I have something to tell you. It may be hard for you to hear, but as a potential client–mine or someone else’s–you need to hear this. Are you ready?

Editors are human.

There. I said it.

Oh, we may use software tools to do our jobs. Some of us rely solely on The Chicago Manual of Style or The Elements of Style or even the more recent and user-friendly Actually, The Comma Goes Here (Hat tip to Michael Bracken for revealing that one to me.) Some of us even edit by memorized rules and years of experience, an elite few even turning off spell check and grammar check. Ooooh!

Actually, even in the days of typed manuscripts and few or no computers, those last editors were freaks of nature. I’m pretty sure Stephen King’s editors or the great Ruth Cavin at St. Martin’s Press kept at least The Elements of Style and/or The Chicago Manual of Style handy.

But editors are human. I’ve caught mistakes by the best. I’ve been called out by a couple of authors of mine, one of whom requested me again, the other who gave me a blurb. They want the best prose possible. Hey, have you ever told your mechanic you want your car done a certain way after they did a job for you? If there’s a little back and forth, that mechanic knows what you want, and you just gave them a new way to fix your car. (Maybe a bad example. Unless you’re customizing, cars are pretty rigid.)

Every author has, or should have, a stet privilege. I’ve had three editors at Down & Out. The first had some bizarre preferences for style, like “a-m” instead of “AM” (my preference, and I usually try to tell an editor that up front) or the standard “a.m.” The others have been Chris Rhatigan, whose presence is missed by those of us on Down & Out’s roster of authors, and Dawn Barclay, whom I’ve also edited. I probably stetted more suggestions on Chris than Dawn, but both of them, at least as editors, hew pretty close to my editing style. In Chris’s case, he had to deal with more made-up place names than Dawn did.

I’ve had others, including beta readers, who did full-on edits. I had one, whom I hope dug his heels in and started editing himself, who tended to treat the rules as iron-clad. No passive voice. Absolutely everything shown, even the most irrelevant details. Especially because that was an independently published book, I stetted. No harm, no foul, because I knew more coming out of that set of revisions than I knew going in. I’ve had some where I’d end up spotting glaring errors in the final copy. (“Dude, did you even read this?”) Most of those were zine editors who couldn’t be arsed, to use a quaint English phrase, as they had a huge stack of submissions to go through. Most have been good.

But a few things editors have to deal with which you may be blissfully unaware as we carve up your manuscript:

• We can’t memorize every grammar rule out there. Oh, we have the style guides and ProWritingAid/PerfectIT/etc. to highlight errors. Or we may be whizzes at trimming up prose and making it as lean as possible. But in the end, we’re not perfect.
• The more errors in a manuscript, the more get past us. Really, if you have a ton of misspellings or misplaced commas or even run-ons and excess passive voice, we’re going to miss some errors simply because we’re busy fixing the last one. It’s human nature, and even software tools either don’t catch everything or, as I’ve discovered, you spend a lot of time smacking the tool’s hand. (“No, stupid, that’s a made-up name! Stop correcting it!” Note to ProWritingAid’s developers: Entity name suggestions desperately need a Disable Rule function. 90% of them are a waste of time, and the other 10%, most of us can spot it without an assist.) Plus, any editor worth his salt is going to use Track Changes or equivalent, which results in a lot of red text and commented passages. So that oddball tense change you stuck in the third sentence of the paragraph where I chopped up your run-on? Well, all that red ink and highlighting just camouflaged it. Sorry.
• You’re not the only writer on our dance card. If you’ve hired a freelance editor, keep in mind they have other clients. Sometimes, you get lucky and hire someone new to the biz, when they’re cheap and available. A lot of times, when you make an inquiry, we get excited as soon as we know the estimated cost (because, hey, new business!), but just the same, we sweat how we’re going to properly slot your work between the current project and the one booked after yours. It’s not just the fee, it’s the time. And if you’re publishing for a small press or hiring someone who edits for one, projects come pretty much on a conveyor belt. The publisher has a schedule to keep, which means we have to stay on top of the workload. But you need proper attention. Otherwise, you wouldn’t hire us.
• Developmental editing is always expensive. I paid about a grand to a dev editor (who taught me developmental editing. Bless you, Stacy. Bless you.) That was cheap, mainly because she was new. I charge roughly $2500 depending on initial word count (payment plans negotiable.) I’ll do a story analysis, which is like a dev edit but with only a light copy edit and without the workshopping sessions over chat or phone, just copious notes and an outline, for a fraction of that. Copy edits are based on word count, but there’s more wiggle room to negotiate.
• Having mentioned money, it should still always be about the reader. You know. The people you want to buy your books. I don’t work with clients who lecture me about their genius or how this is going to upend the literary world. I’ve not only been that writer (that lasted about five minutes before I got put in my place), I dealt with one, who tuned around and sent me three of the most abusive emails anyone’s ever sent me. Blocked on email, social media, and even Paypal. I also know editors who edit for the sake of editing. Uh-huh. Let’s say you get a project from Jim Fusilli, a Wall Street Journal columnist whom I’ve edited. Well, actually, Jim is so good, I basically proofread, moving the odd comma around and chopping maybe one run-on sentence. Are you telling me you’re going to cut anyway because you cut on principle? Now you’re editing to edit, not editing for the reader, not helping the writer.
• Don’t take it personally. You paid for someone’s expertise. Flawed or not, you should know more once you have all that red ink back than when you sent in the clean manuscript. If you disagree with something, ask the editor why they flagged what they flagged. Most of us are also writers. In fact, if we edit, we get some good conversations going. Dawn Barclay and I had some really good conversations ahead of her edits on my Jim Winter collection, Winter of Discontent. (Sorry, no release date yet.) Helps that I edited one of Dawn’s anthologies, so we knew each other’s thinking already.
• One editor will always change what another editor did. I’ve done it. Dawn did it to me, as about 75% of Winter of Discontent came from webzines over the last 25 years. Some of the previous editors I still know. And I once carved up a novel that was a bestseller a decade ago (even won awards*.) He was one of those who gave me a blurb (and some very useful pushback.) I have to purge a contemporary reference from No Marigolds in the Promised Land and am contemplating moving Bad Religion and Road Rules to a new publisher. Quite likely, as I did most of the editing on those myself, I will go through each of them and yell, “Hottle, what the hell were you thinking?!?!” (And I will edit the day after writing this and scold myself for using “?!?!” So far, only Nathan Singer has resisted purging that, and you have to read Nathan to understand why.)

We’re human. But we’re usually as objective as we can be. The best of us ask, “How’s the reader going to see this?” If we do that, we’ve given you a filter to look at your own work. That’s what you hired us to do.

*But not a major award. Sadly, that author doesn’t have a leg lamp in his living room. Unless he bought it on Amazon or eBay.