Freelance vs in-house
When beginning in the industry i learned that there are two main routes that one can take when being an editor. For starters we have a freelance editor, a self employed editor who has to sell their services to other clients to make content for them. Then there are in-house editors, in which editors work specifically in an organization. Both have positive and negative sides to each other but i wanted to find out how other people feel about the two, so i found a survey done by a website called 5crowd and managed to get the following results.
when people were asked about the positives on freelance work. they had stated that they “liked the idea of having lots of variety in my work and expanding my skill set” and “forces you to adapt your skills and grow as a professional”. However, when people were asked about the negative side of freelance work one editor had said that “Managing client expectations is always a challenge”. And another had stated that “It used to be money. It’s not anymore, thankfully. Now it is deadline management”. Even getting paid through larger clients can be an issue as apparently “They have processes that you need to respect, but it can really drag on and that is tough as a freelancer.”
when it came to editors that worked in an in-house environment, i had found a survey done by Gael Spivak for the website Copyediting.com. when they were asked out the positives when working in-house, they had said that“it has a lot of perks” stating that “depending on the employer” there are many benefits that in-house teams can provide such as “medical and dental coverage” and other perks such as “predictable work hours” and also receive “public holidays off”. However, when editors were asked about the negatives on in-house editors, one had said that they would sometime deal with “office politics” and having to work within a “bureaucracy” meaning there’s possibly no room for one’s creative flare.
In my personal opinion i would say that i would like to begin as a freelance editor as i feel like they would have more creative freedom and ways to self educate new software and material and learn new things from their various clients.