Thinking Fiction: An Open Letter to the Fiction Publishing Industry

© Carolyn Haley, Fiction Columnist

Dear authors, editors, publishers, and readers:

I think we can all agree that novels exist for entertainment, enlightenment, and education — ideally in balanced combination.

Authors, your job is to create those stories. Take your vision — whatever it might be — and write it out with all your heart and soul, in the best language you can compose.

Editors, your job is to help authors refine their vision and language so their stories are clearly and easily comprehensible to the people who want to read them.

Publishers, your job is to convert authors’ visions into consumable products aimed at the people most likely to be receptive to the content and appreciate it. (For authors who self-publish, the idea is the same.) Then help get the word out.

Readers, your job is to seek out the kinds of novels you enjoy reading, expanding your tastes and horizons now and then — and support the people who provide the works by purchasing and/or reviewing and/or referring their stories to other readers and influencers.

The one thing that none of you can rightfully do is stop anyone from expressing themselves and putting out their work to the public, nor stop any reader from selecting what they want to read. No book banning or burning. None of you are the thought police.

Here’s how it works instead.

Authors, who usually are readers first, don’t have to read or write about what doesn’t interest or compel them. Their best efforts arise from what does interest and compel them, usually resulting in their most powerful stories. Such stories might prove to be controversial, which can make or break a book’s sales or even an author’s career. If an author isn’t willing to accept that possibility, then they should not release the book.

Independent editors are under no obligation to work on manuscripts that don’t interest them, or that offend or repel them. Their business goal should be connecting with authors who are producing materials that do interest and excite them. If they see an incompatible book coming or receive one (whether unsolicited or discussed beforehand), then they should decline it. If they make the wrong call and end up with a project that upsets them, then they should get out of it by whatever means. Having contracts with escape clauses helps with handling this aspect of the project or interaction.

The problem is different for staff editors at publishing houses: To keep their jobs, they might have to work on material that upsets them. In such cases, they must act according to their principles. That means either sucking up and dealing with the upsetting book, or waving good-bye to their employer.

Publishers can reject manuscripts that don’t support their business or editorial positions. There is no moral obligation for them to publish everything.

Readers have the option of not buying a book that doesn’t work for them, and to close it midstride if they realize it’s the wrong story for them. They can also publicly diss or not recommend any book they feel is unworthy, just as they can praise and promote one they admire.

Designers have a role to play in this equation, too, by helping authors and publishers produce covers and descriptions that convey to readers what lies within. Done properly, this eliminates the need for “trigger warnings,” which in turn eliminates catering to political trends.

Everybody in the chain from first idea to product-in-hand has a responsibility toward the story content. Art — a broad umbrella that covers fiction — exists for people to view and respond to. It reflects the myriad qualities of the world, like it or not. Just because we disagree with an author’s work of fiction or find it uncomfortable doesn’t make it wrong or something to burn/ban or declare unpublishable.

It boils down to free choice in response to free speech in a free world. Unless the country you live in has a totalitarian regime, then writing, editing, publishing, and reading fall within the “to each their own” philosophy, letting us savor the vast and wonderful choice of creative works out there across the globe.

“Thinking Fiction“ columnist Carolyn Haley is an award-winning novelist who lives and breathes novels. Although specializing in fiction, she edits across the publishing spectrum — fiction and nonfiction, corporate and indie — and is the author of three novels and a nonfiction book. She has been editing professionally since 1997 and has had her own editorial services company, DocuMania, since 2005. She also reviews for the New York Journal of Books, and has presented about editing fiction at Communication Central conferences. She can be reached at dcma@vermontel.net or through DocuMania.

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On the Basics — Lessons from a Major Life Change

Ruth E. Thaler-Carter

As some of you know, I recently decided to make a major life change and relocate from my hometown of Rochester, NY, to St. Louis, MO, where I lived many years ago. The process has been exciting, unpredictable and even a little scary, but well worth all the hassle involved with any move, especially one halfway across country rather than across town. Some aspects have offered insights connected to the idea of editing and being in business as an editor that I thought our subscribers might enjoy.

Own your life

This move was inspired by a combination of factors. I found that I couldn’t handle staying where my husband and I had been together — I kept expecting him to be there in our apartment, or around an aisle at the grocery store, and it was painful. The experience and impact of loss is different for everyone; some people prefer to stay where they were happy with a spouse or partner, but it wasn’t working for me.

Within a few months of losing Wayne-the-Wonderful, I fell and tore up my arm, and couldn’t drive for almost three months. Because I lived in a residential neighborhood with no amenities in walking distance, that meant having to ask friends or pay for transport for everything — groceries, doctors’ appointments, entertainment, meetings. It was beyond frustrating. A walkable neighborhood became a priority.

A change of ownership and management for our apartment building, of which the less said, the better, was the third strike. It was time.

A “field trip” back to St. Louis proved that old friendships and professional connections were still in good shape. Before I even started to look at rental places, I fell over an amazing opportunity to do something I’ve never done before — buy a place to live. All kinds of things seemed to line up as signs that this was meant to be, and here I am, back in the Gateway City, where things are both familiar and new.

Edit your life

The biggest lesson of this process has been that it’s time for any and all of us to edit our lives! That is, most — if not all — of us have too much stuff, whether it’s personal possessions or work-related items; probably both. In trying to pack for this big move, I found myself assessing what to keep, what to donate and what to pitch on a scale unlike any other time I’ve moved.

I probably kept a lot of personal belongings that I could dispense with (and I expect to do further clearing out once I’m more settled in), but those were harder to deal with than the work stuff. In that realm, it was surprisingly easy to decide that I really don’t need two or more paper copies of my published work, and that resulted in emptying out two entire four-drawer file cabinets! I have a portfolio for every year that I’ve been working in publishing or communications, so I have a copy of everything I’ve written, edited or proofread, and one should suffice for both my own desire to have a record of my professional life and any client’s need for back copies of projects.

It also occurred to me that I don’t have to keep 5¼” floppy disks, 3.5” diskettes, Zip disks or Syquest disk versions of work from 10, 20 or more years ago. Clients do occasionally ask for old projects, but rarely anything that old — and if someone asks now, I can recreate a version through photocopying or scanning. I pitched what seemed like a ton of old disks — not without some trepidation, but also with a feeling of relief, of being unchained from so much stuff.

I also cleared a two-drawer file cabinet of handwritten notes from probably a couple hundred interviews for articles that have been published without any requests to clarify or verify information. From now on, I’ll keep notes for no more than a year after a piece is published. Anyone with complaints or questions going back farther than that will have to trust my reputation for accuracy.

I went through several drawers-worth of old files and records, clearing out anything I thought was pointless to keep now. I did keep business records going farther back than required, but as minimally as felt comfortable. Several boxes of paper, off to the shredder (and the boxes made available for packing!).

As I continue unpacking and organizing in my new home, I strongly urge colleagues to pretend you have to move next week or at most next month, and use that scenario to start sorting and editing your belongings to see what you can do without. Clothes you haven’t worn in a year or longer; dry and canned goods, medications, hygiene products, etc., that are past their expiration dates or not being used — trash the expired ones and donate the ones that someone else could benefit from; anything in a storage closet, basement, attic or junk room; and old work files that no one is ever going to ask you about again or equipment that you aren’t ever going to use. (I’m not even sure why I keep all those old portfolios, much less albums of personal photos going back even farther; it’s not as if I’m famous enough for anyone to need them to write my definitive biography!)

Be prepared

Any move can mean disruption of some, if not all, business systems. A new location, even in town, can mean new phone numbers (not an issue if you rely solely on a cell- or smartphone, of course), Internet access, bank accounts, mailing information and related aspects of both daily and business life. If you can take a break from work to focus on the move, so much the better, but most of us don’t have that luxury.

As I’ve said in other contexts, having an e-mail address based on a domain name makes it easy to relocate without losing touch with clients and colleagues, because any change in your service provider is invisible to your contacts. It doesn’t matter what company I use for Ruth@writerruth.com; I never have to tell anyone a new e-ddress because it doesn’t change, even if my actual provider does. (The same is probably true for national servers like Gmail, Yahoo, etc., but those don’t relay your brand and business identity in the same way as a domain-based e-ddress.)

Then again, actual Internet access can still be problematic. As I write this, my ATT service is having serious personality issues, and the technician is finding it challenging to resolve them. That’s a function of being in an older building, and a unit whose previous owner apparently did not use the Internet. I’ve had to warn a couple of regular clients that my access to e-mail might be spotty for a few days, and to call me (yikes — actually talking clients on the phone!) for anything urgent.

Before the move, I made a point of looking for, and luckily found, alternatives to my home system. There’s a public library about three blocks from my new place, as well as a wealth of nearby coffee shops and other neighborhood joints with WiFi service. My goal of being in a walkable neighborhood is proving to be a definite plus.

Most of the other aspects of the move have been easy to manage — opening a new bank account and redirecting direct deposits or debits, updating website contact information, forwarding mail, etc. It helped to have a financial cushion for the myriad unexpected aspects of both the move and the change from renting to owning; it seems as if something new, and potentially costly, pops up every other day. (Ah, yes — the joys of homeownership! Everything you’ve heard is true.)

It also helped to be reasonably up to date, and even ahead of deadline, on current projects so changes in scheduling everything from the movers’ arrival date to delivery of remaining furnishings (my big pieces will have to come into the apartment by crane through a window, because the elevator and stairwell are too small to accommodate them!) to wonky Internet access don’t turn into major problems. I highly recommend working ahead of deadlines at any time, but especially before and the first few weeks after a move.

The benefits of editing your life

An “edited” life is likely to be a better-organized, more-manageable, less-stressful life. I’m not advocating dispensing with any and all elements that make your surroundings fun and personalized (yes, all the purple bears came with me to St. Louis); just assessing what you don’t need, don’t use and don’t want to deal with if you have to move — or someone has to manage a move for you.

Moving to a new place can be exciting, and doing so with as little excess baggage as possible is liberating. Like editing a thorny document, editing my belongings is a cathartic and freeing experience. Every emptied drawer, every donated item, every bag of trash — it was as if I was getting lighter and lighter. It felt great!

The process continues — I continue to find more things that I can do without and I’m not sure why I kept. We do reach a point, at least in editing a life for a move, where it’s easier to just bring or keep everything and worry about it later. The problem becomes, of course, that it’s also easier to keep all that stuff (assuming you have space for it) than to continue sorting and culling; editing out what we don’t use or need.

There may not be an exact parallel to editing a document, but there certainly is one to editing your business life. And every unsorted box, pile or file drawer is something to do in-between projects, during a snowstorm or at any other point of life when time hangs idle.

I’m sure that other lessons or advice will occur to me in the coming weeks, but for now, I’m going to take advantage of being offline for a while (I hope a short while) to unpack another box or two. Wish me luck!

What lessons have colleagues learned from needing or wanting to make a big life change like a move?

Signs that an Editor Might Not Be a Pro

Ruth E. Thaler-Carter

Today’s aspiring authors have a lot more resources for getting their work into readers’ hands than ever before, but often have little experience in the publishing world. That can make authors vulnerable to people who call themselves editors — whether of books or of other projects — but are not truly skilled or experienced in that realm.

Since I’m a writer as well as an editor and proofreader, I often think about editing matters from the author’s or client’s perspective. For subscribers to An American Editor who are writers, here are signs that an editor might not be a pro, so you know not to use the same person for your next book, or you might not want to hire an editor you are considering working with. You might even want to find someone to redo an already-published book so it does better in future sales.

For subscribers who are editors, these might be areas to consider when wondering why you aren’t getting as much work as you’d like, haven’t gotten repeat assignments from past clients, or are just starting out in the field. They also might serve as talking points when you want to explain to a potential client or employer why you’re the best pick — or at least an appropriate one — for their editing work.

As colleague Katherine Hinkebein Pickett has said, “Due diligence is essential to finding a qualified, reputable editor. When you know what to look for, you can hire your editor with confidence.” Equally, when we know what prospective clients might look for when choosing an editor, editors can power up their responses more effectively.

Authors don’t have to be experts in language and usage to notice some problems that could indicate work by an unprofessional editor, such as:

• Every word in every title or chapter heading starts with a capital letter, including a/an, and, the, of, etc. (I see this a lot in online material, but that doesn’t make it right.)
• Commas, periods, and closing parentheses are outside the quote marks (in projects using U.S. English).
• There are commas before opening parentheses.
• Basic spelling errors jump out at you or have been noticed by readers.
• Punctuation is inconsistent or missing.
• References/citations are all in different sequences or styles.

To head off such problems with your next book, or a new edition of the current one, here are some red flags to keep in mind. These also can function as suggestions for how editors can position their businesses better.

• A prospective editor has no website, no testimonials at a website, no professional memberships, no LinkedIn profile/account, no formal training, no apparent experience, and/or no references.

A professional editor will probably have a website that outlines his or her training and experience, such as coursework from a respected publications program, in-house work, or a freelance track record. It should include testimonials from employers, colleagues, and/or clients attesting to the editor’s skills and approach, and references that prospective clients can contact (or a link to reach the editor to receive contact info for references).

The editor should belong to an organization such as the American Copy Editors Society, Council of Science Editors, National Association of Independent Writers and Editors, Society for Technical Communication, Editorial Freelancers Association, Society for Editors and Proofreaders (UK), Editors Canada, etc. Since groups like the American Medical Writers Association, Society for Professional Journalists, and National Association of Science Writers all have freelance sections and members who are editors, membership in them is also a good sign that someone is a professional.

Belonging to the Copyediting-L e-mail list and Editors Association of Earth (EAE) Facebook group also would be useful indicators of an editor’s professionalism and commitment to staying on top of trends in language in general and editing in particular.

Training could include having earned certificates from respected editing programs. Experience would, of course, include working in-house for a publisher, publication, or organization, or with individual authors. An editor who writes about the crafting of editing in his or her own blog, has published a book about editing, or is a regular and respected contributor to the editing-related works of others and lists or groups is also likely to be someone with experience and skills.

• An editor hasn’t asked what style manual/guide you use or the editor should use, or hasn’t told you which one s/he will use for your project. There are several standard guides for using language and formatting documents. The Chicago Manual of Style, Associated Press Stylebook, American Psychological Association Publication Manual, and Government Printing Office Style Manual are the leading resources, with many more available for specific professions and industries. A professional editor is familiar with at least one of these and lets prospective clients know that’s the case, which should reassure authors who might be concerned about consistency and accuracy in their documents.

Identifying the dictionary that an editor uses is also helpful to clients. Spellcheck, as most of us know, is not sufficient, but even if it were, some clients have to be convinced by an authority other than the editor that a given word has been spelled correctly.

• The editor’s only credential is a degree in English or a career as an English teacher. While knowing English is a plus (a strong grasp of grammar is essential for an editor), there’s a difference between what’s involved with teaching English and knowing how to edit. Simply having taught English or earned an academic degree in English is not enough to understand the importance and use of style manuals, publishing standards and conventions, and other aspects of editing.
• An editor’s pricing is very low. That might be great for your budget, but is likely to be terrible for the quality of the editing. Someone whose rates are super-low is probably either new to editing or inexperienced, untrained, minimally skilled, and/or only editing as a hobby, rather than seriously committed to editing as a business and profession, with training and experience to match. From the editor’s perspective, lowballing your rates can make you look as if you’re new to the field, unsure of your skills, or desperate for work. If we don’t value ourselves, our clients won’t value us, either!
• There are typos — misspellings, grammar and punctuation errors, etc. — in the editor’s e-mail messages, résumé, and/or website. An e-mail or word-processing program will highlight some of these issues for authors who are not sure of what is right or wrong. Some authors might not recognize such issues in communications from an editor, but they often are egregious enough for an amateur author to notice.
• The editor promises 100% perfection or guarantees agent placement, a publisher, and/or bestseller status for your book. It probably would be easier to pitch an edited manuscript to an agent or sell it to a publisher, but having the manuscript edited is not a guarantee of getting published or selling lots of copies.
• The editor claims to rely on spellcheck, online programs like Grammarly, and other tools to ensure perfection. Not only is perfection unlikely, as noted above, but it takes more than a mechanical software program to ensure high quality in editing. An editor who uses PerfectIt, the various tools at editorium.com, and EditTools from wordsnsync demonstrates a commitment to knowing about and using appropriate, respected resources to contribute to a better result, but doesn’t say those resources are all it takes to provide excellence in editing. The human brain and eyes are still essential to the process, which means experience and training are still vitally important to professionalism and providing high-quality service.

What have colleagues here encountered as examples of poor-quality editing, and how have you positioned your experience and skills to convince clients to hire you for editing projects?

Ruth E. Thaler-Carter is an award-winning freelance writer, editor, proofreader, desktop publisher, and speaker whose motto is “I can write about anything!”® She is also the owner of Communication Central, which hosts an annual conference for colleagues, and the new editor-in-chief of An American Editor.

Lyonizing Word: Workflow for Writing

by Jack Lyon

I do a lot of writing, and over the years I’ve investigated many a tool that’s supposed to help with that process. The most prominent of these, of course, is the bloated but powerful Microsoft Word. With my various add-ins at the Editorium, it can be a terrific editing tool. But for writing, something else is needed. Why? Because (as with most word processors) writing in Word is like scribbling on a scroll. Access to text is sequential rather than random (as I explained in my essay, “Changing Formats: From Scroll to Codex to eBooks”, although if you’ve used Word’s built-in heading styles, it’s possible to jump to those headings using the navigation window.

Rather than scrolling (or jumping) around a long, long document, I prefer to write in bits and pieces and then combine selected bits and pieces into a single document ready for editing. It’s possible to do this (kind of) in Scrivener using its “corkboard” feature (on both Mac and PC). Unfortunately, like Word, Scrivener strikes me as clunky, uncooperative, and overly complex.

Notebox Disorganizer

I’ve tried nearly every writing program out there, and the best solution I’ve found is the idiosyncratic and free Notebox Disorganizer from the Squirrel Technologist. (Sorry, Windows only — but please keep reading, as the other tools I’ll be discussing here work on Macintosh or Linux as well as Windows, and they’re well worth having.)

Notebox Disorganizer is a sort of spreadsheet for writers. It looks like this:

Notebook Disorganizer

The top part of the screen consists of boxes divided among rows and columns. Each box represents a separate document (although all of the documents are in the same file). We can move the cursor to the box we want to use and press ENTER. The cursor jumps to the document at the bottom, and we’re ready to write. To return to the boxes, we hit the ESCAPE key.

With Notebox Disorganizer, we can see the entire structure of our book laid out in a grid. Here, the book is broken up into parts that include the various chapters, but we could just as easily have each column be a chapter, and the boxes in that column be scenes. For nonfiction, each column could be a chapter, and the boxes could be sections of the chapter.

We can move boxes and columns around as needed. If we realize that scene 4 in chapter 2 should really be in chapter 8, we can cut the box and then paste it where it belongs. If we see that scene 4 should actually be scene 5, we can move it down. The program offers lots of flexibility. If you’d like to see the Notebox Disorganizer file in which I wrote this article, you can download it from the Editorium’s website.

(Note: The source code for Notebox Disorganizer is in the public domain and can be downloaded from the Squirrel Technologist website. So if you’re interested in customizing the program or incorporating its ideas into something else, the developer, Forrest Leeson, encourages you to do so.)

Markdown Syntax

Out of the box, Notebox Disorganizer uses Rich Text Format (.rtf) which means we can apply various fonts in various sizes and colors. Unfortunately, that encourages us to apply various fonts in various sizes and colors, when what is really needed is a proper document structure: headings need to be identified as headings, block quotes as block quotes, and so on. Directly applied formatting, no matter how beautiful, won’t supply that. To make that happen (and to keep writing rather than fussing with formatting), we can do two things:

1. Change Notebox Disorganizer’s preferences (under Tools > Set Preferences > Misc > Forbid Formatted Text) so that it uses plain text only — no formatting allowed.
2. Use Markdown syntax to specify (rather than apply) formatting — for example, use *asterisks* to indicate italic. Heading levels are specified with cross-hatches: # Heading 1, ## Heading 2, ### Heading 3, and so on. A complete reference for Markdown syntax (which is intuitive, human readable, and platform and program agnostic) is available as a downloadable PDF or online from GitHub.

Making a Manuscript

After we’ve written the various sections that make up chapters, it’s time to combine the text in all those boxes into a single document. To do that, we add boxes to the program’s “outbox” by selecting them and then pressing the spacebar. The result looks like this:

Outbox

If there are certain boxes we don’t want to include (research notes, for example), we just don’t include them in the outbox. After we’ve finished with our selection, we click File > Export the Outbox and give the document a name. Under “Files of type,” we select “Text.” Then we click OK, and the text is exported as a single text file, with Markup codes intact.

Turning Markdown into Formatting

Now that our document is finished, we need to turn it into a Word document. Why? Because that’s what publishers seem to want, unfortunately. But because it’s properly structured and marked up, we can just as easily turn it into a web page, a PDF, or just about anything else using the marvelous and (again) free Pandoc. (Pandoc works on Mac, Windows, or Linux.)

Pandoc is a tool that every writer and editor should have, as it can turn almost any document format into almost any other document format, which is something you might need to do sometime. For that reason, I’m going to ask you to try an experiment with me. It’s not hard, and I think you’ll like the results. Do this, in this order:

1. Download and install Pandoc.
2. Download and install Typora. (Typora, too, works on Mac, Windows, or Linux. Click the little arrow at the bottom of the home page; then click Download on the upper right.) Typora is an editing and rendering program for Markdown.

Have you finished installing? Great, then download from the Editorium website the Markdown document I created after writing this article. Put it on your desktop and then double-click it to open it in Typora.

Beautiful, no? Nice formatting and proper document structure. Just for fun, try some of the alternative CSS themes (click Theme) — or open the file in a plain old text editor to see the Markdown codes.

You can actually use Typora on its own to write just about anything (note the document outline on the left). As soon as you type something (using Markdown syntax), Typora renders it into an appropriate format. But we need a Word document, right? Well, one of the beautiful things about Typora is that it works automatically with Pandoc, so we can easily export our document as a Word file. To see this in action, click File > Export > Word (.docx). Now open the Word file (same folder and name as your Markdown document) and marvel at the result — a nicely formatted and structured document that any editor would be pleased to work on and any designer would be happy to import into InDesign. Please take a moment to contemplate how revolutionary that actually is.

Authors and Styles and Fonts, Oh My!

Now, if we could just get authors to write using Markdown, what a wonderful world it would be! Here’s why:

As you’ve seen, editors can easily convert a Markdown document into a Word document for editing, with all of Word’s tools at their disposal. The Markdown codes will be appropriately converted into Microsoft Word paragraph styles, with no extraneous formatting or messed-up footnotes to be cleaned up. Wouldn’t that be nice!

But what about authors? Why should they work in Markdown when they could just as easily work in Word? The reasons are many:

1. They can’t just as easily work in Word. In fact, most authors have no clue about how to properly do so. Word makes it easy for authors to mess up a document almost beyond belief, with inconsistent and meaningless formatting, document corruption, fouled-up footnotes, incorrect AutoCorrect “corrections,” and on and on and on. Editors are left to clean up all that stuff.
2. Microsoft Word is expensive — $149.99 for Office Home & Student 2016 (but doesn’t include newer versions as they’re released); if you go with Office 365 Personal (which does include new versions), you’re looking at $69 per year; for Office 365 Home, $99 per year. And those years add up.
3. Markdown is intuitive — easy to learn, read, and use.
4. Authors can create or read Markdown documents in any text editor or word processor (even Word) on any platform — Mac, Windows, Linux, Android, iPhone, whatever, without problems of compatibility.
5. Markdown documents can easily be converted into all kinds of properly structured and formatted documents, including Word, XML, HTML, LaTeX, and PDF — true single-source publishing.
6. Markdown documents will be readable and usable as long as text files are readable and usable — which is to say, forever.
7. As Markdown documents are nothing but text, they’re small, taking up very little room on a hard drive or thumb drive, and they’re easy to send by email. In fact, you can use Markdown to write email.
8. Perhaps most important, Markdown allows authors to simply write, without worrying about formatting and other complexities, thus increasing their productivity — which is something that benefits everyone.
9. If you can persuade your authors to write with Markdown, the benefits should be great for all concerned. Well, for all except Microsoft:

Imagine there’s no Redmond;
It’s easy if you try.
No styles or wonky footnotes—
Something easy on the eye.
Imagine all the people
Writing stuff in peace! (No “helpful” automatic formatting, AutoCorrect, etc.)
You may say I’m a dreamer,
But I’m not the only one. (There are lots of Markdown editing and rendering programs out there.)
Just try to write with Markdown,
And you’ll see it can be done!

(Apologies to John Lennon.)

Jack Lyon (editor@editorium.com) owns and operates the Editorium, which provides macros and information to help editors and publishers do mundane tasks quickly and efficiently. He is the author of Microsoft Word for Publishing Professionals, Wildcard Cookbook for Microsoft Word, and of Macro Cookbook for Microsoft Word. Both books will help you learn more about macros and how to use them.

From the Archives: Two Books Every Author (& Editor & Publisher) Should Read!

(The following essay was originally published on
 An American Editor on September 23, 2015.)

I won’t keep you in suspense. The two books are Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird and Go Set a Watchman.

I was reading Diane Johnson’s review of Go Set a Watchman (“Daddy’s Girl,” The New York Review of Books, September 24, 2015, pp. 22–26) when I realized that Harper Lee’s two novels should be read by everyone who touches — no matter how peripherally — on the editing process. The two books provide a stark contrast of the value of editing. Johnson wrote:

According to its editors and Harper Lee herself, To Kill a Mockingbird had profited from extensive editing at R.B. Lippincott by the late Tay Hohoff, who said she and Lee worked for two years on the project. (p. 22)

The result was the production of a classic that continues, 50-plus years later, to sell 1 million copies each year.

Contrast that with Go Set a Watchman, which was published as written — without editorial input. Although Watchman has sold a phenomenal number of copies, those will be one-time sales and they came about because of the high expectations readers of Mockingbird had. The consensus seems to be that Watchman is a disaster and a blight on the reputation of Mockingbird; its primary value is to demonstrate what should not be done if one values one’s writing and reputation as an author.

Authors & Wannabe Authors

Watchman was the parent from which Mockingbird was spawned. Yet it is as different from Mockingbird as night is from day. What it demonstrates, however, is how a good editor can help an author.

Too many authors on too many lists promote self-editing or no editing or friend editing. The complaint is that a good editor costs too much and there is no reason to hire one when the author can do it herself. Too many authors also say that they would like to hire an editor but editors are too expensive; they cannot afford an editor.

If you believe you really have a good story to tell and that people will buy it, then shouldn’t you figure out a way to get that editorial help? Your book will not sell like Watchman has sold because you do not have the reputation that Harper Lee has been trading on for 50 years. And it is expected that sales of Watchman will fall precipitously now that the book has been seen. What Watchman does demonstrate, however, is that the editorial investment made in Mockingbird has paid off doubly: first, by creating a phenomenal bestseller that keeps on selling, and second, by creating a reputation that allowed the author to sell drivel, which is what Watchman amounts to. Watchman would not have sold except for Lee’s reputation built on Mockingbird.

It is hard to convince authors (and readers) of the value of good editing because editing is an invisible hand — but these two books, a before and after, should clearly demonstrate what a good editor brings to the table and why authors need editors.

The two books also offer one other insight that I think authors need: They graphically demonstrate the difference between — and value of — developmental editing and copyediting, as well as the value of each. Watchman was neither developmentally edited nor copyedited; Mockingbird was both. Could you self-edit both developmental editing and copyediting?

Skilled and professional authors know that it is almost impossible to edit one’s own work because we see only what we meant to say; we cannot be objective enough to see where our work might be unclear, clunky, disorganized, or simply grammatically lacking (suffering from misspellings, wrong or missing punctuation, close-but-not-quite-right word choices, missing or doubled words, poor transitions, and more).

It is true that a very few authors have the skills to self-edit, but those are the rare authors. Most, if not all, of the most successful authors did not self-edit. Either they or their publisher hired a professional editor. As an author, you may have spent years writing your book. You know every word, every nuance, but you do not know where you are going wrong, because your book is “perfect” — you have said so.

As did Harper Lee when she originally submitted Watchman. What a difference a skilled, professional editor made for Harper Lee — and could make for authors and wannabe authors today.

Editors

Editors should read these two books to see what a skilled editor can do. This is not to suggest that you are not a skilled editor, but to suggest that rarely are we given the opportunity to see a before and after of such radical dimension as in the case of Watchman and Mockingbird.

Even more importantly, however, these books give us the opportunity to create an explanation of the value of our services. They also give us the opportunity to graphically demonstrate the differences between developmental editing and copyediting, and what each does for a manuscript. How many of us would reread Watchman or call it a classic or even want it taught in our schools? I know I struggle to envision a movie based on Watchman or caring about the characters or the storyline.

But Mockingbird remains a highly praised novel, 50 years after its publication. It is still discussed in schools and in conversations about race relations. The movie is considered a classic that is still shown. The novel still sells a million copies each year with no advertising to speak of. And all of this is because the original version, Watchman, was developmentally edited and then copyedited by professional editors to become Mockingbird.

Editors should use these books as teaching experiences for clients. They illustrate the benefit of not creating an artificial schedule and of taking the time needed to properly develop the story and to do the editing the story requires.

Editors have looked for years for a way to clearly illustrate why they are worth what they are asking and why editing is a valuable service that is ignored or avoided at an author’s and a publisher’s peril. Watchman and Mockingbird graphically demonstrate the value of editing and editors.

Publishers (& Packagers)

Today, publishing is run largely from the accounting perspective, not the art perspective. Schedules are artificially imposed without regard for the true needs of a manuscript. Editors are asked to do more of the mechanical work and less of the judgmental work; in my earliest years as an editor, for example, the emphasis was on language editing, not on applying styling codes. We did macro-level styling at most, and left micro-level styling to designers and typesetters. But in today’s editing world, the emphasis has switched 180 degrees to emphasize micro-level styling and a deemphasize language editing.

Yet Watchman and Mockingbird can provide a useful lesson for publishers, too. Sure, HarperCollins reaped a quick influx of cash with the publication of Watchman, but if I were the publisher, I would rather have the year-after-year sales of Mockingbird than the one-time sales of Watchman. Watchman will have no lasting value in the marketplace except as an illustration of what publishers used to provide authors versus what they no longer provide authors.

Today, the mantra is “how low can I go”; that is, how little can I, the publisher, spend to take a book from manuscript to bookstore? And the first services publishers squeeze are those that are deemed “invisible” — editorial services. Instead of two years of developmental editing, as was done for Mockingbird, two weeks of copyediting may be provided today (even if the book requires two months of copyediting, let alone additional months of developmental editing).

Watchman and Mockingbird, however, demonstrate the value of the editorial process. Good editing changed a book with no potential into a classic that sells 1 million copies each year and has done so for more than 50 years, with no end in sight. Whatever the editing cost for Mockingbird, it was recouped decades ago, yet keeps on giving. Quality editing is the Timex of publishing — it is the service that keeps on giving.

Publishers and packagers should read these books and use them as guides and reasons why changes to the current editorial and production methods need to be revamped and more attention and money needs to be given to editing. Editing has to be seen today as it was in the early days of publishing. Isn’t it a shame that the books that we treat as classics and must-reads, decade after decade, were nearly all published several decades or longer ago — before accounting supplanted editorial as the decision makers?

Perhaps it is time to rethink the current model. Certainly, Watchman and Mockingbird make that point.

Richard Adin, An American Editor

Worth Noting: Value Marketing & the Editorial Business

A common mistake that editors make is that they do not give enough weight to the business side of their editorial business, thinking that if they edit manuscripts well, business will come with little to no marketing effort. Perhaps that was true 30 years ago (in my experience it was more true 30 years ago than it is now, but even 30 years ago it wasn’t all that true), but today — with all of the competition and the ease of entry into the profession — it is not. Today, marketing is a key part of a successful editorial business.

How to market, to whom to market, and what to market are the pillar questions that editors must face. Not so long ago, marketing amounted to preparing a resume and sending it out. Then when email became ubiquitous, email solicitation became the method of choice. No thought was given to how well these — or any other — methods worked; if the editor did some marketing and received a new project, the marketing effort was considered a success and was repeated during the next dry spell.

Alas, there is much more to marketing, and the more knowledgeable the editor is about the science and art of marketing, the more successful the editor will be in having a steady stream of business. In years past, I conducted regular marketing campaigns. They were planned and measured. The result was I not only did I have more work than I could handle myself, but I rarely had a day without a backlog of work nor a week without an inquiry as to my availability.

But I came to editing from a business route and so had some experience with marketing a service. What I didn’t have — and wish I had had — was Louise Harnby’s newest guide, Content Marketing Primer for Editors & Proofreaders: How to Add Value to Your Editorial Business (2017; £3.99).

Louise Harnby is a well-respected proofreader who also has a handle on the business aspects of proofreading business. Louise does not rely solely on passive marketing to promote her business; she engages in active marketing, too. Although she recognizes the importance of websites and other forms of passive promotion that require the person looking for her type of services to find her, she also recognizes the importance of active marketing. In her Content Marketing Primer for Editors & Proofreaders, Louise shares her insight into active marketing.

As Louise illustrates, marketing is much more than listing one’s services (passive marketing). Good marketing has a very active component that tells the potential client why the client needs services like those you offer and, more importantly, why those services are best obtained from you rather than from someone else. It is this that is the substance of content marketing.

Louise’s earlier books (Marketing Your Editing & Proofreading Business and Business Planning for Editorial Freelancers) provide more detail and a step-by-step guide to creating a business plan, but Content Marketing Primer for Editors & Proofreaders gives you the information you need to identify, create, and execute an active marketing plan for your editorial business.

Content Marketing Primer for Editors & Proofreaders discusses various types of content marketing (with some examples) and includes a framework that you can use to create your own content marketing plan, along with some case studies. Importantly, Louise discusses branding and timing — two very important parts of any marketing strategy that are often overlooked.

Recognizing that it is not enough to have a good marketing plan, Louise also offers advice on how to be seen among the crowd. Editors need to recognize that the editing profession grows daily as an increasing number of “editors” hang out their shingle and seek clients. The successful marketer is the one who is quickly spotted from among the sea of editors. Standing out is key and Louise offers advice on how to do so.

Louise Harnby’s Content Marketing Primer for Editors & Proofreaders: How to Add Value to Your Editorial Business is a guide that every professional editor who wants a successful editorial business should own and read, and implement its advice.

Richard Adin, An American Editor

(Note: I have no interest, financial or otherwise, in the Content Marketing Primer nor have I received any consideration in exchange for this review/mention.)

The Cusp of a New Book World: The Sixth Day of Creation

(The first part of this essay appears in “The Cusp of a New Book World: The First Day of Creation;” the second part appears in “The Cusp of a New Book World: The Fourth Day of Creation.” This is the final part.)

Donald Trump is late to the game. Reshoring of industry has been happening, albeit quietly, for the past several years. Also late to the game are publishers, but increasingly reshoring is happening in the publishing industry. The problem is that publishing-industry reshoring is not bringing with it either a rise in editorial fees or relief from the packaging industry. If anything, it is making a bad situation worse. It is bringing the low-fee mentality that accompanied offshoring to the home country.

Reshoring in the United States has meant that instead of dealing with packagers located, for example, in India, editors are dealing with packagers in their home countries. Yet professional editors continue to face the same problems as before: low pay, high expectations, being an unwitting scapegoat. Perhaps more importantly, the onshore packagers are not doing a better job of “editing” — the publishers are offering onshore packagers the same editing fee that they were offering the offshore packagers, and the onshore packagers having to pay onshore wages have the same or lower level of editorial quality control as the offshore packagers.

There is nothing inherently wrong with the packager system; there is something inherently wrong with the thinking of publishers as regards the value of editing, with the system of freelance editing, and with packager editorial quality control. These problems are not solvable by simply moving from offshore to onshore; other measures are needed, not least of which is discarding the assumption that high-quality copyediting is available for slave wages.

Publishing is in a simultaneous boom–bust economic cycle. Profit at Penguin Random House in 2015, for example, jumped by more than 50% from its 2014 level to $601 million. Interestingly, print revenue in the publishing industry overall is rising (+4.8%) while ebook revenue is declining (−20%). Gross revenue from print is expected to remain steady through 2020 at $46 billion per year while ebook revenue continues to decline.

The key question (for publishers) is, how do publishers increase profits when revenues remain flat in print and decline in ebooks? This is the question that the Trumpian economic view ignores when it pushes for reshoring. Trumpian economics also ignores the collateral issues that such a question raises, such as, whether it does any good to reshore work that does not pay a living wage. The fallacy of Trumpian economics is in assuming that reshoring is a panacea to all ills, that it is the goal regardless of any collateral issues left unresolved; unfortunately, that flawed view has been presaged by the publishing industry’s reshoring efforts.

My discussions with several publishers indicates that a primary motive for reshoring is the poor quality of the less-visible work (i.e., the editing) as performed offshore — even when the offshore packager has been instructed to use an onshore editor. Consider my example of “tonne” in the second part of this essay and multiply that single problem. According to one publisher I spoke with, the way management insists that a book’s budget be created exacerbates the problems. The budgeting process requires setting the editing budget as if the editor were an offshore editor living in a low-wage country and without consideration of any time or expense required to fix editorial problems as a result of underbudgeting. After setting that editorial budget, the publisher requires the packager to hire an onshore editor but at no more than the budgeted price, which means that the packager has to seek out low-cost editors who are often inexperienced or not well-qualified.

Packagers — both onshore and offshore — try to solve this “problem” by having inhouse “experts” review the editing and make “suggestions” (that are really commands and not suggestions) based on their understanding of the intricacies of the language. This effort occasionally works, but more often it fails because there are subtleties with which a nonnative editor is rarely familiar. So the problem is compounded, everyone is unhappy, and the budget line remains intact because the expense to fix the problems comes from a different budget line. Thus when it comes time to budget for the next book’s editing, the publisher sees that the limited budget worked last time and so repeats the error. An endless loop of error is entered — it becomes the merry-go-round from which there is no getting off.

Although publishers and packagers are the creators of the problem — low pay with high expectations — they have handy partners in editors. No matter how many times I and other editorial bloggers discuss the need for each editor to know what her individual required effective hourly rate (rEHR) is and to be prepared to say no to projects that do not meet that threshold, still few editors have calculated their individual rEHR and they still ask, “What is the going rate?”

In discussions, editors have lamented the offshoring of editorial work and talked about how reshoring would solve so many of the editorial problems that have arisen since the wave of consolidation and offshoring began in the 1990s. Whereas editors were able to make the financial case for using freelancers, they seem unable to make the case for a living wage from offshoring. The underlying premise of offshoring has not changed since the first Indian company made the case for it: Offshoring editorial services is less costly than onshoring because the publisher’s fee expectations are based on the wage scale in place at the packager’s location, not at the location of the person hired to do the job. In the 1990s it was true that offshoring was less costly; in 2017, it is not true — and editors need to demonstrate that it is not true. The place to begin is with knowing your own economic numbers.

Knowing your own numbers is the start but far from the finish. What is needed is an economic study. There are all sorts of data that can be used to help convince publishers of the worth of quality editing. Consider this: According to The Economist, 79% of college-educated U.S. adults read only one print book in 2016. Wouldn’t it be interesting to know how many editors were part of that group and how many books, on average, editors bought and read? Such a statistic by itself wouldn’t change anything but if properly packaged could be suasive.

When I first made a pitch to a publisher for a pay increase in the 1980s, I included in the pitch some information about my book reading and purchasing habits. I pointed out that on average I bought three of this particular publisher’s hardcover titles every month. I also included a list of titles that I had yet to buy and read, but which were on my wish list. I explained that my cost of living had risen x%, which meant that I had to allocate more of my budget to necessities and less to pleasures like books. And I demonstrated how the modest increase I sought would enable me to at least maintain my then current book buying and likely enable me to actually increase purchases. In other words, by paying me more the publisher was empowering me to buy more of the publisher’s product.

(For what it is worth, some publishers responded positively to such a pitch and others completely ignored it. When offshoring took hold and assignments no longer came directly from the publisher, the pitch was no longer viable. Packagers didn’t have a consumer product and insulated the publisher from such arguments.)

With reshoring, imagine the power of such a pitch if it is made on behalf of a group. Reshoring in publishing is occurring not primarily because costs can now be lower with onshoring rather than offshoring, but because of editorial quality problems. And while it would be difficult to gain the attention of a specific empowered executive at an international company like Elsevier or Penguin Random House, it is easier to establish a single message and get it out to multiple publishers.

The biggest obstacle to making reshoring be advantageous for freelance editors is the reluctance of freelance editors to abandon the solo, isolated, individual entrepreneurial call that supposedly drove the individual to become a freelance editor. That used to be the way of accountants and doctors and lawyers, among other professionals, but members of those professions are increasingly banding together. In my view, the time has come for editors to begin banding together and for editors to have full knowledge of what is required to make a successful editorial career.

This sixth day of creation can be the first day of a new dawning — or it can be just more of the same. That reshoring has come to publishing is an opportunity not to be missed. Whether editors will grab for that opportunity or let it slip by remains to be seen. But the first step remains the most difficult step: calculating your rEHR, setting that as your baseline, and rejecting work that does not at least meet your baseline.

Richard Adin, An American Editor

The Cusp of a New Book World: The Fourth Day of Creation

(The first part of this essay appears in “The Cusp of a New Book World: The First Day of Creation;” the final part appears in “The Cusp of a New Book World: The Sixth Day of Creation.”)

The world of publishing began its metamorphosis, in nearly all meanings of that word, with the advent of the IBM PS2 computer and its competitors and the creation of Computer Shopper magazine. (Let us settle immediately the Mac versus PC war. In those days, the Apple was building its reputation in the art departments of various institutions; it was not seen as, and Steve Jobs hadn’t really conceived of it as, an editorial workhorse. The world of words belonged to the PC and businesses had to maintain two IT departments: one for words [PC] and one for graphics [Mac]. For the earliest computer-based editors, the PC was the key tool, and that was the computer for which the word-processing programs were written. Nothing more need be said; alternate facts are not permitted.)

I always hated on-paper editing. I’d be reading along and remember that I had earlier read something different. Now I needed to find it and decide which might be correct and which should be queried. And when you spend all day reading, it becomes easy for the mind to “read” what should be there rather than what is there. (Some of this is touched on in my essays, “Bookmarking for Better Editing” and “The WYSIWYG Conundrum: The Solid Cloud.”) So who knew how many errors I let pass as the day wore on and I “saw” what should be present but wasn’t. The computer was, to my thinking, salvation.

And so it was. I “transitioned” nearly overnight from doing paper-based editing to refusing any editing work except computer-based. And just as I made the transition, so were the types of authors whose books I was editing. I worked then, as now, primarily in medical and business professional areas, and doctors and businesses had both the money and the desire to leave pen-and-paper behind and move into the computer world. Just as they used computers in their daily work, they used computers to write their books, and I was one of the (at the time) few professional editors skilled with online editing.

The computer was my salvation from paper-based editing, but it also changed my world, because with the rise of computers came the rise of globalization. How easy it was to slip a disk in the mail — and that disk could be sent as easily to San Francisco as to New York City as to London and Berlin or anywhere. And so I realized that my market was no longer U.S.-based publishers; my market was any publisher, anywhere in the world, who wanted an American editor.

But globalization for me also had a backswing. The backswing came with the consolidation of the U.S. publishing industry — long time clients being sold to international conglomerates. For example, Random House, a publisher with a few imprints, ultimately became today’s Random Penguin House, a megapublisher that owns 250 smaller publishers. Elsevier was not even in the U.S. market, yet today has absorbed many of the publishers that were, such as W.B. Saunders and C.V. Mosby. This consolidation led to a philosophical change as shareholder return, rather than family pride, became the dominant requirement.

To increase shareholder return, publishers sought to cut costs. Fewer employees, more work expected from employees, increased computerization, and the rise of the internet gave rise to offshoring and the rise of the Indian packaging industry. So, for years much of the work that freelancers receive comes from packagers, whether based in the United States, in Ireland, in India — it doesn’t matter where — who are competing to keep prices low so work flow is high. And, as we are aware, attempting to maintain some level of quality, although there has been a steady decline in recent years in editorial quality with the lowering of fees. (One major book publisher, for example, will not approve a budget for a book that includes a copyediting fee higher than $1.75 per page for a medical book, yet complains about the quality of the editing.)

The result was (and is) that offshoring turned out to be a temporary panacea. The offshore companies thought they could do better but are discovering that they are doing worse and their clients are slowly, but surely, becoming aware of this. One example: I was asked to edit a book in which the author used “tonne” as in “25 tonnes of grain.” The instruction was to use American spellings. The packager for whom I was editing the book, had my editing “reviewed” by in-house “professional” staff who were, according to the client, “experts in American English” (which made me wonder why they needed me at all). These “experts” told me that I was using incorrect spelling and that it should be “ton,” not “tonne.” I protested but felt that as they were “experts” there should be no need to explain that “tonne” means “metric ton” (~2205 pounds) and “ton” means either “short ton” (2000 pounds) or “long ton” (2240 pounds). After all, don’t experts use dictionaries? Or conversion software? (For excellent conversion software for Windows only, see Master Converter.) Professional editors do not willy-nilly make changes. The client (the packager) insisted that the change be made and so the change was made, with each change accompanied by a comment, “Change from ‘tonne’ to ‘ton’ at the instruction of [packager].”

This example is one of the types of errors that have occurred in editing with the globalization of editorial services and the concurrent rise of packagers and lesser pay for editors. It is also an example of the problem that existed in the paper-based days. Although there is no assigning of fault in the computer-based system, when an error of this type is made, the author complains to the publisher, who complains to the packager, who responds, “We hired the editor you requested we hire and this is their error.” And the result is the same as if it had been marked CE (copyeditor’s error) in flashing neon lights. The editor, being left out of the loop and never having contact with the publisher becomes the unknowing scapegoat.

And it is a prime reason why we are now entering the sixth day of creation — the reshoring of editorial services, which is the subject of the third part of this essay, “The Cusp of a New Book World: The Sixth Day of Creation.”

Richard Adin, An American Editor

The Cusp of a New Book World: The First Day of Creation

The world of business is an ever-changing world. When I began my publishing career, offshoring was not in the business vocabulary — publishers looked for local-market solutions to local-market problems. Of course, helping to maintain that local tether was that most editorial problems and solutions were paper-based — copyediting, for example, was done on a paper printout.

The general course of events went something like this:

1. The paper manuscript was shipped by the in-house production editor to the freelance editor for copyediting;
2. After copyediting, the copyeditor shipped the marked-up physical copy to the in-house production editor for review;
3. After review, the in-house production editor shipped the finalized version of the marked-up manuscript to the typesetter; in some procedures, before shipping to the typesetter for setting into pages, the edited manuscript would be sent to the author for review and approval of the editorial changes. Which fork was taken depended on the publisher and on the author;
4. The typesetter created a master copy of the final edited version and produced physical page proofs for author review;
5. The authors received as little as the page proofs or as much as the page proofs, the original unedited manuscript, and the finalized copyedited version of the manuscript to review and make any final adjustments that were needed, especially the addressing of any queries;
6. The author then returned the manuscript to the in-house production editor who would review the author changes, do any final accepting or rejecting, ensure that all queries had been addressed, and then send the manuscript to the typesetter for creation of a master file for printing.

Not mentioned in the foregoing are the rounds of proofreading done by freelance proofreaders, which also added to shipping costs.

Of course there was some variation in the foregoing procedure, but there were two notable things that did not change regardless of the exact procedure: (a) the process was very labor intensive and thus very expensive and (b) the process incurred a lot of shipping costs — somehow the physical manuscript had to get from person to person in each step.

For some publishers the answer was local-local; that is, if you wanted to be hired as a freelance editor, you had to be able to come to the publisher’s office to pick up the manuscript and return it the same way. In my earliest days, for example, Lippincott’s New York City office would not hire a freelancer who wasn’t a subway ride away from its offices. The problem the publishers faced was that book sales were growing and the way to earn more money was to sell more books, which meant more books had to be published, which meant more editors were needed. The solution was hire more editors but you had to have a labor pool from which to draw, so even companies like Lippincott had to broaden their geographical boundaries.

The other labor-related problem was that even the best editors had weaknesses and even the worst in-house production editors had weaknesses. These weaknesses were minor stumbling blocks in the early years of publishing, but then authors became less “wowed” by editorial expertise and publisher demands and began asserting their ownership of their words. It is important to remember that most books in the very early years were “owned” (i.e., the copyright was in the name of) the publisher. That put publishers at the top of the power chain. There were always authors who retained copyright, but for most authors, giving the publisher the copyright was an acceptable trade for getting published. The tide began changing after World War II but accelerated in the 1970s with the instant megahit authors; ultimately, what started as a gentle wave of change became a tsunami until the moment when calm returned because it became standard for authors to retain copyright.

But during this changeover, which occurred over decades, costs began rising. Where before publishers simply absorbed the costs, now the pressure to increase profits required an allocation of costs between those who caused the costs to be incurred. Thus the assigning of “fault” became more important — the assigning of something as a PE (printer error), AA (author alteration), or CE (copyeditor error) became an important tool in deciding who would be responsible for the cost of correction once the manuscript had been put into master proofs. A certain number of errors and changes were expected but once that number was exceeded, the costs were allocated and the responsible party was expected to “pay.”

The author usually had a “debt” deducted from royalties earned; the copyeditor, if the number was large enough, “paid” by not being hired again; the printer (typesetter or compositor) paid by not being able to bill for the costs incurred to make the fixes necessitated by PEs. Yet this was where the weakness of the system stood out.

We have had discussions before about grammar, copyediting, what is or isn’t error, the “authority” of the “authoritative sources,” and the like. What I consider to grievous editorial error, you may well think is so minor that it isn’t even worth mentioning. Which of us is right? The answer is that we can both be right, we can both be wrong, or one of us can be right and the other wrong — it all depends on the standards to be applied, who is to apply them, and whether the foundation of the standards is recognized universally as strong, weak, or crumbling. This is the discussion we often have as regards the authoritativeness of books like The Chicago Manual of Style and Garner’s Modern English Usage. It is the traditional argument whether prescriptivism or descriptivism should dominate.

And that was the problem of the AA versus CE assignment of fault. More importantly, it was even more so the problem of the world that had but three possibilities: AA, CE, and PE. There was no possibility that the error was an in-house (IH) error, because just as some editors today always respond with “Chicago says…” or “Garner says…” and whatever Chicago or Garner says is inalienable, unalterable, infallible, so it was true of in-house staff. At no point was there a discussion regarding why the CE was not a CE; it was marked a CE and so it was a CE — now and forever.

There was another wrinkle to this process. Quite often the initial designation of CE, AA, or PE was made by the freelance proofreader, who often was a copyeditor who was doing this particular project as a proofreading job rather than as copyediting job. This, of course, meant that what we really had was a spitting contest between copyeditors. Once again, there was no designation for proofreader error because the proofreader couldn’t make an error. By definition, the proofreader was supposed to only correct and mark objective errors such as a clear misspelling, or the failure to have sentence-ending punctuation, or other indisputable errors. And so that was true on the first day of creation, but by the third day the role had expanded and proofreaders expanded from pure proofreading to a hybrid proofreading-copyediting role. This became by creation’s fifth day the expected standard.

And so we have come full circle — it was not unusual for a strong copyeditor to find that she was being “graded” by a weak proofreader or in-house production editor. As between the proofreader and the copyeditor, both were trying to impress the client with their skills because they both were freelance and both dependant on gaining more business from the client. The in-house editor had to assign fault because accounting demanded it. In addition, the IH was becoming swamped with work and so had to increasingly rely on the proofreader’s judgment calls.

All of this worked because everything was kept local, that is onshore as opposed to offshore, because it was a never-discussed-but-well-understood system, and, most importantly, because once the book was published, there was no customer complaint system. How many readers (or reviewers, for that matter) were concerned with the finer points of editing and the production process. Rarely was a book panned because of poor editing as opposed to poor story, dull writing, factual error — none of the things that those outside the production process would ever associate with poor editing.

This world began changing not long after I became a freelance editor with the introduction of computers, word-processing programs like XyWrite, Word, and WordPerfect, and, ultimately, globalization — the material for the second part of this essay, “The Cusp of a New Book World: The Fourth Day of Creation.” (The third part of the essay is “The Cusp of a New Book World: The Sixth Day of Creation.”)

Richard Adin, An American Editor

The Professional Editor & the Sacrificing of Contemplation Time

As I have noted many times on An American Editor, editing has changed greatly since I began my career nearly 33 years ago. Many of the changes are small and relatively inconsequential; others amount to sea changes. All have added to the burden of the job.

The most problematic changes for me are the triad of increased tasks to be performed in less time but for the same or less pay. This triad denotes a change in emphasis. Thirty-three years ago, budgets weren’t unlimited but priorities were different. The goal then was a better book (manuscript) even if the schedule had to be stretched, the budget increased, or some of the less-important tasks skipped. Today, it is the schedule and budget that reign supreme, especially the schedule.

The sacrifice being made today is that of time to contemplate. I used to have the time to puzzle over sentence construction. Consider, for example, this sentence fragment:

…after the speaker of parliament leaked a report on the crime by Kroll…

There really isn’t a great deal wrong with the fragment, especially in the Twitter age where people are increasingly thinking in 140-character fragments, except that given time to think about what we are reading should raise questions that are at war with an editor’s goals of making the language such that all readers receive exactly the same author message and of answering foreseeable questions before they are asked.

The questions that came to my mind when I read the sentence of which the fragment is a part are these:

1. Was the crime report written by Kroll? or
2. Was the subject of the report a crime that had been committed by Kroll?

(The complete sentence reads: “It was not until April that much information about the bank scandal became public, after the speaker of parliament leaked a report on the crime by Kroll, a security firm.” [“Moldova’s Economy Gutted,” The Economist, August 1, 2015.])

In context, my assumption would be that the first alternative (the crime report was written by Kroll) is the correct interpretation. After all, the complete sentence identifies Kroll as a security firm. But think about that interpretation. It is premised on the idea that a security firm (or a member of the firm) cannot (or would not) commit such a crime. Legitimately, the complete sentence could be written like one of these alternatives:

It was not until April that much information about the bank scandal became public, after the speaker of parliament leaked a report on the crime committed by Kroll, a security firm.

or

It was not until April that much information about the bank scandal became public, after the speaker of parliament leaked a report on the crime written by Kroll, a security firm.

Note the words in bold in each revision: committed and written. The addition of just the one word to the sentence enhances and clarifies the meaning. And because either word fits neatly within the confines of the sentence — with no other change to the sentence, just the insertion of the single word — it is clear that the sentence as originally written (i.e., with the omission of either committed or written) could mean either that the report was written by Kroll or the crime was committed by Kroll. All that context does is give some weight to the credibility of an unstated premise that many readers will unconsciously draw.

Thus, the importance of time to contemplate.

I know from my experiences as an editor and as a reader that the minimizing of an editor’s time to contemplate what the editor is reading in a manuscript has become a seismic change in publishing. Increasingly one cannot rely on, for example, a nonfiction book to be accurate, only that it approximates being accurate. Too many sentences appear in books of “fact” that rely on the reader drawing the correct premise from a well of premises.

It nearly goes without saying that the problem of lack of contemplation time, as brought about by the earlier-mentioned triad, is compounded by the increase in self-editing and in the expansion of the editor pool by the inclusion and use of un-/less-/underqualified or nonprofessional editors. Self-editors would not stumble over the sentence because they innately understand what their words mean; it is no different than writing their instead of there and not catching the mistake when you reread what you have written. Similarly, underqualified and nonprofessional editors would pass over the phrasing because of the subtlety involved in recognizing that there are not only two possible opposing meanings (committing a crime is opposite writing about a crime committed by someone else), but that interpretation of the sentence as written requires selecting the correct underlying premise — which itself may be a false premise — from the well of premises.

Consider this example:

Because of this, while intrastudy interpretations of serological data from clinical trials with Vi conjugates are possible, heretofore comparisons of different conjugates cannot readily be made as two different conjugates have not been used in the same randomized study for direct comparison.

The sentence has several problems, but the one I want to focus on is the phrasing “heretofore comparisons of different conjugates cannot readily be made.” Is the sentence intended to mean that previously the comparisons could not be made but they can now be made? Or that neither in the past nor now can such comparisons be made? The problem is the combination of “heretofore” with “cannot” — it should be either “heretofore” with “could not” or “cannot” without “heretofore,” that is:

Because of this, while intrastudy interpretations of serological data from clinical trials with Vi conjugates are possible, heretofore comparisons of different conjugates could not readily be made as two different conjugates have not been used in the same randomized study for direct comparison.

in which the notion that the comparisons can now be made is implied (which means it would be better to explicitly state that comparisons can now be made), or

Because of this, while intrastudy interpretations of serological data from clinical trials with Vi conjugates are possible, comparisons of different conjugates cannot readily be made as two different conjugates have not been used in the same randomized study for direct comparison.

Sentences like the above get passed over because of the pressure of schedule combined with low compensation and the increased number of tasks that a client expects an editor to complete within the allotted time for that low compensation. Something has to give, and what has given is the time needed to contemplate sentence structure and the order of words.

Professional editors do the best they can within the parameters forced on them by clients. But perhaps we — meaning both professional editors and clients — need to step back and rethink the sacrifices that are being made in order to meet the demands. Should we continue to sacrifice clarity upon the altar of schedule? Should we continue to sacrifice the author’s message to the triad?

These are the questions that editors and clients need to address before it becomes acceptable for every manuscript to look like it has been twitterized.

Richard Adin, An American Editor