Blunt

Blunt

If you hire me as an editor and your work has problems, I’m going to tell you. And I’m not going to sugarcoat it, either. These are the kinds of comments I frequently make: I sometimes wonder why people don’t fire me, but so far, with more than 100 clients, no one has told me…

Cultivating naïveté

Cultivating naïveté

An editor has a challenge. They must know everything about writing and, essentially, nothing about anything else. The power of remaining naïve Of course, I’m exaggerating. Editors tend to know a little bit about a lot of things, because they have to read so many things in detail. And editors in a specific genre need…

The fundamental truth about working on a book with a writing professional

The fundamental truth about working on a book with a writing professional

You are an expert on your topic and your ideas. I will never know as much about your topic as you do. I am expert on nonfiction books. You hired me because I know more about books than you do. This is the basis of our collaboration. It’s our greatest strength. It’s also our greatest…

Motivational editing checklist

Motivational editing checklist

A typical editing checklist includes things that editors should identify, like failures of parallelism, mixed metaphors, sentence fragments, and factual errors. But this is your motivational editing checklist. Follow this to make sure that the person you’re editing will understand, appreciate, accept, and address the problems you point out. Why bother? It’s a lot easier…