2025 Business Review & 2026 Predictions!

In the last episode of 2025, I discuss how the year went from a business and marketing perspective.

2025 was a big experiment in running my business without social media.

Things didn't go exactly to plan—tune in to learn which part of my business suffered, the big decisions I made at the end of the year, and find out how much I earned exactly in 2025.

I finish with some predictions for 2026. YAY!

Transcript

Hello and welcome folks to The Freelancer. This podcast discusses all things publishing through a social justice lens. and I run two businesses, a consultancy for cultural anthropologists called The Narrative Craft and a fiction developmental editing and writing business called Andy J. Hodges.

Make sure you subscribe to the show so you never miss an episode and sign up for my fortnightly newsletter in the show notes if you want more regular updates. So today's episode and it's the last episode of 2025 is a big review of my business for this year. I'll give you some insights into how 2025 has gone in terms of marketing, money and emotions and I'll give you a quick forecast for 2026 as well.

And while the focus is kind of all on me and my business, my intention with this episode is that you'll get some useful insights for reflecting on your business and thinking how it's gone in 2025 as well. So how did the year start? Well, at the end of 2024, I made some radical changes to my business. Up until then, I'd followed mainstream business advice and pursued mostly content marketing.

I had a big blog and I would repost that blog, splashing it across loads of different social media platforms. But there were some clouds gathering on the horizon. First of all, AI was changing the landscape in quite a big way. One of the big words, I think, for 2025 has been AI slop. And there was loads of that on social media. So social media just felt like it was becoming more effort and also just a lot less fun.

I didn't enjoy hanging out in those spaces and I found the platforms quite addictive. While my blog strategy really helped me in the early years of my business, it got me clients, yes through SEO, and I grew an audience and I became known for a particular niche in the editing community. I didn't like how I'd started to approach the blog content.

Sometimes I'd have a great blog post and I'd do a really deep dive into a topic like third person point of view for fantasy fiction writers for instance. That was great but sometimes it felt like there was a content mill voice in my head. I felt like I should be producing and it just it didn't feel good it didn't feel right and I felt like if I just carried on with this approach then I was almost becoming a public information service providing lots of free facts and information in a very vanilla way. There was like no opinions shared, not much narration, etc, etc. It was quite conflict-avoidant and only sometimes did I talk about topics that mattered to me. I now know that this is somewhat encouraged by the social media platforms and also the kind of the ideas about blogging which are out there. There's this idea that if you want to go wide, that is build a really big audience, then you don't want to be super controversial and sharing your opinions on, anti-capitalist approaches to business in every post because that will create a lot of resistance in some people. I also at this point felt pretty disillusioned with the self-publishing world. So when I got started as an editor, I thought self-publishing was really, really cool because it had this kind of democratizing aspect to it. Traditional publishing felt too much to me like academia. There were gatekeepers, there was all this vetting going on. And I just like the ethos of self-publishing, you can take creative control, et cetera. But as I learned more and more about that world, I changed my perspective on it. I still think that self-publishing is a great tool. I like the fact that it exists a lot.

But I didn't like what I'd say is the industry that was built around it. There were paid influencers who were linking up with ChatGPT. There was this whole culture of what's called rapid release where you make money through publishing a really, really large number of novels. lots of self publishing authors were taking a very entrepreneurial approach to it where they were trying to make money from it and some of them were and that's fantastic but lots of them were struggling and my main issue with the self-publishing world was more that there were editors also promoting services and offering, I don't know, light copy editing and proofreading to self-publishing authors. And when I would read some of those books and articles and texts, I would just be like, this needs so much work before it's publishable. And I just realized:

I wanted something else.

I did not want to be in an ecosystem with people who were leaning into generative AI use and trying to publish as many novels as possible. Instead, I wanted a business working with clients who were aligned with me, like politically, who shared my anti-capitalist values. I wanted to be working with writers who are careful about their writing as well. And you can't be careful and pursue a rapid release strategy. And I also wanted a soothed central nervous system and social media really wasn't providing me with this. And then the the whole pivot with Google and Meta happened. When Trump came to power that was the last straw. So I decided I'm taking my business off all Meta platforms.

And I committed myself to running a kind of experiment in 2025. Could I, is it possible to run an editing business without social media? And I'm gonna answer that and I'm gonna let you know how this year's gone. But first, let's take a little look at where I would get clients from. So, my data told me that people do click through to my website through social media. When I came off social media, my web traffic decreased by 25 to 30%. That is massive.

I get clients from directories like the CIEP and the EFA directory, but these aren't really a reliable source, at least for me, of client work. For some editors, they work really well. I get a couple of clients a year from those directories. SEO started working for me big time a couple of years ago, and I regularly get work through SEO. People find my website online and they contact me. And then I get work through editor referrals when other editors refer jobs to me and author referrals when authors refer jobs to me. And finally I would get jobs through Readsy as well which is basically a like a platform for authors who are looking to hire an editor.

It's a bit like Fiverr and those platforms but it's well regarded in the publishing world, although it does skew heavily towards traditional publishing. So my big fear with social media was not that people would never see me or find me and hire me through social media because that didn't just didn't happen very often. My fear was that the editor and author referrals would dwindle because people would stop thinking about me.

if they didn't see me post on social media and so on.

So I made all these changes and then what happened? Well, the year started quiet for me. In fact, I had one week with no work booked in in January and that made me feel a little bit edgy. And I'm going to own this and say, I shouldn't have been worried that week. It's okay to have a week with no work booked in and it's important and useful to be comfortable with doing nothing as well because there's always other stuff you can do anyway like some creative writing or some write some new blog posts etc. But my response to this was to look for kind of an anchor client. Some kind of client that I could work with regularly and wouldn't have to rely on social media for, and I was lucky. I was onboarded by a fiction packager. A packager, in case you don't know, is when a publisher, a big publisher, outsources the whole editorial production side of things to another business so i worked for one of these fiction packagers on titles that were being published by traditional publishers in the US. The pay hasn't been great. It's been slightly less than the traditional publishers that I would work for directly before. But overall, it's been a great thing because it gave me a steady income that didn't rely on me doing lots of marketing. And I walked into this with intention. I had got tired of the whole social media content train and I wanted to take some time out. And that's what I did in 2025.

I used this opportunity as a chance to take a breather. I knew I'd be earning less with them per hour, but I didn't want to up my hours either. I just wanted to take the time to breathe. Shortly after, I was also accepted on Readsy for copyediting and I did a few jobs for them, but I have to say I was disappointed by the volume of poor quality requests. So I declined a lot of work and then—I don't know if they have an algorithm or not, I'm not sure about how they work—but I very quickly saw that I wasn't getting requests after I declined several jobs in a row.

What else did I decide to do? Well, this podcast is another thing, another decision that I made, and I love it. It's been so much fun. I set up the podcast partly out of an anxiety. I was nervous about moving off social media. I wanted something very human because of the whole AI madness right now as well. And this podcast has been amazing. I know I've improved my public speaking skills just through recording episodes and listening to my recordings and editing them for things like filler words and so on. Also through guest podcasting I've had some great opportunities that have definitely led to like me being visible as an editor. And more importantly I like this podcast because it's my container. It's a safe space for me. There's no kind of barrage of negative social media comments or reactions, people telling me I'm woke and stuff like that. And at heart, I enjoy making podcasts. So I will be carrying on with it next year. I hope you'll stick around for that.

Okay, so what happened next? Well, and I'm not sure how surprised I was about this, well things got busy in March and they stayed busy until my summer teaching job. Yay, I felt vindicated in leaving social media. I'll add a caveat here. Like I think with editing, the difference between feeling like you don't have enough work and feeling too busy can be just as much as one job's difference. Like, if I take on a big line editing or developmental editing job, that's two or three weeks of work. So if there's just one less or one more, that can make the difference between feeling like I've got a packed schedule and not feeling like I have quite enough work. So those feelings of not having enough work or having too much, it's a constant sort of roller coaster. And I think that is more so if you're an editor and you like chunky jobs like I do.

The summer arrived. So you may not know this, but for two months every summer, I take some time out from my business and I manage a group of writing instructors at the University of Southampton. I do this every year because it's nice to take some time out of the business. It's nice not to market. It's fun and interesting to do something different. And it's also nice to have a tiny little finger stuck in the employment pie because who knows what's going to happen in five or ten years. I like and embrace taking things in lots of different directions and while I love freelancing, and I feel that it is very much for me, I appreciate the opportunity to do a few little different things as well. So the summer came to an end, and then I found the tempo, kind of the busyness of work was maintained through till the end of the year. So in the autumn, I was nervous about not being on social media. I set up this podcast again, and I went and gave presentations at a bunch of conferences and workshops and that was a lot of fun. I put a lot of energy into all of that.

 I also in that time had some creative writing wins. I had some short stories published in well-known literary magazines, and that was highly motivating.

But something did happen. So it's been twelve months now. I have been off almost all social media for eleven months. I still had a kind of a nominal presence on BlueSky and LinkedIn until April, May, I think. And what I noticed is in the autumn, so that substantial amount of time has passed, the...

academic consulting, dev editing requests, they kept coming, but the fiction requests decreased.

So what does that tell me? What I think is happening here is that while I didn't get clients contacting me, fiction clients contacting me directly through social media, a lot of fiction clients would find my social media presence and some of the vetting and pre-vetting would happen there. Like another editor saying, check out Andy, they're perfect for a certain job, etc.

Also, self-publishing authors in particular are often, very active on social media and use it a lot for their business. And that makes perfect sense why editors like Louise Harnby, who worked very closely with self-publishing authors, have this massive kind of blog and social media presence. But I decided I'm not going back to social media in the near future.

I had a big chat with my business therapist and we agreed until March, 2026, at least I'm not going to touch a social media platform and business aside, I want to say that it's had a massive positive effect on my mental health being off social media. And I think that is absolutely because of the division that a lot of these apps promote just to keep you engaged and a lot of the ways in which they hook you into being addicted on them. If you have an anxious attachment style, which I do have, but not to a debilitating degree, we're talking about tendencies here, then these platforms can be very addictive and you can start second guessing what people are posting and saying or what they're really meaning in a post and so on. So just having that out of my life has made a massive positive difference. And from that perspective, I really do not want to be on any of those platforms again.

So I've been thinking and this is what I have decided that I am going to do for 2026. The first thing that happened is, I got myself approved on Reedsy for dev editing and manuscript critiques. And I started to get a steady stream of suitable clients there for that service. Well, hey, that's cool because I don't need SEO or social media for that. Reedsy do all of that for you. They take a fee. That's the trade-off that you make.

The second thing that I did, I separated out my academic consulting for my fiction, editing and writing websites. And that's because fiction SEO and the fiction market is both more competitive in that there's more editors out there offering those services. And it also pays less than my academic consulting. So it made perfect sense to separate them out.

The academics that I work with are looking for a bare-bones website. Fiction authors are much more interested in vibes, voice, potentially blog content and so on. Separating out the websites avoids awkward questions about the different prices, and it shows that I'm serious in both niches as well from a brand positioning perspective. Like from the perspective of just getting the work, having one side was fine. People would find me and contact me.

But for the higher-level gigs, I do think it's going to help my brand if I separate it out like this. And it lets each niche develop organically. So I always had these marketing questions: How do I combine fiction and cultural anthropology? And I found ways of doing it over the years, but there was always this kind of awkward unity between the two, at least for marketing purposes.

And I don't need that. So that's gone now.

And what about social media? Well, for academic editing, I don't need it. If I were to do anything there, the only site that I would consider is LinkedIn. That's the least addictive site for me. And if you post there, it can get seen like a week later and so on. Whereas the halflife on other social media websites is much shorter. It can just be a matter of hours or a day or something.

But certainly until March, I'm going to be just working on my fiction website SEO and using Reedy to fill in any gaps. I have no desire really to go back on social media at all. Another thing that I'm going to focus on is fiction dev in traditional publishing. And quite a lot of editors, including those super experienced in traditional editing have told me, lots of it gets done in-house these days and that's true, but I know for a fact because I've already been taken on by the packager for dev editing for big traditional publishers, that there are opportunities out there and I have friends, editor friends and colleagues, who have done fiction dev in a freelance role for traditional publishers so I'm going to be focused more on relationship marketing and looking for those specific opportunities rather than building my social presence and audience so that completely new authors find my website and contact me to work with me.

So here's my plan. For socials, I'm going to stay off social media because it's extractive and not good for my nervous system. I know it's useful for fiction, but not for academic editing.

I'm going to explore other options in the fiction space. Fiction SEO and relationship marketing. For blogging, I'm going to slow my blogging down a lot. That's already happened somewhat over this year and I think that's a natural consequence to the fears of AI slop so it takes me several hours to write a decent blog post, edit it, publish it.

I only want to be doing that if I know it's helping me find the clients that I want. So I'm focusing with my blog on quality rather than quantity. I've pruned my blog down a lot. So I just have 10 to 20 posts now. I've focused on what you call cornerstone content, like deep dives into topics that tell Google that I know what I'm talking about with a certain topic. And anything else is just going to be sort of ephemeral opinions or reactions to things that happen.

I don't want to be a free public information service anymore, which is what I was like two or three years ago. I'm running a business and I get to do it in a way that doesn't feel extractive.

In real life, marketing, so I want to build reputation through doing more workshops. So I've got workshops planned in Italy and possibly Greece later this year. I'd love to do some more workshops in Germany and Austria. So if you are in one of those countries and you want to hire me again, please do get in touch.

I will be setting up a course as well. I can't talk about that right now, but stay tuned. And I also realized that another great way of marketing is through having credentials in creative writing too. So if I publish in high quality magazines, I have my bio there and everything, people read about me, find my website. And that can also be a great source of clients.

So I will be continuing to write and publish short stories in these creative writing magazines and I'm just going to roll with that, see what happens.

I still have a newsletter. I enjoy writing that so I'm going to keep that up to near weekly for the fiction stuff and I'll just see how it goes.

Podcasting... I'm gonna carry on podcasting but I'm gonna switch things up a bit because I've found it is a bigger commitment than I thought. There's quite a lot of effort that goes into every episode especially if you're checking transcriptions and editing them well, etc.

So with my podcasting, I'm just going to run it from December to May. That's the decision that I've made. And then I'll use the time out just to relax and have a break from podcasting.

So that's my basic plan for next year. If I'm going to make any predictions, what do I think is going to happen with the whole marketing world? So for editors, I've noticed...

writers particularly like opportunities for human contact even more so now because of the whole AI thing. Like in principle a writer can ask chat DPT for thoughts on a novel or a short story. They shouldn't but they do. So just delivering a report is less compelling I think now to writers who are worried about people using these applications, like AI, et cetera, in their workflows. And they prefer the human contacts, so more coached options, like a coached developmental edit. I expect this to continue being super popular next year.

What else do I think will happen? I do think that the decision I made to become more values focused and values aligned, that in the context of this increased politicization with the hard right US government and so on, which is also affecting the situation in Europe, I think that will mean that some people will be doing something similar. There will be a lot more of people talking about their opinions in their business as well. There will also be some people who kind of go into hiding and don't feel able or comfortable to talk about their business because of this whole situation. So I expect a bit of a polarization there.

And what else?

I think, and it's already started, there's going to be a bit of a reckoning with the limits of these LLMs in the editing and writing world. There have been editors promoting courses and products that are overhyping like generative AI a lot. I've seen people saying that if you take their course you can learn how to quintuple your editing speed for example, and I think there's going to be a bit of a reckoning with this hype machine that's been heavily promoted by the tech industry. The tendency in the editing world has been highly polarized, there's been people leaning into AI a lot, people talking against it a lot. I think this is gonna continue. I think that there will continue to be a kind of a two-tier approach.

My personal view is that people use these technologies mostly to cover up their own shortcomings. It's mediocrity central. That's why I don't work with writers who use it. And I am suspicious of editors who are adopting it in big ways in their workflows, especially if they're working in the creative, as in writing as art, not just as commerce sort of area.

So those are the main things that I think are gonna happen next year. But who knows, maybe there'll be some interesting new technology. Maybe gen.ai will actually step up to the task and be able to just do basic things like format a reference list really well. Who knows, we'll find out.

And finally, okay, so I've talked a lot about how the year went from a marketing and emotions perspective and overall it's been a kind of quite a tiring exhausting year but also it's been a fun experiment to run. I've really enjoyed seeing what would happen as I took the business off social media.

What about my income? Well, this year my main focus was just to maintain my income with making these big changes and I did. So I had my first £7k month, that's in pounds not dollars, which is massive, that felt good, and my total income for this year if you take away the subcontracting is roughly £55,000.

And that includes £9,000 from my teaching income from my summer job.

So in dollars, that works out to an income of around 74,000 US dollars, which is a solid income. It's an income that you'd get as a senior editor if you're working in traditional publishing as well. Although, always remember this, freelancers, when you're defining your prices, if you work in-house and you earn, let's say, 70,000 US dollars, the cost to the business would be roughly double that, like $140,000.

with all the extra costs that they take on, the pension and all of that kind of stuff. So you deserve more, you deserve to charge higher rates than that because even if you're earning like a solid freelance income, which I am, like 55,000 pounds, if you half that and get the equivalent in-house rate, it would still be quite low.

So I've talked about marketing, I've talked about income.

What about dreaming? Because I think this is the important part of running a business as well. Dreaming up the next year. So what do I want the next year to look like? Well, first of all, I'd be quite happy if I stopped doing fiction line editing and copy editing for self-publishing authors. I don't mind doing that if I've already done a developmental edit or if it's a client that I know really well and who is experienced. But I don't enjoy doing it for new clients. It involves taking on a lot of risk and it can be a real slog as well if the text needs a lot of work. So I want to keep the packager work, and I want to keep on doing that with a monthly quota. So just doing a fairly small amount like one title a month of fiction, copyediting or developmental editing.

Obviously I prefer to be doing developmental editing, but I also enjoy the relaxing feel of a copy edit too. Next year I want to do more academic consulting and dev editing. I think this will be quite easy to pick up because I have a steady pipeline of clients when I don't really market and focus on marketing it. So I can only assume that if I put some energy into that, I will quickly be able to get more clients. I want to keep doing the fiction dev and the consulting but I want to be picky about that. yeah. And finally, and this is a really fun one, I'm going to focus more on my identity as a creative writer rather than a fiction editor specifically and that's because I really really enjoy this creative writing. Up until this year my framing of it has been: I'm a novice, I'm learning the ropes, it's something that I enjoy, let's just roll with it. Now that I've had some wins, I've reframed it as a serious hobby that could potentially be a source of income but I'm also quite happy if it just carries on being a serious hobby because it's really good fun.

And finally, I would like to carry on doing more workshops as well, hopefully on interesting academic or fiction consulting and dev editing topics. So that's the year I have planned, and there are no big experiments. There's nothing big planned for next year.

Thank you very much for listening to this podcast all year round! I really enjoy creating it, and I'm really excited about the guests that I have planned for next year as well. All will be revealed in January. And I'm curious to hear how your year has gone as well. And I'm very conscious that it has not been a good year for some people. It can, it might have been exhausting and tiring for you. I've got other editor friends who have had an amazing year. They've earned six figures, and that's so cool. That gives me something to aspire to as well with my income goals.

But however the year's gone for you, I wish you some rest right now, especially as we move towards the winter solstice. I wish you time for reflection, rest and figuring stuff out so that when March arrives, April and the kind of the seeds that we plant now start to flower, that next year will be a great year for you.

So that's it for me and thank you very much.