How to Harness the Power of Consistency and Storytelling for Your Freelance Editing Business

Welcome to The Modern Editor Podcast, where we talk about all things editing and what it’s like to run an editorial business in today’s world. I’m your host, Tara Whitaker. Let’s get to it.

Hello there. Welcome to today’s episode. So I just returned from Kit’s Craft + Commerce Conference at the time of this recording, which is June 2025.

I walked away with two key themes, or takeaways, from the conference that can help all business owners, but I wanted to specifically share it with you all as editors because I feel like they’re very on topic for what we’re all going through right now. So today I am gonna just briefly share those two takeaways and the hopes that you walk away feeling maybe a little more uplifted, a little less down if you have been about your business—or maybe I’m just projecting, we’ll see, but let’s just get right into it.

So, very briefly before I get started, if you don’t know what Kit is, Kit is a platform—it used to be called ConvertKit—for online business owners. It started out as an email platform and it still is very much so.

I’ve been using it for five, six, seven years, a while. But it is rapidly growing into a more full service platform for creators. So Craft + Commerce is their annual conference they host in Boise, which is where the founder, Nathan Barry, is.

And this was my first time attending, so I had no idea what to expect. I’ve never been to Boise. But overall it was an amazing experience. I met so many other business owners outside of editing—I mean podcasters and business coaches, wellness coaches, business, money coaches. I saw Sam Vander Wielen again, who’s an attorney. Membership hosts. I mean so many other creators.

And it was really great to interact with people who aren’t in the editing and publishing community—which I obviously adore the editing and publishing community, but it is nice to get outside of that realm and learn from people who are doing different things that could maybe still apply to editing and publishing.

And I will say many of the keynote speakers did have books, so there was still that element to it. And I came home with ten books, which is amazing and also very heavy. So this isn’t a review of Craft + Commerce. I did already buy my ticket for next year, so I think it’s worth it. But what I wanted to recap are the two themes that came out of it for me.

And I think one of them was intentional in that it was something that Kit brought up regularly throughout the conference. But the other one I don’t think was, I think it just happened because of who was on stage. 

So the first one, which relates to that, is consistency. Now I wish I had actually kept track of this, but I didn’t. But I’m gonna guess I would say 95% of the speakers I listened to mentioned consistency at least once in their talk. I went with my lovely friend Amber, and every time they said consistency, we like, nudged each other’s shoulders or giggled because it was said so many times.

And like I said, I don’t think that was something Kit told the speakers to say. I think it was because all of these people in their own forms were successful. And in order to be successful, we have to do things consistently. We can’t wait for motivation or willpower or the absolute perfect conditions.

We just have to show up consistently. And now, I don’t mean every hour or every day necessarily. It’s doing the thing repeatedly in whatever way that looks for you, regardless of the initial results. We have to be comfortable with not getting immediate feedback or gratification or success, right? Because even the most successful people out there, in whatever way you determine success didn’t start that way.

They had to do something and keep doing it, and keep doing it, and keep doing it. And we see usually the end result, we don’t see the messy beginning or the middle. Right? They got to where they are because they kept going, and that was said by literally almost every speaker there. So it was interesting, right?

I didn’t think that was gonna happen. I wasn’t expecting it. That’s not something new. I’m sure most of you listening have heard some form of “be consistent” somewhere in your life. And of course this is gonna depend on you and your business and how your brain works and there’s lots of different factors.

But at the end of the day, I’m gonna invite you to think about one thing that you enjoy doing that you wanna do more consistently but haven’t done so yet. And if you haven’t, I also want you to look at or read, listen, episode 45, where I talk about the Tiny Habits Method because this conference and this theme of consistency has really reinvigorated me to take a look at what I’m doing, not only in business, but in my personal life as well, and see what it is that I want to do and why I am not doing it, figuring out why that is.

Do I not wanna do it anymore? Are there barriers in the way? Am I getting in the way? So that’s my invitation to you. Find one thing that you like doing that you wanna be consistent at, and give it a go. And I don’t mean consistent every day. It can be something you wanna do consistently, but not every day. It has to be what that looks like for you.

Okay, so number one theme was consistency. Number two was my favorite, and that is that storytelling will beat out AI every time. Now, real talk. There was a crap-ton of AI discussion at Craft + Commerce, and I have a very expressive face and I have to work really hard not to let it emote my hatred for it every time it was mentioned. It was a dark room, thankfully, but I didn’t want anybody to see me rolling my eyes or groaning or whatever. Hopefully I was successful at that.

So what I really focused on while I was there were the creators who were committed to keeping AI out of the creative process, which is what I stand for as well.

And many of the speakers on stage, including Kit, focused on storytelling to help sort of combat the AI wave. Obviously as a book editor, I was very on board with this because we’re coming a little bit full circle these days with storytelling, that was how cultures passed down their knowledge and their traditions in the past, and now it’s going to be more important than ever in this new AI world.

AI can’t experience life. It has no stories, it has no emotions, it doesn’t have any humanity. Humans do. And the big takeaway from the conference was that storytelling is not just for writing books, so to speak. It’s how we connect as humans. Period.

So for you all listening, I want you to think about how you can use storytelling when you’re talking about your business, your services, your knowledge, your expertise. It’s not just listing out your credentials. It’s not listing out what you can do for people. It’s connecting it back to story. How can you incorporate that in your newsletters or your blog posts, or your podcast, or your social media posts, whatever the case may be.

How can you weave story into what you want to say to the world? Focus on actually connecting with people through story rather than using ChatGPT to churn out content slop that has no soul, no depth, and no humanity to it, because we’ve already seen the crap that it comes out with. It’s not meant to connect; it’s meant to just regurgitate junk.

And people, for the most part, can identify that and don’t connect with it. And if they don’t connect with you, if they don’t connect to what you’re offering, it’s gonna be really hard to connect them with your services and to help them with whatever it is you help them with for that particular service.

So storytelling, and getting stories from everywhere. Something that happened at the grocery store, something that happened online, something that your family member did or your kid said, connecting story is going to set us apart more than ever. So when you’re thinking about your business in the coming days, weeks, months, whatever, I want you to keep those two things in mind.

Consistency, even when the results aren’t coming immediately, and storytelling as human beings. Figure out what those look like for you and your business, and I bet you will see results. 

They might not be immediate, they might not be to the level you want initially, but it will happen because in a world that’s going a mile a minute, a mile a second at this point, the power is going to be in taking a beat for each of us and really homing in on what’s important to us rather than chasing an algorithm or the next trend or trying to work against things out there that we have no control over. And we’re gonna keep doing the thing, whatever the thing is. I am human. I think you’re human, I think. And right now that is our competitive edge that AI will never have.

So there it is. That’s my brief, quick-and-dirty takeaway from Craft + Commerce. If you want the full rundown of all the lessons I learned there, I’m gonna be doing that and sharing that inside the Freelance Editors Club. You can join for free with a 14-day trial, and you can get access to the live session or the recording depending on when you join, of course. So you can go to TaraWhitaker.com/Club for the details.

Until next time, keep learning, keep growing, and remember that humans can be trash, but if we prioritize each other and our connections. I know we can do big things.

Thank you so much for tuning in to today’s episode. If you enjoy The Modern Editor Podcast, I would be so grateful if you left us a review over on iTunes. And as always, you can head to TaraWhitaker.com to connect with me and stay in touch. We’ll chat again soon.