Year-End Review 2024: An Honest Accounting
Despite being in business as a story coach and developmental editor for nearly 3-½ years, I’m embarrassed to admit that I’ve never conducted a year-end review. I mean, I’m the only employee. There seemed to be no point of a year-end performance review. Additionally, I spent twelve years in a full-time editorial day job; somebody else did those reviews.
Yet, according to Kendra Gaffin, these reviews are “an opportunity to reflect, assess, and strategize for the coming year.”
Understanding where my coaching and editing business is allows me to plan more specifically where I want it to go in 2025. My year-end performance review includes a massive amount of data analysis. I analyze multiple aspects over the last two weeks of my business year. Marketing, business development, processes and systems, and industry trends affect even one-person businesses like mine.
So, this is a year-end review of where Sage Editing currently stands. The lessons learned in 2024 guide my strategic 2025 goals.
Photo by JESHOOTS.COM on Unsplash
Year-End Review: Sage Editing Performance
It took listing out my business accomplishments for me to finally pat myself on the back for a job well done. The act I’m most proud of? I successfully rebranded my company. My prior name—Shannon S. Scott Editing Services—kicked things off in July 2021, yet over the next 2-½ years, I evolved as an editor. My business needed to evolve with me if I wanted to elevate myself as an entrepreneur.
At the end of last year, I reviewed my client list, my projects, and my changing intentions. Through some focus-group testing among my edibuddies, Sage Editing became the new entity that I felt best represented me and the services I wanted to provide in 2024. I like to think I succeeded.
Company Accomplishments
Seventeen copyediting and proofreading projects, a couple manuscript evaluations, and one each of revision coaching, writing coaching, and developmental edit projects isn’t too shabby. The shift into a more niched part of the story development project is not going to be an overnight success.
Most important to me, though, is that my year-end review allowed me to acknowledge a new aspect of my business. I conducted five speaking engagements, something I had zero interest in doing when I opened my doors. I cringe at being in front of people, even when I’m as passionate as I am about the art and science of writing and editing.
Still, I made two appearances on an editor-geared podcast, held a virtual Q&A through Club Ed Freelancers on editing queer romance, and I ran an LGBTQ+ Editors Association Office Hours session on using social media safely as queer publishing professionals. My proposal to ACES: The Society for Editing was accepted to teach an ACES Academy webinar on personal branding for editors. Finally, at the organization’s virtual conference this past September, I presented on personal branding specifically for neurodivergent editors.
Each of my speaking engagements reinforced to me that I do know what I’m doing. My skills are varied and vast, yet I remain passionate about the writing and editing processes.
Main Area to Improve: Social Media Presence and Marketing
As the end of this year approaches, I have a clearer idea of and appreciation for the various services I’m capable of providing. Better yet, my clients provided excellent feedback as to how I could better serve them and others moving forward.
Although I made it clear earlier this year that I was adjusting the trajectory of my business, I didn’t necessarily reflect that to my intended audience as effectively or efficiently as I wanted. I burned out on social media despite my systematized content strategy. First, I attempted posting twice a day every day across all my platforms. That lasted for the first three months of the year. I blogged three times a week during the third quarter before needing to stop for my sanity’s sake.
2025 will be about using my marketing time effectively, not trying to be everywhere at once. I advise nearly every freelance editor who asks to just pick one platform and go hard on that platform for a good chunk of time. Only then should they look at adding a second (or third). I know where my target audience usually hangs out, other fiction coaches and editors as well as queer romance and queer romantic suspense authors. Best if I spend my time in those places.
Year-End Review: Employee Self-Evaluation
Have I mentioned before that I’m a 2024 ACES: The Society for Editing Richard S. Holden Diversity Fellowship awardee? No? Well, I am.
As part of my year-end self-evaluation, that is a feather in my cap that I will tout for as long as I remain a fiction story coach and developmental editor. Somehow, I earned the right to be part of a cohort of five other extremely knowledgeable, talented, and dedicated editorial professionals.
I also completed an absurd amount of professional development this year, including finishing 22 writing and editing craft books and five courses from Club Ed Freelancers. I’m looking forward to wrapping up my Certificate in Developmental Editing of Fiction from that same organization next fall.
By the way, I wrote seventy-six blog articles and flash fiction stories for my website. You should check them out.
Author Accountability
On January 12, 2024, I answered a single prompt from the Queer Romance Writers Group I recently joined. In forty minutes, I wrote 1,041 words.
On January 19, I wrote another 522 words in that same world based on a second prompt.
January 26 saw 1,145 words involving those same characters in that same world, crossing paths and knocking heads and generally just being clueless idiots on their way to being in love.
When I put fingers to keyboard on February 1? You guessed it. 1,105 more words got added. At this point, I threw my hands up and said, “FINE. I’ll tell your story!”
My work-in-progress—as of December 3—is sitting at 68,976 words. I’m not even at the midpoint yet. Still, part of my year-end review is holding myself accountable to finishing my characters’ story in 2025. Well, I’m going to finish the first draft. How many drafts come after that is anyone’s guess.
Photo by Riccardo Annandale on Unsplash
To Sum It All Up: Setting SMART Goals
SMART goals are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound. My auDHD is in love with every aspect of the process of setting those kinds of goals.
I made a lot of changes after I read Erin Brenner’s The Chicago Guide for Freelance Editors in July, both on a business level and personally. I tracked my finances and built a spreadsheet for accounting. My priorities shifted in terms of the services I wanted to offer. Finally, I gave myself grace for not being everything for everyone.
The year-end review is not a one-and-done process. The nomenclature is, in a way, a misnomer. Quarterly, monthly, and even weekly reviews allow you to stay on top of both accomplishments and setbacks. Better yet, as Dakota Murphey writes, “A well-planned strategy is necessary to ensure you meet your business goals, but impossible to create without analyzing where your business currently is.”
Looking in the mirror is one of the hardest things to do, especially when you’re the one responsible for your company’s success. When I sat down to write this blog, I had to pry the chip on my shoulder off with a crowbar. Ego has no place at the table of a year-end review. Indeed, your year-end review is a time for curiosity and honesty, not pessimism and negativity.
Reflecting On Your Story One Word At A Time!
