A Day in the Life of a Freelancer

I am a freelance copy-editor working miles away from London. I don’t just copy-edit though. I proofread, anglicise from US English to UK English – useful for children’s fiction buy-ins where the publisher is buying in a US title – and sometimes I act as a literary consultant and appraise manuscripts for writers looking for a literary agent or wanting to self-publish. Outside of work, I write poetry. I have a first pamphlet published by a small press and I am working towards a second collection. Basically, my life is all about words.

How did I get into freelancing? It started in house. Back in the day, I worked in London for some of the big book publishing houses, where I learnt both my editorial craft and how publishing schedules run, how the production team liaise with editorial, marketing, design, et cetera.

And now I get to plan my own days. Or that’s the theory anyway! Let’s look at a Monday in July – typically a quieter month, although, like the weather, this hasn’t been a typical year …

Today, I have been sent a large file in the form of a PDF. It’s 5 MB in size as it contains dropped-in-place full-colour illustrations. It’s a young fiction title in the first of a new series. Because of its size, I’ll be returning the file using WeTransfer, but for now I’m working in Adobe.

This one is part copy-edit, part anglicisation. The author wrote the book in Spanish, and it has been translated into US English. Apparently, there are some jokes that haven’t translated very well which I will need to suggest alternatives for – yikes! I’m doing a line edit for punctuation, spellings, American phrasing, American prepositions and anything else that just feels out of reach for a UK child of the reading age. If I mark up anything which isn’t obvious as a ‘Query’, the editor will make a call on it.

The text is fun, and the illustrations are gorgeous, but there are many changes to get everything just right. And I have a few queries with suggestions for the editor. I’ve also kept a close eye on the artworks and have pointed out that the story has our main character leaving her house wearing different, mismatching shoes, whereas the illustration for this shows her wearing matching shoes. It’s going to be up to the editor and the designer to decide what to do with this! Perhaps they can recolour one of the trainers rather than have the illustrator redo the artwork? The job takes me eight and a half hours, so I end up finishing it the next day; it’s always good to revisit a text with fresh eyes for that second read-through, polishing the copy-edit, so spreading a job out over more than one day works for me.

As a freelancer, I’m hyper-aware of what I’m invoicing for, so one of today’s short but important tasks is to invoice for a piece of work I returned at the end of the previous week. I make out my invoice to the editor in question – in this case the Head of Production at an academic publisher whose titles are centred on social, political and cultural discussions. This one was about Silicon Valley. It’s good to have a breadth of reading matter.

Because I’ve now gone online, I decide to faff around on LinkedIn for a bit. It’s a site that doesn’t seem built for freelancers so much as those on a payroll, but it does give an insight into what everyone else is doing, which can feel like an unknown when you’re both freelancing and working from home. I congratulate an editor on her ‘rising star’ industry award. I’ve known her for years and she has worked on some of the best fiction in translation, so it feels right to see her officially lauded for this.

Seeing this post reminds me that I’m due to run out of commissions in ten days’ time, so I quickly dash off an ‘Available for Work’ email to two editors at a company I haven’t had anything from in a while. You never know, and they will keep me in mind even if there is nothing on the horizon.

It’s nearly the end of my day but I want to be fully prepped for what I’m starting first thing in the morning. I reread the emails from the commissioning editor, study the attached style sheet and review the house style sheet for that publisher. Tonight, I just need to make initial contact with the author, introduce myself as their copy-editor and let them know what date I’m going to be sending them the copy-edited manuscript, with attached queries. Also, how long they will have – and this might be negotiable, especially if they are away – to return their comments to me. Working with talented authors is always inspiring, and I get a lot of satisfaction in helping them perfect their books ready for production.

Sarah Taylor-Fergusson worked in-house at several of the UK’s leading publishers before going freelance in 2006. You can connect with her on LinkedIn.