Going Solo: Creating your freelance editorial business

1| Introduction

This guide focuses on setting up and running your business. It assumes that you have already trained in the core editorial skills, or that you are taking care of obtaining the training you need. It is strongly recommended that you do train, although this guide can’t, for reasons of space, go into detail on what to train in and where to source it. Check the CIEP website if you’re looking for direction on training.

As everyone will have reached this point in their career in their own way, guidance can only be general. You may need to take formal advice on money matters, for example, tailored to your current circumstances. Tax is dictated not just by your new freelance business, but by all your sources of income and your personal situation.

This second edition of Going Solo is written as the world struggles to come to terms with the Covid-19 pandemic, and the UK enters recession. Much is expected to change, and quickly, as the UK government tries to steer the country to recovery, to negotiate the end of the Brexit transition phase and to refill its coffers. Rather than scatter caveats throughout about ‘different arrangements under pandemic conditions’ for events that would usually take place face to face in happier times, it is hoped that this guide will outlast the pandemic and it is phrased accordingly.

At the time of writing, the UK is also facing changes to employment status under IR35, due in April 2021; more frequent, and online, tax record-keeping and returns under Making Tax Digital (MTD), due in April 2023 for income tax (and April 2022 for all businesses registered for VAT); and the impact of the end of the Brexit transition is still to be revealed (from 1 January 2021).

The guide is necessarily heavily oriented towards the situation in the UK – the CIEP is based in the UK, although with an international reach and outlook; readers in other countries will need to find out the appropriate business, legal and tax arrangements required for their own location, but there should be enough pointers here towards the things you’ll need to investigate in your own countries.

New for this edition, supplementary information, such as current tax rates and worked examples, is now available to CIEP members on the CIEP website, where content can be updated far more easily for fast-moving changes.

Even so, this edition is quite a bit longer than the previous incarnation, so if you’re thinking about going solo with your own editorial business, or have recently got going, it will still help guide you through the things you’ll need to consider as you set up your enterprise. As space is limited, there are lots of references to websites and other resources for you to gain fuller information. Here, I can only point you in the direction of the things you need to know about, to try to help you avoid the ‘unknown unknowns’.

2| Basics

Business planning

Being a freelance editor or proofreader isn’t all about sitting quietly reading brand new books before publication and being Oscar Wilde, taking all morning to remove a comma and spending all afternoon putting it back. It is, however, about running a business, so your business skills will be as important to your success as your editorial skills – perhaps even more so.

Everyone going into business needs a business plan.¹ Setting up your own editorial business means that you have to think through a whole bunch of questions – and a business plan is how you can record your lists of questions, your musings and your decisions, tightening it as you obtain answers and choose your direction. The document needn’t be formal – you’re unlikely to be applying for large business loans for plant and machinery, after all – but it does need to focus your thoughts. Thinking things through, testing out ideas while they are still ideas, trying out different approaches – all these will save you time and money when you do start to take practical steps to launch your business. Time spent thinking, and investigating, and planning, is never wasted.

I’m going to assume that you have, or are in the process of acquiring, strong editorial skills. So – what services will you offer? And to whom? The great thing about being freelance is that you choose. If you have a publishing background, you’ll be able to use your contacts to find work, and will have a track record in a particular publishing niche that you can point to in your CV and marketing. If you’re new to the publishing world – for example if this is a second career, or you have just left university – you may have skills from your old job or your course that you can reapply in your own business (and can point to in your CV and marketing, too).

Think like a business. Act like a business. Be a business. Right from day one; in fact, from the day you decide to get into editing/proofreading. Have a business plan, and a marketing plan, no matter how basic.

Janet MacMillan

Make no mistake, you’re a business owner with obligations that HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) will expect you to understand. So, in developing your plan, you will work out who your clients are, where you’ll find them, what you want to do for them, how you’re going to abide by the law, how you’re going to establish yourself in your new career, how you’re going to continue to nurture your skills and expertise and how you’re going to look after your own wellbeing while doing so.

So – dive in.

Ask yourself:

1. What services will I offer?

Are you a copyeditor? A proofreader? A developmental editor? Two of these? All three? Have you been a project manager? Do you also index? Do you already have a publishing niche? Do you have any prior expertise? Were you in medicine or in law, or were you a teacher or an academic? Do you want to continue to use that expertise, or are you looking for a complete break? Received wisdom says that people with a distinct area of expertise will find work more readily in that field and may well find it pays better.

2. Am I a specialist or a generalist?

Is your specialism by subject matter or by skill? What kind of demand is there for your specialism? What kind of competition is there from people offering similar skills and knowledge? Do you get bored working in one area all the time? Would you enjoy chopping and changing between varied subject matter and exercising different skills? Some people specialise – others deliberately don’t. It will help you to plan if you think about how you would like to work. You get to design the business you actually want to work in, but do be realistic about how you’re going to get there. You may have to take some intermediate steps to get to where you want to be