I have just been reminded (twice) that I loveeeee my editors.
First Reminder
There are several stories of mine that were published a few years back whose rights had come back to me. I’m now in the process of finding a new home for them.
Every time I look at the submission guidelines on publishers’ sites, they always say something like these (quoted from various publishers’ websites):
“Authors do not need to submit illustrations.”
“Unless you yourself are an illustrator, do not send illustrations with a manuscript. Publishers want to select the illustrators for the books they publish.”
“Except in the case of author-illustrators, we prefer that submissions not include artwork.”
I am definitely NOT a writer-illustrator. I’m sure if I illustrate my own books, nobody will buy it. Or somebody will buy it only to use it as an example how a book should NOT be illustrated. So I should be sending just text to the publishers.
The problem is, in my computer, there is only the unedited version of the text. The edited version is the one inside the illustrated, published book which I always have in pdf format, not word format. So I either have to re-type the whole thing from the actual book (or jpeg images or the pdf) or use the unedited version and make the necessary changes to make it the same with the final printed version.
Confident that my unedited version is not that different from the final version, I decided to start with that and check every page for any editing work.
And oh boy, was I wrong! I ended up making sooo many changes that I think it would have been faster if I just retyped the whole thing from the book! And that was because my editor had done such a WONDERFUL job with my story. All the unnecessary sentences and words have been deleted (and I realized that I had quite many of these. Maybe because I just loveee to write soo much :)) Every single sentence was re-said in a better way. And lots of imprecise words had been replaced by their better equivalent. The result was still my story but it felt much more delicious on the tongues of the readers.
And for those who still think that editors only check the grammar and spelling, boy, are you wrong!
Second Reminder
Recently I have also gotten the news that one of my novels will also be published as an ebook in English (the novel itself has been published here in Bahasa Indonesia). For that novel, I happened to have the English version already for I wrote it in two languages, so I didn’t need a translator. But I definitely needed an editor. And because the Indonesian version of the novel was already out, I told my editor to “Please do only minimal editing work because we didn’t want the English version to be too different from the Indonesian version.”
By saying that, I was already prepared that the editing work was probably limited to grammar and spellchecking but boy, was I wrong, again! My editor left the change tracker on for my benefit and when I got the file back, almost half of the texts on each page were colored (which means had been changed). This cool change tracker allowed me to see the before and after and I was amazed at how my editor had managed to make wonderful maneuvers, even when I already put her inside a very small box that didn’t allow a lot of movements. She found better (and I’m sure if my editor reads this, she will change the word “better” into : “more appropriate”) words and made the sentences sound better (and she will change this second part of the sentence into: and gave a better ring to each sentence.)
So to all my editors, thank you, thank you, thank you! (Please do not delete any of the thank-yous because they are all necessary! :))
Arleen