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“Though I've been a voracious reader my whole life, I never considered that "books" could be a career for anyone other than authors.”
Jessica Snyder has been a corporate recruiter for over a decade. She's also been a romance novel reader for over 20 years. It never occurred to her that "books" could be a career for anyone other than authors — until she attended a romance writers' conference in 2012 and discovered a whole ecosystem of editors, agents, and publicists she'd never known existed.
She won a breakfast with an editing team from a well-known publishing house and used it to ask how they got started. One suggestion: follow agents and editors on Twitter. A few months later, the first tweet she saw one morning was a call for interns at a romance fiction publisher. She DM'd them. Two weeks later she was an unpaid intern — "the best job ever."
After six months she was promoted to Editorial Assistant. She then started freelancing on the side, getting her first client by referral. In Year One: $1,400 from two clients. Year Two: $7,700. Year Three: $15,000 — at which point her calendar was full and she couldn't take more editing projects without cutting elsewhere.
She charges by the word: $0.008/word for developmental edits (story structure, character, pacing) and $0.006/word for proofreading. On manuscripts of 40,000–90,000 words, that's typically $200–700 per project.
Her long-term plan: leave recruiting, go full-time with editing and author coaching, pack up the dog, and work from wherever she wants. Find her at heaauthorservices.com.
