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How to Work Through an Editorial Letter
For some writers, I imagine, having an editor, whether through hiring one or gaining one through acceptance of a manuscript to a publishing company, can feel equal parts exhilarating and terrifying. What if they hate your book? What if they tell you you have to throw away all your precious words and start over from the beginning?
First, I would hope, from the standpoint of an editor, that one would never say any of that to you (or buy your book if they hate it)! If they do, they’re not doing their job right. What they should be doing is providing you with feedback in the form of an editorial letter (most likely), and often with comments on the manuscript itself.
When you get a developmental edit of your book, the length, type, and scope of the editorial letter you get in return can vary widely. But once you’ve got the thing, how do you process an editorial letter? We’ll cover the basics in this article below!
Managing Your Expectations
I’m going to start by making this really clear to anyone contemplating hiring an editor: Don’t hire an editor unless you actually want their feedback. If you’re going into the editing process with the expectation that your book is perfect, your prose is immaculate, and you just want the editor to pat you on the back and tell you you did a great job, don’t waste your money. (This also applies to selling your book to a publisher…they are still going to be honest with you about things that need fixin’.)
From my point of view, my job as an editor is to help bring out the best in my clients. To that end, before I even start a project with a client, I make sure we are as close to a good fit as I can possibly hope for. I don’t take jobs if I don’t think a writer is ready for a professional edit (this is where a sample from the manuscript comes in handy). I don’t take a job if I don’t think I’m the right editor for the book (because it’s not my area of expertise or I don’t connect with the topic).
If it seems like we’ll be a good fit and we come to terms with the scope of your project, you can expect that I’ll be honest, but encouraging. I do my best to point out what I enjoy about a book, as much as what needs work. But I’m going to let you know if something isn’t working, because that’s what you hired me for.
Writers should also go into the editing process with the understanding that, while editors aren’t perfect, most are trained or have the experience to recognize issues that writers might just be too close to see.
What to Expect from an Editorial Letter
Every editor works differently, but if you’ve hired an editor for a developmental edit or, potentially, an editorial assessment, you will likely receive an editorial letter. The same goes if you sold a book to a traditional publisher.
An editorial letter is made up of varying degrees of detailed suggestions about your book as a whole. It might include mention of some or all of the following (example used is for fiction), among other topics:
Story structure - What’s working and what’s not? Do you have plot holes, timeline issues, or character development problems? Are you hitting all the beats necessary for a full and complete story?
Goal, motivation, and conflict - Are all these in place and clear to the reader? Do any of these need to be more fully developed?
Characterization – Do your characters behave consistent with their personalities? Are readers able to relate to them, or are the compelling enough that readers want to know more? Do they have unique voices that fit their age/gender/personality profiles?
Writing clarity and mechanics - Is there any technical aspect of the writing that needs to be improved upon prior to moving to the next step in the editing process? Is anything unclear that might need to be clarified?
General thoughts - As a reader, is there anything that stands out that would take this manuscript from good to great? What’s working or not working from a reader’s point of view? Does your book fit into a particular genre and are all the conventions of that genre being met?
Again, depending on the manuscript, and specific issues that may come up, your editorial letter may contain more or less than the above, and the detail may vary from book to book or editor to editor.
So, what do you do with this editorial letter once you get it? Panic? Give up writing forever? No!
When I got my first editorial letter from an editor at Tor, the publisher of my first book, Venus Envy (now retitled as Bad Romance, I felt the same way. I completely panicked. There seemed like so much to fix!
I’m not going to share how many pages the letter was, simply because I don’t want to encourage comparison. Having a shorter or longer editorial letter doesn’t necessarily mean one book is better or worse than another. It all depends on what type of detail the editor provides, their use of examples or specific suggestions, as well as the experience level of the writer. A more experienced author, who has worked with an editor before, might not need as much explanation as a newbie writer, simply because the writer and editor have a history together.
Processing an Editorial Letter – The Preparation
While processing this letter may seem daunting, taking things one step at a time can help immensely.
In order to process an editorial letter, start by preparing yourself. Read the letter from beginning to end. Just read. Don’t make any changes to your manuscript at this point. Just read it and absorb it.
Then, give it 24 hours (or however long it might take you to calm down if the letter brought up any strong emotions), and then read it again. This time, take notes. What do you agree with? What do you disagree with? What suggestions spark ideas?
Taking notes during this read of the letter (and as you read any comments on the manuscript itself) will help ensure that you don’t lose any ideas that come up as you go. For example, if the editor mentions a potential change to your protagonist’s motivation, taking notes about any ideas that suggestion sparks will be helpful later.
Keep a running list of changes you plan to make. Whether that is fixing inconsistent details or researching a few facts that are potentially incorrect, creating a checklist of tasks can make working through them later a lot easier.
One mistake I made with my first editorial letter was starting to make changes without considering that page numbers would change if I added or deleted things. My editor wrote more of a “summary” type of editorial letter, where she noted things like “Unclear point of view on page 9, paragraph 6” and “Can you describe the room better on page 267?” She didn’t use Track Changes on the manuscript and made very few comments in the file.
Because I didn’t mark any of those spots in the manuscript, and I then made other edits, by the time I got to those points, the issues in question were no longer on the pages they started out on. I had a heck of a time finding some of them later!
To avoid this, consider using the Comment feature to mark specific spots in the manuscript, if they aren’t already marked by the editor, so you can find them later. Doing this as part of your prep work, before doing the actual editing, will save you a lot of headaches.
Processing the Editorial Letter – Getting Down to Business
Once you’ve made a checklist, decide on the best order in which to make your edits. If you need to make some plot adjustments or work more on your character, take care of those bigger-picture issues first. Don’t worry too much about the minute details, many of which might end up on the cutting room floor or be rewritten if you have bigger changes to make.
Make the changes slowly and methodically and use the checklist you created to stay on track.
When you’ve completed all the edits, reread the book, even if you’re completely and utterly sick of it at this point. You’ll need to pay attention to whether your changes improved things or whether they added issues that now also need to be addressed. If something isn’t working at this point, you can deal with it before sending it back to your editor.
What if You Disagree with the Editorial Letter?
Many writers don’t understand that they aren’t required to make every change suggested by their editor. Even those working with a publisher have the option to push back (nicely) when they disagree with a direction the editor wants to take their manuscript.
If you’re working specifically with an editor at a publishing company, you may have to open a discussion with them regarding concerns or questions you have. If you don’t want to make certain changes, feel free to ask them why they felt something needed to be changed in the first place. Once you’ve heard the reasons for their suggestions, you might change your mind and ultimately agree with them.
Maybe they have house-specific guidelines that need to be followed or they are aware of book trends, and they just want to make sure you fit in. Be open to hearing their rationale, and if you still don’t agree, see if you can work out a compromise.
Another thing to keep in mind when an editor’s vision of a book doesn’t coincide with yours is whether your vision was clear on the page. Being a first-time reader of a book means that my interpretation of the book might be similar to how a reader would interpret your book. So, if your vision is different than the editor’s, ask them if there’s a way to convey your vision better on the page. Maybe they just couldn’t see it, because it wasn’t as clear as you thought it was.
If you’ve hired a freelance editor, like me, you don’t actually need to justify any changes you make. I’m open to questions from my clients and am happy to give more specifics about my thought process or reasoning behind suggestions I make, but in the end, the book is yours, and you can do what you like with it. We may just have different ideas about where the book could go, but, in the end, your vision is the most important.
Finally, don’t compare yourself to others when it comes to editorial letters, either based on the style or length of letter. Just as every writer works differently, so does every editor. My letters, for example, can be on the longer side, heavy on explanations and examples, whereas a colleague of mine writes much more abbreviated letters. We edit similar books, and have a similar clientele, so the length of the editorial letters is more about us than about our clients. So you can’t really compare your editorial letter to that of others, since so much of it has to do with the editor and not the writer or the book itself.
If you go into the editing process and the review of your editorial letter with the spirit of learning how someone else perceives your book and with the idea that you may learn even one thing that will help you be a better writer, you’re likely to have a much better experience.
Work with me!
Whether preparing to self-publish or to start the submission process, I’m here to help! You can Request a Quote today. If I think we might be a good fit, I’ll provide a 3- to 5-page sample edit of your manuscript to show you what I can do for you!