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When to Reject Your Editor

Last time I mentioned that when working in Track Changes with an editor, you should accept most, if not all, of the editor’s changes. It should go without saying, but listen to what your editor has to say.

Yes, there are bad editors who will try to impose their voice and vision over your own. And some editors have a tin ear—a writer at a conference once told me her copyeditor had replaced every gonna and coulda with going to and could have. When faced with those kinds of changes, reject away, kiddo.

At a conference last year, I heard Orson Scott Card say he had once received a manuscript back from a copyeditor who was apparently unfamiliar with science fiction and had therefore made hundreds of changes that ruined his story. The damage was so severe that he sent a copy of his original back to the acquiring editor and demanded a new copyeditor, because the first had fouled up the manuscript so badly that the job had to be started over.

Bad editing does happen. If you don’t trust your editor to give you good advice, then you need a new editor. Continue reading →

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Editing Your Book with Track Changes

When you work with an editor on your book, you will probably use the Track Changes feature in Microsoft Word. This can be a little daunting if you’ve never used it before, especially when you get a file back with more red on it than Sweeney Todd’s apron.

First, don’t panic. Remember your editor is there to help you, and those red marks are meant to be instructive, not destructive.

Schedule a time when you can go through your manuscript slowly. If there‘s a change you don’t understand, feel free to ask. Continue reading →

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How Much You Can Expect to Pay an Editor

When I wrote about where to find a good editor, I alluded to $500 for copyediting of a 100,000-word epic fantasy novel being a low-ball budget. So what is the going rate for copyediting or other such services?

In their book APE: Author Publisher Entrepreneur, Guy Kawasaki and Shawn Welch cite $1,050 as a reasonable rate for copyediting a 60,000-word manuscript. They note that “some people might argue that our costs are too high.”

Editor Pay

Photo by ra2 studio • Fotolia

Well, maybe some people would. But at $35 per hour, the rate cited is smack in the middle of the range given by the Editorial Freelancers Association. Continue reading →

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What to Look for in an Editor

Choosing someone to edit your book is like choosing someone to perform surgery on your child. You need to trust them completely. So how can you be sure the person you’re hiring is qualified? If, as I said last week, you asked other writers for recommendations and checked references, that should go a long way. But if you’re choosing someone out of a directory, or someone you’ve connected with through social media but without a recommendation, what can you look for? Continue reading →

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Where to Find Professional Editors

As I said last time, if you’re self-publishing, you need a professional editor. But where do you get one? There is no licensing standard for editors. Anyone with a fondness for reading and a bent for grammar can declare themselves an editor and start seeking clients. Many sites exist to pair this sort of freelancer with writers, but beware. At such sites, pricing often becomes a race to the bottom. Continue reading →

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How to Know When You’re Done Editing

As I noted when talking about editing a novel, writers often fall into an endless editing trap. You could go over your manuscript an infinite number of times and still find things to improve—or at least change.

A client and I once made two rounds of edits on his book. If he had asked for a third round, I would have had this talk with him, but he beat me to it. “How many times could we go back and forth like this?”

I said, “We have reached the point of diminishing returns.” He’s a finance guy, so he understood my meaning. There comes a time when further editing doesn’t produce a better book, it just produces a different book. Continue reading →

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Identifying the Passive Voice

I’ve written before about When Passive Voice is Permissible. Strunk and White admit that “Use the active voice … does not, of course, mean that the writer should entirely discard the passive voice, which is frequently convenient and sometimes necessary.”

active passive voice

Illustration by kikkerdirk • Fotolia

 

But one of the biggest problems writers face in critique groups is the problem of partners who flag passages as “passive” when they’re really not. Often verbs of being (be, is, was) are flagged as “incorrect” or “passive.” They are not. They are not particularly strong verbs, but they are not passive in and of themselves. Continue reading →