I always find it ironic that professional editing—an industry solely devoted to words and language—has so much confusing niche terminology. I say this as someone who edits professionally, both as a freelancer and through Scribble House. One person’s content editing might be another’s structural edits, and whether these are interchangeable or mean slightly different things usually depends on who you’re asking, too.
Part of the problem is that these terms aren’t standardized, and slightly different ones are often used depending on the context. What a fiction editor calls “line editing”, the editor of online news articles might call “copy editing”, and there’s similar overlap between terms like content editing, structural editing, and developmental editing.
I just wrapped up my first experience at the In Your Write Mind conference hosted by Seton Hill University’s popular fiction program—quite literally, in fact; I’m on the train back to Pittsburgh as I write this.
You might think, given how many writing conferences and such I go to in a typical year, that the experience would be predictable by this point, but the truth is that past experience has just taught me not to assume anything. Conferences and conventions vary wildly in just about every respect. I’ve been to some that last a single day and others that last 4-5, conventions with 10,000+ attendees and others with less than a hundred. Most have book fairs or exhibit halls, but not all; some are mostly panels, some mostly workshops, some mostly readings, some a mix of all three—and the value I’ve gotten from going to those activities has been just as wide-ranging.
I have a few manuscripts I’ve been shopping around to agents and presses: A linked short story collection, a speculative micro-fiction chapbook, a 200,000-word sci-fi novel—in short, not the types of projects most publishers are look for.
This has, naturally, gotten me thinking about self-publishing. Especially since I know a good number of people who have done it successfully: My partner self-published his novel, Hungry, through Amazon; a member of my writing group released his comic book series, Theme of Thieves, with funding from Kickstarter; another workshop colleague serialized his novel on the now-defunct platform JukePop, leading to its eventual publication by Spaceboy Books as Lars Breaxface: Werewolf in Space.
