The Transcript

Can You Be a Writer and an Editor-in-Chief?

Stefanie Flaxman: Editor-in-Chief is brought to you by Authority Rainmaker. It s not your typical online marketing conference. The event is a carefully designed live educational experience that presents a complete and effective online marketing strategy to help you immediately accelerate your business.

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On the first episode of Editor-in-Chief, I talked about how we don t like our creations altered, and we don t like mistakes pointed out. Writers might be nervous about working with editors. Even though it s not fun to have your mistakes pointed out and a bit of a blow to your ego, an editor is actually your behind-the-scenes ally because it s better to have mistakes pointed out and corrected before your writing is released to the general public. It s a safety net.

But what if an editor regards a section of text as a mistake and the writer regards that same section as an integral part of his work of art? Right before we launched Rainmaker.FM, I got the chance to talk to my co-worker, Copyblogger Media s Chief Content Writer Demian Farnworth about the fragile nature of writer-editor relationships. Let s now listen to our conversation.

Demian, thank you for joining me today.

Demian Farnworth: Thank you for having me on the show, Stefanie. I am so excited.

Stefanie Flaxman: I am so excited that we re talking because I nicknamed you Vitamin D and we have a work meeting later, but I get an extra dose of vitamin D.

Demian Farnworth: I love that.

Stefanie Flaxman: It s good for my health as well.

Demian Farnworth: There you go. That s good. That s completely new to me. I ve never heard that before, but I love it. So it s awesome.

Stefanie Flaxman: No one has nicknamed you that?

Demian Farnworth: No, never.

Stefanie Flaxman: I m happy that I get to share that fun little bond with you. Thank you, thank you. How are you doing today?

Demian Farnworth: I m doing well. It s been a good day. I ve been getting some good projects done talking to a few people and moving along. Especially as we re coming over the hump of getting this podcast network off the ground, I had a lot of work yesterday that I got done by 5 o clock what I did, so taking a little breather today. I m still working, but just not working nearly as hard, so this is a nice little treat to go to do today.

Stefanie Flaxman: Thank you. Thank you for taking the time. We are coming to the end of the hump of the launch. I know that workflow thing too because sometimes when you re in it you just have to ride the momentum, and you re like, I m not tired yet even though I should be, but I just have to keep going.

Then, you catch up later when all of that, when you can get that big push. I know. I have the same thing too because the learning curve of all of the new podcast stuff we re incorporating it into our schedules and everything and figuring out the best way, the best time and to do what we need.

Demian Farnworth: I don t know if you like me though, but I get anxious when I have to — especially new technology because I just have this fear it s always just going to blow up on me, and learning things from experience that it s always going to be a torrential warfare just getting things off the ground. Once you get through that part, that s like you understand it, you have a skill you ve just developed and you can go and turn around and help other people with that particular skill.

That s how I justify going through that hard work of figuring all that stuff out, a new territory to me because, I mean, I m a writer. I like to sit behind my laptop and create words on the screen versus actually talking to people. That, in itself, I have to learn how to do that better, too. It s one of those things that s just helping — I think it s another life skill. The way I just hone the ultimate craft would be to communicate better.

Stefanie Flaxman: Definitely. It really is a learning experience. I have the same exact feeling like you said. It takes experience to get to the point where you re doing something new and you don t completely freak out because you can see the end result. When everything s new to you, then, I guess I m going back to when you re younger and you just haven t had a lot of life experience, work experience.

You don t know that there is an endpoint yet where everything will be fine and you will be able to almost be an expert on what you learned at the end, and it won t be so bad. Because that s where I m thinking now where with all of the new technology and the new stuff that I ve been learning, too. I keep thinking, One day this will all be second nature to me, and I won t have to look through every single step, Did I do that right? Did I do that right?

Demian Farnworth: Well it s that repetition, right? It s that repetition of doing it and going through it. Then eventually it won t be so overwhelming. Like you said, it will be second nature.

Stefanie Flaxman: I m looking forward to that. I am enjoying the process, but it definitely puts a little bit on edge. If you can have that bigger perspective of, Okay, I m just going to do this like it s the most natural normal thing to mem It s just part of my workflow, then. That s where I m looking.

Demian Farnworth: Is this your first episode, then?

Stefanie Flaxman: This is my third episode. We ve had a little buildup to this interview.

Demian Farnworth: Did you interview two people before this?

Stefanie Flaxman: I didn t. The last two were monologues.

Demian Farnworth: Great, I m looking forward to that. That would be nice.

Stefanie Flaxman: I m doing both for this podcast. To give you a little background of my overall theme of what we re doing. The reason why I m doing both is because I m really big on this editor-in-chief model or mindset. To break it down a little bit, in the role of an editor-in-chief, you have to think big picture and you have to think very detail oriented in order to do your job.

You re looking three months down the line, but you re also looking out what needs to happen tomorrow, and you re making sure it s the best it can be. So the podcast is mimicking that a little bit in style, where I m having conversations with you about editing and writing, and then I m doing other monologues where I break down specific editing topics.

Demian Farnworth: That s neat. I like that. That s a great philosophy. Would you give up one of those, or is it because both of those roles are in the job that you like being the editor-in-chief?

Stefanie Flaxman: I like both of those roles, yes. That is what I think is so special about the job and other people who have roles like that. I actually am making the argument that anyone who does create media online should assume this editor-in-chief mindset.

Actually, I have so much to ask you about your own writing and your own experience. I do make a case for that being a focused mindset to have. But I really do like both. It s part of my personality. I don t think I ve trained myself to have a job like that. I like to think ahead, but then you also have to balance that with the details of the day to day.

What Bores Demian

Demian Farnworth: I think that s a special gift because I would give up the details any day because I am the big thinker, the visionary. The routine and the minute bore me and put me to sleep and irritate the daylights out of me. There are certain things about what I do. I have to pay attention to the details. For the most part, if that was part of my daily routine, I d shoot myself.

Stefanie Flaxman: That is why editors and writers balance each other.

Demian Farnworth: I agree.

Stefanie Flaxman: We work together. You are Copyblogger s chief copywriter, and I edit Copyblogger.com, the blog there. We do balance each other out. I do think writer and editor relationships are very delicate or they can be — and we obviously sound like we re getting along. We do get along. I mean, that s not always the case.

We can talk more about that later of why that is a very, like I said, delicate relationship. I found out something recently that I am very interested in asking about when I was listening to your other podcast. We can talk about your new podcast. It s called Rough Draft, correct?

Demian Farnworth: Yes, it is.

Stefanie Flaxman: Very cool. So what I meant by other podcast is the podcast that you have been doing with Jerod, The Lede. I found out that for a previous job that you had, you were actually a managing editor, and you had editors working below you and proofreaders as well.

Obviously, now, you work Copyblogger, and you re a writer. Like we said, you don t work day in and day out with the editing because that s other people s jobs in our company. I would love to hear more about that experience and how that has influenced your work now since you get to live in the space of a writer, and if you are more comfortable being a writer.

Demian Farnworth: I love that time that I spent as a managing editor because I got the opportunity to mentor because I had a table of six writers and I think it was three proofreaders who are underneath me. So the proofreaders were my saviors since they did the details. They took care of the ground work, or the Lord s work in that sense.

My vision and goal for that group of people, and really I discovered about myself that I love to teach, and I love to grow people up as writers because one of the very first things I thought about was that I was put in that position, I had three proofreaders and six writers. If I was in their positions, I would want to be, in two years, the best darn writer I could be as a writer. Then, if I was a proofreader, I would want to come up in the ranks and become a writer.

I just asked them. I was, Do you want to be better writers, and do you proofreaders eventually want to be writers? They re all like, Yeah, great. I set this goal of, In two years, I want to develop you guys so the writers can walk out of the door here, and go work anywhere that they wanted. Go work for National Geographic, go work for Vanity Fair. Then proofreaders come up behind them and take their place.

Then just make it like a machine, sort of a training house in that sense. I loved the time that I spent and the build that I did. And I did that thing through one on ones with each one, just from critiques of their actual physical work and weekly workshops that I had with them. The other side that I really loved was the long-range planning. This was a print magazine that I was doing, so we were about six months out from print.

So I had to think six months out. I had to coordinate with other departments on products, on events, and make sure that we were all aligned because there was a radio division. There was a television division. I had to make sure the radio shows and TV shows that were going out in November that we were putting out a magazine in November that matched the message they were saying. There was a lot of that and a lot of coordination, so I really loved that.

But it did take me out of the writing role. At heart, I love to write, and it is probably the place that I m most comfortable, that I love to be in. I enjoy it. Even in that position as a managing editor, I had to work really hard to make sure I was doing some writing. We actually created a column, so I could write monthly for that to have something to do.

I do live comfortably in the role. I like it, but again, I also like the collaboration. Because I realize too that this is really a team effort. I could write something, but it s not going to get up on blog unless it gets edited, unless it gets approved, unless it gets reviewed, unless it gets designed, and then it actually gets published on there. It s a team effort. I like the idea of writing, and I m very comfortable in that role.

Stefanie Flaxman: So that experience to me seems incredibly valuable for moving your writing career forward because you re not just an isolated writer in a sense. I don t want to say directionless because not every isolated writer is directionless, but you got a sense of the bigger production picture and how you could fit, what you wanted to do in that role. Like you said, you created a column so you were able to write, but you saw the bigger picture. It wasn t just you producing content on your own and hoping something would happen. Did you just work online for yourself after that? Was that the next step?

Demian Farnworth: Yeah. The next step was The Copybot and working for myself for close to two years as a writer, as being hired to write blog posts, write sales letters, write email, auto responder series, PF white papers. I did a great series. It was an email series for company called Emerging Trains who were selling raw undeveloped land out in Latin America, so it was a lot of that sort of writing.

Stefanie Flaxman: On The Copybot, I just realized yesterday when I was making notes that Copybot sounds like Copyblogger. It was a completely different thing in my head before yesterday.

Demian Farnworth: That s great. That name actually came from my daughter because we sat down when I knew that I was working for myself. I knew that I had to start building an online presence, so I was like, I need a name for