Writer-Editor Makes Six-Figure Life Revision

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

If you're interested in a career in publishing, or just in doing something with publishing for your side hustle, there's more than one option. Now, a while back we looked at the story of a woman who edits romance novels. That was episode 808, "The Fifty Shades of Editing Romance Novels." She liked that genre a lot, I guess you could say she fell in love with it, but she didn't want to be a writer herself. That's when she discovered that she was well suited to editing. We've also featured somebody who writes wedding vows, actually gets paid well to do that.

That was episode 281. Somebody else who helps be corporations, companies like Patagonia, tell their stories, episode 916. And this principle doesn't only apply to publishing, it applies to other industries as well. There's often more than one path, there's often more than one role in these different kinds of fields. So I think the lesson is to first focus on your skill, whatever it is that you're good at, whatever it is that you're drawn to and you like to study, and then consider what the ultimate outcome is.

What kind of industry, profession, career, job, or of course, side hustle, what kind of form that could take. So welcome to Side Hustle School. My name is Chris Guillebeau. In today's story, a writer finds financial freedom by editing other people's work, eventually building his own agency. He puts a lot of work into it.

It's a slow and steady growth, but it is now a six-figure business. So I'll tell you all about that shortly, and we'll also look at a couple of common service provider mistakes. Stay tuned. Liam Carnahan thought he wanted to be a writer. After finishing high school, he studied for a degree in writing, literature, and publishing.

While at college, however, he was surprised to discover his love for editing. In lots of ways, he found more joy in reviewing and guiding other writers than he did in writing his own stories. So when he graduated, he decided to look for a role as an editor. Unfortunately, his hunt began at the height of the global financial crisis. There just weren't many jobs paying a decent wage for an aspiring editor at the time.

Rather than go hungry, he took a position as a writer in what he describes as a content farm. This was a low-level agency, all too popular at the time. Unfortunately, they're still around, and rather than craft well-thought-out, informative pieces, his employers simply paid him to spin out quick and dirty 300-word blog posts day after day. Basically, filler content designed to get people to click certain ads or articles. This was mind-numbing work, but Liam dug deep, put in a lot of effort, and managed to develop a set of skills that allowed him to be promoted.

Eventually, he was able to parlay that experience into a job at a more respected agency. It was there that he first felt the desire to start working more on his own. The idea of living on his terms with a flexible working schedule was attractive, and only more so after working full-time for a few years. So next, he looked at ways to use this skillset to generate a side income. Around the same time, Amazon released the Kindle.

With that launch almost overnight, anyone who wanted to could publish their own ebook, which was both good and bad. Liam found the whole idea fascinating. He started reading several of the 99-cent self-published books available on Amazon.com. Very quickly, he realized, you know, a lot of these authors had some good ideas. But wow, some of them really needed the help of an editor.

He thought this was the kind of work he could easily do remotely and in his spare time. So after searching and discovering a few businesses that offered editing services, he sent off his resume. And before long, he had landed himself his first freelance gig. But that's not all she wrote. But the arrangement didn't last long, as Liam's side hustle employer, basically a boss by another name, decided to retire shortly after hiring him.

He suggested Liam try his hand at running a business himself, and he even offered to link to Liam's new website if he made one. So Liam decided to take a crack at writing his own story, a story of independence. He still had his day job, so there was little risk. But if it worked out, it could be a path to the life of freedom he'd long dreamed of. He called his service Invisible Ink Editing.

His real side hustle was now in its first draft. It didn't take long before he had his first customer, who arrived to be a referral from his previous employer's website. Over the coming months, Liam had a handful of additional clients show up, which all gave him the foundation of his first customer base. Although those first clients came easy, Liam still had some struggles. The main one was that it took a while to come up with pricing that was fair.

For the first year or so, he worked long hours for not much income, a common mistake. As more and more clients came through, fortunately he refined that process. He figured out how best to charge, eventually setting on a rate per word. It was good he figured that out because more and more clients were arriving at his online doorstep. How did that come to be?

Where do those clients come from? Well, at his agency day job, he had been learning a lot about SEO, or search engine optimization, essentially how to rank websites in Google. He was able to take those learnings and use them to benefit himself. He created pages on topics like self-publishing, writing advice, and tips for indie authors. This, combined with being featured on a few websites, meant that Liam's site began to rank in Google for relevant keywords, keywords and phrases potential customers would be searching for.

Within another year, he had more customers than he could handle on his own. Liam decided he needed help and looked for additional editors he could hire on a freelance basis. He would pay them a reasonable rate per job, and keep a percentage for himself. Add on a couple more years, and both SEO and word of mouth helped Invisible Inc. continue to grow.

By 2018, he had six part-time editors, and he was doing quite well. So much so that in mid-2019, he reached the six-figure mark in yearly profit. And that's when he took the plunge, finally leaving his day job. For over a decade, Liam had dreamed of finding work that would allow him the flexibility to travel and set his own hours. He'll be celebrating the achievement next year by taking off to Asia and living the nomadic lifestyle for a while.

But it won't be a holiday, because Liam has already soft-launched his next project, a content agency of his own. If it can do half as well as Invisible Inc., it will be a story worth telling. Alright, so three lessons every service provider eventually learns, which essentially correlates to three mistakes most service providers make. This is very common. First one is pricing.

They usually price too low in the beginning, and sometimes it's okay when you're getting started to start off with a low price or to even do some work for free, but you really don't want to remain at that point for very long, because in the long term, you're just going to get burned out, you're going to attract the wrong kind of clients. And that's why Liam fortunately realized in his first year of doing this that he needed to raise his prices, just to be fair to everyone, including himself. Number two, specialization. Most service providers usually try to do too much, they usually try to do too many things. Doing something really specific, being that editor for romance novels, being the editor for something else, writing the wedding vows, that kind of stuff is great because it is so specialized.

Alright, so don't try to do too much, you're actually going to become more of an authority by being intentional and specific. And then number three, delegation. A lot of new service providers try to do everything themselves, and you often might have to do everything yourself in the very beginning. But ultimately, if you're truly going to create that freedom, the independence, if that is what you crave, then ultimately you are going to need to get some help of some kind. Doesn't mean you need to go out and hire a bunch of employees.

Doesn't mean you need to go out and go into debt. Often with a service business, you can do it by working with contractors who are only paid when there's work that comes in and is assigned to them and then completed. So you don't have to worry about a recurring payroll, you know, if business slows down or if it's a seasonal thing or something, you don't have to worry about always paying the same amount of bills. Pricing specialization and delegation, if you think about those things in the beginning, it will help you as you go along. And by the way, inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is better.

Thank you so much for listening, my friends. Today's show notes, including links to invisible ink editing, anything else I mentioned are at sidehustleschool.com slash one zero four three episode one thousand and forty three. All right. More is coming up soon, including a weekly recap tomorrow and more episodes next week. My name is Chris Guillebeau.

This is Side Hustle School. the Onward Project.