The Editorial Process
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How do you become a freelance editor?
Editing, developmental editing in particular, is not an entry-level position, especially for a freelancer. You can’t just announce that you’re open for business and expect to do well and gain clients. To succeed, freelance editors typically need a bachelor’s degree in English, journalism, communications, or a related degree along with writing and editing experience. However,…
How to get started in developmental editing
You probably landed here because you like books. Maybe you’ve always wanted to be an editor or maybe you think it would be a good side gig to get into. But you don’t know exactly what being a good editor means or how one would go about acquiring the necessary skills to do it well….
How do you gain experience as a freelance editor?
It’s that age-old conundrum: if you don’t have editing experience and all the editing jobs require experience how do you get experience? First, and most important, almost any kind of job you have or have had almost certainly has transferrable skills if you think about it in the right way. So, for example, if you’re…
All fiction can be improved
Recently I read a LinkedIn post from a proofreader who is interested in becoming a developmental editor (DE). They said something along the lines of, “I’ve been studying classic works of literature and although I can’t practice development on them because they can’t be improved, they do teach a lot about effective writing.” And while…
Why I use statements, not questions, in editorial queries
Some editors ask authors questions in the editorial queries (the comments an editor makes on a ms.) For these editors, a typical query/comment might be, “What are you trying to accomplish here?” or “Do you mean for Martha to sound so cruel?” Often such editors feel that they’re prompting their authors to think about what…
What is developmental editing?
Developmental editing is sometimes called content editing, substantive editing, or story editing. The focus is on the big picture, not on sentence-level concerns although we may make sentence-level edits to address the big-picture concerns. For fiction, a developmental editor looks for problems in plot, including implausible plot events and timeline errors; character development, including the…
