I’m going to digress a bit from the more grammar and craft-type issues into a professional one: the editor-author relationship. And I’ll be honest. Having been in this business for a really long time, much of it on the author side, I have an idea of what I like in an editor, and that’s the kind of editor I strive to be.

The truth is, most editors find themselves between a rock and a hard place. The hard place is helping authors craft better stories. The rock is the publisher and their guidelines. It is a balancing act. And in the forefront is the editor’s job, which is to make the book a better one. Let’s not forget that. There’s a lot of politics that go into publishing, and a lot of it can land the editor, and the author, smack dab in the middle. But in the end, the editor’s job is to make the work a better one. (Next week we’ll talk about the author’s job.)

So the editor has to read through the work, suggest changes and clarifications along with the occasional grammatical fix, keeping in mind the author’s particular style, the story, house style and any other publisher guidelines. Not only that, but the editor may have to steer the manuscript through several rounds of revisions, then send it off to a copy editor to have the final tweaks ironed out. All the while staying true to the focus of the story and being professional to the author.

I also believe that the editor’s primary responsibility after all of this is to the author.

House style guides and publisher guidelines are pretty inflexible. And I’ll go out on a limb here and say as an author, I have no love of publishers’ house styles which err on the side of grammatically incorrect. If we have one rule here at Pink Petal Books, it is that if you have questions, the grammatically correct answer always wins. (Yes, we sometimes make mistakes, but we try really hard to ensure that doesn’t happen. We will never deliberately choose the grammatically incorrect answer.)

So what does this mean? It means that the author should never feel as if the editor is jockeying between the copy editor and the author, and standing with the copy editor. It means that the editor should accept the author’s reasoning so long as it’s grammatically sound and understandable by the average reader. It means that in a dispute between the author and the copy editor, barring the previous two reasons given, the editor should back up her author. It also means that the editor needs to be firm, yet professional, in making sure the author is using every opportunity to grow.

Finally, the editor needs to communicate. If something isn’t right, or the editor thinks more work needs to be done, then the editor needs to say so. A fluid dialogue is much easier to follow then choppy dictates and mandates. In the end, the editor needs to make the decision that the book is the best it can be and send it onto the next stage. And hopefully, in that same end, the author can feel well-served by her editor and get to work on the next novel. Because she knows that her editor is dying to read it.