I recently encountered an author with a fantastic question: Should you ever disagree with your editor?
Her follow-up questions included: Do you have to accept all of their edits? What should you do if you think their edits are wrong?
Remember: Editors are human too.
While the point of hiring an editor is obviously to work with someone who has professional training and lots of experience, it’s important to remember that we’re only human.
No editor is going to find every single mistake in a 100,000-word manuscript—this is why, in traditional publishing, a book goes through multiple rounds of revision with multiple different editors and proofreaders before it’s published. And even with all of those sets of eyes on a book, mistakes will still slip through.
Your editor won’t find every single mistake, and it’s likely that they will make one or two of their own. We try to avoid this by doing multiple passes of a book to make sure we’ve caught everything we can and that we haven’t added any new mistakes by accident, but the possibility is still there.
Your editor might also misunderstand something that you’re doing intentionally at some point in your book. I always try to leave margin comments to query my authors if I’m not sure if something was done intentionally, but there have certainly been times where I made an edit and an author let me know that the original was there for a reason.
What to do if you disagree with an edit
The simplest thing to do is just to reject the edit! I send all of my clients their copyedits in tracked changes (accompanied by a clean copy with all the same edits but tracked changes accepted for ease of reading). This way, you, as the author, can identify all of my edits, and if there’s something you don’t agree with, you can just undo the edit.
If you encounter a margin comment query or an in-line edit that you disagree with and think the editor needs to know, you can leave your own margin comments explaining why you disagree and send the manuscript back to your editor with your replies.
An important term in the publishing industry is “stet”—this means “let it stand”, i.e. “keep the original instead of the edited suggestion.” You can respond to an editor’s suggestions with “stet” in a comment to show that your original version was intentional and that you want to keep it as it was.
If you agree that the edit is warranted, but you disagree with the suggested fix, you can either come up with your own solution or you can leave a margin comment or send an email asking for more help with that part. We’re here to help, and we want you to feel that every change in your book was an improvement.
Will your editor be upset if you disagree?
Your editor is being hired to perform a service, and therefore it is your right, as the person doing the hiring, to tell them that you want something done differently. However, we’re still people, and we appreciate it when clients remember that we have feelings and that we care deeply about our work.
That said, disagreement doesn’t have to mean conflict!
I love it when my clients take the time to carefully work through my edits and let me know if there’s something they disagree with.
If I send a client my edits and then I never hear from them again, I don’t have any sense of whether my edits worked for them or if there’s a way I could have done better. And if I see that they’ve hit Publish as soon as they received the edits and put their book up online immediately, that tells me that they didn’t take the time to work through the edits and make sure there isn’t anything they disagree with.
Disagreeing with your editor shows how much you care about your book. And that’s never a bad thing.
Be your book’s champion.
Everyone involved in the editing process wants your book to be the best it can be. But in the end, this book is your baby, not mine, and you are the one who cares about it the most.
I view editing as a collaborative effort. I will frequently go back and forth with a client a few times post-edit to review their revisions and make sure the book is ready to go. When the client takes the time to do these extra reviews with me, I get to see where they disagreed with an edit, where they had more questions, and where they loved my feedback.
Be kind, and remember that there’s a human on the other side of the screen, and then get to work championing your book.
Looking for an editor who values your feedback, even when you disagree?
When I work with clients, I’m on their team, start to finish. Get in touch today to discuss a collaborative approach to revising your work. If you’ve got a story that needs some loving care, Rookwood Editing is here to help!