It was his first book.
He’d never worked with an editor before, and he wanted to meet on a Zoom call. We barely settled in before he asked, “So … how does this work?”
I smiled, wondering if he was bracing for a long explanation of editing terms and pricing, and told him, “Let’s fill our coffee cups, and chat.” Because that question—how does this work—isn’t really about process. It’s about all the nervous everythings underneath it. Am I doing this right? Is my manuscript actually ready? Can I really let someone else read it? And maybe the biggest one: Is this about to get picked apart?
We didn’t talk in technical terms or checklists. I asked him about his story, his idea, when he started writing. We talked about where he was in the process, what he’d written, and what felt uncertain. Mostly I listened, then I told him something simple: my job is to make sure your story is the way you want it, and the way you want readers to experience it.
He paused for a second and said, “Okay … but what does that mean for me and my book?”
And that’s when I told him, “My copyediting is not about making big changes. It’s not rewriting anything. It’s the small things—the ones that are easy to miss when you’ve read the same pages over and over again. It’s me protecting what you say, and how you want to say it.” I gave him an example—a sentence that was technically fine, but not quite clear. The meaning was close, but the rhythm was off just enough that a reader might hesitate. “Sometimes it’s a word,” I said. “Sometimes it’s a sentence that’s doing too much. Sometimes it’s as small as a comma—but it changes how everything reads.”
He nodded, and I could see it starting to click—not because I’d explained anything complicated, but because it felt more comfortable to him.
By the end of our conversation, he simply said, “That actually makes me feel a lot better.” That’s usually the shift—not because anything in the manuscript might be changed, but because he knew what to expect from the process.
