What’s Missing from Your Editorial Process?

Posted: June 25, 2012

[caption id="attachment_10305" align="alignright" width="395"]© mostafa fawzy - Fotolia.com[/caption]There's a process you go through before, during and after writing. However, is something missing from your editorial process?

No one standard specific routine exists for optimizing the quality of written material, but various models have some procedures in common that are, with adjustments, appropriate to any context and any type of content.

What follows is an outline of editorial production for most book publishers, a protocol that, with variations and simplifications, applies to the preparation of text regardless of the medium in which it is presented.

The writer produces an initial draft and reworks it until it seems satisfactory for the writer’s purposes. He or she then submits it to an agent or directly to an editor. The recipient will probably, statistically speaking, reject the manuscript outright, but let’s assume that it is accepted. Even if the agent or editor believes that the manuscript has potential, he or she is likely to return it with suggestions for improvement, which the writer will presumably take to heart before submitting the revised manuscript.

The amount of attention the manuscript receives at this stage varies significantly depending on many factors, even in the book-publishing industry. (The same, of course, can be said for the initial writing phase.) These factors include the publishing company’s policy regarding how much staff attention is devoted to the editorial process, as well as the editor’s skill level.

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