986. Erin Brenner, author of "The Chicago Guide for Freelance Editors," shares time-saving tips including the best practices for using Word, creating macros, and using automation tools like Zapier. You'll also learn about starting and growing a freelance business, including how to figure out what to charge, how to make ends meet at the beginning, and how to handle time management once your business starts to succeed.
986. Erin Brenner, author of "The Chicago Guide for Freelance Editors," shares time-saving tips including the best practices for using Word, creating macros, and using automation tools like Zapier. You'll also learn about starting and growing a freelance business, including how to figure out what to charge, how to make ends meet at the beginning, and how to handle time management once your business starts to succeed.
| Resources mentioned in the podcast:
Erin Brenner, Right Touch Editing: https://www.righttouchediting.com/
"The Chicago Guide for Freelance Editors" by Erin Brenner: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/C/bo213434367.html
Adrienne Montgomerie's book, "Editing in Word 365" https://www.lulu.com/shop/adrienne-montgomerie/editing-in-word-365/ebook/product-p855r4.html
Rhonda Bracey, CyberText Consulting: https://www.cybertext.com.au/
Hilary Cadman, Cadman Editing Services: https://www.cadmanediting.com/
Erin Servais, AI for Editors: https://www.aiforeditors.com/
Jack Lyon, Editor's Toolkit (Word macros): https://www.editorium.com/index.htm
Paul Beverley, Archive Publications (Word macros): https://www.archivepub.co.uk/
Phrase Expander: https://www.phraseexpander.com/
Raycast: https://www.raycast.com/
Zapier: https://zapier.com/
Intelligent Editing: https://intelligentediting.com/
| Edited transcript with links: https://grammar-girl.simplecast.com/episodes/brenner/transcript
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Mignon Fogarty:
Grammar Girl here.
I'm Mignon Fogarty, and today I am so excited to share with you nuggets of wisdom from Erin Brenner.
Erin is the owner of Right Touch Editing, former owner of the website Copy Editing (and business), former instructor at the San Diego Copy Editing Certificate Program and very, very recently the winner of the prestigious Robinson Prize for editing excellence and service to the editing community. And the reason Erin is here with us today though is because she is the author of this fabulous new book “The Chicago Guide for Freelance Editors,” and Erin, thank you.
Welcome. Thank you so much for being here.
Erin Brenner:
Thank you for having me Mignon. I'm so excited to be on Grammar Girl.
Mignon Fogarty:
Well, I have to tell you if I were still teaching journalism students, I would assign this book in my class because it is valuable not just for copy editors, but for anyone who wants to be a freelance editor, writer or sort of just a freelancer in general. It's a comprehensive guide to starting and running a freelance business. Then with, you know, a bunch of wonderful tidbits specifically for editors and writers.
Erin Brenner:
Thank you.
Mignon Fogarty:
Yeah, so we and for everyone listening, you know, we're going to focus on the tidbits that will be useful for all of you who write and edit, even if you're not a freelance editor, and then at the end we'll talk about, you know, if you're thinking about making the leap, what advice Erin might have for you, too. So Erin, is this your first book?
Erin Brenner:
It's my first book in the sense of a traditionally published book. I've done a little smaller projects. I did a workbook just for editors that I self-published through copy editing and then I've done things like a marketing guide that was recently published by the CIEP, the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading.
Mignon Fogarty:
Yeah. Well, it's so complete and well organized. It's the kind of book where it feels like you must have been gathering material for this for years and years.
Erin Brenner:
It's true. I have a blog, and I have been writing that for well over a decade, and I'll write about freelancing as well as about language and writing and editing. I've given presentations for editing organizations like ACES and Editors Canada about how to do this. And mostly, I'm just talking to my mastermind group, my editing colleagues, “How do I do this? What is this thing I need to do?” So it's the result of a lot of thinking and writing and talking.
Mignon Fogarty:
Yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah, it's very, very valuable and complete. You have almost convinced me to switch to using Word. I use Apple Pages and got dragged into using Google Docs by other people, but you know, talking about the efficiency tips you have. Let's start with just what you can do in Word as a writer or an editor.
Erin Brenner:
Oh my gosh. So much. Just the ability to use shortcuts, right? Whether it's a macro that you pick up somewhere or you write that does that thing you do all the time. Software can do it faster and there's nothing wrong with letting it do it for you at the touch of a button. Autocorrect in Word is also something where I don't think a lot of people realize that you can add to your autocorrect library and go and add your own little snippets when you type this, it types this longer thing.
Learning to use the styles so that when a file is brought in to say InDesign, the InDesign knows the difference between a chapter heading and regular copy, which just helps the production process along. There's just so, so much in Word. Editors and writers love to hate Word, and we have our complaints. But there's so much you can do with it to help you be more efficient in your everyday work life.
Mignon Fogarty:
Mm-hmm. You talk about learning to use your tools, like investing the time it takes to learn to use your tools. And you've convinced me. I've been looking into, you know, okay, I have to use Google Docs. I'm going to get a LinkedIn Learning course or something that tells me all the things it can do because I'm probably missing some things. I'm sure there's many courses for learning Word. How did you get up to speed on all the things that Word can do?
Erin Brenner:
Adrienne Montgomerie has a book about using Word 365 and that's got a lot of tips in it. So that was one place I learned. Another place I learned is, Rhonda Bracey does, I think it's called CyberText, is her newsletter, and she gives lots of tips about how to use Word better. And then Hilary Cadman also has a newsletter and courses that tell you how to use Word better as a writer or an editor, you know. So focusing on those things that we're doing most often and those sources have been invaluable to me.
Mignon Fogarty:
Tell me some of your favorite macros. Like what, what can you tell people that you can do with a macro that's gonna blow their mind and wish they'd learned it ten years ago.
Erin Brenner:
The truth is that most of my work is really short, and so it doesn't lend itself well to macros. I will run macros to clean things up to get rid of all the extra spaces and change straight quotes into smart quotes. But it's things that other editors do that really blow my mind. Things like collecting words that you want to go into your style sheet and popping them into the style sheet with just a couple of keystrokes. There's one macro that Jack Lyon has that will take all the files in one folder and make it one document. So if your author hands you their book in chapters, put it all in one folder and you can make a master file and work in that one file. That blows my mind.
Mignon Fogarty:
Yeah. It just saves all that tedious work. It's funny; in the past I was sort of a macro queen like way back in Word Perfect days. But I haven't used macros since switching to Apple, you know, 15 years ago or something and now getting back into it feels a little bit intimidating because it feels kind of like programming. Not that I can't do that. But you know, and I know Erin Servais has talked about using AI like ChatGPT to write Word macros for you now. But I know I think you talked about some books or even maybe some repositories of macros for editors and writers. Can you share your sources for, you know, getting up to speed with macros?
Erin Brenner:
Sure. Jack Lyon, I just mentioned him. He sells a package of the Editors Toolkit, I think it's called, and that is just something, you purchase macros, you upload them, and they work. But he gives you lots of directions, lots of help, and if you email him, he's very good about responding. Another source is Paul Beverly. He's based in the UK, and he gives all of his macros away for free. He's very generous. He has them, again, all collected into one file. He's got lots of help for putting them into Word on his website, in YouTube. And again, if you email him, he's very, very good about helping you fix any problems or even writing new macros for you. Editors will come with requests all the time. “Can you make it do this?” And then he does it, and he adds it to his collection. So both of those resources are very, very useful, I think.
Mignon Fogarty:
Amazing. And for listeners who are scrambling trying to write this all down, I'll be sure to put links in the show notes. So if you go to the show description, you can find these resources. We'll have links to them.
The other thing, you know, I've recently started using key text expanders. I know a lot of editors have talked about it for years. I only started using them recently, and they are fabulous. What is your, what are your favorites… and there are a lot of different ways you can use text expanders. What are your favorite tools for that trick?
Erin Brenner:
I use Phrase Expander, which not only allows you to expand text which I do all the time, you know. Don't ever type your name, your email address again. Pop them in, you're done. But Phrase Expander will also open web browser pages. It will open folders on my hard drive. And I use those all the time just to navigate around my system. Open up that folder where the file is, open up Merriam-Webster or the Chicago Manual of Style. I have shortcuts for all of those things. It will also let me create little fillable forms.
Mignon Fogarty:
What?
Erin Brenner:
So it's wild because Phrase Expander’s main audience are physicians who have to fill out directions all the time. And so, you're not programming but just filling in a few boxes, I can produce a little form that I fill out for say when I'm handing out work to my editors. I will hit the keystrokes, it will pop up this box where I fill in the client's name, the format we're going to be using: is it word, is it PDF? I hit enter and then that whole text appears wherever I've placed it, usually in Slack for me. But it just keeps me from repeating things and not missing details that I need to pass along. And I love it.
Mignon Fogarty:
That's great. It's like an especially efficient checklist, almost.
Erin Brenner:
Exactly.
Mignon Fogarty:
Yeah, are you on a PC?
Erin Brenner:
I am.
Mignon Fogarty:
Yeah I'm on a Mac and I use a tool that sounds similar to Phrase Expander called Raycast and it does those key, you know, I can type two keys, and it'll open a specific folder in my Google Drive that I use all the time, and I click two other keys and it takes me straight to Canva and things like that. I had a computer crash a few months ago now and when I rebuilt my computer, it was the first program I put back on it. It's just … it's essential. It saves so much time. You don't even realize how much time it saves until it's gone.
Yeah, you slowly build up the shortcuts. You know, learn one or two shortcuts a day and you know how people talk about writing books, right? You know, 500 words a day and by the end of the year you have a book or something like that. It's like, you know, learn one keystroke shortcut a day, and by the end of the year you're saving hours and hours of time.
Erin Brenner:
It's so true, and that's advice I've heard from people: if you're trying to learn shortcuts or create shortcuts — just a couple a day. You know if you're doing something two, three times, it's time for a shortcut. It's time for a macro, and if you just do a couple a day, you're gonna build up very quickly over the course of a year and have quite a library.
Mignon Fogarty:
Yeah, and then something I've been interested in but have not yet tried but you talked about in your book is using tools like IFTT, if this then that, and Zapier, Zapier? I'm not sure how to pronounce it. I think it’s Zapier.
Erin Brenner:
I always pronounce it Zapier because the little code you build is called Zaps. And yet both of those are great for linking together your different programs.
I do use Zapier quite a bit, so if I put a file into a specific folder in my Dropbox, it will list that file on my project spreadsheet, which is in Coda. So it feels like magic doing these little things for me so that I am not repeating all these little steps all the time and maybe forgetting them or doing them wrong. The software is going to do it the same way every time.
Mignon Fogarty:
So can it do things like if you load a file up into a Google Drive folder, for example, then can it notify the people who need to know that that file is there now?
Erin Brenner:
It can. It probably has to be the same people every time, or it has to know where to get the information of who to send it to. But as long as you can tell it ahead of time, “When this trigger happens, here's what I want you to do. And here's who I want you to tell.” It usually can.
Mignon Fogarty:
Yeah. So when I upload my script for my editor, and I always put it in the same file, when it can just automatically tell him “Okay, this is ready for you now.” I mean, that would save so much time.
It's just those tedious emails that you spend so much time on just sort of shuffling information around.
Erin Brenner:
Exactly. And yeah, that's the kind of thing where you're repeating the process. You're repeating the person who was receiving the message. There's no reason you can't use a little bit of software to do the task for you, to communicate that this thing has happened.
Mignon Fogarty:
Right, so you can do the more interesting, useful work. I heard you give a talk recently and you mentioned something that again just blew my mind, and I went investigating it. There are, I forget what they're called now, but I think of them as super mouses. It's like a mouse for your computer, but they can have eight, ten, twelve buttons I think. Do you use one of these super mice with extra buttons?
Erin Brenner:
Maybe hotkeys. Is that what you're talking about?
Mignon Fogarty:
Yes, hotkeys. There are mice with hotkeys Yes, there are.
Erin Brenner:
Um, I don't know if that was my talk.
Mignon Fogarty:
Oh, huh? Well, maybe it was just, maybe it was just hotkeys.
Erin Brenner:
But um, I don't use them. I haven't taken that leap, yeah. But I know a lot of editors do for these, for tasks that you're repeating all the time and to put things at the drop of a button.
Mignon Fogarty:
Yeah. Yeah. There's so many little tricks. And then I think, another one you mentioned in the book that we know The Intelligent Editing, a friend of the pod, has a tool called a consistency checker, and I think before I was a professional editor, that was something I didn't really know about, but they could still be useful to a lot of people. Can you explain what that is?
Erin Brenner:
So I think you're talking about “PerfectIt,” which is a Word add-on. And it is great for writers to, you know, have it go through your text when you're done with it looking for things that are pre-programmed into PerfectIt. So it's not AI at all, but it's a predefined list of things it will check for and it's looking for those inconsistencies. Have you used the serial comma consistently? If you select that you wanted to look for the serial comma, it will go and look and whatever it doesn't find it, it will alert you and then you have the option to put the comma in. It's little things like that, common spelling mistakes, abbreviations you haven't spelled out. What number rules you've decided to use. So if you've decided to spell out numbers one through nine, and you use the numeral eight somewhere in your text, it will flag that. And the nice thing about PerfectIt is that the human always stays in control, right?
The software tells you “Hey, this thing goes against the rule you set” and it's up to you to go and fix it or not. Which lets you look and say “No no, that's an exception. Move on and go to the next test or to go in and change it.”
Mignon Fogarty:
Yeah, such a useful tool and another big time saver. Well, we're gonna take a quick break for our sponsor and when we come back I want to talk more about the freelance life if for people who are thinking about maybe trying freelancing, some tips that you have for them because you also have useful sections on that in your book, and we'll be right back.
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Mignon Fogarty:
And we're back. So, you know, you and I both took the freelancing leap many, many years ago and built our own businesses now. I started when I got laid off. I got kind of a push, and it was the best thing that ever happened to me. It didn't feel like it at the time. From your book … it sounds like you were in a job that you really weren't enjoying anymore and that was becoming just a difficult job. Can you talk about sort of how you got started freelancing? When you started were you, I think it sounded maybe you were more excited about it than I was at the time.
Erin Brenner:
Yeah, I had been working for one website for about a decade, and I had just got bored, which is what happens to me. And the company I was at did not have a way for me to grow, and I started freelancing part-time because I wasn't sure what I wanted to do. I continued to look for a job, but my struggle was even though I'm not too far outside of Boston, I'm far enough that it's a long commute, and at that time we had two young children. And it would mean a good three hours a day commuting back and forth, and it was just too much. So I started freelancing slowly, and I enjoyed it. It was a lot at first to do with the full-time job.
Once I quit my job, as sad as I was to leave some of my colleagues, it was great. I could do new things. I could do things on my kids schedule more easily than I could before. It just filled me with so much energy that I forgot to take a vacation for a few years.
Mignon Fogarty:
Same here. When you're freelancing also it's in that beginning phase especially there's that fear that every gig is going to be your last. You don't have that confidence yet to know that there will be another project. So, you can get in the habit of saying yes to everything and over committing because you're afraid there won't be enough. I think one important thing you talked about is everyone wonders, you know, how much should I charge? What should I charge? And you recommend approaching it from a different angle.
Erin Brenner:
I do because we're all working for a reason, right? To pay our bills. And so I just took a different approach and said what's my need? What do I need to make? Where are my goals?
And because I'm working from that perspective, it drives me forward because I know where I'm going, and I know why I'm going there. And then I can start to look at, once I know what my budget is, what I know what I need to make, I can start to really break that down into, what does that look like per project per hour? How many hours do I have to work that are paid hours, right?
As freelancers, we do a whole lot of unpaid work. We do a lot of administration and marketing and all the rest, but it's only when we're working on client work that we get paid. So how many of those hours do I need and what does that look like?
And then I can start to layer on to that. What's my value? What am I offering the client that somebody else might not be? What are they getting out of it? What's the value for them for what I do? Which lets me then raise fees to a more livable level but also one that respects the work that I do and the value that the client gets out of it. And then you've got to balance all of that against, what’s your client’s budget?
Mignon Fogarty:
Right and you can determine, are there certain kinds of work that you do because they fill in the gaps when you don't have other things? And what is the high value work that you should be focusing on developing in the time when you do have downtime? How do you advise people to sort of find those first clients?
Erin Brenner:
So, for the first clients, I put a whole chapter in the book on looking at, essentially job ads, right? It's taking on whatever you can in the beginning to get the money flowing in. Looking at job listings. So as an editor, I might look at the job listings for EFA or ACES or CIEP, all of which have job ads. Some folks will post on Fiverr and will work with places like Reedsy where maybe you're not getting paid quite as much because there's a middleman who is taking their share of the fee. But it starts to get you some experience. It starts to get some money coming in and giving you time then to go and develop those services and look for those clients who are going to pay you what you're worth and what you need to make.
Mignon Fogarty:
And the other thing that's really important that I think sometimes a lot of people don't talk about is, okay you've got the income side, but you also have to control the cost side. And you talked about something in your book that I did, which is moving to a less expensive place to live. When I got laid off I was doing tech writing which was, you know, it paid really well. But when I started podcasting and realized that I wanted to focus on that, at the time especially, it didn't pay as well. And so, you know, we needed to change our life so that I could pursue that. And we moved from Santa Cruz, California to Arizona. The cost of living is vastly less, and it let me sort of pursue this podcasting dream that I wanted to do. What are some other tips that you have for, you know ,people figuring out the cost side as well, and you had some interesting things that you did to sort of fill in the gaps and keep your mental energy intact while you were still bringing in what you needed to do?
Erin Brenner:
So I looked at it from two sides, you know. The first side that you mentioned is the budget. How can I cut my budget? So certainly not everybody can move to a cheaper location, but what are those things that you can do, right? And it's looking at each line of your budget.
Maybe it's, do you live some place where public transportation is accessible? Do you need a car? Could you downsize your living space? Maybe it's, you have a big house, but if you moved into something smaller your budget would go farther. So it was looking for things like that.
Mignon Fogarty:
In service of having a better life in the long run. Having that freedom that you want.
Erin Brenner:
Absolutely. There's always trade-offs and, you know, maybe those trade-offs aren't permanent. You get to a point where you've grown your business and something big that you've cut out, you bring it back in, you know.
Mignon Fogarty:
We moved back to California.
Erin Brenner:
And why wouldn't you? Okay, how can I bring in more money? I really wanted to work on my business when I didn't have clients. So I worked probably 40 hours a week, did the nine-to-five thing that I was already used to. If I didn't have client work, I was working on the business but then I also took an evening and weekend job. I worked at the mall for a few years just to bring in a little bit of extra money. Make sure we could do the things we wanted to do.
Mignon Fogarty:
You know, I thought it was really interesting because, you know, it sounds like you're a lot like me, and you started like two different businesses at once. And, and you know even though the amount of time that you might have been spending in in your business versus the mall job, there's the the mentally taxing element of running your own business and trying to make it work, and I thought it was just brilliant that you recognized that and sort of freed up that mental energy to focus on the one business that you decided was the one that you were going to move forward with.
Erin Brenner:
It's true and I did. I had started this other small business I thought would help, and it just took so much, that by giving it up and going and working at the mall and just not having to think too hard. Show up, do the work. I wasn't in charge. That was beautiful. It did let me put all of my energy into the business I wanted to grow.
Mignon Fogarty:
Yeah. And then when you get to the point of growing, you brought up something that I used to tell my students too, which is look for the easiest ways that you can get help. You know, a lot of people think when it's time to grow their business, “Okay I need to hire another editor or another writer to work with me” and in the beginning, the easiest way is to hire a gardener. It's so much easier to hire that kind of help than it is to hire someone who does the work that you can be doing yourself. Like, what are some other things like that that you outsourced?
Erin Brenner:
We outsourced housekeeping. That was our thing. That freed up hours. And I hired a virtual assistant to do some of the more repetitive work, right? To do the actual social media posting and to help with some of the back, just the back office things, getting lists and projects going. She's invaluable for those things. And it's the whole idea of, what's your expertise? That's the thing you're selling. What are the things you're not really good at or that don't take specialized skills, you know, anybody could do them? Those are the things you can hire out because then you're putting your expertise, your genius into your business.
Mignon Fogarty:
Yeah. Well we've talked about all the ways you can say yes to your business of becoming a freelancer and growing it. But the last part of your book, "The Chicago Guide for Freelance Editors," the last part of your book focuses more on work-life balance and taking care of yourself. And so we've talked about all these ways to say yes. Let's finish up with the importance of actually knowing when to say no.
Erin Brenner:
Oh my gosh, I only learned that one the hard way. I keep learning that one the hard way. “Why did I say yes?” But sometimes I get it, right. It's, you know, taking on that project that is waving all the red flags at you. Oh maybe, you said earlier, we don't know when the work might dry up, and so we're tempted to take those jobs that, when you talk about them to a friend they say “That doesn't sound like a good job. You sound like you're not happy about it.”
And those are the things to kind of watch for, you know, what are the particular red flags where this is going to be a project that will not work well for me. We won't be a good match.
It might take too much time. I won't be able to earn the hourly fee that I'm looking for, and I could use that time to work on my business instead. And so, looking for those kinds of red flags. Keeping an eye on how many hours a week you do work or how many projects you have going at a time and watching when you're getting close to your maximum and not taking on that next thing.
I had a therapist at one point who said, “You know, it's, you don't want to have one spot available, right?” She's like “You really want two. You really want enough space in your schedule for the crisis and for self-care.” Which is really hard to do, but it's something I work at trying to do as often as I can.
Mignon Fogarty:
They will. There's going to be a crisis. These things happen, and when they do and you don't have time built in for them, it's terrible. One piece of advice you had that I thought was great is to track your time, even if you're not billing by the hour that can help you stay aware of how much time you are spending on things whether it's your work in total or just work for one client who may not end up being as profitable as they seem when you track all the extra time you're spending on non billable things for them. Tell me, I struggle with this too, how do you remind yourself not to get over committed? Do you schedule it on your calendar? Do you have post-its everywhere that just have the word “no” on them? Like, how do you do it?
Erin Brenner:
I have a sense of how many hours a week I want to work unpaid work. And so when a new project comes in, if I'm taking it on, it's how many hours is it going to take and what is already going on? So yeah, I'm looking at my project spreadsheet. I'm looking at my calendar and realistically, where am I spending these hours if I'm doing this project? When am I going to do it? Do I have those hours and just really constantly looking at the project spreadsheet, looking at my calendar and checking in with how many hours how much time I think a project is going to take.
Mignon Fogarty:
Wonderful. Well, thanks again, Erin.
The book again is "The Chicago Guide for Freelance Editors," and it's sort of a misnomer because I think it's useful for freelance writers as well. And even if you're another kind of freelancer, there's great great sections on getting started, back office stuff, work-life balance. It's just a wonderful comprehensive book about the freelance life from beginning to end. So, thanks again, Erin so much for writing the book and for being here with us today. How can people find you online?
Erin Brenner:
They can find me at my website RightTouchEditing.com. They can find me on LinkedIn as Erin Brenner and they can find me on Bluesky as EBrenner.
Mignon Fogarty:
Fabulous. Well, and again, we'll put links to all the resources that Erin recommended in the show notes and a link to the book. Thanks again, Erin.
Erin Brenner:
Thank you so much.