2022 Year in Review
I’ve been doing an annual review for the Blue Garret in some form since I started the business, back in 2015, but I’ve never posted an official version. I’ve decided to give you a glimpse behind the scenes, and I hope it will be helpful to other freelance editors and illuminating for authors. One of the resources I’ve been using in recent years is Kerstin Martin’s Calm Business Review, so many of my categories are inspired by hers.
Highlights
I completed another year of being fully booked out. It took me over two years to achieve this, and I will never take it for granted! I’ll give a breakdown below of the kinds of projects I worked on in 2022.
I wrote thirty (!!) in-depth blog posts, most of them in my Novel Study series in which I analyzed nine different novels. In early 2022 I had so much creative energy coursing through me it felt like I was plugged into some kind of magical inspiration socket. That energy carried me all the way into the fall and helped me create a body of work I’m really proud of.
I created and launched two courses, one for editors and one for writers—another result of that creative energy surge. I’m thrilled with the way they turned out and the new skills I learned. Now I just need to learn how to market them effectively!
I had the opportunity to do a lot of public speaking. I presented at two editing conferences (Editors Canada and ACES) and two writing conferences (the San Francisco Writers Conference and the Sonoma County Writers Conference) and made guest appearances on the Creative Penn podcast, Draft2Digital’s Self-Publishing Insiders podcast, and the Nonfiction Authors Association podcast. This was not a goal I had planned, just a series of felicitous opportunities I seized with both hands.
I launched a new service for self-publishers. The author-assisted copyedit allows experienced authors a chance to be more involved in the editing process and save money at the same time. I want my clients to publish books that are impeccably edited and profitable, and I think this new service is working well for the authors who have tried it out.
I started a term as chair of the Events committee of the Editorial Freelancers Association. The EFA helped me build the successful, sustainable business I have today, and I’m thrilled to have the chance to contribute to it in this substantial way. I help manage the events the EFA sponsors and staffs with volunteers to help authors and editors learn more about the organization. I’m also helping to launch a new Speakers Bureau for the EFA in the coming year.
This is a lot! (See creative energy surge above.) I expect to have a much shorter list of highlights in 2023, and that’s fine. Just reading this list again makes me want to take a nap, and I definitely deserve one. Let’s take a look at some numbers so you can see how I made money, how I spent my time, and where my projects came from.
Income sources
I edited over two million words in 2022!
In past years, this chart would have shown a more even split between content editing and copyediting. But as my business matures, I am working with more returning and experienced authors who don’t need as much story assistance from me. I also deliberately took on fewer content editing projects in 2022 because I knew I wanted to do a lot of writing and create those courses, and I find content editing much more brain intensive than copyediting. The “other editing” category includes some book formatting, a few revision rereads, some query edits, and a few re-edits of older books that authors wanted to refresh. That teeny little gray sliver representing books and courses is one I hope to grow over the long term.
Time
As you can see, a third of my time is devoted to non-editing work, like writing emails and blog posts. I’m planning to do less writing in 2023, and I don’t have any new courses in the works. My email time, alas, I expect to remain steady, and I think my editing hours will go up.
I clocked 1,374 work hours in 2022
Project sources
This was the one chart that surprised me a little bit! As you can see, the vast majority of the projects I worked on in 2022 were for returning clients. I would have guessed that number was a bit lower, but I’m thrilled with it since it means my authors appreciate my work. (Note that I didn’t get a single project via social media alone—it can be done!)
I worked with exactly 30 clients in 2022
As a business owner, what all of these charts tell me is that I have a stable, thriving service-based business. I raised my prices a notch for 2023 in order to keep pace with my own rising costs, but otherwise I’m not planning any major changes or initiatives for my business in 2023. This year is going to be all about staying the course and doing the work as my little family navigates its way through a lot of big life changes in our household.
In the long term, I do have my eye on more growth in order to fulfill some personal goals and make sure I have a stable financial future. I want to keep my services as accessible as possible for authors, and I think I want to continue operating as a company of one. The answer to growth then appears to point toward that little gray sliver on the income chart above, but it remains to be seen whether selling my own content will get me where I want to go. Stay tuned! I’ll post an update next year, and we’ll see how things play out in 2023.