Fiction and a New Income Stream
I recently landed my second job editing fiction. It’s a book of “flash” fiction (very short stories) written by an interesting man with a disability. I hope, hope, hope it goes well! Determining the level of editing is really tricky on this stuff. Rules about grammar and punctuation are laughably bendable. Personal writing style is paramount. Egos are involved to a far greater degree than in a nonfiction book. I am delighted to find that the stories written by this author are pretty damned good, which makes me feel better about taking money from a guy with a disability who wrote some stuff and wants to be published.
Working for individuals has not been my preferred means of earning a living thus far. There’s a lot more risk involved, a lot more client hand-holding and education, contracts to draw up, expectations to make crystal clear, etc. And then there’s the possibility of getting stiffed and not collecting my fee. Fortunately, I can now accept payment via PayPal—as long as I manage to build in PayPal’s fee into my own.
The editing network I joined recently looks like it might become a fairly lucrative deal. I get several job notices per week and can bid on the ones I like. So far, I’ve only landed the above fiction job via the network, but I’m in negotiations on several other projects. The drawback is that these are all individuals, so the above-mentioned hassles all apply. And I have to pay the network’s commission for connecting me to the client. But the network does all kinds of marketing in a kind of Web dragnet fashion. I’m not sure how valuable these network jobs will be in terms of providing impressive résumé material: After all, who’s heard of Joe Blow’s unpublished memoire, and more importantly, who cares if I edited it?
