Rosemary Shipton

Mentors

Rosemary Shipton opens up about her past mentors, their varying styles and influence, and debts owed to them. A senior editor mentor will challenge you.

Working With Authors

Editors make decisions all the time as they edit, but the most important judgment call of all is how to work best with each individual author. No one-size-fits-all solution will do. Most commonly, editors make their corrections with track changes, write questions and comments for the author in the margins, …

An Academic Rock Star’s Advice for Editors

Recently I was asked to speak at the memorial service for Francess Halpenny — a true powerhouse in Canadian publishing. In the course of her long life, she was head of the Editorial Department at University of Toronto Press (UTP) during its “golden years,” general editor of the Dictionary of …

There’s No Clarity With Editors or Authors

Editors say they love words, with finding just the right phrase for the context, but, ironically, they can only fail with two terms critical to the world of publishing: “editor” and “author.” When someone says she’s an editor, you have no idea what she does. Is she the editor of …

Editing Is Lifelong Learning

Editors enjoy their careers for various reasons — the opportunity to work in the exciting literary world or the more lucrative realms of government or business, or to specialize in particular areas of expertise. For me the major attraction is the simple fact that every project is different — I …

Succeeding as a Freelancer

The key to a successful freelance business is a steady supply of projects. First, decide how many hours a week you’d like to work — 20, 40 billable hours? — and then set out to achieve your goal. Your professional life and income will become almost predictable. Here are some …

Those Unpublishable Manuscripts

We’ve all had them – those manuscripts that arrive on our desks that should not be published. They have little merit in either content or expression, and our initial impulse is to return them immediately. How do we deal with them? If the project comes from a trade publisher, the contract …

Shorten It!

“Every word is gold,” my author said, “but I suppose you’ll have to shorten it.” Indeed I will: this book manuscript totals 180,000 words, and the trade publisher wants a 40 percent cut. That will be tough. Editors often need to reduce text. Newspapers, magazines, brochures, textbooks and reference materials …

Mentoring

What’s the best way to pass skills, experience and business smarts from one person to another? Mentoring tops the list. We humans have always known the value of one-on-one instruction: parents teach their trade or profession to their children, apprentices work for years with their masters and young hires look …

How to Become an Editor

Years ago, we all became editors through a kind of apprentice system. Once you had the ticket — a university degree — you were hired by a publisher or a communications department. There, a senior person on staff whipped you into shape as you did your work, followed a manual …