Crucial supports for an editing career + Free Bonus

September 20, 2022

If we want to be editors for decades, we need to care for ourselves.

Welcome to the newsletter! If your first time reading, thanks for coming.

Want to learn how to use flat rates as an editor? Stick around till the end.

How do I support my career?

Last time we looked at 5 elements that build an editing career: Skills, Attitude, Process, Experience, and Relationships. If you are intentional in each of these, you can build a long-lasting career.

An unspoken roadblock to these elements is fatigue. How do you maintain intentionality over decades?

I’ve found 4 supports to every career:

  • Rest

  • Health

  • Inspiration

  • Perspective

Despite what producers or clients would say, you are not a machine.

You may use a machine, but you are a breathing, living person. We need more than sleep and food. We need support from these crucial areas.

Rest is more than just sleep. It is activities that restore you. To put it another way, what are activities that leave you with more energy?

Physical health is crucial to your body. If we don’t look for ways to exercise and care for our bodies, years of sitting at a desk in a dark room staring at screen will take years off your life.

Mental health is far more important than has been talked about. Some of you work on incredibly hard stories, whether it’s nightly news or documentaries exposing horrible injustices. And that’s not including difficult notes and creative frustration.

Inspiration brings fresh life to our work. It fuels us to return to the edit suite with vigor—and it sparks new ideas, new creations, new solutions.

Relationships surround all that we do. Family, friends, spouses, children, coworkers, supervisors, mentors—all give us a reason to keep working. All give us someone to edit for. All pour back into us as a person.

When we are missing the 5 building blocks, it’s easier to dismiss that as technical elements we haven’t learned.

But these supports? These hit closer to home.

We may feel exhausted with no time to rest. There may not be time to give to our physical or mental health. Our inspiration well often runs dry. And relationships—well, those can be hardest of all.

But if we want to be editors for decades, we need to care for ourselves.

This week, write these supports down. Take 5 minutes and brainstorm one action you can do for each.

Free Bonus

I’m on a mission to help editors earn enough to edit full time. One of the best ways to do that is learning how to use flat rates.

A lot of editors push back on flat rates, and with good reason. They can be risky for many reasons. They can also multiply your income by rewarding your experience.

So for the next few weeks, I will be writing An Editor’s Guide to Flat Rates—and you can read it for free.

I’ll be covering:

  • What is Flat Rate pricing?

  • Pros & Cons of flat rates

  • Setting your flat rate

  • Pitching your flat rate

  • When to not use a flat rate

  • Raising your flat rate

  • Holding boundaries for flat rates

  • Ways to increase your effective hourly rate

  • Flat rate checklist: is this a good project for a flat rate?

This will be a paid guide when it’s finished, but you can read it for free as I write it.

If you’ve ever felt there was a cap to your hourly rate, or that projects just don’t pay enough, this is the guide for you.

Bookmark this page and learn how to change that.

That’s it for today!

How do you feed these supports? I'd love to hear about it.

Keep cutting,

- Jesse

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