If your author-client is interested in trying to have their novel published by a traditional publisher, you may be asked to look at the author’s query letter (also called a pitch letter). Query letters are easy to get wrong, so here are some tips for making sure your author hits the mark. The pitch needs… Read more Query Letter Basics
One way to broaden your marketing reach is to work with other freelancers to mutually market your work. In other words, you can create a more formal relationship than “I’ll send referrals your way if you send referrals mine.” For example, maybe you and a colleague pitch a client a complete editorial package—you’ll do the… Read more Using Partnerships to Expand Your Reach
Use these questions to help you assess a manuscript in order to provide an editing quote – without having to read the entire ms first. In general, a developmental editor may be able to edit five-to-ten pages per hour (which includes writing the revision letter and reviewing queries), assuming the ms is in pretty good… Read more Keys to Effective Manuscript Assessment
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
