How to Be an Editor

Someone emailed me and asked for a 'short answer' on how to become an editor. It really isn't that simple. There is no course that can help you. In fact, most university graduates with a BA can only work in a non-fiction house. Universities just do not understand many of the concepts used in today's fiction - like showing. I wrote this email, then thought my readers would benefit from the advice.



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Most editors in today's business are interned, take a lot of training, or train themselves. An amateur editor will take months to edit a book, and do a poor job. A professional editor learns who to clean a manuscript in 20 - 50 hours. There are two ways to get paid, either hire editors for about $20 - 25000 a year or pay them on a royalty basis. The royalty is very flexible. Some houses pay only a few cents per copy sold, others pay $.50 or even $.80, depending on the book/sales/ and how much the editor puts into selling the book.


We do have a mentoring group in Friday nights, 7eastern, where you can learn about writing a great novel, or editing. We are currently working on creating strong hero arc types. This isn't the type of course where we say make him nice. We study personality types etc. Last week we watched two movies and discussed the hero arc type. We also had a police profiler come in and tell us what 'mistakes' we were doing that was subconsciously ruining the character/relationship in the reader's mind.


I started in the business by writing reviews. Eventually, you will start seeing a difference between the books that sell, and those that don't. You'll be able to pick an up-and-coming author just by reading her story. It is fun, you receive a lot of free PDF books, and some galleys, and even some print books. (incidentally, we are looking for a reviewer at www.inspiredauthor.com) You can also start your career by posting book reviews at www.novel-writer.com.

If you work with a publisher, you can probably be editing within a few months. There is a great school where some of our editors work, www.writersonlinecourses.com.

If you train yourself, and work with editors through submission, as well as writing book reviews, it will probably take until your third book is published.

There is more to editing than grammar. Content editing means tracking the plots, looking for plot holes, and finding character flaws. Line editing means organizing paragraphs so they flow, fixing grammar, and improving the style. Proofreading means finding all the typos. There is another element to editing, it involves dealing with authors in a professional manner. This skill can be difficult to learn, but a good publisher can help train you.

I hope this helps. Let me know if you have more questions - and maybe we will see you at the chat on Friday (www.enspirenpress.com in the chat room)