The Best Money You Ever Spent: An Editor
Whether you’re an indie author or shopping your work to agents, there’s no better investment you can make in your manuscript than to spring for professional editing. I don’t mean a do-it-yourself program that hunts out verb and subject agreement. I mean real, live editors—people who have spent their careers reading books, especially in your genre, and who know the English language cold, including all the slippery areas that change from generation to generation. Who can bring a fresh and educated eye to your writing and have no dog in the fight. They’re paid to tell you the truth, and they will.
Why, You Ask?
No matter how good you are at these things—even if you’re an editor yourself—nobody can read their own work objectively. Even proofreading. No matter how many times you go over your manuscript, you will miss things like reversed quotation marks. And have you ever had the computer decide that, when you typed me, you meant metadata? That won’t show up on spell check. The reading public may not care about the literary quality of your book, but they demand a clean copy, without egregious errors of grammar or words used just not quite right. Or especially typos and spelling errors. It’s the basic qualification of a professionally written book. Otherwise, it just looks amateurish and will hit that agent’s slush pile immediately. Because you could have done something about it.
Now What?
There are several kinds of editing, and I recommend using them all. We can sum them up in three general categories, although you’ll hear different names in use. First comes the content edit. The content editor is sometimes called a developmental editor. They take a critical look at your plot (in the larger sense). Do the characters all act the way such persons would? Are there any plot threads left to tie up at the end? Is the action convincing, believable? Does the reveal come as a surprise, or is it too predictable? Do the style and subject of the book fit within the expectations of its genre? You might think of the content edit as checking the skeleton of your work. These are the things that hold together the book—plot, characters, themes, etc. A professional beta-reader will give it much the same kind of going over, but in less detail. And I mean professional. Your writers’ group buddies may catch some of these things, but unless they’re trained, they’re likely to be too easily satisfied. This is really a critique of your writing skills, and criticism can hurt. Still, you’ll learn more about your trade from a good editor than in any classroom.
Step Two
The second stage of the editing process is the line edit. This draws the fine-toothed comb over the texture of the writing on a sentence-by-sentence level. Have you used the same word several times on the same page? Is there an unclear antecedent somewhere? (Sure there is, and you’re not likely to see it yourself because you know what you mean!) Does that great metaphor not quite make itself understood? An editor who is impartial and experienced will help you perfect your writing style, and this, too, is worth its weight in gold.
And a Final Polish
Now your copy edit, which is often—erroneously—called proofreading. This should come at the very end of the manuscript stage, because in making changes, you may well have introduced errors. You know what a copy editor looks for—the same sort of thing that will set the reader’s teeth on edge if it isn’t cleaned up before it hits the shelves. Once the type is set and the proofs are ready to go to the printer, that’s when the proofreader swings into action.
One person may do all levels of editing, or you may pass it along to two or three different people. There’s something to be said for the multi-editor approach, because the more eyes that look at your manuscript, the more likely it is that they’ll catch everything, but the choice is yours. And brace yourself—editing isn’t cheap. Prices do vary widely, and the more experienced editors (that is, the better ones) will often be among the more expensive. Because the descriptions of services may mean different things to different people, be sure you know exactly what your editor(s) are going to give you before you pay! But there’s nothing else you can do for your writing that will make more of a difference to the end product. Think of it as investing in a short course in good writing! My thanks to Mary Ann for clarifying some of the terminology of editing.