I just got word yesterday that one of our clients, a PhD student with whom we have been working on and off over the past year, has had her thesis passed, and that she is to graduate in April this year.

It might not sound like a big deal, but it is! We were brought on board to copyedit and typeset our customer’s doctoral thesis in late 2008 (I think). The edits and typesetting took us from roughly Oct-Nov ’08 until through early ’09 to complete. It wasn’t just the work, though, there was collaboration and meetings with both the customer and her supervisor, to ensure that best practice in thesis editing was upheld, and that we were all on the same page with how it ought to read and look.

Imagine our collective disappointment when the first submission came back with the note that it would pass with changes. While this is not an uncommon situation, it was originally quite heartbreaking for all concerned. However, with our support and with her supervisor’s support, our customer rallied herself, did what she had to do, and got stuck back into the work.

And we just found out yesterday that the thesis was accepted, and that her graduation is coming up this April.

After such a long process, one tends to become good friends with customers like this, because it is an intensive task – and at the end of doctoral study it is also stressful and tense for the student. Bearing that in mind, it would probably come as no surprise to you that a big part of our work is also customer support. I could personally imagine nothing worse than coming to the end of such intensive, long-term study, and finding myself stuck with an unsympathetic and inflexible editor. It’s why with jobs like these, we’re in there for as long as it takes.

We would like to take this opportunity to send massive congratulations to our client! It’s been a long time coming, and you and your research both deserve all the acclaim you receive. Well done! We are proud to have been part of your journey.

It’s one thing that many people may not often think about, but editing a book – especially a diary or memoir – can be a really emotional, taxing task.

I was reminded of this just last night when I started to get my teeth into a new project. The project itself is a manuscript that we are assisting our customer to self-publish just for her family. It is not something that is going to be publicly available, because it’s far too personal, but we are editing it and preparing it into book form so that the story, and the experience, can be kept. What is the story? It’s about the author’s daughter’s major brain trauma.

After being deeply enmeshed in the first pass of edits on this manuscript for a full half hour, I had to put it down. Granted, it was late at night. Granted, it had been a long day. But the reason I put it down was because it is just such an emotional project to work on.

As an editor, I’m good at being able to work on a book without getting so ‘involved’ with it that I can’t see the errors for the words. When you are working on an engaging piece of writing – one that you would, if you were a reader, just devour – that is an absolutely vital skill. And yet, it’s easy to forget that once you are faced with a project like this one, you really have to watch out for yourself.

I don’t mean ‘watch out’ in case the errors aren’t discovered, or in case you get too wound up in the story. You have to watch out for your own emotional wellbeing.

Many of us (editors, I mean) work long and hard on manuscripts, because the vast majority of us are perfectionists by nature. Nobody ever wants to do a bad job. All of us want to produce a book with which we, and the author, and all the book’s readers, are proud and happy. That often means working longer hours, or ‘just doing a bit more’ when instead we ought to be relaxing. But when you work on an emotionally charged work, one that reaches into your soul and asks you lots of questions, then to some extent you have to determine what time of the day you can do it, and what mental and emotional state you need to be in when you do so.

It’s an interesting question, this one of ‘workplace wellbeing’ when you are faced with such an ethereal thing. How do you keep yourself from being so far affected by a manuscript that you can’t be sure of the quality of your work? Does the issue of emotional wellbeing seem faintly ridiculous in terms of workplace practice, when all you do is work with words, and mostly creative ones at that? Is the nexus between editing and emotional wellbeing something that you even think about?

I’d be interested in your take on this. Drop me a comment and let me know what you think.

In the past three months, we here at Brascoe Publishing have had a lot of requests for work. A lot of really bad ones. So many, in fact, that we thought it was high time to post a blog about it. Here is how you avoid getting a job with a publisher.

1. Forget that emailing from a website means that the recipient can see that you emailed from the website

One of the quickest ways to ruin your chances of getting a job with a publisher is to forget that when you email them from their website that you have no control over the subject line (usually). By not doing the yards and becoming familiar with the target company by researching the remainder of its website, and writing your email accordingly, you’ve taken the first step towards remaining unemployed.

2. Assume things – preferably as many as you can

The second step is to make assumptions. There is no point in reading through pages and pages of company information – or even one page, an About page (most websites have them) – because if you’ve done a course in editing or publishing, then you know how these places work. There is an Editing or Editorial Department; the company is run by men, and those men prefer to be addressed ‘Sirs’; and if the company is online, active, and appears successful, then clearly there are jobs aplenty.

3. Talk about your qualifications as much as possible

Don’t forget to assume things about yourself too: your huge lists of qualifications are mightily impressive; if you find them that way, no doubt the person at the other end (who works in the field, and probably has done for quite some time) will find them so too. Go your hardest. By the way, if you have done a degree in publishing or editing – yes, a whole degree – remember to only talk about how useful just one subject was. It’s even better if that is the only subject in which you actually did any good. The context of a highly focused, vocational-style degree is all just fluff and should be left out.

4. Believe, wholeheartedly, that as a published writer you would make a good editor or proofreader

Even if you don’t have experience in the area, and cannot provide solid examples of your work that back up your claims, you can always rest on the knowledge that you are a published writer. After all, publishers know how hard it is to become published, and they are aware of how much hard work goes into writing a book, let alone scoring a publishing deal. This should automatically make you a preferred candidate, right?

5. If applying for proofreading or editing work, don’t bother to check your spelling. It’s bound to be perfect!

As a person who has done proofreading and editing work before, don’t bother to check your spelling. You’re an editor and a proofreader, so it is bound to be absolutely perfect all the time. If you work on computers a lot, then your typing accuracy is of course going to be ace as well. So – go forth and email! Remember to hit send before you check for errors.

6. Talk about how much knowledge you have, and get the title of your roles incorrect

All of your qualifications and experience are so fantastic – who could deny them – but to make sure you absolutely do not get the job, you might want to consider getting the title of your role incorrect. For example, substantive editors, commissioning editors, copyeditors, etc work in publishing; but subeditors work in newspapers. It’s a subtle difference, very small, but it will take you that extra step over the line to the trash. One can’t be too careful!

7. Don’t end your letter properly

The final step towards not getting a job is to have a poor ending on your letter. Don’t ask the recipient to get back to you, tell them you will call them, tell them you’d like to send a full resume (actually, it’s preferable if you don’t even have a resume), or anything. Just end your letter with ‘yours sincerely’ and your name. Remember, too, to leave out your phone number because if they can reach you then you just might – even after all your effort above – get a phone call.

And you’re done!

Whew! It’s a lot to remember, but these seven steps are the key elements in avoiding employment with a publisher. If you can do this, then it will free you up to move in another direction and find something else. Have fun!

Here is a sample from our latest direct marketing campaign. We’re rather proud of it, so we thought we’d share it.

It is much better viewed full-screen size. Feel free to leave us a comment!

If you like it, please tweet it, facebook it, email it, or otherwise share it with people you know.

Given that we tweet quite a bit on Twitter and, more’s the point, tweet out stacks of interesting links every week, we figured that it’s about time we compiled a few of them. Here they are – enjoy!

• Prisoners Plagiarise Famous Poems http://bit.ly/2g53ip
• Cover art is a marketing tool but without thought it can go horribly against you! vis: http://bit.ly/Lve1F
• Zine Workshop in Adelaide on 15th August – see http://bit.ly/146DZZ for details!
• Do YOU want your books in Google’s book cloud It’s a dangerous idea, having one company control knowledge, no http://bit.ly/9z0ig
• Why writers shouldn’t bet on careers in magazine writing http://bit.ly/2YaYeb
• The financial reality of a Times best seller. Good reading! And nice to see some transparent honesty. http://bit.ly/TVva8
• Proofing, digitisation and more. Great blog on publication printing technology. Read at http://bit.ly/yMGNt

One of the changes in the punctuation used by many people that I have come across in recent years is the rise of the dash. Increasingly, instead of using commas, people tend to use dashes; whether this is because the dash gives a more immediate sense of a break, or whether it is because of some other reason, I don’t know. What I do know is that the wrong dash is almost always used.

You may not realise it but there are actually three different types of dash that one can use. If you can touch type, and you use a dash in Microsoft Word, you may have noticed that the program automatically changes the dash so that it is slightly longer. But this is still incorrect, too.

Using the right dash isn’t difficult. It’s simply a matter of knowing which one to use where.

Now, because WordPress is not strong on typography (if it is, someone please let me know how to improve my installation!) the dashes here, especially the en dashes, may not be accurately represented. If you run typographical software like InDesign and want to know how to find these dashes, please drop a comment and I’ll let you know.

The Hyphen
You might be surprised, but the hyphen is not a dash. To stick to the topic at hand, it won’t be covered here, but perhaps in a later article.

The Em Dash
The first type of dash is the em dash, so called because it is usually defined as the same length as an ‘m’ in whatever type you are using. This typically measures the full width of the capital M. In Australian usage, the em dash is used ‘closed up’: meaning that it should appear without a space to either side.

The em dash has three uses. These are:

• to signify an abrupt change: This is all very interesting—but it isn’t the point.
• to introduce amplification or explanation: Rainfall has been decreasing for years—a reason for this might be that climate change is affecting rainfall patterns.
• to indicate parenthetical information, in a similar manner to parentheses or brackets: ‘So I told him that I don’t like his dog—I really don’t, you know—and he just slammed the door on me.’

The 2-Em Rule
You can use the 2-em rule to indicate breaks and omissions, or in reference lists and bibliographies to eliminate repetition. The most common uses you would see would be in abrupt breaks in written speech:

‘You get out of here or I’ll ——.’

and to indicate missing words, such as in censored material:
The patient, Mrs M—— came in with a bronchial cough.

The En Dash
The second type of dash is the en dash, and unlike the em dash that indicates separate material, the en dash links things. This dash typically measures approximately half the width of an em dash, or about the width of the letter e. In Australian usage, the en dash is used ‘closed up’, meaning that it should appear without a space to either side, unless there is more than one linking word on each side of the dash.

Its primary uses include:

• to show a span of figures, time and distance: pages 100–105, 10–24 Wimmer Street, January–March
• to show an association between words that retain their separate identities: a Wakefield Press – Borders Books agreement.
• to link prefixes with what follows, in specific circumstances: non–refundable, ex–boyfriend
• to join some types of compound adjectives: HIV–positive, goggle–eyed

It can also be used for the minus symbol in mathematical strings—but this is outside of the scope of this article.

Recommended Reading
AGPS. 2002. Style manual for authors, editors and printers. 6th Edn. John Wiley & Sons: Australia.

The public profile of editing in Australia is not consistent between its national and local societies and organisations. This blog asks the question of whether a profession whose bodies contribute to a split public profile, could ever be considered an industry?

Editors seek greater recognition
As a person who has worked as an editor for a long time, in various capacities; and as one who has been involved at a semi-political level with her local Society of Editors, I know that there is a push for editing to gain greater recognition. This ideal of pushing for greater recognition is, at the local level, described on Google listings as an ‘organisation of editors in the publishing industry’; and states on its homepage a mission to promote editors and editing.

The Institute of Professional Editors (IPEd), however:

exists to advance the profession of editing, by planning and implementing national initiatives…

For those of you outside of the field, IPEd is the national body – formerly the Council of Australian Societies of Editors (CASE). The way it is run now is a bit odd. Whereas before CASE was comprised of people representing their various societies; IPEd is a company in its own right, and all members must act with IPEd‘s interests at heart, and not the societies from which its members originate.

Editing is certainly a profession – now
But the question I would like to ask is ‘is editing an industry?’. Certainly, now that editing has an accreditation exam it is certainly a profession – a paid occupation that involves prolonged training or a formal qualification. With the demise of on-the-job training that occurred a good number of years ago, and the absence of the accreditation exam or any formal qualifications necessary, one could easily argue that for a period of at least ten years (maybe more like fifteen years), editing wasn’t even a profession.

Editors work in other industries – not of and for their own
The Society of Editors (South Australia) also has clear boundaries about where its editors work. If on a Google search it is promoted as an ‘organisation of editors in the publishing industry’, then the society clearly has defined boundaries about what it considers an editor to be, and where it considers an editor to work. My arguments about these sorts of things can be found elsewhere.

In its commonly understood usage, the word ‘industry’ is perhaps best defined by the free online dictionary:

Noun. 1. Industry – the people or companies engaged in a particular kind of commercial enterprise; “each industry has its own trade publications”

According to this definition, therefore, editors are part of the people engaged in a particular kind of commercial enterprise. If editors work in the production of books, their commercial enterprise is publishing – and they therefore belong to that industry. If editors work for BHP Billiton helping to produce technical manuals, they therefore belong to the mining industry.

Editors are the mysterious ‘wordy’ people
Editors, it seems, can almost fit in anywhere. They might collectively belong to a profession of ‘editing’, but they do not have an homogenous or collective public profile. If my local society of editors and IPEd appear to have different reasons to exist (one which is an organisation of editors in the publishing industry, and the other to advance the profession of editing as a whole), then clearly even those within the profession itself are unsure as to why its organisations exist, and what they hope to achieve. On this score, I wouldn’t be surprised if IPEd, as a large and very well organised, well structured, and well defined organisation, gradually made smaller societies redundant.

The profession undervalues its own
Clearly, IPEd doesn’t see the various societies of editors as being essential to its existence, as it allows any organisation to become a member, provided that member supports IPEd. There is no mention of editing whatsoever:

Criteria for new members of IPEd

An organisation that applies to become a Member of IPEd must fulfil the following criteria:

• It must be able to demonstrate that its purposes, constitution and activities are fully consistent with and support those of the Institute.
• Its membership, reckoned in terms of financial members, at the time of application is to be no less than that of the smallest founding Member (c. 70).
• It must have been legally incorporated in an Australian state or territory as a not-for-profit entity for no less than four (4) years before the date of the application, and show reasonable expectation of continuing its existence in terms of steadily increasing paid-up membership over that period.
• It must be able to demonstrate its financial viability, keep financial records of its members’ subscriptions, and have its accounts audited annually.

If the primary body to represent editors doesn’t even mention ‘editing’ in its criteria for new members, that is a good reminder that the profession of editing is undervalued even by its own peak bodies.

So to answer my own question, It is my belief that editing is not an industry – could never be an industry, even if the divisions are somehow repaired or homogenised.

Advancement is hard on shaky foundations
Whether or not the apparent divisions and disagreements I’ve illustrated here are actual, the point is that this is an objective look at a profession’s presentation to the world. If in its public profile, editing in Australia has a shaky or unstable appearance, then advancing a profession to the point where editors gain greater respect is going to be incredibly difficult. Nobody knows what editors do – except for those that have used one. If you have used one, we’d be interested in what you look for in an editor.

An army marches on its feet, so they say – meaning, of course, that good foot health is integral to the health of an army. So, too, does a profession advance on the strong foundations of its supporting frameworks.

On Friday 20 Feb, managing editor of Brascoe Publishing, Leticia Supple, appeared as a guest blogger over at Alan Baxter’s website – returning the favour he did for us. Titled 5 Simple Steps to Editing Your Own Work, it contains essential information for writers.

A sample of this post is below.

There are many stages of editing your own work, and many ways of attacking it. This post takes just one element of self-editing: big-picture changes. It will take you step by step through gaining distance and perspective, how to get a sense of what part of your work needs to change, and a method for getting them under way.

You know that old saying, ‘everybody’s got at least one book in them’? While that is probably true, what I do not think is true is the saying ‘everybody’s got a publishable book in them’. I say that because while nearly anybody can write a good story, especially if they have a clear sense of their audience, it’s my experience that few people can effectively edit their own work.

Good self-editing requires the ability to kill
The process of editing your own work requires you, in the first instance, to be willing to kill your darlings. It doesn’t matter how long it takes you to create your work: short stories and novel-length works all require an enormous input of yourself. Any creative task does. You might find that writing a novel-length work ties you more tightly to your work, but with shorter works you are still tied to them nevertheless.

Editing is a vital skill, but it is not something that many people enjoy…

To read more, head over to the guest blog spot. Even better – if you like it, or have questions, leave a comment and Leticia will respond personally.

So said a client of ours (a PhD student) in an email to me just the other week. It’s fabulous to get this sort of feedback, and even better to be able to share it, but makes me wonder how much training non-Arts PhDs actually get in the skill of crafting an argument.

It’s easy to assume that many postgraduate research students have the skills to build and write good argumentation, particularly since entry to a PhD is usually the result of achieving good scores in prior research degrees.

However, in non-Arts degrees, the focus is usually on research design and analysis, rather than the writing. Yet the writing and development of an argument is integral to gaining a good mark, because a well-structured and well-written thesis demonstrates a researcher’s ability not only to conduct solid research, but also to be able to perform – in writing – in a ‘research community’.

How could this be overcome? Good workshops and training, perhaps, for non-Arts PhDs, at both the beginning of the journey and after the results are in? Better training for supervisors, perhaps, so that they know how to guide their students more effectively?

If you have any ideas, leave comments here to tell us what you think.

We often get requests from doctoral students to edit their theses, and it’s something that we love to do because it’s challenging work. But there are often key things that these students sometimes forget.

Is the picture of a stressed-out postgraduate research student, tearing their hair out in desperation at the last minute of their degree as they prepare to submit their thesis familiar to you? Or do you know somebody who worked their heart out for five years on a PhD and then submitted a lengthy thesis, only to have it returned by exasperated examiners who told them that it needs far more work? It’s utterly heartbreaking; but perhaps the most awful thing about it is that it could be avoided. How? By bringing in a good editor, with enough time for the editor to do some solid work with them.

The first thing students need to know, and perhaps the most important, is that doctoral theses always, no matter how good students might think they are, need an editor to go over them thoroughly before they are submitted. Asking an editor to just ‘proofread’ or ‘polish’ a doctorate is like asking for a health checkup but only asking a doctor to look you over and pronounce that you are ok or not.

Gaining a PhD or professional doctorate is a major step in any academic’s life, especially after working solidly for three, or five, or sometimes ten years on one particular project. Such a huge length of time means that the student – and the student’s supervisor – is usually so close to the content that errors, small and large, creep through to the final piece.

The larger errors are structural, and the minor errors are of grammar, punctuation and word choice. It is not unusual, for instance, to find a doctoral thesis where some basic words are repeated so often that they can make your head spin. It’s not a bad thing: it just means that by the time of writing up the project, the student is so exhausted that thinking about such minor details is just too difficult.

The second thing that students often forget is timing. For a regular, uncomplicated doctoral thesis to about 100,000 words, a solid edit will take approximately six weeks. Once you add in any queries, time for the student to emend its work, and so on, that time can blow out to two months or more. Asking for a good edit two weeks before the deadline is like trying to lose weight by only walking to the mailbox and back every day. It will help, but not by much.

As much as editors love their work, giving them a fortnight in which to edit a thesis is like cramming them into a box and making them work twenty-four hours a day. If we were all honest, editors are perfectionists. That’s why they’re good at what they do: even in a short timeframe they don’t want to hand back something that isn’t substantially improved.

The key here is to bring your editor in early! Ideally, you should start thinking about your editor six months ahead of a tentative submission date – meaning that the absolute best position to be in, is to have finished your draft early.

How do you finish your draft early? By writing as you go. Not only will this help you when it comes time to defend your thesis – because you will learn so much more by writing it along the way – but it also means that you will end in good time to get a thorough edit and take the process a little slower towards the end. Often, this will give you a far better result. You will also be a lot more relaxed come submission time.

It’s easier said than done, and we know that more than most. But if your doctorate is going to push you that extra distance, it is worth it. Isn’t it?