Freelancing can offer great flexibility and a chance to ‘be your own boss’ and now may be a great time to give it a go.  Whether you are looking to build a long term freelancing career or find interim work whilst looking for the right permanent opportunity, a lot of the same challenges and rewards apply.

If looking for a permanent job, getting some freelance experience will be great for your CV and will offer you the chance of increasing your connections.

First you need to decide what skills and experience you have to offer ie experience in social media marketing/general online marketing, experience of designing book covers or experience of editing technical content. 

Whatever this is can be your main offering but being open to new skills and continued learning is essential if you want to sustain a full-time freelance career.  There is so much training available online that you can teach yourself almost anything to either get more advanced with a current skill or learn a new skill.  See our recent blog on upskilling yourself online.  The more skills you have to offer the more successful you can be.

Once you are clear what you can offer potential clients, you can go about finding these clients and letting them know about your service.  Start with your existing network of contacts and build from here.  Advertise on social media channels and consider memberships of appropriate societies where you can advertise yourself and learn from other members.  BookMachine are currently partnering with the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading to offer CIEP free membership in August.

Whatever freelancing services you want to offer there are some key qualities that you will need and that publishers will be looking for:

• Confidence in your ability
• Accuracy
• Self-motivation and discipline
• Excellent communication skills (written and verbal)
• An understanding of your target market
• Value for money
• Being organised and adhering to deadlines

Showcasing as many of these skills as possible when approaching potential clients will give you a greater chance of success.

Once you have had some experience, you can start asking for testimonials and referrals which is a great way of building your network further. Also hopefully you will start to get repeat business and regular assignments.

Good luck!

More resources:

Working as a freelancer and Tips for freelancers from The Publishing Training Centre

Recent government announcements suggest that anyone unable to work from home, should now where possible, start to return to their workplaces.  This is straight-forward advice for industries that cannot work from home but what about those of us that have a choice?  How can we decide the right time to do this and the best way to do this?  The most important thing is to start planning now, in order to do this safely and most effectively, when the time is right.

The last couple of months has turned everything we did and thought on its head, including our attitudes to home working. Working from home is no longer seen as just an employee benefit for the minority, instead it has and will continue to be a core part of business planning. We have now learnt that it is possible for many of us to work from home and whilst there are undoubtedly some negatives, there are lots of obvious positives that many people will be keen to continue benefitting from.  The future challenge for businesses will be how much they can and should continue to offer flexibility, once it is not forced upon them and what the trade-offs will be in doing so.

According to a survey by job board Totaljobs 49% of people are looking forward to returning to work so managing how we introduce our staff back into the office and arriving at solutions that are safe and sustainable is the immediate challenge.  Most experts think that this ‘management phase’ of the covid-19 crisis, is likely to last well into next year, so getting it right is crucial.  In order to decide who to bring back first, you will need to think about what roles you absolutely need to have in the office and plan accordingly.  For example facilities and IT may be among the first to bring back so that they can help plan and implement the rest. Technology infrastructure will play a key part as it will need to continue to support some level of home working for those that cannot come back into the office. The more agile and flexible your systems are, the more you will be able to react to future disruptions ie if we get a large second peak of infections.  It will also enable you to offer flexible working as a long-term benefit. 

The CIPD have published a guide to returning to the workplace and they encourage all businesses to ensure that they meet three keys tests before bringing people back into the office:

• Is it essential?
• Is it sufficiently safe?
• Is it mutually agreed?

The guide includes lots of practical advice on areas such as risk management and the importance of communicating the new rules and procedures. It also has lots of information on how the government’s new extended, more flexible furlough scheme can help. There are links to other useful information including the government guidance for working safely in offices.

What is clear, is that in order to keep to the government’s social distancing guidelines, most of us will not be able to go back into our offices exactly as we left them.  Unless we are able to take extra space, we will need to reduce the number of employees at work at any one time.  This could be done in a variety of ways, from shift patterns to rotational days or weeks, but ultimately will probably require some mixture of home and office working.

Managing all these additional challenges, as well as trying to keep business going will require all of us to work together. Clear communication and thorough planning will be vital. Showing that you are putting the health and well-being of your employees at the heart of all the decisions so that they feel supported and valued will be even more important in these challenging uncertain times.

Some people are understandably nervous of recruiting under the current constraints of social distancing, but this could be the perfect time for you to test ‘remote recruiting’.  Many people think that remote working could be the new norm, so how do those without experience of this adjust and make it work when recruiting new staff?

It is not necessary to put all recruitment on hold until everyone is back in the office – it is possible to recruit remotely – many companies have done this on a regular basis before it became a reality for us all.  Whether you want to consider this as just an interim measure or a more permanent solution, making this work will not only help you to keep your business moving in the current climate but may also be used as an attractive option for the future.  Being able to offer a mixture of remote and office based employment will not only present cost savings but also make you more attractive to future employees. 

Whilst many of us may be used to some form of remote interviewing, taking this one step further to ‘on-board’ new staff remotely may seem daunting and more of a challenge.  We all know how important the first days and weeks of new employment are, both for the candidate and the client, so it is extremely important to get this right, whether in an office or a remote location.  It is obviously important to make sure that your remote employee has the right equipment and technology and that you think about how your existing processes can be adapted to work in a remote setting. With the wide range of video and communication options that are available it is easy to have face to face regular contact wherever your staff are based and getting regular feedback from your new employee will ensure that you arrive at solutions that work for you both.  Our recent blog Remote induction of a new member of staff during the lockdown gives some useful tips on things you will need to consider.  REC business partner Howden has created a hub of resources to help employers manage employee wellbeing and includes a very useful 13 page guide to welcoming new team members remotely (towards the bottom half of the page) on On-boarding in a virtual world.

Many of our clients now recruiting remotely, with no previous experience of this, are finding that starting new employees on a part-time basis has helped them.  This has allowed them to adjust in a more manageable way.

The current situation has proved conclusively that flexibility in working patterns can work and that you don’t physically have to be in the same space to make decisions and work as a team. The enforced lockdown that arrived without warning has meant we have all needed to adapt and live and work in different ways.  There may be many negatives that we have all experienced from this but hopefully there will also be some positives that will help us all continue to build robust businesses that can thrive wherever we are based.

Further reading:

Here’s a quote from a candidate we placed recently: https://blog.atwoodtatepublishingjobs.co.uk/candidate-testimonials

Guardian article: The new rules of remote recruiting