Editting your own writing

One of the ways I market my business is by writing articles. Early this month, I submitted an article, 'Traditional Sales Calls Don't Work for Coaches - What to do Instead, to Business Coaching Worldwide Magazine, for their September issue. The good news is the editor liked the article very much. The bad news is she asked me to cut the article by 300+ words to fit the space for their 'Get the Edge' section.

I am a writer. It's one of the things I love to do. But editting - especially to cut content that contributes to the objective, is antithetical to what I do well. This was hard.

To meet their deadline, I have just gone through the article slashing whole paragraphs as well as sentences, examples, and headings. My goal was to meet their word limit without sacrificing the purpose and value of the information for the magazine audience.

In the corporate world, I used to have an editor go through my material before publication who decided those things. It was out of my hands. Then as a manager, with no ownership of the writing, but responsible for the result, deadlines and budget, it was easy to go through another writer's material and see where it could be tightened up.

It's a different discipline now as a sole-proprietor.