On the Basics: Tips for starting the new year off right

© Ruth E. Thaler-Carter, Owner

An American Editor

Hard to believe — but a relief for many of us — that 2022 is over! I have a few random thoughts for a strong start to 2023, some of which are updates of similar past posts.

The new year means an opportunity to revise or improve some of our work habits to make our lives easier and more efficient. Here are some things to do in the first few days of 2023 that should make your work and personal life better.

• Update or change passwords for all accounts — banking, blogs, social media, associations, subscriptions; anything and everything, but especially anything related to finances and personal security.

• Remind clients to update the year in their document templates, website copyright statements and any other elements that might now be out of date — and do that for your own materials, website, etc.

• Review the style guide(s) that you use and check for any updates, revisions, additions and other changes that might affect this year’s work for current and new clients. If you don’t already subscribe to the online versions of the ones you use, do it now.

• Establish or refresh a connection with a family member, friend or colleague to back up passwords and access to phone, e-mail, social media, banking and other important accounts — your own and theirs — just in case. Think of it like giving a key to a neighbor or building super so you can be found/reached in an emergency.

Business resolutions

The new year offers the opportunity to learn new things and do things in new ways. Here are a few suggestions.

• Instead of relying on the luck of clients finding you, make an effort to seek new clients on a regular basis, through cold queries, responding to membership association opportunities, social media resources, updating (or creating) your website, etc. This is especially important for colleagues with only one major “anchor” client.

• Find a way to be visible in at least one professional membership organization or social media group to enhance your credibility and expand your networking activity. Even I do that, and I’ve been crowned the Queen of Networking! If you already belong to an association, look for a new one to join as well.

• Learn a new skill, something new about the topic area of a client or an entirely new topic to write about, edit, proofread, index, photograph, illustrate or otherwise work on to expand your career or business.

• Draft a few potential posts to use for your own blog, if you have one, or as a guest on colleagues’ blogs. Having drafts in hand makes it easier to get ahead of deadlines and actually publish new articles.

• Look for new projects or services to offer to existing clients.

• If you have regular editing or proofreading clients who haven’t gotten the memo yet about only needing one space between sentences, or have other writing habits that appear in every document and are easy for them to change, consider doing a “Welcome to the new year” note suggesting that they incorporate such things in their drafts before sending anything to you. Emphasize that doing so will cut down at least a bit on the time you need to handle their requests, as well as free you up to concentrate on more substantive aspects of their projects. Whether this will work depends, of course, on the nature of your relationship with those clients and won’t work for all of them, but could be a relief as you work with those who would be amenable to such suggestions.

• Save toward retirement!

• U.S. colleagues might not have to file taxes until April 15, but getting going early on this nerve-racking task is always a good idea. Among the many resources for end-of-year tax planning are the Freelancers Union blog and ones from experts such as my own invaluable tax person, Janice Roberg (https://robergtaxsolutions.com/st-louis-tax-expert-jan-roberg/). Two useful tips: There’s a relatively new simplified process for deducting a home office, and if you delay invoicing from December until January, it’s easier to manage those late-year payments that reach you in January with a December date and/or for December work.

• Start or return to non-editorial creative projects to give yourself the occasional “brain break” and a way to refuel — write poetry or short fiction, make something crafty or artistic, even just spend time at a museum or art gallery (or library/bookstore).

Perks of the new year

• I’m clearing out some of my bookshelves again. I’m donating half of every January 2023 sale of my short story, “Sometimes You Save the Cat …,” to the Humane Society of Missouri. Contact me at Ruth@writerruth.com for information about getting your copy (the print version is $10, including postage/shipping, and the PDF is $5).

I’m also offering my “Get Paid to Write! Getting Started as a Freelance Writer” booklet at $5 off the usual $20 price through January. Again, contact me by e-mail for details.

What are your new year’s plans and aspirations?

On the Basics: Preparing for the new year

Ruth E. Thaler-Carter, Owner

An American Editor

It’s the first day of the new year (thank goodness!), and that means it’s time to put together a plan for the new year if you haven’t already done so. With New Year’s Day falling on a Friday, we have a whole weekend to use for launching the new year on a positive note. Here are a few suggestions for projects to consider.

• Review, refresh and expand your website (or create one!). Look for ways to make the text more active and interesting; add information about recent achievements, such as new clients/projects, awards, etc.; replace long-used images with new ones; add new pages if appropriate, etc. Consider asking a colleague to assess the site to make sure it’s helping your visibility through accurate language and effective search engine optimization (SEO) and keywords; it might be worth paying a professional for an SEO assessment.

• Review and update your résumé. You might not always need it, but it’s worth having a current version on hand in case you do. You don’t want to throw something together in a rush to respond to a request; that’s a guarantee of making embarrassing mistakes. Again, this is where swapping services with a colleague might be a good idea. For the aspiring and current freelancers among us, it also might be worth consulting the new (2020) edition of the Editorial Freelancers Association booklet, “Resumés for Freelancers: Make Your Resumé an Effective Marketing Tool … and More!” (Disclaimer: I’m the co-author — but I don’t profit from sales.)

• Set goals for the new year. These can be basic: Earn more money, find new clients, join new organizations or take on new roles in ones you already belong to, create new promotional/marketing material, expand visibility in social media, be more organized, stay ahead of filing and record-keeping, etc. (Once you’ve thought about them, these goals can be the basis of a formal business plan; especially useful for those thinking about launching a freelance business.)

• Review what you’ve gained from and contributed to professional memberships. There might be organizations that are a better fit for where you are in your current job or freelance business, and ones you belong to that haven’t been as useful as you had hoped. Be patient, because some memberships take awhile to generate income, but make sure that your investment in professional associations is paying off. Ask colleagues which associations have been the most-useful and -profitable for them, and why or how.

• Think about ways to be more visible. Consider writing a book or booklet, especially if you do speaking engagements (even online ones; having a publication to sell or promote at such events can be very profitable); look for ways to become a presenter or trainer (again, even in virtual environments); find new places to contribute comments and guest posts; update your LinkedIn profile; start your own blog; use visual media such as podcasting and videos; partner with a colleague to swap referrals or work on bigger (or new types of) projects together than either of you can handle alone; be more active in associations of colleagues — and potential clients. The more you show up, the stronger your professional image and credibility, and the easier it will be for prospective employers or clients to find, and hire, you.

• If you’re freelancing, increase your rates! Let current clients know that will happen in January and stick to it. If a valued client objects, you can always “grandfather in” existing ones at their current rates — as long as you feel they’re worth it.

Whatever you choose to do in this important new year, here’s to success and fulfillment for all of us. Feel free to share your plans, goals and questions for the year. 

Ruth E. Thaler-Carter (www.writerruth.com) is an award-winning provider of editorial and publishing services for publications, independent authors, publishers, associations, nonprofits and companies worldwide, and the editor-in-chief and owner of An American Editor. She created the annual Communication Central Be a Better Freelancer^® conference for colleagues (www.communication-central.com), now co-hosted with the National Association of Independent Writers and Editors (www.naiwe.com) and sponsored by An American Editor. She also owns A Flair for Writing (www.aflairforwriting), which helps independent authors produce and publisher their books. She can be reached at Ruth@writerruth.com or Ruth.Thaler-Carter@AnAmericanEditor.com.

B&N in a Fantasy World

The Amazon versus Hachette stories in the newspapers and the blogosphere started me thinking about Barnes & Noble yet again. (For those of you unfamiliar with the Amazon–Hachette dispute, it boils down to this: In a few months, the prohibition against agency pricing that came about as part of the settlement agreement between the U.S. Department of Justice and the big publishers expires. Amazon is trying to get Hachette to agree to a new division of fees — Amazon gets more, Hachette gets less — as a sort of preemptive strike to stop the reimposition of agency pricing. For the first time in its history, Amazon is under pressure to produce large profits and it sees as one avenue to doing so receiving a larger discount from publishers. Although the fight is currently over print books, most commentators see it as a proxy for ebooks. The speculation is that if Hachette succumbs, the other publishers will follow; if Hachette prevails, agency pricing is likely to be reinstated by all of the publishers.)

As many of you know, I buy a lot of books through B&N. In May alone, I received eight hardcovers from B&N and preordered several more. In looking at my list of preorders, I find that I currently have 11 preordered hardcovers and 18 that I am thinking of preordering. (I do not preorder ebooks. I only preorder books that I want in hardcover.) Since January 1, I have purchased (and received) another 21 books from B&N.

In my fantasy world, B&N cares very much about me as a customer. In the real world, B&N cares for me as much as Amazon does, which isn’t a whole lot. Yet with the Amazon–Hachette dispute, B&N has a golden opportunity to strike a blow for its own special relationship with its customers. Alas, if history is any guide to the future, this will be another opportunity that B&N misses.

So let’s look longer term than what B&N could do tomorrow while the Amazon–Hachette dispute festers. What is it that I, as a regular customer of B&N, would like that would entice me to spend even more money at B&N (and also might be appealing enough to draw in new customers)?

A fundamental rule for all businesses is that to survive and grow you need not only new customers, but you need to retain existing customers. B&N doesn’t do a great job at either.

Both Amazon and B&N use some algorithm that, when you buy a book, says “customers who bought this book also bought”. Who cares? I don’t care what someone I don’t know bought, especially when the suggested books are so unlike what I did buy. To me, it is like the anonymous reviews or the reviews by IAteMyTongueYesterday.

Instead, I would like to be given opportunities to (a) have forthcoming books by the author automatically preordered for me with (b) a guarantee that I will pay only the lowest price at which the book is offered by B&N and (c) with the opportunity to cancel the preorder before the book is shipped. This would be particularly valuable because customers would no longer need to remember to keep checking to see whether an author has a new book coming out.

I would also like to be able to create a custom newsletter that would keep me abreast of new releases in particular areas. Now I can sign up for broad categories but I want to be able to narrowly focus. I want to be able to say, for example, “World War II history, European theater” of “Fantasy but no vampires or time travel.” I also want to be able to set the frequency. Personally, I would opt for once a month; weekly is far too often for me.

It happens that I am also a member of B&N. With the number of books that I order, it is worth the $25 annual fee to save on the shipping. But except for the shipping savings, being a member is a pretty useless thing at B&N if you shop online. (It isn’t that valuable if you shop in the stores, either.) There area no member discounts or specials online; just the saving of the shipping charges and the getting of “express” shipping, which isn’t all that express.

Now, while Amazon and Hachette (and subsequently the other big publishers) fight over terms and Amazon cuts access to Hachette books, B&N should enhance its membership — give inducements to become a member and to shop at B&N.

I recommended a long time ago that B&N cut deals with publishers to offer a very significant discount on the ebook version of a book if a customer buys the hardcover version. Or, twist it around and offer a significant discount on the hardcover version to the ebook buyer. That’s one inducement that would work with someone like me. But there are a lot of people who are uninterested in having a second copy of a book, even if in a different format.

Perhaps the way to do it is to give members reward points. One point for each dollar spent on books and ebooks, with the points redeemable for a B&N gift card or as a discount on a future purchase.

The point is that B&N needs to quickly figure out some way to immediately take advantage of the Amazon–Hachette spat. It also needs to come up with some ways of inducing book buyers who are currently buying from Amazon to buy, instead, from B&N. Although B&N will not move those who are in lock-step with Amazon, there are a lot of book buyers who are open to shopping elsewhere.

And B&N has to move because its big box competitors, like Walmart, are attempting to woo those same Amazon customers with steep discounts on Hachette books. The odds are long — very long — against B&N doing anything but blowing this opportunity, but one can hope.

Richard Adin, An American Editor