Building my portfolio

The Package said:

I want to be a freelance editor. I have a diploma in "Professional Writing," but the thing's useless. However, I did garner a boat-load of editing experience - it actually seemed like the course was geared toward editing despite its title.

Anyway, I want to build a portfolio, but I am not in-touch with any of my classmates. I really don't have much (I never saved any roughs I received), and I don't know where to begin.

I do remember from one of my classes that a teacher said that taking comments from YouTube and editing them is a good way to show off your talent. However, I'm questioning whether he said, "For this portfolio PROJECT we're working on, YouTube comments are awesome," or if he said, "In the REAL WORLD YouTube comments are awesome..."

As an extra, I read a lot of in-real-life stories (especially the scary ones) on reddit and wondered if taking those and polishing them would be a good way of padding my portfolio. Would that be kosher, or could I get in trouble for that?

So my question is: How can I build a portfolio?

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Taking random Internet comments and 'editing' them is not a way to build anything. I don't even really understand how that'd work in theory. What would it show? How would anyone know what it was or what you did? That's completely aside from your taking someone else's writing for your own commercial use, which I also don't think is a good idea.

Further, what kind of portfolio would that be for? What kind of editing are you proposing offering?

Just in general, you might want to look up hyphen use.

You could use online texts to practise (is it practice? I can never remember which one to use in which context) your skills, but you can't publish or distribute them anywhere as you don't have the rights to do so under copyright law. So no, you can't use them to build a portfolio.

I doubt you'd be allowed to use the exercises given in class in this way either, so it doesn't matter that you didn't save your classwork.

There are a number of errors in your post here. That concerns me: good editors tend not to make such errors and if you can't see them in your own work, I'm not sure you should be charging anyone for your editing skills.

If you do want to pursue this as a career, you'll need to improve your understanding of punctuation, develop a working knowledge of copyright law, and decide what sort of editing you want to do. Fiction? Non fiction? Books? Magazines? Copy editing? Developmental editing? It's a big field, and whether you have a portfolio or not you really do need to have more focus and better skills before you start advertising your services.

And you want to sort out what kind of editor you wish to be.

Read this post on the Jo Fletcher Books blog by a professional.

http://www.jofletcherbooks.com/?s=copy+editor

The Package said:

Pardon me for not being so clear; this thread was the last thing I did before sleep.

I don't intend on being an editor tomorrow, and I know that punctuation isn't my jam. This is just something I want to be eventually.

I'd be offering substantive and developmental editing for fiction writers.

So the question seems to have morphed: What does a substantive editor put in a portfolio? All the portfolios I've looked at just list books the editor has edited. So if you've never done that, how do you prove that you don't suck?

For simplicity's sake, How does an editor prove their worth to potential clients?

Thanks for taking the time to help me. And thanks for the link Bolero.

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By showing them a list of books the editor has worked on, or clients the editor has worked with.

You can't, imo, prove you're an editor, especially one someone should hire, without having edited. Generally, people get experience working with senior editors at publishing houses, or, on occasion, in other ways. I wouldn't hire someone with no client list who had not apprenticed someplace with a good reputation, or with someone with excellent credentials. You can't make a portfolio out of thin air.

The Package said:

I see.

I guess I was led astray. My professors had us build portfolios with literal pieces of edited work in them - a sort of before and after thing.

Thanks for your help; I guess I'll have to try climbing this mountain on another side.

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Maybe someone else will have a different take, but I've never heard of such a thing, and as above, I'd be wary of anyone without a list of work/clients or who came from a known house/editor.

That's not even how editing works, you know? Fiction editors, especially developmental editors, don't take work and do stuff to it and hand it back; it's a discussion, and much of the changing is done by the author.

I'm going to second cornflake's comments: editors don't make any changes to the texts they work on: they identify problems, suggest solutions, and hand the whole thing back to the authors for them to implement the corrections as they think best.

Editors don't get work by showing a portfolio of work: they get work by having a good track record. Most good editors learn the job by working as an editorial assistant at a good publishing house, and moving up the editorial ladder as they progress. It's not a job you can do without aptitude or experience or mentoring. And while there are some very good training courses out there, they won't teach you all you need to know to do the job well.

The Package said:

I see.

I guess I was led astray. My professors had us build portfolios with literal pieces of edited work in them - a sort of before and after thing.

Thanks for your help; I guess I'll have to try climbing this mountain on another side.

Click to expand...

I built quite a few portfolios of things at university. None were applicable to or meant for use in the real world. They were for the class.

As others have said, the portfolio question isn’t really relevant – but here are a few tips for getting started:

• Consider finding an in-house editorial job if you can (i.e. an editorial assistant position or something similar); lots of freelancers start out in-house as it provides you with experience, training, contacts and insider knowledge of how the publishing system works.
• Do a well-recognised training course – this’ll teach you how to edit, and also help prove to other people that you can edit.
• Build up some testimonials by taking any editing work that you can get, even if it’s for free. I guess for fiction it would make sense to do some beta reading, and try to get some testimonials from the writers whose work you’ve critiqued?
• Look at freelancers’ websites and work out how they market themselves. This’ll help to give you an idea of what you need to do before you can properly market yourself as a freelance editor.

I’d recommend the book ‘Business Planning for Editorial Freelancers’ by Louise Harnby – it’s written by a UK-based proofreader, and is aimed at newbie freelancers with no prior experience. If nothing else, it’s a nice reminder that everyone has to start somewhere! (Louise also has a very useful blog here: http://www.louiseharnbyproofreader.com/blog.html)

I hope that helps – good luck!