tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8839584506001378073.post7792549230308509099..comments2023-10-30T22:39:14.941+11:00Comments on Jonathan Gould, Writer: My editor is aceJonathan Gouldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06169533695637011148noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8839584506001378073.post-91311396076349175802013-11-25T13:12:25.648+11:002013-11-25T13:12:25.648+11:00Hi Jim. I do a heap of self editing on my books as...Hi Jim. I do a heap of self editing on my books as well. But after a while, the words begin to swim in front of me and I need someone else to make some sense of them.Jonathan Gouldhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06169533695637011148noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8839584506001378073.post-42862014530909130362013-11-25T00:22:20.472+11:002013-11-25T00:22:20.472+11:00My wife is my editor. I’m lucky to have an editor ...My wife is my editor. I’m lucky to have an editor for a wife. Most people have to pay a stranger. I still get friends to proofread the thing but Carrie does the final run-through. I am, however, a big believer in self-editing: my name on the cover, my responsibility. I think too many authors treat an editor like a collaborator. They shouldn’t be. Everyone needs one because none of us are perfect but basically we should leave them with next to nothing to do. I spent seven months editing my last book. I started on page one and read through to the end and every time I stumbled on a word or a phrase I fixed it and once I got to the end I started again and every time I found new glitches but after I’d been through it—I think it was about seventeen times in total—I then passed it on to Carrie who did her fixes but I still read it through one more time after she’d finished it before it got sent off to the printer and then I read it through once the proof came back. And I was pleased with the results. No editor could afford to spend that amount of time on one book or to put it another way no author could afford to pay an editor to spend that much time on one book. Some people might call it overkill. Perhaps it is but my first novel went out with about a dozen typos in it because I was cocky and I swore that’d never happen again. And the irony there is that was the one book I <i>paid</i> an editor to look at and Carrie still had to clean up after her.Jim Murdochhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12786388638146471193noreply@blogger.com