Staying Freelance by Andrea Reider

Let’s welcome back Andrea Reider as she shares with us “Staying Freelance.” Enjoy!

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Developing the skills to have entrepreneurial success as a book publishing professional is often the easiest part of working with authors and publishers as a long-term freelance book designer and typesetter.

Successful freelancers can spend more time marketing their skills and looking for new clients than they do working on paid jobs and projects.

Staying Freelance is a candid look into the many things I did to establish, grow, and maintain my freelance book design and typesetting business over the course of 30-plus years.

One of the main takeaways is that it’s more important that you try out new ways to find clients than overthinking and coming up with a single master plan.

The most important factor in finding new clients is timing–finding companies that are open to new freelancers because they are growing or have recently lost a valued employee or other freelancer.

The best way to have good timing is to reach out to as many people as possible and hope to connect with the right person at the right time.

Loving the work you do goes a long way toward dealing with and surviving the inevitable downtimes that always seem to be right around the corner.

Staying Freelance offers many thoughts and ideas on how to achieve success, overcome the dreaded feast-or-famine cycle, and maintain a steady business for the long-term.

The following excerpt should give you a good idea of what “Staying Freelance” is all about:

“Much of my story as a book design and typesetting freelancer since the late 1980s is about the constant struggle and the ongoing efforts required to find new customers and maintain relationships with existing ones.

I’ve tried to detail the many and varied things I did in my attempts to keep growing my client base. Some of the things that failed for me might end up working for you.

I advise anyone seeking to establish a full-time freelance career in any profession, or even just part-time to supplement income, to use your creativity and ingenuity to figure out ways to focus on reaching out to other businesses and individuals who might be in need of your services.

You really don’t know what types of opportunities are out there until you start making contact with potential clients.

I’ve built my business primarily through using cold-call letters and emails to reach out to thousands of other book publishing professionals employed by publishers, or working on their own like me.

Most of my success has come from sending out enough mailings to sometimes contact the right person or business at just the right time.

Although I might only hear back from a few people out of one hundred or more emails, most people that do write back thank me for reaching out to them.

Some write back to tell me that they already are working with another freelancer or are doing the work in-house, but many responses lead to real freelance work–sometimes just a single project, but often leading to work on a long-term basis.

While learning to find new clients is an essential skill for all freelancers, I have been successful for so many years because I took the time and effort required to become an expert in my field.

For me, it helped to narrow my focus by specializing in book design and layout, a sub-specialty in the broader field of graphic design.

At the beginning of my freelance career I worked on graphic design projects for many types of large and small companies in San Francisco.

But my business really took off when I decided to focus all of my efforts toward working exclusively as a designer and typesetter for book publishers.

This cut out a lot of potential clients that I could approach for freelance work, but it allowed me to focus like a laser beam on book publishing, and develop my own expertise in the field.

I’ve loved everything about the art and practice of book design and typesetting from the moment I started working on my first books.

But my love of books would never have been enough to carry me through a lifelong career–or even to get me in the door of most publishers.

I had to learn everything that I could about book design and layout–while always keeping current with the latest computer developments and software releases.

Mostly through experience working on book projects and learning from my colleagues and peers, I set about building myself into the best designer and typesetter that I could be, so that authors, editors, and publishers would want to work with me as much as I wanted to work with them.”

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Andrea Reider has been working as a book designer and layout artist/typesetter for publishers and self-publishing authors since graduating from the University of Michigan in English in 1985 with a B.A. in English. It was the year of the Macintosh computer and “desktop publishing,” and her first job was managing a typesetting shop in Ann Arbor.

When Andrea moved to San Francisco two years later her Macintosh skills were very much in demand. Andrea began working as a freelancer for several book publishers and has been at it ever since. Her clients have included John Wiley & Sons, Addison Wesley Longman, McGraw Hill, Rowman & Littlefield, and hundreds of self-publishing authors.

Website: http://www.reiderbooks.com
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/andreareiderdesign/