There are reasons that most professional editors, when assessing an unseen manuscript, double the estimated time it will take to edit and assume that the manuscript's quality is one to two levels worse than what the author has determined it to be:
1. The biggest reason is that writers are dreamers and tragically optimistic about their own work. As much as established writers almost always question their own work, oddly enough, unestablished writers seem to think anything they write is the cat's meow. I once read that 60% of people believe they are better looking than average, but 80% believe they are smarter than average. It is my personal belief, with nothing but anecdotes to support it, that more than 90% of people think they are better writers than average.
2. Most writers, and the general public, have no idea what editors do, nor (and this is scary if you think about it in terms of book quality) do most of them care. Commonly, folks think that editors are proofreaders and correct typos. Most work of that kind can be done with a good spellchecking program, whereas editors are concerned with grammatical and syntactical errors, and especially concerned with faulty logic, unresolved story arcs, and the like. Even so, I've found that most authors, when a fatal flaw is shown to them, will ignore the feedback and instead ask if all the typos have been found.
3. Because of #2, most writers don't realize that having their [insert name of personal relationship here] read their book is not the same as editing, nor will doing so accomplish more than a small handful of the tasks an editor would typically handle. Sometimes it's even worse, and writers will install themselves as the editor of their own work. Sorry to give you the bad news—when a writer makes changes, it's called rewriting or revising, not editing.
Here's a typical exchange:
Editor: Sounds good. What shape is the manuscript in?
Author: It's in pretty good shape. I've rewritten it two or three times, and my [insert name of biased reviewer here] has edited it twice. A few friends have read it, too, and they all think it's freaking great. In fact, they all love it.
Editor: Well, OK, but what kind of shape would you say it is in?
Author: Probably just needs a quick read-through. Proofreading, typos, that kind of thing.
Assessment: Full line edit. Should have a full manuscript read first to assess whether it has any fatal flaws or glaring errors. Unlikely to need only proofreading.
And another:
Editor: Sounds good. What shape is the manuscript in? Is it finished, and how is it formatted?
Author: It's in Word. I already set up all the margins, and I've read the MS through several times to ensure that there are no errors.
Assessment: Probably littered with errors and the formatting probably includes tabs for every indent, a hard line break at the end of every line, even in the middle of paragraphs, and several dozen spaces before words that need to be centered.
[Hey, don't hate me. I'm just giving you the lowdown, Holmes. This is what happens in the real world.]
And just an aside. If you have published your own work and did not have it edited by a professional, it is glaringly obvious. Believe me when I say it—glaringly. I can read copy for books on Amazon and spot the "self-edited" ones in a few seconds. And so can a lot of other people.
Other tips in this multipart post (and a few others):
Cheers.
No comments:
Post a Comment