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Yet the first chapter remains basically what it was when they began—before they fell into the rhythm, before the text fully took shape.

This is where the right freelance editor will help your manuscript grab readers’ and agents’ attention and put it in balance.

Once they’ve seen the whole manuscript—or at least a detailed synopsis (which I often ask for, and is worth doing anyway, since it is often requested by agents), editors can see what is relevant to readers and what will overwhelm readers before they’ve fully committed to reading your book.

Dealing with clients on a business-to-business basis seems to make honoring my invoice terms happen with significantly greater regularity than when I was seen — and treated – as merely an individual freelancer

If I do need additional editors, then I hire them, not the client.

I receive inquiries for work that goes beyond copyediting and into other aspects of the editorial/production process

Many editors of literary journals don’t want work that has been published anywhere—even online. Even on a blog. Even on Facebook.

lit mag editors will likely refuse to consider the individual works for publication, citing the fact that they were previously published.

The industry has long suffered the irony that effective publishing is most evident when invisible; it is only when standards are less than felicitous that we realise how well what we read is managed most of the time.

Gone is our confidence that publishers and agents know exactly what everyone wants to (or should) read

The copy editor, a traditionally marginalised figure, is now in strong demand.

publishing is like Hollywood — nobody ever does the marketing they promise.

Mr. Mamet is taking advantage of a new service being offered by his literary agency, ICM Partners, as a way to assume more control over the way his book is promoted.

New Publisher Authors Trust: Themselves

, for example, use H.L. Mencken’s The American Language (4th ed revised with supplements), Garner’s Modern American Usage (as well as its two predecessor editions), Merriam Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage, The American Heritage Guide to Contemporary Usage and Style, Good’s Whose Grammar Book Is This Anyway?, The Gregg Reference Manual, and Burchfield’s Fowler’s Modern English Usage

But if the book is as good as critics are now saying it is, why didn’t it sell more copies before, especially since the rise of online publishing has supposedly made it easier than ever for first-time authors?

Given how difficult it is for first-time fiction authors, especially in a crowded genre like mystery, to find both an agent and publisher, it’s not clear “The Cuckoo’s Calling” would have made it off the slush piles.

An editor there told The Telegraph in London that the book “didn’t stand out.”

In the United States we’ve developed a concept for these books that relies on the subtle interplay between text and art—a trapeze act, as it were, between writer and artist.

I was shocked to see how few picture books made the new hardcover best-seller list, aside from Jane O’Connor’s “Fancy Nancy” books and titles such as Lane Smith’s It’s a Book. Looking at the list, it’s easy to understand the pressures on editors who love to create picture books. Any bottom-line-driven publishing executive looking at what’s selling in America would order them to hunt for more werewolves, zombies, and vampires.

So possibly the problem isn’t with the genre itself, but what’s happened to it.