The 50 Shades of Editing Romance Novels

This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.

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Today's featured case studies stumbled onto her side hustle when she made an interesting discovery. Although she had been a voracious reader her whole life, she never considered that books could be a career for anyone other than authors. This corporate recruiter then pursues a steamy side hustle editing romance novels. Now here's a fun fact. Did you know that romance novel sales total more than a billion dollars a year?

In fact, they sell as much as sci-fi, mystery, and fantasy combined. As an author, I'm obviously working in the wrong genre. I just made a note to write to my publishers and ask if we could retitle some of my books. I've got some proposals here. The $100 startup, adult content edition, side hustle, find your man in 27 days, and the happiness of pursuit and pleasure.

We'll see how that goes. I'll keep you posted. Now in fact, more than 70 million people in the USA alone read at least one romance novel per year. Some of those readers read 80 books or more, again, in a single year. So we're gonna talk today about the 50 shades of editing romance novels.

How do you get started in such a field? Well, I'll tell you. Stay tuned. [Music]

Jessica Snyder has been a corporate recruiter for over a decade, but her true passion is passion. That's passion in the form of romance novels.

A voracious reader, she never considered that books could be a career for anyone other than authors. She knew that writing wasn't the right fit for her. She was always happy to help a friend work through plot issues or proofread a classmate's research paper. In 2012, Jessica's longstanding love of romance novels led her to attend a romance writer's conference. She discovered a whole industry of professionals she never knew existed, editors, agents, publicists, and many others.

In a moment of luck or opportunity, Jessica won a prize at the conference that included breakfast with an editing team from a well-known publishing house. She took advantage of that opportunity to ask how they had started their jobs and what the requirements were to be an editor or proofreader or anything that would help her get her foot in the door. One of their suggestions was to start following agents and editors on Twitter. So that's what she did. A few months later, Jessica noticed a tweet calling for interns at a publishing house for romance fiction.

She sent a direct message to the senior editor expressing her interest, and they chatted briefly online. A couple weeks later, she was officially an unpaid intern. At the time, it felt like the best job ever. While continuing to work full-time, Jessica soaked up experience from her part-time unpaid internship. She learned to analyze manuscripts for what the market wanted rather than her personal preferences, and what in a not-perfect manuscript could be salvaged or improved, like structure and conflict, and what was harder to fix like voice or lack of storytelling ability.

After six months, the publisher promoted Jessica to editorial assistant, where she received a modest side income and continued to hone her skills. Eventually, she decided to start freelance editing on her own. She got her first client by referral. Though she was initially terrified of making amateur mistakes and being called out as a fraud, that first author found Jessica's work to be just as good as what she'd received at a large New York publisher. She became Jessica's most prolific author and has continued to use her services for the past three years.

For a while, Jessica juggled both freelancing and her part-time projects with the publisher's work, alongside her busy day job. Since she already had the necessary tools, a computer with Microsoft Word, that was pretty much it. Startup costs were next to nothing. Projects due for the publisher always took precedence over her hustle to find new clients for herself. So after a year, she opted to resign from the publishing house.

This allowed her to add more freelance clients, and she went from making a bit more than $7,000 in the second year to $15,000 in the third year. Meanwhile, Jessica slowly added to her toolkit while keeping expenses minimal. She made some business cards, flyers, a website, social media accounts, but nothing fancy or expensive. Speaking of money, Jessica charges for her editing services by the Word and according to the level of edit. For example, a developmental edit covers the structure of the story, plot development, characterization, and pacing.

A proofread is focused solely on the technical grammar of the manuscript, making sure that commas are placed correctly, words are spelled right, and there are no missing words or periods. Because understanding story structure requires a deeper skill set than proofreading, it costs more. Manuscripts generally range from 40,000 to 90,000 words, and each project brings in an average of $500, although because she charges by the Word, it varies, some or less, some more. So what if you want to do this yourself, or something like it? Well, Jessica has noticed that many freelance editors she's met have accidentally fallen into the job.

They started as beta readers for their favorite authors, someone who reads early drafts of a book and gives feedback, or had strong English grammar skills and built their business that way. It's also imperative that an editor know the rules and conventions of the genre they're working in. Jessica focused on romance novels because she's read them for well over 20 years now. Genre conventions are essential. If you read different genre fiction, like sci-fi, fantasy, detective stories, whatever it is, you're gonna notice some of the same kind of themes and elements cropping up over and over.

That's because that's what the genre expects. That's what the reader in that genre expects. In romance, for example, there's a convention that a main character can't die. You can't kill off your main character. You can kill off somebody else, but not the main character.

That's just one example, there's many others. An author has to be very careful with genre conventions if they don't want people to throw their book or e-reader across the room in fury. That's why an editor needs a solid grasp of these rules in order to help guide the author. Editing projects are highly time intensive and Jessica has to live by her color-coded calendar with constant reminders of what she has to do next. She says she doesn't love scheduling every hour of her day, but she's willing to do it for the right project.

She also sees it as a temporary sacrifice. It turns out that Jessica has fallen passionately in love, with her side hustle at least, and hopes to pursue it for the rest of her life. She plans to transition from recruiting to full-time editing and author coaching. When that day comes, she'll pack up her computer and her dog and head off into the sunset to travel the world. [Music]

Well, now you know a little bit about editing romance novels or editing genre fiction in general, and I took a peek at her website, jessicasnideredits.com, which of course we will link up in the show notes for all our would-be authors out there who want to get some help with editing.

And I really liked how on her about page, which our long-term listeners know I always look at, her about page has both professional and personal facts, so she talks a bit about her qualifications, some of the stuff she's done. There's a whole page where you can see all the different books she's worked on, but she also mentions that she is a US Army veteran, she has a dog and a cat, she likes to bake things that are difficult and often French, this is her words, and she's used her passport every year since 1995, except 1997. Apparently she took that year off traveling. And then on the page, she's got pictures of her team, which includes herself, her dog, Arrow, and her cat, Carlos. Carlos is the director of Snacks and Naps.

Arrow is the cheap shredder and editing assistant. So I love that, I thought that was good. It just adds this dash of personality, which I always encourage people to include, especially for anything like this, where you're just working with that one person, she's essentially a consultant. You want to know who that person is, I think. My only suggestion was, she has a few different options, as briefly mentioned in the story, you can hire her to do developmental editing, line editing, copy editing, or proofreading.

There's a few different terms for each of those tasks. And I imagine that most established authors or experienced authors understand the differences there and what that all is. But I bet a lot of people don't, like for your first novel, you don't necessarily understand why do I need a content edit as opposed to a line edit? Do I need both of them? Why do I need a copy edit and a proofreading?

And so Jessica does a good job of explaining the difference between each of these things on that page. I just wonder if there should be some kind of package deal, like where I want you to do my developmental edit, but then also like once I fix stuff, I want you to go back and do my line edit and my copy edits after all that. And I imagine a lot of her authors actually do that, but I just think it could be easy to just have one big package as opposed to going piece by piece. I'm a big fan of buttons that just say, click here to pay me $1,000 or whatever it is. So perhaps she needs a button like that, or at least it might be worth an experiment.

All right, congratulations to Jessica. Be sure you check out her work. And everybody else, inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is better. Today's show notes, including links to Jessica's sites and anything else I mentioned, my collection of romance novels, for example, working on one, just trying to get the plot all sorted out. So I might need to hire her for one of those developmental edits.

Just come to siniscelschool.com/808. That's episode 808. Tomorrow's story is really fun too. It's all about an ABC news reporter who dishes out profitable pizza tours. So today, editing romance novels, tomorrow pizza tours, you never know what you're gonna get.

That's why you gotta keep listening. Stay subscribed, it's free. Thank you so much. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is Siniscel School.

[Music]

- From the Onward Project.