As any editor will tell you, myself included, is that our job is time consuming, tedious at times as well repetitive a lot of times. It's a lot of work whether it's for our books or for clients' books. On the flip side, it's very rewarding and it gives your clients and your readers a look into what your style is.
You never want to put work out there that's poorly edited because that's the first thing critics pick up on. I'd rather an editor tell me my plot was bad or he didn't like my story than to tell me my book was poorly edited. You can recover from a bad plot a lot quickly than you can recover from someone saying your book wasn't professionally edited. What those outside the grind doesn't realize is, editing is a job that requires sitting in front of a monitor a very long time reading ever word, looking at spelling, tense, sentence structure and a lot of other English factors. When editing fiction, there are other factors, we must consider such as what are the rules and when the rules can be broken. There are other factors to working as an at home editor that ruins your grind but I'll stick to the process of editing at this point.
Despite what people tell you, there are no secrets to editing. No shortcuts, no corners to cut. There are several kinds of editing out there and there's a procedure to all of them. It can't be rushed and every I must be dotted and every T crossed (literally). Treat it like a house being built. If you have plans to build or improve on a house, you can't deal with constant delays. Also you can't cut corners or the house would not be safe for those living in it. For authors, it's not safe for their career to cut corners on their manuscripts. Their career as well as your career would be ruined. You don't want that to happen on any accord. Just remember whatever you do or don't do as an editor affects your client's career as well.
Honestly, there are no secrets to getting anything in this world. The only way to get from point A to point B is hard work. The only way to success, a bigger income, or any chance of coming out from under is hard work.