Chris Webb

Writers often work with a variety of people during the publishing process, but the real nuts and bolts of your work is done in collaboration with your editor. I asked Wiley Senior Development Editor Kevin Kent to share his tips for working effectively with your editor.

Working with an editor is too often seen as an adversarial process. The common perception seems to be that an editor is like that most hated English teacher you once had, the one who gleefully marked your writing with red ink and showed you everything wrong with your writing.

That is truly not the case. Working with an editor is meant to be a collaborative process, with you and the editor both interested in working taking your raw manuscript and turning it into the best and most profitable book possible.

To that end, when you work with your editor, keep these points in mind for successful collaboration:

• Editorial feedback is offered non-judgmentally. You’re not being graded. Your editor is not looking to mark things “wrong.” Everyone involved in the process of handling your book wants it to succeed, and all edits are being offered in that spirit. Consider what the editor says, answer the questions that the editor asks, and if a change the editor is asking for doesn’t make sense to you, talk it over with your editor.

• Don’t sweat the small stuff. Make no mistake—changes will be made to your text. A lot of these changes will be small or sentence-level edits. When they do this, editors are often conforming the manuscript to in-house style conventions or trying to make sure the manuscript maintains a consistent tone. In most cases the best course of action is just to accept these changes. You will be queried about the larger changes—suggested changes in organization, requests for clarification or for additional material, possible deletions from the text—and it’s these changes that most benefit from your work and attention. If you let your editor worry about the stuff like whether to use the third person (“We are going to do this”) or second person (“You are going to do this”) as a consistent pronoun choice, then you will find yourself with more time to focus on the real content of your manuscript.

• Make every effort to submit you work on time per your schedule. Once again, make no mistake—your editor will consistently remind you of your due dates and ask for your submissions. He or she won’t be doing this to bug you or add to your stress, but because so much in the book process relies on timely submission. Editors rely heavily on a book’s submission schedule to manage not only the workflow of your book, but also the workflow of all the books the editor is managing. Very rarely will an editor be working solely on your book. Additionally, your own book will be worked on by multiple editors during the course of the publishing process (acquisitions editors, development editors, and copy editors, among others), and that’s not even taking into consideration the layout artists, graphic artists, indexers, and assorted other workers who will handle your book. All of these folks are working on multiple books at the same time, and they all rely to a certain extent on your schedule. So always keep in mind the cascade effect missing a due date can have on the whole process.

• When you submit, submit complete work. When one of your due dates comes up (whether it’s for one chapter, several chapters, or even an entire manuscript), remember that due date is for a complete version of that submission. Don’t turn in partially finished chapters or incomplete work. A key role of the editor is to help build the raw manuscript into a unified book. That involves looking at the book as holistically as possible to plan for unifying features that will run throughout the book and to watch for redundancies and other organizational issues. At the very least, turning in partial work will slow the editorial process down and delay the book. At the most, incomplete submissions may be rejected simply because the editorial staff can’t work with the limited material they were given.

When you work with an editor, you’re actually gaining access to whole group of book-building professionals, collaborators who are ready to work with you, answer your questions, and address the concerns you might have. They are there to help you turn that idea you had for a book into a reality.