Kickstart Your Freelance Editor & Proofreader Career on Upwork

1. Overview: this course provides a complete process for becoming a freelancer on up work. It shows you everything from how much you can potentially earn toe. How to set up an account to how to maximize your success with specific techniques. What are my expectations for you? Please watch all the videos first, to understand how up work functions and how you can put your best foot forward. You don't want to get off to a bad start by failing to follow some key steps in the process . Then do the project listed below this video to try it out. It's important to create some draft versions of the cover letter and profile before you put them on up work. Post your text in the project area and I will review it. 2. Welcome from the Instructor: Hello. I'm Duncan Kerber, and I want to thank you for joining my kickstart, your editor or proofreader Career on Upward course. This course has been used by hundreds and hundreds of students to help make some extra income from home, doing, editing and proofreading tasks as online freelancers. Now I got into this, probably for the same reason you did in 2013. My first child was born, and they're obviously ah, lot of costs that come with having a young child having a baby at home. And while I did have a full time job and I am a university professor, my wife had to go on maternity leave, so that meant we were losing a lot of income. So I went online and investigated some ways that I could supplement that income. I have a 20 year career as a writer and editor, both in journalism and in academia, and this felt like something that I could reasonably do. I could be an editor and proof eater from home. No travel, no no offices to go to. And I tried out the website e lance dot com, and it turned out to be really successful after some hard times. When you begin on up work, it will be challenging. When I transitioned to upward, there was a slightly new website, some new rules, and I decided this point with the success that I have had that I would like to share that with people of there. And I have known as People who are taking this course are often self employed or they're retired or their students, and they're looking to supplement their income. And I hope the lessons on bidding strategies on techniques for editing will help you get off to a really good start as a freelance editor and proof reader online. So if you have any questions, just send them within the course, and I usually reply within about 24 hours. Good luck to you. 3. Introduction to Freelancing on Upwork: So what is upward? Well up work is simply a dating site for professional. So brings together freelancers and clients into a business relationship, and clients confined just about anything on up work. So whether they've got to get some editing done, a proof reading or maybe they need a website designed, maybe they need a marketing campaign. Maybe they need something programmed by an expert programmer. They could find a freelancer somewhere on up work. Upward is a relatively new site, but it has a long history on the Web. So what work is actually emerging of two sites? One called the lance dot com, which I was on for a number of years, and another freelance I called o desk dot com. Now this combined site is the biggest freelance site in the world, bringing in the most freelancers in the most clients. Now I think the lance was a really good sight and in many ways, in terms of its design, in terms of its clients, how the quality of clients who was a better site. But up work is still a good site nonetheless. Now, why did I get on up work? I've got a full time job. Why do I need this? Well, a few years ago, I was getting into some debt problems. Is a lot of people do these days? Also, my daughter was born in 2013 and you know how the bills compile up with kids. And so I was looking for an alternative to make some extra money on the side, and a friend of mine told me about the lance dot com, and I started on it and I guess 2014. And then I just merged my profile onto the new up work site when it started in 2015. I did have freelance experience in the past, so I did some writing for magazines and newspapers. But I always found writing to be extremely challenging, time consuming editing. Improved freedom is not as difficult as writing in my experience, and also, I always had challenges getting paid. So one time I did a big profile of a college football athlete, and then they published. It never paid me, so I lost about $300. Upward essentially solves that problem. That problem of getting paid because they take the money from the clients, hold on to it in escrow while you're doing the editing and proofreading. Of course, they're making interest off that money while they're holding it, and then the client still has to release that money. But the client can't take it back once up where it gets its hands on it. So you don't have to worry about getting paid. And if there's a problem, you can dispute it. Now I want to turn to the specific category on up work that this course is all about and which I'm an expert in, and that is editing and proofreading. The tips I'm gonna give you in this course are designed for editing and proofreading, but you may find another category on up work and apply those very same principles as well. I'm sure the writing categories on up work, and there are many of those reading categories air more lucrative than editing and proofreading. But also it's more time consuming, and I just don't have the time to do a lot of writing. I've done occasional writing assignments on upward, but most the time I like to stick to editing and proofreading because the work is already written. It's already there on the pays you just load up the word file and get to your work. You don't have to do any research. You have to do any writing. So what kind of work is available in this category? Well, people are offering contracts on editing in proof Reading website text E Books is a lot of e books. He books on just every possible topic. Academic papers, of course. Job Applications resumes a lot of novels, fiction, novels, nonfiction, in other words, a little bit of everything. You'll get a chance to try out all kinds of genres and decide which one you like the best. Or maybe you want to be a generalist. Throughout this experience, certainly I've edited a lot of fiction, something that I didn't do years ago, and I quite like it, particularly if it's already well written fiction. You're just trying to make it a little bit better, trying to get it to another level. Do you need experience already to do well on a park? I don't think so. If you look at some of the profiles of the more successful people online, yes, maybe they had some experience offline. Traditional editing improve reading, but they have a range of experiences there, young and old, their veteran. They're inexperienced and they're still doing well. They're finding, ah, market. They're finding some success now. Of course, your eventual income will be determined by how good you are. But you can learn that on the fly, you just them or experience again. The better you get at this kind of work, the better the ratings you'll get later. In this course, all talk about bidding prices. There's a lot of people who are inexperienced, who are just starting out, who have, Ah, lower bidding price just so that they can get that experience. I think you can win jobs and make money. All of you can. How much? I don't know that's up to you, but I think everybody with certain strategies that I'm gonna talk about can win contracts. You will, of course, do better if you do have an eye for detail. If you know grammar rules and style rules and you have a soft touch when it comes to editing people's work, I, for example, see errors everywhere. I see errors on signs I see airs in newspapers and magazines. A few years ago in Malcolm Gladwell's book The Tipping Point, which is published by you know, Major Publishing House. I saw an error 2/3 of the way through the book spelling error, so these things jump out of me. So if you have that kind of eye for detail already, you're even further ahead than a lot of others. 4. The Challenge of Beginning: I want to encourage you to really give this a good, thorough try. Starting out on a freelance Web site like up work can feel like the biggest challenge you face. So the beginning you don't have a rating at the site rates freelancer, so clients will ray you. And in the beginning you have no rating. And that means clients may not trust you, and you may not get many jobs. So at the beginning, it may seem like a big mountain to climb, and often when you do. But on things you gotta underbid is I'll talk about later in the course. And so you're getting really low fees for too much work. One of my first jobs on elance dot com was actually to convert some citations from I believe It was M L A format to Chicago for Matt, for a guy who was doing his PhD, and I believe the cost of the contract was just $100. It wasn't much money I did like maybe 15 hours on that has very, very tedious work to convert somebody citations, but he ended up paying me a bonus. Actually, it was only $20 but It was a nice little reward for those extra hours, and he gave me 100% rating, a perfect rating, and I think it was a rating like that and a couple others that I got. They pushed me forward. It was like a domino effect in terms of attracting clients, cause they saw someone who they could trust. Now, thanks to that rating system, my advice to use just have patients, keep applying for everything and keep doing good work. Of course, you may have to take some crappy jobs where you're not making a lot per hour, but the whole gold the beginning is I'll talk about later in this course is to simply get some good ratings. You can make money on up work, I promise you, how much of that is up to you and your talent is an editor or proofreader? The nice thing about online freelancing is that you can supplement on already full time income, but you're not chained down to the work. You can choose when to work and when not to work. Sometimes I've taken home months off. So was I taking four months off and I've done any editing cause I'm too busy with my real job. But when I've wanted to do freelance, it's always there. There's within a week. I've got some new project that I'm working on, and when I don't want to work, I just relax and do other things. The other nice thing about editing online is, I think clients air more low key. They're cool. They still want you to do a good job, but they're not like the really tough publishers in the professional world. It's not like you have the pressure here of editing a famous author for The New Yorker magazine. I think most people who are on up work looking for editing and proofreading services are just normal people like you and me, and they really appreciate a good job, a job well done. So get started on up work, fight through that initial tough time of getting contracts, and I'm sure you'll see that domino effect down the line as you can start to get more more jobs and also start to increase your rates as you get really good ratings 5. My Earnings Report: Now I want to show you what's possible in terms of earnings on up work in the editing improve rating category. Now, this is part time work, so I have a full time job. I don't have time to do this. Eight hours a day, five days a week or more. I pick my spots, I picked the right jobs and it provides a nice part time income. I'm not gonna show these earnings results to boast at all, because I know, actually, if you can get off line freelance editing in proof reading. And I'm sure some of you have that experience that you haven't done the online stuff, But you've done a lot of the offline stuff. You may actually find some of these earnings to be quite low up. Work does suppress earnings to some degree because of the bidding process. But I just want to show you my earning statements since October 1st 2015 to the creation of this course, which is in June 2016. Just to give you a sense of what's possible with some part time editing of books, academic writing resumes this kind of stuff. So I'm gonna go through each of these in turn. So this is October of 2015 of all these transactions, and the final amount of the credit to my account was 13 28 01 that is in us dollars. Then in November again, all the transactions, the total credits went up a bit. So 15 57. 83. In December, it went down a little bit to 13. 38. Then, in January of the new year, it went back up against a 15 89. So pretty consistent there between 1315 100 U. S. Dollars in freelance earnings. Now, on the February, this goes down a bit. So in down 2000 1 of the reasons this goes down and the next one goes down as we'll show you here. This is March. Actually, that one went up a little. It's the next 1 April. Yeah, for 24 in April. Now that happened. There was a little bit of a downturn in February and April because I was doing a lot of offline editing. Um, I think also in April, I got just really busy with my real job, which is being a university professor, and I just enough time, so just didn't have time to do a lot of this online stuff. So things went down. But I know over those those three months, actually, from February to April I was editing some offline work. I have some customers I've gained from friendships that I've got people that I worked with on other websites that I don't work with on up work, and they just sent me work through email. So I just work with him that way. And so that's not totally representative of my total earnings in that period. Now, in May of 2016 this was my biggest month of these ones of showing you so 2000 and 63 jobs just it just seemed to steamroll. So the ratings went up was up to 95% I believe. Now I'm at 97% in terms of client ratings, and people just started throwing MIM or more work. A lot of it is repeat business, so people just keep coming back to me because we've developed a relationship over time, and so it's hard to turn down that. And so I take those jobs on and that some a pretty good amount for part time work. I think probably I do maybe 10 hours a week on these things of 40 hours in a month. And that's the amount for May and then in the time of creation of this course on freelance editing and proofreading on up work. I have 23 days in June, and I've got about 636 right now that there's a bunch of jobs that are currently underway in June that don't show up on this so they haven't been paid, haven't been released, so that will make that a little bit more won't be 2000 but it'll be close to that. I also have some offline work that I'm doing for a client in the United States. That adds to this, but that doesn't obviously show up on this kind of a chart. So all told, from October 1st to June 23rd up work tells me I made 11,226 doing about 40 hours a month, 50 hours, sometimes when I have extra time, that ending balance of the bottom 110 is simply money that I haven't cashed out yet, So that's what's possible. Remember, this is US dollars. I live in Canada, so there's actually a 20% addition to that because the Canadian dollar is worse than the U . S. Dollar. So check with your country exchange rates. If you're not in the U. S, you may have actually ah, larger exchange rate there, sometimes 30% 40% or more. So the U. S dollar may go a lot further than the raw amount that up work lists in these credit listings here. So just keep that in mind. So again, this is just to show you what is possible. It is possible. And later in this course, I'm gonna show you what bidding strategies I used to make thes earnings and develop these relationships of with clients. 6. Freelancer and Agency Account Types: upper caste, two kinds of accounts. So if you look on my screen here, you'll see on the right that I have a freelancer account and an agency account else of a client account. But that's for if you are doing jobs. If you're putting jobs out there, I have a few times put some documents into up work to get them edited. But on the freelance side, you've got the freelancer account and the agency account. And what is the difference between these two? Well, the freelancer account, you can get a free. It gives you a certain number of what it called connects these air like coins that are required if you want a bid on anything. So bids air, usually almost always to connects in value. And I think they do that because they don't want people doing unlimited bidding or spanning the bidding process with thousands and thousands of bids. So you do have to think a bit about bidding on things because it's costing you these these coins, but a freelancer account will give you a certain number of those connects that you can use every month. If you run outs, it can't bid on anything, so just keep that in mind. If you choose a agency account, you do have to pay for that. I pay about $20 a month for this. What does it give me? What my account gives me. Mawr connects so I can put in more bids. I believe it gives me 80 a month so I can dio 40 bits as they're worth. Two connects each, and I've just found that I need that amounts. That's a good amount for me. I don't usually run out of them, but you can buy more if you need to. But 80 under $20 a month is usually pretty good. Also, the agency account gives you the bonus, will be able to see the bidding range on any contract as it currently stands, and that can be really helpful. And I'll talk about that in the bidding part of this course. Also, if you have an agency you can subcontract. So if you're deciding to get into this to start a real business with multiple employees, you could do it that way so you could actually have people all over the Internet all over the world working for you and you simply sub contract the jobs you win to those people, and you pay them whatever you negotiate with those people and take your amount off the top . So that's another advantage of the agency account. But I think if you're a beginner to all this, the best thing to do is to take the freelancer account. Don't pay anything, try it out, see what happens. As you get more into it, you get me become more interested in this whole process of being editor in proof reader online. You may want to consider the agency account, so pick the freelancer counts begin it's free, get started, tried out and then graduate perhaps down the line to an agency account. 7. Getting Paid: so the first thing you need to do is set up your up work account, and that's really straightforward. Just go to the up work dot com site, click sign up and up Work will take you through the full process. I could show you a video on how to do this, but it might change in a few months as they change their screens. They changed their website, so I'll just leave that to you now. When you do eventually sign up and set up a profile, you will get to this page is kind of the home page of the site is the find work page, and this is where you'll find all your jobs. And from here you next one to set up your payment account. So upward basically releases the money to your account on this site, and then you have to release it to some sort of payment system, and I use PayPal and I've had a PayPal account for many years. So the money is released of that, and then through PayPal, you set up your bank account and you release the money from PayPal or whatever you're using pay in a year or Skrill or whatever to your bank account in your home country. So there's a little bit of, Ah, process there and the releasing of money through each step. It takes some time, so you're not gonna get instantaneous payment from the second the client releases the money to your bank again, it has to go through a number of steps. So I would suggest getting that payment information set up as quickly as possible because you don't know what systems work in your country. You don't know if you have a problem setting it up to your home, make account. So get that going right away, and the way you do that is you appear to the top right and you click down to settings. And when I first started an upward, I spent at least 20 to 30 minutes trying to figure out how to get paid. There is no big button at the top that says Get paid. It's nothing like that. And I think they hide it because they don't want you to get paid. They want you to hold your money. They make interest off it. But then eventually, if I realized down here under contact profile profile settings. We have get paid. So click on that. And here we have the get paid page, and if I had some money in the balance here, I could click, get paid now and here we have set up payments. So that's where you want to put in your PayPal information or the information for whatever site you're using. It says here may take up to three days to activate. So another reason to get started on setting up your payment account right away. 8. How to Avoid Long Payment Delays: in this lesson. I just want to talk about a couple of realities with up work payments and the system that they use. The first reality is that the site uses on fixed rate jobs on escrow system, so the client puts the money into escrow and then has to release it when they're satisfied with the job. When you're about to start a fixed rate job, make sure that it says funded on the contract page and not just funded partially but funded fully. And when you're done the job, you'll do the submit work option, which triggers a message to the clients saying, Okay, this is done. Time to pay. If you don't hit the submit work request payment button, then there is no obligation for the client to actually pay you in my experience. Actually, most clients are really good, and they pay you even before you submitted the work. Maybe you've sent a final draft version in email, and then they go and just close the contract and pay you. But once in a while you get a client who never releases the money, and by hitting that submit work request payment button. You've started a process with the website, and if they don't pay you in a certain period of time, the money will simply be released to you. But back to my point about partial and full funding. I once was editing a blawg post for someone. The total contract was supposed to be $100 but the client had put a $50 kind of mid term payment, so the first pain would be $50 in the middle of the project. So when I did that, submit work, request payment Ah, he took it. He liked it. He released the $50. And then I replied back, What about the half other half of the payment? And he never responded. I actually had to contact him offline through his website and say, What's up? You know what's up with the other 50? And he sent me a really terse message saying that he paid the full amount. He paid the $100 You go and find out what up work did with that extra $50. Now he was either blatantly lying to me or he just has a really bad memory. So I told customer service without work, the cinema warning. The cinema message never got a reply, and Upward told me there was really nothing they could do because he hadn't put the other half of the money into escrow. So I tell you this story just as a warning. Make sure it's fully funded before you begin, and then you have those protections and you don't have to worry about losing part of your income. I also have a situation once, where I sent the final file to the client, they said, Good job. But then they just disappeared, and actually their money was sitting in escrow for a long time. So in the end, a turn of the person just went away and they forgot they had to close the contract. But luckily, the whole system released that money. To me automatically, the second point I want to make about payments is simply the reality of the payment delays that come up with up work. When I worked on the lance dot com, the delays riff you a few days between the release of the client's money to being in my bank account, so an hourly job may not be paid to you are released to you for 10 days and a fixed rate job 5 to 6 days. What this means is it's better to choose a fixed rate job. You get your money sooner, and also you want to get your work done faster so your client approves it and the money is released as soon as possible. 9. The Key Elements of the Freelancer Profile Page: I want to talk now about my profile. I've been on up work since it started last year. That's 2015 and I was on a lance for a number of years before that. And so I've got, ah, profile that I built up over time. And then also in this video, I want to talk about some of the principles of profiles and what you should be saying in those profiles. So this is my agency page. If you go to your page, you may may look a little bit different for the freelancer account. See up here, I've got a freelancer account of got an agency account, so I'm viewing through the agency account. The find work page looks a little bit different, but I think both of them have this bar across the top and you'll see profile the 4th 1 over to the right. If you click on that, you get the profile page and I'm gonna view it as others see it. So here's my page to the world. This is what the outside world sees now profiles air. Interesting, because I am not sure how much clients actually read the profile. I think they're more likely to read the bid cover letter that you're gonna put in on each contract. And they probably look at your reviews, your success rate. I'm not sure which they read this. That doesn't mean you should ignore the description here in the middle of the page, But just don't spend too much time on it. You're gonna describe your specialties? Um, you're going to talk about what you like to do as an editor. You're gonna put in your hourly rate of the top. You want a nice little headline over here and your specialties pop up underneath, You'll choose these when you had it. Your profile. And I think that's probably enough to satisfy clients. When I have been a client and I post a job on up work for editing. I don't really look at the profiles. I don't read them that much, but I do really care about their cover letter, so just keep that in mind. Now you'll see that I've got a 97% job success rate that's at the top right of the screen here, and it says my work history. So I've worked 97 hours. Some jobs are hourly jobs, some jobs, a fixed rate. I prefer the fixed rate jobs, but in terms of hourly jobs have done 97 hours. Has my availability has my response time and my profile link and my languages Now they don't Below the description is the work history and feedback. So remember the clients air rating You. So you want to do a really good job. We have work history here, the titles of the jobs that I've done, the earnings that I've had for those jobs. Um, you have some comments? Sometimes clients putting comments here. I have a five point. Oh, you can only get five point. Oh, that's the max. This person like my job. Duncan did a superb job of my e book. Will definitely work with him again. Duncan was first class, fantastic to work with. This was a $699 job and so on. So I've had really good success, really good reviews. This just gives you proof that I know what I'm talking about here, and you can trust what I'm talking about in terms of succeeding on up work. I also suggest having a picture some people don't have a picture. I think it's important to humanize this. You can also insert a video so somebody could look up your profile and see your video. Get to know who you are, a little bit better. But I will say Don't make this part. The description, the overview too long. No one's going to read a novel here, so just be careful. But also do not pigeonhole yourself. Don't be too specific that I only do this. If you are sure that all you want to do is edit academic writing, then go ahead. Write that. But I think for most beginning freelancers, you want to be open to anything to any possible job. So you'll see in my profile description that I'm talking about editing, romance novels and PhD dissertations. I have indeed edited both and so you want to, um, you have that range there so that nobody rules you out just based on reading that profile, so you can be a bit vague and what you do. Um, and but don't worry about this too much. The profile isn't that important. In the overview section, just make sure you're doing successful jobs. Your you're winning more and more clients, and you've got a good history and feedback. Hopefully, you get some good comments as well 10. How to Find Work: By now, you've set up your up work account. You've written your profile you've attached to the system, your PayPal or other payment system, so you'll get paid. Now you can search for jobs. So what you do is you just go up to top and you click on find work. That's what I have right here on the page and through the set up process of my account, I chose some categories, and I'm sure you've chosen those already that show your interests. So these air my interest. But for the purposes of this course, I'm on Lee looking at editing and proofreading. So I click on that category and here I've got all the jobs down the page to zoom in on the left side of the page and see the sub categories again. I've got checked editing, improve reading. There are currently 1269 jobs available in this category on the right side of the screen. This is a lot more than when up work started. So when up work started in October of 2015 that was about 600 or 700. We've seen almost double the number of jobs, and I see that number going up all the time, so there's a lot of work. They're some of the other categories could be interesting resumes and cover letters. 318 jobs. Right now they're if you're if you want to do writing. I don't talk about that in this course. But if you want to do writing, look at this creative writing to over 2000 jobs. Copy writing, you know, advertising writing 1400 academic writing. I typically don't do that because they don't believe in writing other people's papers from a university professor. I believe you should write it yourself, but I don't mind editing that kind of stuff. So there's even this category help Other writing 2000. So if you like to do writing, maybe that's something you can get into A swell. But I'm only talking about editing and proofreading. If you scroll down on the left side, you get hourly jobs. There's 482 of those and editing and proofreading, and there's, ah, majority of fixed price jobs, and I just want to make a quick point here. Fixed price jobs are better jobs. Why? Because the money is set in advance. Exactly. You can say it's going to be 300. It's going to be 600 that's how much the client's gonna pay. There's no surprises. Hourly jobs Sometimes it can be a surprise there at the end, and clients don't like that Now. Clients can put a cap on the number of hours. That's how they get cost certainty. But it's better than a fixed price, I think. Also a problem with hourly jobs is the payment takes a lot longer because with fixed price , you ask the client to put the money into escrow before you begin the job. So they've already paid it. It's already come off the credit card. It's already in the cloud somewhere, making interest money for up work. And you know the money is there and everything's fine with hourly. The client is built at the end of the job on a Sunday, so if you finish on a Friday, it's not build right on. The Friday is building this Sunday and then the money has to clear. You know, the credit cards have to clear, and you're not actually able to grab that money and put it into papal or your other payment device until about 10 days later. So the Tuesday or Wednesday of another week not the week that that Sunday is on. So just keep that in mind and it's a really big delay. There still is a delay for fixed price, but it for me it seems to be about five days, six days, but I just like knowing that it's gonna be this exact amount. Also, hourly jobs require an application, added sir Computer, and that application monitors your screen so it actually takes stream caps of screenshots of your screen every certain number of minutes, and those minutes are random. It could be every 20 minutes, and then the next time it's 10 minutes, and next time it's two minutes you don't know, and the client sees those screen shots. So if you, for example, click away from your word file that you were working on and you go to a website to check your email, it might be at the exact moment that screen cap is happening and so that clients sees that , and a lot of times you got to delete that screen cap because it looks like you're not working and you lose 10 minutes, you lose 15 minutes, that kind of a thing. So I really don't like being watched like that on the hourly job. I do some of these jobs, but I prefer the fixed price. You can also search by entry level intermediate expert, and those air categories are determined by the clients. If you want to stick to very dependable clients, you can choose people who have only done 10 plus hirings. You can also put a budget fixed price range so I can say I only want jobs that are $1000 to $100,000. Of course, there are no jobs that are $100,000 or anything like that on the site. The only problem with that range option is it allows hourly jobs. He got a turn off hourly jobs, and then you have now a list of fixed price jobs more than $1000. So that's one way to find some of those bigger jobs. You'll notice on the listings that it tells you if the payment has been verified or not by the clients. It gives you the details of the clients spending practices in the past the budget, obviously very important to know how much the budget is and so on. It tells you the country they're in. Oh, here, someone's that air payment verified. So those air people like this person needs somebody to proof read some academic power point slides of the budget of $1000 and they've spent over $100,000 on up work and they're in the United States, a very dependable client. So look for those people as often as you can. So that is the page of the job search. That's where you're going to begin and you're gonna find jobs. 11. Writing Effective Bid Proposals and Cover Letters: Let's say you have been looking through the editing and proofreading category. There's 1262 jobs, and you come across one that interests you down here. I found one earlier. That's a nonfiction Children neuroscience memoir. Sounds interesting, has a $10,000 budget. This is a very highly priced contract on upward. You will rarely see an editing and proofreading job for that amount of a fixed price contract, but they're looking for an expert, so maybe they're willing to pay that amount. We don't know. The only problem is this client has a payment on verified. If you click into this, you'll see more about the client down here on the right. It says the person has a 0% higher rate, so there's the first job they've ever posted. And they don't have a verified payment method, as it showed on the previous screen could raise some red flags here, someone with a very high budget, but no history. This person may be fishing for freelancers, so they might not pay $10,000. They're just fishing to get as many bids as possible, and certainly some people will bid low, and they'll probably jump on those that freelancer so you can read through this. The person says the books been written and edited and so on. Ah, and it's a one time project down below, it says. And this is useful to you. There are 22 50 proposals like this up work doesn't want to tell the exact number. Probably closer to the 50 given the budget. Price says it was last viewed by the client four hours ago. But most important to you is this thing here that says they're interviewing three people already. So by the time I get to this contract, I'm behind the eight ball already so that I'm already behind three other people. Usually that's a bad sign because there's some conversations already going on. Ah, here on this contract for this client. So you want to get that bidden assed fast as possible. If you cook on another bid and you see zero interviewing and you see a lower number of proposals, then you have a really good shot at getting this contract. So up here. It also says the required connects to submit a proposal again. I told you that connects her kind of like coins, the currency of the site. They do not want people doing unlimited bidding, so they put a price on it, which is to connects. You get a certain number of connects in your accounts whether you have a free account or paid account. I have 240 left over because I haven't done much bidding on this account in a little while , So have a lot there, so it's not a big deal for me to to use two of those. I've never seen a one connect bid, so just divide those available connects by two and you know how many bids you can make. You can also save this job for later if you want. You don't want to bid on it, but you want a bid. Later. Let's submit a proposal, and here we have the submit a proposal page. Can we have more details that we can look at? Have you that job posting again if we like, they're looking for an expert. More information on the connects and down here it says the clients budget is $10,000 U. S. Of course I'm gonna bid that and talk more about bid strategy later removed. Let's go a little bit lower cause I have a feeling the people bidding are probably not going. Teoh, um, necessarily bid the max. I'm using my free freelancer account, so I don't see the bid range. If I was using my agency account, I would see that range I pay for that option, Some kind of going blindly into this. Notice the fee here, the up work service fee is $950 So that is explained. Here they talk about what this is costing. It's kind of a high amount. In the days of the lance dot com, the fee was 8.75 on everything. And now things have changed, so you'll receive. This is the amount you'll receive in U. S. Dollars, and this is estimated duration. So let's stop here for a second. You will have to think about how long it would take you to do that, and that will come down to some calculations you have to make. How long will it take me out of this? The problem is the person who wrote this the's job details has not indicated the length of the book, and that's gonna affect your bid number. So what I always say is, just put the lowest one put less than a week. You don't want anybody else to say less than a week and you choose 123 months and maybe you lose based on duration. So I say, Always choose less than one week, even if it's a big book and they tell you it's 400 pages. Just bid less than one week. Nobody really talks about this that much. And actually, I find that when a client chooses me, we have that duration conversation anyways were never stuck to whatever this says in the bid proposal. So just go ahead and say less than one week and then here we have the cover letter. So the cover letter is your riel. First point of contact to the client. I have a set of 45 cover letters like this one here that I have a Microsoft word that I simply highlight copy, and then I just paste it into this box. You know, I've got one that's written for different projects. So this is a book, right? This is Ah, my book. The person says So I've got a cover letter that I've written just for books. It says Hello. I'm quite interested in knitting your book. Let me explain my experience and I go on to give my experience. I mentioned them a university professor, which might have some sway with some clients. And then I say, What I'm going to do, I will edit your book completely. That means I'll do copy editing and proofreading. So I say Do both. And then I also mentioned I usually do two readings of a document. Maybe other freelancers don't say that kind of a thing. And then I say, If you have any questions, you hesitate to ask. Good luck with your book and I put my name in. Now. Some people disagree with this method, so they say that you should write on original from scratch cover letter for every job you apply for, and I say This is impossible. You don't have the time to be crafting personalized letters for each client. Now what I do is I sometimes changed book to e book or to resume that kind of a thing. If the person's name is in their proposal right up, if they sign it with your name. Dave. Sarah, Whatever I'll say Dear Sarah or Hello, Sarah, just to personalize it a little bit. Now, if it's an academic one, I may, for example, right an additional paragraph about some more academic things that I've done. If it's ah romance novel, I may put right away that I've added a number of romance novels, but the bulk of it stays the same, and this saves you time, and it's perfectly fine to do this. I've been a client on up work, so I've seen I posted jobs and I've seen cover letters. And to be honest, most freelancers don't say much. I've had freelancers say almost nothing. You know, they simply depend upon their their history, their ratings, and that's about it. So you don't want to write a book here. You don't wanna have a long screen saying a whole lot of things, but you also don't want to say nothing or one line. Find a middle ground, be focused, get to the point short paragraphs, short sentences be really focused there and get on with it. You're gonna be doing a lot of these proposals and you don't want to have to write different ones for each type. Now I do have one that I write up. That's pretty much the same for E books for resumes, and I just copy and paste that just so I make sure that I've changed those words book resume or whatever. So that's that you can attach files or upload project files. Sometimes I I upload a chapter of my writing textbook that I have with Oxford University Press, just to show them that I know what I'm talking about when it comes to editing. So I show them that, and that's a possibility. If prior clients give you permission, you can actually show documents you've edited. But make sure that you when you upload those, you've got permission from your clients because there may be some privacy rules there. Ah, nondisclosure agreements or whatever. But that can really help, actually, to show prettily with tracked changes on inward what you've done with another client's writing. Now you can also in this box up, sell yourself. So if you're bidding on something that has to do with science and you've got a science background, definitely mention that, and they may be interested in that science background as well. I find certainly that as a professor and I pitch myself as a professor, the people who have master species and PhD dissertations, they really like having a professor look over the work. So look into your own experience and say, What is my experience? What is my knowledge and intelligence about a specific topic and put that in right away? So that's my proposal. And then you go down to the bottom and you just click submit. And they have all these rules to tell you about escrow and payments and mediation services if things go wrong. Yes, I understand, and I submit. So it shows me on this follow up page my proposals. One active Candace candidacy. So you noticed. I also some invitations. So some people over the months of ah invited me. You can respond to those. It also shows me submitted proposals that I've done before. So that's a walk through of submitting a proposal and some of the details you should follow when you fill out that form 12. Bidding Principles to Win: in this video, I want to show you some of principles of bidding that have worked for me in this competitive, really competitive marketplace To put together a pretty good side income or part time income is a freelance editor in Proof reader. The first principle is you need to get into a habit of bidding. I know when you get busy on other things, it's hard to sit down and actually get around bidding on things, and you need to bid on everything. Pick a time or multiple times during the day when all you do for 20 minutes or half an hour is look through the listings. Of course, bidding on anything costs you two connects per proposal. There are some free proposals. That's if you get an invitation to interview. If you get an invitation, it looks like a good job. Definitely bid because they're already high on you. They're already interested in you if you find that you're running out of connects and you probably will if you have a free account, go ahead and buy a few more, do a few more bids or be a little bit more selective in what you're doing. But you should be maxing up those connects every month. I consider the cost of connects simply the cost of doing business, so you will easily pay for those extra connects. Or, if you have an account that you pay for $20 a month, you'll pay for that if you're getting any number of jobs. Another important point is to keep on the lookout for time sensitive jobs. So many clients want jobs done fast, and you'll only see these. If you're looking every day or multiple times per day at those listings, these jobs can be really good paying jobs. They can also be dangerous because you have to maybe rush things a bit, too. Just be careful and see how long the job actually. Is it 400 pages in 24 hours? No way. Don't do that. You'll only get a bad rating. They might not even pay you. But if somebody wants a really short admission essay edited, go ahead, do it. You can do that fast. You can do that in 24 48 hours, and the money can be lucrative because clients know that you're rushed. They'll pay for that rush the next reality of bidding is simply that you're gonna fail a lot and just expect that you're gonna fail. Don't covet a job before you win it. Don't think. Wow, there's a $10,000 job. I bid on it. I want to get it. Don't think about that. Just let it go. Forget about it because chances are you gonna fail. I think my bidding success rate is about 10% but I bid on a lot of jobs, so I might bid on 30 40 jobs in a month and get 3 to 4 of those jobs. That's pretty good to do a lot of bidding. Do a lot of bidding. You'll win a few of those. If it's $1000 job, that one job you win that whole month, that's really good. And if you bid on a bunch of smaller jobs, so $50 jobs, $80 jobs, $100 jobs, who knows? Maybe you win five or six or seven of them and you have a nice 500 to $700 income and it doesn't take you that long to edit that kind of work. My philosophy is the bid on everything and bid and forget. Just forget about it. Move on. Just constantly bid on things, and some things will be surprised. A month later, a client comes to you and says, I finally made my decision. I want to choose you and it's a nice surprise. Another principle of this marketplace is that pricing matters now. That sounds obvious, but it could be used as a strategy and simply. What I'm saying is despite me having a very high rating on the sites of a 97% quality rating, I still lose out to people who underbid me so they put in a lower bid price. I've seen people with almost no experience on the site beat me by under bidding me on the contract. I've had clients tell me they really like my profile that, like my ratings, my reviews, but I cost too much, so lowering your price will always get you some number of clients. You just have to decide how low you're willing to go. Ah, final point on bidding principles that I want to mention is really look out for badly written adds. So the ad has a lot of mistakes in it. There's a good chance the document itself is badly written and may not be worth your time 13. How Much Should I Bid?: I want to now give you some insider tips on how much you should bid on contracts. First, you need to think about your own needs. Why are you doing this? How much do you need to make to survive? How much time do you have in the week and so on? Because that's gonna be your first factor or variable in deciding on a bit amount. What is your time worth? Only you know that number. If you're living in a town somewhere with a really low cost of living, maybe you can bid less than other people. I've seen people bid in countries where, you know, a dollar a day is all they need or $10 a day is all they need. So of course, they put in quite a low bid. Whether they win or not, it's up to the client. But that is their decision to do that. Price also reflects on clients. So good clients people you really want to work with, they respect editing and proofreading, and they'll pay for it at a reasonable level. Having said all that, I encourage you not to go too low The bidding system on up work does suppress earnings. Don't be the person who puts in a $10 bid for, ah 100 page book because that just is an insult to the rest of the editing community, isn't it? It reminds me of that quote by the supermodel Linda Evangelista, who said that she wouldn't get out of bed for less than $10,000 a day. Now I'm not looking for $10,000 but I'm I would even bother to edit anything for $10. Also remain professional with clients. You will see their budget number if it looks really low, do not insult them. A client of mine posted her book job on up work and got a reply from somebody who put a huge number. I think her budget was 300 he put 3000 and then, in kind of a rough way, a rude way, he said, that it's inconceivable that you could do that kind of work in a quality way. For $300. Now, she put in her Add The 300 was just a starting point. It wasn't the final point, and his rudeness just turned her off. Another factor that's going to influence how much you should charge is the size of the project. If the ad doesn't say how long the book is or how long the document is, please ask the client before you bid. Once you know the length of the document, then you can decide how long it's gonna take you and that will determine how much money you're gonna make. And you don't wanna go too fast. But also, you want to maximize your earnings in a month, so you've got to come up with an optimum speed or rate of editing. I tend to think about what my hourly rate is gonna be, even for a fixed rate job. Personally, I want to make 30 or $40 an hour. So I have to figure out how many pages I can reasonably edit of that document within a typical our. If that calculation turns out to be what I think is a bit high, I might lower it just to give the client of break and ensure that I win the bid. Another thing to consider is the bid amount that's listed on the advertisement for the job . This is usually a pretty strict amount, but if you've got a really good profile on the good rating. You can go higher than that amounts. Some clients will put in $10 for a whole book, which is just stupid. But what they're doing is they're not expecting anyone to actually bid $10. They are just putting a minimum. But if that budget amount looks reasonable, then chances are the client has really thought about it, and that is their maximum. If you go any higher than that, you're not gonna get it. One tip for you. Sometimes on some views of those job ads, they don't show that the client has actually put a range in. So on the view you have of that post, you will only see the minimum. And I didn't realize this until well into working on up work. One time I bid 300 which was a little bit low on a job because the guys budget amounts had 300 he chose me, and I was like, Wow, Okay, I got the job. And then when I actually clicked into the original contract, I saw that he had put a 300 to $600 range. So as you can imagine. I felt kind of stupid, but I didn't see that original range of Maybe I lost out on a couple $100. I have one final tip, and it's called bidding against the average. If you've got a paid up work account, you can actually see what other people are bidding not specifically, but the overall range in the mid point. And I've had some success bidding slightly lower than the average, so maybe 10% lower. So I'm not undermining the whole marketplace. I'm not undermining other people greatly, but I am capturing the attention of the client and giving them pause to think about me and to look at my great ratings to look at the great comments from my previous clients. Finally, I know it can be enticing when you see large budget jobs a $10,000.5000 dollars and you want a bid on those. Just be careful, because sometimes those jobs don't actually reflect the amount of work required. Yes, it may be paying you well, but you may have to edit multiple books. Or maybe you're looking at 400,000 words you have to go through. I find the truly big budget jobs do not pay what you're worth realistically, and you might find yourself locked into that job because it's just so much work that you are not able to bid on anything else. In this lecture. I've given you a number of tips to help you maximize your earnings on your bids. And I really hope that you have success. Please tell me how you're doing. 14. The Power of Good Ratings: I know what you're just beginning on upper. You're thinking about the opportunities for income, but I think you actually need to first think about ratings. Ratings are more important than income at the beginning. If you don't get good ratings right away, you're up for career. May be over as quickly as it began. I found when I started, I wasn't getting many jobs because I didn't have many up work ratings. So what I had to do is lower my income expectations. So do some under bidding, wins some good jobs, do a really good job and get some ratings. One of my first jobs was actually to convert a PhD students citations from M. L. A style to Chicago style. That's an awful, tedious job, but I did it. I got paid about $100 which is not worth it. For all the time I put into that job, I think I put 15 hours in, but with a few more of those small jobs getting good ratings, I saw a domino effect. I started to get more and more job. I started to raise my prices slowly to because people could trust me. Thankfully, I've gotten to the point where my ratings were high enough that I don't have to bid so low that I can actually turn away contracts that are even offered to me because they're not worth my time. And I've got other work coming down the pipeline, and now people invite me to job so they find me on the site because of my ratings, and they bring me in to often very good jobs. If your first bids are extremely high, you will just not get any jobs. You won't get started up work. You won't get any ratings. So my tip here is to underbid initially, maybe 30% 40% even if it's not worth your time. Do an absolutely fantastic editing job. Ask the client if they're happy. If they are happy and they really like your work, encourage them to put in a review for you. Not all clients put in reviews. They might not even put any stars down. Sometimes they feel it's just a pain to have to fill out the form after the client is finished so they just skip it. And if you get some solid reviews next time you bid on something. The client will take notice of that. And I'm sure you'll see your rates go up. Your number of jobs go up over time. 15. Develop a Stable of Repeat Clients: another reason to get really good ratings is that satisfied clients become repeat clients. And since you never know how your biddings gonna go, whether you're gonna be successful or not, it's really nice toe. Have jobs come to you from repeat clients. I would say about 50% of my income from up work now comes from people I've worked for before. So when you're looking for jobs, look for clients who might be repeat clients. Maybe they've already bought a lot on up work. Maybe they run a small business that regularly needs editing and proofreading. Maybe they have a magazine that's gonna come out four times a year. It's really a pleasant surprise when a previous client contacts you and says, Would you like to do more work? You didn't have to go through the process of application. The client knows the kind of editing that you do, and you know how much work you're gonna have to do with that person's writing. For example, have a client I met on a let's dot com who, without fail every couple of months, sends me an E book to add it. He has an in house writer who writes books on holistic remedies for various ailments, and these are fairly well written, but they could be better, and I take them to another level. But it's not the most challenging editing that I've ever had to do. So it's worth what he pays me. And it's just a very pleasant experience of re pleasant job that I could do in my spare time, and it pays fairly well. And it's nice toe have that income every couple of months from that one client doing a good job also leads to word of mouth. So some of Europe were. Clients will often talked to other friends, and they'll sign up to up work, and I'll ask you to do their editing. One final point I want to mention is the idea of taking these relationships offline. Why would anybody take thes relationships offline while you can save, for example, the up work fee, which is 20% on the 1st $500 of earnings with one client? This is, however, against the rules of the up work marketplace. Now, I've never suggested that to clients, but one time a client on let's dot com actually suggest that we go off line. And then within a few hours, there was a message popping up in our thread are private thread from a customer service person at elance dot com saying No, no, no, don't be naughty. Boys don't do that. Don't take things off line. And that's because the user agreement says anybody you meet online has to stay on that site . I think the lance figured this out simply because the client was giving me his email address and then said this and maybe that email address flags. Something in the last system, of course, he lands up work. They don't wanna lose their fee. Their commission now. In reality, there's really little that upward can do about this. So the beginning of every job you might give your email address to the client simply to keep thm posted on things or descend big files to them or received files. And then, once the upward job is finished, been paid up, work has their commission. Then you can just contact the client through email from that point forward, and this means you can offer the client the same price that you would usually get minus the typical 10 or 20% fees that up work with charge. So the client is happy You still make what you expected. The only danger in this while you don't get the protections that the up work system provides. So you don't get the escrow protection. You don't get the mediation service. So what if you submit the file on the client doesn't pay you in my experience, though, usually you only go off line with people you know really well, and so you already can trust them. They trust you, and that never happens. The key point here, though, is the cultivate the way a farmer would cultivate his her field. Those great relationships with your clients and you'll start getting that repeat business, and you won't have to bid on his many new contracts maybe just here and there to fill in the gaps in contracts from your repeat clients. 16. Start Strong with These Approaches and Philosophies: in this section, I'm going to talk about some approaches and philosophies that will get you off to a really good start as an editor and proof reader on up work. The first thing is to be really clear on what the client expects from you. The job bad will give you some of that information, but sometimes you gotta ask the client for even more information. A big misunderstanding that can often lead to bad reviews is the meanings of the words editing and perforating so as to claim what they mean by the editing. They want the proof reading they want, and maybe you'll have to define those terms better. Let's now look at those terms editing and proofreading. What is proof reading? I consider proof reading to be just a final check of a document for typos, spelling mistakes, Leia problems and so on. So nothing major. The writing should already have been edited by somebody else, and you're just trying to catch those final airs before the document goes to the printer of the publisher. I don't consider proof reading to be rewriting sentences, moving paragraphs around, changing the order of things. If your client asks for proof reading and you get the manuscript and you find it's in really, really bad shape. Then you're gonna have to reconsider the job and certainly your price. So what is? Editing? Editing has two main levels, so you have the sentence level editing paragraph editing, and then you have these substantive or structural editing. Sentence level editing involves correcting grammar and style, rewriting sentences if necessary. If their wordy or awkward correcting spelling typos punctuation so on. It can also include ensuring consistency of style across the whole document. That may include capitalisation, heading styles, the usage of bold beyond the level of the sentence you move into that substandard of, or structural editing that involves massive changes to sentences and structures. You may even be asked to offer comments on changing the plot changing characterization if it's a novel. So from the examples I've given you here, a proof reading obviously pays the least sentence level of paragraph level editing next and then the most expensive editing is substantive editing because it takes you the most time 17. More Approaches and Philosophies: Now let's look at some other tips on editing and proofreading approaches and philosophies. All editors are worried about being perfect. Perfection is our job, but if you're too much of a perfectionist, you may delay jobs. You might do 345 rounds of editing to find those last few heirs, but nobody is perfect. If anyone thinks a single editor can catch every single air, they're mistaken. Of course, you have to do your best, and that's why I recommend two rounds of editing, one on screen and one on paper. But an editor once told me that the way he gets all the airs out of his documents is to have as many eyeballs as possible on those documents. One person should not be the last catcher of errors. Another approach tip is to create a detailed schedule when I have started a job and look at how many pages or how many words it is, and I determine how many pages words I can edit each day I said a target and I said, I've got added 20 pages every day. I've gotta edit 40 pages or I've got to do 10,000 words per day, and then I know I will meet the deadline of the client. 1/3 approach tip, which I hinted at earlier in this lesson, is to do two readings of every document, so I always add it first on screen, and then I turn around and edit on a second round. On paper, it's been proven that people actually catch airs better when they're viewing those sentences. On paper. The on screen at it is really nice for recasting sentences, rewriting things quickly and easily, and then you just print it out and you're looking for final airs. Your proof reading that second round of editing on paper should go really fast because you've caught 90% of the airs on screen. The second round is also great for catching any errors that you added. It's very embarrassing to give the client a document where you've recast the sentence on screen, and meanwhile, you've added a problem to the document. If you don't have time to do two rounds or you find the initial document is in great condition already, then go straight to the printed editing round, a point I made there about not having time to do two rounds is something I want expand upon here. Obviously, the speed at which you work is gonna affect your earnings. Going too fast will mean lack of attention to detail. And you may miss airs. You need to determine your optimum speed of editing and proofreading a comfortable speed where you're not too slow. You're not labouring over it, but you're not rushing. This, of course, depends on the quality of the manuscript I find in my own experience, if the writing is bad, the editing is heavy and that slows me down. I might only do a page per every 15 minutes if the writing is quality from the start. It's a light, proofreading job, and I can get it done very quickly without compromising on quality. The final tip on approaches to having success in your editing improve reading is about passes. Some editors, when they're going through that sentence level editing, will look for every possible problem and get that editing round done in one pass, I find, though it's hard to concentrate on that level and remember all the possible problems you're looking for. So I'll do the first pass, looking just for grammar style and punctuation of sentences. And then I'll just do a quick scan through the document on a second pass, looking for capitalization inconsistencies in headings. Use of bold, that kind of thing. Any formatting, inconsistencies like in dense That way. I don't miss any of those other issues when I am searching for grammar style punctuation. 18. An Editing Philosophy that Keeps Clients Happy: in this video, I want to talk about an editing style or philosophy that has really helped me succeed with clients. A bonus of this style of philosophy is that it helps you get work done faster. So one of the ways you can fail as an editor in Proof Reader is to make the clients writing sound like the way you write writers air very protective of their own pros, and they don't want you messing around with it. They don't want you changing their ideas. So the key here is not to change the essence or core of the writing. Yes, sometimes you'll think of a better way of saying something, so you'll recast the sentence. I call these parts of writing speed bumps there awkward phrases that you just have to rewrite. But don't go overboard, changing everything for no good reason. And that's time consuming for you. And make sure that any editing you do preserves the original meaning. I prefer to think of editing and proofreading as weeding a garden if I'm weeding the garden in front of my house. Of course, I'm not going to remove the beautiful flowers or the bushes. I'm just removing those weeds that air crowding out those beautiful flowers and bushes. And by doing that, the goodness of those flowers and bushes or, in this case of the sentences, shines through. So the philosophy here is there is goodness. There's great stuff in these sentences by my client. I am just going to make it a little better. A little shiny er, gonna polish it. So this usually means just removing wordiness, passive voice and other things that I talk about in another course that I teach online. Most writers will appreciate this weeding approach because you're keeping their ideas, information and their stories intact. I think you'll find this approach also means you're not digging into the manuscript too much. You're not going beyond what is required of you, and that saves you time, and you can make more money cause you could do more jobs 19. Use these 6 Practical Tips to Ensure Success: in this lesson, I'm going to go through a number of practical tips that will help you succeed as an editor and proof reader. Tip number one is to create what I call an error file. So this is a little note pad page in Microsoft Windows or Microsoft Word Page, or even a piece of paper. In that document, you write down some of the more common airs that you're starting to see as you go through the manuscript or questions for yourself. Here's an example of a note pad like a piece of software I use called Scriven ER, and they have this thing called a scratch pad. And on this you'll see, for example, that my author kept writing out when they meant our another one. I wasn't sure whether they should capitalize the sea in chief. Also, the person was writing stop instead of what they men, which was spot. There's the classic issue of gray or gray. One of my clients always writes Sue s u E. When he really means use u S. E. I like to create a little file called a client profile on. I put these common mistakes into that file the next time I get another document from that claim, the first thing I do is actually do a quick control F in Microsoft Word and I looked through the document. Define those airs first. That means they don't have to find their change. Those common airs again, and I can focus on other things in the manuscript. Practical Tip number two for success is to always use, obviously track changes. Track changes is simply a feature in Microsoft Word and other word processors that shows exactly what changes you've made to the document. The client can then review and accept or reject those changes with tracked changes. You can also writing comments for things that you just didn't understand and you could not at it. Just make sure the client knows how toe view those changes because sometimes they open up the file. They don't see anything I like. You didn't do anything. Tip Number three is to keep an eye open for punctuation problems. Adding extra spaces before periods and commas is very common. And obviously a big big problem in writing is the use of apostrophes. For possessive tip number four is to talk to your client about what style guide they want to use for things like headings and subheadings. Depending on the style guide you want to use, that's M L. A or A P A or Chicago style. They have different rules for capitalization of words inside headings four Bolding Things like that related style point is the typeface that the client is using the font. Sometimes you'll see times New Roman used throughout the document. Then suddenly it shifts to Adobe gear. Amman So standardized that Tim Number five is. When you're all done, you're editing. You're totally finished. Run, spell check, spell check and also the grammar check that's associated with it. In Microsoft, Word will catch often some final errors that you just did not notice. It's a great safety net right at the end. If you have a long document, it could be really tedious to run spell check through 200 pages or 300 pages. But just do it. I promise you it will find you those last five or six years. Tip number six is simply to provide a final summary in your communication to your client. This could be a word file, or it could just be an email message through the up work system. This is important because most clients are They're not experts on editing, and they may not see all the wonderful things you've done to the manuscript. So you must tell them what you've done. Start that document like a letter and I would say, Talk about all the wonderful things about the manuscript. First, people like to hear the positives first. It's not all negatives, then turn to in explanation of the categories of editing that you did. So if you improve the verbs that you improved the wordiness, tell them that this can also help the client become a better writer. So you're not just improving the document. You're proving them as writers, and I think they'll really appreciate that this final communication Congar a long way to developing those relationships that lead to repeat clients 20. Should you use Grammarly?: in this video, I'm going to talk about a piece of software, a Web site that can really, really help you as an editor or proofreader. It's called Graham early. So graham early dot com now telling you this probably will upset some professional editors because Graham Early, which searches through documents to find grammar, airs spelling mistakes, typos, things like that may actually take away professional editing and proofreading jobs from people. So there's some concern in this controversial about Graham early that maybe this is putting us out of business as freelance proofreaders and editors. Now, I logged into this recently, and I've been using it for certain documents. You can see my documents here, some of these air personal documents. So I've had to write up some cover letters and send them off, and I want to make sure that I haven't missed any errors. And I know when you become an editor or proofreader, you become paranoid about that one mistake remaining in that document. So, even though yes, maybe someday, if the artificial intelligence gets really good, maybe this will take away my job. Maybe a computer can do my work right now. It can't but it can help you. So let me show you this. So this is the main Graham early page. There's a Google chrome extension, you consol for websites. Let me run through and look a specific document here. This is a document that I uploaded to the site. You can also cut and paste in documents right now. The bottom you'll see, it says, checking what's going through the over 1000 words and down on this column. Here you'll start to see things pop up. So it just said unnecessary ellipsis. There's a comma issue here. It suggests crossing out, kind of and maybe unnecessary. It says, So I can go through down here tells me there's 100 and four critical issues with this document and 222 advanced issues, and I can scroll and keep scrolling and scrolling and you see all these things come down the right side in my experience of using Graham early for a few weeks on a premium account . So this means I'm paying for this is that it's pretty good. It catches a lot of things both on the grammar side and on the style side. The style side is often something that is on Lee done by human beings. But here he does find some of those style problems, not just the grammar spelling. There's a lot here, so it's useful. It's great as a final check when I was doing a cover letter for a job recently, you know, I proofread it as best I could, but I was too close to my document. So I needed another set of eyeballs, and I use this software to do it, and it found those errors Notice here. There's a spelling mistake reseach instead of research. So I like to use this at the end of the process. So I've already used my skills to get that document into great shape, and I just want another check to make sure I didn't miss anything. And this way you also save time because you get fewer of these air is coming down the right side if you solely depend on this and that would be unethical to do editing and proofreading solely using Graham early. But if you solely use it, you've got a lot to go through. There's a lot here, and it doesn't catch everything, so I've still found things come up that I should catch that a human being would catch or things that it just overlooks eso. It's not perfect, and we still need human beings to review these documents, but I think it's worth it if you can get a discount on this. So I signed up for Graham early. The free account at first, and that gives you some basic functionality, doesn't give you all of the functionality. And then what happened is over the next few weeks. Graham early kept sending me offers. So discount offers and I just waited and I waited and I waited. And finally I found an offer I liked. It was about $70 a year U. S. Dollars, and I decide, OK, this is pretty at Price. I'm gonna buy it for the whole year and give it a shot, and so far I really like it. So that's Graham early, a little bit controversial, something that some professional editors won't like. But I think it has a purpose, and it's better than the Microsoft Word grammar and spelling check 21. What to Do if the Client Wants Substantive Editing: most of the editing you'll do on up work will be at the sentence or paragraph level, but sometimes you'll need to do substantive or structural editing. If this is the case, then you're not gonna worry about little things initially. So you're not gonna worry about spelling. You're not gonna worry about grammar. You'll be working a big picture problems with the manuscript. You may have to edit things to improve the plots. If it's a novel, the characters, maybe even the tone of that novel, you may have to add in sentences to create a coherence in this story or the newspaper article or whatever you're editing, so that there's a very strong spying there that the reader can follow. You may have to flag digressions parts that just don't fit the manuscript, things that you have to just delete and remove. The manuscript may need a better introduction that you will right after you've read. The whole document related to that is the conclusion. Does it effectively some up the whole document you'll find a lot of writers will say the same thing in different ways throughout a longer manuscript, and you may have to delete some of those. I always believe that you can cut it, and it really doesn't change the manuscript in a major way than it's worth cutting. It also keep in Iove for sensory detail. So a lot of writers every vague when they right and they don't appeal to any of the five senses. You may also see a certain theme or certain idea spread around the manuscript, and you'll want to bring those parts together in one location. So these were some of the big picture things you would do before sentence level editing and proofreading. Of course, the client has to request this service, and you want to be in conversation with the client about these big changes before you make them. Also, make sure your suitably compensated for this work because it's gonna take you a long time many, many more hours than if you're just doing proofreading. As long as you make the scope of this work clear to the client early on, there won't be any misunderstanding 22. The Online Editor/Proofreader Lifestyle: choosing to be a freelance editor will affect your lifestyle in certain ways, and I just want to give you a heads up on some of the issues that pop up when taking on this part time job. One issue is that editing has its own seasons, so you may get off to a really good start. But then you find things slow down, and typically those slowdowns occur around Christmas. New Year's, sometimes in the mid summer, is a big slowdown. So if you're depending on this income to pay the bills, just recognize you're going slow months. And maybe when things are going really well, you want to save some of that money for those dry periods. A second lifestyle issues simply finding the time to do the work. If it's not your main job or if you've got a big, busy family life, I have a full time job. University professor have a family of a young child, so it can be very difficult to find moments to concentrate and do this editing sometimes all squeeze editing and proofreading into the time before the rest of my family wakes up in the very early morning or late at night will stay up when they've gone to bed. I can turn the TV off and really get to work to get to my full time job. I take a very comfortable commuter train from the suburbs downtown, and it takes about 40 minutes each way. I can get about 80 minutes of editing and proofreading done in those dead commuting times when otherwise I would just be sitting there sleeping or looking out the window. If family members air busy preparing food like dinner or they're talking on the phone or doing their own work, that's the time to jump on the computer and start doing your work. Take 20 minutes here and there, and that really adds up. I admit that you may have to sacrifice your weekends sometimes to get a job done your Saturdays and Sundays, but you can take a portion of those days and do that work without letting your family down and wasting your whole day sitting on the computer. You may have to explain to your family why you're spending so much time doing this editing , and that obviously comes down to the extra income that you get from this work a final point on editing and proofreading on up work is that this job requires focus. You will need a quiet space, or maybe earplugs or noise canceling headphones just to cut out the distractions around you . The sound distractions. Sometimes you may need to turn off your Internet connection. Just so you stop checking your email habitually turn off the TV, turn off the radio and really get down to work. There are even some maps for your computer that will shut off the Internet connection for a certain amount of time, and you cannot get it back until about 30 minutes of that 20 minutes is up, and that could stop that urge to waste time on the Web.