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Category Archives: Celebration

Happy birthday to me! (or, rather, to my business)

Happy birthday to me! (or, rather, to my business)

Although I issued my first invoice in August 2009 (and so will be celebrating in August, too), when I set up as self-employed, I matched my financial years to the UK’s financial years, to make everything easier, and so Libro officially started in April 2009. I cannot believe I’ve been going ten years, though – that astounds me.

Originally, after a lot of experience working on various types of texts through my working life (see About Me for more information), I was approached by one of my colleagues at the university library where I worked to see if I could edit their student’s Master’s dissertation. I said yes, did it, and instigated a string of lovely referrals. For the rest of that year, I mainly worked on dissertations for people whose English wasn’t their first language (I still do that today, although I work on more PhDs now).

I was lucky enough to have a fairly routine job and flexitime, so with a lot of time management and hard work, no holidays and an understanding then-boyfriend (now-husband), I worked part time editing and full time in the library through 2010. Then in 2011 I made the decision to go part time at the day job, after making sure I was replacing my wages with my self-employed income. I came off the Certificate of Low Earnings (which lets people who don’t earn much from their self-employment not pay national insurance: something I only did because I was paying NI through my PAYE in the job). Later that year I dropped a second day of the day job and in November 2011 I resigned, starting full-time self-employment in January 2012 (at which point I got jury service for the first two weeks of January!).

It’s been a lovely part of my working life and one I hope never to leave. I have a reasonable amount of flexibility, working alone at home (but with lots of friends a Facebook messenger message or “meet me at the cafe!” request away). My earnings went up and then stabilised, I had a good year last year and I’m aiming to work a bit less this year to retain my flexibility. I’m grateful to my lovely clients, some of whom have been with me almost from the very beginning, and I now edit, proofread, localise and transcribe, so I have a lovely variety of work, from helping academics record the voices of their interviewees to sorting out philosophers’ words and making sure British people understand American companies. Here’s to the next ten years!

And to celebrate, I added two chunks to my Kiva portfolio and, with the repayments I had sitting in my account, made three loans to three entrepreneurial women around the globe:

  • loan Rosa
    Honiara, Solomon Islands

    A loan helps to buy bags of rice, biscuits, soft drinks, and noodles for her canteen (general store) business.

    $25.00

  • loan Jivtiben
    Kutch, India

    A loan helps to purchase kurtas, sarees, leggings, etc., to expand her clothing business.

    $25.00

  • loan Mwanaisha
    Makumbusho-Dar es salaam, Tanzania

    A loan helps to add stock of braids, weaves, earrings, necklaces, hair food, hair pegs, and hair treatments.

    $25.00

 
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Posted by on April 18, 2019 in Business, Celebration

 

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What I do when I’m not being Liz from Libro

IMG_20160823_174246954_HDRI’ve been away for a few days, running my first marathon, in Iceland (as you do). As I haven’t had time to write up a blog post on language or business for this week, I thought my readers might enjoy my report over on my personal (and usually book reviewing) blog. Do pop over to have a read!

 
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Posted by on August 24, 2016 in Celebration

 

Season’s Greetings from Liz at Libro

Reykjavik in the snow

Reykjavik in the snow

Season’s Greetings, however and whatever you celebrate, as we slip past the turn of the year and, in the Northern Hemisphere, the days get longer again.

I wish all the readers of this blog and Libro customers older and newer a happy, peaceful and healthy 2016.

2015 has been a good year, and I’m looking forward to achieving some personal and business goals in 2016. Thank you to everyone who’s helped get me to this position of freedom to be able to work hard, give back, maintain connections, read a fair bit and keep fit.

The Small Business chats and other blog posts will be taking a short break, but will be back with a vengeance in the New Year. I will be taking time off 24-26 December inclusive, and working part time between Christmas and the New Year.

With best wishes from Liz and the household.

xx

 
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Posted by on December 22, 2015 in Celebration

 

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Happy fifth birthday, Libro!

Libro birthday cartoonI started working for myself (very much part time) in August 2009 – so now it’s Libro’s fifth birthday!

What am I doing to celebrate? Well …

I’m having a little party today over on the Libro Facebook page … including a draw to win a free Kiva loan

I’m making some loans to Kiva (see below) and donating one to someone else

I’m celebrating the relaunch of my two main business books, with their new titles and covers …

… And I’m launching my new website devoted entirely to the books I write, where people can find info, links, reviews and news in one place

I hope you’ll join me in celebrating Libro’s birthday by popping over to say hello on the Facebook page or by doing a Kiva loan yourselves.

Happy Birthday to me!

Quick update: the Kiva competition in now CLOSED. Alison Mead won the free loan and was sent a voucher. I started new loans to a man selling spare parts in Benin, a travelling salesman in Paraguay and a food stall in Bolivia. These were all people who friends of mine had already lent to.

Kiva is an organisation that facilitates loans to small businesses around the world, who traditionally find it hard to raise capital. You commit from $25 upwards, and you can choose by gender, country, industry sector and individuals within those areas. They then pay the loan back to you in small increments – you get an update email on repayments once a month and sometimes updates on the individual or group you’ve loaned to, if the organisation handling the loan provides them. Once the money’s paid back, you can reinvest it or withdraw it if you want to. I love helping people to help themselves in this way; it feels like I’m helping to make a difference to another small business somewhere far away from me.

 
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Posted by on August 1, 2014 in Business, Celebration, Ebooks

 

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Happy Christmas 2013

Christmas 2013

Well, here I am with books, chocolate, dinner and friends – all that’s missing is Matthew and the cat … Happy Holidays to all of Libro’s lovely clients and all of the various Friends of Libro. Hope you have a good rest and catch up with the things that you like to do.

(Photo taken by Catherine Fitzsimons and reproduced with permission)

 
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Posted by on December 13, 2013 in Celebration

 

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Season’s Greetings 2012

165 L 3 day trip 2.78 Tozeur oasis

Season’s Greetings and Happy Holidays to all of Libro’s friends and clients. Thank you for a great first year of Libro full time, and here’s to a happy and healthy 2013 for all of us!

I thought we could do with a cheery pic, and there are many dates in the shops at the moment, after all …

 
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Posted by on December 9, 2012 in Celebration

 

Happy Birthday, Libro!

Happy birthday, Libro

I’m proud to celebrate Libro’s third birthday today! In August 2009, I really had no idea that I would be working for myself full time, doing such varied things as transcription, writing and editing as well as thesis proofreading, which is what I started out doing.

I am going to have a small celebration at some stage soon, perhaps with friends of Libro, perhaps just with Matthew. I was considering marking the occasion by buying myself something, perhaps a piece of jewellery. But then I had a better idea.

I’ve been doing Kiva loans for a while now: we’ve got two loans on the go and re-loan them as they get paid back. Now I’ve helped to fund five more women entrepreneurs (which means those loans will be on-going too and help more people as they get paid back). Kiva funds grassroots organisations that help people do small, sustainable things that will make a difference to their lives. Here are the groups and people I’ve chosen to donate to. I’ve also made a donation to LUCIA, a charity close to my heart, run by friends from the Library where I used to work, who do the same kind of work in Ethiopia.

So, I’ve helped these women:

These ladies are in Paraguay, where my friend Sandy spent her year out at University, and they make textiles, which is an interest of mine.

This lady from the Lebanon supplies special food for Ramadan – an appropriate time of year to lend to her!

This group of ladies in Mali (location of Timbuktu, twin town of Hay-on-Wye) have already had and repaid several loans.

This lady goes spear fishing to send her children to school. A bit different from sitting at a desk typing to afford to buy millions of books!

And this lady is from Georgia – I met someone from Georgia at the Social Media Surgery last month, so that seemed appropriate.

If you want to start using Kiva, you can have a FREE $25 Kiva loan to make to an individual or organisation: follow this link to sign up and get your first loan for free! (the management of Kiva have sponsored a certain number of free loans to encourage people to sign up).

Thank you for everyone’s support of me and Libro over these three exciting years. Here’s to the next three!

There had to be a cuppa and a bun somewhere in this post …

 
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Posted by on August 1, 2012 in Business, Celebration, Ethics

 

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Competition time

This competition closed in February 2012 so no further entries are being accepted!

It’s competition time! This is aimed at giving you a taste of what I do all day (in one of the areas in which I work). I’m going to give you two texts. Text 1 has a certain number of mistakes. Tell me how many on the form below! Text 2 needs to be helped to make sense. If you want to, write a new version in the form below.

Text 1

you shoul’dnt have gon eto the pub last night, it was a misstake,” She said, “how did i nkow that!’ said him.

Text 2

We need to concern about the incidences of bad spellling in the document and how they can be made made better. It influences on perception of the text in readers. However it makes it harder to understand. Because clearity is the main aim of all writing unless its v creation.






I will accept entries up until midnight in the UK on 10 February 2012. Winners will be decided by a panel of two and the prize is a Libro post-it note pad and notepad!

 
 

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What I got up to in December

In my previous years of Libro work, December has been really quiet, as people seemed to feel they needed to leave me alone for Christmas. This was usually a bit frustrating, as the University where I worked gave us a lot of time off over Christmas and I was raring to get on with stuff with nothing to get on with. This year, I knew I had Jury Service starting in early January, so I thought I’d be able to take advantage of the downtime to get a bit of rest, get some work done on my Iris Murdoch project and pre-write all the blog posts I needed to cover the time I’d be out of the office.

It didn’t quite work out like that! I’d have been even busier than this if two big writing projects hadn’t slipped back (through no fault of my own, just circumstances). I had Christmas Day off, but apart from that I worked pretty solidly. As we all know by now, I left my library job on 12 December, and I actually corresponded with a potential client the evening of my leaving do – I must have done a decent job with the good old Blackberry, as I ended up booking in the work for that week! I then went on to a mixture of pre-booked and just-in-time work for various clients, old and new …

Edited some articles for a local academic who’s a non-native speaker, including putting the documents and bibliographies into the specific format demanded by the publications for which they were written. Also edited English translations for two agencies, one in China and one in Poland, and did the usual checking for my long-term translator client and my French HR consultant who’s writing a series of blog posts.

I transcribed quite a lot this month: a long webinar for my novelist client (more of her later) and I had a large project for an agency, transcribing presentations given at an international conference by non-native speakers of English (on the whole: things got a bit faster when I got the odd British or American presenter, but it was all interesting!).

I wrote some web text and a downloadable “dos and don’ts” piece for my retail shelving client and had a chat on the phone with their new SEO people as I’ll be writing more web content for them in the New Year.

I proofread a PhD thesis and several essays and dissertations, both for my direct clients and the ones I work for via a larger student proofreading company.  I’ve got a couple of coaching clients booked in – I proofread their work but also make suggestions on how they can improve their written English, write out lists of common mistakes they make, etc., throughout their course.

Of course, that’s what we call proofreading, but isn’t really – I did also do a proper proofread on a long sectionof a big document outlining responsibilities and guidelines for the updated manual of a professional body, comparing the new version with the older one to make sure they matched but any dates were changed appropriately.

And I did a final line-edit on a novel by a successful self-published author. I had to read the first novel in the series so I could check for continuity, noticed the odd issue in that one and ended up doing an edit on that book, too, so I spent much of Christmas Eve and Boxing Day concentrating on fast-paced religious thrillers set in various catacombs and other exciting places – not traditional Christmas fare, maybe, but very interesting!

I did manage to work half days in the week between Christmas and New Year, more or less, with just some student work to get on with. And my lovely regular clients are all aware of the Jury Service and keeping things as light as possible for these two weeks.

In the end, December was a very busy and successful month, which encouraged me to think that yes, it was a good idea to leave the Library after all! I had my best month yet for income, which meant I nearly met the biggest of my three targets for the calendar year – so I set some ambitious ones for this year, too.

Things were a bit quiet on the networking front, it being the festive season, but I did have time for some socialising, and I also started my new blog, which is going to chart my experience as I take Libro full-time.

Libro offers copyediting, copy writing, proofreading, transcription, typing and localisation services to other small businesses, individuals and corporations. Click on the links to find out more!

 

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Season’s Greetings and Happy Holidays from Libro!

Just a quick post to say Season’s Greetings and Happy Holidays from Libro – and thank you to friends, Matthew and my lovely clients for making it a happy and successful year. I hope 2012 is full of health, happiness and success for all of you!

 
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Posted by on December 19, 2011 in Celebration

 

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