Editorial Advice from the Trenches

Nobody showed me how to edit—no one really had time, they had their own fish to fry. My first job in the business was editing Spanish-language translations for Rodale, publisher of Prevention and Men’s Health. In the interview, my prospective boss asked me if I felt I could edit a book, and I replied, “Sure—how hard could it be?” She hired me anyway, despite the flip response. Maybe testing had something to do with it.

In any event, because I was one of maybe two people at the company fluent in Spanish, figuring things out fell to me, so I did it by trial and error. And things worked out. From there I went other places and kept learning—usually through trial by fire.

And while publishing has taken some hits, there are still some aspiring editors out there, struggling to hit the dates and figure things out while handling challenges that get tougher every day as staffs are stripped and monetization becomes more of a hope than a reality.

With those folks in mind, here are some things I learned the hard way, in the trenches.

Skip published clips. When evaluating prospective freelance writers, don’t use their published clips as a guide. I have noticed massive discrepancies between the clips and what they actually turn in. Why? Published clips are cleaned up by an editor. So instead, ask for the Word docs they handed in to the editors for those published clips. That will give you a much better sense of what they can actually do.

Synthesize data. In the online world, one of the challenges is filling space with little budget. Often, editors have to get hands-on with the writing themselves. But time can be tough: finding sources, getting quotes and assembling with the traditional journalistic approach can make hitting the dates and filling that content maw seem impossible. One trick that helped me was mapping out a topic and looking for studies about it. For example, for one blog post I decided to focus on top-selling products among Latin American consumers. Rather than interview sources and letting quotes drive it, I went and found studies with the numbers, assembling the links. Then I wrote to the links, creating simple chunks that outlined behavior from solid sources. With that, I had 500 words in a hurry—much faster than hunting up sources, trying to see when they had time to talk, interviewing them, hoping they said something useful and doing the dreaded transcribing to then put together the story. And this breakdown approach works well for online writing—it gives people quick chunks they can scroll through while the title and topic are usually shared more often than a longer piece. This doesn’t always have to be a long piece: here’s a quick way to do it. Another example can be found here.

Break down specific studies. When a reputable source comes out with a study or whitepaper, especially in the B2B world, your readers may not have time to go through it. But as a writer, you can spend an hour going through the pdf, pull out salient points and create a simple breakdown piece that can be done in a couple of hours and offer strong value to the reader—they glean the key points without having to read through 20 pages. This not only fills the content maw but serves the reader well while delivering shares. To see how this plays out, check out this example, this example and this other example.   

Think in pictures. With magazines struggling, this may not be as relevant. Or maybe it might be. For magazine editors struggling with teeny tiny photo budgets, thinking in pictures can help. By this I mean think of stories that lend themselves to free photography. For example, I edited a pub with a number of general-interest stories in the well. So it hit me to do an article on collecting photography. I didn’t see much out there on the topic, making it interesting enough, and galleries are usually glad to supply shots in exchange for the free publicity, especially if your writer interviews them as part of the story. The key is thinking of topics where there are entities with attractive free press shots they are willing to share for coverage. That’s why I developed stories on cars, cuisine, design, cocktails and more—trial and error taught me that players in these areas had great press shots, so all I had to do was build a story around them. Once I managed to build an entire issue of a magazine—70 pages of edit and ads—for $70 in photo costs, which must be some kind of bizarre record. The problem, of course, is that those kinds of feats can lead to expectations that you’ll do it every time. This is NOT sustainable as an approach, but it can sure help out when your photo budget is slashed to bits.

It’s better to cut than add. This is more applicable to magazine folks, but online editors may find it handy as well. One of the challenges in magazine editing can be that ads drop out at the last minute. Sometimes it’s a page, sometimes it can be a spread or more. And when you’re in layout and this happens, it’s extremely difficult to fill those pages out of thin air. With no budget to spend more on writing, I have gone in there and filled pages, finding the spots in stories that could be filled, researching them on the spot and then churning out copy to make that text move in InDesign so as to make up for the dropped ads. Not fun! That’s why I looked for ways to tweak the budget to add 1,000 words or more to certain pieces my writers were working on. That tiny adjustment made life easier. If ads dropped, I had plenty of filler. If not and I was running over, cutting is much quicker than filling—skim and snip can take 15 minutes in many instances.

In the online world, ads dropping are not really an issue. However, your job is still focused on filling space, so extra editorial can come in handy if you can spin it off into a separate piece to post and link to. As such, if it’s possible, it may work to assign extra material to a writer within a piece that could be spun off into a standalone story to cover gaps when they happen.

Edit up front. Sometimes your writers will nail it with the first draft—other times they may need to rework some or all of it. In extreme cases, even if they tried hard, the draft won’t work as is, and you have to break apart the piece and put it back together yourself because there is no time to wait for the writer to fix this.
To avoid these challenges, I often pre-researched pieces before assigning. This gave me a rough idea of how the stories could flow. With that in mind, I would outline pieces up front for writers, suggesting titles, intros and then different sections. Some folks may bristle as this limiting creativity, but my goal was less about art and more about efficiency: I wanted a solid flow that went with the shots I had in mind to use with the piece. And this worked, every time. In fact, I think the detailed outlines made it easier for writers. Rather than work out the set-up as they went through several drafts, they could just follow the flow as established and fill in the blanks. This approach helped me have pieces in much better shape that I could edit faster and drop in the art folder—much needed at the time.    

For experienced editors, this is all old hat and yawn-inducing. But I wrote this one for the newer folks in the trenches trying to make it work. I know what that’s like. And while there’s value in figuring out things on your own, folks in the editorial trenches know the value of finding shortcuts. So hopefully my experiences will help you make the trains run on time with a little less stress…

Abel Delgado works with clients to help improve their marketing ROI in a variety of areas, with content being a specialty. In previous roles he’s driven leads for B2B firms, won business with pitches, spiked web traffic, SEO efforts and social media followership.  
Before that, he edited more than 50 translations of books for the Hispanic market, launched a blog on Latam media called Latin Link and directed content development for hospital systems, hotels, tourism entities, electronic components distributors, pharmaceutical firms and other types of companies.