Looseleaf Editorial & Production

Book Editing & Design

editors

Weekly Roundup: 2/4–2/10

by Leave a Comment

Jeff Norton: Follow the Editor: A Recommendation Engine for Readers

This interesting piece looks at how editors, though vital to the traditional book-making process, are unknown to readers (unlike, for example, film directors and such). Norton postulates that traditional publishers could benefit from making their content curators—their editors—more of a branded selling point than they currently are.

Marie Brennan: Anthropological Warning Signs and How to Spot Them

Fantasy author and “ex-academic” Marie Brennan sheds some light on how to evaluate your research sources. Though this isn’t super publishing-related, I thought some of you fiction writers might appreciate some pointers on how to do good research. Brennan is in the middle of researching for a new novel, and she dissects an anthropology book to show you warning signs of bad research. If you’re not familiar with anthropology, but you use it for backstory and background information, it’s a helpful read.

Joshua Blimes: Do the Math

Agent Joshua Blimes breaks down the differences in author royalties for traditionally published hardcover, mass market paperback, and electronic books. He also tackles the differences for top-tier and mid-list writers, and ends by recommending that authors access P&Ls to help them calculate what sort of advance they should be able to negotiate out of a publisher.

When Should You Hire an Editor?

by Leave a Comment

As an all-purpose freelance editor, I field projects in all stages of development: brainstorming, developmental editing, line-by-line polishing, and the final spit-shine of proofreading. However, some individuals who contact me have projects that are not ready for an editor. If I take projects in all stages of development, how can any project be unready?

It depends on the project, and it depends on the author. First and foremost, before writers hire an editor, they should do enough work to make themselves proud. There are three main reasons why you should contract outside help with your writing, and the third reason doesn’t apply to everyone.

1. You have done all you can and you want your work to reach another level.

As per the Looseleaf editorial philosophy, I believe editors should help writers become better writers. That can’t happen if you, as the writer, throw down whatever comes to mind and chuck it at an editor. Chances are, you’ll chuck over a lot of stuff you could have fixed yourself, which means the editor wastes his or her time (and yours) fixing things you already know how to handle.

If you have 20 pages of a novel and a skeletal outline, you don’t yet need an editor: you need to write. If you have a manuscript with a chapter you know how to fix, you don’t yet need an editor: you need to revise.

But if you wrote the whole thing and tightened up all the chapters and sentences you could and you still want to take it up a notch, it may be time to bring in an editor. An editor can find what you couldn’t see yourself.

2. You have a specific change you want to make, and you’re not sure how to do it on your own (or that change would be many times easier for fresh eyes).

Many people rightly hire an editor when they have a specific task they want accomplished, but aren’t sure how to go about it. Some writers need to cut thousands of words but can’t decide what needs to go. Some researchers want to repurpose their work to reach a lay audience but don’t think they can see what needs to be changed. You might also need to condense a cast of characters, streamline your argument, or find where your plot won’t hold water.

This is a good time to get outside help. You have a specific task in mind, which makes it easier for the editor to help you.

This reason also applies to tasks like copyediting and proofreading, which are much easier for fresh eyes to do. For these types of editing, your specific task is taking out grammar, punctuation, and stylistic errors, and it’s easier for an editor to do that because he or she will not already be neck deep in your prose.

3. You’ve done all the work you’re keen on doing, but you need more work done.

The third reason most often comes up with researchers and businesses that are on tight deadlines. If you’re someone who needs to write to communicate, but you don’t pride yourself on your writing, then you might write the basics of what you need and have an editor to fix it up. Could you have done the task yourself? Maybe, but then again maybe you don’t consider writing your best work. Maybe your best work is the research, the ideas behind the business, or the conceptual work. The phrase-by-phrase writing doesn’t concern you as much, so passing that part to an editor or ghostwriter frees up more of your time for the parts in which you excel. You get to do more of the work that makes you proud.

I don’t recommend this reason for individuals who pride themselves on being writers. It’s rare for this reason to apply to a novelist, for example, because novelists are known primarily for their writing. Once you’ve done all the writing work you can, then you’re ready for an editor, and you can claim your own work with pride.

The Looseleaf Editorial Philosophy

by 1 Comment

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.

Image by markuso via FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Before You Hire an Editor, Know What You Need

by Leave a Comment

Before you hire a freelance editor, you need to decide what type of editing you want right now. It’s also good to know what types of editing you’re going to want in the future; sometimes you can work with the same editor through the whole project, or you can at least work with people your editor refers you to.

You need to know what type of editing you need because editors are not wizards. You can’t take a book you think isn’t quite there, hand it off to an editor, and get it magicked into complete perfection. Editors can help you improve your writing and hone your craft, but they can’t force absolute quality on you (even if they could, it wouldn’t really be your book afterward). The clearer you can be about the type of help you want, the better an editor can help you. An editor cannot effectively edit everything from commas to character arcs all in one go. That takes multiple passes over a manuscript, and you, the author, should be revising after each pass to make sure the piece stays true to what you want it to be.

Writing a story or nonfiction piece means creating a path from beginning to end, and ideally that path will have scenic vistas along the way. Editing involves trying to make that path clear and enjoyable for your reader. If you take the path-making metaphor a bit farther, you’ll understand why you can’t have someone do story-level developmental editing and sentence-level copyediting at the same time. You don’t hire a lumberjack to pull weeds; you don’t hire a golf-course manicurist to move massive boulders. Understand the task you want to hire out so you can hire the right person.

Developmental Editing (Story Editing)

Developmental editing is large-scale editing. In this type of editing the editor makes sure there are no redwoods blocking the path you’re trying to create for the reader. It also includes pointing out any opportunities you may have missed. Perhaps you could have pulled more tension out of a character’s relationship; maybe you ignored an argument your opponents will make; then again, maybe you just have a big plot hole or lapse in logic. A developmental edit involves multiple editorial passes and a lot of editor–author interaction to hone and develop your plot or argument, tone, characterization, and more. This is the lumberjack-and-boulder-removal level of editing. If a developmental editor also tried to do copyediting along the way, he or she could easily miss some uncharacteristic dialogue because he or she was more focused on the punctuation of a nonrestrictive clause.

Learn more about developmental editing from this Looseleaf blog post. Another editing service that is related to developmental editing is the manuscript evaluation or critique.

Substantive Editing (Line Editing)

Substantive editing goes into more fine-tuning than moving boulders: it’s more like clearing the path of hedges and shrubbery and making sure it’s as direct as possible. Substantive edits cover organization, logical flow, word choice, internal consistency, and more. It can go as big as reordering paragraphs and as fine as tweaking a word to sustain your tone. Often a substantive edit can include a lot of copyediting because it is more sentence- and word-based than developmental editing. However, it should not be confused with a true copyedit. Substantive editing involves a lot of tweaking, reordering, and decision-making from the author. By the time the edit is done you’ll have changed a lot of text, and any time you make lots of changes you need to go back and make sure the details of those changes are clear.

Learn more about substantive editing from this Looseleaf blog post.

Copyediting

Copyediting looks at the potholes and pebbles along a manuscript’s path. The editor shifts word and punctuation debris so readers won’t twist their ankles while enjoying your story. Everything gets edited for grammar, spelling, punctuation, style, consistency, and adherence to your chosen citation format (this could be everything from the color of your characters’ eyes to how you capitalize certain words and phrases). Sometimes copyediting isn’t necessarily a right-or-wrong type of thing. There are some language scenarios in which you’ll have more that one option. It’s a copyeditor’s job to make sure you remain consistent in which option you choose.

Learn more about copyediting from this Looseleaf blog post.

Proofreading

Proofreading is a lot like copyediting in that it’s concerned with potholes and pebbles. However, a proofread is performed on the final version of a publication. It should always be done by someone who hasn’t previously edited your work (Looseleaf uses some trusted subcontractors to do the proofreading on projects I’ve already edited). The proofreader catches last-minute errors and items that you, the author, would change yourself if you had your attention drawn to them. Proofreaders also catch formatting errors like over-spaced lines, misplaced hyphens, widows and orphans, word stacks, and inconsistent typeface use. Anything that will disrupt the reader’s final experience gets caught during proofreading.

Learn more about proofreading from this Looseleaf blog post.

An Editorial Relationship

If you want a long-term working relationship with a particular editor, make sure you can get all the types of editing you’re going to need from that editor or from professional acquaintances of that editor. By working with one individual or a collection of close contacts, you’ll be better able to retain your vision and voice across the different stages of editing. For example, when I hire out final proofreading on projects I’ve edited, I review the proofreader’s changes to make sure they don’t go back on anything the author and I have previously talked about. This helps retain the author’s intentions and goals for the project.

Before you hire, know what you want. You’ll be happier with your final product and you’ll save a lot of negotiation with your editor if you can articulate what it is you want him or her to do.

Image by Rob Wiltshire via FreeDigitalPhotos.net

What the Editors Are Looking For

by Leave a Comment

Something writers often hear is that they should submit their novels and sotires to editors and literary agents who will be a “good fit” for their work. The reasons for this are twofold: “good fit” editors are more likely to offer you a contract and they’re more likely to “get” your novel and share a vision of your work.

A concern I’ve often heard is that authors are afraid big, scary, corporate editors will overhaul their stories. That fear is greatly diminished when you know the editor gets your book—which is why you want a good fit editor. This is something most authors understand.

The trouble some writers on the traditional publishing road run into is that it’s sometimes tricky to figure out what individual editors like because they work behind the curtain. Yeah, you know the book came from Tor, but who inside of Tor worked on it? A lot of times you can find that information by looking in the acknowledgements in published books similar to yours. Pub Rants, a blog from Kristin Nelson of the Nelson Literary Agency, often has her impressions of what editors in general are looking for during a given season or year. There are also small contributions like the one I’m about to give you: my specific observations from speaking with four editors at WorldCon.*

Jim Frenkel (Tor)

Jim is looking for “really good books,” which isn’t very helpful for most people who are already pretty sure they have one of those. But if you’ve already got a really good book on your hands, Jim is pretty open in terms of genre. He’s edited science fiction, fantasy, mysteries, thrillers, historical fiction, and engaging science-related nonfiction. He’s hardly picky.

Right now a book he was excited to talk about is Lady Lazarus by Michele Lang. If you don’t know already, it’s a historical urban fantasy set at the beginning of World War II in an alternate universe where the main character is the last in a long line of Jewish witches who help keep demons from meddling in human affairs.

Jim also mentioned that he does agenting on the side and works a lot in foreign rights, so I would be inclined to believe (though he never actually said this) that he thinks at least somewhat on a global scale.

Liz Gorinsky (Tor)

Liz was one of this year’s Hugo nominees for Best Editor, Long Form. She has a background in comics (and she’s starting to get her fingers into more of those again), and she prefers more literary-style fiction. (Since “literary” is such a non-descriptive word: She recently edited Shades of Milk and Honey by Mary Robinette Kowal, if that helps you peg one aspect of what she considers literary.)

Moshe Feder (Tor)

Moshe was also a Best Editor, Long Form, Hugo nominee. He’s the editor for Brandon Sanderson and Dan Wells (to give you some reference points for his taste). Moshe has a background in science fiction, so he appreciates magic and worldbuilding that make sense (which explains why Sanderson’s almost scientific magic systems appeal to him so much).

One thing Moshe stressed while I was speaking with him was how he strives for empathy and understanding in the author–editor relationship, even with authors whose books he passes on. That isn’t to say that other editors don’t strive for it too—both Jim and Liz said that they want authors to have authority over their books—but it was a point of emphasis for Moshe in our particular conversation.

Lou Anders (Pyr)

Lou has been nominated for Best Editor, Long Form, five times, and this year he took the Hugo home. When one of my friends (the lovely Charlie Holmberg) asked him what he was looking for in a book, initially he answered with an abstract measuring stick. If his wife has to ask him what a manuscript is like and he just meanders through a list of its merits, she’ll let him know he needs to put it down; if instead she has to force him to sit down and finish reading the manuscript because he’s so excited to tell her about it, he knows it’s something he needs to buy. (So essentially, he wants writers to be brilliant.)

After the more abstract description he was able to give some definite genres he’s looking for, though. He digs sword and sorcery (he even edited an anthology of short stories in the genre) and epic fantasy. He watches ebbs and flows of interest and developing ideas carefully. He knows the history of speculative fiction genres and he has it in mind when he’s looking at fiction. If you’re a writer who flourishes in the “anxiety of influence,” try running your stuff through Pyr’s open submissions pile.

I mentioned more about Lou’s preferences when I posted about publisher’s styles, so you can find those there if you want more information about what he’s looking for right now.

There are, of course, many more editors than these four—but these are the ones I’ve met and spoken with recently, so that’s all I’ve got for you right now.

*Please remember to take my observations with a grain of salt. I’m hardly perfect.