How an Editor's Style Sheet Can Help the Author

There's more to editing a manuscript than just fixing spelling, punctuation, and grammar. We copyeditors must keep track of a good many things in a manuscript to ensure that the finished book or article is consistent throughout and doesn't jar the reader by odd deviations from its intended structure, message, or voice. What are some of these? Proper spelling and capitalization of jargon, for a start. There's much more, such as chronological numbering of chapters and references, physical and personality traits of fictional characters, and how ranges of numbers are handled.

To do all of that, we create a document called a style sheet as part of the editing process. (Here are examples to download as PDFs: for a novel, for a book of literary criticism, for a medical textbook.) The style sheet then serves as a reference for anyone who deals with the manuscript later in the publishing process, including the author, the proofreader, the production editor, and the indexer.

Recently, several colleagues and I had a discussion on Facebook about an author's gratitude for my creation of a style sheet for her book. Editor and writer Patrick Inman offered an excellent explanation of the value of editors' style sheets for authors, and he has allowed me to share it here:

Authors are often too close to their material to consciously organize it. Also, for some writers at some points in the process, explicit sorting and categorizing may interfere with necessary ambiguity in thinking—ambiguity that has to be clarified in the writing but shouldn't be clarified too early in the development of a piece. When someone else provides that explicit organization in a style sheet, the suggestions it contains can be both supportive and freeing. The author can take the advice, or leave it, or, most likely, use what works and reject what doesn't.

Style sheets promote and enforce consistency. Just as important, they identify and catalog inconsistencies, and in so doing may point out where and how the editor has misunderstood the writer's intent. Clear points of misunderstanding are great signposts for authors. The editor's misapprehension shows the writer where readers may get lost. If the author believes the editor has managed to approach, read, and react to the text approximately as intended readers will, any text passages or patterns that the editor misidentifies or miscategorizes deserve close attention. The writer can figure out what he or she wants to happen at those junctures, and revise the text to make the trail clearer, or to make the puzzle more prominent, but in any case to create a more deliberate pattern that either gets to the point or creates purposeful confusion or questions in the reader's mind.

The most enjoyable and possibly headache-provoking editing gigs in the world must include continuity editing for the best mystery writers. I imagine those style sheets track what the reader knows when as part of their structure, including the misleading clues.

See the "Circuitry" section on pages 30–52 in Thomas McCormack, The Fiction Editor, the Novel, and the Novelist (Paul Dry Books, 2006) for more on this. McCormack describes, with intricate examples, what he judges to be two of three essential tasks of novel editing: the acts of discovering or inferring and then communicating to the writer, first, how the text overall and at each point affects its ideal appropriate audience (the editor must have the sensibility to experience the text as those readers would), and second, how the narrative causes those effects (the editor must have developed the craft to make informed guesses as to what may be causing undesired effects).

McCormack wants us to always be aware that the point of editing is to offer clues and tools to the writer that may guide the writer in generating, revising, cutting, and structuring the work to achieve the writer's purposes. We can also help the writer decide what those purposes are by demonstrating what the current draft accomplishes or seems close to accomplishing. That may or may not be what the writer wants.

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Why I'm a Convert to Standing at Work

Standing while I edit at my new sit–stand desk

I love my new sit–stand desk. When I stand while I work, I feel more alert, more in charge, physically lighter, unchained from my desk, and more cheerful. Using standing desks or sit–stand desks is becoming popular, in part because other people have experienced those same feelings when they stand on the job rather than sit. Gut-level enjoyment is what will get more people to stick with standing at work after they try it. But there are other reasons to avoid sitting all day long, ones that I find compelling.


The Backstory
I've been self-employed full time since January 1995. I edit all day long, and for most of those 17 years, I sat all day long too. I sat in front of my computer, which itself sat in a roll-around computer cart in a corner of my kitchen, because my home is small and has no spare room eligible for conversion to an office. Hardcover and paperback reference works, copies of journals I had edited, and paperwork sat stacked wherever I could find a bare countertop, because I had no office shelves. I had no real desk, so I glommed the kitchen breakfast table.

My sit–stand desk lowered for seated editing

I gave birth to two boys, one in December 1994 (a mere 2 weeks before I began freelancing full time) and one in 2001. When they were very young, I would do things to squeeze in more work to compensate for the time it took to care for them. For example, when they were babies, I often wore them in a sling-style cloth carrier, and they would fall asleep in the sling as they were breastfeeding. A happy baby meant I could work without interruption for a while. Later when they were mobile, I would close all the baby gates so that they were closed into my workspace with me, as if we were toddlers together inside a giant playpen. As they played with toys and crawled and then toddled nearby, I worked at my computer, seated. I often took time out to play with them or read to them, but I was sitting as I did so.


The Equation of Consequences
It didn't occur to me back then that I could edit while standing. I thought that standing at work was for people with very physical jobs, like my husband, who is a cabinetmaker. There aren't many work-related tasks that he can do while seated. If he's not on his feet moving around, he's not making money. But editing doesn't require walking back and forth from one piece of equipment to another, so because I was hyperfocused on building my editing business, my personal motto became "If I'm not sitting, I'm not earning." Eventually I encountered this equation:

constant sitting + a disinclination to exercise (a family tradition!) + three cesarean sections (my daughter was born in 1983, well before I began freelancing) + a carbohydrate-heavy diet (another Southern family tradition!) + a family history of diabetes (type 1 in my father and type 2 in my mother) = a gradual weight gain of 139 pounds, high blood pressure, high cholesterol levels, and type 2 diabetes

By 2010, I was taking several medications for diabetes, plus medications for hypertension (high blood pressure), hypercholesterolemia (high cholesterol levels), and hypothyroidism (underfunctioning thyroid). That's expensive. And it's emotionally distressing, especially because I am a medical editor: I know all about healthy behaviors, including getting exercise and eating a low-carb diet rich in fruits and veggies. But I hadn't been engaging in those healthy behaviors. So I changed the way I eat. I didn't "go on a diet." I changed the types of foods I eat and the quantities of food that I eat. The glycemic index is my friend. I'd stopped drinking soda years ago because I know what all that sugar can do to the body on so many levels. I began losing weight. But it didn't go very quickly, and every afternoon after lunch, I still felt sluggish and mentally dull. What was I doing wrong?

I wasn't moving. It was that simple. Sit all day long, and you'll lose muscle tone. Sit all day long, and you don't use much energy, so your body ends up with too much fuel hanging around that it doesn't burn off. Sit all day long, and your blood doesn't circulate as well as it should. That leaves you at risk for deep vein thrombosis (blood clots in the major veins), pulmonary embolism (blockage of blood vessels in the lungs by blood clots), and all sorts of other nasty physical consequences. I began reading more and more articles about the effects of too much sitting, and I became determined to find a way to stand while I work.


The Dream
I prefer working on desktop computers to working on laptops, so I wasn't going to get a laptop and just move from room to room in my house, standing sometimes and sitting other times. I came across a blog post by freelance translator Corinne McKay about her "treadmill desk." (Be sure to read her follow-up post.) This part of her post excited me:

Exercising while you work has been in the news of late, ever since Dr. James Levine, an obesity researcher at the Mayo Clinic, posited the idea that most desk-based workers would lose about 50 pounds a year if they walked at a very slow (1 mile per hour or less) speed while working, rather than sitting in a chair.

I tracked down an article about Levine in USA Today. But though I dreamed about getting his Walkstation, I knew that I couldn't afford $4,000-plus for a desk. And I read this article, which led me to the GeekDesk. That was much more affordable but still a large chunk of money. So I gave up on the idea for a while.

At my old improvised standing desk

But Cabinetmaker Husband had a temporary solution. He built a foldable box that I could set atop my computer cart's rollout so that I could place my keyboard and mouse on it to raise them to a level that I found comfortable for working while standing. It worked great and was very cheap. But it was heavy. And I found it a pain to set up and take down repeatedly during a workday.


The Sit–Stand Desk
Finally, in April of this year, Cabinetmaker Husband felt bad enough for me, hearing me talk about my dreams of an easier way to stand at work, that he sat down with me and drew up plans for a custom sit–stand desk, one that would allow me to alternate between sitting and standing. I knew, from all the reading of medical journals that I do, that this standing thing shouldn't be all or nothing. Yes, it's bad for your body if you sit all day, but it can be hard on your joints when you stand without reprieve or without moving around. So the plans that he created for my desk showed a stationary left side, with a pullout where I could do paperwork while seated, and a right side that I could raise and lower at the touch of a button. Here's a slide show (7.3 MB) about my desk's creation.


Money-Saving Alternatives
Before you ask whether my husband can make a custom sit–stand desk for you, you'll need to know that custom desks aren't at all cheap. All of the materials—lumber, hardware, and desk lift together—cost about $400. But that $400 is much less than what I could have paid. My husband saved us a lot of money by purchasing an electric scissor car jack to lift the standing portion of my desk; it's hidden under the desktop. The pneumatic lifts used in many commercially available desks cost between $800 and $2,000. Also, if I had had to pay my husband for his labor, just as his clients have to pay him, that would have been an additional $4,100 or so. And if I were a client of his who didn't live in the area, I also would have had to pay huge shipping costs, because this desk is heavy. Finally, once the desk was delivered, I'd have had to assemble it.

But don't despair if your budget is small or if you don't have a life partner who is a cabinetmaker. Lots of people improvise ingenious and inexpensive setups for standing at work. Here's a post from the blog Lifehacker, with photos, describing how one person improvised. And here are lots of photos of inventive, weird, and funny setups that people have improvised. Also, Mark Lukach at Wired has written a helpful review of several different commercially available standing desks, and he provides a good summary (with links) of current research about why sitting too much is unhealthy.


Good Practices for Standing
I'm not a physician or ergonomist, but these are the guidelines I try to follow while I stand at work:

1. Stand on a good, cushy floor mat.
2. Stand barefoot or in no-heel shoes (on that cushy mat).
3. Alternate between sitting and standing, to build up core, back, hip, and leg strength.
4. Stand with the knees slightly flexed, rather than locked straight.
5. Shift weight from foot to foot periodically; don't stand as still as a statue.
6. Make sure that the desk is truly at the right height for personal ergonomics.

I've lost a total of 91 pounds since I started making lifestyle changes 2 years ago. As you can see from the photos in this post, I still have more pounds to lose before I get to a healthy weight. But already, I have gone down 3 clothing sizes, my physician has decreased my daily dose of thyroid medication, my blood glucose levels are excellent (for someone with type 2 diabetes), I have more stamina, I sleep better at night, and I don't get drowsy or bored at work. I often dance to instrumental bluegrass, baroque, or Celtic music as I stand in front of my computer monitor and edit. And I feel great!

I'd enjoy seeing your sit–stand or standing setup, so please leave a comment with links to photos of your workspace.

________________________
I thank my colleague Adrienne Montgomerie for reviewing the first draft of this post and providing helpful suggestions. Everyone needs an editor—even an editor needs an editor! Be sure to check out her blog for lots of great how-to posts.

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A Rule of Self-Employment

Isn't this the way things always work for the self-employed?

My husband, Ed, has been waiting for a couple of weeks for an okay from the architect and designers before starting work on custom cabinetry for a mansion in the Hamptons. Today he was starting to get a little worried about the length of the wait and didn't feel like doing any of the home-repair projects he's been doing around here to keep busy. But I asked him to begin work on a desk for my office, so not long after he took measurements for the desk and started working on plans, the okay for that custom cabinetry arrived by e-mail.

The lesson from this story? When you get busy, more work always arrives. When you sit on your hands, no work arrives.


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QR Codes in Print and Electronic Books

I think that this is really, really cool: TSTC [Texas State Technical College] Publishing, which is both my publisher and one of my editing clients, is using QR codes in its printed and electronic textbooks. This is what the publisher says on its Facebook page:

We have seen the future of textbook publishing, and thankfully it's a title we're releasing! Our forthcoming 3rd edition of Taking Charge: Your Education, Your Career, Your Life features, among other things, digital ancillary content that will be easily accessible (for free!) from both the print and e-book editions. Take a look at a sample at Issuu.com. (Remember, though, publication is still almost six months away, so this is most definitely a work in progress!)

Readers can the QR codes in the printed book with their cell phones and be taken to additional online book content. If you don't know what QR codes are, you can find an explanation here.

I love the book's redesign too. Additional disclosure: I was brought in as a coauthor for the second edition of the book in 2010.


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Why Editors Love Editing

The anecdotes that web editor Andy Hollandbeck tells in this interview on the blog of Copyediting newsletter illustrate exactly what's so wonderful about being an editor—the odd topics covered in manuscripts. Cool graphic too.


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A Cautionary Tale: How Not to Treat a Small Business

Here's an excellent blog post from my friend and colleague Kristine Hunt on how, if you're a very large corporation, not to treat the owner of a small business. And the small business in question would be KOK Edit.


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kokedit.com and the Copyeditors' Knowledge Base Are Back!

Thanks to my persistence and to my colleagues, who told the tale on Facebook and on Twitter of the disappearance of kokedit.com, EarthLink has gotten my business web site up and running again. That means the Copyeditors' Knowledge Base is once again available for your use.


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In search of kokedit.com

If you're trying to reach my business web site, which is at http://www.kokedit.com, or the Copyeditors' Knowledge Base, which is located within my site, at http://www.kokedit.com/ckb.php, you're out of luck for the next 24 to 72 hours. EarthLink, which has hosted my web site for years, messed up and incorrectly set kokedit.com to "inactive" status. I'm livid. I'll post again when my site's back up.


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How Do You Know When You Know Enough?

There are only a few certifications available for editors, such as those offered by the Editors' Association of Canada and the Board of Editors in the Life Sciences, and many academic degree programs and courses are out there, lots of them offered by profession-related associations. But there are no US national licensing boards for editors, and editing itself is still largely learned on the job, often as sort of an apprenticeship. And editing is a solitary occupation; we editors don't usually sit around in groups and edit, unless we're members of one of the rapidly disappearing newsroom copy desks. All of that can make it hard for individual editors to judge their own skill levels. Chris Galan asked about this issue recently on the private e-mail list of the Editorial Freelancers Association (EFA). She received some very helpful responses, which I'm sharing here with the permission of everyone quoted.

Chris wrote:

I joined EFA because ... I've been an aspiring novelist and have judged writing contests (which included editing) for seven years. Friends of mine later asked me to edit their [manuscripts], and I enjoyed the work so much (and they were so pleased with the outcome) [that] I wanted to know more, thinking I might be able to earn extra money editing, etc.

My problem is, how do I judge how good I am? That I know enough to be a professional at it? I want to give great quality, but I feel so uneducated because I'm 99% self-taught. I've [taken workshops], but don't want to go back to college if I can help it.

Ruth E. Thaler-Carter replied:

The flip answer ... is that we never know enough; there's always something new to learn, and I don't think it's possible to either stop learning or draw a line in the sand for "enough." Language evolves, usage changes, styles vary. Essentially, I don't think there's any one way to reassure ourselves about being good enough. We keep plugging away, doing our best, interacting with colleagues, and keeping our ears and eyes open for trends and new info. ...

You can rely on client feedback. You can take self-editing tests, or tests from prospective clients. You could take a grammar refresher course, and maybe something like the EFA's editing classes. Interacting with colleagues here is helpful; so is participating in the [Copyediting-L e-mail list] and subscribing to things like Copyediting newsletter.

Patrick Inman replied:

Chris—I agree with everything Ruth told you.

At least a few people have happily paid you for writing, providing feedback on writing, and editing. Payments from clients, the state of their writing before and after we work with it, and the referrals they send us are the best external measures any of us has of "Do I know enough?"

Better questions, and the beginnings of answers:

• How do I know what kind of editorial work I'm best at?

• How can I market myself?

• How can I deliver what I promise?

• How can I learn on the job without disappointing clients or myself or undercharging?

Most editors, copy editors, proofreaders, researchers, ghost writers, fact checkers, copy writers, indexers, etc. start out learning their skills on a job or in school and begin editorial work either as part of a regular job or by freelancing for people we already knew. You started editing friends' manuscripts, and both you and they were pleased with the results. Where do you go from there?

List those jobs you did for friends side by side and categorize them: Genre? Length? State of development? Number of meetings with the author? Face-to-face or long distance? Number of rounds of editing? Fee? Relationship to writer? Etc. Also categorize the work you did in the course of each job. (For example, you may have helped the writer decide the direction of the book, article, or story; structured a ms. to meet the author's goal; queried gaps in continuity or the development of an argument or plot; cleaned up paragraphs, sometimes resequencing them; eliminated redundant passages; corrected grammar and spelling and queried word choice; conformed a ms. to a style sheet; etc.)

That list will help you see patterns. Advertise for work that fits those patterns, and for clients whose needs resemble those of your friends. Ask your former clients (including the sponsors of those writing contests you were asked to judge) to write recommendations for you for LinkedIn or for your web site. Begin working in a niche you feel some mastery in, take on jobs that won't take too long, charge low on the first job, raise your rates a little after every successful gig.

Laurie Lewis's book What to Charge: Pricing Strategies for Freelancers and Consultants can help you with rate-setting. The key is taking on small jobs to start with, inching your rate up to find the market rate. Avoid big jobs until you have more confidence in your abilities, in your time estimation and time management tools, and in your ability to negotiate and obtain payment of a fee you can make a living on. A job you spend 5–30 hours on that you learn from and decide you were underpaid for or did not perform up to the standard you are shooting for is a problem you can learn from. A job you spend 5 days to 3 months on with one of those outcomes can be disastrous for you and possibly for your client.

When you are offered large jobs, try and break them into pieces that take no more than a week to complete where both you and the client can evaluate the results, and arrange for regular payment no less frequently than monthly, not a lump sum. (When I say "a week," I really mean at most 20 hours in one calendar week or 30–40 hours spread over 2 weeks to a month, assuming you have at least one other gig or a day job, and that work for any one client has to be slotted in and that you can do regular work each week on each job, so neither eagerness nor procrastination forces the hours higher than you can afford in a single week. The key is not to invest too much time total or in any one week on a job you have doubts about or where there is any doubt about timely payment in full.)

When you add a new genre or editing level to your repertoire, try and start small in that new area, giving yourself the safety provided by short-term commitments while you're learning it.

Try and ensure you reach an agreement with each client before you start work on each job on the services the client is paying you for, on your fee, and on the obligations and deadlines of both parties. Avoiding misunderstandings saves you time and effort you won't be paid for. An agreement needn't be a complex contract, but it should be in writing. After you hash things out with the client, send a concise e-mail to which the client can reply, "Yes, I will pay you as specified for the work specified." Communications will go better if you each have a clear work plan to refer to.

If you screw up, own up to it, fix it, and don't accept payment for time lost to your errors or for work you didn't do. If the client proves unwilling to pay—and some will even if you do great work—make a reasonable effort at collection, then write them off. Take the time to review your communications with them to determine if possible how to avoid that sort of client in the future.

Some jobs will go badly. Keeping jobs small to start with limits your disappointments, wasted time, and wasted investment.

Go to a local EFA chapter meeting and ask fellow editors what market niches they work in and how they found them. Share your marketing plan (asking clients to pass your card or website address along is fundamental), and you'll find colleagues will share their own experiences you can learn from.

It sounds like you are already doing manuscript editing in fiction, working directly with writers either before or after the author finds an agent or begins submission to prospective publishers. Fiction is not my usual niche. The one book I'd recommend to read in that area is Thomas McCormack's The Fiction Editor, The Novel, and The Novelist: A Book for Writers, Teachers, Publishers, and Anyone Else Devoted to Fiction, because he is so good at explaining what makes someone a good editor for a particular manuscript. Also, Gerald Gross's Editors on Editing: What Writers Need to Know About What Editors Do (3rd edition, 1993) is great on the different sensibilities required by different genres.

Ally Peltier replied:

It sounds like Chris is doing developmental editing [DE], so I'm going to answer based on that assumption. It's more difficult to gauge where your skills are with DE than with copyediting or proofreading—in the latter types of editing, things are less subjective and skills are a little more straightforward. As other listmates have suggested, there are classes, tests, etc. that will show you where you are on the skill spectrum and help you improve. But for DE? There are few such tests and courses.

I really like what Pat said about trying to identify how you can learn on the job without disappointing clients, and also the books suggested. The rest really is on-the-job training. The more you edit, the better you'll get at it, so if you can charge some clients and keep practicing on friends in between, that's one approach that can be practically helpful and also bolster confidence, which is pretty important when you're trying to convince someone to pay you to work for them!

Also, I think this is where networking with more experienced editors comes into play—one of the most important ways I learned to edit books was basically an apprenticeship. I worked under two senior editors and as part of a team at Simon & Schuster. In the beginning, my boss had me read her edits as I photocopied them to mail to authors. Then she started asking me to write up notes and a report so we could discuss. Then she actually started giving me manuscripts that had already been edited once or twice and had me do a second or third pass, which we would review and discuss before sending to the author. Finally, when she trusted me, she started letting me edit certain manuscripts myself. And by that time, I was acquiring and inheriting my own projects to edit as well. All throughout this process, I also read submissions and wrote reader's reports to help her and other editors select which submissions to consider, which isn't editing but which trains the way you think about a piece in terms of its strength and marketability. And I read as many of the bestselling books as I could, analyzing them, paying attention to what critics said and what other editors said in-house.

Since then, I occasionally have had the opportunity to see what other editors are doing. I've built relationships with other [developmental editors] and will sometimes swap edited manuscripts or editorial letters to see how my process stacks up against others'. If I come across sample edits online, I read them. (Remember that famous series of editor–author exchanges making the rounds a while back?) I adjust when I feel like I've learned a good new technique or when I see a new approach that I think will benefit my clients. I also found that participating in a writing critique group gave me a lot of practice in identifying problems and discussing them—but of course, I also write fiction, which is the main reason for joining such a group. If you aren't a writer, it doesn't make sense to do something like that just to practice editing, but I will say that I think it's super beneficial for editors to have their own work (could be anything) edited from time to time as a reminder of what it's like being on the receiving end of criticism.

One thing I've considered recently is the value of fiction writing courses. I studied [creative writing] at both undergrad and graduate level, and it absolutely informs how I edit a novel. You're learning in a slightly different way, but I do think it's valuable training for an editor because you're learning how to construct different types of stories, how to develop authentic and believable characters, how to use description to set a tone or foreshadow events, etc., and you want to be able to show your clients how to improve their work when you identify a problem. Better than fiction writing, I've come across a couple of fiction courses focused on revising, and these seem like good potential resources for polishing up old or picking up new editing techniques. I will probably try one in 2012.

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The Copyeditor’s Golden Rule

Here's my guest post about client relationships on the The Proofreader's Parlour, the blog of my colleague Louise Harnby.

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The Power of Social Media for Editorial Professionals

I'm not the only introverted editorial professional who has found social-media platforms to be a boon to her business. Periodically on one or the other of the e-mail lists of the American Medical Writers Association, my colleagues and I discuss the role of social media in building and maintaining our clienteles.

As a result of one of those discussions recently, medical writer Meg Bouvier and I began a conversation onlist that we continued offlist. I'm sharing it here with her permission. Meg wrote:

I [was] certainly born (well) before 1982 and did not grow up in the computer generation. And while I don't make extensive use of technology for personal interactions, I wouldn't have a business were it not for social media. I think it can be an extremely powerful tool for teaching and learning, and certainly for marketing a business. Almost my entire professional existence is virtual. I rarely, if ever, meet my clients—or my own 1099 writers, for that matter. Essentially the only marketing I do is with social media. I live in the middle of nowhere, so initially I thought social media was probably my best marketing option. Now I realize [that] in this day and age, it is likely the best option regardless of where you live. I have found it extremely effective at generating new work on a consistent basis. Thanks, Katharine O'Moore-Klopf, for your informative blog posts on the subject, which helped get me started with social media marketing.

I replied:

I loves me some social media. Just this morning, I received an e-mail from a woman who has written the first in a planned series of books and needs an editor. I haven't met her; she came to me because a freelance writer whom I've gotten to know through Twitter highly recommended my services. That freelance writer sees me constantly demonstrating my knowledge of editing, publishing in general, and medical publishing through all of the material I tweet.

[Now, my work schedule is jam-packed through at least the end of April, so I can't take on the editing of that book. I didn't want to leave the author stuck without an editor, so I turned to my network of colleagues. I ended up referring the author to a science-editor colleague whom I'm known several years through various profession-related e-mail lists. I've gotten a good sense of this colleague's skill and professionalism through how she presents herself and what she talks about on those e-mail lists. It's unlikely that years ago, before the advent of online networking, I would have ever known of that colleague, especially because she lives across the country from me.]

Meg replied:

I have had the most success with blogging—probably because the format suits my writing style, so that's what I gravitate to. At this point even when I am bogged down with a deadline and don't blog for weeks, I still get tons of hits every day because of the body of work I have created. I am amazed at how much work it consistently brings in.

One of my goals this year is to make better use of Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. I have been so bogged down with work I haven't applied myself in these areas (admittedly, it's a nice problem to have!) But I am finally developing a network of colleagues and 1099 writers to whom I can turn when I have too much work, so I can dedicate myself to exploring these other platforms more fully.

I remember a post early on in this process for me in which you even broke down the way you use your time daily on each of these platforms. My business coach and I spent some time looking at your schedule and strategizing about how I might proceed with these platforms. And like you, I am by nature a very shy person, so these platforms really suit me.

I'm such a big fan of Twitter that I love helping colleagues use it to their advantage. I'll lead an hour-long webinar on March 27 called "Using Twitter to Build Your Freelancing Business." It will be hosted by the Editorial Freelancers Association. I will teach you how to present yourself on Twitter: what to say, how to network with colleagues who can provide referrals, and how to connect with prospective clients.

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When the Publisher Backs the Freelance Copyeditor

It's so nice to have backup! We freelance editors don't always get it, so when we do, it's fun to share it:

A new-to-me physician-researcher from China wrote to request my ESL (English as a second language)/EFL (English as a foreign language) editing services, at the recommendation of the editorial manager for a particular English-language U.S. medical journal. I told him I'd be glad to work with him but that because so many of my authors have articles in the editing process right now, the earliest start date that I have available for him is March 31.

He asked whether I could find a way to begin editing earlier than that, because his manuscript is "only" a meta-analysis (rather than reporting his original research results) and so shouldn't take very long. Plus, he said, the journal "asked me to return my revised manuscript as soon as possible."

Before offering to refer him to one of my talented science-editor colleagues—because I've already referred a few projects to them this month—I decided to check on the journal's deadline for revisions. The editorial manager wrote to me:

Tell him we have no deadline for revisions. [Early] April would not be too late, and [...] having you do the English editing is worth the wait.

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Editor, Know Thyself

I guess I'm just a get-down-in-the-mud-and-wrestle kind of editor.

I came to that conclusion today during a discussion on the Copyediting-L e-mail list about how much rewording to do while editing.

Don't get me wrong; I don't tamper with the author's voice or substitute my writing style for the author's. But even before I specialized in medical editing years ago, publishers and authors tended to send me the manuscripts that needed—and for which the senders wanted—heavy editing. Sometimes that's called developmental editing or substantive editing; some people don't understand the various levels of editing enough to call it anything in particular. I haven't seen anything come across my desk in years that needed light editing. I don't even enjoy editing anymore unless it's heavy. I picture all of my clients thinking, "This requires drastic work—get KOK!" rather than "We need somebody who'll zip through this quickly."


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What Makes This Medical Editor Tick

I'm honored to be featured on the blog of Copyediting newsletter today. The blog post is accessible even if you don't subscribe to the newsletter. If you do subscribe, though, you can follow the link within the post to a longer profile that talks about how I got into medical editing and mentoring freelance editorial professionals.




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Sprints: Freelancing with a Baby or Toddler Around

Have you ever wondered what it takes to juggle self-employment as an editorial professional with parenting of a baby or toddler? In this guest post on the blog of freelancer—and mother-to-be—Andrea Altenburg, I tell you how I did it.

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You Just Never Know

Now, this is seriously cool.

On every public holiday in their respective countries and at the end of each year, I e-mail my 60-plus biomedical-journal authors who are non-native speakers of English, even the ones I've worked with only once, to wish them a good holiday and thank them for choosing me as their editor. And for the new year, I usually snail-mail greeting cards to them. They all like this.

Well, okay, now that the expository paragraph is out of the way, here's the cool part:

In March 2010, I e-mailed all of my authors in Japan to ask whether they were okay after the earthquake and tsunami. One of the authors who didn't reply is one for whom I last edited a manuscript in 2005. I was left wondering whether he was hurt or dead or instead was just too busy to answer my message. But late last night, he e-mailed me; the subject line reads "Long time no see." He used my 2010 message as a starting point to contact me to ask me to edit his latest manuscript.

This little adventure illustrates my belief that self-employed editorial professionals should never give up on hearing from past clients, because some of them may save our e-mails, waiting till they need our services to reply. Just keep on contacting them.


Updated at 11:4 a.m., January 10, 2012: My long-lost author has agreed to my project fee and a February editing start date. Hurray!


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The Editor's Stress-Reliever

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The Copyeditors' Knowledge Base Has Moved

Editorial professionals, this post is for you.

As part of the conversion of my business web site from HTML to PHP, the Copyeditors' Knowledge Base has moved. After you update your bookmarks, you'll want to check out all of the helpful sections within it:

• The Basics

• Education and Certification

• Business Tools

• Social-Media Resources

• Editing Tools

• Tea Vendors and Communities

• Networking

• Finding Work

• Profession-Related Reading

If you know of any items that should be added to the knowledge base, please e-mail me with links to information about them.


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How to Find Medical Editing Freelance Work

As a self-employed medical editor, I'm often asked how freelancers can find medical editing work. This topic came up recently on an email discussion list and in a discussion within a LinkedIn group. Today I'm sharing with you both my response in those discussions and the response of my colleague Susan London.


My Advice
First, see the Ultimate Guide to Becoming a Medical Writer; it applies to medical editors too [updated 1/13/2020].

To develop a clientele in medical editing, you may want to contact the managing editors of various medical journals to pitch your services to them. There are plenty of places online where you can find lists of medical journals so that you can then hunt down their websites to find contact info, including these:

• Bioscience Journal Abbreviations

• Directory of Open Access Journals

• Instructions to authors for more than 6,000 peer-reviewed journals in the health and life sciences (from the Mulford Health Science Library of the University of Toledo)

• NLM Catalog: Journals Referenced in the NCBI Databases

• List of All Journals Cited in PubMed (download a text-only file listing information about journals indexed in PubMed and MEDLINE, to search them for journal-name abbreviations; PubMed is a service of the U.S. National Library of Medicine that allows free access to citations and abstracts in journals in medicine, nursing, dentistry, veterinary sciences, health care, and preclinical sciences)

I also suggest that you consider joining the American Medical Writers Association (AMWA); it counts medical editors among its members, including me. The AMWA website has lots of excellent resources for both medical editors and medical writers. Its private email list is great for networking and learning from colleagues, and members who are freelancers can purchase an entry in the website's freelance directory [updated 8/19/2026]. You can also follow AMWA on X (formerly called Twitter) and on LinkedIn [updated 12/15/2024].

There is a large market, for those who are persistent, in doing medical editing for researcher-authors who are non-native speakers of English and need their journal-article manuscripts polished before submission to U.S. and UK journals. See the article "Building Good Relationships with ESL Authors" from Science Editor, the publication of the Council of Science Editors (CSE).


Susan's Advice
Susan gave me her permission to share her with others as long as I credited her. So here's what she posted to that list:

What Katharine said! All great advice. I'd add just a few things.

The Council of Science Editors also has a Job Bank open to all[, even to those who aren't CSE members].

The National Association of Science Writers (NASW) has many medical writers and editors among its ranks, a great freelance discussion list for NASW members [updated 1/13/2020], and job postings for members.

Katharine interrupting here: And, I add, BELS—the Board of Editors in the Life Sciences—offers certification of applicants' skills as editors in the life sciences through a rigorous 3-hour examination. I have this certification, and it has made my services more desirable to some clients.

[If you are] interested in a certain genre of medical writing or editing, [you] might want to look into organizations specific to that area, such as the Association of Health Care Journalists, mainly for reporters and feature writers.

I'm still a big fan of cold calling, as hard as it can be. Just prepare a brief pitch, research some companies, and give them a call and be sure to get to a top person in publications. The worst that happens is they decline. In that case, always ask (1) if they know of someone else who might be looking for a medical writer or editor and (2) if you could send along a résumé for them to keep on file should their needs change.

As with all types of freelance writing and editing, you have to get a foot in the door, [and] then things get easier.


Your Advice?
If you're a medical editor, what advice would you add?


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Do Freelance Editorial Professionals Keep 9-to-5 Schedules?

One of the big attractions of self-employment is the ability to set your own work hours. The variety of schedules that freelance editorial pros keep is quite large, as shown by a discussion this week on the Copyediting-L e-mail list. What freelancers' schedules look like depends on their workload; their clients' needs; their circadian rhythms; whether they must accommodate the needs of life partners, children, aging parents, and/or pets; and the activities they're involved in outside of work.

I'm sharing my general schedule here in hopes of helping other freelancers see the possibilities and inspiring them to share their schedules in the comments section.

Several factors affect my schedule because they require my attention:

• I'm married.

• I have a 9-year-old son and a 16-year-old son.

• I have an adult daughter who visits us, with her husband and my 4-year-old granddaughter, on some weekends.

• My husband, a cabinetmaker, is self-employed like me. Periodically, I take time away from my work to help him with his project estimates, because I'm better at estimating time than he is, and to write up his estimates and help him with customer e-mails, because effective writing is one of my skills rather than one of his.

• My in-laws live in the downstairs apartment within my home.

• There are 2 dogs and 1 cat in my home.

So here's my approximate weekday schedule:

• ~7:30–10 a.m.: Eat breakfast in my office, while I alternate between helping my husband get the boys out the front door (if it's during the school year) and doing workday-startup tasks:
• Read and respond to e-mails.
• Do my Facebook rounds for the following people or groups: the Board of Editors in the Life Sciences ([BELS] I'm one of the page administrators), the Council of Science Editors ([CSE] I'm one of the admins), members of my extended family, me, and friends and colleagues.
• Do my Twitter rounds for accounts held by the following: BELS (I'm on its Twitter team), CSE (I'm on its Twitter team), KOK Edit.
• Create proposals and invoices for projects as necessary.
• Review my calendar items for the day.

• ~10 a.m.: Shower.

• ~11 a.m.: Start editing the first project of the day.

• ~12:30 p.m.: Eat lunch.

• ~1 p.m.: Get back to work.

• ~7 p.m.: Knock off work and eat dinner, unless I'm facing a dire deadline. If it's a deadline night, stop for dinner and then go back to work till ~10:30 p.m.

• ~Throughout the day:
• Answer client e-mails and e-mails from colleagues and mentees; spot-check profession-related e-mail lists; spot-check Facebook walls for BELS, CSE, and me; spot-check Twitter for BELS, CSE, and KOK Edit.
• Write up project estimates for my husband's cabinetmaking business when necessary and edit his e-mails to clients.
• Brew multiple cups of tea.
• Pet and/or play with my dog.
• Take breaks with my husband and my kids or go flop on the hammock under the giant old maple tree in my backyard (in warm weather).
• Make sure that my sons are on track for chores, for music practice (for the one who plays the cello), and for homework if it's during the school year.

I often do some work on weekends, but I don't get up for the day until about 9 or 10 a.m. I don't usually post anything to Facebook or Twitter on weekends, and I much do more hanging out with family members than on weekdays.

Even with a work schedule that spreads widely across the day, I answer e-mails and phone calls from U.S. clients only between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. on weekdays, to help me separate my work life from my home life. But I do make some exceptions for my authors in other nations; I sometimes answer their e-mails in the evening or early morning because of the time-zone difference.

So, colleagues, what's your schedule like, given your lifestyle and personal and work needs?

Building Lasting Relationships with Authors Who Are Nonnative English Speakers

There is now a huge and lucrative market for medical copyeditors like me who can polish the language of researchers who are nonnative English speakers and who must get their reports published in US and UK English-language peer-reviewed journals.

It takes constant work to build up and maintain a clientele in that arena. But it's worth doing, and not just for the income that we editors can earn but also for the sake of getting important research findings out there that might not become widely known without our assistance. I share my techniques for doing so in "Building Good Relationships with ESL Authors," my article in the April–June 2011 issue [2011;34(2):57–58] of Science Editor, the journal of the Council of Science Editors, of which I am a member.

After you've read my article, please come back to the comments section of this post and share additional techniques for working with ESL authors. Let's work together to further international cooperation in the science community.


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All About Medical Copyediting

I'm pleased to be featured in a blog post on the field of medical copyediting, "A Primer on Medical Copyediting." The blog (Angilee Shah's Career GPS) on which the post appears is part of ReportingOnHealth.org, a project of the California Endowment Health Journalism Fellowships of the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.

If you're thinking of moving into medical editing, the post will fill you in on what to expect.


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