Editor’s Note: This is the first in a new series of interviews with BAIPA service providers. If you are interested in being interviewed or being an interviewer, contact [email protected]
What services do you offer authors?
I’m an all-purpose copy editor with 25+ years of experience, and I work with full-length book manuscripts (fiction, nonfiction, and memoirs) as well as online content and material for private and corporate clients.
Tell me about your experience and your approach to the work. What drew you to the work initially?
I’ve actually been writing professionally for 40+ years – mostly in the culinary field (e.g., food*, wine, restaurants, entertaining), but also on topics as diverse as opera, architecture, and nanotechnology. Learning to edit my own writing developed from that. Fortunately, I had excellent English teachers, whose “old-school” methods drilled the rigors of grammar and punctuation into my pliable young brain. (And fortunately, I’ve always had a sort of automatic “spell-check” function – though I do still double-check tricky words when I need to.)
In 1997, I became a co-owner and the managing editor of Wine X Magazine. In addition to writing regular feature articles, I fact-checked and edited all the articles for the magazine’s seven-year tenure.
What do you charge? How much would a copyedit cost?
Unlike editors who set an hourly rate, I prefer to charge by the word, with a sliding scale, decided in advance, that varies according to the work required. This ranges from 3 or 4 cents per word (for a really clean manuscript) to 8 or 10 cents per word (for one that has many errors and/or needs a lot of fact checking). Please note that I give BAIPA members a 25 percent discount on copyediting. (I’ve worked with about 20 BAIPA authors thus far.)
Also, unlike editors who do only one “pass” through a manuscript, I do two, which helps polish the writing even more. Additionally, I provide a separate document – an “Author’s Style Guide” – describing or explaining some of my edits. (Example: The term is “free rein,” rather than “free reign” – it’s a horse metaphor!)
What do you enjoy about this work?
I love to help creative people express their thoughts clearly, as well as perfect the technical aspects of their work. What’s more, I tend to immerse myself in the work I’m editing and connect with authors in a very personal way. It’s also just plain fun – I’m an unapologetic “word nerd,” with a deep interest in language and languages. I delight in finding all sorts of fascinating information and wonderful turns of phrase in the works I edit.
In this same vein, I like that the English language changes and evolves. Many of those hard-and-fast rules that were drilled into all of us have gone by the wayside. For instance, it’s now just fine to split infinitives; even the august Chicago Manual of Style says so. (I’m told that we have “To boldly go…” to thank for that.) And we can use the “singular they” instead of the clumsy “his or her” of the past. With this in mind, when I edit, I use a more flexible approach: I consider myself more of a “descriptivist” (reflecting how language is *actually* used) rather than a strict “prescriptivist” (not open to new ideas).
What are the biggest challenges you face when doing your work?
This is a hard question to answer, actually. But I have had some challenges – first with authors who were afraid to have me edit their work because they thought it “wasn’t good enough” (something we’ve always been able to figure out). At the other extreme, there have been authors who wouldn’t accept my (very gentle) edits, even to correct actual grammatical errors. I’ve even had someone use an AI program on their manuscript, after my final edit, which unfortunately introduced mistakes that hadn’t been there before. Ugggghhhh!!!
What do you do when you’re not copyediting?
I’m working toward finishing the first book in my Drink Wine With Dinner® series: Food and Wine Pairing – The Easy Way! I also have a children’s book in the works, based on the (imagined) origin story of my sweet little cat Calli: The Calico Cat With No Name (And Her Five Kittens).
As you can imagine, I love cooking – and being Italian, I’m a pasta junkie. So I’ve been developing recipes, many pasta-based, for follow-up cookbooks – and for each one, I include suggested wine pairings that explain the reasons behind them.
I’ve always loved nature, and fortunately, there’s a wildlife sanctuary just a couple of miles from where I live in San Rafael. On my walks there, I routinely see dozens of bird species, plus deer, coyotes, river otters and more.
With a lifelong interest in astronomy, I’ve ventured to such far-flung locales as Turkey, Madagascar, Antigua (in the Caribbean), Madrid, Guam, and Japan to see total solar eclipses and a meteor storm.
I also enjoy gardening – especially succulents, which are easy (!). This year I hope to get an early start, clean up the back patio (finally!) and plant some edibles. I’ll start with tomatoes, a few more herbs, and then we’ll see.…
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* This includes a cookbook: Seafood, Pasta and Noodles – The New Classics (Ten Speed Press).