I’m starting a business again. And I’m confident that it will go a lot more smoothly than the last time I did so, starting The Elizabethtown Advocate in 2010.
As publisher of a weekly newspaper, I spent around $700 every week to print and distribute the paper. The cost of the office (rent, the electric bill, etc.) was around $700 a month. Revenue came from subscriptions, single-copy sales and advertising. After years of hard work, I eventually managed to achieve a small profit, but I never made as much money as someone working a minimum wage job.
In my new business, I’ll be editing academic papers. A friend of my mother’s teaches at Walden University. (No, not the fictional institution of higher learning from “Doonesbury”; that’s Walden College.) This professor told me that students usually need professional editors to polish up their doctoral dissertations. The going rate for this work is $50 an hour; I’ll start off at $40 until I have a client base established.
Even if I only have 10 billable hours a week, that’s $400 gross. Since a dissertation is 150 pages or more, I should have a lot more than that most weeks.
And the expenses will be minimal. I don’t need to rent an office. I won’t be paying a printing bill. I’ll email the work to my clients, so no need to pay the postmaster for distribution costs or to drive all over town to distributed copies to retailers.
The main expense will be bookkeeping. I met this morning with John Snowden at Hollinger Services Inc., the same company that kept my books when I ran the Advocate. They can collect any checks that are mailed to my P.O. box in Elizabethtown and deposit them in the bank on my behalf. (Yes, mailing checks is still a common method of paying bills in the United States. It’s not as common as it used to be; I have my gas and electric bills automatically debited from my checking account, for example, but I got a check in the mail as recently as yesterday and I mailed a check last week. A friend of mine who lives in Hungary seemed quite surprised that we still do this.) Hollinger Services will do a much better job of bookkeeping than I would if I tried to keep my own books (which I did try at first when I ran the Advocate).
Before I can get started editing, I’ll need to learn a new style manual. I’m accustomed to following the style manual of The Associated Press, which is a good manual for news writing; there are several good manuals for academic writing. Walden University uses the style manual of the American Psychological Association. I’ve already ordered the books for this, so I’ll need to study them to learn this style. I’m not going to study the Chicago Manual of Style or the Modern Language Association manual to avoid confusing myself.
The beauty part of this is that I can do this work from anywhere. When I get everything fixed up nice on my house in Elizabethtown except for the floors and the interior painting, I’ll go to my mother’s home in Ohio; I’ll have no trouble working from there or any other place with internet access. Once the interior painting and floor work is done, I’ll rent it out to a tenant and put it up for sale.
The other great thing is that it will give me a way to be productive that doesn’t harm anybody. I was considering looking for an ordinary job in Ohio. But if I were to get hired to (for example) deliver pizzas, I’d be taking a job that somebody else needs a lot more than I do. I’m not sure if it’s ethical to do that at a time of high unemployment.
Assuming I begin Peace Corps training in June of 2021, I’ll wind down the business by not taking on any new clients starting in April. I won’t do this work while in Peace Corps training and service because I won’t have time for it. Also, Peace Corps regulations expressly forbid professional writing while in service. I’m not sure if professional editing would be allowed, but even if it is, I want to concentrate on my country of service. (Peace Corps service could be delayed even more because of the virus. And I can’t rule out the possibility that Congress will vote to eliminate the agency altogether, though I think that’s unlikely.)
One other development this week: I began a fitness routine called None to Run. It’s designed for people who are too out of shape to run for an extended period. You run three days a week. You begin by walking briskly for five minutes before you run. The first week, you follow that by 20 minutes of alternating between 30 seconds of running and two minutes of walking. Then you gradually work your way up; on the 12th week, you’re running continuously for 25 minutes.
In Ohio, I’ll ask a doctor about how to fine-tune my fitness routine, but just getting vigorous exercise consistently is a good start. When I’m in Peace Corps service, I won’t need to set aside time for exercise since I’ll get all I need by carrying the water I use from a communal pump in the middle of the village and by using a bicycle as my main means of transportation.