In this series, editors share their experiences, insights, and tips on the practical aspects of working as an editor. In some of our previous “Editors Advise” instalments, our contributors have shared their thoughts on various topics, including professional development and formatting your résumé. For this edition, four editors share their advice for newer editors.
Editors Advise: What one piece of editing advice would you give to newer editors?
Holly Vestad (she/her), non-fiction editor and sole proprietor at hollyvestad.com
If you are a freelancer, it is crucial that you know what your rate must be to not only afford your life, but also live well and save money. (Thank you to Molly McCowan’s free course for getting this through to me.) Determining this rate can feel especially hard if you charge by the word like me – what does $0.04 per word even mean in relation to my phone bill, rent, saving goals?
McCowan’s Freelance Hourly Rate Calculator was a helpful place to start. I typed in how much I wanted to make annually (before taxes), and then added how many billable hours per day, days per week, and weeks per year I wanted to work, and it generated my hourly rate for me. (Remember that no one is paying you to answer your emails or do administrative tasks, so putting down eight billable hours per day isn’t realistic.)
However, I wanted to charge per word. I feel this is a more sustainable business practice because I’ll be able to slowly increase that rate as I gain more experience and therefore become a faster editor. In my mind, charging per hour fundamentally changes your relationship to the work because you’re thinking of hours spent rather than projects successfully completed.
To understand how many words I can edit in an hour, I timed myself doing different types of editing on different genres of work. Let’s say I completed a light copy edit of 3,000 words from an academic essay in one hour. I divided the hourly rate offered by McCowan’s calculator by the number of words I edited in an hour, which gave me my rate per word. I then looked at Editorial Freelancers Association’s recommended rates to see how it compared with the industry standard.
I have a chart in Notion that keeps track of how fast I am at different levels of editorial interventions (proofreading, heavy copy edit, light substantive edit, etc.) for different genres (academic essay, memoir, etc.) to ensure my business is sustainable and growing. This process allows me to strategically set rate increases over time. My rates are non-negotiable for this reason.
James Harbeck, freelance book editor
The number one piece of advice I would give any new editor is the same advice new doctors get: “primum non nocere” – first, do no harm. Along with that, I would (and often do) tell them that rules are made to serve communication, not vice versa.
I guest lecture for an editing course taught by a friend, and every semester, there are some students who go out of their way to try to find ways that a text can be wrong. The result, of course, is unnecessary and often awkward rewriting. Don’t go on error-hunting missions. If you wouldn’t notice anything wrong with it if you weren’t looking for things to be wrong with it, there’s a reason for that. If you’re going to change it, you have to be improving it in a way that will make a perceptible difference to readers. To add one more thing I often say, quoting Niccolò Machiavelli: “si guarda al fine” – consider the results.
Michael Kenyon, poet, novelist, freelance substantive, structural, stylistic, and copy editor based in Victoria
Most of my editing work has been with creative non-fiction, fiction, poetry, and memoir, so this response may be most meaningful to others editing in those areas. And yet since all (human) writing is creative, to some extent what I say will apply to all editing. Crushing the editing task down to one piece of advice, I’ll say that point of view is critically important.
Specifically, the editor’s and the writer’s points of view are not the same. Whether editing your own writing or someone else’s, the points of view are different. The editor is primarily a reader (hopefully a wide reader), not a writer. The work in front of you is not “yours” though you must go through it as though it belonged to you. The work at this stage also does not belong to the writer. The text has its own autonomy and sits in a kind of free zone between writer and editor. Ego must be suspended.
If you proceed this way, with humility, the suggestions you make will belong to the text itself, which ultimately is in the service of the characters. Every scene or section is driven by characters, each with a unique perspective; dynamics evolve from the rubbing together of points of view.
The story is empty without a vibrant sense of who is telling it. Step back and sense the narrator and his her their distance from the action and from other characters.
Lean in and every editing move will be a suggestion (to be accepted, to be challenged, or to generate more writing) that evolves from a super-engaged reading of the sense and music of the text.
Laura Jones (she/her), freelance editor
The advice I would give to newer editors is to push through the fear. Starting out as an editor can be scary, especially now, with the rise of AI and the difficulty of the job market. When I first started looking for editing work a couple of years ago, I felt out of my depth, but I embraced the discomfort of being afraid and did things that felt difficult.
I applied for jobs that I thought I had no chance at, and I sometimes got them. I did work that felt new and intimidating, knowing that I could figure out the challenges that each job presented. I built community through editing classes and the Editors Canada conference last summer. I tried professional development opportunities that intimidated me, such as mentorship and study groups. If I hadn’t pushed through the fear, I wouldn’t have had the opportunities that I had. When you’re starting out as an editor, you won’t feel ready. That’s okay. But I strongly encourage you to do the things that you don’t feel ready for anyway.
This article was copy edited by Ambrose Li who copy edits for Studio magazine and also freelances.
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