I am presently going through a kind of slump in my business. One of my dear friends was going to give me an 80-page paper to edit for her work, but her personal circumstances have prevented her from doing so at this time. I don’t dare pester her for the paper at such a difficult time in her life, so I must say to myself regarding this, “It will come when it comes.” Other work has been scarce as well (other than the editing of the church videos, about which I wrote last week).
So, you are probably wondering, what do I do in such times?
For one, I market myself. I contact current and former clients and let them know of my availability. I also reach out to potential new clients.
Another thing I do is improve myself and my skills. For example, I have been going through a book on MS Word 2019 chapter by chapter every weekday, reading the text and doing the exercises. I upgraded to Office 2019 from Office 2007 (stop that laughing!) last December, so I need to know everything I can about Word (and it doesn’t hurt to learn some stuff about Excel and PowerPoint, too; I will tackle those next).
Last summer, I completed an online course called Beginning Copyediting. I plan to go over the lessons which I downloaded, so that I do not forget what I learned. On September 8, I start the Intermediate Copyediting course.
What do you do during slow times?