How did I start in editing?

Along with archaeology (my degree subject) I think books are the closest thing we can get to time travel. I was such a bookworm as a child. Books were my gateway to imagined lives in other times and places. I would often sit down to read after breakfast and not move until I was called for dinner - bliss! I would spend hours poring over my parents’ big dictionary, fascinated to learn new words. That love of reading, the magic of books and words, never left me.

Fast forward to 2016 … I had been working as a transcriber and freelance ghostwriter, something I could do from home while my children were small. I loved the challenge of getting the grammar and punctuation just right, and I had a knack for spotting even tiny errors and slips. So when a friend put out a call for help with his novel, I jumped at the chance. I learned so much working on that first book. We had both thought it ‘just’ needed a proofread, one final check before sending it to the printer, but as I worked I found little inconsistencies, grammar errors, loose ends in the plot, repetition and more. The book was fantastic, but it needed more than proofreading. It needed the polish that only a human* copy-editor can bring. I didn’t know, then, that the queries I was raising with the author, and the kinds of slips and errors that I was catching, were all part of the job of copy-editor. But I did know I thoroughly enjoyed the work and couldn’t wait to do it again.

Fortunately for me, that friend was a prolific writer and had another book in the pipeline. While he was working on the final draft, I was learning as much as I could about editing and proofreading. I joined the Chartered Institute for Editing and Proofreading (then called the Society for Editors and Proofreaders), and started working my way through their courses. I bought books about editing. I may even have had the odd dream about editing! I became an editing geek. When the next book in the series was in final draft form I was ready and waiting.

That was it — by the time I’d completed the edit on that second book I had several other authors’ manuscripts booked in with me and I’ve never looked back.

*AI is great for some things, and I use some computer software to do the first ‘clean-up’ pass on most manuscripts, but AI absolutely cannot replace the human touch - I’ll be writing more about that in a future blog!