Editors ???

[KRD19254]

How do you know an Editor is a good editor or just someone who wants to get the scoop on the newest of stories?

What is L's criteria for listing Editors - do Editors need to have posted L stories to prove themselves?

Shouldn't editors be rated like the writers 0-4.99 based on the story they edited?

I personally have email requested to a number of editors listed and never got a reply - is it because they do not what to hang their reputation on a newbie? Should L police their Editors list - listing the number of stories THAT Editor worked to give us some understanding as to who is active or NOT?

How does a newbie/virgin get beyond that branded label?

All my stories have been dinged for lack of Editing, well MS Word and my dyslexia can only do so much when no Editor will step forward.

 

[KeithD]

Anyone can volunteer to function as an "editor" here. You take your chances on them being any better at it than you are yourself, and you have to be pretty good at it yourself to discern whether someone else is--or you have to see some sort of evidence of experience and training for it, which is unlikely to happen much on a Web site where anonymity is so important.

When you see something in the same vein as what you write that you think looks like particularly clean copy, you could ask the author if she/he can share who, if anyone, edited it. The best thing you can do is study a lot of grammar yourself to minimize your need for editing. Then a second reader would do you well, to pick up mistakes that would be obvious to a fresh set of eyes but that yours will read right through because you've been too close to what you meant to (and thought you did) write.

You also need to internalize that there's really no such thing as error-free copy, even that's been published by a mainstream publisher, and learn to live with a few misspellings and such in the stories. This isn't the New Yorker, and the New Yorker copy isn't perfect either.

 

[Bramblethorn]

How do you know an Editor is a good editor or just someone who wants to get the scoop on the newest of stories?

You go to a professional editing house that vets their authors, and you pay the rates that they ask for a professional service.

If you don't want to do that, and you're relying on free volunteer editing, you should expect it to be a bit of a lottery. Unless you can get them to provide proof of their RL identity and editing cred (and I'd never, ever provide that kind of info to a Literotica stranger) all you can do is try them out and see how they do, or ask for recommendations from other authors.

What is L's criteria for listing Editors - do Editors need to have posted L stories to prove themselves?

There are no criteria other than willingness to volunteer. There's generally an undersupply of volunteer editors, so it wouldn't make a lot of sense to impose further restrictions on who can edit.

Shouldn't editors be rated like the writers 0-4.99 based on the story they edited?

Hell no.

I don't know how other editors find it, but for me, the better a story is when I get it, the better it is when I'm done editing. If I have to stop every couple of lines to correct basic spelling/grammar issues, it's harder for me to pick up structural problems. I've also had cases where authors completely ignored my advice (which is their prerogative) and then got criticised by readers for publishing stories with errors that I'd already identified.

So, when readers see a story with poor "editing", they have no way of knowing which problems are the editor's fault, or how many problems they didn't see because the editor caught them. If you hang around this forum for long you'll see plenty of discussion about how flawed the rating system is as it stands.

Rating editors would suffer from the same problems and more. It would give editors an incentive to only edit the best stories, the ones that least need editing.

I personally have email requested to a number of editors listed and never got a reply - is it because they do not what to hang their reputation on a newbie?

Probably nothing to do with you. People sign up to the list and then leave, or stop answering their emails, so there are a lot of non-active editors up there.

All my stories have been dinged for lack of Editing, well MS Word and my dyslexia can only do so much when no Editor will step forward.

I understand that's frustrating. But that's the nature of a free service dependent on volunteers.