How to successfully start off your career as a freelance editor
Your fingers tingle when you see a typo in a restaurant menu and you bite your tongue when your friend asks if you can borrow her that pencil. Welcome to the (sometimes unpopular) club of language nerds. If you find it easy to immerse yourself in a text for hours, you know grammar rules by heart, and you enjoy working by yourself, you tick the first boxes for a successful career as a freelance editor.
Editing and proofreading are diverse fields that you can find your way into by many different paths. In this article, I will guide you through some important questions to set yourself up for success in your new career as a freelance editor.
What are the qualifications I need as an editor?
Anybody can be an editor or proofreader. There is no universally accepted certificate — in fact, a lot of excellent editors are self-taught. While some companies might ask for a degree in fields such as literature, linguistics, or journalism, others focus more on your work experience. At Scribbr, any native speaker with a bachelor’s degree and a passion for language can apply to be an editor.
How do I develop my skills?
As there is no standardized path to becoming an editor, your professional knowledge and development lies completely in your hands. You can choose to invest in formal training offered by institutions and societies (e.g. SfEP), or you can look for on-the-job training and coaching programmes where you get paid while learning, such as the Scribbr Academy.
Regardless of your training and education, a curious mindset and a dedication to professional development are indispensable for any freelancer. Something that should be glued to every editor’s hands (or to their bookmark page) are reliable reference materials (e.g. AP stylebook for the English language or the Duden for German editors).
What do I specialize in?
Editing is a competitive market, and the task itself can differ significantly depending on the industry, so it’s a good idea to become an expert in a specific type of text. If you learn the jargon, conventions and standards of one industry, you can offer a valuable specialized service to your clients, rather than spreading yourself thin and offering average services in everything.
When you’re deciding what field to specialize in, ask yourself not only what type of text you want to edit, but also how you want to work. Academic editors at Scribbr work independently on their own short-term projects, with each job taking anywhere from a few hours to a few days. Editors in book publishing, on the other hand, often work closely with a team on big projects that can stretch over many months.
How do I present myself to clients?
Once you feel confident in your skills and your specialization, it’s time to promote your services and win your first clients. As a freelancer, you’ll have to create a spotless CV and a convincing web presence if you want to win exciting projects.
Besides describing what services you offer and showcasing some references or a sample, you shouldn’t shy away from adding a personal touch to your online presence. In the end, you’re not just an editing machine — clients want to work with someone who they like as a person.
What tools and tech do I need?
If you start your editing career with a full bank account and a good portion of faith, you could invest in a remote work setup complete with laptop stand, noise cancelling headphones, or even two monitors (you’ll never recover from this luxury once you’ve tried it). But if you don’t, the good news is that the only tool you really need is your laptop.
Besides that, there’s an endless array of tools to help you with your bookkeeping, time management, and document organization to avoid losing hours of work. Although you’ll still have to do the editing work yourself, it’s worth looking into practical aides like Word Macros and Autocorrect, as well as proofreading software like PerfectIt.
Needless to say, there is no one-size-fits-all setup. Working as a freelance editor gives you a lot of freedom, and I can only recommend you take advantage of that and discover how you work best — whether that’s a matter of your working schedule, location, or the tools that help you the most.
How do I get in contact with other freelance editors?
When starting out as a freelancer, you’ll have to be prepared to work by yourself. For a lot of us, that’s actually a selling point of a freelance career. But we all need social connections, and with no colleagues to ask tricky questions and commiserate with, it’s worth investing the effort to meet other freelancers and editors. You can choose to meet people in person in coworking spaces or at local meetups, or join online communities for your industry (you can find out more about online communities in this article I wrote).
Not only will this help you avoid social isolation in your career; talking to other editors can also expand your knowledge about editing and the industry as a whole. If you truly want to succeed as an editor, you’ll have to stay up to date in your profession. Editing is a competitive field that requires drive and resilience, but there are many experienced, supportive colleagues out there to guide you and help you build your business. One of them is our senior editor Shane:
Advice from Scribbr’s senior editor
My start as a freelance editor was slower than necessary, beginning with writing tutoring at my university’s writing centre and marking for various university courses, plus taking some writing and editing courses on my own. From those experiences, I made a few connections and was asked to do some odd jobs, which helped me get comfortable with working on people’s texts as a freelancer. A few years later — after my MA in English Lit. — when I started trying to make a go of freelance editing as my sole source of income, I still felt poorly equipped to deal with the myriad conventions editors have to navigate, so I bought a few books and read them. Once I felt comfortable enough to at least know where to find the information that might apply in a given edit, I started editing — very slowly and too meticulously. Over time, I’ve tried to streamline the editing process with tricks like auto-correct commenting and Ctrl+F exploits, and I’ve also tried to identify things that I used to do in edits that did not provide obvious value to the author or reader. I still try to focus quite a lot on mechanical details and small things, but I’m less apt to revise sentence structures just to suit my tastes, for example.
I guess I have three main tips that might be useful to people starting out, helping them to take a shorter path than I did to profitable and consistent freelancing.
(i) What an editor likes isn’t always what an author or reader needs. Try to ditch what are merely your preferences (we’ve all got them, mere preferences), and stick to the necessary work; there will be enough of that to keep you amply busy.
(ii) A brief digression: I was once a very slow treeplanter (still am, I’m sure). I often thought about how slow I was; I would plant 1,200 trees in the same day that a friend of mine, call him “Jeffy,” would plant 2,500. Jeffy explained that to an outsider, it would look like we two were doing the exact same thing (step, dig, plant, step…) and at similar speeds. The difference was that Jeffy thought about every motion he made, and he took pains to eliminate every possible inefficiency in his movement; he also customized his tools (e.g., got comfortable boots, shortened his shovel). My contemplation of the job was limited to “step, dig, plant.” When I realized his philosophy could apply in the editing world, my editing life became much easier (and my work, more efficient). The small inefficiencies (e.g., hand to mouse) together make a big difference, and taking the time upfront to set up good editing tools (e.g., macros or auto-correct comments) yields exponential long-term gains.
(iii) Read some books of (descriptive and preferably not prescriptive) grammar and about editing, and buy one prominent style guide (e.g., Chicago). The internet is fast and easy, but it’s inconsistent and often enough dogmatic; plus, vetting internet sources can be difficult. A well-regarded book comes pre-vetted and has an index. I save a lot of head-scratching just having a few books on hand. Good writing guides save time, afford confidence, and have more authority than someone’s blog when you need to explain a convention to an author who might prefer not to hear it.
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