Editing | Karavansara

My new ebook is ready to roll.

Time to give credit to my editors.
While beta readers, artists and marketers are a relatively new thing, to me, I’ve been working with different editors for a few years.
And I learned to respect and appreciate their work.
And I ‘m finally learning to work with them – because it’s not something that comes to you straight away.

Now, there’s this strange theory, going around, that the editor rewrites your story.
Which is, to me, eminently dubious.
Oh, granted, I did work with editors that just went and changed my text straight away – in one case requesting a 10.000 words article and then arbitrarily cutting it to 6.000 because the available space on the magazine had “contracted”.
My reasoning then was, they could have asked me for the cuts – or for a shorter piece from the start.
And no, I’m not selling my stuff to that mag anymore*.

And yet, the practice of rewriting has become such, that one can actually recognize the editor’s style when reading the text.
The author is reduced to the role of content provider, not of text stylist.

In my experience, good editors point out the problems, and get me on the right track for rewriting my own stuff in a more efficient way.
The sort of professionals that can accept the fact that yes, it does sound weird, but it’s supposed to sound weird.

Anyway, I’m very lucky – not only I worked with great editors in the past, but right now I’m exploiting shamelessly some of the best editors – both copy- and content- – I ever met.

Which is why I’m taking some blog space to thank both Marina and Chiara.

Thank you ladies!

[yes, both my copy editor and my content editor are gorgeous, brilliant young women, and excellent writers in their own right – it’s one of the perks that come with writing pulp fiction]

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* In another case I worked with one editor that was so enthusiastic about my work, he did not see a number of problems – causing me to withdraw my ebook after publishing it, in order to insert the corrections suggested by my (paying) readers.
It was awkward.