Working in an editorial team Part II: copyeditor, typesetter or designer, proofreader and indexer

For an editorial project to meet its goals, multiple people (sometimes many) need to work together, but potentially without ever actually communicating with each other. This requires each person to have a clear understanding of their role in the process and the ripples (good or bad) they can create for others in the editorial team.

Part I of this article gave some suggestions on how the author, developmental editor and project manager can contribute to each other’s work and the work of people later on in the process.…

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Working in an editorial team Part I: author, developmental or structural editor, and project manager

I almost called this article ‘How to Avoid Screwing Things Up in an Editorial Team’, but the SEO gods said it was too long. However, that’s essentially what this article and its follow-up are about.

All editorial projects require collaboration. The simplest might only involve an author and a proofreader, whereas the most complex can involve many more people working together in an editorial team.…

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The seven deadly sins of freelance editors

You’re a good editor. You can juggle serial commas and breathe fire at dangling modifiers. Your ninja coding skills can subdue even the most tortuous of manuscripts.

But, however good your editorial skills, they may not be able to save you from losing a client to certain common etiquette pitfalls. I’ve collected seven of these below.…

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How much would it cost to edit, proof, index and print Wikipedia? (all of it)

Mountain of books

In my project-management capacity, I generally have an encyclopaedia or two on the go at any one time. These usually range from around 500,000 to around 1.5 million words. The largest modern encyclopaedias are upwards of 40 million words (Britannica’s 2013 print edition has 44 million).

These are difficult works to handle, with a whole raft of consistency and data-handling considerations that simply don’t apply to ‘normal’ books.…

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Co-mentoring: free CPD for editorial professionals

Free mentoring for editorial professionals

Two truths of editing are universally acknowledged: (1) editors are good at objectively reacting to work produced by other people and (2) no two editors will edit the same piece of text in the same way. Remember this – I’ll come back to it.

For many of us, being mentored – in other words, having our work scrutinised line by line, edit by edit, marginal squiggle by marginal squiggle – is something we haven’t experienced for some time.…

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How to get repeat editorial work from publishing clients

How to make your publishing client love you

Here’s the situation: you’ve got yourself onto a publisher’s or other editorial client’s list of freelancers and, after a few months, you receive an email offering interesting work at a great rate of pay. You accept the job and complete it on deadline and to the best of your abilities, and the client seems happy (or, at least, you don’t receive any negative feedback, which is often the best feedback a busy client has time for).…

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Seven ways to make your LinkedIn profile more appealing to editorial project managers

LinkedIn image proofreading

Being an editorial project manager (PM) can feel a bit like being a very delicious, but very forbidden, cake. When I tell other freelancers that part of my work involves hiring copy-editors, proofreaders and indexers, I sometimes find myself the object of longing glances from those who seem to feel themselves starved of work. However, I’ve met enough freelancers to know that a person’s talents may not be equal to the amount of work they are receiving – it may be how they are presenting themselves that is to blame.…

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