The Christian PEN: Freelance editor Kathy Ide organized The Christian Proofreaders and Editors Network as a Google group. She offers online courses for people wanting to become freelance editors. I joined the group about four years ago. The discussions on the group were helpful to me, but the online classes have helped me improve my writing and editing. Especially useful to me as a writer was my first class, “Proofreading and Editing for Clients.”

Contributing members of TCP pay lower course fees than non-members, but all the fees are quite reasonable. Kathy Ide does not teach all of the courses. Instructors must be contributing members and submit a course syllabus to Kathy for approval. She manages the enrollment details for all courses. The complete list of course offerings is here. The 2010 course schedule is here.

Write Integrity Editorial Services: Tracy Ruckman, freelance editor and photographer, is the proprietor of WEIS. She offers a broad range of online courses on writing craft. Most workshops are for fiction writers, but she offers some non-fiction, organization, and marketing topics, too. Ruckman’s courses are modeled after TCP’s. Tracy finds the instructors, schedules the classes, and handles enrollment. For details and 2010 schedule, see this page.

Writer’s Digest Online Workshops: These courses are more costly that TCP and WIES offerings, but they do carry the Writer’s Digest name. General information is here. Some courses are six weeks, while others go for as long as 14 weeks. See a detailed list of offerings here. WD also offers special events like the upcoming (March 11, 2010) webinar featuring literary agent Rachelle Gardner. Details here.

Disclaimer: I have not taken any of the WD workshops myself, but I have heard from friends that they were pleased with their experience.

My online marketing class (offered through The Christian PEN) that’s wrapping up now has been a great learning experience for all of us. We had 10 participants from all over the U. S. States represented are Washington, Idaho, California, Ohio, Virginia, Alabama, Colorado, Kansas, and Tennessee (my location).All students are aspiring freelance editors, many of them also freelance writers in the Christian publishing industry.

I’ve taught this class each year for four years now. This year’s class enlightened me on the following developments in marketing for Christian publishing.

Writers/editors know they need a Web site. In the first class, very few members had a Web site. Blogging was foreign to most people, and social networking was not yet a big thing. When we started this class, 80% of the class already had a Web site, and some of them also had blogs. Part of our course deals with promotion, and a Web site is recommended as a “must.” Those who didn’t have one at the start are well on their way to getting a site set up. Those who had one in the beginning have heard ideas about how to improve theirs. See my Wired to Write blog for how-information on Web sites and blogs.

They are intensely interested in how to present themselves online. Having accepted the necessity of being online, the students wanted to know what else they could do. Some of them cannot do much in-person networking to promote their business because of their location or family situation. Online networking is the next best thing. Twitter, Facebook, and Shoutlife are some of the most popular networking methods these days. There’s some information on electronic networking on my Wired blog, too. See it here.

Most are hesitant about “selling” themselves. All of my class members expressed hesitation or downright distaste about having to “sell” their services. All of the class members were women. I don’t know if that had anything to do with it or not, but I’ve observed that men don’t seem to be bothered by the idea of selling as much as women are. We spent some time discussing the fact that they have a product or service that has value for their customers. If they believe in their product, they should not have qualms about telling people about it and asking a fair price for it. I’ll develop an article for this blog on the subject of personal selling soon. In the meantime, take a look at the information on KnowThis.com.

Although I said the next post on this blog would be about setting up a writer’s Web site, I thought it would be interesting for you to see the sites for my class members. We have 10 in the class, but two of them don’t have sites yet. I’ll post their links when they’re available. Meanwhile, I list the name, link to site, and name of Web design program and/or hosting company, if available.

Amy Timco – http://www.wisewordsediting.com/ (Yahoo Business)

Andrea Graham – www.povbootcamp.com/about (WordPress.org)

Dawn Kinzer – http://www.dawnkinzer.com/

Juliet Kennedy – www.jkkwriting.net

Laurel den Hoed – http://site.writerlaurel.com/

Sally Bradley – http://sallybradley.com/

Tracy Ruckman – www.tracyruckman.com and www.writeintegrity.com/

Vie Herlocker – http://www.violetwrites.com/

If you need help getting your manuscript in shape, perhaps one of them can help you. Check them out.