Q: I had a free critique from you some time ago. It was really helpful. I'm wondering why you guys don't use a mailing list or newsletter like others do?


A: The truth is, we don't want clients who have to be talked into working with us. We do monthly free critiques as a service, but most of our clients come to us via word of mouth. As a result, the clients we do work with have specific goals in mind. They want to get published traditionally and haven't had any luck on their own. Or they want to self-publish but they don't feel their work is ready. They want to make it better and learn how to do this themselves in the future.


We're both ethically against the constant spamming that we all have to deal with. We feel it lessens the quality of services. You know what we do. We're good at it. That either works for you or it doesn't. We see no value in filling up your inbox with 'helpful' marketing materials.

Q: I had my novel copy-edited by another editing company, but someone told me it's still not good enough. Why are there still mistakes on my pages? I thought editing would solve everything. Thanks.

A: (Salome) A copy-edit will solve certain kinds of problems. It will get rid of typos, bad grammar, maybe repetitive words. It's basically a final polish. You can't polish away major flaws in the story.

Depending on your level of writing skill, you probably need a line edit and/or a content edit. In a line edit, the editor will look at your book on a sentence and paragraph level, rearranging sentences and pieces of sentences for clarity and power and flow of words. In a content edit, the editor will look at your book as a whole, making sure that everything makes sense on the level of scene and story and giving suggestions for improving it. (In our list of services, this would be covered under either developmental, mentoring, or heavy editing.) Many inexperienced writers believe that a copy-edit will make their novels perfect.

Publishing companies hire different people to do the various levels of editing. A content editor doesn't generally do the final copy-edit. Depending on what service you hired an editor to do, there may be a long way to go. Also, an editor is only an editor. An editor is unlikely to make your book great with editing alone unless it's already very nearly great. There are tools a good editor who is also a good writer and teacher can use to make your book great. Rewriting is one of them. The other is mentoring, helping you learn what the problems are with your writing. Mentoring is more valuable than any book on writing because a good mentor can get to the heart of your particular writing issues very quickly, and then work with you until you understand how to solve them.

As an example, one writer I worked with had almost no change of emotion in her entire manuscript. Stories need ups and downs, not just in what happens, but in the emotions of the characters. In general, people read fiction to be affected by it. Her manuscript also contained numerous errors of logic, depictions of actions that made the characters look like they either had superpowers (because they broke the laws of physics) or were extremely naive. I did a lot of extra work for her beyond the level of a copy-edit or even a light edit, but her book still had problems and there was no way for me to fix them without a lot of rewriting which was well beyond the level of editing she had paid for. Eventually I convinced her to take a course of mentoring with me and with guidance, she rewrote until she had a pretty good book.


A: (Tim) Editing is a catch-all term for several different functions -- generally known in the trade as copy-editing  line editing and structural (or content) editing. It's a bit like a carpenter's toolbox. A saw, a plane and a chisel all allow a carpenter to work on a piece of wood, but you wouldn't want to try to halve the length of a plank with a plane, or cut out a neat groove with a saw. 

Broadly speaking, copy-editing checks that your individual words are correct, nothing else. It doesn't make any judgement on whether your characters are well-developed or your plot makes sense. Most copy-editors will be concentrating so hard on the individual letters that they'll barely notice that there's a plot going on anyway. A lot of people call this function proofreading, but to be strictly accurate, proofreading is when you're comparing the publisher's final version of the manuscript with the printer's first rough output, to make sure that the printer has it all correct.

Line editing doesn't pay as much attention to spelling and grammar. Instead, the editor will be looking to make sure that the sentences read well and do the job that they are supposed to. If there are inconsistencies -- say the teacher was blonde four chapters ago, but here he's a redhead -- then the line editor is supposed to pick that up. Line editors will often notice spelling and grammar mistakes, but it's not strictly part of the job, and they're concentrating on other things. On top of that, line editing often involves a bit of rewriting here and there, and that will inevitably involve the odd typo. Line editing is more commonly known (outside the book trade) as light editing. 

Structural editing is much more fundamental than the other two levels. Here, the editor puts aside any concerns about spelling or word-flow  and instead concentrates on the basics of the book -- whether the plot makes sense, how the structure is, whether the theme is clear, the way the scenes fit together, how the pace flows, character depth and arcs, whether everything is bogged down by exposition, and so on. If line-editing is like a personal trainer, and copy-editing is makeup and nice clothing, then structural editing is open-heart surgery. 

So a novel that's been edited at one level is not necessarily going to be perfect in every respect. A copy-edit is very much on the surface. A further consideration to bear in mind is that the more exposure an editor has had to a piece of writing, the harder it is for them to effectively copy-edit it. The brain quickly marks things as familiar, and slides past them. So if someone has already done some line editing on a piece, they're not really going to be ideal to copy-edit it afterwards. The best copy-edits always come from fresh eyes. 

by Salome Jones


I've been nosing around on the internet looking for information about freelance fiction editors. As I was reading through various fora it became clear to me that people usually have two critical questions about having their fiction edited. I'd like to take a stab at answering them here.

Why Do I Need an Editor?

A lot of new writers who have put their work out into the ebook market love the freedom of just putting it out there. No strings. No publishers or agents blocking their path to fame and fortune. They've had friends look at their books. They personally believe in their own work. (Well, they do on Tuesday, but then on Thursday they get a bad review and self-doubt sets in.)

Do you actually need an editor? Probably. People who've been writing and getting published for years still have an editor look at their work. When I was in graduate school the first time, I sat in the cafeteria at lunch and listened to my writing faculty praising or complaining about their editors. One semester in particular, a respected editor passed away. Several of the faculty had used her services. They were bemoaning how their new editors hardly wrote anything on their pages.

Friends and critique groups are helpful. And it's fun to have people cooing over your work. I was in a writers' group for several years that met weekly. I got some good feedback there. But it was never in-depth enough for me. Trying to divide a two hour meeting into time to read aloud and critique seven or eight people's work, even if limited to five pages, means no one really has time to give a thorough critique.

Asking people to read your book and give you feedback comes with its own set of problems. If they're friends, most likely they'll only give you positive feedback. They like you. And also, they don't really have enough experience to point out the kinds of problems that a publisher or an agent is going to notice. Also, unless the person is a very close friend, they probably don't have time to devote to your book.

You do need positive feedback. I'm a big believer in positive feedback. Especially for new writers. But it won't make your writing better.

A person who is trained and experienced in reading fiction, who knows what kinds of things on the sentence, paragraph, scene and story level publishers and agents will be looking for, is going to be able to give you much better feedback than a friend. Someone that you're paying to tell you the truth about your book and to help you make it better is not just going to say 'good job' and give it back to you untouched. At least that's what you hope.

How Do I Find a Good Editor?

The more important question might be, how do I find the right editor for me and this book right here?

In working with a colleague to get several novels ready for print, we subcontracted out some editing. I edited one book, someone we knew edited another, and three people who were recommended to us took on the other books. The three unknown people wrote almost nothing on the pages, in spite of edits being needed. We essentially paid them for nothing.

What I learned from that experience was that just because someone is recommended, doesn't mean they'll be suitable for the job. But then, what's a writer to do?

I recommend these steps.

1) Ask for a sample edit. Many editors will offer to edit a few pages for you free of charge once they've decided that they'd like to work on your book. It will probably be somewhere between two and eight pages. This is the best way to know whether the editor's notes will make any sort of sense to you, whether the editor 'gets' your book, and what, exactly, the editor plans to do to your pages.

2) Find out about your editor's experience and education. Before I got my MFA, I was told that if I wanted to be an editor, I'd need a degree. I'm sure some people are editing without degrees, and having a degree doesn't guarantee that an editor will be good. But if I were looking for an editor, I'd look for one with some sort of education specifically in fiction writing. (That said, my editor doesn't have a graduate degree, but he does have twenty years of publishing industry experience. And yes, I have an editor for my writing. Because a novel is hard to hold in your head and you do lose perspective when you've been working on it for a long time. It's difficult not to.)

3) Find someone who edits in the genre you're writing in. This can be a bit of a double edged sword, so use it as a guide more than a strict rule. Ideally, your editor will know something about the tropes of the genre you're writing in. This will probably be helpful to you in the sense that they'll know what publishers, and readers, expect to see in that sort of book. They won't advise you to take out something that's crucial to your book because they've never seen a book of that type before.

That said, and this is the edge that can cut you, you don't want your book to be just like every other book in the world in your genre. (Well... maybe you do.  I don't. See Chuck Wendig's rant about niche and market. ) You want an editor who can adapt, who can think along new lines. You want someone who can look at your book and see what you were trying to accomplish with it. So someone who only edits in your genre may have their limits.

4) In my opinion, the most important quality in an editor apart from being knowledgeable is the ability to grok your book. An editor should not have his or her own agenda when editing your book. An editor is there to make your book your best book. Whether this will happen depends on the editor's skill, the editor's adaptability, and your comfort with and trust of the editor.  So talk to them before you place your book with them. See if you can get them to edit a larger chunk of your book for part of the fee if you don't feel certain after the free sample. Try to have a voice conversation if email doesn't provide enough info. Ask for references or whether there's a previous client who would be willing to talk to you.

You may not need all of these things, but they should be options for you. Just recognize that good editors are often in great demand and they may have to squeeze in time to talk to you. Don't take advantage of their willingness to help you make a decision.

A Plea on Behalf of Editors Everywhere

If you've found a good editor, you will want to keep him or her. Toward that end, try to be aware that someone who edits for a living is going to have other clients. Editing is in many ways as demanding as writing itself. In fact, I'll say that editing done by a good editor can be more time consuming than writing. Especially if the author hasn't spent much time revising the piece him or herself.

Don't ask your editor to work for free. Don't ask him to do more work for you without offering to pay. You really will get what you pay for from a good editor. You're developing a relationship as much as anything - one in which you can trust the editor to be honest without brutalizing you, and one in which the editor can trust you to respect the fact that editing is her job.

Salome did a Q & A with Bees Make Honey Creative Cooperative yesterday. You can read the article here.