Ideas on Fire is thrilled to sponsor ACES VCON26, the online conference for editing professionals, taking place September 16–18, 2026.
The three-day conference brings together editors from across industries and career stages for conversations about editorial craft, business, professional development, and the future of the profession. We’re excited to connect with fellow editors and share some of what we’ve learned from more than 17 years of editing and indexing interdisciplinary scholarship.
Find Ideas on Fire at ACES
Throughout the conference, attendees can visit our virtual booth in Whova to learn more about Ideas on Fire, our approach to interdisciplinary scholarly editing, and the ways we invest in editorial professional development.
We’ll also be sharing free resources for editors who want to better understand the broader scholarly publishing ecosystem, including the Ideas on Fire Publishing Series, our free online event series featuring conversations with acquisitions editors, journal editors, authors, developmental editors, copyeditors, book designers, indexers, marketers, and other publishing professionals.
And if you’re a developmental editor specializing in scholarly books and book proposals, be sure to stop by: Ideas on Fire is currently hiring developmental editors in the interdisciplinary humanities and social sciences.
We’ve gathered everything in our Ideas on Fire Guide to ACES VCON26, including resources for scholarly editors, free publishing education, ways to connect with us during and after the conference, and more.
Join us for The Freelancer’s Exit Strategy
Ideas on Fire founder and CEO Cathy Hannabach and editorial director Rachel Fudge will also be presenting at the conference.
Their session, The Freelancer’s Exit Strategy: Mid-Career Actions to Set You Up for a Great Retirement, takes a long view of what it means to build a sustainable freelance editing career.
Retirement planning can easily get pushed aside amid the immediate demands of finding clients, meeting deadlines, managing business finances, and actually doing the editing. Cathy and Rachel will help editors think further ahead, exploring practical financial and business decisions that can create more choices in the later stages of an editorial career.
The session is designed primarily for mid-career and senior editors, with plenty for earlier-career editors who want to start planning ahead. While many of the specific financial and retirement systems discussed are US-based, the broader questions of career longevity, financial sustainability, and planning for an eventual transition out of freelance work apply much more widely.
Supporting Editors Beyond the Conference
Sponsoring ACES is a natural extension of our commitment to supporting the people who make scholarly publishing possible.
At Ideas on Fire, that means cultivating editorial expertise within our own team, creating spaces for editors to learn from one another, and sharing resources that make the often-opaque processes of scholarly publishing easier to understand. It also means thinking seriously about what editors need to build sustainable, intellectually rewarding careers over the long term.
We’re looking forward to learning alongside the ACES community, meeting editors from across the profession, and contributing to conversations about where editorial work is headed next.
Attending ACES VCON26? Explore the Ideas on Fire Guide to ACES for everything you need to find us at the conference and keep the conversation going afterward.
