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May 2007
The Writer's Quest, part whatever.
Any writer who decides to get serious about selling his or her work has to prepare themselves to face that one person who is both ally and adversary: the editor. It doesn't matter what you're writing, be it fiction, non-fiction, short pieces, book-length manuscripts, magazine articles, comics, humor, horror, smut, whatever. It is extremely rare to sell any form of writing without passing it through an editor first, and more than one writer has done themselves more harm than good by refusing to work with their editor.
We most often think of editors as the people working for the publishers, making sure the submissions meet all necessary criteria. If you submit a column to the newspaper, the editor is supposed to check for errors, either correcting them or sending the submission back to you for correction, and may cut or expand the column as needed for space requirements. Submissions editors at publishing houses look over the offerings to determine which ones present the best prospects for the business. What they look for is the balance between sales potential and how much work they will need to invest to make it readable.
You may have a great story idea that would sell millions of books, but if the editor looks at the first chapter and sees nothing but an amateurish mess, you're going to get a form rejection. The publisher wants something that looks like you've put some work into the manuscript, as the more work you do means the less they need to do. The less work they need to do, the sooner they can get a sellable book on the market and the less they have to spend to do so. That means better profits.
There is another category of editor, though, and one that more writers should avail themselves of. These are independent editors whose task is to read over a work and find those things that the submissions editors are going to balk at. Professional editors don't throw out your manuscript just because they don't see "Bestseller" in the future. Their job isn't to evaluate the market potential of your book, but rather to improve said potential.
Agents and publishers often say that one of the most common submission mistakes they see is writers sending in their first drafts. They can tell; many times, it's someone who has managed to crank out their first book and in their enthusiasm and optimism, they make a bazillion copies and send them out, expecting rave reviews and a bidding war for the rights. When they get the rejection slips, they wonder what went wrong.
Self-publishing and Print-on-Demand services are suffering from this same tendency, and it's inhibiting the move away from the "Vanity Press" image. Few self-published authors invest in the cost of professional editing, and while some of the POD services offer some editing, most cannot give a manuscript the kind of attention it really needs. As a result, the traditional publishers point to the sloppy writing in many of the self-published and POD books as evidence of the superiority of their businesses. A first draft reads like a first draft, whether it's on your computer screen, bound in a loose-leaf notebook, or printed and bound like a traditional book.
The writer must invest in his or her work. There is the original invest of time and imagination to produce that first draft. We make an emotional investment when we open ourselves up for critique, and accept the constructive criticism for how we can improve that first draft. We invest more time in editing and revising, sometimes repeating the critique - revise cycle several times. For some of us, we decide to make the financial investment of paying the professional editor to work on our manuscripts.
It's not always an easy decision; in some ways, it feels much like the idea of paying someone to rip your heart out. You're trusting someone to make changes to your story, knowing this person has no real attachment to your characters. Yet you also know that in many cases, a professional editing job can make the difference between a cursory glance by an agent or submissions editor and a more thorough reading. It can make a difference in the cover letter, when they see that you believed enough in your manuscript to pay for editing. It tells them you're the kind of person who can work with an editor, so when they start to go over your manuscript, you're not as likely to refuse any and all suggestions. It demonstrates to them that you're serious about your manuscript, and this isn't a spur-of-the-moment thing of "Hey! I wrote a book! Let me send it to Big House publishers so they can throw buckets of money at me!"
Why is this subject so prominent in my mind this month? Because Cardan's Pod is now in the hands of a professional editor, about to be given the kind of evaluation I cannot give it. Despite all the editing and revising I've done, I'm not a submissions editor and I don't read my materials the same way. After some careful study and consideration, I decided if I was going to stand a real chance of selling my story, either to a traditional publisher or else through self-publishing, I need to make the investment to make it the best possible manuscript I can, even if it means trusting it to someone else for a while.
I expect to bristle at her suggestions and her changes. I expect to balk a bit. I might even get offended. In the end, though, I also expect to look at things and find she was right about most of it, if not all. That's her job.
When the time comes that I actually get an offer for my story, I'll know then how much it was worth.
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