The Concierge (Blog)

This is the season where goals are on people’s minds, mine included. That said, it’s perfectly fair if your primary goal is “I would like not to be so exhausted by external circumstances in 2022” but sometimes it can be energizing to make a little pile of things that are under your control and do…

Editors sometimes focus on selling services (“I copyedit fiction, particularly genre fiction like romance and mystery”) and there’s nothing wrong with that if your clients know what you mean. For example, if you’re pitching book publishers or packagers, they don’t need to be told that copyediting includes making sure a manuscript adheres to house style….

Editors who are just starting out or who are moving in new directions usually have an idea in mind of the work they want to do. Often this starts out as a very broad concept: they want to help novelists write better stories. Then they realize this is too broad – where do you find…

I’ve taught adult learners for over twenty years and I’ve devoted considerable time to thinking about and exploring what goes into effective instruction. One of the challenges with teaching is that just because you’re good at a particular skill—whether it’s basketball or oil painting—that doesn’t mean you automatically know how to convey the information effectively….

For editors interested in getting freelance work from book publishers and packagers, a crucial resource is your colleagues. I don’t mean you should pester random acquaintances to ask their publisher clients to hire you. I do mean you should: Ask what they did to land their first publisher/packager client. While a freelance editor is probably…

Editors marketing their services often hear a lot of guidance about getting clients, some of it . . . well, let’s call it naïve. Just the other day I came across a LinkedIn post on how your first year in business you should give everything away for free and only after that should you start…

To get better at developmental editing you have to do developmental editing! But it’s not always easy to figure out how to go about that. Previously I’ve talked about being a beta reader as a way to gain practice as a DE. And, the self-paced Naked Editing class allows you to follow along as an…

People with a growth-oriented mindset are happier and more successful than people with a fixed mindset (see Carol S. Dweck’s Mindset, among others). Growth versus Fixed Mindset People with a growth mindset are those who think they can learn and grow through hard work, persistence, and thoughtful feedback. A fixed mindset assumes that people are…

A while back I took a class on the algebra of symmetries and it turned out to be taught by a philosopher masquerading as a mathematics professor. Algebra, he told us, comes from the word al-jabr, which means restoration by balancing. “Restoring the unknown,” the teacher said. He went on to talk about how having…