In this episode of the Self-Publishing with ALLi Podcast, Matty Dalrymple talks with Kristen Tate of the Blue Garret editing service, a seasoned freelance editor, about the intricacies of editorial services and how authors can effectively engage with editors. The conversation provides insights into the editing process, the role of trust in the author-editor relationship, and how to navigate the often complex landscape of editorial pricing and contracts.
Listen to the Podcast: Behind the Scenes of the Editing Process
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About the Host
Matty Dalrymple podcasts, writes, speaks, and consults on the writing craft and the publishing voyage as The Indy Author. She has written books on the business of short fiction and podcasting for authors, and her articles have appeared in Writer’s Digest magazine. She serves as the campaigns manager for the Alliance of Independent Authors. Matty is also the author of the Lizzy Ballard Thrillers, beginning with Rock Paper Scissors; the Ann Kinnear Suspense Novels, beginning with The Sense of Death; and the Ann Kinnear Suspense Shorts, including Close These Eyes. She is a member of International Thriller Writers and Sisters in Crime.
About the Guest
Kristen Tate has been a freelance editor for more than a decade, guiding authors from rough drafts to polished books. She holds a PhD in English from Columbia University, where she focused on publishing history, and is the author of Novel Study: Decoding the Secrets and Structures of Contemporary Fiction. Kristen also publishes a regular newsletter offering craft advice and encouragement for writers. Her editing business, Blue Garret, is an ALLi Partner member. You can find Kristen at thebluegarret.com, on Instagram, LinkedIn, and Bluesky.
Read the Transcripts
Matty Dalrymple: Hello everyone. I am Matty Dalrymple. I'm the campaigns manager for ALLi, and I am here today with Kristen Tate.
To give everyone a little bit of background, Kristen Tate has been a freelance editor for a decade helping authors transform their work from rough draft to finished book.
She has a PhD in English from Columbia University with a focus on publishing history. She's the author of Novel Study: Decoding the Secrets and Structures of Contemporary Fiction and writes a regular newsletter full of craft advice and encouragement for authors. And her editing business, The Blue Garret is an ALLi partner member.
I invited Kristen on the podcast because, with all the editorial background that Kristen has, I thought that there was this list of questions that authors are either explicitly thinking to themselves or it's never occurred to them to think about it, having to do with how the whole editing process works.
We got a great foundational information in a recent episode with Ricardo Fayette about the different types of editing, but now we're going to peek behind the curtain and find out the why of what's going on. We're going to walk through the process in which editors and authors are interacting.
Understanding Editorial Pricing
Matty Dalrymple: I think the first area is when authors are assessing editorial services and they're trying to decide how to assess the prices they're hearing from editors they may be approaching.
So, can you just talk a little bit about the whys behind the pricing of editorial services?
Kristen Tate: Yeah, that's a great question, and editors do this in all different kinds of ways, which I know makes it a little bit harder for authors. But I will tell you from my point of view. So, I charge everything by the word. In part because it's the clearest measure, I think, for both editors and authors. They know, when they send me a document, exactly what their word count is, so they know exactly what the price is I'm going to charge. I give them a per word price.
Then on my end, there's a lot of behind-the-scenes math because I know, after many years of doing this, how long it will take me down to the word to edit a certain manuscript.
I have a range that I'm usually in and then if it's an author I've worked with before, I've tracked that and so I know really down to the hour, it's pretty accurate.
For someone I haven't worked with, I've usually done a sample edit, so I know within that range how long it's going to take me.
Then behind the scenes, I know what the target hourly rate I need to make to keep going as a business and cover all my expenses and all of those kinds of things.
So, the end goal, you should always get an overall project rate for whatever you're booking from an editor, and really in the end, it doesn't matter so much whether they are thinking of it per hour or per word, as long as you are both really clear on what that end price is going to be and how they got to that, what that's based on.
So, if they're charging by hour, they should be able to give you, at minimum, an estimated range of how many hours it's going to take.
Matty Dalrymple: Is there a standard about whether editors publish their rates, either hourly or per word, on their websites, or is it almost always something you have to ask for to be tailored to your own situation?
Kristen Tate: Many editors will post on their website. Mine are posted on my website. I like that just because it's transparent. I want people to know whether or not I'm in their budget.
I have definitely experienced this on the other end of checking into some kind of coaching service or something like that, and just not knowing if this could cost $200 or it could cost $2,000.
Especially when you're just starting out with something like that, I think it's nice to set everyone's expectations, and then people don't contact me and find out they can't afford me, and I also don't have to field those inquiries. So, I think it's a win-win.
From an author perspective, I think enough editors publish their rates that you can get a sense of a range if you're doing research, and I think that's something you should do.
Then also the Editorial Freelancers Association, for example, and Reedsy as well, both post kind of rate ranges that are more averages, so you can do your research.
Matty Dalrymple: I suppose that once you have a client, the author may be going to your website to see your standard rates, and then you've had the experience, and if it's a bad experience, I don't know, maybe the rate goes up next time or maybe you just decline. Do you ever find you have to do that? An author comes back to you and you're like, oh, you know what, I just don't think that like this is the match made in heaven.
Kristen Tate: That has happened. What happens more frequently, in terms of the rate, I raise my rates every year at the end of the year, but for my returning clients, I try when I can to keep that rate steady and it ticks up a little bit more slowly, and that works because often it takes me less time to work with them in the future. They're learning things often, or our back and forth is faster. They know my routines and all of that.
If there has been a case where something has taken me longer than I expect, I actually try to have that conversation while the project is ongoing.
When I was a baby editor, I did not do that and just ate it. Just recently I had a project come in where I had done a sample edit, this was an author I' d worked with for the first time, but I thought that the manuscript was at one point, and when I got a few chapters in, I realized that it could really benefit from a mini content edit to zero in on this one aspect of the storytelling that I knew would just transform the novel.
So, I just went back to the client and said, what if we did a pause, I spend four hours doing this very targeted edit, you do revision and come back to me.
That's how I prefer to do it now, or sometimes it'll happen that an author has done more revisions during a copy edit than is normal. So, then when the manuscript comes back to me for a check, I've needed to spend more time doing those checks, and in that case, we just have a conversation the next time and say, okay, I budgeted for doing 5,000 words worth of checks, and last time you did 15,000 words. So, I can either charge you for the extra or you can just be more restrained, and then it's just up to them. I don't like to make assumptions about anyone's budget either, so I'm pretty careful about that.
Sample Edits: Benefits and Process
Matty Dalrymple: You had mentioned the concept of a sample edit. From an editorial point of view, what do you see as the benefits of a sample edit?
Kristen Tate: There's a lot. On my end, it's for me to make sure I know what the author needs and that I can deliver it. Am I a good match for this project? Do I feel in tune with this project? Do I feel connected to it? Do I think that my specific expertise and what I know that my particular skills are, do I think those are well matched to this manuscript? Because sometimes they're not, and I feel like another editor would do a better job.
It helps me know how long it's going to take. So, if I need to adjust my rate up from the standard that's on my website, that's when I can do it. So, there's not a surprise again, at the end, I know ahead of time I can tell them. Actually, it says on my website, I charge this, but I'm going to have to charge you that unless you do X, Y, and Z to clean it up.
Then from the author standpoint, it really shows them what they're going to get, and I think trust is crucial in that relationship between an author and editor. If there's not trust there, nothing is going to go well. So, having that sample edit, and maybe having a Zoom call and the initial email communications, really help build trust.
So, an author can read my comments and my edits and assess, is this person respecting my voice? Do I think I can learn from this person? Are the tone of these comments what I would prefer?
There's a range of preferences from authors. Some like things quite direct and others need more praise amongst the corrections. So, I just want to make sure that's all matched before I'm spending 25 hours, a pretty typical amount of time for me to spend on a manuscript, and that's a week or two of work. So, before I do that, and the author invests a lot of money, it's good to do that due diligence.
Contracts and Confidentiality
Matty Dalrymple: Do you normally sign a formal contract with your clients or is it more informal than a formal contract?
Kristen Tate: No, I sign a formal one. Once I've worked on several projects with a client, we just assume that everything's going to keep going the way our initial contract went. But that's another trust piece and it just clarifies things.
There's a lot of important things around copyright, for example. My contract specifies that once I'm paid, authors have copyright over any tweaks I've made, any suggestions I've made. I've never heard of a case of an editor claiming that this is their intellectual property. We've heard a lot of wild stories in publishing, and you never know, and this is just another trust piece. It talks about confidentiality, that I will not share their work without their permission. There's now an AI clause in my contract, which I think is important. That is something I do, and it's something I would encourage authors to look for and ask for from an editor.
AI in Editing
Matty Dalrymple: What does your AI clause cover?
Kristen Tate: Well, it is changing all the time, I will tell you.
Right now, consent and disclosure are the two things that I focus on. So, it says in there that I will not use AI in any shape or form without asking for permission, and that's a conversation that we have.
The folks I work with range from anywhere between absolutely not, I want a firewall between my manuscript and any AI tools, which includes Microsoft Word now. So, there are settings that I have to have on there that are turned off. So, I know that there's no way that I can be the conduit that way.
Then I have authors who are using those tools themselves. So, consent and disclosure on both ends is really helpful.
If someone's using the tools, it means that I know to dial up my human intervention. So, I look for places where I think, oh, this is a little cliche, this might have been an AI tool. Or this feels like a very distinctive aspect of your voice, so let's pull that out and dial it up even further to compensate for the AI tendency to flatten things out a little bit and make it generic.
Matty Dalrymple: Yeah, I just submitted an article to a magazine where you had to sign an agreement that said, I didn't use AI in any way in the writing of this. So, I signed it.
But one way that I really like using AI is, I'll be working on a sentence and there's like one word that I'm just not happy with, and I'll say, is there a better word for this, and it'll give me five alternatives, and oftentimes one of those turns out to be a better word than the one I have.
At the end of writing that article, I just thought, oh man, it was so frustrating not to be able to do that. I thought, I'm just going to not submit to that magazine anymore.
Even like you're saying with Word, they were so strident about it I thought, if I run spellchecker am I going to get in trouble? So, it can be a minefield, and I think having that agreement upfront when you're working together.
Kristen Tate: And having a conversation, just so I know where they are on that spectrum, and then I can operate accordingly.
Matty Dalrymple: Are there any other aspects of the contract that you can imagine an author might say, huh, I wonder what the deal is with that?
Kristen Tate: Yeah, I guess an important part is a termination clause, which always feels scary, but things happen.
I definitely saw this during COVID, that's actually the only time in my career where that clause has come into play. I had people who needed to cancel, and my kids were suddenly Zoom schooling from my living room and I had to ask for some schedule shifts, and so that had to come into play.
So, I think it feels scary. It feels like, oh, this person might bail on me or whatever, but it's really just there, like what happens if there's some calamity and you have to pull out or I have to pull out, and how does that work? So, that's one that I sometimes get questions about.
The confidentiality piece, and I have had authors ask me to sign a non-disclosure agreement before even looking at a sample before.
I don't think that's necessary, in part because I think it's actually quite hard to make money from your books and get an audience from them. So, indie editors are not out there pirating books and profiting from them, because that would be very difficult to actually achieve as well as you would be run out of the industry. But that confidentiality clause really covers that aspect.
Matty Dalrymple: I had a question about the circumstances where you run into some personal issue and maybe you have to withdraw entirely from that agreement. Is there any expectation authors should have about what assistance their editor might be expected to provide to them in order to fill that gap?
Kristen Tate: Yeah. I luckily just only had to delay things. I also got COVID a couple years ago, not during that whole initial pandemic time, and had to delay some edits.
So, that was just a matter of figuring it out, getting all the clients stacked up and moving it around, and making sure that people who had a firm deadline, we hit those.
I have been like the pinch hitter in the past for an editor who had to pass off a project for some reason. One editor retired in the middle of a book series, and I ended up picking up and then another editor ended up passing off something to me in case of illness.
We're a pretty close-knit industry. I know and refer back and forth quite frequently with a really trusted handful of editors. So, usually you can expect that they will be able to link you up with someone who can take on the work.
Matty Dalrymple: Yeah, it does all go back to the trust issue that if you're building that good relationship, then you're each going to be looking out for the other hopefully.
The Editing Workflow
Matty Dalrymple: So, let's say we've got the contract all signed and they're on the calendar. I think a question that a lot of authors have is, we send off our manuscript and then we wait for some period of time and pretty soon the manuscript comes back. Can you just describe at a high level what's going on?
Is this something on Monday at 9:00 AM you pick it up and you work on it until it's done, or are you parcelling it out among other projects? What does that look like?
Kristen Tate: Again, this will vary by editor and for me it really varies whether I'm doing a developmental edit, or a copy edit, or line edit.
A developmental edit is squishier. So, the first thing that I do is it comes in, I have a big iPad that I use actually for reading and taking notes on. So, I do a quick first read, just so I'm familiar with it and I know what I'm dealing with. I'm taking notes alongside, but I'm reading quickly. That usually takes a couple days and then I slow down, and I go back from the beginning, and that's when I start to build in my editorial letter.
I've taken notes and I know what areas we need to cover. So, maybe this manuscript really needs to focus on the plot, or maybe it's the character arc that needs to be beefed up, or maybe there's a point of view issue that's going on, or maybe there's just a bunch of odds and ends. Maybe this is a more experienced author where we're finding all of those little places where they can elevate their style or find a better scene ending, whatever.
So, I'm taking all of those notes and then I'm going back through the manuscript in Microsoft Word and leaving a lot of comments along the side that go hand-in-hand with the editorial letter.
That developmental edit process is actually not dissimilar from writing an essay for college or even doing other kinds of writing.
In almost every one, there's a point where, I don't panic, but I feel like, wait, have I really got this? There's just always this moment of doubt where I feel like I'm spiralling a little bit. Usually, I ask for two weeks for those, and it's usually the end of that first week where I'm like, is this right?
They're big projects, and there's a lot of responsibility when you are suggesting changes to someone's plot or saying you should take out this whole subplot, or you need to add a whole other subplot. So, there's room for that doubt to creep in. So, I like a buffer day built in for me to freak out a little bit and then recover and go back in.
Then a copy/line edit, on the other hand, there's never a freak out moment for me. I can do 9-10 pages an hour, I can predict that. Ideally, I'm only editing for four or five hours a day. I just plug that in. I have a spreadsheet. I know what my word count is. I lay that along my calendar, and we just go through the days very methodically and there's no panic.
Matty Dalrymple: Yeah, I think that description really helps illuminate the differences.
Ricardo had talked about the differences between developmental editing and line editing and copy editing, and I think that seeing it from the editor point of view really helps illuminate exactly what the differences are there.
Tools of the Trade: Why Microsoft Word?
Matty Dalrymple: You would made a joke before we started recording about, why Microsoft Word?
So, this is a question I guess you've gotten, how come I have to give you my manuscript in Microsoft Word? Talk about that a little bit.
Kristen Tate: I feel everyone's pain because none of us like to pay for it, including me, and it just feels like they have a monopoly there and people don't have it, typically, on their machines anymore. A lot of people are writing in Scrivener or they're writing in Google Docs, or if they have a Mac, they're writing in Pages. So, not everyone already has it, but the reason why editors continue to use it is it really is a pro tool.
So, the number one reason I use it is, I can assign key commands to anything. So, I have a whole set of extra keys over here. I have one that will change an uppercase letter to a lowercase letter. I have one that will change the next punctuation sign to an em dash. I have one that will change the next punctuation sign to a period.
So, assigning key commands, and there's a little built in software tool in there called macros and you can actually get AI tools to write them for you now. So, really almost anything that you can dream up that you would need to do to a manuscript, I can get Claude AI to write a macro that will just execute that for me.
So, turn anything that says chapter, when it's by itself in a line, to a heading one style. Those kinds of things. Highlight everything that's in italics, unhighlight everything that's in italics.
So, it gives me maximum flexibility, and it makes me very fast when I'm doing the copy editing in particular.
Matty Dalrymple: Yeah, I can imagine trying to switch from Word to Pages to something else would be really unmanageable.
Kristen Tate: Yeah, and then track changes. It's a beast, but it does give you so much flexibility in terms of what you're showing and what you're not showing and how you're showing it, and you just want to see the comments, and everything else is as if it were accepted and it has all those tools.
Even Google Docs is pretty good, but still not near at that same level of flexibility and power.
Matty Dalrymple: Yeah, I don't know if it's just that most of us at some point got used to Microsoft Word, but I cannot look at Google Docs and feel creative.
It would be fine for a business note, but there's just something about the user interface that does not scream creativity to me.
Kristen Tate: It's funny because when I do my own writing, I think because I edit so much in Microsoft Word, I actually write in Google Docs.
Matty Dalrymple: Really? Interesting. Yeah, we all develop our preferences.
Author-Editor Collaboration Tips
Matty Dalrymple: Another question I had that I think authors might be curious about is, to what extent is it okay for an author to push back on a suggestion that an editor has made?
Kristen Tate: Oh, it's a hundred percent okay. I actually always say, especially with the developmental edit, but also with the line edit, these are suggestions.
I am ingesting that story world as I go, and I'm living in it for a week, but an author has been living in it for weeks, months, years. So, I can only work within the parameter of what's there in the manuscript for me to work with, but the author can invent new aspects of this story world and change things.
As an editor, I am not going to take that amount of leeway. My job really is to say, here's the problem and here's one solution. If it's a line edit, I just generally go ahead and do the edit. Sometimes I'll have another version out there and a comment on it on the side.
For a developmental edit, I'll often say, here's the problem, here's some questions that I think will get you on the track of solving it.
Then I often will have my own ideas, and I will use the highlighter tool to black them out so the author has some time to think about what they might want before they look at my suggestions and get imprinted on those, just so I don't block off some creativity that they might have.
But it's always really exciting for me when I've said, here's the problem and an author comes back with this solution that is just brilliant, and I would never have thought of. It's a delight for me when I see that.
Matty Dalrymple: That's great to hear. I like the redacting your comments approach until somebody wants to see them. That's great.
Just as a wrap up to our conversation, what are some insider tips for the best way to work with an editor, like the top couple that you think would really smooth the way to a great relationship?
Kristen Tate: Communication is the biggest key. So, be brave, communicate more rather than less. Be really upfront about what you think the strengths and weaknesses are of your manuscript. Tell us what are your hopes and what are your fears about this, because we can help you address those things and help you achieve those goals.
I work with dozens of authors a year, and I have a lot of experience now and I can say, I don't know what will happen with this manuscript, but here's what's happened with similar manuscripts.
I think there's this holdover from school, where we send in a project and we get feedback, and we expect it to come with a grade or an assessment. There's that holdover and fear. I think authors, there's some part of them that they want to turn in something that's already so perfect that I will just say, you know what, good job, it's just perfect as is.
Which, of course, never happens and you would never want to pay me to do that. It's not a good sign if that's what you get back.
Authors can sometimes be apologetic; I know that I should know this comma rule and you're going to have to fix it. Don't do that, this is really what we live for. It's our joy to fix your commas and that's what we specialize in.
Authors are the idea people and the creative people, and we're here to clean it up. We're here getting it ready for your reader. We're building that bridge between the two of you. That's our job.
Matty Dalrymple: Great, I love that perspective. That has really shed the light for me on a couple of things that I wasn't even explicitly wondering about the editing process, but hearing you talk about it helps me understand it better and then helps me pave the way for working better with an editor.
Kristen, thank you so much. Let everyone know where they can go to find out more about you and The Blue Garret and everything you do online.
Kristen Tate: My website's thebluegarret.com.
I have a newsletter and if you want to do deep dives into studying novels, I have a Patreon too, where we're picking a novel a month and doing deep analytical work on it. So, if that's interesting, you can find me on Patreon at The Blue Garet, or everything's on my website.
