Looseleaf Editorial & Production

Book Editing & Design

Kristy S. Gilbert

Looseleaf Developmental Editing

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This week I’m going to look at each of Looseleaf’s editorial services and tell you what they are, when you need them, and some tricks you can use to do some editing yourself before you hire it out. Today is developmental editing day.

Editing ScaffoldingWhat Is Developmental Editing?

Developmental editing is also called story editing, book editing, or book doctoring. It’s large-scale editing in which I make sure your book doesn’t have any lapses in logic, character consistency, plot plausibility, argument rationality, or tone. It means digging into the meat of your manuscript and finding where it can be better. Maybe you can get more tension out of a character relationship or you can make a stronger point by refuting an opponent’s argument. I make sure that scenes and sections are happening in the most effective order; that characters’ dialogue is organic, engaging, and consistent; and that the choices you’re making as a writer are the most effective for communicating with your audience.

Essentially, a developmental edit looks at the same things as a manuscript evaluation, except after I grasp the overarching idea of your story, I dig into each chapter, scene, and paragraph and comment on how to make each one more effective for the whole. I do very little on the sentence level unless something is repeatedly problematic (i.e., a character always uses words in a weird way or there’s a consistent tendency to grammatically obscure your point).

Developmental editing normally requires multiple passes. Because the fixes I recommend are larger, sometimes a change will either introduce new problems or uncover smaller issues that were hidden by the larger one. After you make your changes, it’s a good idea to run it past me again.

When Does a Manuscript Need Developmental Editing?

A manuscript needs developmental editing if you’ve received a lot of feedback that says something about the manuscript “just isn’t working,” and you want help making it work. Often copyediting and substantive editing will not help a story or argument that isn’t working on a larger level.

Developmental editing is also a good idea if you’ve gotten manuscript evaluation–type feedback and you want help applying it throughout your manuscript. If you want to work closely with someone who knows your work and understands your goals while you’re developing your story, initiate an editorial relationship and dig in.

How Can Authors Developmentally Edit Their Own Work?

Hiring a developmental editor is a big commitment: this type of editing tends to be the most expensive and it usually involves more passes than other editing types. So before hiring an objective eye, you may decide to use your own first so the editor you hire isn’t telling you things you could have figured out yourself. Here are some questions to ask yourself while you’re editing:

  • Does this section/scene/chapter communicate my purpose to my audience?
  • Would this paragraph/section/scene/chapter be more effective earlier or later? What would I gain from a change?
  • How can I communicate this character’s personality better?
  • Does this scene or section do double duty? (For example: In a narrative, is the scene showing character as well as moving the plot? In instructive nonfiction, is this section communicating new ideas and reinforcing what readers should take away from the book?) How could it be made to do double duty?
  • Is this scene/section/chapter consistent with the tone of the book? (A humorous chapter could be great on its own, but farce in the middle of a tragic book may ruin the book’s effect on a reader.)
  • Is this action consistent with the character I’ve created? Is it stereotypical or cliché?
  • Is this bit of dialogue didactic or stilted?
  • Is this a logical progression of the plot or argument?
  • Does this element of the book support or erode my theme?

Many of these questions are hard to answer on your own because you will be close to your manuscript and might be blind to the problems. But the better your manuscript is when you hand it over to an editor, the more useful the editor’s feedback will be.

Other Editorial Services

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Looseleaf Manuscript Evaluations & Critiques

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This week I’m going to look at each of Looseleaf’s editorial services and tell you what they are, when you need them, and some tricks you can use to do some editing yourself before you hire it out. I’ll post about one service a day, in the order a manuscript typically undergoes them in a full publishing process. That means today is manuscript evaluation day.

What Is a Manuscript Evaluation?

Manuscript Critique ScalesWhen I evaluate a manuscript, I read the whole thing in as few sittings as I can manage. This allows me to look at how the book functions as a whole: the plot arcs, the character arcs, the promises the writer made at the beginning, whether or not those promises paid off in the end, etc. I look at repetitive quirks the writing has (do you always use –ing phrases?), consistency in the dialogue, and anything else I can think of.

I do not edit grammar (though if there is a grammatical error the author consistently makes I’ll make a note of it), I don’t consider whether single sentences might be better placed differently, and I don’t tighten the wording. All that is for later, more fine-tuned editing. Manuscript evaluations are for grasping the big picture and making judgment calls about it.

When I’m done reading and making notes to myself, I write up a multi-paged letter (the length depends on the length and quality of the manuscript I’m evaluating) in which I discuss things that work well, things that don’t, recommendations, and cautions about where you need to be careful about the fixes you employ.

When Does a Manuscript Need an Evaluation?

There are three times when you might want a manuscript evaluation: early, late, and in a special case.

Early. If you’ve finished your manuscript and you’re about to dig in and do heavy revisions, you might want a manuscript evaluation to give you some guidance. A manuscript evaluation will point out the things you should keep and the things that need tweaking, so that editor letter can come in handy as a road map for getting started.

Late. If you’ve been querying and submitting and people are asking for your partial or full manuscript, but ultimately they’re passing, you might consider a manuscript evaluation to figure out why. Sometimes you won’t get detailed feedback from the people you’re querying; you will get it from me. This can help you hone a manuscript and get it past a brick wall.

Special Case. If you have something specific you want to do with your manuscript, but you’re not sure how, a manuscript evaluation can again give you the road map. Maybe you need to cut a substantial amount from your manuscript but you’re too close to the work to see what can and should be cut. Maybe you’re trying to popularize a scholarly work for a general audience and you’re not sure if what you’re doing is effective. Whatever the special case may be, announce that purpose in your request for a manuscript evaluation and I can focus on that purpose in your editor letter.

How Can Authors Evaluate Their Own Manuscripts?

If you’re early in your revision process, you may choose to evaluate your manuscript yourself or use free alpha or beta readers. When you’re doing evaluations, keep a few questions present in your mind:

  • Who is your audience? Are you communicating to that audience?
  • What insights are you communicating? Do you communicate them well?
  • Does your tone change a lot over the course of the manuscript, or in unpleasantly unexpected ways?
  • Are your characters flat stereotypes or fleshed-out people? Are they consistent and competent? Are their arcs believable?
  • Is the dialogue didactic or stilted? Does it feel organic and unique to each character?
  • If you’re writing informative nonfiction, is the takeaway explicitly linked to what you’re saying, and is it apparent what you want the reader to take away? (This is also relevant to fiction and creative nonfiction, but subtlety is more advised in those genres.)
  • Are there any sentence constructions or errors that are repeatedly problematic?
  • Are there any lapses in logic or plot holes?
  • What is your theme? Is the theme present throughout? Is that theme useful to your target audience?

More questions will likely apply to your manuscript, and you’ll have things you want to ask yourself throughout based on your individual story or purpose. But these basics can get you started in the right direction. As always, the more objective you or your beta reader can be, the closer you’ll come to an editorial opinion.

Other Editorial Services

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Weekly Roundup: 10/29–11/4

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Locus Online: World Fantasy 2011 Winners

Locus Online has posted the results of the World Fantasy awards, which were awarded at the World Fantasy Convention last weekend. I haven’t read the best novel (though I’ve read or will soon have read much of the short list), or any of the shorter fiction, but I am in the middle of reading the winner for best anthology, My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me, edited by Kate Bernheimer. Thus far I’ve found it excellent. My review will come out after I actually finish reading all the stories.

Nathan Bransford: Are You Participating in NaNoWriMo?

In case you writers didn’t already know, National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) started earlier this week. If you’re up for the challenge, commit to writing 50,000 words in a novel this month. If you want to get in on the biggest online party the writing community has, jump on the NaNo bandwagon. If you haven’t started already though, you’re going to need a boost to make up this week’s word count. So look to Nathan Bransford’s compilation of NaNoWriMo-related advice.

Publishers Weekly: Survey Says Library Users Are Your Best Customers

This week PW put out an article describing a new research survey that illuminates the contribution libraries make to the publishing industry. Many readers report buying books of authors they have read in the library, and there are a host of other findings.

Liz Castro: Where Should an Ebook Begin?

Ebook wiz Liz Castro explains how to make your ePub file guide a reader to the first chapter of your book when a reader opens it (instead of, say, the cover). I disagree with Liz—I like to see the cover first—but I do agree that the frontmatter of ebooks can get painfully excessive. Outside of the table of contents, I’m a fan of putting what is traditionally frontmatter (like copyright pages, etc.) at the back of the file.

David Carnoy: Amazon Launches Free E-book Borrowing for Prime Members

Now as a part of Amazon’s $79.99/year prime membership, Kindle owners can borrow one ebook at a time, free of charge, with no due date. Kind of like Netflix, but for books, and the prime membership also includes Amazon’s video service. Not all books are a part of the program, as it depends on publisher consent.

Canto: The New Font from Font Bureau

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Canto Typeface SamplesAlthough I may not have enough knowledge to be considered a font nerd, I’m certainly a fan (I leave the nerding to other members of the Looseleaf team). Last week I got an email from Font Bureau announcing its newest font family: Canto, designed by Richard Lipton.

I’ve gotten a few announcements from Font Bureau since I joined its mailing list, but Canto is the first new release that really piques my interest.Check it out. Look at the PDF sample. Look at closeups of the different options. Elegant, fun stuff. I’d love to see the bold brush style on a book cover somewhere. The optional swashes (like the fancy N in and at the bottom of the snippet I show in this post) and optional ligatures give it a lot of diversity and plenty of options for titles. (Look at the Canto characters sheet to see what each character looks like and what the optional characters bring to the table.)

Canto is a bit like Trajan, which is probably a typeface more of you are familiar with, only it has more options and an organic touch.

For any of you who aren’t familiar with professional fonts, no, Canto is not free for download. Richard Lipton and the other folks at Font Bureau need to make a living too, and I’m sure this beauty took a good chunk of time and effort. It is available for purchase, and you can buy individual styles or the whole family. If you’re an indie author looking for a brand font, Canto wouldn’t be a bad option to look into.

Weekly Roundup: 10/22–10/28

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Guido Henkel: Amazon Introduced New Kindle eBook Format with a Major Misstep

Guido Henkel points out that Amazon’s new Kindle format isn’t supported on older Kindle devices. Amazon certainly isn’t the first to roll and update like this, but that doesn’t make it ideal. I know it’s not exactly the same situation, but when Sony updated its bookstore so all books came in ePub format, Sony paid for my ereader to be shipped to their shop and given and upgrade so the new format would work on my clunky, archaic device. I really appreciated that. It’s a bit annoying when you pay a company for a piece of their hardware and then that company releases updates that can’t apply to your device.

Christopher Priest: Are You Watching Carefully?

Christopher Priest writes an article about the genesis of The Prestige for Fantasy Magazine. I greatly enjoyed The Prestige, so it was fun to read this bit of background on the novel.

Intelligent Editing: Consistency Mistakes

Intelligent Editing shows the most common consistency mistakes that writers make in their manuscripts. Consistency helps your reader understand you meaning; when you switch between hyphenating or capitalizing a phrase or not, you signal a change in meaning to your reader. If you don’t actually intend a different meaning, you end up confusing your reader. Being aware of common inconsistencies helps you avoid them yourself.

Mike Shatzkin: Can Big Publishers Actually Do Tech and Make Books at the Same Time?

Mike Shatzkin discusses some changes rumbling through the big publishers: they’ve started to get into the tech game. But his article’s title raises an interesting question: can and should publishers be splitting their attention between books and technology? This applies as much to Amazon as it does to traditional publishing houses. Can you have core competencies in both stellar technology and stellar content?

Prose Tip: Simultaneous Syntax

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Quill-and-ink writingWhen fiction writers come to me and ask me to add some spit shine to their prose, there’s a pair of problematic sentence constructions I’m almost guaranteed to run into (nonfiction writers also use these construction, but not as often). These two constructions are grammatically correct, and sometimes they are appropriate to use, so they’re hard to catch. But once you know what to look for, it’s fairly easy to keep a wary eye out for these sentences when you’re revising your work.

These sentence constructions center around
–ing words and as. Permit me two examples:

  • Pulling out her red pen, she sighed.
  • As her eyes hit another –ing sentence, she reached for a match.

The Problem

As you may have noticed, and as I’ve already pointed out, neither of these two sentences is grammatically incorrect. As far as correctness goes, they’re completely sound. The problem with these two sentence types is twofold: 1) you’re making some of your action subordinate to other action, and 2) you’re making two actions simultaneous.

Subordinate action. The first issue is kind of like the argument against passive voice: these constructions minimize action and weaken the impact. As editors Renni Browne and Dave King* say:

Both these constructions take a bit of action … and tuck it away into a dependent clause. … This tends to place some of your action at one remove from the reader, to make the actions seem incidental, unimportant.

If that’s what you intend to do, then you have no problem; using these constructions will be just what you need.

Simultaneous action. The second issue is something you should consider any time you use one of these two constructions. The syntax of these sentences means that both the as or –ing clause and the other clause happen at the same time. In my examples, she pulls out her red pen and sighs at the same time. That’s not a problem. The problem arises when your characters start doing impossible simultaneous things.

  • Pulling on his shoes, he ran out the door. (You can’t run and pull on your shoes at the same time.)
  • She pulled open the door, climbing the stairs. (Unless the staircase is really short, it’s unlikely she can open the door at the top while she’s climbing. Alternately, if the stairs are on the other side of the door, there’s no way she can climb them while she’s opening the door.)
  • Jumping astride the horse, he tucked the trinket into her hair. (I’m not even sure what this guy is doing, but I’m pretty sure it can’t be done all at once.)

Lesser Problems

The other problems with these constructions exist mostly because the constructions are difficult to use properly. The subject of your sentence needs to come immediately after the comma (i.e., Jumping astride the horse, he tucked the trinket into her hair; not Jumping astride the horse, the trinket was tucked into her hair) and you need to punctuate them properly. If you don’t set it up right, then not only are impossible simultaneous things happening, but generally impossible things are happening (how the devil does a trinket jump astride a horse?).

Even if you use them properly, be wary of using these constructions too often. They’re just unconventional enough that they stick out a bit, so if you overuse them your writing starts to draw attention to itself (instead of the story) and it begins to feel false.

The Cure

The cure for these constructions is a pretty simple one: don’t use them. Here are all my examples reworked:

  • She pulled out her red pen and sighed.
  • Her eyes hit another –ing sentence: she reached for a match.
  • He yanked on his shoes and bolted out the door.
  • She pulled open the door and started climbing the stairs.
  • N/A (The last sentence was too messed up for me to fix without knowing what’s going on, and I didn’t think through my example that far. Is the horse a she? Is there another she on the horse?)

If you use one of these constructions, consider whether or not you mean what you’re saying. Is the –ing or as action really subordinate? Do both actions really happen at the same time? If the answer to both questions is yes, then using one of these grammatically correct methods is perfectly all right. But as I mentioned before, be wary of using them too often, even if you use them correctly. If it starts standing between your reader and the story, even the most elegant prose needs to meet either a red pen or a match.
_________________________

*This quote is taken from Self-editing for Fiction Writers, by Renni Browne & Dave King. I highly recommend this book to writers who want to do all they can to polish their work before handing it off to an objective eye (whether that’s a reader, a publishing house editor, or a freelance editor).

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The Looseleaf Editorial Philosophy

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Looseleaf Freelance EditingEvery writer works differently—there are a lot of similarities between many writers, but no two work the same way or come up with the same end products. Similarly, every editor works a little differently. Even when it comes to copyediting, different editors do things differently. When you, as a writer, are looking for a freelance editor to help you with your work, it’s important that you find one that fits you.

In the spirit of giving you all the information you need, allow me to give you a rundown of the Looseleaf editorial philosophy. There are three main principles: editors exist to help writers be better writers, words need to communicate to and capture a reader, and books belong to their writers.

Editors Exist to Help Writers Be Better Writers

There are some services out there that exist to help make books better. However, Looseleaf isn’t about taking a manuscript and making it into an awesome book. It’s about working with a writer on a manuscript to help make that writer a better writer. The manuscript will become a better book as a result, have no doubt about that, but my primary focus as an editor is to help writers do what they want to do, only better.

This means that when it comes to changes bigger than commas or colons, I’ll be writing comments to you, the author, so you can understand why I thought a change was necessary and why what I did fixes the issue. I’ll expect that if you don’t understand my comment (or if I made a change you don’t understand because I forgot to comment on it) you’ll ask me to explain myself. I expect to be available for questions during and after an edit.

If you want to hand your manuscript over, have it polished, primped, primed, and packaged into perfection by someone else, Looseleaf may not be for you. Make no mistake: I’ll be digging in and doing as much tinkering, tweaking, and fixing as I can to make your vision a reality. As it says on the Looseleaf home page, “We’ll help you achieve the clarity, credibility, and style you need to reach your audience.” But my primary goal will be to help you be better, not just your book.

Words Need to Communicate to and Capture a Reader

Looseleaf editing is very reader-centric. If there’s something you like to do in your writing that isn’t strictly correct but will still communicate and carry your credibility to a reader, I’m not going to touch it. If it’s something that will make a reader think you don’t know what you’re doing, or that will force the reader to read your words more than once to understand them, I’m going to recommend a change.

This means that many “rules” are flexible. For a hyper-formal, scholarly audience, I might recommend that you don’t split your infinitives (i.e., “to boldly go” would be changed to “to go boldly”); in a young adult novel, I won’t touch your slang unless it’s so heavy I think it will make your book sound dated in two or three years, or that you won’t be able to get any crossover audiences with it. I will always be considering your reader, not just the rule book.

Books Belong to their Writers

Some writers fear editors: this minority considers editors to be a group of people who meddle with a creative individual’s work and take it away from the creative source and beauty it originally had. However, I subscribe to the mentality described by legendary editor Maxwell Perkins:

I believe the writer … should always be the final judge. I have always held to that position and have sometimes seen books hurt thereby, but at least as often helped. The book belongs to the author.

Everything I do to or suggest for a manuscript exists to help you and the reader communicate more effectively. You have ideas you want to communicate; your reader wants to engage with and receive those ideas. I will make suggestions and explain the reasoning behind them; I’ll tell you why they should be made. But the final decisions always belong to you. Because you’re the one with something to say; I’m just here to help you let that idea loose.

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Weekly Roundup: 10/15–10/21

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Page from the Book of KellsChristopher Butler: How Disregarding Design Limits The Power Of Content

This is a pretty long article from Christopher Butler that talks about how design can shape and inform meaning and interpretation. It’s especially relevant today when design is so fluid—ebooks change from device to device, etc. Butler points out that the problems with fluid form aren’t problematic for everything, but fluid form does present limits that are problematic in some instances.

Kevin Canfield: Can Harper Perennial Reinvent Publishing?

In this article Kevin Canfield examines how Harper Perennial is staying nimble and relevant in today’s publishing climate. It’s a good look at how publishers can adapt to the opportunities available today.

New York Times: Authors to Get Sales Data Online From 3 Big Publishers

The New York Times reports that three big publishers are implementing online access to sales data that they will release to their authors. This is a great change, in my opinion. Authors have been a bit starved for information in many situations—that’s one of the appeals of epublishing. Changing that discrepancy will strengthen publishers’ positions in the market.

Duolit: Get Noticed: 5 Steps to Boosting Book Publicity

The team over at Duolit gives out five key points for publicizing your book. Their tips help you look professional and prepared. Another piece of their advice—having your publicity plan figured out before you publish—is key to publicizing your books properly.

Writing Excuses: Endings

Writers often get a lot of advice about starting out and beginning, but advice on endings is a little harder to come by. Lou Anders returns to Writing Excuses to discuss sticking your novel’s ending.