Hey everyone! I want to talk today about my new series on the Art & Craft of Writing: Step by Step Guides to Becoming Your Own Dev Editor. You can find out about how to sign up for this series through the email list inside my new free ebook, Secret Advice for Writers.
In the past year my business has undergone a radical change: now the majority of the queries I receive are mass queries from self-publishing writers seeking only Copy Editing—not Developmental or Line Editing.
I’ve mentioned before and I’ll mention again that Copy Editing is so minor to my work that I throw it in free with Line Editing. But it turns out that about a year ago someone self-published a book on how to sell yourself as an independent editor, so that my industry is suddenly inundated with ‘editors’ who may or may not know anything about this real work, but they can certainly buy a book on grammar and punctuation and sell themselves to writers as though they do.
Some of these people even sell themselves as Developmental Editors, hoping to rely upon their experience in beta groups, advice from writing books, and the blogs of working Dev Editors. (I know because they email to tell me.)
It sounds like a good idea, doesn’t it? Charge writers for your blind guesses instead of giving them away free? Who’s going to know that you’re simply taking advantage of someone else’s generosity toward those same writers? If you know where to look for the right advice, and the writers who query you don’t, you can skim off your piece of the pie at the writer’s expense, and they’ll never be able to tell.
That what burns me up: at the writer’s expense.
I call these guys Faux Editors.
And they have become legion.
They are all over the Internet now, taking writers’ hard-earned money for passing on their—often shockingly wrong—interpretations of real advice, making blind guesses, and in many cases actually introducing errors into manuscripts. Believe me, I hear the horror stories. I see the mangled manuscripts. Writers contact me in distress, having hired not one but two, three, sometimes even more Faux Editors, throwing good money after bad in the desperate hope that someone, somewhere, will turn out randomly to be a real editor.
It is appalling, but there’s been nothing much I could do about it for those who can’t afford me or my (all top-flight) editor friends. . .
Until now.
This year, I’m changing the focus of my editing business. Instead of promoting my free advice on my blog and advice column to those writers who can’t afford me—simply hoping that they don’t fall prey to the Faux Editors—I’m going to begin teaching writers how I do the Dev Editing work I do, so that the Faux Editors can’t profit off their innocence.
Yes, I know the Faux Editors will just use my advice to advance their own agendas. If I make public my professional body of knowledge about this wonderful art and craft, I won’t be able to stop them.
But it’s better to raise the quality of writing everywhere than to continue standing by and watching slack-jawed the damage being wreaked.
I want to give you the tools to protect yourself from the Faux Editors. You guys have stood by me through years of this work, and I really appreciate it!
So please feel free to join us. Sign up for my email list inside Secret Advice to Writers, and you’ll receive an invitation to become a part of my private list, the Mixoneers, for the Step-by-Step Guides to Becoming Your Own Dev Editor.
If you’re already a Mixoneer and reading this because we’re all reading it together. . .thanks for being in the avant-garde!
And if you don’t want to sign up for anything—that’s great too! I’ll be publishing the Step-by-Step Guides later this year, on sale to everyone.
I love fiction so much.