Styles of Manuscript Editing
When you are correcting or making changes in a book manuscript,
what you are doing is editing that manuscript. I've been in the
business of editing would-be books for over the past twenty-five
years, and I've helped many a first-time author put his or her
book together in a way that made it more readable, enjoyable,
saleable and finally -- marketable.
There are two basic forms of helping an author write his or her
own book. One is ghostwriting. That is when you take the
material the author gives you, such as through tapes, written
materials and/or phone calls, taking notes as you go, and
holding meetings and interviews, and then you actually do the
job of writing the book yourself. You may supply new material,
new characters, fresh nuances, etc. for the book. But
ghostwriting can also be on the fine edge of rewriting. For
example, the ideas laid out by the original author may fully
enter your writing of the book, sometimes as originally
constructed by the author. Or you may simply rewrite a
manuscript that was pretty much formally written by the author.
This is near the finer edges of copyediting, where what you
actually do is simply correct the major and minor mistakes made
by the original author.
The big difference between ghostwriting and copyediting is not
always so pronounced, you see. Some people consider it to be
ghostwriting when you simply take an author's ideas and
rearrange them into readable material, while other people
consider that to be rewriting. A major job of rewriting might
involved adding a new "voice" to the material, or making changes
in the general writing style, which may be superfluous,
exaggerative, or simply downright dull.
Copyediting or editing, on the other hand, usually involves
keeping to the style of the original writing, without adding
much if any of your own writing "voice" to it. What you are
doing is perhaps rearranging some of the material to reflect
greater consistency in the writing along the lines of what the
author wants -- or seems to want. You might be making changes in
grammar, syntax changes which entail remaking word order and
perhaps utilizing new words and phrases, correcting punctuation,
and changing some of the sentence structuring. You may be adding
some of your own fresh material again here, as when you do
ghostwriting, but when copyediting and not ghostwriting is
involved, this will not usually be major additions of new book
material.
However, you can certainly mesh both copyediting and
ghostwriting. You may research additional material and either
intersperse it where it is needed in places throughout the
manuscript, or you might rewrite the opening "hook" so that it
"grabs" the readers' attention in a far more arresting manner.
You could also perhaps rewrite or write a brand new ending for
the book or for its various chapters, to make the book more
dramatic, give it more "flair," and add more "spice" and
substance to it. All this can be done while still mainly keeping
to an editing or copyediting style when it comes to the
remainder of the manuscript. And you would probably not be
changing the overall original "voice" of the book.
Sometimes you will find that a book contains nearly only minor
grammatical errors and doesn't need much actual editing except
for grammar and perhaps some syntax or minor structural errors,
and maybe some fact checking as well. Fact checking involves
making sure that a character's name is always spelled the same
way, that a town remains to the north and doesn't suddenly slip
down south, and keeping to other such factual consistencies.
This style of editing is called proofreading the manuscript, and
is usually the last thing you do before you turn in your final
copy of it to the client, whether you ghostwrote, rewrote,
copyedited or simply proofread it.
Charges for the above services, as you've probably guessed, vary
widely. You would of course charge more for more work involved
in the writing, and less for less work involved. It all depends
on how much time and effort you feel you need to put into the
writing. If you are practically writing the book from scratch,
only using the author's ideas and doing a lot of "side research"
where you are looking up ideas for new material and adding it,
this would be considered upper level ghostwriting or "ghosting"
-- and you would charge commensurate to the greater amount of
work involved. On the other hand, if all you are doing is
proofreading or "proofing" the manuscript, naturally you would
charge far less money to properly perform such a service for the
would-be book author.
Whenever you receive a manuscript from an author, or a request
to "look at" his or her material and judge what needs to be done
with it, review the materials the author is willing at first to
release very carefully. Explain to the author that his or her
own original material is fully copyrighted under the US
copyrights law of 1989, and that all nations with copyrights
treaties with the US cover this as well. You may also explain
that the partially or fully completed manuscript can be
registered with the US Copyrights Office. And once you have a
good idea of approximately what is needed to turn the material
you will have at your disposal into a full-fledged marketable
book manuscript, sound out the author on his or her total budget
and figure out a decent rate for the actual work you will be
performing. You might call it "light to medium copyediting" or
"research and ghostwriting" or "simple proofreading." Whatever
you decide professionally by your own standards and what you can
get the client to agree to is the best possible course of action
for you to take in regard to the manuscript.
Then finally you will begin to work on what will be either your
client's own masterpiece, or if an agreement is struck, a book
co-authored by the two of you. That is if the client is amenable
to the latter course of action. This way you can get your name
on the book spine and in the book jacket, and possibly make more
money from the book as an equal partner of the client. Or if you
simply want to remain "ghostly," you might request the client at
his or her discretion to consider you to be the "editor" of the
book, and ask him or her to credit you somewhere. This is often
done on the Acknowledgements page, for example by stating, "This
book would never have been accomplished without the help of my
Editor, So and So." That way you have ample hard evidence that
you actually worked on the book. But if you feel you did far
more than mere editing, you could request of the client that he
or she put "Ghostwritten by So and So" somewhere within the
book, so that the world will know all about the hard work you
actually did. In the bad old days, usually all the byline any
such ghostwriter could hope to receive was indeed "Editor," but
nowadays it may be permissible to more often use the terms
"Ghostwriter," or "ghostwritten by." It largely is up to the
discretion of your client.
You will also always need to make certain simple but necessary
assessments when it comes to creating a truly fine, hopefully
best-selling and clearly wonderful fiction or non-fiction book,
and when figuring out what exactly you are going to charge to do
the job. Whether payment is made for the actual construction of
the manuscript or you are willing to wait and take a percentage
of the book's net sales, or you even agree with the client to
use both courses of action, you will have to make these
arrangements somehow. Please remember that the work involved is
the greatest determinant when it comes to figuring out what you
are going to do and how much you are finally going to charge to
do it.
The fields of copyediting and ghostwriting are fast becoming
much more common nowadays, especially with the greater advent of
self publishing services and the ready availability of book
writing services on the Internet. And it doesn't hurt to know
exactly what style of so-called "editing" that you will be using
to qualify and quantify a new book's content by polishing the
manuscript to its gleaming perfection of beauty, profundity, the
information gained from it, or whatever the client's and your
goals ultimately happen to be.