How to Hire a Professional Book Editor
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Finding a book editor is a challenging task for any author to undertake, and getting the right fit is crucial for the proper development of your manuscript. It’s easy enough to enlist someone who has an English degree or just a love for reading, but it's no replacement for the years of training and experience possessed by a professional editor. It’s important to partner with an editor who has the technical expertise to maintain the standards and expectations of a polished book, but also one who understands your authorial voice and recognizes all the written mannerisms that make it uniquely yours. The editor’s objective should be to help diagnose your manuscript’s mechanical and structural needs, while maintaining your creative vision through all the edits.
Whether you’re hiring a freelance editor or partnering with a publishing services provider to work with you on your project, we recommend you use the same 5 criteria we do at FriesenPress to hire our own vetted editing team. As a publishing services provider with over 11 years’ experience — spanning 5,500+ published titles and countless hours of editorial review — we’ve outlined the five markers of qualification and quality you should consider to make sure you’re getting your money’s worth from a book editor. With these criteria as a helpful rubric, you can better determine whether your potential editor is up to professional industry standards and (most importantly) if they’re the right fit for you.
1. Accreditation
Professional editing reduces distractions that diminish your book's readability, such as convoluted content structure, incorrect grammar, and persistent typos. From developmental editing to proofreading, our vetted editing team will match you with the editorial services you need to create the best book possible.
An official acknowledgement of one’s editing ability should include either an Editing Certificate from a respected university or accreditation from an institution like Editors Canada, who developed North American guidelines for professional editing.
We require all of our editors to pass an exam based on Editors Canada’s EAC guidelines to uphold an expected industry standard of accuracy. This education helps the editor to best assess the needs of a manuscript. This includes not only grammar, spelling, punctuation, and language rules, but also the different approaches to improving a manuscript, from the stylistic pieces that ensure your book still sounds like you when the editor’s finished their work, to the substantive pieces that smooth out presentation of ideas to ensure your reader is getting what you intended from your book.
While degrees in English, literature, or other tangential topics are helpful, they are not a replacement for dedicated editorial training. Tangential degrees are just not the same as honing the high-detail skills of balancing the writer’s voice with a reader’s engagement that an editor acquires from specialized training.
Ask Your Prospective Editor: “Where did you acquire your official editing credentials—editing certificate or accreditation?”
2. Style Guide
A foundational aspect of professional book editing, style guide adherence ensures that your book meets industry standards. In-house at FriesenPress, our editors use the Chicago Manual of Style primarily, as this is the most commonly applied style guide in the North American publishing industry. Some academic writers may prefer American Psychology Association style, so an editor who can use your preferred style ensures consistency. Here are the four most commonly used style guides for your reference:
Chicago Manual of Style (CMOS or CMS) is typically used for fiction of all genres, books intended for laypeople, business, history, the arts, and general literature.
American Psychology Association (APA) style is typically used for medical texts, psychiatry, academic journals, and texts intended for educational institutions.
Modern Language Association (MLA) style is typically used for academic audiences, the humanities, and high-level nonfiction.
Canadian Press (CP) (or American Press (AP)) style is used for journalism, especially in online media, newspapers, and magazines.
Following one of these styles ensures that the grammatical rules and text styling are given a consistent treatment for items with accepted variations, such as capitalization, italics, quotations, reference citations, and end matter organization.
The style guide should also implement a consistent English spelling convention, such as Canadian, American, or British. Some treatments of punctuation and spelling vary between these variants so consistency is key to having your book look professional.
Ask Your Prospective Editor: “Which style guides are you most familiar with?”
3. Experience
We recommend that your editor have specific book editing experience with a minimum of two years practical application. Knowledge of your genre is a must; certain cheats of English grammar are permissible in hard-boiled noir that won’t fly in academia, for example. We match up every project with a vetted, experienced book editor who has specialties that match your genre/topic. When hiring editors, we assess on our authors’ behalf the projects and clients the editor has previously worked for. But if you’re searching for your own freelance editor online, you should be able to review samples of their work.
If you end up with an inexperienced self-professed editor they can unknowingly make the mistake of changing your unique voice to suit their own personal preferences or implement inaccurate grammar “rules” and miss potentially grievous errors. You don’t need errors introduced that undermine all your hard work and credibility, and possibly even cause readers to stop reading.
Ask Your Prospective Editor: “How many years experience do you have as an editor and what type of projects have you worked on?”
4. Specialist Knowledge
Our editors come from a wide variety of backgrounds, and their specialist knowledge can inform our decision when pairing up an editor with an author. It can be valuable to consider any additional careers an editor has held, degrees they’ve earned, family (and family’s experiences), places they’ve lived, hobbies, and even their favourite authors. If the editor understands some of your experiences and interests, you can potentially find overlap that strengthens your book.
For instance, if you're writing a fantasy series and your editor mentions their signed copy of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Silmarillion, you know it’s likely that person will be more interested and informed on the genre than most.
Often these benefits become apparent when the editor catches inaccuracies, anachronisms, clichés, jargon, and provides finely tuned audience expectations. Such specialist knowledge comes from being a curious individual who continues to learn within their field. The best editors have a range of other experiences and skills, so ask them how widely they read, what they’ve gleaned from past projects, how consistently they implement editors’ tools (such as readability reports, style sheets, plagiarism trackers, etc.), and what sort of enriching personal-life experiences they’ve sought out.
Ask Your Prospective Editor: “What sort of skills, knowledge, or experiences do you have that might be particularly beneficial to the content of my book?”
5. Approach
As part of our selection process for matching an author with an editor, we also consider the interpersonal fit, and particularly the method by which feedback is delivered. When you’ve worked on a writing project for many days and long hours and have grown attached to the work you’ve created, it can be understandably difficult to hear criticisms. As such, an editor’s approach can have a huge impact on how a writer receives constructive criticism.
Are you the kind of writer who is sensitive to criticism, either feeling like it’s a personal attack or making you worry your work isn’t good enough? Or, do you thrive on people tearing your work apart, willing to throw the baby out with the bathwater in your efforts to improve?
The best editor in the world is useless if they can’t deliver feedback in a way that inspires you to make your book better. But what does “ideal feedback” look like? That depends on you — the author. If you’ve never had your work edited before, you may not know what tone will be most helpful. You can get a taste for your ideal feedback style by getting a few friends to beta read a sample of your book and provide you with their thoughts.
Knowing which manner of feedback is most encouraging to your writing and understanding the potential editor’s ability to provide it in that way, will mean a more pleasurable interaction and fruitful experience.
Ask Your Prospective Editor: “What is your approach to delivering feedback? Can I review a sample of edited work and the feedback provided?”
The FriesenPress Editing Process
When your manuscript slides across our desk, the matchmaking process begins with an assessment by our dedicated expert Editing Coordinator. We take into account your goals and background, your preferred method and tone for receiving feedback, the manuscript’s subject matter and themes, and the appropriateness of length for your book’s genre. With these considerations in mind, our coordinator can then confidently select the editor that best fits your needs from our pool of over fifty screened and accredited editors.
Although, before we proceed with any editing, we start with an Editor’s Manuscript Evaluation. An editor first reads your manuscript in its entirety, then produces a 5 to 6 page written assessment with its strengths and weaknesses, suggested improvements, and a recommendation for the editing services that will have the greatest impact on improving your book. This enables you to review the editor’s perspective on the project and the ways in which they can assist you to improve the manuscript. This way you can ensure your visions are aligned — or clarify your intentions on certain items before proceeding so that the editor can be sure of matching your vision. Ideally the editor will have worked on comparable books (for your target audience) before, so that they have a keen sense of the market and what adjustments might best enable your book to reach its intended audience.
