Does Your Editorial Business Actually Need to Be Visible?

This episode is all about book editor visibility.

tl;dr: For most editors, visibility is an optional strategy, not a necessity

Tune in to hear how:

• Visibility isn't something you have to do if you're an editor.
• You can have a fallow season without pressure to be visible.
• The pressure to be consistent can have negative mental health implications.
• Referrals are a significant source of clients for editors.
• Not all visible editors are successful
• Building relationships is often more effective than audience building.
• Social media visibility can help if you're selling low-ticket offerings or editing for self-published authors.
• It's possible to run a successful editing business without social media.
• A focus on depth in client relationships rather than quantity can work well.

Transcript

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

Now today I wanted to discuss editor visibility and if you're if you're an editor you've probably heard or you felt the idea that you have to be visible online that you have to create a social media profile you have to show up in particular online spaces or forums things like that post constantly, build a brand, show your face and if you don't then you disappear and you lose all your clients and your business vanishes.

So last year I ran an experiment where I made my editorial business much less visible than it has been in previous years. I came off all social media platforms and I was still visible in some ways. I still have my blog and my newsletter. But what I learned over that year is that visibility isn't something you have to do if you're an editor. Instead, it's a strategy.

And you're not failing if you're not highly visible.

So first of all, let me talk a little bit about what editor visibility actually is. And then I'll talk in more detail about the differences between building your business relationally and focusing on audience building. So visibility is all about being publicly findable and discoverable is the word that's used a lot in marketing speech.

People need to know that you have an editorial business and they need to have some way of contacting you. And ways of being discoverable include having a social media presence, a newsletter that people can sign up for, a podcast like this or a blog. You might be speaking at events, giving talks and workshops. You might be commenting on other people's posts in writing communities on Reddit or on Facebook or something like that.

You might have a website which is your kind of real estate online, like your shop window where people can find you.

Now the first thing to point out here is that, well, visibility doesn't have anything really to do with your effectiveness as an editor. But people will draw conclusions about you from the way in which you show up online, the way in which you are visible. If your website is a mess and it's full of typos, well, people are going to make assumptions about how good a copy editor or proofreader you are.

if your website is very counter-intuitive and has really bad UX and UI, then people are going to think, well, how is this person going to be a good developmental editor if they're not thinking about the website user as they navigate the website, et cetera? So the ways in which you are visible, if you choose to be, people will make assumptions

from that about your effectiveness as an editor and that applies for any job really The absolute same applies to author websites as well. Now, visibility often gets treated as essential and that's in my opinion there's a few different reasons for that. First of all, many editors will learn marketing advice from people

other industries. There are lots of people promoting online business services, there are coaches, online business influencers, creative entrepreneurs and so on. And some of these have good advice, some of the advice isn't so good. But a lot of that advice is about doing something like creating a personal brand, audience building and so on.

basically promoting ways of growing your business because if your business is highly visible online then it's in a position for it to grow, your audience is likely to grow and a lot of that advice is about posting consistently that I don't know a new blog post every week or three LinkedIn posts every week something like that and there's this idea that's often promoted that you have to be consistent

if you want to grow. And I think that last little bit is the key thing to emphasize here, if you want to grow. There's this assumption that all businesses are wanting to grow all of the time, but nothing really works like that in the natural world. And your business doesn't have to work like that either. You can have a fallow season, you can decide to hibernate for a few months or a year or two. And during those periods, you have no pressure really to be visible, unless your business is unable to survive without some kind of visibility.

And what's often left unsaid here is that just promoting this consistency and constantly showing up online, it can have negative mental health implications for your business because we're humans at the end of the day and we can't just show up online. I think it's fundamentally against human nature to keep doing the same thing in exactly the same way for extended periods of time. For my own writing practice, I absolutely love

like the writer's hour, which is where you get up at 8am and then you write for one hour. And I stick with it for a few weeks, but then my mind wants to do something else. I would find it incredibly difficult to stick with, the writer's hour constantly for one year, two years, three years, etc. Because life inevitably gets in the way and the same applies to our businesses. And that is it. That is life. It is a good thing. 

So...

This idea that we should be constantly producing content, quote unquote, in this consistent way, it may drive growth, but you can also ask yourself, is it really necessary?

now, when I set my business up, I was highly visible for about the first five years. And there were some good reasons for that. It was a growth phase for my business. And I saw good results from that visibility. I think there is a case for putting in the hours when you're setting up your business.

and then you can take a break when everything's set up and people know who you are. Like, I've disappeared a little bit from these online spaces for about a year, but people still know who I am. It's cool. It's fine. I'm not going anywhere.

But when things aren't going so well, I think the idea of being online and visible, feels like there's some sort of lever that you can pull. Like to get more clients, to bring people into your business. If I just post more, I do six LinkedIn posts a week instead of two or three, if I write a blog post every day, et cetera.

it feels like something you can do that is going to take your business to a better space and it might do that.

But the downside of that, the negative aspect is that it can just turn into a prop for staying productive, for being productive It's not all about numbers and quantity. If you are struggling to find like writer clients for your business, then I recommend

taking a look at exactly what's going on. Is it about numbers and visibility or is it about something else? Is it about the kinds of relationships that you are building? Is it about the way you talk about your business when you have a potential client and so on?

And the other reason why I think visibility feels essential is because on well, this is obvious, but also really interesting. We see editors who are visible. If you are in these online spaces, you're going to see people who are posting online. And just because they're visible and talking about their business in a successful way, it

doesn't mean they are necessarily that successful.

For example, like I don't think this applies to every business but I know for myself and having seen other editorial businesses when things are busy I'm less likely to focus on whatever social media or newsletter or blogging and so on but when things start to quieten down then I'm more likely to do those things

and there's there's a an argument which i think is correct you should be doing some kind of marketing all the time at some kind of low level but the most visible editors on all of these platforms are actually likely to skew towards less successful because they are spending all of this time on i don't know social media platforms writing blog content etc etc

What you don't see are the editors who are fully booked through referrals alone. You don't see the editors quietly working via publishers and packages. You don't see the editors who are just very quiet online but have very high converting websites, which applies to the academic side of my business. So I didn't really talk about that very much, but I have a very steady stream of people who find me online and instantly decide to work with me.

And the editors who are visible, also... Okay, so now I want to talk a little bit about why you don't have to be visible. You don't have to build an audience. First of all, editing is very heavy on referrals. When I look at the data for my own business, I can see that about two thirds of

my clients are either repeat clients or clients who arrive to me through another editor or an author referring them to me. I think that's just what writers do. Like the academic writers, they're very tightly connected. They're looking at credentials, they're looking for someone they can trust. the fiction authors are a much looser set of people.

But they also look closely at word of mouth, recommendations from other writers in their networks and so on. They're not really going to look at, I don't know, an Instagram reel or TikTok reel or something like that. And that matches my experience. So I was using social media a lot for about four years of my business.

I would occasionally get clients directly through social media but not that often. They were mostly through SEO or through referrals as I've said.

Next point is, well writers generally don't choose editors based on urgency If people are saying oh I've got 50 % discount if you book by Sunday, if I was a writer I'd be thinking why are they trying to push me into this sale which is gonna a big sale that that's gonna cost me hundreds maybe thousands of pounds.

dollars or whatever why are they trying to rush me with it

I'd be researching my editors very carefully. I'd be looking at their websites for tone, personality. I'd be comparing their rates and looking at what they offer and how they're all a little bit different. And I'd be looking for an editor who got me in my writing.

They're not looking for people who are posting constantly on social media offering tidbits of helpful advice.

And here's the rub, like just being invisible as an editor is not the same as being unsuccessful. Of course, some invisible editors are unsuccessful. That's just logic. But also there are editors who don't use social media at all or who very rarely post or people who just have a really minimal public presence and who are booked through repeat clients, publishers, agencies.

referrals from other editors. Now visibility can help with some things. It can help if your business model is based around building like an audience. So if you're selling say webinars that cost either let's say $50 or $80 whatever, then having a big audience really helps with that because

that is the sort of thing someone would just buy on a whim and then learn a little bit about you and get to know you through that webinar. So if you're selling those kind of products sometimes called like low ticket offerings then yeah absolutely a larger audience is important and visibility can help and what you'll see is that and one thing that I've noticed is that

The editors who are most visible online tend to skew towards those editors who are selling certain kinds of products. It might be webinars, it might be courses. They're often selling these things to new editors or aspiring editors or writers. And it absolutely makes sense for those people to be very visible online. But if that's not your business model, then

You don't need to be particularly visible. instead of building an audience, you can build your business relationally through focusing on kind of right fit people who are very aligned with what you do and how you approach things. Because the bigger the audience is, the less likely it is that each member of that audience or most members of that audience will be very tightly and closely aligned with you and what you're about.

So you've got the editors who are selling products, be it courses, be it webinars, that kind of thing. And then another group who's very visible is editors who are working with new indie authors. And that is because if you're an indie author, you have to build from scratch an audience online as well. And because they're mostly selling books, then...

that's a low ticket offering and they have to focus on that audience building. So that then becomes their sort of natural ecosystem and that is how they will often look for editors as well. And I noticed this with my own business because I said, I took my business off social media and my academic client stream, it just remained the same. I would keep getting the same, roughly the same number of people contacting me. But my indie authors,

quickly dried up because I just wasn't in the spaces anymore where they were hanging out. That was, and for me that was fine and that was intentional because I've been switching to doing a lot more work with traditional publishers. But if that is your business focus, if you are working with new indie authors, then it absolutely makes sense to be very visible online. And I see that a lot with people in my editor network.

Also, I think visibility helps if you're building out from zero. If you're just starting out, then I think it does make sense to try being on different platforms, be it social media or things like Discord, Substack and so on. Give it a go. Visibility also helps if you want to become some kind of thought leader in your niche. So...

By having a podcast, yes, that's what I want, partly what I want for my business. I like having these conversations. I like sharing what I've learned and I like learning from other people. but even within that, I still get to choose how I'm visible. So I've chosen to be visible through blogging, through podcasting and through my newsletter. I am not visible through social media platforms at all.

But I think it's a myth that being a visible editor automatically means you stand the chance of being a more successful editor. Some of the editors I know who are highly visible...

don't make that much money. There's lots of different ways of measuring success in a business and that's just one, but there is no correlation here. And I know of other editors who make lots of money, but They're not in these spaces and they don't need to be because their model is based on gaining work through referrals and building relationships with a small number of

authors rather than going wide and trying to build like this massive audience.

so the takeaway here is I would say when you're starting a business visibility is highly useful and experiment and see if you feel comfortable with that. But you might not want, you might not feel comfortable. You might not want to be visible in a certain kind of a way and you don't have to be. A lot of the whole business of selling marketing tools and business admin tools

to other business owners is caught up in this marketing landscape that is based around fear and partly based around ambition slash desperation I would say.

So if you take a platform like LinkedIn and all of the people selling things like SEO and so on, there's always a new trend, a new thing that people are trying to sell you like GEO, like SEO for generative AI and so on. And this kind of fear, everything's changing and I need to figure out a way of like...

adapting my business to all of these changes can drive sales for like of these kinds of products to people and There are some people I'm sure offering quality products out there, but there's also a lot of shoddy products and services being sold to naive often newer business owners and

platforms and certain kinds of platforms and in my opinion social media often but not necessarily is one domain where this fear this kind of like if you buy my service or product is a lever that you can pull and it will help you and climb the next rung to success so maybe you're super ambitious yes I will buy that product etc or maybe you haven't had any work for a month or two and you're desperate

you really need some money coming in and you buy one of these things because of that. So that's kind of what I see as the dark side of visibility is all of these kind of scammy things that are based on fear and when you're experienced, when you've been in the small business space for I don't know I would say three or four plus years then they're really really easy to spot but when you're starting out

you're not really sure because you're not experienced, you haven't learned how to operate, you've just kind of landed in a field and you're trying to make hay and when you're in that situation you're more likely to feel the fear and try lots of different things out including making some silly mistakes and I've seen really really experienced small business owners do that as well.

So to finish I would say you can choose to be visible I've chosen to be visible in a way that suits me but you don't have to be visible it's optional

Just look at your energy and make decisions based on what's right for your business rather than like fear.

And the other conclusion is that you don't have to build an audience. The audience building is tightly linked to visibility. You don't have to build an audience. You can just build out relationally instead. It's that simple.

So yeah, you can just, if you want your business to be quiet, let it be quiet. I've decided I dislike social media. It just doesn't work for how my mind operates. You don't have to focus on quantity. You don't have to focus on building a big audience. What does it really mean if you've got 10,000 or 20,000 people in your newsletter?

You can focus on depth instead. And you can especially do that as an editor because you're selling like a high cost premium service that costs hundreds if not thousands of pounds. It's not a $50 webinar.

that's it. okay so this episode has ended up being a bit of a rant but I hope it's been a productive rant and I hope that you've enjoyed it, that it's useful for you and I will be in touch again very soon with some more episodes. So thank you folks for listening. Don't forget to take a look at the show notes for all the useful links and if you want to keep in touch sign up for my newsletter.

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