For awhile it probably seemed to some friends and family that Rebecca Faith Heyman had pursued an expensive degree at NYU without any intention of actually using it. She did her undergraduate and graduate degrees there, both in English, and while many of her classmates secured internships at the big publishers and magazines, Heyman spent her summers working service jobs in hotels and restaurants. "When I got out of school I wasn't really sure what to do," she told me recently. "I had started teaching yoga, which is not, as you can imagine, terribly lucrative."
But despite forgoing the traditional publishing route, Heyman had always held an interest in book editing, and what with her advanced degrees in English she thought she could give it a try. So in 2007, right around the time of the Amazon Kindle's debut, she signed up for a couple online freelance marketplaces, the kind where potential clients post jobs on which freelance editors bid. At first, many of the jobs she took on were for simple proofreading, but when she began offering tentative feedback on the editorial structure of a manuscript she was surprised to find a receptive audience.
