Building an Editorial Consulting Co-op

Announcing Good Light Editors and Reflecting on What It Means to Freelance and Write in the Age of Social Media

First, if you missed the announcement, the Good Light Editing collective is a group of freelance editors offering editorial consultation services such as developmental editing, copyediting, translation, and ghostwriting. [1] We work in various genres—fiction, nonfiction, academic, and poetry. Recently, we launched a website and a literary magazine, Backlit.

Our goal is to cross promote each other as freelancers, attracting more attention as a group than we might as individuals. This enterprise was born out of the spirit of the co-op: GLE is controlled and run by our members, who share the same mission to provide quality editorial feedback to counteract the limited in-depth consultations writers find in today’s publishing industry. The GLE is here to fill the gaps as well as provide editorial services to writers who may not follow the traditional publishing route.

For me, being part of the GLE relieves the competitive pressure I would feel if I freelanced in isolation. [2] Under capitalism, we face the myth of scarcity—that there is not enough pie for everyone to have a piece. As a result, many freelancers move forward as lone-wolves, assuming that they don’t need or want community, assistance, and shared recognition. A co-op offers an antidote to this distorted perspective because, in the case of an editorial co-op, it reframes freelancing as teamwork, providing a way to distribute tasks among peers who share similar experiences and talents, without seeing them as competitors and adversaries.

Moreover, in the era of social media, everyone—from freelancers to influencers—competes online for attention.

But maybe we don’t need as much attention and engagement as we think, online or offline. This point also relates to attracting clients in the freelancing world. Considering the scarcity myth, freelancers might think that they need all of the clients—the whole pie. Yet, as an editor, I aim to cultivate a small number of writers whose work I genuinely believe in and enjoy, even if that is antithetical to optimizing profit.

Plus, I don’t have the time or capacity to edit a 300,000 word memoir or a self-published romantasy zombie novel. Not all projects will be worth the business to me. Yet, certainly someone in the GLE, or in the broader world of freelance editors, will want to read that romantasy zombie novel—in fact, that’s probably an incredibly marketable book right now. That’s another advantage of sharing clients under the co-op model.

Writers also fall prey to the scarcity myth, making them think they have to engage and attract the attention of all readers. As a writer, this idea—that little if any of my writing will ever reach a wider audience—is indeed hard to swallow. We all hope that our art will resonate with others. But my questions are: How many people do we truly need our work to resonate with in order to feel relevant? How do we learn to find satisfaction with a small, intimate audience instead of a huge one?

Besides being part of an editorial consultation group with editors whose advice and perspectives I admire and learn from, I’m also in a writing group. This group actually reads my work—closely. It is a rare and wonderful group that I am trying to appreciate as my complete audience. While I’m still striving for something bigger, of course, I also hold this possibility in the back of my mind: What if this little circle is as big as it gets? Would that be so bad?

Bottom line: Every writer needs readers and an editor. Moreover, if you get the right editor, you might discover one of your best readers and biggest fans. So, maybe an editor’s belief in and admiration of your work can mean more than the New York Times bestseller list; maybe the right editor for you is someone in the GLE. Go find them.

[1] If all of this industry lingo is new to you, I encourage you to see Backlit’s first post, discussing current editing trends in an interview conducted with the four GLE co-founders: Austin Eichelberger, Maggie Grimason, Steve Jansen, and me. The first question in this article is about the difference between different editorial services and also goes on to unpack the good qualities writers might look for in the editor they hire.

[2] While I am advocating for group-endorsement over self-promotion, I also don’t want to totally bury the fact that I invited the co-founders, Austin, Maggie, and Steve, to launch this collective with me, which is why I appear first on our website. After I conceived of this project, we all built the GLE. and continue to develop and promote it.