After exhibiting and presenting at last month’s Tucson Festival of Books, I’m reminded just how lucky I feel about being able to do what we do here at The Editorial Department. With an estimated 100,000 people in attendance over the weekend-long event came a steady stream of people of all ages stopping by our booth, many of whom wanted to know, among other things, how to become a book editor in the first place and what to expect from that career path, should they choose it.

 

These are questions I’ve heard often in my nearly 20 years in this line of work, and my answer hasn’t changed much: you probably won’t get rich editing books, but if you love to read and value the creative process, it can really be a pretty amazing choice of careers. There’s no single right way to prepare for it, but in this and a few future blog posts I’ll be putting the microscope on some of the most important attributes we look for in our staff and reflecting on some considerations that I hope are useful to the editorial-curious.

One general point anyone contemplating this kind of work should consider is the difference between the jobs of in-house publishing editors vs. their freelance counterparts. While there are in-house editors who do still do some substantive developmental work, the trend of the past decade or two is away from this, especially at major houses. In-house editors these days tend to be focused more on the business and acquisitions end of publishing, which leaves little if any time for editing manuscripts.  

Freelance editors are typically hired by the writer directly, sometimes at the suggestion of a literary agent or publisher but in many cases before the submission process even begins. Some writers hire their own editors simply to get an objective, informed perspective on whether their work is ready for the marketplace. Others know they need help with some aspect(s) of their project. Others are just looking for help in raising the bar higher, no matter how well done or fully realized a manuscript might be, before publishing a manuscript themselves. And then there are of course those who aren’t getting the results they’d hoped from submission to agents and publishers and want help in getting a warmer response.

While the nature and scope of the work performed can vary significantly, the deliverable to the writer will usually fall into one (or more) of three categories that I’ll be talking more about in a future post. The point worth making here is that there’s much more to editing than dotting Is, crossing Ts, or making sure that grammar, spelling, and punctuation is correct. That kind of editing has its purpose, of course, but it’s just one facet of a much broader (and I daresay far more interesting) spectrum of ways a good editor can help a promising manuscript realize its full potential.

With novels, a lot of what’s most interesting about our work here at The Editorial Department is the help we’re often able to provide with the story itself, the world the author creates for the story, and the characters who inhabit that world and give meaning to the events. In some cases there is a good bit of craft teaching involved--helping authors better understand principles of plotting, characterization, pacing, story structure, and so on, and also how to implement those principles most effectively. So one thing anyone interested in this kind of developmental editing as a career can do is get educated on story craft and the basics of dramatic structure. The better you understand the best principles of dialogue, characterization, scenewriting and things along those lines, the more valuable your perspective will be.

If you’ve read this far and feel like a career in editing might be for you, I hope you’ll stop back to check out further posts in this series. For more information right away, you might want to check out a few other articles by Editorial Department Staff that pull back the curtain on the work we do here:

What Editors (Really) Do, by Renni Browne
Evaluating Nonfiction: One Editor’s Approach, by Peter Gelfan
Copyediting & Proofreading Explored: A Guide for Nonfiction Writers, by Kate Steele