What Does an Editor Do?

I’m amazed at the number of first-time writers who think that they can call me up, send me their manuscript (MS), and let me go through it once — then send it off to McGraw-Hill, Penguin, or Scholastic and have the next Harry Potter on their hands.

It just doesn’t work that way. I’m a freelance, front-line editor and proofer. I get your MS into shape so that a full-time, publishing editor will actually put it in his pile of things to look at, rather than his slush pile or, worse, his garbage pile.

When you send me your MS, the first thing I’m going to do is reformat it. Generally, your MS should be in 12-point, monospaced typeface, such as Courier, double-spaced, with one-inch margins on all sides of the page. Yeah, okay, it’s not “pretty” that way, but the editors don’t care about pretty. They care about word-count and page-count. And they can estimate those two numbers a whole lot better if you give them a MS that’s in a standard font with a standard number of lines having a standard line-length.

Then I’m going to take out the old red pen — some editors use blue, but I prefer red. It stands out more and gets your attention. When you get your first-round draft back from me, it’s going to look like I bled on it. What your Freshman Comp teacher did to your first assignment in that class is nothing to what I’m going to do to your “baby.” So be prepared. First round is for focusing on spelling, grammar, diction (word choice), and consistency. If your hero was born in Tokyo on page 10, but says he was born in Osaka on page 96, I’m going to make a note in the margin. If your heroine has blue eyes on page 3, and you say that her “chocolate-coloured eyes slowly filled with tears” on page 27, I’m going to call you on it. If you invariably use “their” instead of “they’re” or “to” instead of “too,” I may note on the cover page that you need to do a universal search for the offending word and correct each instance yourself.

Once I’ve gone over the MS a couple or three times, I will return it to you for correction. If you don’t understand a correction, call or e-mail. A good, professional editor welcomes questions. She wants you to understand why she’s marked a change. At this stage, when you’re dealing strictly with mechanics, trust her. She’s gonna be right nine times out of ten. Indubitably. She doesn’t stay in business by giving you bad grammar advice. Happy customers come back and bring their friends — and she knows this.

After you’ve gone through and made corrections, you send the MS back to me and I proof it again. This time, I’m not looking so much for grammar and spelling, though I will probably catch a few of those. This time, I’m looking critically at the story itself. Does the plot make sense? Do the parts fit together well? This time, I’m looking at the story as a reader, and asking if this story is one that makes me want to keep reading. Have you changed viewpoints too much? Do you suddenly change styles? This time, when I mark notes in the margin, they will be more along the lines of suggestions, and you will want to discuss them at length with me before you accept or reject them.

After we’ve done that review of the second-round edit together and you’ve made the changes you accepted, I’ll go through it once more, just to make sure we haven’t missed anything really egregious. Then you are ready to start submitting to publishers.

This is a long process that requires patience and a thick skin. You are going to get rejections. Don’t get impatient and circumvent the process by self-publishing after a half-dozen rejections. Most of the self-published books in this world really aren’t worth the ink and paper they are printed on. There are a few exceptions, but the general rule is that if an author has to resort to self-publishing, he’s not really ready for the big-time yet. Publishers’ editors do know what will sell. They are keenly aware of the trends that readers are following, and of what is likely to succeed and what isn’t. And they do know talent — and lack of it — when they see it. A lot of new authors come on the scene every day, and many of them really need to spend some more time honing their craft, perfecting the art of writing, before they are ready for publication.

Be patient. Be prepared to take constructive — and even non-constructive — criticism, and learn from it how to better your writing skills. Your editor can help. But she can’t perform miracles. You’re not going to be published six weeks after you first give her your MS. But if you are prepared to work hard, be patient, and learn from doing, you might have a good start within a year or two.

Tags: editing, op-ed, publication