Reading Like an Editor To sharpen your critical skills, learn to read like an editor does (instead of the way a reader does). When you’re a reader, you enter the author’s world. You willingly suspend your disbelief in order to experience this world. That doesn’t mean you won’t notice if an author has made some… Read more How to Read Like an Editor
Beginning developmental editors sometimes ask me how “awful” books make it onto the New York Times bestseller list, and how can we worry about what makes a story “good” when obviously quality doesn’t matter to readers? How do “bad” books make it through the editorial process? In other words, your existential crisis is common and… Read more Growing Your Developmental Editing Mindset
Publisher Versus Private Clients When I’m doing a developmental edit for a book publisher, I usually have a much more extensive familiarity with the acquisitions editor than with the author, so while I’m careful to keep my queries and comments neutral and polite, as far as I’m concerned, authors come and go. It’s the acquisitions… Read more Differences in working for indie authors and publisher clients
Fact-Checking in the Editorial Process Fact-checking is verifying that the information included in a ms is accurate: World War I took place in the early twentieth century, production of Hummers stopped in 2010. An author (even a novelist) who gets facts wrong irritates and alienates readers, so one of our roles as dev editor is… Read more How and what to fact check in developmental editing
Initial Manuscript Assessment Before you agree to do an edit, you need to review the ms to help set expectations. If the ms will take more than one round of editing to develop—that is, it has more big-picture problems than you can reasonably address and the author can reasonably revise in one round—then you need… Read more How to do an initial manuscript assessment
What Does the Client Want? Because editorial functions can go by different names, the first rule of freelance editing (whether developmental or otherwise) is to figure out what your client wants. If your client says, “This manuscript needs a good editor,” you need to verify what that means. You may think it means a thorough… Read more Setting client expectations
The Importance of Separate Developmental Editing and Copyediting Rounds As I mentioned in my previous blog post, indie authors often want editors to combine DE and CE in one round of editing. I mentioned that one problem with doing this is the likelihood of overwhelming the author. Another problem is the complexity. There’s no point… Read more How (and why) to keep developmental editing and copyediting separate
What is the difference between a developmental edit, a critique, and a copyedit? It’s important to distinguish between an edit that is largely intended to deal with big-picture problems (the developmental edit) and one that is meant to catch the sentence-level problems (a copyedit). It’s common, especially when working with independent authors who can’t afford… Read more Editorial Distinctions
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 freelance business 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.… Read more How to get started in developmental editing
If you’re new to editing, you may not be familiar with the various roles different types of editors play. If you’re planning to work as a freelancer, it pays to understand who does what at a publishing company. This list is intended to help you figure that out. The Different Types of Editors The acquisitions/assigning… Read more What Do Editors Do?
