3/3/24
That’s Not What I Meant!
This is number fifty-two in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.
“THIS HAS BEEN EDITED and proofread by three different people. Two of them are English teachers. All you need to do is format it for publication.”
That was literally a cover letter I received for a book I planned to publish. I responded by telling Mark that if it went out with my publishing company name on it, the least I would do was proofread it. He thought I was wasting my time and his money.
When I finished my read-through I wrote back to this fine author.
“Mark, I can’t guarantee I found every error in this manuscript, but there are 783 fewer now.”
English teachers are not the same as editors.
I’ve published a hundred books for different authors and I have yet to see one that was ready when I received it. A top tier literary agent once sent me a manuscript and asked me to publish it because the author was dying and she didn’t feel she had time to put it through the traditional publishing process. The book was written by an English teacher and the manuscript had been sent to a highly recommended professional editor in New York who charged quite a lot to edit the book. I was shocked at the condition of the manuscript I received—things a competent editor should have corrected immediately.
This English teacher author had quoted an article from The New Yorker magazine. Not a sentence, but the entire article! I asked him if he had permission to use it. He said he didn’t think he needed permission because his book was educational. I suggested that he was publishing the book for profit and had plagiarized a very large and famous magazine. He checked with the publisher and after being told it would cost $500 to reprint the article, decided his book didn’t really need that. What he didn’t realize was that it could have cost ten to a hundred times that if he had published the article without permission!
Most of us don’t even know what to look for in an editor or what kind of editor we need. There are many different kinds of editing and they will all play a part in your successful story.
I’ve mentioned the role of a developmental editor as fundamental to getting a book written in the first place. I’ll come back to that in a future post. Today, I’d like to focus on the line editor and the proofreader.
A line editor will look at each line of your manuscript and examine it for syntax, grammar, understanding, and accuracy. Imagine going through a manuscript line-by-line. The biggest problem many amateur (as in unpaid) editors have is becoming involved in the story and forgetting to edit. That’s one of the problems with alpha readers I could have mentioned in my previous post. They become so caught up in reading the story, they forget to edit it.
Some of the things a line editor will look for include misuse of words like homonyms—their there they’re, your you’re, than then, by buy, to two too, and many more—words that don’t actually mean what the author intended, and words that are used too frequently in a short span. If every story I’ve read had simply had a good line editor, the sum quality across the board would have gone up by fifty percent.
A really good line editor will also spot inaccuracies in the manuscript, though down-and-dirty fact-checking should probably be done by a copy editor.
My recently published fifth book in the “Photo Finish” series contained an error that should have been caught in editing. In Over Exposure, two characters are arrested and charged in court. They post bail and then I made an off-hand comment that by four o’clock, they were released on their own recognizance. I received this immediate response by email when the chapter posted:
No!
Release on your own recognizance means you don't have to pay bail. Simply put, OR release is no-cost bail. Defendants released on their own recognizance need only sign a written promise to appear in court as required. No bail has to be paid, either to the court or to a bail bond seller.
Well, I’ve never been held for bail and didn’t know the distinction. My editor (the one who was a lawyer for forty years) should have! But I spelled it all correctly, so the proofreader didn’t catch it.
Over Exposure and all six of the Photo Finish books are now available on Bookapy.
Line editing will reveal awkward sentences that just need to be rearranged. A good line editor will find inconsistencies in what has been said. I recently wrote about a four-and-a-half-year-old girl in one section of a chapter and just a few pages later talked about her upcoming fourth birthday. Line editing catches that kind of error.
But even though a line editor will correct spelling and punctuation, the final pass on that is done by the proofreader. On the surface, you’ll think the proofreader and the line editor do the same thing because they both look for syntax, sentence structure, spelling, and punctuation. They both have to read carefully, not for entertainment. The best distinction I can draw is that a line editor goes line-by-line through the manuscript and a proofreader goes word-by-word.
While a proofreader will also spot misuse of words, homonyms, and repeated words, most of those should already have been corrected. The proofreader will spot a missing closed quotation mark at the end of a paragraph. She’ll determine if the correct spelling of a word is transferal or transferral. (And probably note that the correct word would simply be transfer.) He’ll correctly note that an additional comma is needed in the statement, “I’d like to thank my parents, Paul McCartney and Martin Luther King Jr.” She’ll correct whether a closed quotation mark falls inside or outside the period in the sentence.
And sometimes the author will disagree with the editor. He will say, “That’s not what I meant!” In most cases, if the editor has tried to correct something to a statement the author didn’t mean, then the author should consider rewriting the entire sentence to be clearer. And there are differences of dialect, education, and even region. I have an editor who insisted that nearly every instance of the word “anymore” should be “any more.” I hold that it should only be two words if I can answer the question “more what?”
I, the author, got the last word on the matter, whether I was right or wrong!
Really? You mean there is more editing to be done? When is the book ever finished? If your book is going to market for sale on any of the major websites in either eBook or print, then someone has to actually prepare it and lay it out. Next week, “Mechanical Editing.”
Please feel free to send comments to the author at devon@devonlayne.com.
