When you’re a newer editor, success – that is, booking clients regularly enough to pay your bills – can feel elusive. And when people who’ve been working as editors for twenty years give advice, it can feel as if their gems of wisdom aren’t especially pertinent to the current year. So, I asked some students…
Many freelance editors are interested in getting editorial work from book publishers and packagers, and often they’re so focused on landing the client that they don’t think about setting expectations for their work. Then the first project is assigned, and they have less time than they normally have with indie authors, they’re asked to sit…
A lot of editors ask me how to get started in freelance editing for publishers (so many that I actually started a class to show you how to get editorial work from book publishers and packagers). Other than having the skill to do the work, the most important element in successfully freelancing for publishers is…
Line editing for parallelism sometimes requires being a line editor detective—solving the sentence-level issues to take a manuscript to the next level. Editing Detective: Line Editing for Parallelism As a line editor, sometimes the problems I catch are obvious (“Roy laghed at the joke”) but sometimes they’re not. Sometimes being a line editor is a…
Line editing for filter words is a skill to master for line editors. Tips on Line Editing for Filter Words Filter words in fiction are words that get in the way of the reader experiencing the moment. These often relate to senses: “I saw John get out of the car” instead of “John got out…
Getting work as a freelance editor is always a challenge, and my colleagues sometimes see an opportunity when a local business or other organization publishes a newsletter or blog post with errors. They ask me, “I’m thinking about pointing out the errors and offering my editorial services for pay. What do you think?” I think…
I’m frequently asked, “How do I get my first client?” This is one of those questions that can take three hundred pages to answer. But I did want to provide an overview answer to this question. First, I want to distinguish between a beginning editor who has no idea what they’re doing and needs to…
When I encounter a manuscript with a sagging middle, the very first thing I turn to is the conflict. Is there a clear conflict in the ms, and is it of sufficient weight to support a full story? Conflict drives narrative. Without it, we often have a lot of splashing around that makes everyone wet…
Ah, the sagging middle. Also called the muddle, the slog, the struggle, and other depressing nicknames. The middle of the story is known to cause existential dread among authors as they toil over it. You’ve surely encountered problems with a sagging middle before in a novel you’ve read. A story starts off with a bang!…
Back when I edited a custom magazine, I assigned and edited a package about an upcoming event (similar to a business conference) which included profiles of some of the attendees and speakers, a how-to-get ready checklist, a travel piece on side trips to take at the location, a celebration of highlights of the event over…