Leaving Academia: Becoming a Freelance Editor

If you’ve been thinking about leaving academia for months, maybe years, and you still haven’t taken the first step, this episode is for you. I wasn’t ready when I started. I began by editing for agencies at about 1.5 cents a word, with no niche, no website, and no plan. Today my business brings in six figures a year. I figured it out as I went. In this episode of Leaving Academia, I explain why ac...

You can’t grow if you’re stuck in the weeds. And if three of your best clients wanted to start with you today, would your business hold up? In this episode of Leaving Academia, I talk with Emily Reagan, a freelance marketing educator and mentor, about when a newer business owner should hire marketing help and who to hire first. You’ll learn: Why marketing falls apart when client work gets busy, an...

One unedited video of me talking to my phone on my couch got over 300,000 views, about 1,500 new followers, and about 200 new people on my email list. No trending audio, effects or perfect lighting. If your content keeps landing with a thud, this episode is for you. I break down why my reel on faculty pay versus administrator pay hit such a nerve, and what you can copy for your own editing, coachi...

You’re lying in bed on a Sunday night, running through Monday in your head, and one question keeps circling: is this really what I worked so hard for? That feeling isn’t a sign something is wrong with you. It’s a sign you’re meant for more than this system was built to give you. This episode is my talk from the Ivory Tower Inner Fire Summit, where the theme was the “vow of poverty” academics are e...

You hit full professor. You edited the top journal in your field. And somehow you still felt adrift. In this episode, Kyle Rudick (professor, graduate program coordinator, and host of the Publishing Academic Research podcast) shares how he went from losing his advisor in his first year of hid PhD to building a podcast, a coaching practice, and a career that truly brings him joy. We discuss: 🎙️ Why...

You have a great idea for a paid program, but it only works at a certain time of year, and that time of year is almost here. Do you scramble, or do you wait another 12 months and hope the idea is still good? In this episode, I walk you through a "minimum viable playbook" for testing a program idea when you're short on time, have no audience yet, and are tempted to let perfectionism m...

You've probably been told you have two choices: stay in academia and hope for flexibility, or leave for a 9-to-5 job in industry. There's a third one nobody talks about, and it's a lot more fun. In this episode, I talk with Marie Gasper-Hulvat, a tenured art history professor at Kent State and the founder of Soulstar Attunement. She also created the Ivory Tower Inner Fire Summit, a fre...

You've been trying to grow your reach on LinkedIn—posting consistently, following the experts' advice, tweaking your hooks—and nothing's working. Each post gets 8 likes and disappears into the void. Christos Efthymiou, PhD, knows that feeling. After a random rant went viral on LinkedIn, he thought that maybe there was something to the platform that could help him grow his consulting business. But...

If you're an academic, have you ever wondered what your spouse really thinks about the countless moves, job insecurity, stress, and burnout that are likely shaping your life together? In this episode, my husband, Travis, sits down with me on our back porch in Maine to talk about what he saw—from the outside looking in—during my entire journey through academia and into business. We moved six times...

You've always assumed that niching down will scare clients away, but you're getting it wrong. I know it's counterintuitive, but Erin Schleiden, PhD, is the perfect example of why narrowing your niche is the way to grow your audience and expand your client list. After grad school, Erin picked one tiny slice of the dissertation--the literature review--and became the go-to editor for it. That's what...

You're fully booked with editing or coaching clients. Revenue is good. And somehow you still feel like something's about to fall apart. If that sounds familiar, you haven't done anything wrong—you've hit a point that almost every academic entrepreneur hits after the early growth stage. In this episode, I walk through the four signs that your editing or coaching business has outgrown the "figure it...

If you're still charging 2 cents a word for academic editing, this episode is going to make you uncomfortable—in a good way. In this episode, I break down the two beliefs that keep editors underpriced ("I'll lose clients" and "who am I to charge more?"), why the EFA rate chart is training the whole industry to undercharge, and exactly what I charge now for copy editing, developmental editing, and...

Leaving academia can feel like admitting the whole thing was a mistake. It isn't—and the fear that says otherwise isn't an accident. In this episode, Paulina sits down with career coach Jen Polk (From PhD to Life) for an honest conversation about the stigma around leaving academia: where it comes from, whether it's actually loosening, and how to push through it if it's holding you back. You'll hea...

Thousands of moms around the world are getting their PhD while juggling many (or all) of the parenting responsibilities. In this week's episode, I spoke with Laura Vasquez Bass, of Atlantic Editorial, about how she defended her dissertation and launched her editing business--while being a toddler mom AND an international student. Laura is a September 2025 BAE grad who came to the US as an internat...

You keep hearing there's no editing work out there. Let me be clear: That is NOT true—and if your calendar has been empty, the problem probably isn't the market. It's that your ideal clients don't know you exist... yet. In this episode of the Leaving Academia podcast, Paulina debunks the "no work" myth. Although agency work is drying up as AI floods the low tier of the editing market, people in th...

You've been editing for an agency since 2020, and you're still making the same 1.5 cents a word you started with. Meanwhile you're staring down another year of barely cracking $40K for work that's eating away all of your evenings and weekends. In this episode of the Leaving Academia podcast, Paulina lays out the real numbers most editors never see—and the way out that nobody taught you. She's not...

After a Yale University Press internship where a supervisor told her she had "a strange brain," and six months of applications with zero interviews, Hannah Bartlett stopped trying to fit into a system that wasn't built for her. She launched a freelance editing business instead—and has doubled her income every year since. In this episode of the Leaving Academia podcast, Hannah shares what it's like...

You did everything right—the degree, the publications, the cross-country moves—and academia still didn't deliver the flexible schedule, job security, or financial comfort it promised you. In this episode, I walk through the five promises academia made to every one of us, exactly how each one got broken, and the part nobody tells you: running your own editing or coaching business delivers every sin...

You know you're ready to leave academia. What you don't know is whether you need a program with a syllabus and a group cohort, or one person in your corner helping you move at your own speed. Here's the thing: BAE (my group program) and 1:1 coaching aren't "better" or "worse" than each other. They solve different problems. One gives you structure and community. The other gives you speed and total...

Your website is losing you clients before they even scroll down. If your editing or coaching website leads with your credentials, your degree, your publications—you're doing it backwards. And it's probably costing you inquiries you don't even know you're missing. In this episode, I'm breaking down the StoryBrand framework—one of the most effective marketing approaches in the world—and showing you...

Is the fear of losing your health insurance keeping you trapped in academia? This worry keeps a lot of chronically ill academics stuck in jobs that are making them sicker—and the premise is worth questioning. In this episode, Paulina talks with D. Scott, PhD, JD, a former academic who developed a chronic illness during a postdoc at the University of Edinburgh and slowly realized the tenure track w...

You've been doing everything right—teaching, advising, serving on committees, even organizing a union—and still hitting a wall. Annie Brubaker did all of that for 20 years, watched her salary get frozen for 12 of them, went on a 29-day strike, and finally decided she was done waiting for an institution to value her. Then she landed 7 editing clients in her first 12 weeks as a professional editor....

You're worried AI is going to kill academic editing and coaching. Here's what's actually happening—and why it might be the best news you've heard all year. If you've asked yourself, "Should I even bother starting an editing or coaching business when AI is taking over?"—this episode is your answer. Paulina Cossette has been watching the industry closely, and the picture is more nuanced (and more ho...

You spent months preparing to launch your editing or coaching business, and you still haven't started. Or maybe you launched, got crickets, and shelved the whole idea. Here's the truth: it's not your idea, your niche, or your credentials holding you back. It's a single question your PhD brain has been trained to ask on repeat–and it's functioning as a verdict before the trial has even started. In...

⏱️ Stop doing this academic work for free. Every Tuesday, you wake up, drink your coffee, read a dissertation chapter, meet with a struggling grad student, teach a seminar, peer review an article, and edit a colleague's grant proposal—and you call it "being a professor." But each of those tasks has a name in the freelance world. And a price. And a market full of people who would pay you handsomely...