Here is the list of skills we believe are necessary for this career.
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- High-level book experience: In order to be considered for this role, you’ll need to have at least a decade of high-level writing and editing experience, especially experience positioning and structuring books. At a minimum this means you’ve worked on a lot of good and successful books. Credentials are not required but always helpful in your application. For example, experience as a full time editor at a publishing house, book agent, experience writing your own books, experience working on best selling books, etc, is great to have (though we have excellent full time and freelance Scribes without these credentials).
- Excellent writing and editing skills: This should be obvious and a given, but we’ll say it: you must be a very good writer and editor.
- Good people/interviewing skills: This is the big differentiator between who does and does not succeed with us: the good writers who are also really good with people tend to do well with us.
You’ll be on the phone with authors a lot, so comfort with people and talking on phones is a necessity.
What’s really important here, though, is good interviewing skills. You must be able to listen closely, understand what the author is saying, and then ask the pertinent questions that ensure he or she fully explained his or her point, and extract every piece of relevant knowledge.
Furthermore, you must be able to help the author fully unlock and explore their idea. Though you’re not a ghostwriter and the ideas in their book are theirs only, you still need to be good at helping people flesh out and explain their ideas.
There are many, many excellent writers and editors who do not succeed in our process because they have poor people skills. - Organized and detail oriented: This is another obvious one, and if you’ve been successfully freelancing for awhile, then this should be easy: you need to be organized and detail oriented. In addition to writing, you’ll be asked to work within our project management system, which is simple to learn, but does require you to keep up to date. This is not a “free for all” writing system.
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