This is my favorite of your posts so far! Probably because I just finished the final round of edits on my new book. But you left out the group that's even worse than copy editors: proofreaders. At PRH/Waterbrook, they send it to a couple of proofreaders AFTER all the copy editing is done, and then you have to deal with their "I didn't follow this," or, "You lost me there," comments. I had one that absolutely didn't get any of my humor, in chapters where the humor made the whole point... frustrating. My wife and I realized that the manuscript has to be readable by everyone, so some proofreaders need to be of different educational and cultural backgrounds than the writer.
At the end of the project, all the edits make the book "just right" for as many readers as possible. Grateful for editors! (And even proofreaders)
Congrats on finishing the editorial process! That’s major.
It’s all about refining. We usually think everyone understands us—except they don’t. Everyone brings different assumptions and experiences to a text, all of which affect how they read and understand it. The editorial process is designed to help a book work with as many of those assumptions and experiences—as broadly—as possible. I still tell writers I work with today something I learned back when I was in publishing: clear is better than clever. The real magic happens when you push through the editorial process with your own style intact and yet still as accessible as possible.
I love this post! Thanks for a peek into the kitchen of how book sausage is made. I have a hyper-critical eye/ear when it comes to reading a book, article, story (or even a comment on a Facebook post). I often wonder how something made it past layers of copy editors and proof readers. When I got my first book published the editor suggested two punctuation edits and said, "this is the best manuscript we've ever received..." I guess I didn't know how high that praise really was. Thank you!
Wow! And you’d be surprised what can sneak through. The truth is a lot of developmental editors don’t have enough time to do thorough edits—there’s the pressure to be out acquiring new authors. You usually don’t see outright shabby work, but I do sometimes see a book where I think the editors either nodded off or pushed it through too quickly. Sometimes that happens because the author overruns their deadlines so far, there’s no time for a thorough job—and there’s revenue attached to that ship date.
Thanks, man! You’re right about editors being trained pros. They bring a critical faculty to the work that the author probably doesn’t have. That’s a tremendous value and prevents a lot of underbaked books from publication until their problems are fixed.
I also get the concern about moralistic copy editors. The job is help an author say what they want to say more clearly—not alter what they say or bring it into conformity with an agenda outside the book itself. Where that gets tricky, of course, is that the publisher will usually have pretty broad contractual authority to edit the book as they see fit.
This is my favorite of your posts so far! Probably because I just finished the final round of edits on my new book. But you left out the group that's even worse than copy editors: proofreaders. At PRH/Waterbrook, they send it to a couple of proofreaders AFTER all the copy editing is done, and then you have to deal with their "I didn't follow this," or, "You lost me there," comments. I had one that absolutely didn't get any of my humor, in chapters where the humor made the whole point... frustrating. My wife and I realized that the manuscript has to be readable by everyone, so some proofreaders need to be of different educational and cultural backgrounds than the writer.
At the end of the project, all the edits make the book "just right" for as many readers as possible. Grateful for editors! (And even proofreaders)
Thank you for another great post!
Congrats on finishing the editorial process! That’s major.
It’s all about refining. We usually think everyone understands us—except they don’t. Everyone brings different assumptions and experiences to a text, all of which affect how they read and understand it. The editorial process is designed to help a book work with as many of those assumptions and experiences—as broadly—as possible. I still tell writers I work with today something I learned back when I was in publishing: clear is better than clever. The real magic happens when you push through the editorial process with your own style intact and yet still as accessible as possible.
I kept meaning to get back to this one. Really great. I’m not an editor in any stretch of the imagination but I love the substantive part.
It’s rewarding work. And it’s fun when an author appreciates the work. It almost always improves the end product.
I've done it twice for friends who were self publishing. I feel like both times I made an impact.
I bet you were great at it.
I love this post! Thanks for a peek into the kitchen of how book sausage is made. I have a hyper-critical eye/ear when it comes to reading a book, article, story (or even a comment on a Facebook post). I often wonder how something made it past layers of copy editors and proof readers. When I got my first book published the editor suggested two punctuation edits and said, "this is the best manuscript we've ever received..." I guess I didn't know how high that praise really was. Thank you!
Wow! And you’d be surprised what can sneak through. The truth is a lot of developmental editors don’t have enough time to do thorough edits—there’s the pressure to be out acquiring new authors. You usually don’t see outright shabby work, but I do sometimes see a book where I think the editors either nodded off or pushed it through too quickly. Sometimes that happens because the author overruns their deadlines so far, there’s no time for a thorough job—and there’s revenue attached to that ship date.
Thanks, man! You’re right about editors being trained pros. They bring a critical faculty to the work that the author probably doesn’t have. That’s a tremendous value and prevents a lot of underbaked books from publication until their problems are fixed.
I also get the concern about moralistic copy editors. The job is help an author say what they want to say more clearly—not alter what they say or bring it into conformity with an agenda outside the book itself. Where that gets tricky, of course, is that the publisher will usually have pretty broad contractual authority to edit the book as they see fit.