Season 1: Human-edited Transcripts

S1 E4: Into the Generative AI Trenches Hello, and welcome, folks, to The Freelancer. This podcast discusses all things publishing through a social justice lens. My name is Andy Hodges. I'm a cultural anthropologist and fiction writer and editor, and I own a book editing business called The Narrative Craft. Please 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 from me. Now, today's episode is all about generative AI, and how it's showing up in my little corner of publishing. That's the editorial world. I'm going to offer you a critical perspective on generative AI technologies in editing. Now, it's fair to say, some version of these technologies will clearly have a big role in publishing. But until they're regulated, it's a Wild West out there. With technologies such as ChatGPT, if I input clients' manuscripts into these technologies, I'd be putting myself and my clients at risk. And even if I weren't, using technologies like ChatGPT would be an ethical issue for me because these technologies are putting artists, writers, translators, and editors out of business while also delivering a subpar product. So I'm gonna start off with my position statement, and it goes something a little bit like this. [Position statement]: Generative AI technologies trained on datasets acquired without the author's consent are theft. If you use technologies that do this to generate or edit text, or to generate artwork for your books or courses, then I will not work with you, and I will not take your course. And this actually makes me a little bit sad, as it's one reason why I haven't taken some of the courses available in the editing world right now. Before I go and dig into this in lots more detail, I also want to share with you a skeleton version of my AI policy. And I'm sharing this so you can consider it in your own work as an author or an editor. [Skeleton AI Policy]: So point one, AI generated texts. I do not work on text generated by AI. I work only on human generated texts. Point number two—AI assisted texts. I do not work on texts that have used ethically dubious products trained on stolen datasets to assist them with copy editing or proofreading. Now I currently accept texts that have used responsible AI products. One example is Draftsmith. I'll put a link to that in the show notes. But if you're using these products for copy editing or proofreading, I advise caution, because using such tools can flatten voice, and it can lead to incorrect or unfaithful edits—edits that don't match the original intention. And I'll talk a little bit more about this later on. And by choosing not to work with AI-generated text, I'm aligning myself with literary agents and most gatekeepers in traditional publishing, be it in academic or fiction publishing. I'm fully aware that some self publishing authors are taking a more AI-positive position right now, as are some editors, but I'm not interested in working with those authors. And a few more points while we're at it. What AI policy do I have for my own content? It's pretty simple. [My AI content policy:] No individual or business is allowed to use any of my websites or confidentially shared content, including contracts, to train AI models. And this works both ways. So for client content, I promise I will never put any of your text into a generative AI product, not even a responsible product right now, such as Draftsmith, etcetera. And finally, AI and the environment. So in my spare time, I will personally experiment with tools like ChatGPT because it's important to keep up with what's happening in publishing and how these tools are changing publishing. But I will not use these tools frequently because of the environmental damage linked to them, and I will definitely not use these tools to create images. Now I want to talk a little bit about hype-mongers because there's a lot of hype surrounding these technologies. So a few editors, and many people who work in tech, have been heavily promoting or encouraging use of generative AI technologies. And one of the things that I've noticed quite often amongst these people is this all-or-nothing thinking. If you're not on the hype train with them, then you're a Luddite or you're scared. Now let me give you one example. I recently bought an electric car. Didn't realize it at the time, but I'm one of the first four percent or so of people in the UK to have one. And the infrastructure isn't quite there yet. So here, I'm a fairly early adopter— not so with ChatGPT. I've experimented with it, but I've found hardly any use for it in my business. And I'll tell you what use I have found for it later on. Point two. In this kind of hype environment—it's called a hype cycle, and I'll put a link to that in the show notes as well—editors, writers, and translators do not have the same interest as the companies promoting these technologies. In their current form, I think tools like ChatGPT are an assault on critical thinking and on creatives. And I would link these tools to the rise of an oligarchy and shifts in society and the tech industry—big social shifts. Here's one example. Big companies often promote human-in-the-loop as a concept. This is the idea that a human and generative AI tool will work together in some kind of workflow, and the human will edit or work with the content that the machine, the generative AI produces. So this has been a useful concept in lots of fields, but what's going on there with it? It's really emphasizing the technology. Like, the human is part of some kind of cybernetic loop here rather than taking the lead. This reminds me of concepts like the mechanical turk. If you don't know what that is, Google it. You can find lots of sources on how big businesses such as Amazon have been using people to do almost mechanical tasks over the past twenty years, often tasks that relate to language. So if we take something like human-in-the-loop, can we flip it around? Can we talk about machine-in-the-loop, where the human takes the lead and has the power and chooses to use these other technologies, you know, in their own time and in their own way. And one translator has gone beyond that and come up with the idea of the expert-in-the-lead. So that's saying that the human expertise should be foregrounded, not the mechanical, the machine editing, and so on. And I'll put a link to that article in the show notes as well. These are all important conversations, and I think it's interesting. A lot of [these conversations] are happening or have happened in translation over the past few years, which just seems to be one step ahead [of editing] with AI hype and exploitation. But some of these conversations are now seeping into editing as well, so watch out for them. I think we've got a lot as editors to learn from our translator friends. Point three. And that is that this generative AI output often flatters to deceive. It's currently not very good at editing. It might be one day. Who knows? But not everybody is aware of this. If you don't know what good editing looks like, then it could look convincing enough. And I think that's interesting here. I noticed that that through conversations with editor friends and discussions on editorial forums and so on, the bottom half of the market for self-published copy editing and academic editing, that'd be things like thesis editing, disappeared overnight. But I genuinely believe that this is a really good thing because lots of those people didn't value editing very highly. If somebody doesn't value editing very highly, doesn't know what good editing looks like, then they may well be happy with generative AI outputs. But these kind of people, they'd be the ones who are more likely to argue over edits, insist on incorrect edits, and so on. So I think it's a really good thing that they're not in the pool anymore, and this matches my experience over the last couple of years. When ChatGPT came out, I did notice a slight decline in the number of requests for editing at first. But since then, there's been a rebound, and there's been an increase in the average quality of the inquiry that I've received. So I feel pretty good about that. Now I want to talk a little bit about how generative AI is showing up in my client work. First things first, I've changed my onboarding procedure. I make sure I ask about the use of generative AI tools. It's so important. And through those conversations, some authors have disclosed using these tools to do things such as copy editing, summarizing plot, because these tools can be quite good at summarizing. Now you have to be really careful here if you're an author using a tool like ChatGPT, especially if ChatGPT is then using your input for its training, for its models, and so on. There's a real copyright gray area here because it's not regulated properly yet. It's like the Wild West, and this can cause friction with traditional publishers. If you're self-publishing, you can do a lot of these things if you want. There is still a small chance that you will have issues further down the line, for instance, with plagiarism. But if we just look at traditional publishing, generally speaking, editors, gatekeepers, etc., won't touch AI-doctored texts from that have used services like ChatGPT. So the main way it's shown up in my client work is through conversations about it with clients, through finding out whether and how they're using it. And then sense-checking that against my AI policy and making sure that I'm working with the kinds of authors, the kinds of people who are on the same page as me about this. And there's been one other way in which it's shown up in my client work, and this was a one off. I sent a contract to a person. Fifteen minutes later, I received a detailed critique of that contract. And it was clear to me as soon as I read it that this person had put the contract through something like ChatGPT and asked for feedback. In an instant, any trust that had been built up with that client was gone. So that just meant, oof, I cannot work with this client. That's only happened once. It's a one-off, and there's all sorts of reasons why a person might have done that. They might have been distrusting, unsure, new to the whole publishing industry, and so on. So I don't have any bad feeling towards that person for having done that. But it is an interesting kind of experience that I had, and it did make me think about what guidelines I need to have in place. Because on my website, I state that you cannot take text off my website or through my emails and use them for that kind of purpose. So if these tools are not that great at the moment for for writing or editing in fiction or the creative humanities, which are the two areas I work in, then what is it good for? And what are the specific problems that come up in these areas? Well, fiction, especially, depends on unique voice. These generative AI tools give you a mash-up of what's already out there. ChatGPT, for example, could create, in principle, a carbon copy of, say, a completely new kind of novel that becomes a new trend. But I do not believe it can do the the human creative work of creating something radically new that strikes a chord with people. And there's one translator who uses this lovely phrase: "It takes a human to reach a human." And I firmly believe that. Next up, it can create texts that look good on the surface. So it could be used for tidying up texts. For instance, if you write in a language that isn't your first one. And this is the main way in which I am using it in my business right now, not for any forward-facing work, but tidying up emails I write to clients in German or Croatian, which are the two main languages I speak apart from English, that is. But tools like ChatGPT make mistakes here as well. So if you don't have a knowledge of those languages already, this use of it is wouldn't actually be that useful because you wouldn't know where it's slipping up and where it isn't. Now, in the creative humanities, and this comes out of discussions with academic colleagues and friends, I believe that the use of ChatGPT and similar technologies could lead to a two-tier system. If you look at any humanities text, each one has a communicative aspect to it. It's about communicating research, often to other academics, sometimes to the public as well. And it has a symbolic aspect to it. The symbolic aspect is all about author style and voice and these other considerations. And when I'm discussing this symbolic aspect, I always use the example of Pierre Bourdieu. He's a really famous sociologist. Don't know if you know him, but if you've read any single text by him, you will know that that text was written by Pierre Bourdieu just because he writes in a really, really unique way. Now these ChatGPT-style tools, they can help often with the communicative aspect, but they tend to flatten voice. And it's fairly easy for me to notice and see when a text has been put through ChatGPT because there's this kind of bland voice to it and the use of certain words, phrases. There's been a big discussion about it defaulting to US English and em dashes and stuff like that. And I find those conversations which are nonstop on social media quite boring now, but that's another example. It's a homogenizer, and homogenizing isn't always good. And it's not good if you're trying to create, like, a unique style. So I believe, and I think I see this happening already, you could end up with a two tier situation where some users, especially those who aren't fluent in a in a language—they're using, say, academic English as a second or third third language. Those people are using these technologies to tidy up their texts. Whereas you have first-language English speakers and those from more elite university backgrounds really heavily invested in their own writing and in the symbolic aspects of what they're doing as well as the communicative ones. My observation is that these kinds of elite writers are flat-out refusing to use ChatGPT and similar technologies. I've noticed this across my whole academic network, and I believe you could end up with kind of a two-tier situation here, which isn't good at the end of the day. So that's a kind of snapshot of what I see going on in both fiction and academia right now. I could talk about this a lot more, but I know that I will be coming back to this topic in future episodes. So I'll just end by saying a brief summary of what I think is happening. So first of all, one thing that I think is missing is a much more critical kind of stance taken by some people in the editorial community towards the use of these tools. The courses that I have seen so far, and the conversations I have seen taking place generally seem to be kind of either on the fence or mildly positive towards the use of generative AI. I think there's a space there, an important need for a more critical perspective, and that's what I'm trying to achieve here. How do I think these tools are going to transform editing? Well, I've already talked a little bit about two-tier systems, and I think that will probably happen in fiction as well. I know that some publishers are even experimenting with AI-generated novels. And there's an argument that these tools are more of a stylist than an expert. They're not very good at expertise. There's the so-called ChatGPT-splaining, like mansplaining. It tends to confidently give the prompter an answer to a question, but it doesn't necessarily give the right answer. However, it's quite good at, you know, styling texts in a certain style. So there's an argument that it will be used for certain kinds of fiction. And, you know, romance fiction is a genre that sells the most. And in some ways, it often has a more prescriptive story structure. The more prescriptive the story structure, the more algorithmic it is, and the greater the use of algorithmic technologies like ChatGPT and so on. I believe that in the editing world, writers will still be looking for human judgment, and there'll be a shift towards more book coaching, consulting, and developmental editing services. And there'll still be room for, you know, heavy copy editing, stylistic editing, which is incredibly human and subjective. I've already noticed this a little bit in my own work as well. I've seen increased demand for Zoom sessions, for book coaching services over developmental editing services where you just deliver a report. More widely, I think generative AI will lead to a modest decrease in the number of editors. I think in adjacent fields like translation, that has been happening already. And I think it will lead to a substantial decrease specifically in the number of proofreaders, and that's because large parts, significant parts of copy editing and proofreading will likely become automated. But I think that's a good thing because it frees editors up to focus on higher level issues with a text. And this has already happened several times already in publishing with innovations like word processors, macros, etcetera, etcetera. And that's it for now. Those are the main things that I think will happen in the editorial world. I'm really keen to hear your perspective too. So let me know what you think about my AI policy and the decisions I've made. Are you much more AI positive? Are you using AI in your business in new and exciting ways? Or have you taken a more critical and distanced perspective on the technology like me? So thank you, folks, for listening. Don't forget to take a look at the show notes again for all the useful links. If you want to keep in touch, sign up for my newsletter. And please, please, please subscribe, rate, and review. Until next time.

S1 E3: Is Your Small Business Extractive? Hello, and welcome, folks, to The Freelancer. This podcast discusses all things publishing through a social justice lens. My name is Andy Hodges, and I'm a cultural anthropologist turned fiction writer and editor. And I own a book editing business called The Narrative Craft. Please, please, please 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. Right. So this episode is a business advice episode, and it will apply to anyone with a small business. But I'm gonna use examples from my own experiences in publishing. Today's topic is all about how extraction can show up in our small businesses, and I'll start with a quick definition. My first thought is of a tooth extraction. You know, when you go to the dentist – it's not happened to me yet, and I hope it never does, but it probably will happen one day – so you go to the dentist, and they take your tooth out. It's taken out. It's removed with force. So with extraction in small businesses, it can be a little bit different. When you go to the dentist, there is clear consent there. You consent to that happening. But with extraction in small businesses, there may be a lack of consent. Basically, extraction in the abstract is a kind of asymmetrical taking, often repeatedly, that benefits one side, but is bad for the other. And let me start off with an everyday example that isn't even about business. You've probably shared a flat with someone at some point, and that can get niggly. Imagine you're sharing a flat with someone, and you're buying things for the fridge, lovely meals for every day. And this other person, they just keep taking a little bit. And it's not like they took something one day, and then a few days later they provide, and they add things to the fridge. That would be kind of like a gift economy, anyway. We're getting technical here. But if they just keep taking and it's all one-sided, then that would be extraction. What does this look like for a really big business, a corporation? Well, it could be a corporation taking lithium ore from a country, and there's been massive discussions about this, in relation to Ukraine and also Serbia. In small businesses, what could extraction look like? Well, if you wanted to take from lots of other businesses, You might want to trick them into buying something stupid and unnecessary, something based on a false or an unrealistic promise. That might be something like buy my PDF course and learn how to become a six-figure proofreader. And I put that phrase in because you'll often hear like overblown claims like this and that. You know, start this business and then six figures, etcetera. And I would say right now, there are there are easier ways to earn six figures than to become a proofreader. That's for sure. So here there's often some kind of beautiful lie, and this beautiful lie taps into a customer's fears or pain points. And there's often a lack of informed consent here. Because that judgment's often clouded by emotions, by urgency. They might say you have to buy this thing by the end of the day, etcetera. And it's not just emotions and urgency. Sometimes the customer just doesn't know enough. This often happens with hybrid book publishing. A new author invests heavily in a nice cover, nice editorial, and so on. And that's what the hybrid publisher makes their money from. But then they don't have a clue about marketing, or they don't know that you have to market a book heavily and build an audience. And the hybrid company doesn't always offer them much help with that, and that can be a real problem. So they can feel cheated, etcetera. That's one situation in publishing where this shows up. What does this look like for you as your small business in publishing? And I'm assuming here, you're not a hybrid publisher. And if you don't know what that means, I've got some links that I'll leave in the show notes. So when you run a small business, you can be extracting from other people. Other businesses can be extracting, taking things from you. You can be the person or the business that's being exploited, or you can be exploiting others, or you can be doing neither. And this can quickly become a blurry mess, and it can be confusing to navigate. And I think this is one of the things which is behind why a lot of small business owners feel icky about marketing and about pricing and about selling their services. Because sometimes they feel like they're exploiting others, and sometimes they feel like they're being exploited, and it all just becomes like a mess full of contradictions, and it's super confusing. So in this episode, what I want to do is break through the confusion a little bit. And I'm not saying this will solve your qualms and your issues with pricing in general, because there's so many different things which contribute to what makes up a price, so many different thoughts and feelings. But to break through the confusion, I'm gonna discuss a simple way of thinking about extraction. And I learned this on Bear Hebert's amazing course, Marketing for Weirdos, which I've also linked to in the show notes. And I'll start with the situation where someone else is extracting from you. So you are being exploited here. And it's a little bit abstract, but I'll give you some examples. So, in this situation, they are following the logic, this other business or whatever, they are saying, "I want to get the most amount of work for the least amount of money." And what can this look like when you're exchanging emails or jumping on a call with someone? Well, it can look like them asking you for a discount without giving a good reason for it. It can look like them asking you for your so-called best rate. And I've got a lot of friends who work in the translation industry, and it's one of those phrases, "your best rate," that [translation] agencies often pull out. And it's a funny phrase because, you know, it's like gaslighting in a phrase because it's not the best rate for you as a freelancer. It's the best rate for them as an agency. So that's one situation. And if someone else is exploiting you in this way, there are a few clues that that might be happening. So first of all, think about: Do you have the power to set your own rate? Is there a debate in a discussion, or do you have to work for their rate and it's fixed? Point two, do you have control over your workflow and the tools that you use to complete the job? And I give you one example here. So when I started out as an editorial freelancer in my first year, I used to take on quite a lot of translation work as well. And some of the translation agencies who were not so great quality, in my humble opinion; they would impose workflow conditions on me. They'd say you have to use, specific translation tools. It's called a CAT tool if you work in that industry. And that involved some learning, but you just had to learn how to use that tool, and you weren't paid extra for that. It was just assumed that you would jump through that hurdle if you wanted to work with them. Other [better] translation clients I had were like, you do your own thing, have your own processes, use your own CAT tool if you want. All we care about is the quality at the end. So that that's one thing to watch out for. How much control do you have over your workflow and the tools that you use to complete the job? And in my experience, editors and proofreaders who are often working for very big corporations, mostly, like, publishing presses and so on, very large presses, mostly fit into this category. And that is because corporations are designed to maximize profit. And you maximize profit by following that principle. "I want to get the most amount of work for the least amount of money." A small press or another freelancer is more likely to look at you not as something that can be extracted from, but as another human being with needs and desires, etcetera. And that's why they're much less likely to follow that principle. So it is a little bit linked to the size of a business and how much they're focused on being a business. Now let's flip all of that over and look at situations when you, as a small business, might be exploiting others. In this situation, you might be being extractive if you follow this principle, and I'll say the sentence a couple of times again. "I want to get the most amount of money for the least amount of work." Sounds pretty good. Right? Let me say that again. "I want to get the most amount of money for the least amount of work." So if I followed that principle to the extreme, this might show up as charging a really, really, really high amount for a one-hour coaching call or something like that. And I mean ridiculous. I don't mean doubling your rates or something like that. So what does all this mean for you as a small business owner? Well, the first thing that I learned when I got my head around these two sentences – I was able to categorize lots of my business interactions with different big publishers and other freelancers and so on. And it really got me thinking about situations where I'm being extracted from, and where I might be being extractive towards others. I think one of the phrases that you've probably heard is scope creep, and that's when you sign up for a job. And for some reason, the clients asks or makes many more demands on you. And you should just say no, but sometimes there's an unfirm boundary there. Like, there aren't strong boundaries asserted, and that's the situation of scope creep when you can be extracted from. I think that's especially common at the start of a freelance career, and a lot of it comes from not knowing, as well, and not being firm and confident in your workflow and your pricing, etcetera. I want to add, I don't think you should get paralyzed by this idea of being extractive. I think it's useful to recognize situations when we are being extractive towards others. That could involve, like, the opposite of scope creep, for instance, cutting corners on a particular task, etcetera. But even if you doubled your rates for editing services: let's say, instead of editing for twenty hours a week, I was like, oh, I'll double my rates and I'll just do ten hours a week instead. Well, I'd still be earning the same amount, and there's no freelance law that says I have to work ten hours, twenty hours, forty hours, eighty hours a week. That wouldn't necessarily be extractive because I'd still be working in a way that just met my needs and freed up time for other stuff. That could be cool activist stuff, that could be community building. It could be, I don't know, household tasks and so on. Care responsibilities. There's all sorts of reasons why I might just want to work for ten hours a week. But if I were to charge, like, a hundred times as much, then I wouldn't be able to spend all of that money on my everyday costs and, you know, a bit more than getting by, you know, comfortable stuff. But I wouldn't need all that. And what would happen then is that I'd reach a moment where I was starting to hoard money and hoard resources. And when you think about these principles and you look around, you'll be able to see it a lot in everyday commercial culture, especially if you live in the UK or the USA. I'm just thinking of ideas like the all-you-can-eat buffet, for instance, that feeds into this logic of I want to get the most amount of stuff for the least amount of money, and lots of offers that you'll see in the supermarket. Like, buy one, get one free. Do you really need that second thing? You feel like you've got some kind of bargain or special offer, but if you just needed one of those things to meet your needs, then maybe you've bought too much, that kind of thing. And it's interesting that these buy one, get one free offers were actually not legal in Germany where I used to live, until the early 2000s. So how can you avoid being extractive or being extracted from in your small business? Well, the first thing is to recognize when extraction is showing up and when it isn't. Charging someone a fee for something isn't capitalist and extractive. Marketing has existed for thousands of years, as has the exchange of goods and services. And Bear Hebert emphasizes on their course that this exchange is basically ethically neutral. It's come to feel icky because a lot of the exploitative and extractive marketing tactics have been baked into marketing as a thing and, the small business space in general. So point two on how to avoid extraction, I would say, be careful around big businesses in particular. That's corporations, very big publishers, and so on. They are trained to extract. It's behind the principle of maximizing profit. If they can reduce the fee they give to freelancers by $1, when you multiply that across the many freelancers that they have, they will be saving millions of dollars or millions of pounds. So watch out around things which are trained to just think of themselves as businesses. Also be careful around freelance marketing advice, and that's because lots of it is loaded with tips and tricks that encourage extraction, and that'll be a whole other episode. Playing number games with pricing when you're buying something, saying the first price is twice what it would actually cost, etcetera. That is one example. Another example is fake urgency, saying you have to make a decision by the end of the day, by the end of the week, by a certain date, and that places are going fast. Say if it's a course, something like that. So by setting fake deadlines and creating a sense of fake urgency, they can create tension in the person who's thinking of buying the thing. And that tension can then cloud their judgment, and they can end up buying something that wasn't quite what they needed or what they wanted and so on. And this has probably happened to us all. It certainly happened to me when starting to run my small business. And it's really easy to promise a formula or a five step plan that only this person has or this company has, and, like, this five step plan will bring you fame and fortune. You know? And you see that in the book publishing space a lot too with the really overblown claims of Save the Cat! and, like, other outfits like Story Grid saying that they have the one formula. They know how storytelling works, and they're telling you how to do it. When in actual fact, it's not like that at all. And if you follow their formulas very strictly, you might end up adding completely unnecessary scenes and creating a novel that just doesn't work. And finally, I'd say, be careful around content marketing as well, and social media marketing. So it's in the interest of lots of big corporations that people are on their platforms for as long as possible, as they're trying to capture your attention. And it's also in their interest that these people create free content on those platforms too, because that's effectively a free way for them – for those businesses – to keep other people on their platform, the readers. So please, please, please, if you do choose to pursue content marketing, and I like content marketing and think it's really cool, please make sure it's working for you and that you're not self extracting, that you're not producing a lot of content that's nice and is maybe creating visibility on these platforms, but isn't really helping your business in any big way. And I see this quite a lot with posts on social media. So, at the end of the day, Bear Hebert and myself recommend picking a price which is focused on your needs. And that doesn't mean your basic survival needs. It can be a zone of comfort as well. Absolutely. And rates and pricing that take into account all of your costs, holidays, sick pay, pensions, etcetera. And this isn't easy, and I could probably do five episodes discussing different aspects of pricing. But by making a note and writing down all of that information of what you need to survive, like a a basic income, and what you need to be comfortable. That is a good approach. And that's basically what I do with my business. And as a separate topic, if you want to avoid extraction, think of ways in which you can give back to the communities you're working with. Think of ways in which you can model what's called reciprocity, kind of a mutual giving and taking. And when you do that, you're building relationships as well. And I think this works better because if you want to create a small human-sized business, then relationship building's incredibly useful for that. And it's potentially a lot less draining. You need a lot less energy than you would to build, like, a a really large audience. And for those of us who have been in business for several years, it's easy to see, like there is a certain kind of business that might be a little bit scammy and people might only buy from them once. And then they constantly need to find new clients. So that ends up being one-sided. It's a one-sided pursuit of growth just to keep going and to find new clients that [they] don't build relationships with. You would just do one exchange with them. Whereas the kind of the services work that I do and loads of other editors and authors do, well, someone might come back to you in one year, two years, five years, and this happens, and it's really nice when people get in touch again. But it makes a lot more sense, and you can conserve a lot more energy if you're relationship building rather than just working with people very much on a one-off basis. Sometimes people only need a service once and that's fine. But if you're thinking about building relationships over trying to make [your] audience as big as possible, then you'll probably grow in a smaller but more sustainable way, I would say. Okay. So that's extraction. I will be doing other episodes looking at extraction in other settings, like academic settings, other publishing settings as well. But I just wanted to give you a taste of the kind of socially informed approach to business that I take. So thank you very much, folks, for listening. Don't forget to take a look again at the show notes for all of the useful links. And if you want to keep in touch with me, first of all, you can contact me about this episode, send me an email, sign up for my newsletter, or leave a review. And I'll see you next time.

S1 E2: Prestige Traps in Fiction Publishing Hello and welcome, folks, to The Freelancer. This podcast discusses all things publishing through a social justice lens. My name is Andy Hodges. I'm a cultural anthropologist turned fiction writer and editor, and I own a book editing business called The Narrative Craft. Make sure you subscribe to the show, so you never miss an episode, and sign up for my newsletter in the show notes if you want more regular updates. Today's episode is called Prestige Traps in Fiction Publishing. Now this episode is really aimed at editors but authors may appreciate the behind-the-scenes perspective that I'm going to provide here on traditional publishing. If you do a lot of editing for traditional publishers, watch out for what I call a prestige trap. A prestige trap is a situation you can end up in if you do a lot of high prestige, low wage jobs for top publishers. And by top publishers I'm just referring to the big five publishers here. That's HarperCollins, Penguin Random House, Macmillan, Simon and Shuster and Hachette. I'm not sure how to say the last one. I've heard some people say hatchet but I don't... I don't know. Anyway, that brings me nicely on to Pierre Bourdieu, a sociologist of taste and class. And if you're familiar with his work, you'll know that he came up with this idea of cultural capital. And he basically looked at things like prestige, as a bit like a currency that somebody has lots of or not very much of. And he said that high cultural capital, which often equates to high prestige, doesn't go hand in hand with being paid well. The more prestige something has, the fewer other benefits, like a good salary, for example, that thing often has. And that thing might be a company, a publisher, or a university, or something else. And this principle applies in fiction and academic publishing, certainly for copy editing and other editorial roles. Today I'm just going to discuss fiction publishing. But if you work in academia, as I used to, then you will know a lot about this already. And that's why you see elite UK universities offering unpaid lectureships in exchange for food and board, for example. I'll start with my backstory. What's my relationship with the Big Five publishers? So I've been editing fiction of all kinds for five years. When I say all kinds, I do not mean all genres. I'm talking about self-publishing and other kinds of publishing here. But I've only worked for Big Five publishers over the past two years. And my experience tracks with what I've heard from other editors too. You don't just start editing and get a Big Five gig. And a lot of the Big Five gigs are given to people who used to work in-house for those publishers previously. Now, I can't talk about the details of the work that I do, but I can say I've been regularly editing young adult fantasy and LGBTQ+ fiction, as well as adult genre fiction, for big five imprints in the US and the UK. So before I switch to talk about prestige traps, what are the pluses, what are the carrots linked to doing this kind of work? I think this is really important to spell out, and I've got four of them for you. Carrot number one, these jobs usually (okay, not always but often) offer work on a highly polished and vetted text. And that's a big draw for editors. These texts, for instance, have almost certainly been reviewed and improved by literary agents and some of the people at the publishing press/the imprint. I could say in my experience the US texts I've worked on have generally been a bit more polished than the UK ones and the pay I've received has been slightly higher, but maybe that's just my experience. That's not something I'm going to get into now, and like I said I can't tell you the details. Carrot number two. These titles look really good on a portfolio, and they're likely to be recognized by other potential clients. So if someone sees that you've edited, I don't know, The Hunger Games, then that can quickly help to build trust. They get a signal that you are a good editor who has been trusted with a big name book. This can really help an editor out in the long run. They can use these jobs as a marketing tool for their business. Carrot number three. Publishers can offer editors a stream of work. You'll be working with the same people in the same workflows multiple times. So you'll know what you're getting. And that can really help, for instance, if you're worried about a quiet month, then you can just contact the publisher and see if they've got something available for you. And carrot number four, and this is a big one. They [the production editors] know what good editing looks like. They know what quality copy editing looks like and through like agreeing with them and working with them, you are on the same page regarding things like the level of intervention and so on. Now we've got a whole little bag of carrots going on here and what all this means is that publishers can be choosy about who they take on and they can afford to pay these people lower rates and still get quality editors. Quick side note here, rates offered for editorial are often lower than rates offered in other departments such as marketing or publicity and I believe that's about the history of editing as being strategically undervalued, and there's a whole gendered dynamic going on here. It's a Victorian stereotype of the lady wife editing and proofreading her gentleman husband's manuscript. Now on to the prestige trap. Well, I think it has two parts or there's two dangers here. The first one is getting stuck in a cycle of low paid work and the second part is an emotional dynamic where working on prestigious projects gives you a self-esteem boost that you sort of become addicted to. So I'll start off by talking about the first issue. Experienced editors face this danger of getting stuck in a treadmill of fairly low paying work that is satisfying and high prestige, but whose rates aren't usually enough to comfortably live on. And that's the case, at least, if the household relies on the editor's income. So it's not a second income. And it's also the case if the household lives in the country where the publisher does. This low paid work might not even be a trap if you're living and working in another country where you can live very comfortably off that freelance income. Now let's talk about rates. So I'm going to talk in general terms here about what I have heard on the grapevine, and I want to say don't draw any big conclusions from the numbers I share about my business because everybody's situation is different. I'm going to talk in a ballpark way about freelance editorial rates for Big Five publishers. Maybe I'm breaking a publishing norm of open secrets here, but you can basically find this info on various anonymized spreadsheets anyway. For Big Five publishers, what I have heard is that copy editing and proofreading in the UK generally pays between 20 and 25 pounds an hour. That's a freelance hourly rate. And in the US, I've heard that it's typically between 30 and 40 US dollars an hour. So you can see that the US rate is significantly higher, maybe five dollars higher an hour, something like that, but not massively higher. You can edit comfortably for five hours a day. Let's say you do six hours. Well, on the UK rates that's £120 to £150 a day, which would be working full-time but including a small amount of time for sickness and holidays etc etc. It would be around £2,000 a month or £24,000 a year. Full time. I think that's quite a low rate for an experienced professional – because they don't take newbies, generally speaking. An experienced professional who has to pay pension contributions, sick pay, all their equipment and training costs, etc. Wow. Well, I've done my research and I know that to keep my business going, I need to earn a minimum of £200 a day. And £300 is comfortable, like not megabucks at all. I have a friend who's a lawyer and she charges £175 an hour. And my experience tracks with the CIEP's, the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading's, suggested minimum rates, which also landed at around £200 for between five and six hours work as a kind of minimum day rate. What this means is for me, if I rely on my trad pub [traditional publishing] income, my business will fail. And I can tell you, last November, I took on three trad pub books, and I started to get nervous about money by the end of that month. There's also an ethical issue here for me, which is true for me, it might not be true for you. And that is that if I choose to work for a lower rate, then I'd rather do that for a client who can't afford my regular services. With big publishers, they can afford to pay editors more, but they choose not to because they can get away with it. And this is extraction and editors should call it out. Now to finish, I want to discuss the emotional aspect of this prestige trap linked to traditional publishing. So here's the issue. When you work in this way, you will receive a text, you will copyedit, or proofread it, you will receive a style guide and precise instructions, and then you'll send it back. Now project managers are very busy. And that's why they usually just pick freelancers who they know have been around for a while, like, through their networks. And for most copy editing and proofreading jobs, in my experience, you don't get feedback. In fact, the only form of feedback you really receive that's positive feedback is them sending you more work. But even that isn't reliable. Production editors move on all the time, and if your contact leaves, you won't necessarily be asked as much by the new one when they take a look at, you know, the freelancer spreadsheets. They might have other favourites. Who knows? Sometimes you do receive some feedback, but in my experience that has been quite rare, and it's usually been when I've been working on very high profile projects. All of this can create a difficult dynamic when you're starting out in that trad pub, Big Five world. Especially if you've not come from the in-house background where you've been working closely with that team already. Now, there are roughly two kinds of people out there. The kind of person who is convinced they always do an amazing job, and the other kind of person who often feels like an imposter when they're doing that job. And I'll go out on a limb here and say that the majority of people working in editorial are the latter. They're often dealing with these imposter sorts of feelings. All it takes, especially for a copy edit, is somebody commenting on a hyphenation decision and doing it a little bit different, that kind of thing. And then you can be second-guessing yourself all day. There's something, I think, about the nature of copy editing that promotes this kind of thinking. So if you are one of those more imposter-y types of people, then this lack of feedback can be scary. You can send a job back and then you can be just asking yourself for a day, did I suck? Or did I do a good job? You can then start second-guessing yourself. Was that comma in the right place on page 52? Should I have hyphenated half-heartedly or not? And that can continue until the next job request arrives in your inbox and then that job request boosts your self-esteem. Yay, I did a good job. Now this can end up being a kind of cycle of self-esteem boosts linked to getting more work in this environment, these kind of high prestige jobs. And if you don't watch out, you can end up getting hooked on them. You know, the self-esteem boosts linked to the prestige of working with these big name authors, et cetera, combined with the lack of feedback, which is ... well, I don't think anything intentional is going on here. I don't think publishing decided to set up its systems in this kind of way. I just think it is a side effect of these current arrangements. And I also believe it relates a little bit to the undervaluing of editing, too, because there are workflows that would stop these problems from happening, where you might get feedback on a sample for every job that you did, for instance. And I've seen examples of that in publishing more generally, but it's not the common way of doing things for Big Five publishers, at least in my experience and my network's experience. So this self-esteem trap, even if the publisher did pay well, this could still be a dynamic, an unpleasant dynamic. But when it's combined with low wages, it can lead editors into an emotional cycle of taking on low paid work. And what I'll say about this, and I've said it once already: I don't think the publishers are doing something deliberately here, but the whole system sort of promotes scarcity, a life of scarcity, through the low wages. And it makes you feel thankful and boosts your self-esteem when you receive certain crumbs from it. And that, my friends, is how the prestige trap operates. Now sure, after a while, you know if you decide to stick with this kind of work, you know you're doing a good job. All of that repeat work and these feelings will diminish somewhat. But this setup can still last for years and if you've experienced these kind of feelings, send me a message and let me know: I'm curious to hear about other people's experiences as well, and I think sharing experiences is also powerful. Now to the ways in which you can solve this problem, to finish off. Well, number one, you can do a small number of jobs for your portfolio and then move on. And this is what I did in a, well, in a past editorial life. I was doing, I started off doing a lot of academic editing, including copy editing. And I just moved on from an academic press very quickly in year one of freelancing because of the low rates that were on offer. And they were about half the rates we've been talking about above, so not much more than minimum wage. Another approach is to work loads of hours. However, that is a fast track to burnout. It might work for six months. You could even make a deal with yourself for six months and then decide to, you know, put an end to that way of living and those kinds of jobs, but it's a fast track to burnout, working loads of hours. You can't really edit for more than six hours a day, in my opinion. And a comfortable day for me is five. You could accept the rates and keep taking the work. But this approach favours people who do not rely on the wage that they earn. So I think it's elitist because of that. It's preventing people from lots of economic backgrounds who rely on their income to live from working in that area. And it feeds into the gendered and classist stereotype of elites editing for top publishers being Oxbridge-educated women who don't rely on that income. Number four, you could have a quota of such jobs, especially if you find them really fulfilling and interesting, and make sure that you find other work that compensates for the lower pay and conditions. If you can be picky, you might combine that with some kind of activist role. So I tend to just take on jobs that I see as giving back to the LGBTQ+ community in some way. And option number five, and this is an interesting one for further down the line, you could take that experience and switch to developmental editing, either for publishers, which tends to pay better rates than copy editing per hour, or for those authors directly. I've heard stories of this, of editors who used to work for top presses building up a reputation with top authors, and then they would often do like developmental edits, manuscript critiques for them and so on. I've given you five options there, but we're going to exclude option three. So think through this situation and this trap carefully and, you know, plot your way forward with intention. If you need to, practice making your no stronger when those requests for work arrive in your inbox, and stick to your boundaries if you have a quota. And I will say that despite all of this, I do find these kinds of jobs fulfilling and interesting to work on and I do like to have a small quota of them in my schedule. So thank you, folks, for listening. Don't forget to take a look at the show notes for all of the useful links. If you want to keep in touch, sign up for my newsletter, subscribe to this, rate and review it. And I look forward to seeing you next time. Thank you very much.