I got my line edit back and it’s covered in Tracked Changes, and now I’m worried my line editor hates my book and I’m a bad author and this book is going to bomb and I hate myself.
Okay, everybody breathe. Writing a book is an emotional process; there’s just no way around it. When you get your manuscript back with read changes all over, it’s easy to think, “Oh my gosh, my line editor hates my book.”
I’ve never actually gotten this particular kind of feedback, so I think my authors trust me. But I’ve heard authors feel surprised, anxious, or overwhelmed by an edit.
And I get it. You worked hard on your book, and you think it’s pretty good. You want people to like it. Your editor may be the first person outside your peer group who gets to read the whole thing top to bottom. It’s a vulnerable situation.
There’s no way around sometimes, perhaps often, feeling like you suck at writing and the book is bad and all those negative things. Unless you’re a narcissist who thinks everything she does is amazing because she has no insight or self-awareness.
For the sake of argument, let’s assume you’re like most of my authors. You know you have good ideas, something to say to the world, but you’re not used to writing books. You hire an editor because you want professional advice on how to make your book as strong as it can be.
You just didn’t expect the editor to have quite so much advice.
Remember What a Line Editor Is For
Most authors want editors to tell them how great their books are and that they only had to make a few tweaks. Your editor should have supportive things to say, but he’s not a yes man. Remember what a line editor is for. A line editor works at the level of paragraphs and sentences and prioritizes clarity and competence.
Any editor is like a midwife helping to birth your book into the world. You’re still doing the hard work, but the editor may have to administer some uncomfortable treatments along the way.
All those red changes may indicate that your manuscript needed more help than you expected, but they were made for the sake of the final product. They are there to make you sound more competent and to clarify your message or story.
Those changes don’t mean your editor hates your book; they mean your editor is doing his job.
Think Like a Line Editor
It may help to try to think like a line editor. In the first place, I personally would not agree to be your line editor if I truly hated your book. In the second place, most line editors chose to be line editors because they don’t usually hate books. We generally love books.
A good line editor wants you to sound good.
When it comes to the actual manuscript, a good line editor will see more than words on a page. He will think forward and backward in your book and make sure sentences makes sense in its paragraph and each paragraph follows upon the last in a sensible way. He will be obsessed with transitions and run-on sentences and parallel structure. He will root out throat-clearing or hesitant phrasing, and he will expunge overused words like just, really, actually, very—words you didn’t know you were overusing.
More importantly, a good line editor wants you to sound good. I’m not thinking about whether I’m hurting anyone’s feelings as much as I’m thinking, “Does this confuse me as a reader? Does this feel out of place? Do I understand why she’s saying this here, given what she’s said earlier?”
It’s not that it’s not personal, but I assume that we both value the success of the book more than protecting your feelings. Nobody writes gold right out of the box.
Shoot, I’ve been writing for 25 years, and you’d still be surprised how many times I revise myself when I’m writing even a short blog.
Remember Who Is the Author
When you hire a line editor, you implicitly cede some control over your manuscript to someone else.
You’re also paying them a decent amount of money. (My rates aren’t the cheapest, but most people find them more than fair for what they get.) Spending money on something that makes you feel vulnerable can create cognitive dissonance, or a tension in your mind between your thoughts and actions.
“I paid this guy a lot of money, but he didn’t tell me what I wanted to hear.”
Your mind wants to resolve that tension, so you may convince yourself that the editor is always right. You want to believe you’re getting your money’s worth.
You are the source; you are also the authority. You get the final say.
That’s where the whole “my editor hates my book” thinking comes in.
I’m not going to pretend that I don’t usually think I’m right. However, I’m still just the editor. You are the author.
Author, from an old Latin word meaning origin. You are the source; you are also the authority. You get the final say.
(Okay, if you go through a traditional publishing house, you will get less say. They have some good reason to think they know how to sell books, but they are sometimes wrong, too.)
Know When To Bend, When to Break
There are some rules of English that hold whether you like it or not. Sentences need a subject and a verb. Implied, at least. Paragraphs should be about one main idea. Lists or series should have a parallel construction.
But there are so many rules that you can bend, and here it’s a matter of judgment, style, and preference. How many rhetorical questions can this paragraph sustain? Does this run-on sentence do some good work that merits leaving it be? So what if I like using em dashes? Take it up with Emily Dickinson.
In other words, if you really don’t like a change by your line editor, you can opt to reject it. You might retain the original wording or you might revise the sentence to amend the problem your line editor saw but use a word or phrase you like better.
Read Through the Changes
Keeping all this in mind, it’s time to actually read through the changes. When you stop freaking out about all the red on the page and take the time to study what your line editor actually did, you often come to appreciate how much clearer and stronger your prose becomes.
Like someone coaxing burning embers into beautiful flames.
The best way to do this is to only view the revised version of the manuscript. In Word, go to the Tracking section of the Review tab and select “Simple Markup” on the Display for Review dropdown menu. You’ll see a red bar in the left margin beside each line that had an edit but you can read a clean copy of the manuscript. If you like, you can open your original draft in a second window and put them side by side.
You should see that your line editor doesn’t hate your book but rather has lovingly shaped it into something better than you had imagined it could be. Like someone coaxing burning embers into beautiful flames.
Quick tip on accepting changes: Start with changes you wish to reject. There will be fewer of these, and when you’ve combed through the whole MS, you can go to the Changes section, click the arrow under Accept, and select “Accept all changes.”
Know When a Line Editor Goes Too Far
No line editor is perfect, and it’s possible your editor doesn’t exactly hate your book so much as made some professional gaff or overreach. In these cases, you have to call in your authorial privilege.
Making Developmental Changes
I know my big temptation is to make developmental changes. Developmental changes concern the larger structure of your manuscript’s argument or narrative. A developmental editor may come back to you with a new outline or table of contents. He may note places where your argument lacks good support or gets derailed or even when you seem to be arguing at cross purposes to yourself.
At the line edit stage, however, those questions should mostly have been answered. If you’ve had a developmental editor look at the manuscript, your line editor should not start asking you to make developmental changes.
Because I’m a big-picture thinker, however, I do sometimes see developmental problems. Since I was not hired for that, I will at most leave a comment noting what I observed and suggesting the easiest fix I can imagine.
If you’re not sure whether you need a line edit or a developmental edit, take this editing self-test.
Playing Co-Author
Ideally, I won’t be writing many new sentences, much less new paragraphs, as a line editor. I have done this in the past when the MS called for it and when I felt I had promised something that required it.
In those cases where I was writing new copy, I made it my goal to rely as much as possible on the logic, ideas, and content the author already provided in the book. I was, to some extent, playing ghostwriter. I did not want to play co-author.
What’s the difference? An editor always defers to the author. A co-author brings their own ideas to the table. If your line editor starts to play co-author, she’ll be adding things you did not approve or may not agree with. Instead of helping to clarify your ideas, she changes them to suit her own impression or opinion of the subject.
That’s a big no-no, and I would guess is pretty rare. If I ever write new material, I almost always include a comment that asks the author to check the accuracy or asks a question about if I got the right idea.
Misrepresenting the Process
This last error doesn’t necessarily look like red changes all over your MS so much as surprise upsells or surcharges late in the process.
If your editor conducted the early interview and contract phases properly, you should never run into this. That’s because it usually happens when the MS needs more work than the editor had anticipated.
Again, it’s not about the editor hating your book and charging you more to work on it. At least, it better not be.
In my experience, it’s more likely that the sample edit I saw did not accurately represent most of the MS. It makes sense: You probably chose a favorite chapter or one you felt was particularly strong in order to make a good first impression.
Unfortunately, that impression may create some misleading expectations.
When this happens, the right thing for the editor to do is to come back to you and communicate what’s going on. If I do ask to renegotiate the contract at a higher rate, I usually don’t charge what I would if I had priced it right the first time. It’s my mistake, not yours. So while I need to charge enough to pay my bills, I’ll take a little hit for the sake of making things right.
You should never get a surprise invoice from your editor. You should know at the outset what happens if the project goes beyond the initial agreement, something called “scope creep.” I include a scope creep item in my proposals, and I always tell my authors when those extra charges are going to kick in.
Helping You Sing Your Song
At the end of the day, your line editor is on your team. I’m like the center lineman that snaps the ball to you. I’m like the producer that takes your raw tracks and blends them together into something singable.
If you’d like an editor who helps you sing your song, contact me to set up a call.
Photo by Marcos Paulo Prado on Unsplash
