A tightly time-and-money-defined
project leads to an irascible reaction to my work from my contact, and an
implicit sense I might not get paid—though I did secure payment [JCP]
[I fashioned an
account on this experience at least once before, in 2010 or 2011 (but didn’t
publish it), and it has certainly been in my memory for many years. It’s nice
to lay it out here, explaining it so that, hopefully, outsiders can understand
the situation. One good thing about this is that it encompasses all phases of
doing honest work as a freelancer in a “creative” publishing situation—getting
the work, finding a reasonable method for doing the work, pursuing pay
issues—and dealing with a company that seems it might end up being crooked with
you…and I even have a later corroborating anecdote, from someone else’s
experience, presented in a Manhattan editors’ newsletter in 1997. Edits 1/15/14.]
A different version of this essay may appear in the “Jersey Combo Plate” package, not
available online.
“They didn’t
want it good, they wanted it Wednesday.”
—Robert Heinlein,
commenting in relation to doing stories for the old sci-fi pulps; quoted in a
standalone way in The Freelancer
(March-April 1997, p. 7), editorially placed next to a letter by another
freelance editor (the latter to be quoted at the end of this essay [in Part 2])
Subsections below:
My triggering getting work involved both dogged efforts and weird luck
A draconian budget-consciousness
How I managed my time, and the semi-amateurish nature of the manuscript
A “good enough edit”
Part 2 will include:
My vacation, and making the deadline
The denouement
Chasing after the pay (and catching it)
A 1997 anecdote shows a worse experience than mine
Here is a story that’s almost 20
years old. It involves a project, one of the few non–educational-book
manuscripts I’ve done copy editing work for, and the published book you can
find information on online, in terms of it being linked to me. (This has to do
with a Google Books listing for a work of my own, and the way the information
on the copy edited book is linked to me is quirky—it is [or was, not too long ago] cross-referenced
to a self-published book of mine. There was no apparent reason for Google Books
to do this other than that I had worked on both books in some way.)
The story below may seem a bit
overly detailed, and moreover it is from “another world” to the extent it is
from pre-Internet, early-1990s publishing. From another angle, you may ask, Did I ever try to edit for psychological
publishers? Yes, I have, and the one covered here, Jason Aronson, is one.
But it would seem there are general oddities about psychology publishers, even
in a wider field (print publishing) that would seem to outsiders to typically have
oddities that almost seem contrary to the industry’s business interests. Other,
much shorter anecdotes I have on other psychological publishers would help bring
this point home.
But this Aronson experience is
relevant for this reason: it was, I
believe, the only time I’ve done editing for a book—arguably a sort of “trade
book”—where I would have presumably been the only copy editor. (This though
what actually happened is that the production editor did a second edit—and may
have gone a bit too far.)
Meanwhile, despite with how my
being a novice at this point in 1994 may help explain Aronson’s handling of me
here, starting in 1995 I would do editing work of one sort or another for a
book within every year until 2013. This would account for at least 24 books, by
a rough count, and all of them educational, reference, or otherwise
narrow-audience books—including four literature textbooks, about a dozen yearly
library reference books, three editions of The
World Almanac, some religious-school textbooks, and a book compiling essays
on the “psychology of terrorism.” In all or nearly all these cases, there are
typically more than one editor doing the level of work I do on them (even if I
am relied on, in specific instances, as a “main editor” of sorts). The bottom
line is that, despite the high-handed way the production editor of the project
described below summed me up after my work, I would end up doing some form of
copy editing for many, many more volumes.
What can I say about this 1994
situation after all this later work? One thing is that you “always have to
start somewhere,” and learning to ride a bike may “require” falling down. But sometimes a project is handled by a
publisher so questionably that it still looks about that bad 20 years after the
fact. And what that means for people starting out in the field can maybe be
gleaned from a careful look, combining memories and a re-check of records. And
the issue of getting paid is one handy lesson that can be gotten here, if
nothing else.
##
Maybe attuned to more modern viewpoints: Nowadays, when it comes to
arguably sleazy book-editing arrangements, perhaps the more common stories are
characteristically freelance-business matters mediated by the Internet, with that medium’s being apt to deliver
problems such as with other dubious “business propositions” regarding book
publishing (such as for new authors), like cases examined by the blog Writer
Beware. As we will see, in 1997, Jason Aronson worked with a freelancer
(unsatisfactorily to her) in another state, leaving her hamstrung partly
because of her distance from its offices. (This doesn’t necessarily mean the
current form of Aronson is likely to do this.)
But the peculiar nature of this
story I’m to tell from 1994, and what authority I have to tell it, relate to a
situation that I think potentially can still come up today, because new technology, for some kinds of books at
least, hasn’t erased the need to have books copy edited. And this
particular story is one of a pretty cheap company, which is the sort of thing
that doesn’t go away.
I am writing this in part from
memory, but I also started to refer to my old business records, and I hope not
to need to recheck too many little details. Jason Aronson Publishers was in
1994 a book publisher of a few decades’ duration, started by a doctor named
Jason Aronson, and it specialized in psychology books, and later it started publishing
Judaica books as well (it still does this now). I speak in the past tense
because it was bought by a firm (Rowman & Littlefield) that is located in—and
hence Aronson moved to—Maryland. And even if Aronson currently “exists” as an
imprint called Jason Aronson that produces the same kind of works it once did
(and even if it does, it’s safe to say this is merely an imprint, little more than a name at the foot of a title page), Aronson
most likely had its main business “essence” when it was located in the New York
metropolitan area.
It was located in New York City in
its earlier years, but when I dealt with it—and for quite some period of its
existence—it was in Northvale, N.J., which is in Bergen County, immediately to
the west of New York City (across the Hudson River). Whether its quality as a
business declined when it moved to New
Jersey, I don’t know.
It had been a reputable enough
publisher, I suppose, for its niche; in my independent research into
psychological matters, I encountered a book by Murray Bowen, a noted psychological researcher/writer who
specialized in a systems theory approach, which was published by Aronson. The
book was Family Therapy in Clinical
Practice (New York: Jason Aronson, 1978).
My triggering getting work involved both dogged efforts and weird luck
How I learned about them I’m not
sure, but I probably saw them advertise for editors or the like in the classified
section of the newspaper (they used to advertise this way for staff jobs a lot),
so I wrote them the type of query letters I did in the early 1990s to try to
get work. No one I directly knew tipped me off (or otherwise helped me) to get work
there. I recall writing them a number of times (with cover letter and resume; I
don’t recall if I would have enclosed a work sample at that time; probably
not).
When I finally got a response
that led to work, it was quite quirky—and this in a sense presaged how odd they
would be to work for. (I think in prior years I’d written them and gotten a
sort of routine letter saying my resume would be kept on file—this was when
that was a kind of standard business practice; but nothing more came of this
from Aronson. Also, as I had learned to do, and as I would continue doing, at
different levels, for many years, I contacted this employer more than once to
kindle or rekindle interest in me. A recheck of my business records shows that
I was given a copy editing test by them in November 1992, then I didn’t get the
results—with my “failing”—until February 1993.) (See End
note.)
It was possibly in late February
1994, maybe very early March, that Muriel J., the woman who was the editorial
director there at the time (and who seemed, I think, to be the main one to contact
to seek freelance editing work), wrote me a letter as if I’d just failed a copy
editing test they gave me, or such (this may have been in response to my having
earlier sent a “tickler” letter to Aronson, but Muriel J.’s letter may have
come out of the blue). I had taken no such
test yet in 1994.
My deciding what to do in
response would have happened by about early March 1994; I answered by mail,
including my noting that I hadn’t just taken the test. In response, a letter
from Muriel J. came, dated March 11 and arriving March 16. This was a little
more than two weeks after I had left the medical publisher Clinicians
Publishing Group in February, which for me was a time resounding with shock
from how it ended.
(This may all strike you as of
personal interest mainly; but it’s interesting to re-piece a history of this
time, to explain for you why I dealt with Aronson as I did—and it also seems
like from a “greatly different time of my life,” unlike some other stuff from
that time, as in local politics.)
As I suggested, March 1994 was a
depressed, rather desolate time for me; it had been a tough winter for everyone,
and the principals of CPG had been scandalous with me as led to my being fired
from their company (this situation, actually having developed over months back
into late summer 1993, included, as I’ve said elsewhere [see the
subsection “2. Into a Kafkaesque
situation”], my having been declined group health insurance by their
carrier in fall 1993; I had been in touch with the state about this by December
1993, and the CPG partners came to know this). In March 1994, after having left
CPG and having made an unemployment claim, I had been pursuing an appeal of an
unemployment-insurance denial (and I would win the appeal); and it was almost a
shock that I ended up getting regular work again starting in April, now doing
clerical work at a branch of the insurance company MetLife, through the temp
agency Olsten. Of course, I was desperate for paying work given my expenses,
including car payments.
In any event, how my business
with Aronson slotted into this several-week situation was about as densely
arrayed as seeking work ever was in those long-walk years; and certainly I was
eager to continue publishing work, especially trying my hand at editing of
books if I could. So I wrote back to the editorial director after receiving the
“you failed” letter, saying there was a mistake; I had not just taken the copy editing test (which was true). I added
something like that it would be a shame to be denied work based on such a
mistake.
Muriel J. then sent me a test to
take—her cover letter (already mentioned) was dated March 11, 1994—and this
time, according to an April 1 letter from her, I passed it. I was put on their
freelancers list and was thus presumably able to get copy editing work (I
should wait for a production editor to contact me).
This sort of oddity might lead
some to say, “Watch out for this place.” (If I examined my records on them
further, I might have to add more crazy details on an erratic place.) At that
time, I was rather in a situation of “beggars can’t be choosers,” but I might also have felt this test situation
was something of an isolated quirk, and I was glad to be able to get the copy editing work. Plus, in pursuing publishing
work as I did in those years, you had to do a lot of “not taking ‘No’ for an
answer.”
Then the waiting started. When
would someone call me? I sent Muriel J. a tickler letter in late May, and this
would lead to something that month. A production editor, Janet W., contacted me
about a project, which I’ll refer to—as she did—as the “Bulka book.” This was a
reprint of a book under their Judaica umbrella. I had forgotten all about this
item until I went through my records days ago. I find that, after trying to
start work on it in June, I returned the project to them, with apologies—I felt
unqualified to do it. I think it was implicit in my previous applying letters
to them (going back to at least 1992) and my educational background that I knew
psychology, but not nearly so much stuff that was quintessential Judaica. (Janet
in her June 15 cover memo said this book followed “Jewish book style,” not
Aronson’s usual style manual for psychological books.) Today I remember very
little of the “Bulka book,” but it must have been pretty foreign to me to
return it. Surprisingly in retrospect, this didn’t cause hard feelings toward
me at Aronson. (I will refer to it again briefly below.)
By the way, I mentioned an
Aronson style sheet for the psychology books: they indeed had this, and I have
at least one copy of it, and it was pretty detailed about technical matters
such as how to style a list of references to books or other media (in a way
generally typical of all types of style—whether AMA, Chicago Manual, and so on;
Aronson basically, I think, adapted American Psychological Association style).
But I think it may have been vague or unspecific on certain issues (which isn’t,
broadly speaking, necessarily bad in itself), and one production editor in the
correspondence I have says that the Aronson style sheet wasn’t complete, or
such…which is relevant when you consider how much ground such an editor has (or
may not have) to take you strongly to task for missing certain things in actual
editing you’ve done for the firm. That is, if you are excoriated for how you’ve
done editing for them (never mind your years of relevant experience), and yet
they admit their own style sheet is lacking…then what standards are we talking
about here?
A draconian budget-consciousness
The basic problem with this
place was that—aside from such procedural carelessness as led to how I was
added to their list of freelancers—it was very cheap. Years later, in 2001, I
would work at a magazine publisher in Montvale, N.J., also in Bergen
County. I encountered
some people there who had done in-house editorial work for Aronson for a time,
and they acted as if it was a fairly grand place to have been and they spoke of
certain staffers there with a sort of fondness. In 2001 I regarded this with
confident irony, or at least felt there were solid grounds for a difference of
opinion on Aronson; you could say I felt about Aronson in line with what I
think is fairly common, and not simply within the book-publishing world: a
media place might be (in the opinion of some of its workers) “great” to work at
in-house, but a stinker in one way or
another for freelancers. Aronson
would certainly turn out in 1994 to be a bit of a stinker in terms of how they
handled me—which I think conformed with how they handled freelancers in
general, though over some years, in a different context, I would cite my work
for it with some pride (and from my angle as a freelancer) as an example of copy
editing I’d done for a book. I’m always willing to highlight the positives of
work I’ve done, if they are there, from a technical standpoint, even if the
company from the managerial standpoint verged on making quality work there
impossible.
The project I finally worked on
came up in the later summer of 1994. This was several months after I’d been
added to their freelancers list. The project would end up starting a few weeks
before Labor Day, run through Labor Day, and end a few days after.
The way they worked with a
freelancer was idiosyncratic—in a way biased toward cheapness—which will prelude
to a story of how I got my money from them. As I was finding then when going to
educational meetings of the Editorial Freelancers Association (EFA), based in Manhattan
(and whose meetings I started attending in 1994), the way a freelance copy
editor worked with trade books published in Manhattan was this: a contract of
whatever sort with the freelancer was arranged, with a deadline date pre-agreed
on, which seemed usually to mean a project (editing a trade book manuscript) could
be turned around in just a very few days. I recall hearing stories about a book
being edited in 48 hours, with all-nighters “pulled” in the process. This was
not a way I could work; and I don’t know how typical it was, but I have a
feeling it was, in NYC. Anyway, it
apparently worked well enough for those in NYC who routinely did this. And the
freelancer would charge whatever hourly rate that person was apt to seek, and
could be agreed on, for whatever hours it took.
So, for a 48-hour project, if
the rate was $25 an hour, that could mean a chunky paycheck. But in the
abstract, this might seem a bear of an item of work to do—in 48 hours.
The copy I have of the 1996 Rates and Business Practices Survey of
the EFA says that, for copy editing, the following rates were used by
practitioners (with hourly rates shown here as low, average, and high): books (“publishing industry”), $12, $19,
$75; books (“nonprofit”), $15, $19,
$30. For what I had more experience in at the time, magazine articles (with my own experience more often proofreading,
but sometimes copy editing): (“publishing”), $12, $23, $50; (“nonprofit”), $10,
$19, $25.
Aronson wasn’t quite so tight-fisted
with a short turnaround as with the hypothetical 48 hours in Manhattan that I noted (or, at least and in
practical terms, not as it seemed at first). But it was strict in how it worked
out the terms of the project to keep it cheap for itself. First, as was unusual
in any sort of book publishing I directly knew about (even educational
publishing, at least Prentice Hall, didn’t do this), it strictly set pay rates
at $10 an hour (I think) for proofreading, and $12 an hour for copy editing
(EFA members in Manhattan
seemed typically to negotiate rates).
This was a bit low even then (compare the rates I listed above), and it’s
certainly low by today’s standards. (In fact, even if you consider there was a
“New Jersey differential”—things would be cheaper here—the Aronson rate was on
the low end of the likely relevant scales—and there’s nothing “official” in New
Jersey; you find through experience, and especially from work peers, what the
going rates tend to be.)
Then Aronson had you estimate
how much time it would take you to do the job. I came up with 24 hours, or just
a little more. (I did this by calculating via a page-per-hour rate, referring
to my own work style/speed on prior material I’d dealt with, including Aronson’s
own copy editing test, which took me close to three hours, with two reads—this
is a reasonable way to try to estimate work time for such a project.) The
contract they would work up with you rather held you to that time—and they had a firm calendar deadline (a
date). In this case, it was some weeks into the future. There was also (in some
form) a clause in the agreement where, if you needed to renegotiate the
schedule a bit, you should “immediately” give them a call.
Another feature was that they
absolutely required that they ship the work to you by UPS, the cheapest
delivery means at the time. I might have asked to pick it up myself, but this
may have been declined by them. I don’t know if they’d said they wanted me to
ship the work back by UPS, but I
ended up sending it by U.S.
mail, and I billed them for the postage for this. (Today this is fairly
reasonable practice in the industry, at least the corner I work in, though I
don’t remember how Aronson specifically liked this.)
How I managed my time, and the semi-amateurish nature of the manuscript
So I had this project (I was
certainly working full-time at MetLife in summer 1994), and I had a very few
weeks to turn the project around. It started in August (the middle of the
month). I had sketched for myself a projected schedule that seems to have
wedged the work into long Saturdays for a few weeks. Also, as it happened, I
was supposed to visit a friend in Brattleboro,
Vermont, for the Labor Day
weekend. (This had been in the works for weeks.) So after some days of my work
for Aronson at home, for a few days I took the project with me to work on, on
the road.
This whole situation, as so far
described, wasn’t so unworkable or unrealistic. One problem that arose is that
the project got to me a bit late (six
days from the date of the production editor’s cover letter, according to a
letter of mine sent with the returned ms.). For some reason it took one or two
days longer to reach me than was originally anticipated, so I lost a day or two
(or more) to work on it. (All this account, to people who’ve worked on books
for years, may seem rather plodding and “novice-like,” but I am showing how
anyone, I think, would tackle such a project as an early effort, which everyone who ever works on books has to
do—their first book-editing project: and it best involves careful planning
based on your past experience and how you can most responsibly arrange your
schedule.)
When I finally got it, there
were some definite quirks in the project itself. The manuscript, for A Primer of Kleinian Therapy, was by a practicing
psychologist (Irving Solomon, Ph.D.) who was not a multi-work author (the
production editor who worked with me, Judy C., said Aronson had worked with him
before, but I can’t find anything else by him in the long set of books listed
as in the series [or “library”] presented in the front matter of the
1995-printed Primer, which “library”
was of “object relations,” a specialized area of talking therapy). I don’t know
whether the Primer was his first or
second book to that point, but he certainly didn’t have many books to his
credit by that point. (From a Google search, I find that on Amazon, a previous book
by him, published by Aronson in 1992, is The
Encyclopedia of Evolving Techniques in Psychodynamic Therapy.)
The manuscript was hard copy, of
course, and it was printed in an early-1990s Apple format, with a rather nerdy
typeface—and weirdly, the line width got narrower as the pages went on, until
it was only about an inch and a half (or two inches) wide. So you had a
manuscript that was about 442 pages (plus “front matter,” per the parameters-setting
memo I got from Judy C.), but the line width got absurdly small. The finished
book was 228 pages, including back matter (that included an index), with not
much type per page. I’ve long estimated that if a manuscript is X pages,
double-spaced, at the usual typing line width and character size, the finished
book, if no major cuts are done, is about 65 percent of the X pages of the ms.
In this case, the book was about 51 percent of the ms. size, which shows how
few words were on each ms. page after a while.
Sidebar:
An exhibit. Here is a copy of two documents that I copied
together, reduced, so they fit on roughly an 8 ½ by 11 sheet (the originals
each fit on such a sheet; note the documents are sideways). On the left is the parameters-setting memo from Judy
C. that I mentioned; the lightly written-in numbers of 24 (for hours) 288 (for
dollars) is what I sketched, but I don’t think I ever got a copy from them of
the memo, with this information, as signed by them. The item on the right side
of this pdf is a letter I received from the author in early 1996, long after my
involvement on this project in 1994 was done (I never corresponded with him
directly in 1994). I would be able to explain this letter in Part 2;
essentially, I contacted Dr. Solomon in late 1995 (first try, October; second
try, December, which he answered in January 1996), seeking to work for him as
an independently contracting freelancer, not tied to Aronson. His answer written on my letter is, “Sorry
but I am not working on any ms so that I have no need for your skill.” It would
seem, from an Amazon listing seen on about January 7, 2014, that he would not
publish another book until 2005, and then through the New York publisher
Springer.
This weird-line-width factor
itself wasn’t so tricky to work with day to day, but it shows some of the
amateurish nature of the project. It was written in a somewhat conversational,
occasionally gossipy style. To my mind, it seemed to focus on sexual issues
reported in the writer’s clinical setting an awful lot. (This is not to
criticize or condemn it, but to show some of the source for how it would be a
tricky editing task.)
A couple things can be addressed
for laypeople who don’t know how, in publishing, people (writer and editor) can
be jumbled together on a project pell-mell in terms of their backgrounds,
though this might be beside the point in terms of making a competent finished
product.
(1) With this project, the
psychologist had his professional experience and wisdom, which informed his
book. Deficiencies in the manuscript due
to his not being a professional writer were not unlikely, but then the
question was how these deficiencies should be handled. It should be noted I am not knocking the author as to his professional
qualifications or experience in psychology, or saying that his book was
“amateurish” for any other than technical reasons that can very understandably
arise from people new to writing book manuscripts.
(2) This book was a sort of
handbook, a “primer,” that articulated concepts and practices in Kleinian
therapy (which were originated by therapist and theorist Melanie Klein).
This was not an area I was especially well versed in when I got the assignment
of copy editing the book. But was my technical proficiency in the subject
matter an issue? No. I did know enough from my own psychology-educational
background and, importantly, I had enough basic psychological intuition and
instinct to extemporaneously do well enough in grappling with the semantics of
the book, while I was also expected to do not
a lot of semantically-oriented copy editing (though we will see some
paradoxes on that issue). This while the text introduced certain little new,
intriguing, and edifying concepts to me.
(3) The conception that a lot of
laypeople to the publishing world might have that it is a horror for someone who
is not an expert in a field to be doing lower-level editing—such as copy
editing and proofreading—on technical works is
quite misguided. First, this level of editing often doesn’t require full understanding of all of the content
of the material you edit (as I’ve found from experience in this area—when you
can sometimes feel sorely put to the test in keeping up with what an article is
saying). Second, as was no less the case with me and Aronson, a low-level
editor is often thrown into material that he or she may be quite unfamiliar
with. (This can especially happen in areas of more traditionally medical
publishing or promotions, and sometimes in that realm the high-handedness of
the manager-effected ill fits can grate on you—in moments of exercising your
conscience—as the lower-level editor.) Yet as often happens, and as gives you a
bit of a break, even with a medically specialized piece, you are only expected
to straighten out errors in grammar, punctuation, and clarity that usually
don’t require you to fully understand all the content as to its semantic or
technical richness. (But with this Aronson project we will see some stark
ambiguities in expectations from the managers.)
(4) Not so much an issue in this
story I’m detailing, if the idea is that doctors or other high-level
professionals are the ones best equipped to write on (and, therefore, by the
laypeople’s apparent assumptions, edit)
the particular subjects peculiarly within their field, this idea is quite
wrong: doctors and the like can be among
the worst writers you ever saw. They are in need of editors—in a way that is very generally true of many
writers across all fields, and is particularly (even acutely) true of a fair
amount of doctors. But then the question is, where do you find the best editors
for them? This is, of course, as I’ve found, an area where editors get to do
this by simple footwork, experience, trying a new career area, luck—as with any
other kind of editing. You don’t go to school for this or get licensed for it.
(At least, you didn’t use to.)
But in the case of this Aronson
project, we weren’t even going to such a pinnacle of professionalism as could
be strived for within the factors I’ve just described. The editing I was to
do—aside from the issue of the pay for it—was decidedly “un-rigorous” in a way.
A “good enough edit”
Judy C., the production editor,
had stipulated that the manuscript needed “a light edit only.” Which means
what? So I tried to go somewhat easy on the ms. The book, as I’ve suggested,
was supposed to be a Q&A thing, a “primer,” so it could be slightly
informal in style.
The paragraph I just wrote was
what I recalled based on 20-year-old memory. Actually, the phrase used by Judy
C. to describe the expected editing was different; but I also find that Muriel
J., in her March 11 letter to me, conveyed the “light edit” standard.
Fortunately, in a spare moment I
located my original folder of Jason Aronson records, and found all the old
letters, and even production-related materials for the Primer book. I had originally (days ago) thought there was no use
here of the sort of production-related log that some books are edited with:
this is something I’ve rarely used, but which numerous older-generation editors
who work closer in the orbit of NYC are familiar with: something with boxes or
spaces for editorial notes, such as on use of terms, that may be alphabetized
or such. But I do find from my records that such a log was used by Aronson,
including on this project; I find I have blanks for the log, but I hardly used
it for this job (I used some page or two in a limited way; I did make a
conscientious list of problems to follow up).
(Years later, I would encounter
some project managed by Dee Josephson, an editor especially versed in
educational books, whom I first met and worked with at TSI Graphics in 1999,
where I worked briefly as a staff production editor of sorts; Dee had worked
previously as a staffer at Prentice Hall. She knew about these logs, and seemed
a bit surprised I had never worked with one before. She and I generally got on
OK—including in freelance arrangements in later times [e.g., about 2001]—and I
hope to return to her in another blog context.)
Looking today at the letters I
exchanged with Aronson staffers is enlightening, but generally this doesn’t
undercut my arguments here. First, the person who had said “a light edit only” (aside
from Muriel J.’s variation) was Janet W., whom I had worked under briefly on
the “Bulka book,” some weeks after I was first put on Aronson’s freelancer list.
The production editor who
supervised me on the Primer, Judy C.,
had a cover letter with the project, dated August 9, 1994, that numbered a few
specific guidelines, and had the general remark, “We emphasize what we call the
‘good enough edit.’ This means, in the words of Ann Landers [actually, it may
have been someone else, but…], ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.’ Please
concentrate on what needs fixing, rather than improving what’s good enough.”
Dwell on that last sentence a moment, and consider the guidelines:
“It
requires a light edit only.”
“We
emphasize…the ‘good enough edit.’”
When we get to Judy C.’s
reaction to my work in a September 19 letter, I think my argument through this
whole entry will be quite undergirded with nice details. In other words, if I
seem to be tedious here, this is all important to explain the denouement—itself
quick enough—of my involvement with Aronson in 1994. (And if I stumble with
some minor details, that’s my fault, but maybe I’m just trying to do a “light
edit” here, too.)
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A certain procedural approach
was important to defining how I worked: to
get all these pages done—even considering the tiny line width later in the
ms.—I made a priority to keep up a certain pace. With the days limited by a
hard deadline, and my getting a slightly late start, I kept myself moving, and
did not try to fuss over the language. (Of course, I’d done millions of words
of proofreading and copy editing in three in-house editing jobs beforehand.) It
also seems I made an effort to rigorously read over the entire ms. twice
(probably the second time I was more cursory than the first time).
Now you can see that there were
a few sources for problems here: two were the time limits and the subjectivity
about what constitutes—to adapt the earlier, spring 1994 guideline—a “light
edit”—or, per Judy C., a “good enough edit.” How light is light enough, or too light? How “good enough” is “good enough”?
But another source of problems
is more general, and insidious: the tendency for you as a freelancer to meet (maybe
best appreciated after you have done the work) with a certain vagueness in
expectations from a manager for your work: that is, you may encounter a first “iteration” of guidelines from the manager
that suggest one level of precision, and then you may receive a later
assessment by the manager, accompanied by her claim to be citing the original
guidelines, that implies something a good bit different. (And this can
create suspicion bound up with indignation: was the manager suddenly asserting
a new standard in order to have “cause” for faulting your work, maybe even not
paying you?). And this sort of thing, I think, is not uncommon.
There certainly has been
generally promulgated discussion of this sort of thing in the freelance
editor’s world.
In the 1991 EFA booklet Occupational Hazards: Problems Frequently
Encountered by Freelancers, there is the category of “Jobs That Aren’t What
They Were Supposed to Be,” and this section includes the remark (p. 9): “The
most frequently occurring situations are the copyediting job that turns out to
be a rewrite and the proofreading job that turns into copyediting.” My own
version with Aronson could maybe be described as “the expectation for light,
hurried copy editing that turns out to be an expectation for heavier copy
editing that the time didn’t really allow.”
Part 2 is here, on my other blog.
For a 2012 situation defined by
more modern technology (which didn’t entail getting work through the
arrangement, thank goodness), see this entry. The problems with this are in many ways different from what I am describing about Jason Aronson.
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