I work as a freelance marketing consultant, which means that my days are hugely varied. I currently do a mix of copywriting, working directly for authors, working for publishers and working for the Book Marketing Society, an industry body.

I have two young children who are at home all morning, and they are not very understanding of ‘Mummy is working now, please don’t bash on my keyboard’. So although I ‘work from home’ for most of the week, I only work in my actual home in the afternoons, when one child is at school nursery and the other is asleep.

For the rest of the day, I head out.

Today, for example, I went to a coffee shop and then headed over to our local library. I’ll then head home for lunch and work in the living room or bedroom in the afternoon. A couple of times a week I work at a friend’s house for the day (while she’s in the office), which is a great set up.

Some days I work specifically for one publisher, in which case my day would look a bit different, but today, I’ve been:

• Doing a bit of brainstorming around a big project I’ve just started working on. It’s for the launch of a new list within a major publishing house, and I’m coming up with the social media and email strategy. I wasn’t due to start working on it until next week, but I had a meeting yesterday and a lot of thoughts around it, so wanted to get them all down on paper.
• Responding to queries in the BMS inbox. They are in the final stages of becoming a members’ organisation (previously they were part of a larger entity), which involves changing their invoicing and membership programme, so there are a fair few emails to deal with each day regarding that.
• Scheduling activity for two Facebook pages I look after. The pages are pretty big author/series brands, but Facebook pages can be a challenge to grow with the algorithm changes. Today I spent some time with the team in-house thinking up some new ideas for the coming month.
• Finishing up some course material for an online course I’m taking with the AllBright Academy, all about setting up your own business.
• Starting this post for whitefox.

Once I’m back at home, I have a short afternoon, as I look after the kids after nap/school on Fridays, so I’ve just got a couple of things planned in. I need to:

• Finish up this ‘Day in the Life’ post.
• Have a client call with someone whose business plan I’m consulting on.
• Reply to a potential new client who wants help with her marketing plan, blurb copy and metadata.

As you can see, there’s a lot of variety, which is something that is really important to me! I am really grateful that since going self-employed, I’ve had a lot of interesting projects to work on. My passion is helping publishers and authors reach more readers and sell more books, and I’m so happy that’s what I get to do day after day, in different guises!

Katie Sadler is a marketing consultant and mentor. You can find out more about her services here and sign up for her monthly newsletter, Noted, here.