When folks outside the publishing industry hear the words “editor” or “proofreader,” they often think of one single person making corrections to a paper or book. However, that couldn’t be further from the truth; editing is a group effort.
I’ve always thought of the different editorial employees as players at different positions on a sports team. Although everyone in the group is gifted in the field, their biggest talents all lie in various areas. Attention to detail is always a must, but each person within a given company will have different strengths and weaknesses when it comes to which details he or she is good at spotting. This means that for each piece, one proofreader typically is not enough for a quality editing job to be done. One person might re-read the work up to ten times, but still won’t catch some of the issues that a co-worker would.
The use of more than one person is also crucial when it comes to checking to make sure author guidelines are followed. Let’s face it—it’s impossible for every employee within a business to be aware of the guidelines for every single publication that the company deals with; there are simply too many publications being worked on at one time. This means it’s each employee’s responsibility to thoroughly know the rules of a few select ones.
As is the case with any place of business, there are times when an employee isn’t in the office due to vacation, health issues, a family emergency, etc. Each publication should never have just one resident expert within the company. If one employee needs time away from their desk, a few others are waiting in the wings to cover his or her bases during the absence. Inevitably, there will also be times when one employee has some time on his or her hands, but another employee is just too busy to get everything finished on his or her own.
A group of employees might also be invited to a work-related conference for several days. While they might still be able to get some of their work done, they’ll need others to cover for them during the time they are traveling, going to meetings, or participating in networking events. Conferences also involve teamwork for an entirely different reason; one of their main purposes is to make sure everyone—authors, editors, publishers, and those in the production side of the business—is on the same page.
Especially with longer projects (such as editing a book with, say, 20 chapters and 500 pages), an “all hands on deck” mentality is needed. When deadlines are tight and notice is short, the whole crew might just have to drop what they are doing and pitch in to get the job done.
I admit that when I first started working in the editing/publishing industry, I thought that it would be a series of solitary tasks with lots of individualized work. But after being in the business for several years I’ve learned that getting the job done as a team is not only much more efficient, it’s also much more fun.
