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Please Don't Make Us Format or Write Your Book!

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By Amethyst ChampagnePublished 2 years ago 3 min read
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Please Don't Make Us Format or Write Your Book!
Photo by Anne Nygård on Unsplash

Hi, it’s me again, and for this blog post, I’m going to lay out the reasons why authors should not expect editors to do other aspects of your book other than editing.

As I have told you in previous posts, I use freelancing sites to help me find work. And something I keep seeing is that many of the writers posting these jobs expect the editors to do more than editing. These writers often expect help with formatting, finishing their book, and even with publishing.

But that is not our job. And here are several reasons why you shouldn’t expect us to do work outside of our scope.

For one thing, it makes more work for us. Now, I’m not complaining about working on a manuscript. I find great joy in editing, but that is all I want to do. If we have to focus on things like formatting, it takes time away from making a sentence flow better or placing a comma in its proper place.

This is especially an issue if your project is on a tight schedule. We like to meet our deadlines, and adding unnecessary tasks will only slow us down.

Not to mention it’s just tedious.

Yes, I do make some formatting changes on the documents I work on, but that’s mainly because there are certain styles I can see better. Plus, it looks nice.

So, I’ll give some tips on basic manuscript formatting to make our lives somewhat easier, and maybe your life too.

First off, if you can, make your text formatted to justify. It is the most professional paragraph style, and if you are writing a book, it gives you a good idea about how the layout will be.

Secondly, please use either a Word Docx, pdf, or Google doc. That way, your editor can either work within that file type or convert it into what they prefer. I’ve learned from experience that not all file types can convert easily, such as anything from Scrivener. It was a pain trying to make it into something I could work on.

I personally prefer a good old Word Docx. I’m most familiar with it since that’s where I write my book manuscripts, and it’s the one I’ve read how-to’s on. But I can work with Google docs if required by the project.

Third, do a 1.5 spacing for your lines, or double spaced if your editor wants to make their edits on paper, make your indents 0.3 (0.01 for the first line of a chapter or section), turn on the automatic hyphens, and have your words at 12 pt in Times New Roman, or Times Roman, depending on how old your software is.

These are also typical editing and publishing standards. And it will make your life easier if you make these your default settings, so you won’t have to go back and correct your manuscript later. Trust me. As a writer, it is annoying and takes away from writing.

Number four, don’t expect us to do a rewrite for your manuscript. Unless specified by the editor, it is not our job. We might add in some words or a sentence here and there, which I have done on occasion. But you want someone else to do a rewrite for you, there are plenty of ghostwriters you can choose from.

Lastly, please don’t make us give you two versions of the same document, one with and one without the changes. You already have the before, so you don’t need us to do that. Many editors use the track changes mode, which tells you where changes to the document have been made. Or they do their edits on paper, so either way, it’s not necessary.

Well, I do apologize if that sounded like I was lecturing you, but I see this more than you might think, and I wanted you to know what you can do to help us help you.

Until next time!

Originally published at https://gemintheroughediting.com on November 8, 2021.

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About the Creator

Amethyst Champagne

I create anything from fiction to personal stories, poetry, and more.

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