Editing for Fun and Profit
Actually Just Profit, Fun Not Guaranteed
One of the joys of writing Shelf Life is that once I have written an article, I don’t have to write it again the next time the topic comes up in conversation. Sometimes I just write about whatever foolish writing/editing/publishing thought is on my mind at the moment, and other times I write articles to answer questions that people have asked me.
Usually, for a question to rise to the level of getting a Shelf Life article, I have to hear and see that question a lot. I’ve been asked it several times personally, or me and my similar-profile friends have all received the same question, or I see the same question a lot in the writing groups and forums that I frequent, or some mix of the three.
A question I am often asked in passing, as a conversation-maker, is how I got into the career I’m in. Fell into it serendipitously, as I discussed in a recent post. A question I am almost never asked is how does one become an editor, or prepare for becoming an editor, or pick up the skills needed to become an editor. Then, this week, I was asked three times. This has now risen to the level of getting a Shelf Life article.
There are all kinds of editors and their titles and roles vary widely depending on whether you’re talking about news, or magazines, or journals, or books. Within each of those categories again, there are many different editorial roles: There are the editors who get the content (they might acquire it, or solicit it, or commission it to be created, or develop it) and then there are the editors who produce the content (copyedit it, proofread it, manage the production process).
I can only talk about the latter kinds of editors, since those are the kinds I have been and am. And I can only talk about journals and books. I have not produced magazines in a very long time and I have never worked in news. I never want to work in news. Sometimes I think I should, though, just so I can collect the whole set.
Anyway, I’ll break this down. You’re interested in becoming an editor, for whatever reason, and I have tips on what you can do to make that happen. Let me start with some information about the field in general to make sure we’re on the right page.
Being an editor doesn’t always pay well.
Payscale puts the estimated annual average salary for an editor around $55,000 with a range of $36,000 to $83,000. That isn’t to say you can’t make more; it depends on the type of editor you are. Most editors don’t get wealthy. Some editors may earn significant bonuses depending on the revenue their books pull in (usually acquiring/commissioning editors).
Many editorial jobs are freelance positions.
Fewer and fewer editorial jobs are full-time, in-house, permanent positions all the time. The editor that many people imagine when they think of editing—the person reading the text with a red pen in hand, suggesting revisions to make the text better, finding mistakes and eliminating them—pretty much never works on staff anymore. This work is almost always done on a freelance basis. For good or ill, something to keep in mind. If you like getting a W2 and employer-subsidized healthcare, then becoming an editor may not be for you or you may need to be very choosy about the type of editor you become.
Many editorial jobs are now remote.
The type of work editors do is the type that can be done from a home office. Most of what you do is done on a computer. Not very much of the job involves physically handling stuff (paper, printed products) but when it does, that stuff is getting shipped anyway—the printer is almost never co-located with the publisher. So even if you need to receive samples for color matching, or bluelines to review, there’s no reason you need to be in an office to do that. Still, a lot of these positions were tied to an office until COVID happened and all our bosses realized most of us work just as well from home as we do from an office. (Not my bosses, I’ve been a full-time work-from-homer for years.)
There are editorial jobs out there for both introverts and extroverts.
The type of editing I do attracts tons of introverts, and extroverts are often unhappy in the role. It’s a very solitary job and doesn’t involve a lot of meetings or collaboration with others (until you reach a workflow management level in which case, introverts take note, the whole job becomes going to meetings and collaborating with others). If you are an extroverted personality and enjoy working with others, you will probably be happier in an acquiring/commissioning role where you’re often talking with authors, attending conferences, and meeting with a publishing committee to pitch projects. Production roles are very well suited for introverts—this is the kind of job where you can put your headphones in at 8am and not take them out again till 4pm.
That all said, if you still think you want to get into the business of editing in exchange for cash money, here comes the real advice. I shall devote the rest of this article to my top five skills to acquire to set yourself up for success. Please bear in mind that these are tips coming from an operations and production editor and manager, and not from an acquiring or commissioning editor or manager. They are, however, tips that I think would serve anyone well starting out in the publishing industry.
Master a Style Manual
Pick up a style manual and learn how to use it. There’s an ancient Shelf Life on the pros and cons of the various manuals out there with information on how they are different from style guides (we’re talking CMS, not Strunk & White). Do read Strunk & White, but that’s not what I mean.
There are several major style manuals in use across the industry and then, on top of that bedrock, pretty much every publishing organization has built their own proprietary manual that governs the ways in which that individual publisher wants to deviate from the major manual or dictates how to handle specific situations that come up very often in their particular niche. For instance, the publication I work on at the moment is a family of prominent medical journals and they are governed by AMA Style broadly and then, more specifically, by a proprietary style manual just for that journal family that is about 100 pages long.
No one can memorize all that, right? Right! No one expects you to know any style manual by heart cover to cover. The CMS 17e is more than 1,100 pages long. There is an expectation, though, that you will know how to use a style manual.
To learn how, if you’ve never used one before, get a messy text from somewhere. Sit down with the text and the style manual you’re using and start reading the text slowly. When you come to something you’re unsure about—Should there be a comma here? Should that be italicized? Is this header capitalized correctly?—open up your manual to the contents and start digging for the answer.
When you find it, make the correction and move on. You’ll remember the basics of the manual you’re using before long—for instance, that under CMS you always insert a series comma if one is missing, and publication titles are always italicized, and in a headline you capitalize verbs even when they are short and lowercase prepositions even when they are long.
Once you feel confident that you can find the information you need as you’re editing, you’re gold. If you’ve been practicing with CMS and a prospective employer asks if you know APA, just be candid—you don’t know APA but you know CMS and you can get up to speed with APA rapidly because you know how to use a manual and can learn style on the job.
Understand the Printed Page
Print isn’t dead and it’s not going away anytime soon. If you’re going to be an editor, you’re going to have to look at laid-out pages at some point.
Understanding how pages of content are generated, the names for their parts, and the logic behind the design choices that go into them are critical knowledge for editors of all kinds. You will need to be able to tell when a page is laid out correctly or incorrectly. You’ll need to be able to glance at a page and see that the folio is on the wrong side of the page, or the running head is in the wrong font, or there’s text falling into the gutter. For a brief overview of the terminology associated with page layout, see my article on the topic.
Acquire one of these bad boys, I’ve mostly heard them called leading gauges (the ladder-looking rectangle running the length of the ruler is for measuring from the bottom of a line of text to the bottom of the line of text below or above it) but I fondly call it the screaming ruler because it goes EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE. Spend some time with your fancy ruler exploring the book and journal and magazine pages in your life.
You’ll be glad you did the first time someone asks you how to lose 5 percent of a book’s spine bulk when the author won’t cut any content and you can say “we’re at 11 over 13 let’s go down to 10 over 12 and increase the text block 5 picas on three sides” and, listen, if you say that with confidence the person who asked the question will just go away and let you do your job in peace even though they didn’t understand anything you said.
Prepare for Project Management
If you don’t already know how to juggle—learn. Unless you intend to freelance and to do it on a very relaxed schedule, you will not have the luxury of working on one project till it’s done and then moving on to the next project. Nothing in publishing works that way.
Get ready to juggle multiple projects at a time with complex schedules that all conflict with each other. Get ready for those schedules to be changed, and changed again, as market needs shift and the personnel you need to get the job done go on vacation or sabbatical.
Let’s say you’re a freelance copyeditor and you receive three 256-page titles to edit at the same time with a deadline six weeks out. It may seem like you can edit each one for two weeks, but you can’t because giving the author of the first manuscript four weeks to review 256 pages of edits and the third author 5 minutes to review 256 pages of edits doesn’t work for them—it only works for you. Instead, you’ll have to do a few chapters of each at a time, get publisher and author feedback, incorporate edits, make revisions, and keep all three of the projects straight in your head. As an in-house production editor I sometimes worked on as many as 20 titles at a time.
Attention to detail is obviously critical, I think everyone who wants to be an editor knows that already. Whatever kind of editor you want to be, you also need to be highly organized. You need to back up to a treetop view of your workload and rapidly deduce your top five priorities—even knowing the top five will be completely different tomorrow.
Dust Off Your Customer Service Hat
A huge part of being an editor is managing authors. Authors are great, I love authors. I mean, I genuinely do. I can think back more than a decade and remember individual authors I worked with and how they treated me and how they responded to my work on their manuscripts. Whoever wrote the content you’re editing, that’s one of your customers. You’re not doing them a favor. A lot of the time, they do not want your service. They think their manuscript is already perfect and their expectation is that you will read it and turn back to them and say “Ah, it was perfect, no notes!” but that is not your job.
Your job is to take their hard work and rip it to shreds. If you want authors to respond to your work in a positive way—meaning both that you are able to keep the working relationship cordial and that they don’t react defensively to your edits and cross them all out—you need to treat them like a valued customer. Handle with care. Package your feedback to them in a way designed to generate receptiveness (here’s how). Say please and thank you. Address them by their title (Doctor X, Professor Y, Miz Z) unless they ask you to use their first name.
And don’t get defensive when and if they push back on your edits—most authors won’t accept every edit you suggest. That’s okay. Don’t take it personally. Remember that it’s just the business of publishing books and not an indictment of your editing skill.
Learn Editorial Judgment
Last but not least. Last but most. In the course of working as an editor—unless someone is just truly unsuited for the work and can’t learn to pay attention to detail—everyone will reach a point where they can find every error in a given text. Where, if you show them a text with five errors, they can find five errors. In the aggregate, yes, everyone misses something from time to time but generally an experienced editor can catch everything.
That’s not what makes a great editor. A great editor is not someone who can look at a text with five errors and correct all five. A great editor is someone who can look at a text with five errors and identify which need to be corrected and which can be let go based on context.
You just got proofs and you notice there’s a serial comma missing on page 12. The deadline for proof corrections is in two weeks. Do you add the comma?
Your press deadline is in ten minutes and there’s a serial comma missing on page 12. Do you add the comma?
Your author is insisting that the placement of the comma in this series on page 12 alters the meaning of what he’s trying to say, but your house style manual says all series should have a comma. Do you add the comma?
An editor will have to make decisions like this all day, every day, on the fly, eventually without guidance. Editors are always working under the triple constraint: Keep costs under budget; keep quality high; stay on schedule. You will never be able to do all three. Something will always be giving way.
Developing that editorial judgement takes experience; I don’t think there’s any way to learn it except on the job. Perhaps the best way to prepare yourself is to contemplate the nature of perfection and what it costs to try to achieve it consistently. Perfection is almost never the smartest business decision.
If you go up the ladder of people in publishing, asking each one how important it is for a book to have no typos in it, you’ll see that the higher up you go the less important it is. Laypeople think books should never have any typos. Editors think books should have no or mostly no typos. Leadership wants to know what the service-level agreement says about the acceptable number of typos.
It sucks the first time you have to let a book go to press with a typo in it that you could have fixed had you caught it earlier. It’s like putting the first scratch on your new car. Only after that do you really begin to drive it confidently.
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