My Advice for Book Editors
I have worked with nine professional and four amateur book editors. Throughout many articles, I have shared my experiences, but I have not provided advice to editors. I thought this would be a fun topic to explore.
Writers hire book editors to improve a document to the point where it can be published. Editors will point out that there are multiple approaches, including a quick pass, beta read, basic edit (proofreading), comprehensive edit, copyedit, and developmental editing.
Allow me to begin by stating that I do not know what it requires to be an editor or how difficult it is. This means that I do not have any insight into or knowledge of their techniques or hardships.
What I do know (a little) is how to self-edit a document to the point where I am comfortable providing it to a professional editor. My self-editing process typically requires around 20 passes and at least six months. No professional editor would get any value by explaining my cobbled-together method.
I suspect that a good editor does what I do during those six months, except much faster. In other words, they are fixing logic, dialogue, grammar, and flow all at the same time. To do this level of repair in a few days is beyond my comprehension, but it does lead to my first piece of advice.
It is essential to establish clear editing goals. I have received edits that changed the entire story direction, deleted chapters for no stated reason, changed character names (in one part of the book but not others), and skipped editing entire chapters. The editor had an entirely different view of what I wanted.
To avoid this situation, I recommend using a checklist or flowchart to define what the author expects. This will allow the editor to take a high-level view to set their price and tell the writer what to expect. “I cannot check the flow and dialogue at the same time. That will take two passes and cost you more.” “If you do not want me to check facts, it will be less expensive, but there may be issues I miss.”
Building on that last piece of advice, before a quote is provided, the editor should thoroughly review/understand the document status. Meaning if it is in rough shape, they should let the author know in advance.
Of course, any bad document can be edited into a good one, but with so much heavy lifting, the original document’s charm will be altered. Thus, the writer needs to understand that the editor will be taking control.
I would have greatly appreciated it if the first editor I used had said, “Look, this book is in rough shape, and I will have to charge you $$$. How about you fix XYZ, give it back to me, and then I will only charge you $.” This suggestion would have helped immensely and made me a loyal customer. Instead, I paid $$$ and received a book that still contained major problems. Side note: It took three different editors to bring the book to the point where it was ready to be published. And a second edition… Yeah, it was in rough shape.
A significant aspect of this initial conversation is to establish a predetermined course of action for addressing an important problem. “In Chapter Eight, Sally kills rabbits. Readers will hate this story.” Now, the author has the option to stop the editing process or to have the editor ignore the problem.
This leads to my second piece of advice. Turn down a bad project. One editor hated my second book, but still did the editing. I had to pay big before getting the insulting/worthless edits. No refund. I left a scathing review and know this editor lost work because of it.
What would have made the situation better? I would have appreciated a one-page document describing the problem and would have gladly paid the editor for their feedback and insight.
This painful experience leads to my third piece of advice. I have learned the very hard way never to write or edit in a bad mood. Yet, editors must make money. I have certainly gone to work in a bad mood and seen the results. Angry interactions, lousy work, and hurt feelings that lasted far beyond that day.
I have seen strange behavior in edits, such as mean comments, poor edits, incoherent thoughts, and missing glaring problems. I am sure this is a result of not entering the process with the right mindset. My advice is that before editing, take a step back and evaluate the mood. Perhaps a walk around the block to clear your mind.
Building on this, editors need to maintain a consistent comment tone. Several editors I worked with left snarky, rude, and condescending comments. This basic customer service somehow got missed.
Funny side story: One editor left the comment, “I have corrected the same obvious mistake five times, and I am not doing it for the rest of your book.” The problem they identified was a complex issue involving present/past tenses. It was not at all evident to me how to locate/fix the problem. The rest of their edits were good, but their attitude turned me off from hiring them again.
My fourth piece of advice is the most important. In a word processor, it is common to turn on track changes. This mode is essential in the editing process because it shows where changes have been made. The old and new text is displayed in a red font.
The problem occurs during “red editing,” meaning editing a document while looking at the tracked changes. Here is an example of a before-and-after edit. “Bill walked walked down the street.” “Bill walkeddown the street.” I deleted the repeated word, but in the process, also deleted the space.
I made this mistake because the red editing did not clearly show the deleted extra space. This is compounded by the fact that word processors use a red underline to highlight problems.
The problem becomes more complex as new errors get introduced, particularly those involving missing or extra commas. So, I always recommend editing in the black or “show no markup.” Here is an excellent site providing a modification to MS Word that introduces a hot key to switch between the modes.
Writers hire book editors to improve a document to the point where it can be published. Editors will point out that there are multiple approaches, including a quick pass, beta read, basic edit (proofreading), comprehensive edit, copyedit, and developmental editing.
Allow me to begin by stating that I do not know what it requires to be an editor or how difficult it is. This means that I do not have any insight into or knowledge of their techniques or hardships.
What I do know (a little) is how to self-edit a document to the point where I am comfortable providing it to a professional editor. My self-editing process typically requires around 20 passes and at least six months. No professional editor would get any value by explaining my cobbled-together method.
I suspect that a good editor does what I do during those six months, except much faster. In other words, they are fixing logic, dialogue, grammar, and flow all at the same time. To do this level of repair in a few days is beyond my comprehension, but it does lead to my first piece of advice.
It is essential to establish clear editing goals. I have received edits that changed the entire story direction, deleted chapters for no stated reason, changed character names (in one part of the book but not others), and skipped editing entire chapters. The editor had an entirely different view of what I wanted.
To avoid this situation, I recommend using a checklist or flowchart to define what the author expects. This will allow the editor to take a high-level view to set their price and tell the writer what to expect. “I cannot check the flow and dialogue at the same time. That will take two passes and cost you more.” “If you do not want me to check facts, it will be less expensive, but there may be issues I miss.”
Building on that last piece of advice, before a quote is provided, the editor should thoroughly review/understand the document status. Meaning if it is in rough shape, they should let the author know in advance.
Of course, any bad document can be edited into a good one, but with so much heavy lifting, the original document’s charm will be altered. Thus, the writer needs to understand that the editor will be taking control.
I would have greatly appreciated it if the first editor I used had said, “Look, this book is in rough shape, and I will have to charge you $$$. How about you fix XYZ, give it back to me, and then I will only charge you $.” This suggestion would have helped immensely and made me a loyal customer. Instead, I paid $$$ and received a book that still contained major problems. Side note: It took three different editors to bring the book to the point where it was ready to be published. And a second edition… Yeah, it was in rough shape.
A significant aspect of this initial conversation is to establish a predetermined course of action for addressing an important problem. “In Chapter Eight, Sally kills rabbits. Readers will hate this story.” Now, the author has the option to stop the editing process or to have the editor ignore the problem.
This leads to my second piece of advice. Turn down a bad project. One editor hated my second book, but still did the editing. I had to pay big before getting the insulting/worthless edits. No refund. I left a scathing review and know this editor lost work because of it.
What would have made the situation better? I would have appreciated a one-page document describing the problem and would have gladly paid the editor for their feedback and insight.
This painful experience leads to my third piece of advice. I have learned the very hard way never to write or edit in a bad mood. Yet, editors must make money. I have certainly gone to work in a bad mood and seen the results. Angry interactions, lousy work, and hurt feelings that lasted far beyond that day.
I have seen strange behavior in edits, such as mean comments, poor edits, incoherent thoughts, and missing glaring problems. I am sure this is a result of not entering the process with the right mindset. My advice is that before editing, take a step back and evaluate the mood. Perhaps a walk around the block to clear your mind.
Building on this, editors need to maintain a consistent comment tone. Several editors I worked with left snarky, rude, and condescending comments. This basic customer service somehow got missed.
Funny side story: One editor left the comment, “I have corrected the same obvious mistake five times, and I am not doing it for the rest of your book.” The problem they identified was a complex issue involving present/past tenses. It was not at all evident to me how to locate/fix the problem. The rest of their edits were good, but their attitude turned me off from hiring them again.
My fourth piece of advice is the most important. In a word processor, it is common to turn on track changes. This mode is essential in the editing process because it shows where changes have been made. The old and new text is displayed in a red font.
The problem occurs during “red editing,” meaning editing a document while looking at the tracked changes. Here is an example of a before-and-after edit. “Bill walked walked down the street.” “Bill walkeddown the street.” I deleted the repeated word, but in the process, also deleted the space.
I made this mistake because the red editing did not clearly show the deleted extra space. This is compounded by the fact that word processors use a red underline to highlight problems.
The problem becomes more complex as new errors get introduced, particularly those involving missing or extra commas. So, I always recommend editing in the black or “show no markup.” Here is an excellent site providing a modification to MS Word that introduces a hot key to switch between the modes.
My fifth piece of advice is to provide an edited document as a sample of the editor’s style and ability. However, it is unethical to give an edited customer’s document. I recommend going to a fan fiction page and downloading a public domain story. Such stories will be of awful quality, but short, making them perfect for an editor to show what they are capable of. I have learned the ultra-hard way that if an editor cannot provide a sample document, do not hire them.
Building on this last piece of advice, I do not recommend a freebee edit. “How about I edit your first chapter for free to show you what I am capable of?” I have fallen into this dreadful trap twice. The problem has three parts.
First, it leaves a bad taste. “What, you do not believe I can edit?” Second, the editor devotes more effort to the freebie chapter and less to the rest of the book. Third, the time between the freebee and the actual edit means the first chapter does not receive a comprehensive edit, as the editor completes all edits before reading the rest of the book.
My sixth piece of advice is to use MS Word exclusively. Open Office, Google Docs, and other similar tools are not the gold standard. They all have software bugs, especially in formatting. Yes, MS Word is expensive, and yes, it does not play well with other word processors, but it is a professional tool that ultimately saves time.
Yet, those reasons are not why I recommend it. The problem is when there is a problem. With MS Word, you can always find an answer, a workaround, or a detailed description of the issue. This broad knowledge base spans MS technical support, user forums, the help menu, articles, third-party books, and colleagues.
Plus, add-in programs like Grammarly work best in MS Word. And exotic things like different languages, strange fonts, templates, integrating something from another program, or working with the IT department will always work best with MS Word.
A good example of unknown issues with other word processing programs occurred with my daughter. She was using Google Docs, and somehow, an entire paragraph got indented. Together, we could not figure out why, despite 20 minutes of internet searching. The only solution was to copy everything into Notepad, paste the raw text into a new document, and then reformat everything. (Pasting/converting into MS Word only made the problem worse.)
One editor used OpenOffice on my document without my permission, and the conversion removed all the italics. Their edits were great, but I will never use that editor again.
My seventh piece of advice regards the use of tools like Grammarly, ProWritingAid, Hemingway, LanguageTool, and Wordtune. It is critical to know the tool and its limitations, but there is another problem, especially with professional editors.
I use Grammarly and ProWritingAid to polish my document before I send it to an editor. Therefore, the document is the best it can be from a grammar tool perspective. I count on the editor to take my document to the next level. Meaning a professional editor understands English better than the tools. Specifically, they examine each sentence (independent of the rest of the document) to ensure it has no problems, as opposed to a tool that only follows high-level rules that may not apply to that specific sentence.
I recommend that at the beginning of an edit, the editor do a quick pass with one of these tools. This will reveal how much effort the writer applied to their work and identify and correct obvious flaws, which will save editing time. After hand-editing the document, I recommend running the tool to identify any issues created by the hand-edit.
I suspect all professional editors know what I recommended in the last paragraph. However, I have received many edits that did not do this last step because I saw glaring grammar mistakes. This poses a significant problem for an author like me. Was that an intentional edit, or did they make a mistake? A fifteen-minute Grammarly pass by a professional editor would have eased a lot of my heartache.
There is another problem with these tools. They can transform a “fun” document into a “business” document. So, take great care in accepting a tool-based edit, because in an ideal world, the author ignored the tool advice and made a sentence their way to convey something out of the ordinary.
My eighth piece of advice is to use AI chatbots ultra-sparingly and never directly. A good use is to generate a summary for private use, conduct research, gather ideas, or identify problems. I never use these tools to create content or to update a document for better readability.
Also, an AI-generated or AI-altered document is becoming easy to recognize. Meaning readers are starting to dislike this kind of content. I have noted before that AI loves micro-paragraphs, and these are a dead giveaway.
Six months ago, a professional editor I used for the first time pushed my entire document through an AI chatbot. The “improved” results, while grammatically correct, were awful. There was no refund despite my demand for one, and I left a scathing review on four editing websites. (Yes, I was pretty upset.)
Feeding a document into AI makes it public domain because AI saves all files. Professional editors must never allow private documents to have this exposure and will leave themselves open to lawsuits.
My ninth piece of advice is to make use of an outline where possible. I have found this invaluable tool during development, debugging, reviewing, and creating the summary/book blurb. It shows the overall plot from a high level, which is essential when identifying the big problems that are not visible at the sentence level. Big questions can be asked. “Is this a good idea?” “Will people like this?” “What if I change X to Y?”
My recommendation is for the editor to make big (important) notes on the outline. “Why would Sally do this?” If this note were made on a sentence, it might not be clear from the larger story perspective.
What if the book were written without an outline? An editor can quickly create one, perhaps a page. Then, it is possible for both the author and editor to see the big picture. “We need a chapter to explain the missing car.” “Sally spent ten paragraphs looking for her dog. That is slowing down the story.”
My final piece of advice is not advice; more of a perspective. Every editor I worked with proudly stated, “I do all my edits according to The Chicago Manual of Style.” What this means is that they settled on the standard in that book. And this is a good thing, because this book represents the gold standard. Well, sort of.
The problem is that the English language is a hodgepodge of flimsy rules with endless exceptions. The goal of a good editor is to make a book that readers love. This translates to presenting the reader with outstanding sentences, which means that the rules in The Chicago Manual of Style should not always be followed, especially with dialogue.
Then there are the unwritten rules. For example, avoid beginning multiple sentences with the same word. “I went to the store. I purchased cheese. I left with a full bag.” Another is reminding the reader who is speaking. “Hello,” Bill said.
I have seen many edits that result in poor sentences, but there is an included comment, “Rule X from The Chicago Manual of Style.” My reply is, “Now it reads all wrong, and defending a poor edit with an established rule is making things worse.”
I feel the ideal approach is to edit with the mindset, “I do my best to follow The Chicago Manual of Style, but use my experience to make your book the best it can be.”
In a month, I will be searching for a new editor for my latest book. So, if you know somebody…
You’re the best -Bill
August 20, 2025
Building on this last piece of advice, I do not recommend a freebee edit. “How about I edit your first chapter for free to show you what I am capable of?” I have fallen into this dreadful trap twice. The problem has three parts.
First, it leaves a bad taste. “What, you do not believe I can edit?” Second, the editor devotes more effort to the freebie chapter and less to the rest of the book. Third, the time between the freebee and the actual edit means the first chapter does not receive a comprehensive edit, as the editor completes all edits before reading the rest of the book.
My sixth piece of advice is to use MS Word exclusively. Open Office, Google Docs, and other similar tools are not the gold standard. They all have software bugs, especially in formatting. Yes, MS Word is expensive, and yes, it does not play well with other word processors, but it is a professional tool that ultimately saves time.
Yet, those reasons are not why I recommend it. The problem is when there is a problem. With MS Word, you can always find an answer, a workaround, or a detailed description of the issue. This broad knowledge base spans MS technical support, user forums, the help menu, articles, third-party books, and colleagues.
Plus, add-in programs like Grammarly work best in MS Word. And exotic things like different languages, strange fonts, templates, integrating something from another program, or working with the IT department will always work best with MS Word.
A good example of unknown issues with other word processing programs occurred with my daughter. She was using Google Docs, and somehow, an entire paragraph got indented. Together, we could not figure out why, despite 20 minutes of internet searching. The only solution was to copy everything into Notepad, paste the raw text into a new document, and then reformat everything. (Pasting/converting into MS Word only made the problem worse.)
One editor used OpenOffice on my document without my permission, and the conversion removed all the italics. Their edits were great, but I will never use that editor again.
My seventh piece of advice regards the use of tools like Grammarly, ProWritingAid, Hemingway, LanguageTool, and Wordtune. It is critical to know the tool and its limitations, but there is another problem, especially with professional editors.
I use Grammarly and ProWritingAid to polish my document before I send it to an editor. Therefore, the document is the best it can be from a grammar tool perspective. I count on the editor to take my document to the next level. Meaning a professional editor understands English better than the tools. Specifically, they examine each sentence (independent of the rest of the document) to ensure it has no problems, as opposed to a tool that only follows high-level rules that may not apply to that specific sentence.
I recommend that at the beginning of an edit, the editor do a quick pass with one of these tools. This will reveal how much effort the writer applied to their work and identify and correct obvious flaws, which will save editing time. After hand-editing the document, I recommend running the tool to identify any issues created by the hand-edit.
I suspect all professional editors know what I recommended in the last paragraph. However, I have received many edits that did not do this last step because I saw glaring grammar mistakes. This poses a significant problem for an author like me. Was that an intentional edit, or did they make a mistake? A fifteen-minute Grammarly pass by a professional editor would have eased a lot of my heartache.
There is another problem with these tools. They can transform a “fun” document into a “business” document. So, take great care in accepting a tool-based edit, because in an ideal world, the author ignored the tool advice and made a sentence their way to convey something out of the ordinary.
My eighth piece of advice is to use AI chatbots ultra-sparingly and never directly. A good use is to generate a summary for private use, conduct research, gather ideas, or identify problems. I never use these tools to create content or to update a document for better readability.
Also, an AI-generated or AI-altered document is becoming easy to recognize. Meaning readers are starting to dislike this kind of content. I have noted before that AI loves micro-paragraphs, and these are a dead giveaway.
Six months ago, a professional editor I used for the first time pushed my entire document through an AI chatbot. The “improved” results, while grammatically correct, were awful. There was no refund despite my demand for one, and I left a scathing review on four editing websites. (Yes, I was pretty upset.)
Feeding a document into AI makes it public domain because AI saves all files. Professional editors must never allow private documents to have this exposure and will leave themselves open to lawsuits.
My ninth piece of advice is to make use of an outline where possible. I have found this invaluable tool during development, debugging, reviewing, and creating the summary/book blurb. It shows the overall plot from a high level, which is essential when identifying the big problems that are not visible at the sentence level. Big questions can be asked. “Is this a good idea?” “Will people like this?” “What if I change X to Y?”
My recommendation is for the editor to make big (important) notes on the outline. “Why would Sally do this?” If this note were made on a sentence, it might not be clear from the larger story perspective.
What if the book were written without an outline? An editor can quickly create one, perhaps a page. Then, it is possible for both the author and editor to see the big picture. “We need a chapter to explain the missing car.” “Sally spent ten paragraphs looking for her dog. That is slowing down the story.”
My final piece of advice is not advice; more of a perspective. Every editor I worked with proudly stated, “I do all my edits according to The Chicago Manual of Style.” What this means is that they settled on the standard in that book. And this is a good thing, because this book represents the gold standard. Well, sort of.
The problem is that the English language is a hodgepodge of flimsy rules with endless exceptions. The goal of a good editor is to make a book that readers love. This translates to presenting the reader with outstanding sentences, which means that the rules in The Chicago Manual of Style should not always be followed, especially with dialogue.
Then there are the unwritten rules. For example, avoid beginning multiple sentences with the same word. “I went to the store. I purchased cheese. I left with a full bag.” Another is reminding the reader who is speaking. “Hello,” Bill said.
I have seen many edits that result in poor sentences, but there is an included comment, “Rule X from The Chicago Manual of Style.” My reply is, “Now it reads all wrong, and defending a poor edit with an established rule is making things worse.”
I feel the ideal approach is to edit with the mindset, “I do my best to follow The Chicago Manual of Style, but use my experience to make your book the best it can be.”
In a month, I will be searching for a new editor for my latest book. So, if you know somebody…
You’re the best -Bill
August 20, 2025
