Are you wondering how to find a professional editor for your book? There are tons of places where you can find editors. But I’m going to start with the places I think are the best. The first one is if you have a friend who’s written a book and loves working with their editor, there is no better qualification than that.
You are getting first-hand knowledge that this person is somebody who is easy to work with, who worked well with a friend of yours, and who they can recommend. Recommendations are huge when it comes to editing because obviously, anybody can throw out a shingle and say they’re an editor.
I want you to make sure you have someone who has qualifications and has done this work for a long time. So number one would be a recommendation from a friend.
Editorial company’s recommendations
Number two would be a recommendation from an editorial company that you can find through search engines such as Google. It’s not easy to find editors who have all the qualifications, the right personality, the right experience, work within your budget, et cetera.
So it’s the kind of thing where once you find an editor who’s great, you really hold on to them. It’s a type of recommendation where if you don’t have a friend who can recommend somebody go to accompany you and have them recommend somebody.
The bonus with working with an editorial company is that you have more than one person to turn to, so if for some reason the relationship is not going well with your editor, you have someone you can call and say, hey, this isn’t really going well.
Can you step in and if you ever hired a contractor for something and had no recourse when things went wrong. Do you know how much of a gift it is to have someone you can call who’s going to listen and make it right? So that’s an editorial company.
Freelance editors
Obviously, there are numerous people out there who freelanced for a living, and you can find them on one of my favorite places to look for it, which is reedsy.com. It is an amazing site full of tonnes of information if you want to be on the inside of book publishing. If you are looking for fantasy book editors, then I highly recommend you can look online for them.
Different types of editors
The different types of editors include Content, copy, and line.
Content editors
Content editors are big picture editors. They deal with things such as a boring novel. Does it drag in the beginning and then just zip through the ending at lightning speed? Are your characters inconsistent? Do they annoying? Are they unnecessary?
Do you have unnecessary scenes? Do you have plot holes in your novel? Things that don’t make sense, or things that can be eliminated altogether? These are all of the questions that a content editor will answer, and this editor is very important.
Copy editors
They know all of the rules about writing, about how to improve the writing, and they’re going to help improve the writing as they read through and edit it for you. So what are the things they’re going to fix? The main thing is readability.
Readers don’t understand. Typically, a lot of readers just don’t understand why when they read a novel; they don’t enjoy it. They don’t know what it is that makes them not enjoy it. Other than this big picture stuff. But the actual writing of the author, why do they enjoy one offer over another?
Well, those are the things they’re involved in. Copy editing, the readability of the novel. It’s whether you’re varying your sentence structures, whether you’re using a lot of adverts that you shouldn’t say, dialogue tags that you shouldn’t say, or varying sentence structure. It’s all of the minute things that take writing from good to break, and that’s what a copy editor does.
Line editors
And finally, you have a line editor, and I call this proofreading, and they’re the ones that are going to catch typos, missing commas, incomplete sentences, missing quotes at the end of a line of dialogue.
What you should do before your editor
So let’s discuss some of the things you can do before you send off your work to an editor. Your editor will thank you for this by giving you this information. Don’t just send off the first draft; they will absolutely despise the ground that you walk on if you just send a first draft that is just riddled with errors and if it has not been cleaned up at all.
So what I always recommend is you are going to do a quick edit. You are going to do it through two different sources. And for me, I typically go through something simple like Microsoft words, grammar, and spelling checker, and I just go through and then just clean up any kind of small infractions, so any kind of typos and all the just small grammatical errors.
I just go through it really fast, and then I will take that same manuscript, and I will go over to something like an autocorrect feature, and I will just put it right on in there. Then I go through that editor again, and I just try to make it as fast as possible. I try to make split-second decisions.
So that way, it is a quick process, hence quick editing, and then I will take my time, and I will go through what’s called line editing, and that means going through each and every single line, making sure that. All of them work together, and it is very cohesive to see if you are missing any areas.
One of my favorite ways to do line editing is actually through Microsoft’s read-aloud feature. You can click on that, and it will read it to you. Just sit back and allow the reader to give it to you instead of you reading yourself. You have got to sit there and listen to what it says so that way you can correct anything that sounds off.
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Things to consider
Have a conversation with them. Feel whether that you jive with each other, whether you have that vibe right; it is important to get along with that person. It is no shame if you don’t get along with somebody, you know, everybody is different. And we all have different personalities.
It’s really important to make sure you feel good with that editor, so be sure to interview them. Talk to them about what the process is going to look like, how they envision editing. Are they going to do a chapter at a time, or are they going to have the book first and then send it to you?
Do you want them to do a few pages first? The two of you can sort of work out together whether the edit is too light or too heavy—et cetera. Have the plan in advance. And then, once you pick them, make sure the two of you together put together an editorial calendar for yourselves. To make sure you know when you are going to expect to get content back from them.
Conclusion
So there you have it, a quick rundown of how to find a professional editor. You have options such as a recommendation from a friend who has worked with an editor, a recommendation from an editorial company, or freelance editors.
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