Fifteen Years of Freelancing

over 12 million words edited ... and lots of other numbers

Most of you who read Limning the Ordinary are familiar with my writing profile but aren’t as aware of my vocation as a freelance editor. This month marks 15 years since I opened a profile on Elance—a platform for freelancers.

At the start of this year, I began combing through digital files, documents, and folders from the past one and a half decades (yes, I keep everything) to tally how much editing, and other projects, I’ve finished.

Don’t feel obliged to read this, especially if you’re mainly here for my poems. :) It’s a longer post with a lot of numbers, but if you’re at all interested in what an unexpected (freelance) journey looks like, here is a visual overview of the past 15 years in a nutshell:

15 Years of Freelancing

Elance/Upwork was my main source of freelance work for over a decade, from 2010 to 2020. (In 2015, Elance renamed itself Upwork; that’s why you’ll see two terms for the same platform in this post.) Over the past five years, since Covid-19 and the heightened interest in remote work worldwide, the number of freelancers on Upwork has drastically increased. (By the end of 2024, there were above 18 million freelancers from 180 countries.)

These changes, though understandable, have also made it more difficult to find good projects on Upwork—but I'm grateful for the opportunity to build a freelance editing profile there. There was a time in 2011-2013 that if you searched for “experienced editor” or “Christian editor” on Elance, my profile was in the top five results. (Wish I’d taken a screenshot of that!)

Out of 327 full-length manuscripts edited or written, 201 were nonfiction manuscripts. Genres include education, devotional, marriage and parenting, spiritual and Christian living, narrative, lyrical, business, internet marketing, politics, and plenty more.

I’ve edited 56 works of fiction and 27 memoirs (technically nonfiction, but a genre unto itself), and I have “ghostwritten” 37 books—many of them either children’s books or memoirs.

This comes to a total of 12,715,689 words edited, 691,792 words ghostwritten, 2,074,867 words proofread, and 245 pieces ghostwritten (articles, short stories, etc.). I’ve also proofread 1,878 blog posts or articles, and in many cases performed SEO operations, found images, and scheduled these for posting on WordPress. (This is all work for clients; it doesn’t include my blogging or writing.)

Where the Projects Came From

I’ve completed 414 projects in total, with the vast majority of these projects coming through Elance/Upwork. Between 2010 and 2013, only six projects came directly through social media or my blogs.

In 2014 and beyond, I got more direct projects as I started teaching writing workshops at a local adult school and got some clients that way. (In 2014, five projects came from folks who’d taken one or more of my writing courses.) In total, I’ve had 98 projects that weren’t via Upwork, so the remaining 316 have been through that online platform.

Why Freelancing? — The Back Story

I started freelancing in early 2010 as a way to diversify income and help support our mission work in India. With three kids aged five, three, and 10 months old, remote work was ideal. A friend recommended Elance, Guru.com, and MTurk. I tried all of them, but Elance is the only one that worked out for me.

My first project was with a man who ran a small independent press. About a dozen people applied to his project, and he sent us all a test sample to edit. He let me know I was the only one who caught all the errors, so I got the project.

(The fact that I was willing to work for only $5 an hour on that first project probably helped me get the job.) I worked with him over several years on at least ten nonfiction manuscripts—most about politics, which is humorous if you know me and how apolitical I tend to be.

After that first job, I won one proposal after another, finishing 19 projects in 2010. I'm grateful to all those people who hired me when my profile was slim and I didn't have a ton of experience … or a degree.

My family in 2010, the year I started editing. Yep, we were all young. :)

My husband and I weren't yet planning to move to the U.S. when I started freelancing, but within a few months, we were preparing to leave India. We moved to California in late 2010, after I’d spent nearly 12 years in India. My freelance career took off, with forty-one projects in 2011, thirty-two in 2012, thirty-three in both 2013 and 2014, and a whopping forty-three projects in 2015.

After that, I started working part-time at the school our kids were attending. Also, in 2015, I started toward a BA in English and right after that an MFA in Creative Writing. Freelancing took a back burner for a couple of years with nineteen projects in 2016 and only nine in 2017. It jumped back up to thirty-one in 2018, and twenty-nine in both 2019 and 2020.

When Freelancing Changed (Drastically and Rapidly)

The year 2020 started out great, but when the pandemic hit, even remote work screeched to a halt for several months, slowly picking up toward the fall. In 2020 and 2021, I noted a shift in editing work—with an increase in web/blog articles and posts. I finished thirty-nine projects in 2021, eighteen in 2022, twenty-five in 2023, and I just completed fourteen in 2024.

The last few years brought a huge migration toward remote/freelance work—increasing the “competition” on freelance platforms. Another big change in the past few years has been with AI now able to perform a lot of things clients hired me for in the past. I only had three projects on Upwork in 2024, all for clients I’ve worked with for years.

Speaking of ongoing clients, that is another thing I’m grateful for. The 414 projects have come from 228 clients, which means that nearly half of the clients I’ve worked with have turned into “repeat clients” for at least two projects.

There are some folks I’ve worked with for over a decade—not consistently; sometimes months or even a year will pass between contact, but they get in touch when they have something for me to write or edit. Although I’ve only rarely met folks I work with, I’m privileged to call a few of them critique partners and friends.

By the way, when I say “project,” this can mean editing a single manuscript or writing one story, but in many cases, these projects consist of ongoing work over the space of a year—such as editing a client’s web articles—which could constitute hundreds of work hours.

Also, sometimes a single manuscript goes back and forth several times (two to four, usually) with each version a little cleaner and more refined. If I counted each of those revisions as a separate project, the edited word count earlier in this post would be a fair bit higher.

Some places my work has been published over the years

Conclusion: When You Know What You Know

If you’ve read this whole post, thank you! It’s a lot of numbers. Like I said, it took me about a month to compile. I probably should have done this a long time ago. I’d never taken the time to tally these numbers, and it amounts to quite a bit.

It helps if you know what you know.

I’ve been on Substack for not quite two years, and when I look at the subscriber lists others have (in the thousands) or when I visit Instagram and see bookstagrammers with tens of thousands of followers, it can make me feel like I’m playing catch-up, trying to measure up against far more successful writers.

So maybe I’m not very good at putting myself out there. Maybe I’m not good at marketing or creating reels with me front and center. And maybe I never will be.

But I am good with words (the written kind at least … in conversation, not so much). 😊 Having completed more than 400 projects in 15 years, I am an experienced writer and editor, even though making that statement makes me cringe. (“Imposter syndrome” might be an overused phrase, but it’s a real thing.)

Work might be dwindling, but I’m not going anywhere. I love what I do. I am grateful for every project that has come my way and I’m looking forward to many more.

If you or someone you know is looking for an editor or writing coach, feel free to get in touch or send them my way.

Lastly, I haven’t written much in this post about my philosophy behind writing, words, and story.

I believe we live in a spoken world held up by the words of the Word. Our hearts are made for story as we are made in the image of the Storyteller.

There are a lot of poor stories out there—both written and lived—but I love the vocation of helping people write better stories, the privilege of coming alongside someone in the often solitary act of writing to help them find the right words, and encourage them not to give up … their story is needed.

Your story is needed.

Side Note: What Does “Editing” Entail?

While I’ve done ghostwriting and other random projects (transcription, research, compilation, and even a couple of design projects), editing has always been my primary work. There is a range within that—from proofreading and line editing, checking for punctuation and grammatical errors, all the way up to substantive and developmental editing, which involves extensive feedback and help with organization of a manuscript, reworking entire sections, rewriting sentences and paragraphs, honing an overall message, and more.

There have been times clients would say, “My book just needs a basic line edit and it’ll be good to go.” But when I got started, I realized the manuscript needed a lot more than a basic edit.

I’ve learned to clarify what I am offering when I send out an editing proposal. I’ll often say, “I will correct any errors in grammar and punctuation, as well as syntax and word choice. On a developmental level, I will look at the flow and pacing, organization, plot and character development, and offer revisions, suggestions, and comments as needed.”

My work as an editor has often been more along the lines of writing coach than just a proofreader making sure a manuscript was clean. I try to offer as much help as a client is interested in receiving. My goal isn’t to do the minimum but to make a manuscript the best that it can be. I find joy in this.

If you’ve made it to the end of this, thanks for reading. I promise, my next post won’t be nearly as long. :)