My Farewell Column to Bill Shipp

http://blogs.ajc.com/political-insider-jim-galloway/2009/05/19/bill-shipp-types-30/ (Beware the inevitable troll-like comments.)

http://www.blogfordemocracy.org/poli/2009/05/farewell-bill.html
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Bill Shipp came into my life personally in the last quarter of his career, and in the early to middle stages of mine. As a freelance copyeditor and proofreader working for almost all of Atlanta’s business and political periodicals in the mid-1990s, I received a call one day in 1997 from Tim Bentley, another great and unfortunately late-too-soon Georgia political journalist, saying he’d heard Bill Shipp needed an editor, and could he pass my name along?

Me? Work for Bill Shipp? Pinch me, I’m dreaming. Having lived in Atlanta since 1977, I was more than familiar with Mr. Shipp’s work. (And I called him “Mr. Shipp” for years before he invited me to call him “Bill.” I was just raised to talk to my elders that way, especially one as esteemed as he was, yet I know he didn’t stand on formality. That’s just how it went.)

So I’m sitting in the DeKalb County Public Library near Northlake one day, and my pager went off. I found a public telephone (remember those?) and dialed the number. Bill Shipp’s number.

“Bob, I heard about you. My editor just quit, and I need someone to read my columns and newsletter. I don’t want just someone to check grammar. I need someone who will tell me when I’m off-base and tear up my writing when it needs it. Can you do that for me?”

Pinch me.

Off we went. Via fax and e-mail. The very occasional phone conversation. For 12 years. I worked with him anywhere from two to four days a week, 15 to 60 minutes at a time. I believe I met him face to face exactly three times: twice very early on in the parking lot of Channel 5 when I was working on his book The Ape-Slayer and Other Snapshots and once with my wife Tere and his daughter Michelle about two or three years ago at a restaurant in Kennesaw.

My life for the last 12 years has been the steady drumbeat of Sundays and Thursdays, editing his columns before they were distributed to his syndicate. And Bill Shipp’s Georgia before it became Matt Towery’s property. And his columns for Georgia Trend. And the every-so-often special-occasion piece.

When I started using a laptop, I’d take it with me, mostly so I didn’t have to miss a column if I was traveling somewhere. If I didn’t get the column, I’d write to his assistants over the years, concerned that I’d missed something or, later, concerned about him.

Bill was a unique writer in that he had absolutely no fear of the editing process. Just the opposite. Some years ago, if I went for, say, 4 weeks without bleeding all over one of his columns — in some cases rewriting or trying in my own clumsy prose to say what I thought he was trying to say or even should have said — he’d call me up and give me a hard time.

“I’m not paying you just to pass over these columns. You need to tear them up more often than you have been. I know they need it.”

But they often didn’t. So what’s a poor editor to do, given good material?

Bill’s political leanings were hardly concealed. And in the days after the Republicans took over Georgia, his voice became more noticeable. Every once in a while, he’d pen some piece that seemed a little too moderate, too conciliatory. I’d email him and ask what was up? His response: “I’ve got to write one of those every so often so my newspaper editors don’t think I’m a communist.”

Then the email hits my account today that Bill is hanging it up. Effective immediately.

I want closure, a different kind anyway. I want a farewell column. I want the dean of Georgia’s journalists to give one last wave to the first rumblings of integration in Athens while he was a student, Billy Graham, Zell Miller, his dear departed son Ernie and wife Reny, Jimmy Carter, Ernest Vandiver, Tom Watson Brown, Lester Maddox, Romeo Richardson, the AJC, the Talmadges, Roy Barnes, Mike Bowers, Tom Murphy and a hundred others. Even Sonny Perdue. I want the perspective of history. I live in Virginia now, but Georgia still feels very much like home, and a big reason for that is Bill Shipp.

I’d have worked for him for free (although I don’t think I ever offered), but now I’m feeling a far greater loss than the monthly, promptly delivered check. He was no doubt my smallest regular client measured by dollars, but dollars are an entirely insufficient measure of the last 12 years.

Mr. Shipp — Bill — thanks for taking me along for the ride.

index entry of the day

Clarke, Kent

personal interlude

My work comprises, on many different levels, ongoing battles with matters theological. My life, to some extent, has gone the same way, and from a much earlier age. I'd even say the personal theological battles predated by some years my introduction to the standard canon of proofreading symbols, which occurred at about age 14.

I visited a Unity church today. Very, very interesting. And I will leave it at that.

Extension Course Correspondence

Just received the following email:

Sent: Tuesday, May 12, 2009 2:27 PM
Subject: Question

I was pleased to stumble upon your blog. After earning an M.A. in English in 1999 and being a stay-at-home mother for the last 10 years, I am contemplating taking courses through Berkeley Extension in order to become an editor. I have no prior editing experience. Do you think I'll be wasting my money ($2000 for a four-course certificate) given how difficult it seems to be to get employment in this field?
Thanks!

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My response:

Thanks for reading the blog. I hope you found something in there worthwhile.

I'm not sure that it's impossible to get employment in this field, although times are tough all over. But with improvements in self-publishing and the huge amount of website content that companies must have written, I'd say a lot more is being written and published these days than 10 years ago. It's a matter of finding people and companies that recognize the value of editing.

With an M.A. in English, you presumably have pretty good editorial skills already (which I can also see from your email). I'd be curious about the course content. Would they be reviewing style manuals, editing for different types of publications, marketing . . . or just reinforcing what you already know about where the commas go and when you should use semicolons?

Here's a question to ask yourself: Do you think potential employers would be any more likely to hire you seeing that you've taken an extension course in editing? There are a lot of laid-off editors out there with experience. And $2000 is a lot of money.

Not knowing any more about your background than what you've told me here, and not knowing what part of the country you're in -- particularly whether you're near a big city, where the need for editors is always greater -- my guess would be that if you spent the time you'd take in completing the course in trying to develop contacts for whom you could apply your editing skills, you'd probably end up with clients quicker just by putting your thinking cap on and being really creative in considering who you can hawk your skills to than by taking the course.

Because even after you've spent that $2000, you still have to find the clients. It's Step One in either case. The course would be a prelim.

Have I answered your question? And remember this is just one person's opinion. I'm sure you're not going to make the decision based on my input. Check around. Ideally you can find some people who have been through the course and see if it helped them.

Best of luck. Let me know how things turn out.

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Agree or disagree? Talk amongst yourselves.

Cognitive Decline, parts 1 and 2

Two things.

Perhaps my longest-term client, other than a former employer of mine who has used me as a freelancer since I went freelance, is a syndicated newspaper columnist. Per has been an editor and a writer since before I was born and is rather esteemed within per's own geographic niche. Suffice it to say that when you've been doing something for 50-something years you're (a) pretty good at it and (b) probably pretty well respected as a result. I think of Count Basie who, when asked about perfection, said something along the lines of, "Find something you like to do, do it well, and keep doing it for about 70 years." I guess he was talking about himself, the master of the well-timed, sparse note.

Sidetrack: Back in my younger days, I was ridiculously shy around females. I used to blame that on being educated at a boys' school for 8 years, but the problems were elsewhere -- like in the mirror and inside my own head. It took me many years to stop blaming my parents' choice of school for me for my own social backwardness. Anyway, when I was in college, the Count Basie Orchestra -- with Count Basie -- was playing at a high school about a block from my college. Ohmygod. For like six bucks. This says as much about the lack of appreciation for jazz in the late 1970s as anything else. So I get up the nerve -- and trust me, it was virtually impossible for me to do -- to ask this really cute girl in my philosophy class if she wanted to go with me to see Count Basie. I'm not sure she even knew who Count Basie was, or how amazing it was that he was going to be within walking distance of the school. She didn't give me an answer right then, but the next time the class met, I followed up and asked her if she'd decided, and she said, "No, thanks." No explanation, no apology. Needless to say, this response did not do much for my already long-cratered self-esteem. Well, I went anyway (alone), enjoyed myself, and she ended up dating the head of the college's Young Republicans chapter. Maybe she knew something I didn't.

Back to the story. So, this columnist loves it when I tear up per's work. This is what the good writer-editor relationship is about, class. Per used to give me a hard time if I went too long without essentially rewriting one of per's columns. On the first anniversary of 9/11, I told per I didn't like the column per had written. Per suggested I write one. So I did. Per submitted it to the syndicate (about 100 papers, I believe), saying that "I wrote a column for this occasion, but my editor Bob Land didn't like it. So here's what he wrote instead." That was the beginning of the column. And thus it was that I am on record during the week around 9/11/2002 essentially stating that, "Hey, guess what, folks? We're probably not going to change as a nation as a result of last year's events. We're going to end up being the same self-centered, self-absorbed jerks that we've always been. And besides that, not everyone who was killed on 9/11 was a saint. Just by the law of averages, there were probably wife beaters and child molesters among the 3,000 dead who we might as well be better off without." Per got more than a few positive reponses to that column. If per ever got any negative responses, they didn't find their way to me.

Am I back to the story yet? So, I've torn into the last three or four of per's columns pretty drastically. I receive a (very rare) call from per this morning, with per asking me very sincerely if I think per's lost the cognitive ability to continue working. Per's got some health issues, lost a spouse within the last few years, etc. Per's asking me if per still has what it takes? Who the hell am I to judge? Per's got more chops than I'd ever know what to do with. But per also respects the value of an editor who will wield a heavy hand when necessary, and per said, "If you think I can't do this anymore, let me know. I don't want to go out after my time has passed. I realize I'm not going out at my peak, but I don't want to be doing this too long either." I was humbled and honored and amazed and saddened and felt a little bit lost after the conversation. I guess I still feel that way.

Cognitive decline, part 2: My own. I've gotten into this thing lately that many days, when I wake up in the morning, if I lie in bed a little while -- not even in a half-asleep state, but pretty much awake -- I start having literal visions of the manuscript I'm working on, but the words are all wrong. The topic is right, but there are all kinds of problems with the book that don't necessarily exist in real life (that is, in the bunker, where the manuscript is residing). The words are a jumble, the language is wrong, it goes off track repeatedly. Needless to say, this doesn't provide me with any extra restful moments, so all there is to do is go downstairs and get back to work.

This hasn't happened once or twice, class. It's, like, dozens of times now. I don't know what it means, but if I had to put it into the good or bad side of the ledger, umm, I'm thinkin' bad.

Easy Pickins

Yeah, I know that pointing out typos can be amusing and fun, and I've sent out any number of pieces of correspondence and probably blog postings that have typos -- my worst was about 12 years ago, sending out a flyer referring to my editiorial services (last-minute change, forgot to spell-check: lesson learned = no more flyers) -- but I can't resist posting this gem, which I just saw on a writer's blog:

Nothing kicks a writing pro in the teeth like writing something which does not communicate what you indented.

I happened upon a blog the other day that was nothing but pointing out typos in newspapers and screen grabs . . . and then going on for hundreds of words about each of them. Boring.

Is This How Bad It's Getting?

Here's an email exchange I've had over the last few days with a fellow freelancer. I think now I've heard just about everything. You have to read all the way to the bottom for the punchline.

*****

----- Original Message -----

From:

To: landondemand@bvunet.net

Sent: Monday, April 20, 2009 9:00 PM

Subject: request

Hi, Bob, I wonder if it would be possible in the future for you to pay me 10 percent of any indexing jobs I send your way. I am paying more and more fees to people who refer work to me; that's why I ask? Would you be comfortable with that? Many thanks,

*****

From: Bob Land

Hi.

In the circles I travel in, I've never been asked to pay referral fees, nor do I ever ask for fees to be paid to me. I've referred a lot of work to typesetters/book designers, mostly, but to a few editors and writers, too, and they've referred a lot of work to me. And I think we've all just figured that what goes around will eventually come around. Referral fees have never come up.

Having said that, if you wanted to talk to me up front and ask me my indexing page rate (for a standard 6x9, one-column job, that would be $3.50), then turn around and tell the client that my rate is $3.85, I'd bill at $3.85 and send you the difference, which would be the 10 percent you are seeking. Of course, we run the risk of losing on the business because of a slightly higher rate, but that's just the risk involved.

I guess what I'm saying is, if you can sell my services at a 10 percent mark-up, I'm happy to pay you the difference. However, if anyone bothers to find me on the Internet, they'll see my rate sheet there and wonder why they are paying more than my standard rate, and then it falls back on us to explain why.

Bottom line: the idea of referral fees coming out of my basic pay rate isn't one that I'm wild about, but if we can charge it back to the client, I have no problem paying the difference to you as a finder's fee.

Thanks for asking.

Bob

*****

To: Bob Land

Sent: Tuesday, April 21, 2009 9:10 PM

Subject: Re: request

I understand 100 percent. I'll keep your idea in mind about the markup.

People who sub out to me mark up routinely and have for many years. Now, several publishers I get referrals from are asking for 10 percent and they're coming out of my normal rates.

THANKS.

*****

From: Bob Land

PUBLISHERS??? I have absolutely no response to that that I can repeat in polite company.

*****

Folks, I have publishers hook me up with authors probably 6-12 times per year for indexes. Many publishers just leave it up to authors to generate their own indexes, and the smarter authors, as I've mentioned before, stick to what they know: their area of expertise. They ask the publishers for referrals to indexers, and that's one way authors find indexers.

I cannot even imagine what my response would be to a publisher who asked for a referral fee for sending an author my way. That a publisher -- a publisher, for god's sake -- would ask for a referral fee from a freelancer? I think that falls somewhere in Merriam-Webster's 11th Collegiate under extortion. Or kickbacks? Help me out here, class. I am at a total loss for words . . . words that I would print on my blog, anyway.

Careful What You Wish For

Talk about a bummer. Don't judge a book by its summary, not when you've been given it to work on, anyway. Because work somehow turns out to be work.

A few days ago, I was pretty happy with the summary of this book I'm working on. I'm about 90 percent done with it now. Aside from those topics listed in the previous post, the book also relies heavily on Breakfast at Tiffany's, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and some other pretty cool topics.

Problem: author, with some press complicity, I feel, has managed to put into production a manuscript that still needs a hell of a lot of work.

OK, class. Today's lesson is MLA style. MLA, I believe, is the Modern Language Association, or maybe it stands for More or Less Authorlike. Because that's often what I get when I receive a manuscript that's been written according to MLA style: authors who know how to put words together but who fall down on the job when it comes to things like organization or documentation.

Case in point. In MLA style, you generally use a short in-text citation that refers to a complete list of Works Cited at the end. In the hands of a fifth-grader who knows how to follow the damn instructions, this task should be easy enough.

The sentence goes on like this and you get to the end, where the reference appears (Land 23). "Land 23" means that I am citing page 23 of the book or article by Land, which in this case happens to be titled, "Why Authors Are the Bane of the Publishing Industry." If I happened to have two items in the Works Cited and the other one was a book titled Why Can't PhDs Compile a Decent Freaking Bibliography? then the original reference would appear as (Land, "Why Authors" 23).

So, you cite a book in your chapter, you list the book in the Works Cited. Easy enough.

Except per has cited no fewer than 50 books in per's work that don't appear in the Works Cited, which means that per's gonna spend a lot of time pulling books off per's shelves and recording bibliographic information (or missing page numbers [grrrr]) before per can send this book back to me. Then I'm gonna have to copyedit all the references that my time would have been better spent copyediting on the first pass. Because half the time, they can't get the style right, either.


Other side of the coin: Works that appear in the "Works Cited" when they don't appear in the text at all. My solution is to call the damn thing a Bibliography, which might comprise Works Cited and Uncited. A lot of publishers want there to be a one-for-one correlation, though, and don't often agree to the Bibliography heading.

Another problem with this book. Per has left in the book summaries of the entire book that don't match the book's content. Here's where I blame the press, since I don't give authors much credit for the authoring they do. Why didn't someone at the press pick up on the fact that of the five chapters the author describes, not only are they all out of order, but the damn chapter on serial killers isn't even mentioned? If there's a demographic I don't want to inadvertently make mad, serial killers come at the top of the list.

(The book does bring up an interesting point about serial killers though. Just like there might be nonpracticing Jews or nonpracticing Catholics, there might also be nonpracticing serial killers out there. Now that's a comforting thought. Reminds me of an old Onion article: "Neighbors Remember Serial Killer as Serial Killer": "Oh, yeah, he was always bringing home nurses and chopping them up in the backyard. . . .")

Where was I? Oh yeah. Well, never mind. It's 2 a.m., and I'm going to try to get as close as I can to finishing the copyediting before bedtime. Then it's a full day of word processing -- mostly queries for the author. And since it's the end of the term and all the students will be going home, per's gonna have to do all the work perself. Poor, poor per.

"Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody."

"Keep your own counsel. Don't draw any conclusions from anything you see or hear."

Blind Pig Finds Acorn

How much have I complained about the subject matter of the books I read? Well, I might have a winner here. From the introduction:

The five chapters thus examine five diverse and highly distinctive narrative genres which manifest the cultural history of authenticity: the literature of adolescence [with a focus on Catcher in the Rye, for better or worse one of the basic texts of my own adolescence], the narrative discussion of depression, the serial killer genre, stories of mid-century Jewish assimilation, and the narratives of corporate manners.

Now if this book lives up to the promise of this sentence, I have a few pleasant days of reading ahead of me. If the author goes all academic and takes all the fun out of it, then fifs on per.

Can I complain? Of course I can complain. The manuscript is in 10-point Courier, 1.5 spacing; MLA style; and a gazillion references to look up in the Works Cited.

But how often do I get any of the following: Holden Caulfield, depression, serial killers, Jewish assimilation, and corporate manners? And all in the same book? Pinch me, I'm dreaming.

Proofreading? Priceless

Found this gem today on a publisher's website:

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Proofreaders are responsible for correcting grammatical and typographical errors in our books prior to publication. The ideal candidate will have the following skills and experience:

* Prior experience proofreading copy
* Excellent attention to detail
* Ability to meet tight deadlines
* Total commitment to quality
* Exceptional knowledge of grammar

Proofreaders are paid in complimentary copies of the books they proofread. For consideration, please send your resume. . . .

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Guess what? They're looking for proofreaders. Now, why would you think that is?

Who Ya Gonna Call?

I did a little cold calling (emailing) a few weeks back to some professors and department chairs at a number of universities, hawking my indexing, proofreading, and copyediting services. In response to one email, sent to a professor of religion at a quite fine northeastern liberal arts college, I received the following:

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Dear Bob,
Thank you for your message, and I will be happy to pass this information on to other colleagues in my program. I'll keep you in mind for future projects, though right now I have no present needs of proffreading services.
Best wishes,

-------------

Now, either per has a finely honed sense of humor and irony, or, well, uh . . . draw your own conclusions.

Fourth-Generation Edit

I am reminded of a great Saturday Night Live skit, which incidentally had Sean Penn doing a wonderful DeNiro impersonation, that featured Jon Lovitz as a lounge singer doing a version of "The Way We Were" as translated into French and then back into English. The transcription here is to the best of my recollection.

Memories
In the corners of my eyes
Misty autumn-colored memories
In a way we were

Scattered pictures
Scattered all around the room
It's too messy to remember
In a way we were

Can it be that it was all so simple then
Or has time rewritten every time?
And if we had the chance to smash into the wall again
Tell me, did we?
Will we?

Memories
May be beautiful and yet
What's too painful to remember
We send the Jews to forget. . . .

I am working on a book now that came about as follows: A Polish gentleman related elements of his life story in Italian to a ghostwriter. For some reason, the ghostwriter decided to write the book in third-person instead of first. The book was then translated into English, and the folks who will be trying to get the book published in English (first, probably, among at least a few other languages) decided the book would be better as a first-person account. That task has fallen to me. Not only am I copyediting the book, I am changing biography into autobiography, based on an Italian-to-English translation from a man whose first language is Polish. Here's a frustrating element. As for a while the man lived and did business in Great Britain, I suspect his English isn't too bad. The whole thing probably could have been done in first-person English to begin with, although his English is likely not as good as his Italian, or of course his Polish. Just a guess.

Very interesting book by the way, and it comes to me via a few relative giants in the publishing world -- one in religious publishing, one in the newspaper field. Kind of another case where I'm pinching myself that these people have found me and actually respect my opinion. I'm not at all trying to blow my own horn, but it's as I tell my sons (ages 19 and 16): one of these days I'm going to wake up and realize that I'm an adult -- something I guess they've grown up knowing. And given that today happens to be the anniversary of my birth, one that leaves me a year shy of the half-century mark, adulthood might actually be just around the corner.

Author testimonial

"I am doing the final editing that Bob sent me today and I think he is just super in the way he treats my work." --from a romance novelist publishing her twelfth book, reporting to the designer/project manager

I'm baaaack, and the case of the Flying Negroes

Thanks to my five or four regular readers for allowing me this little hiatus, and for occasionally checking in to see if the test pattern was still up. I can't say that it won't go up again soon, but there's been a little activity that calls for an update.

Big question among freelancers is "How's business?" One of my fellow freelancers, a book designer and typesetter, is staying busy because he has learned how to lay out books for Kindle and such. Smart guy.

Another one who mines similar fields as I do, I've not gotten a real good feel for how things are for him. His client list is by design a little smaller than mine, but it used to be that a lot of my work came from him, and if his clients are sending him work and he has time or the need to do it, he might very well be busy, and it keeps work from coming to me. No hard feelings there. I would do the same thing.

I wrote to a few of my publishers last week. One, which has a printshop in the basement (a big one), just laid off 35 people on the pressroom floor and in the art department. Not a good thing.

Another one, a production company that kept me very busy over the last year and a half, says that business has slowed tremendously, and if it keeps up, they don't know what they are going to do. I think much of their work revolved around the textbook market, and it might be that the publisher who was their main client has decided that new editions every two years are not necessary. As the parent of a college student, I can't say this hurts my feelings that much.

So I've been beating the bushes a little the last couple of days. One or two things might turn out. Maybe. I'm going to go along as if nothing will happen, because that's often when something does. But a cratering economy causes people to put on their thinking caps, and that's what I did. We'll see.

So, what's with the Flying Negroes? Probably one of my earliest posts dealt with the phenomenon that I'll go my entire life without hearing of a concept, and then I'll read about it in consecutive unrelated books. This last weekend I was working on a book of essays about Phillis Wheatley, the first African American woman to be published in the United States (late 1700s, from New England). The book mentioned the Flying Negroes, a myth from that time about slaves in America who sprouted wings and flew back to Africa. Interesting stuff. The book went back to the publisher Sunday night.

Today I'm reading a book of essays about the Gullah-Geechee culture in the barrier islands of Georgia. And here again come the Flying Negroes. This time there was a little hint of the whirling dervish thrown into the mix.

Anyway, the test pattern is gone for now. If you're reading this, I'm glad you're here. And I hope the feeling is mutual. Let me know what's been going on in your world since I've been gone.

Land in Demand Studios

Well, the wheels are turning. I won't say yet I'm doing a complete 180 on earlier posts, but I'm getting there. Just in the interest of fairness and full disclosure.

I guess I can look at it this way as well: Imagine yourself as an Internet company in an age when everyone has a keyboard and a way to send in an application, when the company is offering work, when the economy is imploding, and when far more people who are qualified to do so think of themselves as being writers or able to do editing and proofreading work.

I've had a most pleasant ongoing exchange with one of the company's employees to this point, and have done some work that is awaiting internal review. They appear to have an interesting business model and, if nothing else, do seem to be hiring writers and editors . . . which is more than one can say for publishing companies and newspapers these days.

I will report further . . . to a degree. Then I will put the company behind the same veil of anonymity that covers the rest of the Land on Demand stable.

testimonial

From the managing editor to the author:

The indexer has completed his work. I have attached the indexes for your review. Up to now, the index of subjects is clearly the best index in any [book of this series].

From the author to the managing editor:

This looks very good after a first quick scan. I agree with the indexer’s strategy, so am fine with that. I’ll look through this tonight and send a word along to you. I can’t imagine, though, that I will have any issue with this. I am very impressed with it. One of my tests was to look for [a particular, and particularly obscure, technical term] to see if that was indexed, and it was. I think the indexer understands the book!

(Insert nervous cough from indexer here.)

Becoming a freelance editor; becoming a freelance proofreader; becoming a freelance indexer, Parts 3a and 4: Cold calling follow-up; client relations

One last matter on the cold-calling thing. The first client, one of my faves and responsible for steady work going on 10-11 years, has resulted in zero referrals over that time. The second client -- the vanity publisher -- has, through referrals by its two book designers, been responsible for a variety of work that now accounts for about 10 percent of my annual income, even though the client itself is in a dormant phase. There's no real point to that statement, except that you can never really tell where a nice chunk of work is going to come from. Big client (one that actually publishes books you've heard of), no referrals. Little client, great referrals. I'll take 'em both. Like I said about potential pornography clients (no, I don't have any . . . yet), their money spends the same as everyone else's.

OK. So you've got a client or two or twenty. You're meeting deadlines, you're getting steady work. Scenario: all of a sudden, from a good client: bupkus. (Look it up if you need to.) What happened, and what do you do?

This actually did happen with the first client above last year. I think I got three or four books from them all year until about November. I'd been steady with other work, so didn't think much of it. Then the economy started cratering and I'm thinking it's time to shore up the good folks. So I wrote the managing editor and asked what's up? How come so few jobs this year? The answer I received was instructive, if not entirely logical. "We've been sending work to those people who have let us know they are available." Well, damn. Never occurred to me that I needed to do that.

For many of my clients, I pretty much have a standing arrangement, even though most usually do the courteous (but unnecessary) thing and check with me first. I say, Go ahead and send me the work. Presume I will take it and meet your deadline. Presume I am always available to do your work.

I really think that some of my clients believe (or believed) that I work only for them . . . although how they figure that I am supporting four people, two school payments, a mortgage, a ton of medical bills, and debt out the yin-yang on the basis of a couple of proofreading or indexing jobs each month, I'm not exactly sure. But that is exactly what I want my clients to believe: that I live to work just for them. It's called customer service. I've told my publishers, some in a rather direct manner and any number of times, that my workload is absolutely none of their concern until I start missing deadlines. As long as we have agreed-upon dates and rates, then what other work I have to do is none of their business. And, quite frankly, if I'm working on a page-rate basis, how long it takes me to do a job is not really a concern of theirs either, as long as the quality of my work is such that they have an incentive to send me more work in the future.

This approach sometimes puts me in a bind (I might be giving away some Land on Demand secrets here), because a client will send me a job with a three-week turnaround and five days later ask me how it's going or if I have any questions, or can I send them what I've done so far so they can begin futzing with the design. Ummm, when is my deadline again? Have I missed something?

My fear, with one of my clients in particular, is that per is going to drop a stickinote in the middle of some project that says, "No matter when you are reading this, call me and leave me a message," knowing that it's some huge project, and I'm reading it at three in the morning about five days before it's due, and it's been sitting on my desk for three weeks.

Questions, or the Freelance Performance Appraisal:

Am I getting the work done?
Is it being done for the agreed-upon rate?
Is the quality what you expect from me?
Are you getting it back on time?

If the answer is yes to all those questions, I expect the client to remain a good one. Please don't make me ask the following question:

It's been 30 days. Where's my money?

I hate to be so mercenary about it, but if it weren't for my little slice of the world, I'd have no slice at all. It's called being "without other employable traits."

news alert: Demand Studios

Talk about a company that doesn't harbor ill feelings. Demand Studios sent me an editing test, which I passed (whew), and they are looking to train some editors to work about 20 hours per week steady through the year. We will see where this leads. In these days, even if the pay is a little less than I might be willing to accept from my regular clients, some of my regular clients have become a little lackadaisical about prompt payment. The idea of someone dropping some money in my account every Friday sounds pretty good right about now.

Funny thing: The woman who sent me the test and let me know that I'd passed it quoted a word or two from my blog back to me. I'll award bonus points for that. I'm not sure I'd have been so magnanimous.

Becoming a freelance editor; becoming a freelance proofreader; becoming a freelance indexer, Part 3 -- Cold calling

I might have to retitle this string of posts, "How to Avoid Working and Not Be Paid." We'll file it under community service.

OK. So the two cold calls that resulted in work: I won't give away the names of the publishers in the list to the right, but if you wanted to do the research, you could figure it out -- or narrow it down to three or four anyway. One is a trade publisher, one is pretty much of a subsidy publisher.

Both of these clients go back to the late 1990s, because I remember that I was living in Florida when I started working for both of them. Here was my underlying strategy and thinking.

I'm in the Southeast, which is also where my college degree is from and where my entire work career has taken place. The northernmost point on my resume is Atlanta. I figure that for no logical reason (except maybe saving a few dollars on FedEx), a southeastern publisher might like working with someone in the same region rather than a publishing mecca like NYC. I imagine that most of the big-name publishing houses probably have deep lists of freelancers or get so many requests from freelancers that my chances of breaking in to one of them is slim. I also figure that I should concentrate on publishers that are relatively newly formed (within the previous 15-20 years), ones that don't put out a huge number of books per year (maybe 40-75), and ones that publish books I'd like to read.


Armed with those parameters, I buy a copy of Writer's Market, a 1000-page paperback that comes out every year, listing most of the book publishers in the United States and Canada. I begin looking for publishers that meet the above standards. Nailing it down, I send out maybe 20 letters, figuring that for the cost of 6 or 8 bucks in postage and a morning of writing and printing letter and envelopes, it takes only one job to pay back that time and expense. The only time I ever consider a no a "No" is when I actually receive a letter back saying, "Thanks for trying, but we ain't hiring, and we ain't hiring you." That rarely happens. I imagine that my unanswered letters are waiting in a file cabinet somewhere for the proper moment. And yes, that line of thought has paid off more than once.

One of the companies calls me. They send me a proofreading test and a copyediting test. I pass them both. In the first month I worked for them about 10 or 11 years ago, they sent me a book a week for a month. Not a bad return on my time investment. And the company is still a good client. I just finished a copyediting job for them and now have a proofing job on my desk from them. Except for one of their editors, I have been associated with the company for longer than any of the present editorial staff. Even better, their jobs are nonscholarly, so they provide a nice break from the usual tedium.

Case number two. It's nighttime sometime in 1999, and I begin searching the Internet for vanity presses, emailing the publishers and wanting to know if they need any proofreading/copyediting/indexing help. I hear back from one of them within about an hour, saying, "Sure. Can I send you a job in a few weeks?"

For these two success stories in cold-calling book publishers, I've written probably 100 letters and emails over the years that didn't pan out. Yet every once in a while I'll get bored and still send some emails to publishers or potential authors (ABDs, for example [all but dissertation]) letting them know I'm out here, but I'll be pretty direct about whom I send such letters to. Mostly these days, I would not be looking for more scholarly work. I've written to a number of publishers in the fields of erotica and, well, porn, for example. You know what? I need a break from indexing things like the latest exposition on the book of Revelation or copyediting 1500 pages of theological anthropology, and if some publisher wants to pay me to copyedit or proofread the latest trash fiction on gay romps in the British boarding school system, that check'll cash the same as the one from Yale University Press.

Probably more than you needed to know. But I am practical.