Writer and Editor Erika-Marie Geiss was kind enough to answer a few questions about theWAHMmagazine, writing, editing and freelancers. Take a look!
I notice that you began as an editor- tell us a little bit about how you got started in the business?
Erika-Marie: My "first" editing job was with ADPG, a small company located in Cambridge, Mass when I was a graduate student at Tufts University. It was serendipitous actually, because I was originally hired to call people to verify their information for alumni handbooks. After finding inconsistencies and other issues, I ended up also editing final copy.
I'm a trained art and architectural historian, which is what I have my Master's degree in. When I was a fellow at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston my responsibilities included doing in-department copy editing of exhibition catalogs as well as providing provenance and other research. I also worked freelance for the company nSight where I edited journal articles and other academic texts. I finally decided to freelance under my own company name (Red Pencil Editing Services) and have done so as a second job throughout my art historical career.
When I moved to Michigan in 2003, it made sense to create an on-line presence for the company and keep the company going, especially since it would give me a way to work from home when my husband and I decided to start a family.
What made you want to focus on the WAH (work at home) element for theWAHMmagazine? How did you come up with the idea?
Erika-Marie: I'd been thinking about the vast quantity and ranging quality of resources for parents who work at home for a while, especially after I became pregnant with my son, and I knew that I'd be working at home full time. What I found was that most of the resources are directed towards moms, some are hard to navigate, some are outright scams, and others are thinly veiled advertisements for individual's products with links to articles that also range in quality. I wanted to see something that was content-rich and addressed not just business issues or parenting issues, but one that examined the whole person as a work-at-home parent.
Many business magazines and women's magazines focus on these issues every now and then, but I had only seen one other magazine (the WC, which is no longer in production) that was even close to what I was envisioning.
The catalyst for starting theWAHMmagazine occurred when my husband approached his primary employer about telecommuting shortly after our son was born. They initially gave him a hard time with it, saying things like "that's for women." After a few months of discussions, his work-schedule change was finally granted, but during the course of the struggle, we found very little information available for WAH-dads, at least nothing that was in the scope of what is available for and targeted to moms. That experience solidified the decision to make the magazine targeted for work-at-home parents regardless of whether they are women, men, business owners, telecommute to a traditional job, or freelance and for those people who are considering it whether they are parents with jobs already or professionals who are planning to have kids. The other key for me was that it had to be green and cutting-edge, which meant that it had to be a digital publication and not just a PDF in order to provide rich content and new media.
