What editors *actually* want authors to do with their editorial feedback

This isn't a hostage situation. You don't have to choose whether to capitulate to our demands or try and negotiate the demands away. Here's what we're hoping to do instead.

If you’re a first-time or aspiring author: do you know how to work with editors? Book editors?

Do you know what the people who’ll edit your work—literary agents, acquiring editors, etc.—hope you’ll do with their feedback?

Do you really?

Here’s why I ask: in my experience, many, many more industry n00bs think they know how to work well with editors than actually do. This is as true for agents, etc. as it is for authors, but since most of you reading this are in the latter category—and I’m just generous—we’re going to focus on criticizing you today. Not me. You.

Here’s the thing: responding well to editorial feedback on a book is its own distinct skillset. It DOESN’T look like any of the following:

• integrating a thesis advisor’s feedback into an academic paper

• responding to a magazine editor’s notes or ideas as a freelance journalist

• completing a copywriting assignment for a corporate client

• working with a fact checker

• employing a ghostwriter

• people-pleasing

• being graded

• being wrong

• being in an argument

• getting in trouble

• subconsciously reenacting childhood trauma

When an author-editor relationship is going wrong, however, it generally does resemble one or more of the above.

What results is a lot of needless suffering and dull writing. See also: career disappointment.

Through trial and error, most authors do eventually figure out how to work well with their editors—but I’d rather spare you that journey if I can.

Forthwith I will show you how to make the most of your editors and editorial feedback like the seasoned pro I know you will one day be.

Let’s start by going over the fundamental point of why we do so much developmental editing in this industry:

Our mission is to shape your book into its most valuable, galvanic, and appealing form—as art AND as commodity—in the minds of your specific target reader(s).

Commercial publishing is a capitalist industry. Our shared goal as author and editor is to sell a cultural commodity to book-buying customers for profit.

As the author, your role is to create the rough commodity and know roughly who it’s for. Your editor’s role is to help you polish and package that commodity into something that is appealing, available, and worthy of purchase in those people’s minds.

If you’re working together properly, neither you nor your editor should be concerned with satisfying, angering, kowtowing to, or defying each other. You really shouldn’t be looking at another at all.

Instead, what you should be doing is both looking outward at your target reader with deep interest and empathy, using what you observe to shape everything you do.

Neither you nor your editor is “the boss.”

Properly undertaken, the author-editor collaboration is a partnership of equals. It’s NOT supposed to resemble an employer-employee, master-servant, parent-child, or teacher-student dyad. Sure, an acquiring editor might represent the interests of a corporate financier / logistics manager participating in your book deal, but even in that dyad, you, the author, represent the IP. It’s a partnership.

If one or both parties in this partnership behaves like the other’s superior or inferior, neither party will be able to do their job properly. Because the job is to devote our full attention to the desires and needs of the book’s prospective buyers. Not each other. Not to mutual hypervigilance, annoyance, or deference.

If we do that, the book will suffer for it. Probably a lot.

How to tell when you’re doing it wrong

Most authors and editors don’t enter the editorial development process determined to act a fool. If we end up doing so, it’s generally due to ignorance or subconscious projection. Either way, the underlying problem is a lack of conscious understanding. So it can be hard to spot.

Still: we’re all capable of spotting it. Like a black hole in the cosmos, a dysfunctional editorial relationship has an event horizon—and you can see it in the participants’ neuroses, gripes, and complaints about each other.

For example: authors caught in this dysfunction tend to say things like this:

“I feel like the goalposts keep moving here.”

“But you said you wanted me to use more I sentences.”

“I notice there aren’t any contractions in the alternate language you suggested. Are you implying there’s something wrong with contractions?”

“But I accepted all of your changes! What do you mean, the proposal still needs work?”

“Suresuresure, great notes, can do.”

[4 hours pass]

“Hi, boss! I’ve incorporated your notes! Full revision attached!”

[Ron Howard voice: he did not incorporate the notes.]

Can you pick out what all of these quotes have in common? Eh, I’ll just tell you: they’re all predicated on the assumption that the author’s job is to validate the editor. Or obey the editor. Or something other than stand next to the editor in mutual regard of the target audience.

Remember: editors are not bosses, children, or parents. Editors—competent ones, at least—make suggestions with an eye to how we might connect this book by this author more strongly to its audience.

Whatever specific things they suggest might not actually do the trick. But that’s okay: they’re not the person in charge of doing the trick, the creative innovation. That’s you. The Author.

Editors don’t care whether you act on their specific suggestions for doing the trick; they just want you to do the trick.

Put another way: editors are frequently wrong about how exactly to enhance the value of a book in the minds of its target audience, but they are almost never wrong in saying some part of the book is not yet valuable enough.

Why do editors make specific suggestions for solving various problems if we don’t expect our authors to use them?

I can’t speak for everyone, but I make specific suggestions for a couple of reasons:

• I’m a concrete, literal thinker. (Neurodivergent. Hello.) To me, articulating abstractions feels like describing the facial features of The Invisible Man to a friend in order to get her to believe he’s standing right in front of us as we speak. It’s much easier to just get a jar of glitter out of my purse, dump it on the Invisible Man’s head, point to the silhouette now covered in my glitter, and say LOOK, THE INVISIBLE MAN. (Metaphorically.)

• The alternative to concrete suggestions is often open-ended, vague criticism: “I’m bored and have been for five-plus pages.” “Make this entire third of the book, um, better.” This feels mean.

So what do editors really want authors to do with their edits? What’s the dream collaboration?

As an executive editor once described it like this to me over coffee:

“My dream is that I write on an author’s draft, ‘I feel like this scene is missing a car.’ He says, ‘OMG, you’re right.’ I don’t see him again until it’s time for the metaphorical dress rehearsal. When we get to the scene in question, it turns out he’s worked in in not just ‘a car,’ but a fleet of Ferraris. It’s amazing. Everyone in the audience is just screaming.”

At this point, the editor’s eyes misted over, seeing Valhalla in his mind’s eye. “Then the author gets out of one of the Ferraris, takes off his helmet and thanks me for having such a great idea.”

Spoiler alert: your agents and editors have imposter syndrome, too.

Do you understand this editor’s point, though?

There’s a lot you can learn from his story:

• Our dream is to work with an author who’s obsessed with their target audience first and us second.

• The dream is that we and our authors collaborate by looking outward together to observe and meet the audience’s desires. Neither of us is particularly concerned with our own, although we do enjoy the occasional compliment break.

• We long for authors to take the lead on creative innovation. We want them to look out for the missing thing we’re identifying with our notes—even if it’s between the lines. And we do not just want but HOPE that they come up with a better plan for filling that gap than we ever could.

• Empathy, empathy, empathy. In book publishing, a book’s commercial chances live or die on how well the team behind it crafts every aspect of its creation, development, and design with empathy for its target audience. It can take authors a while to believe us on this front. We love authors who believe it straightaway.

The annoying fact of human existence is that we are a social species. We’re nodes who need a network to be alive.

Like our personalities themselves, therefore, our empathy and emotional maturity can only grow in relationships—as something between first and within later.

That’s the real reason why great books, hit books—books that are successful by any metric—require more than just one person to create. It’s why Eliot needed Pound and Morrison needed Gottlieb.

Brilliance, like electricity itself, happens between. It lights up only when people are connected, conductive, their valences surging unencumbered into each other’s hearts.

“The School of Athens,” Raphael, 1509-1511