The Cost of Keeping Up

As a freelance editor who is trying to land an in-house job, it is incredibly difficult to keep up with everything I know I should be doing as a publishing professional and what I can realistically afford to keep up with as someone who is still cobbling together jobs. 

In undergrad, the professor of the one publishing-related class my college offered said that it was important to keep up to date with the news. Our first assignment in that class was to sign up to as many newsletters as we could from Publishers Weekly, LitHub, Shelf Awareness, and Publishing Perspectives among others. In grad school, I was encouraged to spend time catching up on publishing news and author newsletters to see how they connect with readers from a marketing perspective.  While you can get most of these news sites for free, some of the articles are behind paywalls and 

In pursuing freelance editing, I was encouraged by people at Portland Book Fest and others around me to sign up for the Editorial Freelance Association, ACES: The Society for Editing, and the Northwest Editors Guild. 

Not to mention online tools such as your preferred style guide, professional development books, and possibly dictionaries (although I haven’t determined if a MW subscription is worth it). 

While these are all relatively small amounts, and probably not much for people who are working in the industry full-time, it is a high cost of entry to maintain.

That’s almost $600 dollars not including conferences or other professional events or books like The Conscious Style Guide or Copyediting Fiction, which both came out recently and had my connections on LinkedIn buzzing.

If you’re a freelance editor, I would love to hear more about how you budget or plan your expenses for subscriptions like these ones. Or if you have suggestions about alternative services, workarounds, or anything else you would like to add, please leave a comment!