What Is an Editor?

Identifying Your Manuscript’s Best Friend and Worst Enemy

When I say “worst enemy,” I don’t mean it. I was just kidding. Guys, come back.

An editor is your manuscript’s best friend: An editor’s job—every editor’s job—is to make the manuscripts that cross our desks the best they (the manuscripts, that is, not the desks) can be. There are many types of publication editor (you can read about some of them in Somewhere Over the Transom Part I and Part II), and all the different editors do different things, but all of us share this common goal: Make the best publication possible out of the materials we receive.

An editor can also feel like your manuscript’s worst enemy—in the same way a cardiological surgeon might feel like your sternum’s worst enemy when she is making that cruel cut. It’s no fun to get open-heart surgery—I assume, having never had it—but nobody gets open-heart surgery for fun, do they? People get open-heart surgery, or any surgery, or any medical intervention, in fact, because they need it. Not because they woke up one day and thought “You know what I want to do today? Get my pancreas removed.”

It is always better to not need an intervention than to need one. On this, I hope we can all agree. It’s obviously better not to need chemotherapy than to need it. It’s infinitely better to not need your appendix removed than to need it. That said, if you need an intervention, that intervention is a good thing. The intervention itself is not a bad thing, inherently, just because you would rather not need it—would rather no one ever need it—and because it may be painful to undergo.

I am definitely still talking about editing.

Entrusting your manuscript to an editor is an intervention of that type. Would it be better not to need this intervention? Sure! It’s always better! It would be better to have produced a perfect manuscript on the first try than to have produced an imperfect one. It would be better to drop your finished book onto the marketplace and watch it become a runaway bestseller without any editorial, marketing, or sales help—than to require that editorial, marketing, and sales help. But in real life, most of the time, we do need a little help from the pros. Right? You wouldn’t pull your own teeth. You wouldn’t remove your own appendix . . . unless—but, no! Enough about Leonid Rogozov.

So: You entrust your manuscript to an editor. Several editors along the way, probably. But exactly who is this publishing functionary? Who are they to criticize and mark up your manuscript? What education or credentials gives them the right?

An editor is anyone who has a hand in the selection and preparation of text for publication; they are someone who performs this function either as their paid job or in some other capacity—perhaps as a volunteer or in trade for other services. An editor may work on newspapers, magazines, books, journals, or reference materials. They could also work on adjacent, ancillary publications like marketing copy, book cover text, test banks, slide decks, websites, and more.

There are tons of editors outside of publication editors—the ones I’m talking about here—by the way. Video editing, for instance, is an entire profession and I would not be surprised if there were more video editors in the workforce now than publication editors.

Also videos are kind of publications, but now I’m getting into semantics. You know what kind of editor I am talking about. If you’re a novel writer, for instance, an editor may be

• The person at the publishing company to whom your agent submits your manuscript for consideration and who, hopefully, signs your book (acquisitions editor).

• A freelancer or publishing company employee who provides high-level feedback on your manuscript as a whole and helps you implement that feedback (development or line editor).

• A person who helps you determine which parts of your manuscript—if any—require permission from a third party to reprint, and helps you secure those permissions (rights and permissions editor).

• Someone who marks up your manuscript for grammar, mechanics, style, and usage (copyeditor).

• The person at the publishing company who shepherds your manuscript through the different stages of production (production editor).

• Someone who marks up your proof for any last little lingering typos (proofreader).

But whichever kind of editor—or editors—you’re working with, here are some facets I think we all share.

1. Red-Pencil Wielder

It’s me: Your friendly neighborhood manuscript marker-upper. Every editor I can think of, regardless of their overall editorial function, is trained and experienced at reviewing a manuscript with an eagle eye and making that manuscript better than it was before it crossed their desk.

As any publication proceeds through the publishing process, the editorial focus goes from bigger/broader/macro to smaller/narrower/micro. The editors who work on the manuscript earlier point out bigger-picture things and those who work on the manuscript later look to correct for smaller, more detailed things. Some editors may look more like businesspeople from the outside, like the acquisitions editor who creates a contribution margin for your book to convince the publishing committee to sign your contract, who sets the project’s budget for production, and who may forecast the the frontlist sales.

But all of us are pretty handy with the correction pen. Its all of our jobs to leave a manuscript better and cleaner than we found it, whether we’re looking for big-ticket items like “you’re going to need to go back and add X, Y, and Z if you want to compete with your shelf mates” or small fry like “you need a serial comma here, here, and here.”

2. Destroyer of Worlds

And of egos. No easy way to say it: An editor is going to tear your work up in some way, shape, or form.

As a writer, you have to believe in the value of your own writing. You have to, or you can’t do it. Maybe you don’t have to believe it’s perfect but you have to believe it’s good. You have to believe it’s an enjoyable read and worth the reader’s time. 

An editor is the person who will step in and say: “No matter how good or perfect you think this work is, I’m going to show you twelve places where it’s less good or perfect than you thought.” An editor is the person who sends you 300 corrections on 100 pages and gives you a tight deadline to address them. Speaking of deadlines, every time you think you’ve put the book to bed an editor will pop up with a new task for you and a new tight deadline. An editor will gobble up your free time and never say they’re sorry.

3. Tastemaker

A big responsibility of any editor is to make decisions that affect what people read and how people use language, downstream. It’s obvious how acquisitions editors do this—they select the books that will be signed by a publishing company, the ones that will ultimately be published, marketed, and available in stores and libraries, the books that people will buy and read.

In less obvious ways, other types of editors also influence readers down the line—by choosing how and where to apply style guidance from the major manuals (like Chicago, APA, AP, and so on) and where to ignore or even subvert that style guidance. When an editor makes a conscious choice not to replace slang or jargon with a dictionary-approved alternative, that slang or jargon reaches readers and begins to permeate the common lexicon. Over time, these words  become dictionary-approved because people are using them.

Editors (and the style manuals we follow) are much more socially conscious than many people realize. If you picture the style manual as a dry list of grammatical rules and regulations to follow, it’s not. Some of the things you can find in the style manual of your choice include:

• When and how to use the singular they.

• When, how, and why to use “people,” “patients,” “cases,” or “populations” instead of “men,” “women,” or “men and women.”

• How to avoid slurs and offensive terms.

• Guidance on learning and using bias-free language.

4. Juggler

Nobody is working on only one book at a time.

Okay that’s not true. Sometimes authors are working on only one book at a time. Not always, but sometimes.

No editor—except possibly for freelancers who can afford the luxury of this gentle pace—gets to work on one book or project till they’re done with it and then move on to the next one. Every editor is juggling projects at different stages of the publication process—all day, every day.

An acquisitions editor may be giving your contract a final read before sending it out to you to sign. Once that’s signed, your book is under contract. It’s the acquisitions editor’s job to choose books and get them contracted, so that’s her day—right? But her day also consists of reading proposals and pitches to find new manuscripts, working with authors who are already under contract to develop their manuscripts, preparing proposals to bring to the publishing committee for consideration, budgeting, reviewing cover comps for books in production, attending meetings, answering emails, and perhaps even attending conferences to solicit new authors and manuscripts.

And to that end, every editor is also a—

5. Jack of Several Trades

If not all. Listen, nobody’s a jack of all trades. Maybe a jack of all spades at best. Put another way—to put it the most annoying way possible—every editor wears several hats. Nobody likes to hear that the position they are applying for “wears many hats.” This, in translation, means “we will expect you to do things on an ad hoc basis that are not in the job description and we will not compensate you accordingly.” This is why it’s called a hat trick. I’m just kidding this is not a hat trick. It’s just a scam.

But that’s not what I’m saying about editors. They’re not all getting scammed by their employers all the time—though I’m sure some are. What I’m saying is that editors have a wide range of job duties that do not neatly fit in the “editing” box—that is, editing as you may picture it: Reading and marking up pages, looking up style guidance, meeting with authors, and walking around the printing press, apparently.

An aside: The printing press and the publishing company are almost always separate and unaffiliated things. The publishing company is where your editor works and is full of cubicles and desks like any other office. The printing press is more like a factory and is probably in Ann Arbor, MI. I can’t tell you how many times an author comes to visit the publisher and gets the tour and the royal treatment (as they should) and then shyly asks to see the printing presses. Thank you Mario but our print press is in another castle. I have disappointed many authors in this fashion.

Anyway, editors do a lot, but the motivation and the goal is always the same: To move your project further from a manuscript and closer to a finished book as it crosses our desk.

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