Photo by Samuel Scrimshaw
do your due diligence before submitting
An editor is essentially a well-trained second set of eyes whose purpose is to catch the things you can’t. The manuscript you send to your editor should therefore be the version that represents how far you are capable of taking your work on your own. Ideally, this means you have
1) finished a full draft of your ms
2) revised that draft
3) sent the revised draft to beta readers
4) revised again based on the readers’ feedback
5) run spellcheck and checked formatting one last time
before sending your book to a professional.
Even after the ms has gone through all that, there will still be plenty for your editor to suggest and correct. However, doing your due diligence upfront should not only decrease the number of paid edits your book needs, but will also save your editor the concussion that comes from banging her head against a wall when faced with the easily avoidable, careless errors of a poorly self-edited ms.
Be upfront about anything that might impede your ability to write or Self-edit, as well as anything that might affect your content
Years before becoming an independent editor, I was an annoyingly thorough college-level grader. Since then, I’ve found that much of the advice I once gave to my students also applies to the writers I work with. The most widely applicable of these wisdom-nuggets is to be upfront about anything that might affect your writing and its content. If I know a writer is vision impaired, for example, I will have significantly more patience when his/her manuscript is littered with commas where there should be periods—or vice versa—than I would be otherwise. The same goes for those writing in a second language.
Similarly, it is also helpful to know whether clients are writing from their own experience. If you are writing a main character with a particular mental disorder, knowing how much first-hand knowledge you have of that disorder will help your editor know how much to question your presentation of that character. Likewise, if you are writing from the perspective of a particular culture, it helps to know if you are either from that culture or if you have spent significant time in/studying that culture. Your editor should want to respect your point of view, and if she feels you’re an expert on a subject, she probably won’t question that expertise unless it seems absolutely necessary.
Make the changes your editor asked for before sending a draft back to her
Obviously, no one wants to redo work they’ve already done, just as no one wants to do work for people who don’t take their own writing seriously enough to do what’s necessary to improve it. More than that, though, it’s important to keep in mind that editing is really a refining process, and the edits for each draft clear the way for a new set of issues to show up and be corrected. When changes that need to be made aren’t, this process is both stalled and imperiled.
Of course, your editor may suggest changes you decide are not best and/or appropriate for your work. In these cases, you should discuss your reasoning with her. Not only will this help her understand your choices in these specific instances, but it will help her better understand your perspective as a writer in a way that should improve the kind of feedback she gives you in subsequent drafts and manuscripts.
Learn from your previous edits
If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result, then the surest way to make otherwise sane editors feel crazy is to make them correct the same mistakes over and over. If, for instance, the first ms you give to your editor is full of sentence fragments that she carefully corrects for you, make sure your subsequent manuscripts are drastically fragment-reduced, if not completely fragment free. If you instead decide not to learn from your previous mistakes and treat your editor like a garbage dump for lazy writing, be prepared for increasingly harsh feedback or for her to stop working with you altogether.
Besides, why wouldn’t you want to write the best book possible and save yourself significant time and money by avoiding what should be unnecessary revisions?
In summary
Basically, what all of this boils down to is just another version of the Golden Rule: treat your editors with the respect you want them to show you and your work. Remember that, even in the best of circumstances, editing is an extremely time-consuming, painstaking process done by fallible humans. The more problems your ms possesses, or the more additional frustrations you add to the process, the less complete—and kind—their feedback will be. On the other hand, the more effort you put into your own work and the more openly you communicate with your editor, the better her feedback can be and the more willing she will be to go the extra mile for you.