Looseleaf Editorial & Production

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From This Reader’s Shelf

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Today I’m going to take a timeout from being a Serious Editing Professional and let you in on a secret: most every editing professional is a hopeless, passionate book lover. Don’t let them fool you with their comma-tinkering, fierce plot critiques, or official-sounding titles. Many of them are astute, professionally trained, and incredibly skilled, but underneath those things, they’re enthusiastic readers. I’m no different.

To give you a peek at my reader-life, today I’m going to share a look at my bookshelf. This is a special bookshelf: it’s transient. I’m in the middle of a months-long visit to an Air Force base, but since it’s only months long instead of a year or more, my husband and I left most of our books in my parents’ shed in Utah (thank heaven for their free space; we stole plenty of it). Here are all our books, minus books of scripture, those in foreign languages, and those I’m currently reading.

Kristy G. Stewart's Bookshelf

The Breakdown

Some of these books are titles Mr. Stewart and I have acquired since arriving here: you’ll see both Thief’s Covenant and The Rook, books that have only come out since the start of the year. There are also some necessary work-related books: the two most recent versions of The Chicago Manual of Style (or as I like to call it, BOB, for Bright Orange Bible); Eats, Shoots & Leaves; Editors and Editing; and Rewriting (which is the most useful book I’ve ever found about academic writing). Not shown is the APA publication manual.

Seven of the books directly draw on folklore or collect folktales. Yes, I read both the tales and the commentary included in The Classic Fairy Tales (edited by Maria Tatar). That’s the black book between Eats, Shoots & Leaves and Best-Loved Folktales of the World.

There’s only one book of poetry (prose is more my speed). Unless you count my Poe collection, which has both poetry and prose.

Yes, I have a complete collection of Poe covered with creepy red decor. I also have a less-complete collection packed in my parents’ shed.

Genre-wise, there’s biography, YA, dark fantasy, satirical fantasy, science fiction, horror, war fiction, nonfiction, and instructional books on screenwriting and typography. There is also a whole host of classics, but they’re contained in that sneaky little eReader on the bottom left, hidden beneath Billy Collins. (I don’t love my eReader, but I love that it carries my classic library for me.)

The books that are horizontal on the bottom of the shelf are books I brought because I am frequently set upon by sudden impulses to re-read them, so I couldn’t bear to leave them. Included in that list is Night Watch by Terry Pratchett, one of my favorites in his repertoire, which is also hidden in the eReader. If I had a hard copy, I would have brought it.

I haven’t read four books on this shelf: John Adams (I just haven’t been able to sit down to a page commitment that big since we got here), the Dean Koontz books on the right (recent acquisitions from my father-in-law), and The Hundred Dresses on the top left (a recent acquisition from my mom).

Kristy G. Stewart's "Currently Reading" Stack

In addition to that abused shelf, I have three books that I’m currently reading or am about to read. They migrate through the house with me, from kitchen to couch to bedroom and back. One of them (The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland) just arrived today, and it’s hard to make myself wait to open its covers. I probably won’t hold out much longer.

If you could only bring one shelf’s worth of your books with you on a months-long expedition, which ones couldn’t you do without? Do you ever read more than one book at a time?

(Rules: Saying “I’d get an e-version of everything and just take my Kindle” doesn’t count unless you really do have your entire library on your ereader. In which case, if you only had a shelf’s worth of memory on your ereader, which files would you keep?)

Weekly Roundup: 1/20–1/27

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Angry Robot: The Return of the Open Door

Angry Robot LogoAngry Robot, a publisher of science fiction and fantasy, ran an open door submission policy for a month last year. They’re going to do it again, but with slightly different rules. They will only accept epic fantasy, and they will only accept submissions that follow the format and standards laid out in their open door submission guide. Unless you write YA, in which case any type of SF&F is cleared for you to submit to their YA imprint, Strange Chemistry. Submissions will be made through the Angry Robot website April 16–30. That means you have a few months to get your manuscript completed and finalized before you send it in.

(To learn more about my thoughts on Angry Robot’s publishing style, see my post here. I’ve also reviewed one of their books, Lauren Beukes’s Zoo City, here.)

Gini Dietrich: Reading Fiction Helps Your Career

Remember last week, when instead of posting a weekly roundup I posted about how important stories are? On Tuesday of last week, PR pro Gini Dietrich posted about the same thing, but in a different context. She cites a thick chunk of research to back up her claim that reading fiction helps your career. See? Stories are important to your daily life as well as to your world citizenship.

Digital Book World: Bookseller Backed by Big Publishers Advocates Abandoning Digital Rights Management

Anobii, a bookseller whose stakeholders include the UK arms of HarperCollins, Penguin and Random House, is hoping to leave DRM behind. They’ve got good reasons too, including trying to give Kindle users more options.

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.

Image by markuso via FreeDigitalPhotos.net