Staying Freelance Part 4 by Andrea Reider

Let’s welcome back Andrea Reider as she shares with us “Staying Freelance Part 4.” Enjoy!

***

I wrote Staying Freelance to inspire and advise other freelancers on how to build and maintain their careers for the long-term. My goal is to teach people the art of staying freelance, and how to achieve financial stability.

An Excerpt From Staying Freelance 

The following is an excerpt from Staying Freelance:

I was mostly hard at work designing and typesetting books for a variety of large and small publishers and self-publishing authors.

My early Macintosh skills had placed me in a good position to attract new customers for my freelance business. If anything, I had better clients than I really deserved at first.

However, I was highly motivated to keep learning and eventually became a pretty good book designer and an even better typesetter.

I don’t think I would have even considered starting my own business if I hadn’t grown up working at my family’s men’s clothing store in Detroit, Michigan.

The store had several people working as tailors and seamstresses in a walled-off space at the back of the store. From an early age, I saw how they worked to satisfy the customers’ needs and even whims, while producing high-quality work–more or less on schedule.

The tailor shop seemed to be perpetually one day behind on their work, but could usually finish things up quickly if a customer came to call early or on-time for their tailored clothing.

I remember many times having to apologize to customers and tell them that their clothing wasn’t quite ready yet, and offering a cup of coffee or a glass of wine while they waited, or even worse, having to ask them to come back another time.

My experience working at the family business taught me many of the things I would need to know to manage my own business one day. But no lesson was as important as seeing how our expert salespeople interacted with our mostly affluent customers–doing their utmost to please everyone, while maintaining their own personal dignity and space.

Freelancing for the Professor

My connection with a coin collector and retired professor came through a referral from another client who had worked on the author’s last book. The new book had hundreds of photographs of rare and ancient bronze coins that had to be precisely arranged on the pages.

The professor was a well-known coin collector and a professor of psychology at San Francisco State University and had published many books on different topics. This book was a catalogue of his collection of ancient Greek and Roman bronze coins.

The professor was about eighty years old at the time we worked on the project, and was one of the few clients that I’ve ever typed a full manuscript for–let alone a book full of Green and Latin inscriptions. Luckily the work was spread out of several months and the professor was very understanding of any time constraints that arose for me.

We met each week at the professor’s home, which was filled with walls and cases full of rare and ancient artifacts from his collection.

I would give him the typeset pages from the last week, and he would give me new sheets of lined yellow legal paper with handwritten descriptions of the coins, including dates and the Greek or Latin inscriptions that appeared on the coins. The descriptions included things like: “Demeter holding a sheaf of wheat.”

The text appeared on one side of the two-page book spread. The opposing page had the coins neatly arranged in rows by a freelance graphic artist that the professor hired for the purpose.

Unlike me, who did everything on the Macintosh computer, this artist did everything by hand, pasting the photographs of the coins on white boards for the professor to review.

At one point, the artist decided on her own to vary the “dull” and orderly layouts, arranging the coins as though they were parts of a fancy necklace. The professor rejected the pages right away, but I think he kept a few of the necklace coin arrangements in the book, joking that readers would think that he had “lost his mind” during the production of the book.

Freelancing for Another Major U.S. Book Publisher

As a result of another one of my email campaigns, I connected with a production manager at a division of a highly respected U.S. book publisher, who hired me to work as a freelance book designer and typesetter for their textbooks.

I came up with a good idea for the design of my first book project, and at first they seemed to be very happy with my work. The editor told me she really liked the preliminary design samples I submitted for the book.

I was pretty upset, surprised, and shocked when I received her next email, writing that she was “extremely disappointed” in me for not submitting the proper forms along with the design samples. I sent the filled-in forms to her the next day, but the damage was already done.

They had sent me a PDF of an eighty-page production manual that I had skimmed over, but not read thoroughly.

No publisher had ever sent me anything like this before, and I foolishly ignored it, thinking that I already knew everything that they could possibly have to say about book typesetting.

I ended up making a small mistake in the preliminary design samples for the next book design and typesetting project, but they were happy enough with my work that they scheduled me for a third project.

For the first time in my career, the editor sent me the wrong files for typesetting the new book. She sent me an earlier, unedited version of the text.

The editor tried to turn the error into an advantage when she realized that a lot of my work would have to be redone, resizing some of the book’s photographs in a way that would effect the layout of every page in the book.

I didn’t fully understand what she wanted me to do, and when I sent in the new pages I soon received another harsh email, instructing me to return all of the materials and files that I had, and stating that I would no longer be working on the book.

I was once again very upset and shocked at this abrupt ending. I emailed the production manager, saying that I could fix the design right away, but she wouldn’t budge.

A few months later, having healed from my wounded pride and finances, I was moving into my first condominium in San Francisco, and sent the production manager an email with my new address.

I had no thought that they would be sending me more work, but wanted them to have my new address for sending out my 1099 tax form.

I was sent yet another unkind email, detailing all of the mistakes I’d made on the three books I’d worked on. She wrote that these were the reasons she was no longer sending me work.

A couple of years later the company was merged with an even larger publisher and all of the people I’d worked with lost their jobs.

Even if things had worked out between us, the job would have been temporary.

I ended up in a much better long-term position having found other publishers to work for without coming to rely on this publisher as a major client.

Staying Freelance is available on Amazon.

***

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
andreareider@gmail.com
www.reiderbooks.com