Today has afforded me an opportunity to actually *think* about the editing process. I was asked, in my everyday job, to defend some choices that I'd made in primary source documents, and so I had to think about how and why I narrowed down an infinite field of reading material to just those 200 articles. As the hours passed, I began to think about the editing process, as it applies in my business...

Every author has a story to tell. My job as an editor is to help them tell that story so that it appeals to the broadest audience possible -- after all, the ultimate goal is to SELL the book. Sometimes that makes me a mechanic, tinkering with the nuts and bolts, the grammatical errors, the punctuation, the word choices. At other times it makes me a gentle adviser, forced to suggest changes to a character or a storyline.

There are a few steps that almost every good editor takes, every time they take on a new project:

1. Set a goal, with the due date as an end, and divide the assignment into roughly even portions. You don't want to be up all night trying to edit a manuscript at the last moment - it won't get your best effort.
2. Have a separate word document open to take notes. Use this to keep track of character notes, locations, plot holes, overused words, etc.
3. You might consider using a checklist of common issues: commonly misspelled or misused words, items to search and replace, trademarks, etc.
4. Make it a point to leave positive comments for the author. If you laughed out loud at a certain line, say so!

Also, it's important to keep track of the work that you do. A spreadsheet, or some other tracking system, noting the title, author, word count, publisher, and date of edit will ensure you receive the proper payment for each work. We'll discuss this in more detail next time!