The birthday cake in the pic marks Edit for Indies‘ first five years in existence! I realized when I looked at my records just now that I did my first real freelance job under the Edit for Indies name in May 2012. I have also recently passed invoice #300, another milestone!

It is true that the self-publishing scene has changed a lot in the last five years. Some wonderful outfits have gone out of business (Self-Publishing Roundtable, for example), while small presses that once flourished have fallen by the wayside, most notably All Romance eBooks but also including Samhain.

To generalize, it seems as if most indie authors at this point are either doing quite well or are feeling discouraged about their prospects. There isn’t very much upward momentum except for people who carefully plan out their series and write to market in a small number of categories. There are also shady promoters out there…a recent lengthy thread on Kboards.com entitled “Box Set Scams” reinforces this point.

There’s a lot of competition among freelance editors, so I’ve decided after much thought to lower my rates for proofreading services to .002 a word for new clients only. (Distinct from the more thorough copyediting process, proofreading is finding mechanical errors in a manuscript, including punctuation marks, missed words, and wrong names.) I would prefer to take books that have already been seen by an editor–that way I’ll be able to catch glaring errors that stick out of an already clean-ish manuscript.

I want to thank the loyal clients who have stuck with me this far. Thanks for your trust in my work, and I look forward to working with some old AND new faces in 2017.