Sometimes you might move into a new editorial field in a leisurely fashion – a new topic here, a new bit of learning there. At other times, you might want to grab your business by the footnotes and drag it bodily into a whole new arena. These five tips – from an editor who’s successfully moved from academic to charity and business editing – will help you chart your path.
One of the best things about freelancing is that you have full freedom to evolve your business however you see fit. Moving into a new editorial field is one such potential evolution, and it can be done slowly or at speed.
I’ve had a go at both. After I started out in 2009, for several years I worked almost exclusively on academic content. Over time, I gradually accepted more work in other fields, such as a charity magazine and books on business and digital topics – but this happened naturally and without any particular drive towards change. Later, a strategic review of my business led to a new focus, and this prompted me to much more decisively pivot in the charity/business direction.
This post looks at moving into a new editorial field both strategically and psychologically (hello, impostor syndrome!). Whatever your starting point and wherever you want to end up, purposeful preparation and a good dose of realism can help you move forward with confidence. Whether you do so circumspectly or decisively is up to you!
1. Use what you already know
The charity magazine I proofread during my slow evolution phase was the membership magazine of what is now the Royal Osteoporosis Society. I also sometimes proofread some of the charity’s materials aimed at practitioners in the field (researchers, doctors, radiographers, etc).
As a humanities graduate whose formal scientific education ended at age 16, I arguably wasn’t the best placed to work on such material. However, I was able to demonstrate familiarity with scientific concepts, terminology and editorial practices through the social sciences and psychiatry texts I’d ended up editing for my academic clients (which in itself demonstrates an earlier slow evolution, from humanities onto the edges of the sciences). I also have a strong personal interest in nutrition and fitness, which came in very handy when proofreading diet and exercise advice for people with osteoporosis.
The key thing is to know your limits. Had I been offered intensive scientific copyediting, I would definitely have turned it down. However, I felt quite confident proofreading expert-approved text. And, in fact, my relative ignorance sometimes came in useful, making it easier for me to see things from the perspective of the reader (potentially a person newly diagnosed with osteoporosis and with very little idea of what this meant).
2. Understand your role in the relationship
Sometimes moving fields means working with a whole different type of client. It’s therefore important to understand how clients in your new field will expect the business relationship to work.
For example, taking two extremes from my career, there are big differences between working with academic packagers and working with businesses. In the first case, the packager usually sets the terms and fees and establishes the standard of work required. They generally have a good understanding of how publishing works, and there often isn’t a great deal of client management needed beyond keeping up to date with the client’s evolving specifications and submitting and chasing invoices.
In the second case, you’re typically much more in the driving seat. The client may have very stringent editorial standards. However, they may also know comparatively little about how to actually achieve those standards. There is also more of a need to manage the relationship through onboarding, terms and conditions, and ongoing negotiation of fees.
Some of what’s expected you’ll only find out after you begin a working relationship with a specific client. However, the next tip may help you to get some clues about the field in general…
3. Know their world and speak their language
If you’re brand new or a relative outsider to the field you want to move into, there’s a world of nuance that you won’t understand (yet). You’ll need to learn all the specialist terminology – and then when and for which audiences it should be used (versus when the audience will deem it unhelpful jargon).
To this end, it can be helpful to find industry-specific blogs and follow relevant people on social media – both practitioners (i.e. potential clients) and other editors who already work in your desired field. Pay attention to the words they use and how they talk about concepts. Read the kinds of publication you aspire to work on. You can also pick up relevant books, attend webinars and industry conferences, and consider getting a new qualification or two. Once you start working in your new field, you might also want to add a bit of padding into your schedules where possible, to enable you to read around topics with which you’re less familiar.
Another crucial place where you need to know your potential clients’ world is in your marketing. Use what you’ve learned from your research and up-skilling to speak their language (on social media or wherever you do your marketing), so that you’re identifying their pain points and showing how you can help.
4. Be prepared to be flexible – and don’t expect it to be quick
Ideally, opportunities in your new field will arrive exactly when you have time for them. Naturally, though, sod’s law means your dream client is going to send you an enquiry for work needing to be done tomorrow when you’re already booked solid for the next four weeks.
So, what do you do? You might choose to do the extra hours, especially if the new work might turn into a long-term collaboration or the fee is especially enticing. Alternatively, you might turn down this particular offer but thenceforth be more proactive, using the fact that your ideal clients are finding you as a confidence-booster to encourage you to step back from one or two of your old clients to make space for new opportunities.
Or you might do a bit of both. The right option will depend on your circumstances and other commitments. If you choose to dial down your current workload, it’s obviously important to ensure you have enough cashflow to tide you over if the enquiries don’t come flooding in as quickly as you hope. Also consider having other productive activities on hand so you’re not left twiddling your thumbs if work is sparse. For example, perhaps there’s a time-consuming chunk of CPD (continuing professional development) you’ve been wanting to do for a while, or maybe you’ve identified the need for a big business development project (such as an update to your website).
The transition may take time – even once you fully commit to it – so take care not to burn bridges before you can see the path forward.
5. Remember that you don’t need to be overqualified, just qualified
As Harvard Business Review says: ‘It is important… to have at least some of the skills a job requires up front. But nobody should limit themselves only to positions for which they are already overqualified.’ (The article is about employed positions but the ideas apply to freelancing too.)
Obviously, it’s crucial not to over-sell your skills to your potential clients. Aside from this being a bad idea ethically, you may set yourself up for a world of stress if it turns out the project is further outside your capabilities than you thought.
But it’s easy to hold yourself back from new opportunities, imagining that everyone else is ten times more qualified than you or has a career’s worth of relevant experience. We in the editorial world aren’t known for brash boastfulness. If anything, we’re more likely to talk our skills down than talk them up. Because we tend to be extremely conscientious, we want to feel our clients are getting the best editor for the job – even if that isn’t us.
However, this reticence around recognizing our own worth can go too far. And it’s particularly easy to fall into the trap when we know, objectively, that we have less experience in a field than others who are more established within it. This knowledge – objectively true but potentially missing the big picture – can put up what seem like impenetrable mental barriers to moving forward.
So what can we do in these circumstances?
The answer is to flip the script. Each time you think of a reason you aren’t qualified to move into your desired field, try to counter it with a strength you bring. For example:
- Perhaps you’re particularly good at working accurately to tight deadlines. A client with time-sensitive publications could value your input more than that of another editor who knows the client’s industry inside out but gets flustered by scheduling pressure.
- Maybe you pride yourself on holding clients’ hands through the editing process in a way that a more technically focused editor wouldn’t.
- Perhaps you’re lightning-hot with the client’s preferred style guide, meaning you’ll have plenty of brain space to devote to quickly learning about their topic.
Clients want different things. Identify your strengths and highlight them in your marketing, so clients who value those strengths can find you.
And remember that you’re not (yet) looking to be the best in your new field – just competent enough to offer your clients a sound, professional service that you can build on in the future.
Stay responsive and use your imagination
Whether you move into your new field cautiously or with a bang, the overall theme here is flexibility. Successfully moving to a new field is about using what you know but being ready to adapt your approach and mindset to a whole new arena, without making assumptions. If you can do that responsively and with imagination, putting yourself in the shoes of your new client and their readership, you’re unlikely to go far wrong.
This is an edited version of a post originally published on the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading blog as ‘Five tips for moving into a new editorial field’.
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