A question I’m often asked is, “Authors can be confused by what kind of editing their manuscript needs. How do you handle that? Whenever an author reaches out to me, I ask them a bit about their past experience – have they published before, and if so, did they have a traditional publisher or did…
In any profession, having contacts can help you succeed. Yet most of us don’t start off knowing anyone who can help us get published. I’ve often said, “It isn’t who you know, it’s who you get to know.” Successful writers read books and blogs, join writers’ groups, attend conferences, and somehow eventually connect with the…
When I talk about the author’s work of addressing areas of concern, I call it revision to distinguish it from what an editor does, which is editing. Most people writing and speaking on the subject don’t distinguish between the two but since I write a lot about the interaction between the editorial process and the authorial process, I…
I’ve heard developmental editors talk about “sensing” that a story isn’t working, even going so far to say that “sensing” problems is their job. And sensing that something is going wrong is a useful skill for a developmental editor to have—all of us do, to one degree or another. But developmental editing isn’t about “sensing”…
It’s important for editors to recognize that authors have different stages of ability: Most of our author clients are at Stage 1, 2, or 3, and how we shape the edit will depend on which it is. If we expect an author at Stage 1 to be able to spot their own errors, we aren’t…
Editors with some experience often come to me with concerns about sustaining their business. They’re usually in a particular niche, such as copyediting mystery fiction, and they’ve stalled in some way – they don’t have quite enough clients and they’re not making quite enough money. But we know that niches are a great way to…
I’m on LinkedIn quite a bit because it’s a good place to talk about Club Ed. Sometimes on LI people share stories about why they want to quit their jobs. While I am well accustomed to bad boss behavior, this recent one made my jaw drop: “I’m at a funeral and my boss is texting…
One of the lessons I’ve learned over many years of editing is that you have to let the manuscript teach you how to edit it. Every manuscript is different and every manuscript needs a different touch. Even when an author does something I’ve seen many times before, I have to edit for that particular manuscript,…
If you’re interested in editing – whether copyediting or developmental editing – it pays to become used to a few basic editing resouces. What’s Your Style? Most of my clients have wanted me to follow The Chicago Manual of Style with some variations, and that is standard for book publishing, so it pays to become…
As a developmental editor, you’ll occasionally (maybe even frequently) encounter clients who need more than what you can offer in a developmental edit. Sometimes they don’t have the skill to do the necessary revision or they simply don’t have the time to do the writing. In these cases, instead of sending the client off to…