Hendrix Editing: An Origin Story
Do you like musicals?
Growing up, every Saturday my twin sister and I would put on Pandora, turn to our favorite Broadway station, and jam out to show tunes as we cleaned the house. I’m not sure how our parents felt about being subjected to the same repeat of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Stephen Sondheim songs week after week, but the house always looked great afterward, so I guess it was a worthwhile trade.
Every once in a while, the opening number from Avenue Q, “What Do You Do with a B.A. in English?” would come on. And while we weren’t as familiar with Avenue Q as we were with other shows (in retrospect, that’s probably a good thing—we were only twelve or so at the time), we still thought it was a funny song. Little did we know how much we’d come to identify with Princeton’s blunt lament just a few years later.
But first, let me back up a bit.
Middle School
A lot of times when people explain where their love of reading came from, they harken back to their childhoods of hauling around stacks of books like Matilda with her red wagon. That wasn’t us. We didn’t particularly like reading when we were kids. Didn’t hate it. Didn’t care for it either. I remember when we were in elementary school, and the annual reading competition would come around. We’d struggle just to hit the minimum page count required and move on with our lives. Things changed when we hit middle school.
The Twilight Era hit the late ’00s like a flaming semi-truck with a cut break line, and frankly, I haven’t recovered since. Say what you will about the franchise, but I have Stephanie Meyer to thank for me being the person I am today. The Twilight series were the first books I ever truly enjoyed reading. The switch in my head had finally been flipped.
It wasn’t just the zeitgeist darlings of the YA boom that we devoured, series like The Twilight Saga and The Hunger Games. No, we branched out wide and fast, jumping feet-first into classics like Oliver Twist, Jane Eyre, and The Odyssey—even 1000-page doorstops like Les Misérables and The Count of Monte Cristo. I’ve read Wuthering Heights nearly a dozen times over, and my battered paperback copy still sits on my bookshelf to this day. My sister still hasn’t finished A Tale of Two Cities, even over a decade later, and I still give her grief about it.
Shout out to our middle-school English teacher, Mrs. Drexler, for letting us borrow her books and for inspiring our love of reading.
College
We didn’t want to go to college at first. We had graduated high school early thanks to a home study program and had barely left our house for two years by that point. The thought of packing up and moving off to college, even if it was less than two hours away from home, was terrifying. But with some encouragement from our older brother, Josh, we decided to go and get it over with.
We didn’t have a specific plan for what to study or what career to pursue. We only applied to one school, Josh’s alma mater, Toccoa Falls College, and were readily accepted. I remember us both lying on the floor of our first dorm room, staring at the ceiling and trying to figure out what we were going to major in. If you’re hoping that this is the climactic point in the story where everything falls into place and we suddenly understand our life’s purpose, you’d be sorely mistaken. In fact, we put off declaring a major until the literal last second, just before our junior year. We picked English.
Don’t get me wrong, we still had absolutely no idea of what to do with an English degree. Princeton’s verse from all those years ago returned with a bitter irony. Our sole reasoning was that we liked books and wanted to keep the same schedule. The question of careers and repaying student loans was a problem for future-us, and they probably deserved it anyway.
We loved our English classes. It was basically book club with homework, especially the upper-level courses. Every day we’d get to walk into class, sit down, and talk about how much we wanted to slap a fictional character. It was great! To this day, we marvel at Lancelot’s (French? Russian?) accent in the Camelot movie, and the phrases “Feed my lamps” and “There is more be money” still crack us up—the accidental but hilarious result of poorly edited freshman papers.
Shout out to Dr. Williams, Dr. Murphree, and Professor Thomas. Thank you for everything.
What Now?
Remember what I said about careers and student loans being a problem for future-us? Well, future-us became present-us once we finished college. We graduated early in 2018, just before our twenty-first birthday—the product of dual enrollment in high school and as many online, winterim, and summer classes as we could cram into our schedules. I said we wanted to get college over with, and I meant it.
Our first job, post-graduation, was as housekeepers for a local conference center. Mostly, we made beds—so, so many beds—and cleaned the public bathrooms, but we later took up positions in the snack and coffee shops too. We have a lot of fond memories from our time housekeeping, quiet evenings prepping rooms, reorganizing fifteen-foot-high shelves of linen in the laundry building, and getting to see all the kids during the summer programs. But it wasn’t our end goal. The pandemic and my sciatic nerve saw to that.
The center never recovered after the lockdowns, and they sold the property, officially laying everyone off even though we hadn’t physically worked there in over a year. All the long days hunched over beds and hauling heavy stacks of sheets messed up my sciatic nerve, so I can’t stay on my feet for hours at a time like I used to. It’s a good thing that by that point, we had a new job to fall back on.
Shout out to Kai, for being the best first boss anyone could ask for.
Getting Started
I remember the exact moment I figured out my answer to the question “What Do You Do with a B.A. in English?” I was sitting on the floor of my room in my parent’s house, scrolling through Pinterest, when I came across a Pin for a course on freelance editing. I thought, and I quote, I can do that. I can do that.
Editing seems like the obvious choice for an English major, and you’re right. But as a kid, I was always put off by the soul-sucking imagery of people being stuck in cubicles, hammering away at a computer until they were finally allowed to go home. Frankly, the idea of getting a job at a publishing house felt no different. But fortunately for child-me, with the pandemic and the advent of telecommuting as a legitimate method of working, the image of a poor sod caged in a cubicle for eight hours a day is becoming blessedly obsolete.
We dove head-first into learning how to edit, taking as many courses as we could get our hands on (and afford). If you think just having an English degree is enough to make you a competent editor, you would be sadly mistaken. At least, that was true in my case. We both had a lot to learn then, and even now, we still take every opportunity we can to learn more about the craft and the industry as a whole.
We got our first jobs as freelance editors in 2019, with Proofed Inc. (an editing agency) and Grammarly, as part of their live editing service. It was great to finally get hands-on experience after studying for so long, but editing business documents and academic papers wasn’t our end goal either. We wanted to work on books.
In March 2021, I landed a position as a freelance proofreader for a nonfiction publisher. After over two years of working on corporate and academic papers, I finally got my hands on some books! Editing nonfiction wasn’t what I had in mind as my dream job, but it was an important stepping stone. It’s easier to transition laterally from nonfiction to fiction than it is to get into fiction with no book experience at all. Baby steps instead of blind leaps.
Hendrix Editing
Ever since we started working in editing, our vision was to provide a one-stop shop for self-publishing authors looking to get their books edited. My sister had always wanted to transition into developmental editing, so she would do dev and line editing, and I would do copy editing and proofreading. Everything an author needs to make a clean, publishable manuscript without having to shop around for different editors.
At the start of 2023, we started putting serious effort into building our freelance business. My sister took courses on developmental editing, we made a brand-new (and super cute) website, we applied to jobs on Upwork, and we started seriously marketing our business (even though I know next to nothing about marketing businesses). Getting our first client was a HUGE moment, and we loved working with her (we’ve gone on to work on several books together!). It was also hugely validating. It’s one thing to say you’re a freelance editor because you have all the training. It’s a whole ’nother feeling to actually have the experience under your belt. Imposter syndrome can very kindly step off a cliff.
This year, we’ve been able to help fantasy, romance, mystery, and nonfiction authors create fun, gripping, and informative books. As 2023 comes to a close, I can’t help but look back at where we started and look forward to where we’re going. It’s been a wild—and sometimes super stressful—ride, but we’re taking it one step at a time. A journey of a thousand miles and all that.
It’s been a long and continuing journey of learning how to run a freelance editing business. Taxes are complicated, and I still don’t quite know how marketing works. We’re both introverts who find the prospect of “putting ourselves out there” to be extremely anxiety-inducing, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned over the past few years, it’s that you’ll never get anywhere if you don’t put in the work. You won’t get the client if you don’t pitch for the project. You won’t get the job if you don’t apply for it. In freelance work, you get out what you put in. So get to work.
Looking forward,
Samantha
