Lion's Tooth Editing

If I’m going to make this venture a success, I’ll guess I’ll need to actually do something with this blog. That’s the thing about self-employment: you have find your own clientele. You have to be discoverable. You have to market yourself.

I have to find what keywords people are going to use when they want to hire an editor, and then I have to use them, more than once, organically, on my website. (You don’t have to commit to an ad plan to use Google Keyword Planner!)

I have to make my website active, which means updating it regularly, and I have to connect it to the rest of the web, which means incorporating links to other sites visitors can use take them far far away from my little corner. Google doesn’t want us to be dead-ends.

It makes sense. They don’t want people to just put a bunch of words in a footer to drag traffic by for no reason. Sites that connect to others, or have more to explore, are more likely to be desirable, satisfying, or useful.

Marketing doesn’t come naturally to most people. Whether they’re trying to sell a product, a creation, or a service, getting out in front of people is difficult. It certainly doesn’t come naturally to me.

There are those charismatic extroverts that just seem to shine and make it all look so easy, but when most of us sit down to seriously contemplate the nature of ‘marketing’ it gets overwhelming very quickly.

To be honest, it’s why I’m personally pursuing traditional publishing before I bite the bullet and self-publish my own book. I have two finished manuscripts and one fully drafted. I figure when I have five fully finished, I’ll start tossing them into the wind myself.

In the meantime, I’m going to explore marketing for this not-entirely-unrelated enterprise. SEO optimization can only get you so far when you’re trying to break into a niche market, and independent book editing is definitely a niche market. Networking is key, but social media is exhausting, overwhelming, and in something of a state of flux at the moment anyway. (Not that it has ever been particularly stable.)

So, before I jump on the TikTok trend, or even its copycat younger sibling Instagram Reels, I think I’ll try a few other experiments.

To start with, I’m going to attempt a scavenger hunt. That could be fun, right? Maybe? So, buried in this blog post I’m going to offer a free proofread under 90k words (or $150 off) to the first author looking to self-publish that mentions ‘scavenger hunt’ in the contact form. Of course, to be fair, I should offer the same to the first author looking to query their manuscript with agents as well. And, because I like threes, another free proofread or $150 off to the first person who’s never worked with an editor before.

Just mention ‘scavenger hunt’ in the contact form and let me know whether you’ve ever worked with an editor before and whether you plan to self-publish or query your manuscript. Then, once you’ve received and reviewed your edit, write me an honest review. I’ll include an author website or bookstore link of your choice, and we’ll both benefit.

We’ll see if anyone ever claims one of these.

Maybe in a week I’ll write another blog post and share it to BlueSky without mentioning this one at all.

Maybe a week after that I’ll start leaving hints.

Remember, my promotional prices (hopefully) won’t last forever!