Your editorial department is working well—until suddenly it isn’t big enough.

Maybe an editor is going on parental leave. Three publications have converged on the same deadline and there’s no way to shift the timelines. A major catalogue is ready for copyediting while your internal team needs to stay focused on working with curators and contributors. A new project requires multilingual editing or another specialization your existing team doesn’t have.

You need more editorial capacity, but you don’t necessarily need another permanent employee. And finding, hiring, onboarding, and managing several individual freelancers to pick up the slack can end up creating a lot of additional work for a team that’s already stretched thin.

This is where editorial support services from an outside organization will help the most. An editorial agency can supplement your existing team for a single project, provide fractional editorial support over several months or years, or bring in specialized editors as your needs change.

But what does it actually look like to have an editorial agency working alongside your team?

When Does It Make Sense to Bring In an Editorial Agency?

Organizations seek outsourced editorial services for many reasons. Sometimes the need is predictable: a museum has an exhibition catalogue going into production or an organization publishes a steady stream of articles that require editing every month. Other times, a department simply hits a temporary capacity problem.

Common situations include:

• A major publication or website project creates more work than the existing team can handle.
• An editor is going on extended leave.
• Several projects reach the editorial stage at the same time.
• An organization needs line editing, copyediting, proofreading, or another specialized editorial service that isn’t available internally.
• A project requires multilingual editors or translators.
• A team needs additional project management to coordinate authors, editors, files, deadlines, and deliverables.
• An organization is publishing regularly but doesn’t have quite enough work to justify another permanent editorial position.
• A project unexpectedly grows in scope and needs to scale up quickly.

Bringing in an editorial agency doesn’t mean replacing the editors or freelancers you already work with. In many cases, the goal is the opposite: to give your existing team more capacity so that they can concentrate on the work where they will make the biggest impact.

At a museum, for example, an internal publications team may have deep institutional knowledge and strong relationships with curators, artists, educators, and outside authors. Rather than shifting their attention away from those relationships when production gets busy, the museum might bring in outside copyeditors or proofreaders to handle later stages of the editorial process.

How Does Working With an Editorial Agency Begin?

A successful editorial partnership starts with understanding what is already happening inside your organization.

At Flatpage, we begin by talking with a new collaborator about their project or ongoing editorial need, focusing on the people involved, the project’s audience, current challenges, and any existing workflows, deadlines, or content. This allows us to recommend an approach based on the organization’s actual needs rather than trying to fit every client into the same predetermined editorial structure.

For a one-off publication that might mean assigning two copyeditors to work simultaneously so that a large volume of text can be edited within a tight production schedule. For an ongoing publication it might mean establishing a regular workflow in which articles are sent to the same editors each month. For temporary staff coverage an editor might become more closely embedded in the organization’s existing team and systems.

The scope can also determine how the work is priced. Depending on the engagement, editorial support might be scoped by the hour, by the word, by deliverable, or through a weekly or monthly retainer.

Establishing Editorial Standards

One of the first things we ask a new collaborator for is their style guide.

A strong style guide gives an external editorial team a common set of standards for everything from capitalization and punctuation to organization-specific terminology. It becomes particularly important when a project involves multiple authors and editors.

If an organization doesn’t have a style guide, that doesn’t prevent the project from moving forward. Developing or expanding one can become part of the onboarding process.

This is also the time to learn about the organization’s audience, voice, terminology, accessibility requirements, and other editorial priorities. Meetings with internal project managers and other relevant stakeholders help an outside editorial team understand not only how an organization writes but also how it publishes.

Fitting Into Your Existing Editorial Workflow

Hiring outside editorial support shouldn’t require rebuilding your entire workflow around the agency.

During onboarding Flatpage works with the client to determine how files will move between teams, who will communicate with whom, how deadlines will be tracked, and where project information will live.

We use Basecamp for our own editorial project management, and clients can join us there when it makes sense. But we can also work within a client’s existing systems, whether that’s a project-management platform, content management system (CMS), spreadsheet, Microsoft Word, Google Workspace, or another collaborative tool.

The format also depends on the work. A book or exhibition catalogue may be best edited in Microsoft Word, while a regularly updated blog might work better in shared Google Docs. A digital publication may require editors to review content directly in a CMS.

The objective isn’t to add another app or administrative step. It’s to establish a workflow that allows the two teams to work together with as little disruption as possible.

Who Manages the Relationship?

Ideally the client designates one primary point of contact who works with the agency’s project manager. This creates a clear channel for questions, schedules, files, and feedback.

That doesn’t mean the agency can’t work with the rest of the organization. Depending on the engagement, outside editors can attend recurring meetings, communicate directly with authors, work with different departments, and coordinate with other stakeholders.

Some organizations want to retain all project management internally and send materials to Flatpage only when they’re ready for editing. Others want us to help manage the process, including communicating with outside authors, tracking deadlines, assigning editors, and coordinating production.

Both approaches can work—the choice depends on your needs and preferences.

What Does One-Off Editorial Support Look Like?

Project-based support works well when an organization has a defined publication or a deliverable with a clear beginning and an end: a book, exhibition catalogue, annual report, research publication, website, or similar project.

For the 2024 Venice Biennale, for example, Karen Marta Editorial Consulting (KMEC), a museum book packager, brought Flatpage in to provide copyediting for the Stranieri Ovunque—Foreigners Everywhere exhibition catalogue and guide. Two Flatpage editors worked simultaneously on approximately 300 short artist biographies as well as essays and interviews written by an international group of contributors. The editors were selected for both their copyediting expertise and their backgrounds in art history and exhibitions. The project took place on an ambitious schedule of approximately two months and involved at least two editorial passes on each text.

In an arrangement like this, the outside agency isn’t taking over the publication. Instead, it assumes responsibility for a defined part of the process and supplies the editorial capacity and expertise needed to move the publication through that stage.

The result can also be increased capacity for the organization managing the larger project. KMEC noted that working with Flatpage enabled it to expand the number of projects it could take on while maintaining a consistent editorial partner.

What Is Fractional Editorial Support?

Not every editorial need has a fixed endpoint.

Fractional editorial support allows an organization to add editorial capacity without necessarily creating another permanent position. Think of it as flexible editorial staffing: an organization gets the expertise and capacity it needs for the period when it needs it.

Here are some instances when an organization might need fractional support:

• An editor is away for several months
• A publication needs copyediting every week
• An internal team needs ongoing proofreading support
• An organization regularly publishes multilingual material but doesn’t have editors on staff with the necessary language skills
• Several departments send content to a central editorial team that has reached capacity
• Publication volume fluctuates significantly throughout the year.

The arrangement doesn’t have to look like a traditional part-time job. An editor could work a set number of hours, while another organization might reserve a certain amount of editorial capacity each month. A predictable stream of content might be priced on a retainer or by deliverable.

Fractional support can also involve more than one editor. That flexibility is one of the important differences between adding a single temporary editor and working with an agency.

How Can an Editorial Agency Scale With a Project?

Individual editors tend to have particular strengths. One might be an excellent academic line editor. Another specializes in copyediting art publications. Another might be a native Spanish speaker who can compare an English source text with its Spanish translation.

An agency can build a team around those differences.

For a complex publication that might mean assigning a line editor first, followed by a copyeditor and then a proofreader. A multilingual project might require editors working across several languages. A project with highly specialized content may benefit from matching different sections with editors who have relevant subject-area knowledge.

And when the volume of work increases, additional editors can be added so that a single person doesn’t have to absorb an unrealistic workload.

Flatpage’s recent work with Bloomberg Connects provides a larger-scale example. The project began in 2022 with ongoing copyediting, proofreading, and editorial project management for digital guides produced by cultural organizations. Flatpage assembled a larger editorial team under a dedicated editorial manager, with editors selected in part for subject-area knowledge relevant to the participating institutions.

The work subsequently expanded into multilingual editing. As of September 2026, Flatpage has edited more than 1,100 guides in seven languages, totaling more than 19 million words.

This kind of scalability is useful when an organization can’t reliably predict whether next month’s editorial workload will require one editor or several.

How Does Multilingual Editorial Support Fit In?

Multilingual publishing introduces another kind of capacity problem. Your existing editors may know your organization and content exceptionally well but not have the language expertise needed for every publication.

An editorial agency can bring in bilingual or multilingual specialists for those portions of the workflow without requiring the organization to maintain all of those language capabilities internally.

That might involve translation, editing content in another language, or comparing translated and source-language versions to identify discrepancies and help maintain consistency. Flatpage provides multilingual editorial services for cultural organizations and other clients, and its work on Bloomberg Connects has included editing in languages such as Spanish, French, Dutch, German, and Japanese.

The same principle can apply to subject-area expertise. Rather than expecting one editor to know every field represented in a publication, an agency can match editors with the content they are best equipped to handle.

What Does Ongoing Editorial Support Look Like Day to Day?

Ongoing support doesn’t necessarily require a huge editorial operation.

Open Global Rights, an online publication previously hosted by the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice and the Future of Rights Program at NYU School of Law and now based at Friedrich-Alexander University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany, offers another model. The publication produces approximately 8–12 articles per month by academics and practitioners writing about international human rights issues. Flatpage provides ongoing content and copyediting support for the platform.

A recurring arrangement like this allows an organization to establish a consistent editorial process rather than finding and onboarding a new editor every time another article arrives.

Continuity matters for a project that may extend across months or years. Whenever possible, keeping the same editors on an account allows them to become familiar with the organization’s style guide, audience, terminology, preferences, and workflow. At the same time, the agency model makes it possible to add specialists or capacity when the work requires it.

Editorial Agency, Freelancer, or Employee?

There isn’t one staffing model that’s right for every editorial department.

A freelancer can be an excellent choice when you know exactly what work needs to be done and can locate an individual with the right expertise and availability. Many organizations maintain long-standing relationships with freelancers, and working with an agency doesn’t require replacing them.

A permanent employee makes sense when an organization has both a stable, long-term role that belongs inside the institution and enough work to support that position.

However, an editorial agency becomes particularly useful when the need is variable or complex: you need several editorial specialties, your workload changes from month to month, you need to scale quickly, or you don’t have the internal capacity to recruit and manage multiple outside editors.

The agency handles the work of finding editors with the appropriate skills and qualifications, assembling the team, and managing that editorial capacity. The organization can then engage that team according to the amount and type of support it actually needs.

What Does Your Internal Team Remain Responsible For?

Outside editorial support works best when responsibilities are clear.

In most engagements the client remains the expert on its own subject matter. Museum curators know their collections and exhibitions. Researchers know their scholarship. Program teams know their initiatives. Communications departments know their organization’s audiences and goals.

Those people usually generate and develop the content, whether internally or with outside authors. The editorial agency then helps refine, standardize, manage, and prepare that content for publication.

The same principle applies when many subject-matter experts are reviewing a manuscript. The agency can help consolidate files, identify inconsistencies, and query unclear or conflicting material, but substantive institutional decisions should generally remain with the organization.

The goal isn’t to transfer ownership of the content. It’s to create an editorial process that allows the people with the right expertise to concentrate on the work they’re best suited to.

Project-Based or Fractional Editorial Support?

One useful way to distinguish between project-based and fractional editorial support is to consider whether you’re trying to finish something or keep doing something.

If you’re producing an exhibition catalogue, book, report, or other defined publication, project-based editorial support may be the simplest approach. The scope, schedule, editorial stages, and deliverables can be established around that project.

If you’re publishing a regular stream of articles, temporarily replacing a team member, managing ongoing overflow, or consistently finding that you need a skill your internal team doesn’t have, fractional editorial support may make more sense.

The distinction isn’t rigid. A one-off project can reveal an ongoing need, and a project-based relationship can evolve into regular fractional support. Likewise, an ongoing arrangement can expand and contract as publication schedules change.

Start With the Editorial Challenge

You don’t need to know whether you need a line editor, copyeditor, proofreader, project manager, multilingual editor, fractional editor, or an entire external editorial team before you speak with an agency.

Start with the problem.

Maybe your publication team can’t take on another catalogue without delaying something else. Maybe your managing editor is going on leave. Maybe your organization wants to publish in three additional languages. Or perhaps the volume of content has just gradually grown until a system that used to work no longer does.

Those are editorial challenges—understanding them clearly will help determine the staffing or service solutions that will help you deal with the problem in question.

Flatpage’s editorial support services are designed to fit into existing teams rather than replace them. We can provide support for a defined project, step into an ongoing workflow, or assemble an editorial team that expands and contracts with your publishing needs.

If you’re not sure what kind of editorial support would work best, schedule a consultation with us. We can talk through how your team currently works, where the pressure points are, and what an external editorial team could look like within your existing workflow.