I’ve been a writer and editor for several years in Taiwan. I don’t see any long-term chances of advancing in my field, so I’m thinking about moving into freelance work. I hope that will allow me to spend more time with my growing family and let me keep an income in case we have to leave Taiwan for health or war or something. I probably want to start small with the little free time I have and if I can make a go of it, I’d leave this job, maybe working part-time until I got enough clients.
I have an APRC, but I don’t speak Chinese.
What do I need to know, consider, or work towards if I’m going to do this in Taiwan? Do I work as self-employed or do I become my own company? I’ve read companies in Taiwan pay little, so am I better off looking for work abroad, or do legal or tax issues make it better to work for clients in Taiwan? I can write well, but overthinking makes me slow. Is there enough work to do editing alone?
How does one find clients? I’ve tried before on UpWork with some success, but the amount of time it takes to find a client, the costs, and the competition from people with more experience make it unappealing. Also, it pays into my US bank account and that means I pay US taxes on it. I already have a very very small online business that I can’t seem to scale and taxes take enough of that.
Speaking of which, if I need to be a business, is it better to register and/or get paid abroad and transfer money here, or just get paid to a local account?
Are there any problems or pitfalls, or even advantages, that I should know about?
That’ll work against you in Taiwan, as most of the English documents that need editing are translations from Chinese. You can only “edit” so much before you need to verify something against the original Chinese text. A bilingual English editor will always have an edge over you.
Yes, that’s one thing that has prevented me from finding another job or switching careers. The majority require Mandarin. My only advantage is proximity. But there is a lot of content that is produced in English or simply needs to be proofread.
did it for a few years, was very difficult to sustain a family, so i opted to be a salaried employee.
my best advice is to play your strengths first.
if you have experience in writing for a certain field, start with that field and approach relevant companies (i.e. if your experience is in writing about IP networks, you have a slim chance of being hired by a travel company to write about ocean cruises ).
second advice, is to try and get foreign clients. you can charge slightly less than a writer based in USA, and make more money than a writer bsded in TW.
for the legalities : you can consult an accountant to understand at which point it makes sense to open your own company, back in the day i was recommended to be self employed till i reached ~1 million ntd a year.
Were you working for Taiwanese companies or foreign ones?
foreign ones. the money was good, the problem was maintaining a constant stream of projects. some months were super busy, some months dry…
in the end, i preferred the stability of a regular paycheck over the flexibility and potentially limitless earnings of being independent.
as a writer its difficult to scale your work, so the way to make more money is through experience and expertise others dont have.
I hope you are ok with intermittent and unpredictable workload…
As in some months/weeks where you are so busy you don’t even have time to sleep/shower/eat, and other months/weeks/years where you have absolutely nothing to do.
Can you do research articles?
Academic research? “do” means edit? Are you going to say Wallace? I saw they hire freelancers. I heard they don’t pay well.
Writing research articles, it depends on the field.
Yes, do means edit. You’re looking for work as a freelance editor, can you do research articles?
Not Wallace, that wouldn’t be freelance. I have been asked to edit research papers, or if I know someone, and I point people to Wallace because I won’t do research articles and I don’t know anyone who does.
But I know you, and there are others like me on here who work at universities and could probably send work your way.
I’m glad you know me, I don’t pop up that often, and I’m doubly glad I managed never to offend you too badly. Yes, I can do research articles as long as it’s not too badly written or badly translated and requires knowing Chinese in order to fix it. I haven’t done them before, but I read research articles.
Wallace does hire freelance workers, though I don’t know how regular the work is or how well they pay. They have a job ad that seems to be permanently up on 104.
Any idea what people pay for academic editing?
Not enough! I think the way to do it is by hour, take a look at the draft and quote an amount of hours you think it will take along with your hourly rate.
There’s also the ChatGPT complication. For articles and prepositions and even style the AI can do it faster…
Using a Grammarly plugin in Word is more reliable, because you can go through problems one by one, but ChatGPT’s output is unreliable. I just gave v4 a test and wasn’t impressed. It’s like talking to someone who just doesn’t “get it” unless you give it a simple task. It can work as a proofreader, but I wouldn’t trust it to, for example, understand if domain vocabulary is used properly in a certain context.
I don’t like the idea of charging by the hour, at least not at first. It’s a different type of work and I’m afraid it will take me longer than is fair to the client. Though since no one is looking over my shoulder I suppose I could quote less time than it actually takes.
I’m not sure how much I would charge per hour. I’m making hardly any money now, so I guess more than that.
Nobody charges by the hour because it’s really hard to quantify hours needed to edit something, and more importantly there’s no way to verify it unless there is a strict and well monitored clock in and clock out system.
Editing is charged by page, word, or whatever. This is easier to quantify.
AI chat bot is unreliable, because it will output something extremely professional sounding until you went in and read the stuff only to find that it doesn’t know what it’s talking about.
It just means it’s easy to say a bunch of nonsense without actually saying anything.
Not necessarily, once again you speak without checking
https://www.google.com/search?q=editing+service+hourly+rate&oq=editing+service+hourly+rate&aqs=chrome..69i57j33i160.6623j0j16&client=ms-android-samsung-ss&sourceid=chrome-mobile&ie=UTF-8
I wouldn’t charge the same per word for something simple that is very well done and I could check quickly, compared to something that is very poorly done and also complicated.
One needs to quantify based on quality. The way I would do that is a quote based on my experience doing this kind of thing.
Edit: come to think of it, the last couple of academic editing projects I did were all hourly and self reported. Different types of editing. For the copy editing and proofreading, the professor thought I was such good value he kept giving me more work
Presumably, the person requesting the editing knows what they are talking about and the content is fine. If the content is fine and the writing is reasonably well done, Chat GPT is fine for editing. If the content isn’t correct or the writing is too awful for the AI to fix it, having a human editor who isn’t a content expert won’t necessarily be better.
For the things I specifically listed, Chat GPT is fine.
Yes, that’s what I meant
Presumably the author can do that themselves, in my experience content specific vocabulary is the one area where academics in a field probably know more than I do
You will need to figure out what your time is worth. If you go slow because this is new to you and you don’t know much about research writing, especially if you have to look up a lot of words and phrasings (when I started, I corrected “the literature” because I thought it should be uncountable), you should charge less per hour.
But it will take you more hours to do 100000 words that are awful than 100000 words that are almost perfect. If you want to charge by the word, how can you do that fairly for your client and yourself? You could see how long it takes to do a random page, and extrapolate for a quote. See what the client says, maybe negotiate.
Basically, your time is worth what people are willing to pay for it. How much would you get at a Buxiban, maybe start there?
A lot more than I make now if measured by the hour, but I got tired of teaching.
What I meant was that ChatGPT wouldn’t understand the vocabulary and therefore would be unable to proofread the grammar, punctuation, clarity of the sentence structure, and natural word use. The researcher would understand the vocabulary, but might have made those types or errors.
I think the key, for both pricing and for dealing qith gpt is being a subject matter expert. doesnt matter what subject , but you need to have a certain expertise to be valuable.
for example : I would pay an english speaking lawyer more to edit my contracts, than just any English speaker.
if you do academic editing, having experience in getting papers published or experience in the field of research is a power multiplier and a way to earn more.
I just did a little test. I took a random medical science abstract and introduced four errors. It caught three, but changed an inconsistency in time to a different inconsistency. An error in punctuation was fixed, but the change it chose made the writing feel clumsier than what I would expect from a professional. The error missed required understanding the use of a preposition in context.