What Does an Editor's Client List Actually Tell You?

I had a Zoom with a potential client this morning at 9:00 a.m.

This was immediately after Yom Kippur, during which I somehow ended up as diaper changer in chief. Bless them.

So there I was, slightly sleep-deprived, talking about editing and publishing with a prospective client when he asked me a question that I thought was actually quite interesting:

Why aren't there more Big Five authors on my client list?

It's a fair question.

If you're considering spending a significant amount of money on an editor, you want to know that the editor knows what she's doing. Looking at an editor's previous clients seems like a sensible way to investigate.

But the question also made me think about how we measure editorial experience.

Because if you look only at whether an editor has worked with authors published by the Big Five (it might be Four at this point), you're seeing a very small part of the picture.

I edit novels, but I also edit a lot of nonfiction.

I have spent hours doing painstaking editorial work on UN reports for Impact-SE. I work with a university architecture magazine, reviewing academic submissions about architecture from around the world. That kind of work requires close attention to argument, structure, terminology, consistency and accuracy.

It also makes you a better editor of almost everything else.

When you've spent hours figuring out whether an article is actually saying what the writer thinks it is saying, you get very good at finding the sentence that doesn't quite follow from the one before it.

You notice inconsistencies.

You notice when something important hasn't been explained.

You notice when a paragraph is doing three jobs and none of them particularly well.

You learn to ask: What does the reader need here?

Those are editorial skills.

They don't suddenly become more valuable because the finished piece appears under the imprint of a major publisher.

I have clients who are therapists, doctors and rabbis who are writing books connected to their professional work.

Some are writing for their communities.

Some are writing for their careers.

Some are writing because they have something they want to put into the world.

Some are publishing books for their families.

I've edited speeches for family events. I've worked on academic writing. I've worked on professional material. I've worked on manuscripts that were always intended for a relatively small audience.

There is nothing unusual about this.

Not every book is trying to become a bestseller.

And not every writer needs a publishing contract to make the book worthwhile.

Sometimes the audience is 500 people.

Sometimes it's a professional community.

Sometimes it's a family.

Sometimes the writer wants the book on a shelf in their office.

And sometimes, yes, the writer wants thousands or millions of people to read it.

I work with all of them.

Some of my clients absolutely do want traditional publication and a wide readership.

That's a different process.

An editor can help make the manuscript as strong as possible. But after that come agents, submissions, acquiring editors, publishers, publishing lists, timing, market considerations, rights and budgets.

And those things take time.

Sometimes a very long time.

The fact that a manuscript has been professionally edited does not mean that it will immediately find an agent or a publisher.

And a writer may decide along the way that traditional publishing isn't what they want after all. More and more often, this is the case. 

So when I look at my client list, I don't see a list of people who were all supposed to end up at the same five publishing houses.

I see writers, academics, professionals, families, researchers and people with something they care enough about to put into words.

I'm one person.

I can only take on so many projects at a time.

And editing is not a conveyor belt.

Some projects take weeks. Some take months. A major developmental edit can involve an enormous amount of concentrated work.

So even if every client I had wanted to become a widely published author, I would still have a finite number of clients.

And not every writer who wants a large commercial audience has the budget for a highly experienced editor for a long, intensive project.

That's not a criticism of the writer or the editor. It's simply how the economics of publishing and freelance editing work.

The truth is that I love working with writers.

I love working with their messages.

Every writer comes to me with something they are trying to say, whether it's a novel they've carried around for years, a book based on their professional expertise, a family story they want to preserve, an academic argument, or something they simply feel needs to exist in the world.

I get to spend hours inside those ideas.

I get to ask questions, find the places where the writing isn't yet doing what the writer wants it to do, help clarify an argument or a story, and sometimes help a writer see something in their own work that they couldn't quite see before.

I find that enormously satisfying.

And I feel very privileged to have been doing it for decades.

That's the part of my work that doesn't show up on a client list.

Neither does the satisfaction of watching a writer suddenly understand why a chapter isn't working. Or seeing a complicated argument become clear. Or reading the final version of something that we have worked through together and knowing how much changed between the first draft and the finished piece.

It tells you that people hire me to work very closely on their writing.

It tells you that I have worked across fiction, nonfiction, academic writing, professional writing and everything in between.

It tells you that I have spent a lot of time with writers who need someone to look very closely at what they've written and ask the questions a reader is going to ask.

And it tells you that I have been doing this for a long time.

It doesn't tell you which publishing house will eventually acquire a particular manuscript.

That isn't something an editor can control.

I live in Beit Shemesh, Israel. My clients are not all trying to enter the same publishing pipeline, and I'm not trying to build a client list that looks impressive because of a handful of recognizable names.

I'm interested in the work.

Sometimes that work is a novel.

Sometimes it's a 40-page academic article.

Sometimes it's a UN report.

Sometimes it's a professional book.

Sometimes it's a family history.

Sometimes it's a speech that will be delivered at a family celebration.

And sometimes it's a novel that the writer hopes will eventually be read by a very large audience.

They're all different kinds of editing.

But they all require the same basic thing:

someone who is willing to read very carefully.

And after this morning's Zoom, I found myself thinking that perhaps that's a more useful thing to ask an editor about than the names on her client list.