Editor Interview: Erin Brown

May 2010
Vol. 1, No. 5

Erin Brown: Book Doctor and Professional Editor

ErinBrownEdit1 CWG: Last year you offered your services as a Book Doctor at the Pacific Northwest Writers Conference in Seattle. Your site indicates you also offer various editing services, from copyediting to
proofreading, content editing to manuscript evaluation. Can you explain the differences?
Erin Brown: The services I offer are all designed to get your manuscript into the best shape possible, usually before submitting to agents. Most of my clients opt for an evaluation, in which I read their manuscript and provide overall suggestions for content revisions in the form of a ten to twenty-five page feedback letter. The feedback includes ideas for improving plot, pacing, characters, dialogue, point of view, etc.—basically everything, including some overall grammatical issues. This allows the writer to implement my suggestions on their own. I’ve found that the revision process is also a great learning experience for writers. Half of good writing is about revising, after all!
Copyediting and proofreading focus solely on grammatical issues, and do not include any content editing. A line edit, or content edit, is when I read through the manuscript and make content and grammatical changes myself, usually using Word’s Tracked Changes. In other words, I make all of the changes to the work, versus the author. The client can, of course, accept all of my changes, or pick and choose.
CWG: With your background as an editor for several large publishing houses, you clearly have a foot in the door with those houses as well as many literary agencies/agents. If you are editing a manuscript and see that it's something that might be of interest to an agent or house, are you able to assist the author in getting the manuscript represented or sold?
Erin Brown: If I feel strongly about a manuscript, I can recommend agents that I’ve worked with who might be interested or I can contact them directly. However, I am completely honest with my clients and tell them that this is not what they are paying for. I am not selling my agent contacts. Any writers can get those online for free, if they do proper research. Any freelance editor who guarantees up front to get a writer an agent is up to no good. What I can promise is that I will help my client make their work the best if can be. Overall, I would say that I end up personally referring about 10% of my clients to agents. It’s something I take very seriously.
CWG: Your background, prior to freelance editing, allowed you to edit a wide variety of genres. Is this important for the author to consider when hiring someone, such as yourself, to edit a manuscript? Why or why not? 
Erin Brown: I definitely think it’s important to seek out an editor who is familiar with a writer’s genre. I’ve worked in almost every genre over the years, but I usually recommend other editors for those clients who come to me with science fiction or fantasy, because I simply don’t have much experience with those novels. If you have written a romance, you don’t want to seek out a freelance editor whose background is only military fiction or thrillers, for instance. The same goes for agents. Don’t waste your time submitting to those who aren’t interested in your genre! It sounds like common sense, but you’d be amazed at how many writers don’t do their research and submit to agents that have no interest in their genre.
CWG: Along those same lines, in a writing group where manuscripts are being critiqued, of varying genres, what advice can you offer to the group at whole for providing the author with feedback, especially when the genre they are critiquing is different than the one the critic him/herself is familiar with?
Erin Brown: Well, there are certain things that are universal, which a writing group can provide effective input about in most cases—whether characters are appealing, whether the dialogue is natural and exciting, whether a reader wants to keep turning the page, whether the narrative is strong. Those are the most important parts, not necessarily specific plot points that would affect a critic’s knowledge of the genre. So there’s still a lot to gain from getting feedback of this kind. But also remember that too many cooks in the kitchen are often a problem.
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A warm thank you to Erin Brown for the interview and all of the great information about all things editing. Visit Erin at her Web site, www.erinedits.com. To learn more about Erin, visit our resources page [here].
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