ bad copy.
• I never write frothy little feature articles.
• It is amazingly better paid.

How is it better than editing a large regional magazine?

• What we read is far more challenging.
• I never have to rewrite contributors’ bad copy.
• The economic model is different and exerts less pressure on editors.

How is it better than teaching?

• It demands no unpaid overtime.
• I never have to try to make constructive comments on badly written copy carelessly slopped together at the last minute.
• It does not entail dealing with the public.
• Even quasiadministrative jobs get lots, lots more respect within the institution than do faculty jobs.
• Pay is significantly better.
• The service we perform is appreciated by the people we work with.

I do think it is the ideal job for me and feel very fortunate to have landed it. For a person who wants to take undergraduate and advanced degrees in an academic subject and then get a decent job, a seat at the copyeditor’s desk is perfect: it’s interesting work, it pays better than teaching, and it can take you to any part of the world you choose.

by V.H.