This volume is now available to purchase. At one point or another, I performed in most of the editing modes, but mainly developmental.
Randy and I go back forty years, to when he was a year ahead of me in college. He was always an unconventional thinker, a stand-up guy, and while quite bright, leveraged his natural intellect by seeking out people who knew things he did not. He was never for five seconds of his life at risk of becoming one of those stupid-smart people who get so caught up in all their knowingness that they resist learning unless it comes from approved directions. (Most people with that mentality get Ph.Ds and become professors. Academia is the only place that will put up with that crap because it’s common enough.) Randy is the kind of guy who, if he wanted to learn to skate backward, might just go to the rink and find some kids who were doing that, and ask whether they would teach him. And they would, because he’s very amiable that way.
He won’t tell you the juicy details, but as a businessperson Randy has enjoyed enormous success in some very difficult environments, notably investing. When he brought me this book idea, therefore, I was very glad to be working on it because I have many of the entrepreneurial wrong tendencies and bad habits that the book describes. I have taken guidance from him in ways that I see manifested in his book, and they are very helpful. For example, for five years now I have been carving out an hour a week to do CEO things, which I define as management and planning activities that are not doing the actual hourly paid work that is my main business focus. It has helped me to stay focused, to review a business plan, to recognize my weaknesses. Randy is an authority on this stuff.
Want a sample of the most notable principle of Randy’s that guides me? Very simple. Offer solutions rather than services. Think about what I do. Many editors think that their work is to change people’s use of the English language. No; that’s the car, not the journey. People come to editors because we are industry pros whom they expect to know things we can share with them. Editing a book ms is not the end goal; the end goal is the best possible book or other ms consistent with the author’s objectives. Editing is just one of the ways we can help make that happen.
I knew this intuitively, but I really knew it when Randy codified it. Take websites. No one just wants a website if for commercial purposes. People want websites in order to share information, answer common questions, describe offerings, allow viewers to inquire further, and generally present the best possible marketing and informational face to the world. The website just happens to be an efficient means to those ends. The web designer who believes that her job is to push HTML and scripts around has missed her real job and needs to remember why people hire her. So in this context, I offer clients the best possible guidance (including editing support) to help them achieve their writing objectives. It is wonderful when people want to become better writers, but sometimes a writer just wants it out the door and doesn’t want to learn.
Think that’s lunacy? One of my more recent clients was a nonagenarian with a bucket list book, a wonderful man who was a marvel to work with. My directive was to get the ms from draft to publishable, staying as true as possible to the au’s intent and experiences. I was approached, I believe, because evidence indicated that I understood this. He passed on, sadly, a year after the publication. He never made back his money and did not give a rip if he did. He saw his book in print, looking professional and with the benefits of experienced handling, and had that joy while he could revel in it. Mission accomplished all around, with the helpful intercession and interpretation of one of the best in the business, Maggi Kirkbride (who does not happen to work on fiction, thus the approach to me).
Yeah. Randy has that kind of impact. As I worked through his ms, I saw numerous areas where I could improve, and other areas where I already had good practices but it helped to see them codified and reinforced. This is why his book is such a gift for entrepreneurs.
When the original ms came to me, it needed a fair bit of polish and consideration. Randy began our relationship with as many bad writing habits as the typical college graduate, but the difference is that he has declared war on them and worked to eradicate them. The work has been successful. My task was to take the mistakes (comma splices, excessive adverbs, hyperdependency on parens and em dashes) out of Randy without taking the Randy out of Randy. His basic style is informal, friendly, and approachable. For the most part, anyone at the GED level or higher can understand all of it.
We batted it back and forth. Oh, how we batted it back and forth. Randy’s always coachable, and is one of those clients who wants to know why. Why do we do it this way? What’s wrong with doing it that way? The best clients, and the ones who get the most out of what they pay me, are always the ones who ask me why I did things. Sometimes they will present alternatives and ask me why those options aren’t a better method. Well, sometimes they are. Editing isn’t sitting like the statue at the Lincoln Memorial, a giant gazing down upon the masses. Editing is making written material the best it can become. If my client has a better idea than me, that’s excellent because in the ideal world it would be the author’s creativity that would formulate solutions. So I would toss something out there, and he’d often accept it or come up with a different way of incorporating it. I did the appropriate thing: beam with pride and keep marking.
The last major step was the dignified execution of a Faulknerian darling. Randy wanted to incorporate a marketing presentation that had been very popular. Why it was popular was obvious enough to me, but it also duplicated a lot of information. When I mused about that, the fact that he was readily open to the idea told me that he’d had that same thought. Protip: When your client accepts a fairly radical change idea with surprising readiness, it’s probably because they have already been wondering about it. I left the decision to him with a recommend that he fold it in. He folded it in. With that, the book’s last major hitch was handled. He’d even bent a little bit on one of our longtime factual disagreements; an amiable difference, to be sure, but he did provide enough context that a reader couldn’t just poke a hole in it as presented. Excellent; that was all I’d wanted.
What authors should know is that some of what we do involves review protection. The editing mind looks at what the au did and comes up with the most caustic comment a reviewer might offer (and we have the capacity, if we wish, to be much meaner than most reviewers; we just should not often want to be) if that were stetted. That editing mind then figures out what changes would render the possibility of such review comments unjust; someone might still say it, but importantly, they would be incorrect and probably wouldn’t even think of it because most people at least have a process for not making up crap.
This was a lot of what I did for Randy. I foresaw the spots where readers and reviewers might start to think he didn’t know as much as he purported to (which would be wrong on their part). I got him to make enough changes that those weak spots were no longer present.
The remainder is one of the most important books any entrepreneur could read. As an entrepreneur myself, I can just about assure even seasoned pros that they’ll find new ideas. Randy is a good guide as well as a good guy, and he will give your fair value.