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Since a lot of people
aren’t quite sure, I thought I’d write a few
notes to help anybody interested get their
bearings. Of course, everyone works
differently, so you should only take these
as things I’ve noticed in the course of my
own work these last few years.
Essentially a
free-lance editor does for a manuscript (or
a proposal) what an in-house editor working
for a publishing house would do if s/he had
the time – that is, what she would do
after she had signed a contract with the
author for the book. With the increasing
consolidation of the business into a few big
houses in the last decades, in-house editors
have had so many responsibilities heaped on
their plate that they are often left with
virtually no time to actually edit a
manuscript page by page. This is one source
of work for us free-lancers, as overburdened
in-house editors sometimes call us in to
assist. Also, with the pressure to acquire
books increasing and the acquisition process
becoming more and more one done by
committee, it is often impossible for an
editor to take on a promising manuscript or
proposal that s/he might believe in but
which needs work before it can be
successfully shown to the acquisition
committee. This whole process forces the
editor to look for virtually finished and
polished manuscripts or proposals when at
all possible. Any need for serious
structural or line editing tends to
disqualify a manuscript from consideration,
unless there are other factors that can
strongly outweigh it, and a proposal that
isn’t convincing on the first quick read is
dismissed. The net result, it seems to me,
is that the developmental editing that used
to get done after a book was put under
contract now has to get done before a
manuscript has the chance to get a contract!
And this, of course, is
what has lead to the growth in the ranks of
free-lance editors in the last decade, as
developmental editing is increasingly pushed
out of corporate publishing, indeed becomes
a pre-requisite for a manuscript to be
considered by corporate publishing. And
while this is no doubt a gross
generalization, open to all sorts of
quibbles, I don’t think there’s much doubt
that this is the direction things have been
headed in for some time now.
This is where the
free-lance editor comes in. If an editor or
an agent tells a writer that the book they
are proposing seems promising but needs work
before it could possibly have a chance of
running this gauntlet successfully, a
free-lance editor can be very helpful.
Increasingly, many writers want to work with
a free-lance editor in the beginning before
they undertake the arduous process of
finding a publishing house, or even finding
an agent. This is especially true if we are
talking not about a finished book, but about
a book proposal and sample chapters.
I’ve come to think that
the best image for the free-lance editor is
that of the coach – or at least it fits what
happens between me and my clients better
than anything else I’ve come up with.
Consider it like hiring a personal trainer
at the gym. I think my responsibility is to
get the best performance out of a writer
that they are capable of, at this time in
their life, given their talent. I will not
actually write the book (or proposal) for
you – that is a completely distinct job,
that of the ghost writer, and while some of
us also do this, it costs a great deal more,
since it takes vastly more time. No, my job
is to see to it that you write at the top of
your form; like any coach I need to bring
out the best performance you are capable of.
But, of course, hiring
a coach doesn’t guarantee that you’re going
to win the contest, far from it. Many
people coming to free-lance editors are
really looking for reassurance that either
1) this book will find an agent, or 2) this
book will be signed up by a publishing
house, or 3) when it’s published, this will
be a successful book. Which is like asking
your personal trainer to guarantee that you
will win, or at least place, in the
contest. But this is nonsense. I would no
more guarantee that you would find an agent
or that the book would get published than
any honest agent would guarantee that she’d
get you a contract or any sane in-house
editor would promise to make your book a
best-seller. There are no guarantees in
publishing.
And it was your
decision to enter the triathlon, after all.
1 December
2005
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