Reflections on the self-publishing process

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Three CIEP members, Kia Thomas, Judith Leask and Eleanor Abraham, reflect on the self-publishing process from their perspectives as author, editor and typesetter.

Kia: the author

I self-published my first full-length novel, a contemporary romance called The Scoop, in July 2022. I always knew I’d hire a professional editor before I published it (practise what you preach and all that), and I always knew I’d start my search within the CIEP, whose members have been as wonderfully supportive of my publishing journey as they’ve been on my editing one.

Finding the right editor

It was important to me to find not just a good editor, but the right one for me. I wanted someone I could trust, someone who was fun to work with, someone who could work with me the way I am – as an editor, I’m generally quite hands-on, and I work best with people who are willing to put their trust in what can sometimes be a lot of intervention. But I’m not that kind of author – I’m the absolute pain in the backside who’s extremely precious about every last one of her words. (One of my notes to my editor was ‘You can prise my adverbs out of my extremely cold, absolutely dead hands.’)

I began by asking CIEP members who were looking for more experience in fiction to put themselves forward for the job. Fiction editing is very competitive, and various CIEP members have helped me find opportunities over the years, so I wanted to offer that chance to someone else. I asked each candidate to complete a sample edit. There are often debates in editorial circles about whether they’re a good idea or not, and whether editors should offer them for free or not, but I know that I wouldn’t have been able to hire someone without seeing their work, as every editor is so different.

And this was proved by the ways in which each editor approached the text. No two samples were exactly the same – everyone picked up on slightly different things, and had different solutions for the problems they identified. That said, every single editor did point out one ambiguous passage that was totally clear in my mind, and it hadn’t occurred to me until then that it could be read differently. It just goes to show why external editing is so important, for everyone; I might be a professional editor, but I’m still the author who can’t see the story from that objective angle, because I’ll always know what I meant!

I found some great editors through this process, and in the end, I chose to work with Judith Leask. Her sample showed me that she had a really sharp eye, which is obviously important, and she could work with my ideal timeframe and budget. And, just as importantly, her queries had a warm, friendly tone, which was exactly what I was looking for in my relationship with my editor.

The editing process

The edit itself was great – Judith picked up on so many little quirks I didn’t know I had. It was a really (one of my quirks is that I am far too in love with this word, I’ve discovered) positive experience, and at the same time humbling – being edited definitely makes me a more empathetic editor. She did a great job and made so many suggestions that made my story better, but at the same time always respected that the final decisions were mine to make. (I did end up ignoring many of her perfectly valid suggestions – like I said, I’m precious!)

Working with a typesetter

Once my manuscript had been copyedited, it was time to prepare it for publication. I’d worked with Eleanor Abraham before on A Very Sweary Dictionary, so working with her again was an easy decision. Design was more important for the dictionary, but even though a novel’s requirements are much simpler, I still wanted a high-quality interior. I’m a total pain when it comes to anything visual because I only know what I don’t want, but Eleanor was endlessly patient and happy to tweak things until I was satisfied.

I’m so happy with the finished book – it’s a polished, professional product that I’m proud to be sharing with the world.

Judith: the editor

Being chosen by Kia to edit her novel was very exciting, because I knew I’d learn a huge amount from her, and that turned out to be true.

I’ve never minded being asked to do a sample edit, as it’s part of the process for both parties to get to know one another, and it can help with producing an estimate of timing and costs. I see it as an opportunity to show how I’ll be able to add value to the author’s work, and hopefully that I’ll be reasonable and friendly at the same time. I want the author to feel reassured that they’ll keep control of their work. I’m so glad Kia’s response was so warm and encouraging.

It was both easy and hard to work with an Advanced Professional Member (APM) of the CIEP – easy, because Kia knew exactly how she wanted the process to work; and hard, because it was sometimes difficult to find anything to edit! But I really appreciated that Kia had already made some style choices that I could add to my style sheet before getting started, and she let me know when she’d prefer a query without an edit, and where it would be OK to dive in (potentially with a comment). I wouldn’t expect an inexperienced author to be able to give those instructions, but I’d make sure they knew they’d retain control.

Keeping the author’s voice

I was happy to accommodate Kia’s love of adverbs (I might have worked on a few of the instances of ‘really’!). Her use of adverbs just seemed to work for her characters’ voices and for her close narrator’s voice, giving them a fun, informal and modern feel. I didn’t feel the need to suggest a more interesting use of vocabulary, which I sometimes do when I see adverbs. And this point illustrates what I love about editing – it feels like part of the creative process and an accomplished craft. It navigates various factors and focuses on working with the author to make the work consistent and right for their style and intended audience, while keeping an eye on the conventions (there are far fewer rules than you might think).

In some places, my main input to Kia’s book was to consider repetition of words or sentence structures. I made suggestions for alternative words or phrasing, and for some Kia gently gave feedback that she didn’t feel they were in keeping with her voice. I’m completely happy with what she describes as a controlling approach, because I’m always clear that all decisions ultimately lie with the author. We had a laugh about one or two of the repeated words in certain, ahem, intimate scenes. I’ll leave it to your imagination which words those might have been!

Making conscious choices

I also kept in mind the need for sensitivity and conscious language choices, but (as you might expect from a professional editor) Kia had written with these things in mind. I made one comment relating to the female character’s safety, but Kia decided the plot wouldn’t allow a different choice, which was a completely understandable decision. I’d done my job, though, in making sure an author is making their choices consciously.

Where Kia decided she didn’t want to go with a suggestion of mine, just because her wording felt right to her, I quite understood. I know what that’s like, and I don’t take it as a snub. I’d make a comment to an author if I felt there was a risk in their choice, but that didn’t apply here, and authors are free to disagree if they wish.

I have to say I haven’t had a bad experience working with an independent author. I’ve always found authors to be open to the input from a professional editor and happy to see what a fresh pair of eyes will spot.

I think Kia’s book will be successful, because she’s written a truly entertaining novel that just about anyone would enjoy. If she’d told me to stop work after a few chapters, I’d have bought the book and read the rest anyway.

Eleanor: the typesetter

Kia seems to think she was difficult, but I didn’t think that. She made it clear she likes things plain and simple. That’s sometimes all the brief you’re going to get from a client. I find that preferable to receiving a brief that is very prescriptive. Sometimes if people have really specific requests, maybe without understanding the repercussions of those, it can result in some time-consuming discussions. I suggested a few fancier features to her, knowing she’d likely say no, but it was useful to see what she considered to be plain enough. Rather than her being picky, I thought she was quite pragmatic about accepting advice when it mattered.

Working as a team

A pragmatic and professional attitude is common with the indie writers and publishers I work with as an editor and typesetter. I enjoy working with people who have clear goals for their books, brand and business. They take selling books seriously and consider the publishing professionals working with them as an essential part of the team, rather than an expensive extra.

Self-publishing can be an overwhelming process. For some writers, it makes sense to outsource certain tasks so they can concentrate on the creative stuff … and on the sales and marketing, which are going to take up lots of time and effort.

Typesetting, like proofreading, is a process that people often assume is quite easy and for that reason they might choose to do it themselves. Making print attractive and readable, while conforming to the conventions that make it printable, is, like most things, trickier than it looks. But then, I would say that.

The typesetting process

For Kia’s layout I imported her edited Word file into Adobe InDesign. In my opinion, it’s the best tool for the job. Cheaper alternatives have just eaten up my time working around their limitations. I can control and automate a lot of InDesign’s layout settings (running heads, hyphenation, word breaks, styles, kerning, table of contents etc) but I do what I call a quality control (QC) check too. If no further proofreading is going to take place (and these days that stage has usually been carried out in Word), this QC check is the equivalent of the layout checks a proofreader would do (checking that the way the text appears on the page is attractive, balanced and as it should be).

Although my settings choices took care of ‘widows and orphans’ (short lines or single words that end up at the top or bottom of a page), and kept bad breaks to a minimum, my own clearly prudish settings kicked in one time to prevent the first word on a page being ‘nipples’.

After typesetting, I sent Kia a PDF proof and she marked up any final changes she wanted with Acrobat commenting tools. With final corrections done, we exported an ePub from the InDesign file. Other ebook formatters may work in a different way but that’s the workflow and software that I prefer.

Working with another CIEP editor was a great experience. We trust each other and speak the same publishing language, and no doubt this contributed to the process going fairly smoothly. It also helps when you find people to work with who are good-humoured and pleasant!

Kia

Working with such helpful, friendly professionals was an important and really positive part of my self-publishing journey. It cost money, true, and I may never make that back (because I’m terrible at marketing), but my writing is absolutely worth investing in. I’m looking forward to working with my fantastic little team again for book 2!

About Kia Thomas

Kia Thomas is an Advanced Professional Member of the CIEP who works primarily with independent authors, specialising in contemporary romance. She is also the author of A Very Sweary Dictionary, a style guide for bad language; Wings, a literary fiction novelette; and, as KW Thomas, The Scoop, a contemporary romance novel.

About Judith Leask

Judith Leask came to freelance editing following eight years of honing her skills in creative writing, and twenty years’ writing experience in the business and public sectors. Now a passionate copyeditor and developmental editor for fiction and narrative non-fiction, she is an Intermediate Member of the CIEP.

About Eleanor Abraham

Eleanor Abraham has been an editor and typesetter for a long time and remembers having to look stuff up in encyclopaedias, paste up camera-ready-copy and send faxes. She will bore you about typography at the drop of a descender. Her published written words can be found in Meowditation, Maw Broon’s Cookbook, Maw Broon’s But an’ Ben Cookbook and Maw Broon’s Afternoon Tea Book. She is an unapologetic generalist – from computer science to memoir – but loves a cosy whodunnit on a rainy afternoon.

About the CIEP

The Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading (CIEP) is a non-profit body promoting excellence in English language editing. We set and demonstrate editorial standards, and we are a community, training hub and support network for editorial professionals – the people who work to make text accurate, clear and fit for purpose.

Find out more about:

Photo credits: header image by Ciao on Pexels, woman working on a laptop by Teona Swift on Pexels, wooden typesetting blocks by Raphael Schaller on Unsplash.

Posted by Eleanor Smith, blog assistant.

The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of the CIEP.

Resources round-up: Self-publishing

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Welcome to this round-up of resources compiled by the CIEP. This time, we look at self-publishing and working with independent authors. We have divided our picks into:

websites
blogs
a book and some guides.

Websites

This is a great time to be looking into working in self-publishing and with independent authors because of the sheer number of resources in this area that have built up in the last few years. The website of the Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi) is almost unbelievably useful. ALLi offers a regular podcast that covers a wide range of topics, and two web pages – ‘AskALLi: Self-Publishing Advice You Can Trust’ and the ALLi blog – that are a goldmine for anyone working, or hoping to work, in self-publishing. The blog is divided into 16 categories, including editorial, design and formatting, production and distribution, international insights, and writing.

Another useful website is Jane Friedman’s. Friedman commissions colleagues to write regular blogs on topics that are mostly relevant to self-publishing writers, but that editorial professionals working with these writers will want to dive into as well. These blogs are particularly strong on bigger-picture aspects of fiction like narrative arc and viewpoint, as well as the business aspects of being an independent writer, such as promotion. One particularly useful, and long, resource on this website is ‘The Comprehensive Guide to Finding, Hiring, and Working with an Editor’ by Chantel Hamilton, a non-fiction developmental editor.

Blogs

Blogs offer glimpses into different perspectives, and this is particularly true of blogs about self-publishing which aim to help different people at different stages of a complex process. Fiction editor Sophie Playle covers self-publishing from the viewpoint of writers on her own blog (‘Preparing your novel for self-publishing’) and of editors on the CIEP blog (‘Working with self-publishing authors: Expectations and implementation’). Also on the CIEP blog, Helen Jones considers the benefits of using an editor if you’re writing a business book, and Averill Buchanan writes from the perspective of a book production specialist.

On the AFEPI blog, Louise Harnby suggests 4 ways to get noticed by indie crime fiction and thriller writers if you’re an editorial professional, and Laura Bontje for the Editors Canada blog covers editing for authors on a budget, which can be a useful skill in the self-publishing world. Finally, Siobhán Prendergast at Dingle Publishing Services offers a completely different perspective – self-publishing as an act of defiance – reminding us that writers from Jane Austen to Walt Whitman self-published their work.

A book and some guides

At first glance, Richard Bradburn’s Self-Editing for Self-Publishers would seem to be doing editorial professionals out of a job, but many editors have found it useful, including Sophie Playle, who has reviewed it on her website. Playle says that Bradburn, a professional editor, ‘makes an excellent case as to why the best method for self-publishing authors would be to take their manuscript as far as they can on their own, then hire a professional’. She actively recommends the book to fiction editors ‘as it provides such an excellent overview of how a manuscript should be treated during the publication process, as well as giving the editor a wider understanding of the author’s role in shaping their work’.

What helps the writer helps the editor, which in turn helps the writer. So ALLi’s seven publishing guides for indie authors, including 150 Self-Publishing Questions Answered, based on AskALLi’s gathered advice, are also a help and resource for the editing community. Finally, Alison Shakspeare’s CIEP guide, How to Work with Self-Publishers: Editing, proofreading and other considerations, ‘for practising editors who want to develop their support of self-publishing authors, in fiction and non-fiction’ empowers editorial professionals with the skills and knowledge to guide authors to self-publishing success.

About the CIEP

Photo credits: kindle by felipepelaquim on Unsplash, Jane Austen books by Leah Kelley on Pexels.

Posted by Belinda Hodder, blog assistant.

The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of the CIEP.

An introduction to editing textbooks

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In this post Hetty Marx, author of the new CIEP guide Editing Textbooks, gives a flavour of what it is like to edit textbooks by describing ten aspects of textbook publishing that differ from other specialisms.

Editing textbooks, and educational resources more broadly, requires the core editing skills necessary for any field of publishing. But there are some aspects of textbook publishing that require a different set of skills or knowledge and in this post I will describe ten of these aspects. You might be familiar with some of these from other fields, for example complex designs in illustrated non-fiction, or scholarship in academic books.

1. Learning

Textbooks are designed to help students learn, and this principle should be at the forefront of most decisions in creating a textbook. It’s also one of the reasons why editing textbooks feels rewarding, as you know that your work will help students grasp a difficult concept or deepen their understanding of the subject.

2. Accuracy and scholarship

Accuracy of content and general principles of scholarship are important in textbooks. While fact-checking is not normally part of textbook editing, editors should be alert to any possible inaccuracies or inconsistencies. Textbooks should usually feel balanced and objective, so (depending on the project) it may be important to check that the author covers both sides of a debate, uses a neutral tone and avoids presenting their own views.

3. Differentiation

While textbooks are often written for a particular age group, they will be used by many students within that group, all with their own interests, abilities and preferred ways of learning. And these differences should, as much as possible, be catered for within each textbook. Textbook editors can help by checking that the author includes:

a range of different examples and photos (so that more students feel the content is relevant to them)
a variety of activity types that test different skills (multiple-choice questions, creative activities, speaking tasks, etc)
different levels of challenge in the activities.

4. Complex design

Textbooks are often full-colour and highly illustrated with several design features. Tasks like tagging/coding a feature-heavy manuscript or working with artworks (checking they are useful and suitable for the reader, pulling together artwork briefs, creating an artwork log, etc) can amount to a large part of textbook editing.

5. Pedagogical features

Textbooks include a range of pedagogical features to help students learn, such as boxed features, case studies and activities. Editing pedagogical features involves checking they are:

useful, ie that they are designed and written in a way that will actually help students learn
relevant, for example that questions test content covered in the chapter, and at a suitable level for the student
consistent, in terms of purpose, style, frequency and length
complete, for example that there is the required number of case studies or that answers are provided for all the questions.

6. Multiple components

Multi-component products are ones where several resources are built around the main student textbook, such as worksheets, online quizzes, teacher books, revision guides and/or audio scripts.

The components are often closely linked to the main textbook, for example for every subsection in the book, there may be an online activity, a worksheet, a set of answers to the textbook questions, a lesson plan, a practice question in the workbook, etc. In addition to normal editing tasks, editors need to check that each of these linked aspects is provided, check that they are consistent with each other (eg in style and content) and keep track of any knock-on effects of a change in one component on the linked resources.

Editing multi-component textbooks adds various challenges (and requires good organisational skills) but it does offer opportunities for more varied work. Editing just one component (eg a teacher book) can also be a good introduction into editing textbooks, as they may be less complex.

7. Multiple stakeholders

Students are the main target audience that textbook editors need to keep in mind throughout the edit, but other stakeholders are also important, including:

The teacher: the main textbook for a particular course is usually chosen by the students’ teacher or lecturer.
The exam board: if the publisher wants the textbook to be endorsed by an exam board, the editor will need to check the text meets the exam-board requirements.
Ministry officials: in some countries teachers can only use government-approved textbooks, so editing textbooks for these markets involves checking the text and artwork for cultural considerations and ensuring it meets any official requirements in the target markets.

8. Curriculum and qualifications

At school level, most textbooks are written in line with a national curriculum (government requirements about what students should learn in each school year). For examined subjects, textbooks are usually written in line with an exam board’s specification (a list of the content that could be examined).

Particularly for examined subjects, editors often need to check that all the specified content is included, that the structure of the textbook matches the exam board’s specification, and potentially that the textbook meets extra requirements imposed by the exam board. Because of tight timescales, textbooks are often drafted before the specification has been finalised, which can result in last-minute changes to the textbook.

9. Competition

The publisher is likely to have planned the textbook with competitor books (other textbooks for the same course from other publishers) at the forefront of their mind. The main competition’s features may influence the publisher’s decisions on things like length, coverage, pedagogical features and online resources.

10. New editions

Successful textbooks are likely to be put into new editions. Editing a new edition often involves less work, as some of the (already edited) material will be retained from the previous edition. But it can add extra consistency checks (eg making sure the end-of-chapter questions match the new content), and if the book is revised by a different author there may be a mismatch in writing styles that the editor will need to smooth out.

Summing up

This list gives you a flavour of the nature of textbook editing. If you are interested in exploring editing textbooks in more detail, download the CIEP Editing Textbooks guide to learn more about how educational publishing works and how to edit textbooks.

About Hetty Marx

Hetty Marx is a freelance textbook development editor. She has nearly 20 years of publishing experience, including in-house as a commissioning editor at Cambridge University Press and as a development editor at Pearson. She is an Advanced Professional Member of the CIEP and author of the CIEP guide Editing Textbooks.

About the CIEP

Find out more about:

Photo credits: header image by RDNE Stock project on Pexels, Love to Learn by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash.

Posted by Belinda Hodder, blog assistant.

The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of the CIEP.

Editing fiction: Dialogue

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In the first of a series of posts on editing fiction, Katherine Kirk looks at how editors can help authors create engaging dialogue that really brings individual characters to life.

Style manuals like New Hart’s Rules and guides like The Chicago Guide to Copyediting Fiction can help editors know exactly how to punctuate an interruption or how to capitalise a stammered first name, but there’s more to great conversations than the lengths of their pauses. Sometimes we need to dig a little deeper into them, and at a line editing level, this can start to feel a bit abstract. It can be hard to explain to an author how to add more subtext to a snippet of dialogue: ‘You need to not write more things not being said’ sounds like some kind of magic trick.

This post will look at how great dialogue starts with the character, it changes depending on whom they’re talking to, and how editors can add or subtract to bring those voices out.

Start with the character

If a novel’s characters aren’t distinct enough from each other, their voices will blur into one and the reader will soon forget who’s who and why they should care.

A strong character voice comes from who that character is at their core. Their background, their beliefs and their agenda all play into how they speak. If you’re working directly with an author, you can ask them probing questions like: ‘These characters live in the US but are originally from the UK, having moved there when the children were quite young. How much of their British accent has remained a decade later?’

The answers will inform word choice and what sort of rhythm the characters use when they speak. For that reason, I usually don’t wait until the end of my main pass through a manuscript to ask the author these types of questions, but send them along as soon as possible.

If you’re not working directly with an author, then you can only work with the information they’ve given you in the manuscript itself, which is why it’s a great idea to read the whole thing first, before editing. In your style sheet, make notes not only of the concrete details like a character’s age or hair colour but also about characteristics that could inform the way they speak. If they have a pet phrase or verbal habit, see if it’s used consistently. Does their spoken voice match their inner voice? Is there a good reason for it not to?

Paying attention to these aspects of the character’s voice can help you to pick up on where characters might start sounding the same. For instance, what maybe started as a verbal habit for one character might have been applied to multiple characters, nullifying its effect. Or it may be an author habit instead. If an author is relying only on these verbal habits to distinguish characters from each other, they might be overused and feel repetitive. Authors of YA may be tempted to have their teen characters say ‘like’ in every sentence; while this might reflect how some real-life teens speak, overuse may irritate readers. Don’t be afraid to suggest removing some of them.

Pet phrases aren’t the only tool we can use to make the voices more distinct. Some other options might be:

talking around the issue vs getting to the point (look at sentence structure here)
utilising gratuitously verbose lexical terms vs using short, simple words
airily drifting in and out of a conversation with pauses and ellipses vs jumping in and thrashing about with dashes
popping in slang vs using very ‘correct’ formal language. Regional slang, age-specific slang, and industry jargon can all tell us a lot about a person, and about a person who refuses to use it.

The roles we play

I am her mother, his wife, her teacher, his naughty little secret, their ally, your worst nightmare, and that will affect how I speak to you. People who know each other well develop a kind of shorthand and can read each other’s subtext better, so characters who are close might not need to have every question answered. I often find that deleting the answer to the question (especially a yes or no) loses nothing. The reader can infer the answer from context and how the conversation proceeds, and it feels snappier and more vivid.

Here’s an example with every question answered. Note how slow it feels.

‘Where is he?’ I asked, reaching for the frozen peas.

‘He’s out back, I think.’ She turned away, as if she couldn’t bear to look at me. ‘Are you hungry?’

‘I’m not hungry. The peas are for the swelling.’ I pressed them to my throbbing cheek. ‘Did you tell him?’

‘I didn’t tell him,’ she said. ‘I knew it would make him angry.’

‘Because you know how he gets,’ I muttered.

‘Yes. I know,’ she said. ‘That’s why I didn’t tell him.’

When the characters are family, as these two might be, then much of this does not need to be said. Cutting text out can turn it into subtext, making the conversation feel less stodgy and more suspenseful. If there’s a tag along with an action beat, we can probably take the tag out too and use the action beat as attribution on its own. Where it’s clear who’s speaking, we don’t need any attribution at all. Here’s an extreme example of how it might be pared down:

‘Where is he?’ I reached for the frozen peas.

‘Out back.’ She turned away. ‘I didn’t tell him.’

‘You know how he gets.’

‘I know.’

What if they were acquaintances?

‘Where is he?’ I reached for the frozen peas.

‘He’s out back. Working in the shop, I think.’ She turned away. ‘Did he do that?’

‘You couldn’t have known.’

‘I might have. But it wasn’t me that told him.’

Here, they need to give each other a little more information, and the shared knowledge of years of history is gone. They speak in slightly more complete sentences and give each other more grace.

How the characters negotiate the control of the conversation (or turn-taking) could also show their intimacy. It might change over the course of a novel. A meet-cute might have our lovers verbally stumbling over and butting up against each other, but by the end of their love story, they’re listening to each other, reading each other’s subtext and finishing each other’s sentences. Or it could go the other way, with a couple who used to be able to read each other’s signals now finding they’re no longer fluent in their shared unspoken language, and they might misread it.

What if our two characters dislike each other, and one of them is a little tougher? Let’s have the tough lady interrupt more and use more colloquial language, and contrast it with the other by having more hedging and hesitation. We might need to add an action beat to make the character more vivid.

‘Where is he?’ I reached for the frozen peas.

She spat out an apple seed. ‘I ain’t his keeper.’

‘Did you tell him? That I–’

‘Course not.’

‘It’s just that, well, I wouldn’t blame you if you had.’

‘Well I didn’t.’

Their relationship affects the words they choose to say, the questions they dodge and the assumptions they make. Dialogue that fails to take these elements into account tends towards soulless conversation that is just furthering the plot, reacting to an event or revealing a secret.

How much can an editor change?

It tends to be easier to take things out than to add things in. Whatever we remove, the words that remain are still entirely the author’s. Luckily for us, authors tend to bloat dialogue rather than be too brief, so we usually just need to do some careful snipping. But sometimes the dialogue feels like it’s just scaffolding and it needs something more substantial.

When it comes to adding stuff in, editors are limited in what we can do. It’s not our job to write the book. But we could provide examples. My favourite trick is to mine the narrative for key phrases that ring with the character’s voice and move them into sleepy dialogue to wake it up. I might borrow a phrase from one speaker and give it to another, or flip who says what. That way I’m using the author’s own words to patch the hole rather than speaking for them. If there isn’t a handy phrase nearby, I’ll provide some examples in my best imitation of their voice and let the author choose.

If you’re asking them to add something, you must have a good reason for doing so, and be very clear in your directions. Be specific about what exactly needs to be added, why and where. Review their revisions to check they haven’t introduced errors. And remember that it’s not your book.

Summing it up

If you read a manuscript in full before you dive in, you can get to know the characters a little better.
Take note not only of what characters are but who they are, and how that affects their voice.
Make note of their relationships, and check if these relationships are reflected in their conversations.
Trim out the unnecessary padding and let the best parts of the dialogue shine without being smothered by redundant dialogue tags or awkward attempts to show dialect.
Be just as careful taking out as you are adding in, and don’t fix what ain’t broke. Ask more questions and respect the characters as much as you respect the author.

For more insight into making dialogue sparkle, I recommend Louise Harnby’s dialogue resources, this blog post by Emma Darwin, and Sophie Playle’s fabulous explanation of ‘As You Know, Bob’ dialogue (and how to avoid it).

About Katherine Kirk

Katherine Kirk is a fiction editor who has been described by clients as a hopeless semantic and their secret weapon. She offers line editing, copyediting and proofreading to indie authors and publishers of all fiction genres, and she particularly enjoys science fiction and fantasy.

About the CIEP

Photo credits: speech bubbles by Miguel Á. Padriñán on Pexels; couple by Samson Katt on Pexels.

Posted by Sue McLoughlin, blog assistant.

The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of the CIEP.

A week in the life of a journal manager and magazine editor

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Nik Prowse project manages medical journals and edits a magazine on ecology. In this post he describes how he got into this work, what it involves, and what he most enjoys about it.

My first job in publishing was for a learned society, and its main publications were journals. In my interview, the editorial director described journal publishing as ‘a sausage machine’, a phrase which is true in one respect, but it doesn’t do justice to the pleasure of putting an issue together. I was trained as a copyeditor and proofreader, working on two journals, but as I worked only on individual articles the sausage machine aspects of the production process didn’t concern me.

Eventually, I was allowed to work on some of the few books that the society published too, which I enjoyed. When I went freelance, I did a bit of journal copyediting but focused on academic textbooks. After a few years, I also started project managing the same type of material: large textbooks aimed at students and researchers in fields such as ecology, life science and medicine. I enjoyed the project management work (and it paid better), and one of its most enjoyable aspects was seeing a project through from manuscript submission to final printing. That, and building solid working relationships with authors and editors along the way, were good reasons to find the work rewarding. I never thought that I would manage a journal until I was offered the chance to do so, and the opportunity for a new challenge gave me the motivation to try it out.

Wind forward seven years …

My work as a journal manager

I now manage a suite of four medical journals for one publisher. I started out just working on one, an orthopaedics journal. At first I found the work akin to driving too fast along a winding road in the dark: scary and hair-raising. The need to juggle issues going to press, manuscripts being submitted for upcoming issues and planning for issues further down the line, as well as frequent emails about other matters from authors, editors and the typesetter led to a frenetic pace of work that was, occasionally, almost overwhelming. But after a while I began to get the hang of it, developing systems to help me stay on track and generally getting into the swing of things. I felt much calmer as the months progressed.

That first journal publishes six issues a year, and now I also work on three others, all of which publish twelve issues a year. And it all runs calmly and smoothly … most of the time! All of the journals are commission-only, meaning that we approach potential authors based on what topics we need to cover.

Working as a journal manager is mainly an administration job but I find it rewarding, not for that aspect but because it allows me to build long-term relationships with editors who are experts in their field. I also get to interact with the huge number of authors we commission who are also at the peak of what they do. Their willingness to share their expertise for virtually no return, passing on their medical knowledge and teaching the next generation of doctors for the benefit of patients, is motivating and inspiring in itself. They do this despite the pressures of clinical work in the NHS and the increasing pressure that consultants, junior doctors and other healthcare staff are under, and it gives me huge respect for all medical professionals.

Organisation is the key

The main tool of the job for me is a series of Excel spreadsheets that allows me to see at a glance the situation for any particular month’s issue. Keeping an eye on these spreadsheets on a regular basis is the key to the job, helping me stay on track.

At any one point, I have to think about issues being planned but not yet commissioned, articles commissioned that haven’t yet been submitted, articles in review, articles for the issue that is about to go to press and ones that have been typeset and which may need checking. Many authors who are due to submit articles need chasing, or their deadline renegotiating, because for virtually all of them writing an article for me is not their main concern 97% of the time. In my first few months on the first journal I managed to annoy a few authors by being overly officious, but I quickly learned that respect, diplomacy and courtesy are essential for receiving material on time.

Long deadlines: Good for all concerned

I set very long deadlines, which allows me to grant an extension almost whenever one is requested and has no effect on the publication schedule. This is key to the stress-free running of each journal. Sometimes an article is so late there is a danger it may not be published. However, by that point I’ve hopefully built up enough of a rapport with an author that they are understanding and can work to the final date that we have agreed.

So, in summary, the main tasks of working as a journal manager are:

creating, checking and working to schedules
emailing authors to thank them for accepting an invitation to write, and providing information on article format and the deadline
following up on late articles and negotiating their delivery
checking submissions and ensuring that nothing is missing
sending papers for review by the editorial board
compiling issues and preparing files for typesetting
checking proofs
and … in the long run, thinking about the commissioning of issues further down the line.

I enjoy this job for a number of reasons. The main one is the sense of satisfaction of getting an issue out on time that contains articles that will help young medical professionals improve people’s lives. They get valuable information from journals like the ones that I work on. It’s a fantastic feeling. And, as I’ve already mentioned, building long-term working relationships with experts is also very rewarding.

My work as a magazine editor

I’ve always enjoyed reading magazines, from Smash Hits as a teenager to Kerrang! when my musical interests changed to New Scientist when I was a student, and more recently cycling and photography magazines. However, with a background in science and traditional book publishing, I never thought that I would have the opportunity to be the editor of what you could call a magazine.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, I saw a vacancy advertised by an organisation that represents ecologists in the UK and overseas for an editor for their membership magazine. I quickly realised that the requirements of the job were a combination of the various skills I had picked up in my 20 years in publishing. These included copyediting, proofreading, project management and, more latterly, understanding periodical workflow and the need to consider more than one issue at a time. Plus, ecology is one of my favourite fields of life science.

I get to choose the cover!

I’m responsible for the front half of the magazine, which consists of articles on a theme that is publicised beforehand. I check submitted articles and send them for review. For each quarterly issue, I chair a meeting involving the magazine’s editorial board, who are all experts in their field. Again, the job involves working with experts who are doing valuable work, this time in nature conservation and in tackling the climate and biodiversity crises that we face.

Many of the tasks of running a magazine, albeit an academic one featuring peer-reviewed articles, are similar to running a medical journal. Scheduling, keeping to deadlines, commissioning and manuscript preparation are all part of the job. One challenging new task is sending feedback to authors, advising them on how to revise their articles based on the editorial board’s comments. The main requirement is diplomacy, giving lots of encouragement as to how to make the article publishable.

But what I love about this new role is that I also play a small part in the way the magazine looks. Journals are very rigid affairs: there’s a front cover with a table of contents on it and there are articles inside, all typeset to a predetermined design. That’s it. However, on a magazine there is a design element to every issue, including arranging the front cover and the straplines that it will feature. Some of our authors provide some fantastic photographs to illustrate their articles, and I really enjoy looking at them and choosing one that will be suitable for the cover.

About Nik Prowse

Nik Prowse has been a copyeditor and proofreader since 1997, following a PhD in evolutionary biology. He went freelance in 2004 and since then has worked as a copyeditor, development editor and project manager of academic, professional and educational materials. Up until recently, he was a tutor for the Publishing Training Centre and the CIEP’s book reviews coordinator. In his spare time, he cycles long distances in search of cake.

About the CIEP

Photo credits: magazines by kconcha on Pixabay, medical journal by Abdulai Sayni on Unsplash, puffins by Wynand van Poortvliet on Unsplash

Posted by Sue McLoughlin, blog assistant.

The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of the CIEP.

A finer point: British and US styles

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Editing between British and US styles can be less straightforward than expected. Cathy Tingle explores a few of the trickier aspects of switching between the two.

‘Never assume: it makes an ass out of u and me’ is a phrase from salaried working life that rattles around my head as a freelance editor. In the early noughties it was my boss’s waggish response when one of the team said ‘I assume that …’. But it’s gained new significance with editing experience. Nothing is set in stone. It might even be different to how I’d always imagined.

US style: Firm ground or shifting sands?

US style is one example. It’s common for British editors to be asked to edit in US style, or into it. With the first, you’re on firmer ground. The overriding style is likely sound, most of the decisions already made for you. When you need to decide on something, you do it based on what else you’re aligning with, author preference and general convention. Easy.

But if you’re editing into US style it’s less easy, for two reasons that David Crystal outlines in ‘Regional variation’, chapter 20 of the Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language. First, with global communications and shared culture, the linguistic boundaries between US and British English are becoming blurred with loanwords and spelling variants. And, second, there was never one ‘US style’. As with British style, there have always been variations, including regional ones.

Why style matters

Readers are less awake than editors to the style of whatever they’re reading, although most will know which side of the Atlantic it comes from. What they can detect, however, is a lack of stylistic coherence. Inconsistency jars, and it can slowly but surely destroy the reader’s trust in the text, even if the reader isn’t sure why. There will just be a general sense of shoddiness, which could then find its sorry way into an unfavourable Amazon review.

Correspondingly, most editorial professionals will know the main differences between UK and US style: spelling, punctuation, the formatting of dates and times. But there are more nuanced differences. And you can’t assume there will always be a difference. You might think that dialog and catalog are the US version of dialogue and catalogue because you saw those spellings once in some US content, but in the US’s Merriam-Webster dictionary, dialogue is listed first as more common than dialog. And then it gets more complicated: Merriam-Webster lists catalog first. This means that The Chicago Manual of Style, as it ‘usually prefers the first-listed entries at Merriam-Webster.com’ (CMOS 7.1), uses dialogue and catalog too. So we can’t even rely on the easy assumption that if the end of one word behaves in one way, the end of a similar word will do the same thing.

Toward/s an answer

How about towards and toward? The answer seems straightforward: towards is UK style; toward is US, right? When someone asked about the difference on the CIEP online forums recently, that’s what I said, because it’s what I’d always … ah … assumed. I was soon corrected, with a link to a previous forum thread that cited a Merriam-Webster article. This article concluded: ‘If you’re an American, you can use either toward or towards, depending on what sounds more natural to you. There are those who will claim that towards in American English is wrong, but it’s really a matter of preference.’ So, not so straightforward.

There are certain spellings that are famously different in UK and US styles: colour/color, centre/center, travelling/traveling, mould/mold. But some US spellings we might miss when editing US text into British English, and some British spellings we might miss when translating into US style.

Nouns kerb (British) and curb (US) can cause problems. If you’re talking about restraining something, or reining it in, you should always use curb in both British and US styles. So we might not realise the noun curb is in US style because we see it as a verb in British English. And because in the UK we’re used to seeing the noun practice, people get confused about the spelling of the verb in British English, often mistakenly using a c.

Keep your eyes open

The key is awareness of all the tricky differences between UK and US styles. These also cover variations of vocabulary and different systems of measurement.

Would you notice truck rather than lorry in a piece? Or morgue rather than mortuary? The BBC, after mentioning these examples, singles out rooster in its news style guide: ‘we should not use the word “rooster” instead of “cockerel” for a story about a “cockerel” based in France’, but as rooster is used in British contexts – it’s the name of a UK banking service for children, for example – it’s easy to miss. Similarly, if you’re used to hearing about monster trucks from a young relative, it’s hard to remember that the UK version is lorry.

Measurements are important to get right – a mistake could ruin a recipe or, worse, overdose a patient – but in the UK and the USA the same or a similar word can represent a different quantity or weight. A UK pint is 20 fl oz. A US pint is 20% less liquid, at 16 fl oz. You might think: ‘Yes, and a billion in the UK is a US trillion.’ You’d have been right a few decades ago, but now US and British billions and trillions are aligned. Make sure you keep up to date, and know the exceptions, too: in some European countries, billions still mean the same thing as US (and now British) trillions.

Do your homework

All this matters. When converting British style to US style or US to British, or when editing in US style if you’re British, you need to understand all the possible variants. Start with a basic list from your favourite usage guide, then add to it. New Hart’s Rules contains a detailed account of the differences. Part 2 of the Economist Style Guide is about American and British English. The CIEP has a fact sheet on the differences. Keep Merriam-Webster open in your internet tabs. But dig deeper, too. Lynne Murphy’s The Prodigal Tongue will remind you that differences are rarely as straightforward as they seem.

Finally, when we assume, is the ‘ass’ it makes out of you and me ‘a fool’, ‘a donkey’ or – you know – a ‘rear end’, that common US slang definition now increasingly used in British English? That question alone should be enough to send you hunting for a second opinion from reference books, dictionaries and colleagues whenever you’re working between different Englishes.

Resources

BBC Style Guide. Americanisms. bbc.co.uk/newsstyleguide/all/#a

Chicago Manual of Style (2017). 17th edition. University of Chicago Press.

CIEP (2021). Common style differences between British and US English. Fact sheet. ciep.uk/resources/factsheets/#BUE

Crystal, David (2019). The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language. 3rd edition. CUP.

Economist Style Guide (2018). 12th edition. Profile Books.

Merriam-Webster. Is it ‘toward’ or ‘towards’? merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/toward-towards-usage

Murphy, Lynne (2018). The Prodigal Tongue. Oneworld.

New Hart’s Rules (2014). OUP.

About Cathy Tingle

Cathy Tingle, an Advanced Professional Member of the CIEP, is a copyeditor, proofreader, tutor and CIEP information team member.

About the CIEP

Photo credits: header image by Clkr-Free-Vector-Images on Pixabay, shelves by freestock on Unsplash, woman with magnifying glass by Clément Falize on Unsplash.

Posted by Belinda Hodder, blog assistant.

The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of the CIEP.

Flying solo: Editor education – an essential investment

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In this Flying solo column, Sue Littleford makes the case for why training and continuous professional development are vital for editors and proofreaders – considering their importance to CIEP members in particular.

Members of the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading (CIEP) understand the emphasis put on training and the acquisition of the appropriate level of skills, as well as maintaining and expanding them through continuous professional development (CPD).

The CIEP distinguishes between core skills and editorial skills, core skills being about how to edit or proofread, and editorial skills being more about the context in which the editing or proofreading takes place and expanding your skillset.

But why this emphasis on training? It’s there in the curriculum for professional development and in the upgrading system (members should take a look at How to upgrade your CIEP membership, especially chapters 2, 3 and 11 for all members, and chapter 4, 5 or 6 depending on the grade you’re working towards). Training is all over the forums! Advanced Professional Members (APMs) are required to show their commitment to CPD, to stay current with best practice.

Simply put, we don’t know what we don’t know.

We don’t know if – while we’ve been nose to the grindstone – new tools, new standards, or new and better approaches to the work have been developed and are now circulating. Training allows us the time to look up and look around, and see what’s happening out there.

Training also gives our clients the confidence that we do actually know what we’re doing, which is invaluable to them and to us. Members in the Professional grades can take out an entry in the Directory of Editorial Services, and potential clients searching the Directory will have confidence that members who have achieved Professional membership or higher have the backing of solid training.

But surely, I hear some of you cry, I already know what I’m doing! English isn’t evolving so quickly I can’t keep up all by myself. I don’t need additional training – I’m learning on the job all the time. I don’t need formal training – I pick things up as I go!

I say again: we don’t know what we don’t know.

Going on training courses that challenge you to do better expands your abilities and your experience and gives imposter syndrome a biff on the nose. And, as workshop training starts to become available again in some places, there can be the chance to meet other editors and talk together. Just talking to other editors about their contexts can be a real eye-opener.

Sometimes an absolute gem of a tip gets mentioned in the margins of a course, off-topic but really useful to you. Learning isn’t restricted to the course outline.

Some people prefer to learn on their own. Well, that’s fine, so far as it goes; but, especially if you’re still building up your experience as an editor or a proofreader, how do you know you’re learning what you need to know? Are you learning in sufficient breadth, with perspective? Or are you just burrowing further into your own snug editorial world, unaware of what you can learn from outside that niche?

If so, you’re really restricting the kind of material you can work on competently and, in these ever-uncertain days, that may be somewhat counterproductive for your business and your financial health.

Equally, some people have learned on the job by being tutored or mentored by their boss – or just by ‘sitting with Nelly’ as we used to call it in the civil service. That’s fine too, but to upgrade you’ll also need to sit and pass the CIEP’s editorial test (page 34 of the upgrading guide and on the website). Again, the CIEP’s emphasis in the test is on across-the-board competence. Niche away in the jobs you choose to take on, but don’t become isolated and narrow in your approach to your professional practice.

Getting a good solid grounding in the fundamentals of editing under your belt (and keeping it current) gives you a great springboard for developing yourself and your business in the way you want.

One of the characteristics that unites good editors is our curiosity, along with our quest for new knowledge (and a headful of otherwise useless bits and bobs of general knowledge). The ability to know when something we’re editing sounds off is of great value to our clients.

Maintain that inquisitive approach.

Record-keeping

Regular readers will know what a fan I am of record-keeping. It’s no different with training, which is why the Going Solo toolkit (CIEP members only) has a spreadsheet on which to record the training you’ve already undertaken, and the training you’d like to take.

Listing out the training you’ve already taken will help you see where you have weaknesses, or where your training is out of date and ripe to be refreshed.

Keeping a note of training courses you fancy the look of – the spreadsheet has a handy column to keep a link to each one – will whet your appetite and enable you to see whether anything you’ve taken note of neatly plugs a hole or tops up your training in that area.

Consulting the curriculum for professional development will also help you check whether you’re getting a rounded education as an editor or a proofreader. Looking at that curriculum will open your eyes to what it is you didn’t know you didn’t know. Add topics to your wish list so you can be on the lookout for courses to fill the gaps.

And if you’re still working through the CIEP’s grades, the spreadsheet was developed with the input of the Admissions Panel. Collecting the evidence is easy and you don’t have to copy out your training all over again on the upgrade form.

Planning and budgeting

Training costs time and it costs money. If you’re still working through the CIEP grades, then you’ll want to set aside a training budget each year – in cash and in time. If you’re already an APM, then you’ll set aside a CPD budget each year.

But how much money? And how much time? This is where the curriculum, the requirements of the grade you’re aiming for, the direction you’re taking your business in and your wish list of training courses come together.

Using all the information you have recorded on courses taken, gaps in training and your wish list, you can prioritise which course(s) to take next. You can then ensure you can afford them and set aside the time available to do them justice.

I know some inveterate course-takers who have huge plans and then, when they come to tot up the total cost and the time commitment, have to move some courses they’d love to do into the next year – or the next two years. Well, it’s nice to have something to look forward to!

Tax implications

For UK taxpayers, training is an allowable business expense for the self-employed in some cases only. If you pay tax elsewhere, check your own jurisdiction on this.

In brief, in the UK, training is not an allowable business expense if it’s undertaken to enable you to start trading.

Nor is it an allowable business expense if it’s undertaken to enable you to move into a new area of business. Harsh but true.

Training is an allowable expense if it keeps you up to date in your skills and knowledge. Even HMRC likes CPD!

Take note that, as with all other allowable expenses, training costs are only allowable if they are incurred wholly for business purposes.

This is the advice on the GOV.UK website:

Training courses

You can claim allowable business expenses for training that helps you improve the skills and knowledge you use in your business (for example, refresher courses).

The training courses must be related to your business.

You cannot claim for training courses that help you:

- - start a new business
  - expand into new areas of business, including anything related to your current business [my emphasis].

It’s made very clear that not all training is allowable.

The technical bit is in HMRC’s Business Income Manual.

Takeaways

Training is a sound investment in yourself and your business, making you fit for purpose as an editor or a proofreader. It gives your clients confidence that you do actually know what you’re doing and will do it well. It also keeps you poised to move your business in a new direction if that’s something you want – or need – to do.
Autodidacticism can work well, but can also come across as less authoritative and clients may feel less confident about your offer. Training supplied by reputable providers enhances your profile and ensures you don’t get in a rut.
Learning on the job is also fine, but you will need to pass the CIEP’s online editorial test in order to upgrade.
Training is also clearly set out in How to upgrade your CIEP membership as an essential pillar of every upgrade.
Some training, but not all, is an allowable business expense to be deducted from your business’s profit to reduce your income tax and National Insurance contributions liability.

About Sue Littleford

Sue Littleford is the author of the CIEP guide Going Solo, now in its second edition. She went solo with her own freelance copyediting business, Apt Words, in March 2007 and specialises in scholarly humanities and social sciences.

About the CIEP

Photo credits: back to school by Olia Danilevich on Pexels; love to learn by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash.

Posted by Sue McLoughlin, blog assistant.

The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of the CIEP.

Forum matters: Educational publishing

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This feature comes from the band of CIEP members who serve as forum moderators. You will only be able to access the posts if you’re a forum user and logged in. Find out how to register.

The CIEP forums are a wealth of information, but sometimes you need to know where to look. Joining a specialist forum can help you find other members who are in the same boat or who have encountered (and solved!) whichever problem you might be facing. In this article, we cover:

How much fact-checking should we do on textbooks?
Beyond the mechanics
Digging deeper into the specialist forums
Join a specialist forum

How much fact-checking should we do on textbooks?

On the SfEPLine forum, members discussed how much fact-checking should be done on textbooks during a proofread. Some said they are regularly asked to do it for education publishers, usually as a separate activity at second proof stage. Members might not feel comfortable fact-checking in a field in which they don’t have a specialism. It’s worth gauging the extent of the facts that need to be checked in order to give a fair quote that works within the client’s budget, and charging for the extra time you will need beyond a standard copyedit or proofread. This ties into an earlier thread about fact-checking that goes into a little more detail on what it requires.

Beyond the mechanics

Editors in any genre sometimes need to think beyond the style guide. We might need to consider the personal approach we’re taking to the job or to the client. A link to a helpful CIEP blog post about textbook publishing from an author’s perspective led to an interesting discussion of members’ experiences in editing textbooks and how they communicated with their clients, while a simple request for some suggested synonyms for some secondary school books turned into a thought-provoking and sensitive conversation about the nuances of language about religion.

Digging deeper into the specialist forums

Educational publishing is vast, and we have many members who work in the industry as proofreaders, copyeditors, developmental editors and project managers. We’ve even created several focused specialist forums where members can dig into these topics more deeply. There’s the general Education specialist forum as well as the English Language Teaching (ELT) forum and the MedSTEM forum (which focuses on medical, scientific, technical, engineering and mathematical textbooks). You can subscribe to as many of these as you like. For example, if you specialise in editing mathematics textbooks, you might want to subscribe to MedSTEM and Education.

If you’re not yet a member of the ELT or Education specialist forums and want to read the threads in the rest of this section, jump straight to ‘Join a specialist forum’ below. Once you’ve joined those groups, come back!

Editors working in ELT publishing will definitely benefit from this collection of resources in the ELT specialist forum. Others working in any area of educational publishing would probably enjoy the discussions about formatting answer keys to help dyslexic students and how many words per page are best for children’s educational books in the Education specialist forum.

More recently, the educational publishing landscape was drastically changed by the shift to hybrid learning in many countries, making this discussion about whether educational publishers consider home educators (also in the Education specialist forum) particularly useful.

Join a specialist forum

There’s no barrier to entry into the hidden specialist groups. Instead, they’re hidden from view to avoid overwhelming members on arrival. If you’re interested in a deeper exploration of a niche or subject related to editing, follow the step-by-step instructions on this page or get in touch with one of the forum moderators by emailing forums@ciep.uk. As well as location-based groups and the Education and ELT groups, we have other topic-based groups including Music, Fiction, Translation (Languages), Legal and more. And sometimes that’s where the real action is!

About the CIEP

Find out more about:

Photo credits: header image by Susan Q Ying on Unsplash, woman carrying a pile of books by cottonbro studio on Pexels.

Posted by Eleanor Smith, blog assistant.

The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of the CIEP.

Curriculum focus: Educational publishing

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In this regular feature for The Edit, former training director Jane Moody highlights areas of the CIEP’s Curriculum for professional development related to educational publishing.

Editors who work in educational publishing use all the same tools as every other kind of editor, so it is difficult to pick out anything specific. Often, however, the areas of scheduling and process are important to editors working in this field. Clarity is also particularly important in writing for educational purposes, so let’s look at these few aspects of the curriculum.

Knowledge criteria	Editorial competency, professional skills and attitudes
2.1.2 Schedules and budgeting	• Understands the importance of scheduling and budgeting within any publishing process • Understands the influence of the schedule/budget on the scope of editing/proofreading
2.1.3 Editorial processes	• Understands the meaning and significance of common editorial terminology • Understands the roles and responsibilities of members of an editorial team • Understands the stages of the editorial process
2.1.4 Production processes	• Understands the roles and responsibilities of a production team • Understands the meaning and use of common production terminology • Understands the stages of the production process (eg prepress, print/electronic production)
2.3.3 Clarity in writing	• Understands the need to avoid ambiguity • Understands appropriate use of language and tone • Understands conciseness (elimination of redundancy/repetition) • If space is limited or layout is fixed, is aware of the need to fit any change into the available space without causing a new problem • Can reword appropriately to simplify, clarify or shorten text • Can identify whether material is well expressed and flows logically, with the ideas and wording easy to follow

Resources to support your learning and CPD

The CIEP course Editorial Project Management would be really useful to enhance your skills. You could also try the PTC course Introduction to Digital Project Management. For clarity in writing, try the CIEP courses Getting to Grips with Grammar and Punctuation and Plain English for Editors. The CIEP guide Editing Textbooks would also be worth a read.

This book chapter would also be worth reading: Miha Kovač, Mojca K. Šebart. ‘Educational publishing: how it works: primary and secondary education publishing’ in: The Oxford Handbook of Publishing, edited by Angus Phillips and Michael Bhaskar. OUP, 2019, pp274–288.

If you work with interactive exercises, the CIEP course Editing Digital Content could prove useful.

Read Anneke Schmidt’s blog post: ‘What makes a good elearning course? elearning best practices explained’ (Skill & Care, 13 March 2023). This post could also lead you down various other useful rabbit holes.

The Society of Young Publishers has published the video ‘Introduction to Education Publishing’, which you can find on YouTube. It’s a panel discussion and gives a good overview of the education sector of the publishing industry.

This is only a snapshot – almost every other topic in domains 1 and 2 of the Curriculum for professional development are relevant to editing for educational publishing!

About Jane Moody

Jane has worked with books for all her working life (which is rather more years than she cares to admit), having started life as a librarian. She started a freelance editing business while at home with her two children, which she maintained for 15 years before going back into full-time employment as head of publishing for a medical Royal College.

Now retired, she has resurrected her editorial business, but has less time for work these days as she spends much time with her four grandchildren and in her garden.

About the CIEP

Photo credits: header image by Pixabay on Pexels.

Posted by Sue McLoughlin, blog assistant.

The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of the CIEP.

Talking tech: Maths editing

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In this month’s Talking tech column, Andy Coulson looks at tools to input, edit and format maths.

This month The Edit is looking at educational publishing, a field I work in, specialising in maths, science and technology. One of the biggest headaches I come up against is dealing with maths. Why is it so difficult? Well, maths has a lot of rules around presentation – what should be italic, how things are positioned, strange symbols, symbols nested inside symbols, precise alignment of symbols between lines, and so on. In short, standard Word is not able, or indeed designed, to cope with this.

Because these rules matter to people who deal in maths, and a lot of these people are in educational publishing, there are tools available. The three main tools are Word Math Builder (the built-in equation tools in Word); MathType (a Word add-in) and LaTeX (a typesetting language popular with academic paper writers). I will look briefly at all three before doing a more in-depth comparison of Word Math Builder and MathType to highlight the features of these two tools for working with maths in Word.

Your maths toolbox

Word Math Builder is the in-built editor in Word, accessible through the ‘Equation’ menu in the ‘Insert’ ribbon (or using Alt+=). It allows you to enter maths in several ways – as predefined equations; by building them from the menus; or by drawing them or entering them using text-based UnicodeMath or LaTeX code. It integrates well with Word but uses its own format – Office Math Markup Language (OMML). This can lead to issues when trying to export the maths content to other programmes, such as InDesign.

MathType is a Word add-in to handle maths and chemical equations. It is a subscription product, costing about £40 to £50 per year depending on the type of subscription, but with a 30-day free trial. The different subscriptions allow the tool to be used across a range of different programs, including PowerPoint, Google Workspace and some learning management systems. I used the Office 365 version, which seems to have fewer options than some of those shown in the tutorials. The explanation of the different versions is definitely an area the software developer, Wiris, could be much clearer about.

MathType offers a lot of the same features that Math Builder does, but presents them in a different way. Most of my clients use Math Builder, but I think I have a slight preference for the way MathType allows you to build things – it just feels slightly easier to lay things out.

Two potential advantages of MathType are that, first, it creates equations in MathML, which is an agreed standard for representing maths – although it is not yet well implemented. In theory you should be able to create an equation in MathML, include it on a webpage and a web browser should then display it correctly. The second is that it will also export the equations as EPS (Postscript) files, which current versions of InDesign appear to play nicely with.

LaTeX is a different proposition from the other two as it is essentially a typesetting language and you work in a LaTeX editor rather than in Word. It is far more like working with HTML for web pages than a Word document. It can accommodate a vast range of mathematical and scientific styles and is very popular in the field of academic papers. One of the most common tools is an online editor called Overleaf, which has a free version and a subscription version. If you only use LaTeX occasionally then the free version may well be adequate, with the subscription version giving access to collaboration tools. I’m not going to dig deep into LaTeX here, but you can find out more through the introduction on the Overleaf site.

Comparing the tools

Let’s take a look at Math Builder and MathType. Both of these will work within Word and work in a similar way – you select components of an equation, like a pair of brackets, and then fill in the terms inside them. I’ll take you through the two interfaces below and look at the obvious way of using them – clicking on symbols – before looking at some of the other options.

Math Builder presents options as a ribbon, accessed from ‘Equation’ in the ‘Insert’ ribbon:

$Math Builder ribbon$

It groups symbols, like Greek letters or operators (+, = etc), in blocks in the middle and has a number of groups covering a range of uses. On the right of the ribbon are some of the common structures you find in maths, such as fractions, as a series of drop-down menus.

Using this approach, it is fairly easy to create mathematical material within a document. Math Builder makes it easy to create inline material, where the maths runs as part of the text, and display material where it is presented as a separate paragraph. You can also type a simple sum into Word without spaces, select it and press Alt+=, and the text is converted to a correctly spaced maths expression.

One feature Math Builder offers that MathType does not is prebuilt expressions (although some versions of MathType allow you to save created equations for reuse). There are a number of common expressions, like the area of a circle or Pythagoras’s theorem, that can be selected from the Equation dropdown at the left end of the ribbon.

MathType works slightly differently from Math Builder. When you launch it, a separate window pops up. Like Math Builder it offers a series of building blocks, accessed through tabs, to build mathematical expressions as well as commonly used symbols. I think MathType seems to offer a larger range of symbols than Math Builder.

One really neat function in MathType is the red contextual tab. Here you get different options depending on what you are doing. For example, you can add carries and strikethroughs to digits in a subtraction calculation, which I’ve not found a way of doing in Math Builder.

MathType also offers simpler ways to change the formatting of text, so it is easier to remove italics so a measurement remains correctly spaced but is formatted as non-italic. It is also easy to change text colour, something that can be really useful in textbooks to highlight particular digits in a calculation.

As well as the menu-based way of building an equation, both tools offer other ways of entering material. Both have a drawing input, so if you have a touchscreen you can draw your equation. I’ve been really impressed by how good the recognition is on both of these, even when you draw with a mouse.

Math Builder allows you to type in maths using LaTeX code or Unicode Maths autocorrect codes. If you already use LaTeX I can imagine this could be quite a quick way of adding material. The Unicode approach is probably also quite fast, but clearly has a learning curve to be able to learn the codes.

Which should I use?

The short answer to this would be whichever your client asks you to. However, if you have the choice, it is more complex. Both tools have a great range of features that probably cover most needs. I think MathType has more options to build equations, but Math Builder’s text input tools to use LaTeX or Unicode may allow you to work around some of these. That is an area I need to experiment with. As I mentioned above, my clients generally prefer Maths Builder and one in particular has some wizardry that helps with the importing into InDesign. The finished proofs rarely exhibit some of the layout issues people have described when bringing this into InDesign. While I like MathType I generally use Math Builder as it meets my clients’ needs and so I am more familiar with it now.

Thanks to Martin Payne and Rich Cutler for their input on InDesign.

About Andy Coulson

Andy Coulson is a reformed engineer and primary teacher, and a Professional Member of the CIEP. He is a copyeditor and proofreader specialising in STEM subjects and odd formats like LaTeX.

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Photo credits: header image by Thomas T, maths equations on blackboard by Artturi Jalli, both on Unsplash.

Posted by Belinda Hodder, blog assistant.

The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of the CIEP.