Not all editors are equal

Some of you may know that I recently hired a professional editor to clean up Magelife.

What most of you don’t know was how difficult that experience was.

As I mentioned in other posts, editing has different levels, and pay scales accordingly.

I was recommended to my editor by another, who is quite a big name in the indie publishing industry. He was fully booked, and very much out of my price range. But he was very helpful, and nice, way beyond anything I expected.

I contacted his recommendation, she was polite, helpful, and gave me a reasonable quote for Copy Editing.

Any sort of effort like this normally involves some back and forth, communication and discussion between author and editor, if it goes beyond simply cleaning copy.

In this case, that didn’t happen. I have no idea why.

I got very excited when I first received my edits back. But as I looked through them, my heart sank.

I didn’t get copy editing, which is what I paid for. Not in any useful format. What happened was that my editor decided to change my story without any discussion, and any cleaning of the text there was was inextricably linked to her version of my story.

I never had an objection to rewriting my story based on intelligent feedback, but I didn’t get intelligent feedback. I got a very different story that was missing all the character, all the depth, that I placed in the original. She wanted a very dumbed down version to reach the most people, which would have been fine, if that’s what I was writing or what she was paid to do.

I try to assume that the people that read my book are at least as intelligent as me, and I’m not the brightest of people. Part of that is not treating my readers like idiots. Things like violence, anger, swearing, might not appeal to all people, but I don’t write to reach the most people. I write because I want to tell a story. And sometimes that story is not all lightness and kittens.

I was angry, and it took a lot to calm me down. Spending a week trawling through her work, accepting the majority of her language changes, which were good, and using my judgement on her story alterations, taught me a lot, about myself and about my work. It also taught me that this isn’t how it is supposed to be.

There are horror stories about editors, and I think that if it had been universally bad I would have had one of those horror stories. But, I’m trying to think this is a cautionary tale.

This experience has shown me that not all editors are equal and not all professionals are professional.

I was going to keep quiet about my experiences, in the hope that it was an honest mistake. But I have thought about it more and more. Keeping this quiet helps no one. It doesn’t help me, it doesn’t help other writers that may go through similar experiences.