Coffee heat rising

side jobs

Wah! I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up

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So I’m plodding across the freeway and thinking how much I hate wasting 90 minutes to two hours driving back and forth to the campus when it occurs to me that what I really hate is my job.

Oops! Say what? I hate my job? Come ON! Sure, the pay’s not equitable (my new opposite number is coming in at six figures on a 9-month contract, very annoying), but it’s still a decent living and it ain’t cleaning terlets or flipping burgers. The problem is, I am soooo flicking bored!

Writing the index for the current issue of the renaissance and medieval history annual meant having to read all that stuff AGAIN. Once was quite enough. Twice was more than enough. Three times is decidedly not a charm.While a couple of the essays are pretty interesting (relatively speaking), the archival study where the author notes every single sale of every tiny plot of land in the ninth-century Spanish March, with the name of each buyer and seller, was almost as mind-numbing as the excruciatingly detailed analytical comparison of Bromyard’s Tractatus iuris ciuilis et canonici ad moralem materiam applicati with his Summa praedicantium, a lively work when set next to the endless dissection of Milton’s educational theory and practice.

The index took all day Friday, all day Saturday, half of Sunday, and all of Monday and Tuesday to complete. By the time I sent it off to one of the RAs to be edited, at 4:30 Tuesday afternoon, I thought I was gunna die.

New business enterprise gets under way

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Well, the tiny newborn business my friend and I are starting has climbed to its little feet and is toddling around. Yesterday we got our first serious nibble, if you don’t count the client we already had when we began. The contract isn’t landed yet, but we were thrilled to attract a serious expression of interest.

Here’s what we did to get the business under way:

First, we wrote a business plan. We articulated a) what we wanted the business to do; b) how we would deliver on that; and c) how the business would be organized (as a partnership).

Next, we set an earnings goal. Since this is a side business and we both have day jobs, we decided we would each like to be grossing at least $1,000 a month within one year.

Then we established two marketing strategies: 1) join the Arizona Book Publishing Association (ABPA); and 2) create a blog in the enterprise’s name, The Copyeditor’s Desk. The ABPA turns out to be a gold mine: its meetings are frequented not only by publishers likely to need our copyediting, proofreading, and indexing services but also by writers who are either self-publishing or seeking publishers and very much need our services. It remains to be seen whether the blog will bring in much business, but it gets our name out there, and if it develops much readership, it can monetized to contribute a few dollars toward our earnings goal.

Finally, we obtained some business cards, free, off the Internet, and we designed a brochure that we will have printed through her brother-in-law’s Kwik-Kopy outlet.

It’s pretty rudimentary and at first blush doesn’t look very ambitious — until you consider that we both have jobs and she has a family to take care of. We think it will keep us busy, and if we’re lucky it will generate the fairly modest financial goal we’ve set for ourselves. Keeping it simple should at least keep it manageable.