This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
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Hey there, what's up? Welcome to Side Hustle School. My name is Chris Guillebeau, your host. Welcome as well to our segment known as Throwback Thursday, also known as Where Are They Now? 'Cause we have two names for some things.
Just seemed like a good idea at the time. No matter what you call it, this segment is about taking an in-depth look at someone whose story has evolved since we first featured them. Now, I'm very proud of our 1,600 plus episodes in the Side Hustle School archives, all of which are freely available for listening. You can go to sidehustleschool.com, download the entire batch if you'd like. It's possible to download the batches one file.
It's a very big file. I'll just let you know that. But the point is we have all these great stories in our archives, so it's fun to go back and kind of see, okay, what's changed since we first featured this person. Now, last week we heard from the founder of IG Works. IG stands for indoor gardening.
They specialize in kits that allow you to grow dozens of large plants in a small space, truly an unbelievable achievement. And before that, we had a sex-positive blogger, which in some ways connects to today's update. All right, different person, but today in our latest feature, we're gonna hear from Jessica Snyder. She is a freelance romance novel editor, freelance editor specializing in romance novels. We first featured her more than 800 days ago.
And as you'll hear in her update, she is now working full-time. Well, she was working full-time before, but now she's working full-time on her passion project. That's the point, because she was, I believe, a corporate recruiter, and now she is all in on romance novels. It is, of course, a happily ever after story. But what else has happened and what is the world of editing romance like?
If you have ever wanted to do it, and I am taking notes right now, let me just tell you. Well, soon, we're both gonna have some action steps, okay? So let's hear directly from Jessica and I'll come back at the end to wrap us up. [Music]
My name is Jessica Snyder. I live in Northern Virginia.
I started my side hustle as a romance editor, and I was originally featured on episode 808. So as a romance editor, I work almost exclusively on romance novels, and most of the books that I work on are written by what's considered indie or self-published romance novelists. And so they are possibly writers that you've heard of, but they don't have traditional publishing contracts with any of the big publishers out of New York. For several years, I thought I wanted to be a writer, and that was really hard, but I was on Twitter, and I saw that there was a senior editor at a romance publisher who was looking for interns. And so I started a conversation with her, and we seemed to match up pretty well with what she was looking for, what I was interested in, what I wanted to learn, and so I interned with a publisher for about six months before I was promoted to editorial assistant, and I stayed with them for about another three years after that to kind of gain experience and learn the industry, 'cause it was like nothing I've ever worked in before.
I'm very excited to say I quit my corporate job in October of 2020. The pandemic turned out to be really good for my career, which is an odd thing to say. So I knew probably by 2018 that this was a legitimate job, and I could make it a real thing that I could depend on for full income. And then the way things worked out in 2020, I had more clients than I knew what to do with. I was sending clients to other editors because I didn't have time to take on the work, and everything just kind of came to a head around September.
I started offering client services to a couple of my authors, so I was doing more like advertising and social media stuff as well as editing, and it just worked out, and I quit my job in October. So that was exciting. I have changed my offerings almost every year. So when I first started in 2016, I was just doing copy editing and proofreading, and that was mostly because I still didn't feel comfortable doing like larger story edits. From there, I went into story edits.
I went into line editing. I started offering coaching, I think, in 2018. In 2019, I had a lot more coaching clients coming in. I quit my corporate job in 2020. I launched a paid membership site this year, and so that's growing, and I'd like to continue doing more new things, but I just see something, and I'm like, "Oh, that looks interesting. Can I do it?"
And then it works, and I'm excited about it. I would like to work a little bit less. I'm averaging anywhere from 45 to 50 hours a week. I would like to cut that back to probably closer to 35. I would like to have weekends, and not work weekends all the time.
It's a little bit scary bringing on the other contractors because now they're working as my brand that I've grown over the last, what, seven years at this point, eight years? So that's been a little bit scary, but they've been amazing to work with, so I'm super happy about that. If I could continue to grow the business, bring on more people, not have to say no to clients, and still keep some work-life balance for myself, that's kind of the ultimate goal. It's a weird, complicated industry that we're in, and it's because everyone is self-publishing and it's indie publishing. There are new companies that are coming up all the time for writing and editing and marketing and all these things that you don't even think of, so I think there's a lot to learn.
Definitely, if you want to get into fiction editing in general, know the genres that you want to work in and read those genres because you can't really edit it if you don't know what the expectations are for the genre and every genre has its own expectations. If you can get on with a publisher and you can intern with them, I think it's really great because it gives you a different perspective, but a lot of people, I see a lot of editors come up and they've started as superfans of particular authors. They beta read for them. They have really strong grammar skills. They're good spellers, and so they start out with proofreading and they just kind of grow into it from there, so I think there are many different ways that you can get into this, and I'm one of those that I've been constantly learning.
I'm constantly doing new classes and online workshops and all of that, and I would say keep doing that because the industry changes so fast that you have to be aware of what's going on all the time because things will change and get left behind. [Music]
Jessica, thank you so much for the update and congratulations, big congratulations on going full time. The pandemic has been weird for so many people. I've heard of a lot of career changes, a lot of people who've started all new businesses as we've talked about many times on the show, but of course Jessica also had to make a lot of choices there to first of all lay the foundation so that she has this client roster and this experience and then continuing to improve her skills and create different offerings as you heard about, and then when the opportunity came along, be able to say, yes, I think that's the right thing, I am gonna go for it. So listeners, I hope that is helpful and inspiring to you.
Check out Jessica's website, jessicasnideredits.com or follow her on Instagram @icaedits, I-C-A edits. If you have a question, if you'd like to update us about your side hustle, come to sidehustleschool.com/questions. If you'd like to read my new best selling romance series, Hey, I Think You Ghosted Me, also the sequel. Wow, that's a lot to handle. Just ask at your local independent bookstore and they'll probably look at you and be like, what are you talking about?
But he has some other books, they're over here. Okay, that's all for me today. Thank you so much for tuning in. Come back tomorrow. My name is Chris Guillebeau, this is Side Hustle School.
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From the Onward Project.
