Finding an Editor
The Process of choosing an Editor – Unless you’re an editor yourself, chances are you’ll need to have a relationship with a professional, who can help you to be certain that you cross your t’s, dot your I’s, that your grammar and punctuation are top-notch, and that your writing is clearly expressing all that you want it to.
Professional editors are especially adept at reading our work in a way that helps us to turn our vision into reality, to reach the readership we target, and to do it effectively and efficiently.
I have taken notice of multi-tasking authors’ tendency to be exhausted all the time, working on editing jobs full-time, and on their own compositions full-time. There just isn’t room for them to do their best work on both! I have often found typos and errors that should have been caught.
These people are making a living as an editor, and, chances are, they have a ton of work to do, while pursuing their own writing goals; this will not work for me.
You cannot risk spending your money on an editor who is giving you half-baked editing or rushed work. Remember that you are very probably one of several or many clients, and your editor may have no time, in that whirl of responsibility, to give you their best.
My advice is to find an English teacher or professor of English from a colleague who has no aspirations of becoming an author. There are, also, retired English majors who actually enjoy editing as a hobby, rather than for simply making a profit. They take a real interest in watching others achieve their writing goals.
If you don’t have a big budget for editing, you might try contacting or visiting a local college and checking the English department for outstanding English majors; they usually will not charge a lot. Follow up by having several people you trust to proofread your work, as well.
If you are an editor who’s inspired to become a writer, please don’t take this personally. I have friends who are editors and are aspiring to become career novelists. While I respect their goals, I think they understand how I feel, and even agree with me on a lot of my points.
I suggest that my writing contemporaries investigate, do their homework, and check out references and samples before you commit to an editor. I do agree that we should “never say never,” and it could happen that I someday hire a writer to do editing work for me, but as I see it from here, I will try to avoid that. Good luck to you in this process!
