I have been presenting at national conferences on topics concerning the business side of freelancing since 2013. I’m also an experienced panelist.
Systems & Shortcuts is my cornerstone presentation, which can be modified to fit specific audiences and needs, such as working with indie authors.
Systems & Shortcuts
Running a freelance business involves more than simply doing what your clients hire you to do. You must also nurture your client relationships, find new clients, manage your overall workflow and individual projects, keep on top of your invoices and finances, and so much more — all without letting anything fall through the cracks. This session will explore how to use systems to save time, increase productivity, bring flow to your business, and ultimately make more money.
Pack Your Parachute: Contingency Planning for Freelance Editors
When you’re a solo business owner, it’s all on you to deal with emergencies that crop up, whether it’s equipment failure, an extended power outage, severe injury or illness, or worse. You can’t necessarily prevent emergencies, but you can make contingency plans so that they are less disruptive to you and your clients if they do happen. In this session, we’ll discuss various types of emergencies that might affect your business and how to lay a solid foundation for creating plans to handle them — including a framework for notifying your clients and handing off your work in worst-case scenarios. You’ll leave with an outline for thinking through and establishing your own personalized contingency plans.
Get It (and Keep It) Together: Project Management Basics for Individuals
The phrase “project management” might evoke images of large teams working on complex projects governed by Gantt charts and daily stand-up meetings. But the foundational principles of project management are just as useful for individuals working on their own. We’ll discuss these principles, how they apply to successfully planning and completing deadline-driven editorial projects, and how they can be applied to different work styles. We’ll also look at some common project management pitfalls and what to do when things go wrong.
Styles from the Ground Up
Styles are the foundation of getting content through the production process from manuscript to its final form, yet many editors don’t have a solid understanding of what styles are, how they work, or why they’re useful for anything more than just making text pretty. This presentation will start with the basic whats and whys and work up from there, showing you the various ways to set up and apply styles, how to adjust styles, a few neat tricks you can do with styled text, and a couple of potential pitfalls to avoid.