So you want an editorial career? Transferable skills and new ones

It’s fair to say that a lot of editors and proofreaders come to the job as a second career. And that’s great – it means you have transferable skills (which I wrote about many moons ago). But it also means you have to learn new skills. There’s a great deal more to copyediting, proofreading and other editorial skills (manuscript critique, structural and developmental editing, and the new kid on the block, line editing) than ‘spotting typos’ on menus or in published books.

What really grates on me is people claiming to be an editor when they have no training, because it’s their ‘side hustle’ <shudders> Well, it’s true, editing is an unregulated career. Anyone at all can call themselves an editor or a proofreader, without any kind of training or experience beyond reading their friends’ essays in college and maybe ‘loving language’ – maybe not even with that! I’ve seen too many articles in the media suggest that editing is easy money with no investment required in skills acquisition. It makes me very cross indeed!

What do you need to be an editor?

I’m going to wrap all kinds of working with words into the term ‘editor’, so as not to be too annoying to read. I wrote about the different kinds of roles in an earlier post The 5 Kinds of Editing (which has a downloadable infographic) if you want more detail.

So – what do you need?

1          You need to know what you’re doing. That requires training, not relying on instinct. And that training will differ according to what kind of editor you want to be. I’m a copyeditor. I’ve had basic training in proofreading just so I know what goes on there, and what the proofreader needs from me. But I don’t work as a proofreader – I’ve invested nowhere near enough effort in learning the rather technical skills required.

2          You need to keep your ear to the ground for changes to the language and not get hung up on zombie rules. On various editorial forums, you can tell the editors with a tin ear. Editors often post sentences they’re struggling with and ask for suggestions on how best to fix them. The number of times I’ve seen an editor propose a rewrite that completely changes the rhythm of that sentence and rides roughshod over the author’s voice is… disturbing.

3          You need excellent people skills. Here’s room for some of those transferable skills from an earlier career. If you’re freelancing, you need to be able to provide excellent customer relations or your clients won’t be bringing you repeat business, no matter how brilliant your actual work. If you’re working in-house, then you’ll have colleagues and authors to work with.

4          You need – if you’re freelancing – to be able to run your business as a business. That means not being afraid of numbers, or spreadsheets, and being detail oriented beyond the words you’ve been hired to edit. It means keeping up to date with the legal requirements for running a business where you live. In the UK, we have Making Tax Digital for income tax coming up soon, for instance, that will require thousands of small businesses and freelancers to make large changes to their record-keeping.

5          You need excellent time management – more room here for your transferable skills. Missing a deadline is bad enough – but if you can’t manage your time and mess up often, that will be fatal to your new-found career.

Sources of training for editors

Get your training in the variety of English you’re going to be working with (and if you want to offer more than one variety of English, get training in the other, too). It goes without saying that if you’re editing in other languages, get your editorial training delivered in those, because publishing norms differ from country to country.

And get reputable training. You’re not going to get solid training for a career from one of those online colleges offering a gazillion topics at bargain basement prices. Sure, they may help people to write a bit better, as a student or at work, and they may help such people to look at their own writing with a more critical eye. But few of the courses I’ve taken a look at talk about preparing text for publication, for instance. That’s bread-and-butter work – and so many courses don’t even mention it!

In the UK, your first port of call should be the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading (CIEP) (and if you’re at all serious about a career in editing, join the Institute and get a healthy reduction on the cost of your training as well as plenty of guidance about launching your career).

In the US, there’s ACES and in Canada, Editors Canada / Réviseurs Canada. In Australia and New Zealand Aotearoa there’s the Institute of Professional Editors (IPEd), and in South Africa the Professional Editors Guild (PEG). Some of these offer graded membership and/or certifications. This is great, as you can advance your training and experience, and demonstrate to prospective clients that you’re the real deal and not an untrained side-hustler who occasionally spots a typo and refuses to split an infinitive. All offer training.

There are many more editorial organisations you can join for community, support and, often, more training. Some focus on a particular niche – romance editing, fiction editing and so on – and others on location, such as the Editors’ and Proofreaders’ Alliance of Northern Ireland (EPANI) and the Association of Freelance Editors, Proofreaders and Indexers of Ireland (AFEPI Ireland). But the ones I’ve already given here are the big hitters in their country.

Also in the British Isles, Publishing Scotland and Publishing Ireland offer good training, as does the Publishing Training Centre in London. So much training is available online now that your location rarely matters.

If you’re interested in indexing, in the UK, you’ll want the Society of Indexers, in Canada, the Indexing Society of Canada / Société canadienne d’indexation (ISC/SCI) and in the US, the American Society for Indexing, in Australia and New Zealand Aotearoa the Australian and New Zealand Society of Indexers (ANZSI), and in South Africa it’s the Association of Southern African Indexers and Bibliographers (ASAIB).

Around the world, some universities offer extension courses in editorial skills – do your homework on how practical they are. Ideally you want tutored training with marked assignments and feedback.

Continuing professional development

For editors who are serious about their careers, CPD is essential. In fact, the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading requires applicants for their highest grade, Advanced Professional member, to demonstrate commitment to CPD. (And yes, I’m an Advanced Professional member.)

Things change – language changes, tools change, the publishing world changes. If you’re freelancing alone (as so many of us are), you can get stuck in your own little way of doing things and get into bad habits, without realising. Keeping your training up to date and your outlook fresh, and being curious about developments in your field, will help you give a much better service to your clients, and keep your business healthy.

Transferable skills

I’ve already talked about these, and indicated where they come into play most readily. But no matter when you become an editor, you’ve had a life beforehand: knowledge, education, experience.

I see newbie editors sometimes going all rabbit-in-the-headlights, convinced they know nothing and afraid of actually getting going, preferring to take yet another course instead. To avoid this earliest appearance of imposter syndrome, take inventory of what you bring to your new career.

Let’s start with your old career! Maybe this is the jumping off point for your new one. Just two days ago, as I write this, I was talking to an editor who started her business just over a year ago. She came from a highly specialised and rapidly growing technical field, and her instinct was that there was room in that field for an insider-editor. She was thrilled to be telling us that she’d been right – she’s booked up solid for the next four months and already has people asking to work with her beyond that. There was a real, untapped demand.

Some people, mind you (and I was one of these), want to put as much distance between their old career and their new one as possible. But if you haven’t totally fallen out with your previous life, it can be a real help to your new career. And once you’re established, you can move your business in the direction you want to go.

What about time management? So much earlier life experience can teach you the value of that. Move forward with confidence that you will be able to juggle the demands of your new career using this transferable skill – and you’ll know what you need to think about in order to make sure you have enough time to give to training and working.

Great people skills can come from many places – retail, management, volunteering, family life and so on. Many editors turn to this career because they can fit it in with family commitments, as freelancing can be so flexible. And that’s true. In this case, you’ll come ready-made with time management and people skills!

And what about hobbies? Like an earlier career, a hobby you’re really knowledgeable about can be your in to an editing career.

You’ll also need to be a self-starter, with initiative and discipline. And, of course, a freelancer is all the departments of a company all by themselves. If you don’t have excellent Word skills (Microsoft Word is the pre-eminent program in the editorial world, especially if you work for publishers or packagers) and decent IT ones, able to handle security, file management and so on, you’ll run into problems – do you need to undertake training in these areas?

However, if in your old career you struggled with these things, being freelance will amplify the problems, not miraculously cure them.

So think through all you’ve done and been, and make a list of what you bring with you. Then think about what else you need – aside from learning how to edit, perhaps you need to read up on running a business in your own country. See what information the tax authorities provide to the newly self-employed. Scour the websites of licensing authorities, if your country requires you have a licence to trade. Join a local association for small businesses, if only for a short while, to find out what it is you don’t know you don’t know. Maybe you finally need to get to grips with the softer skills.

And now, a small plug. My own guide, written for the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading, Going Solo: Creating your freelance editorial business, is free to CIEP members (download in the members’ area of the CIEP website) but is now also available to buy on Amazon. (Proceeds go to the CIEP, not to me!) The guide is intended to help you navigate through setting up as a freelance editor. Apart from the tax and business requirements bits, it should apply across most countries.