I’ve worked on books, magazines, and news for about a decade, on staff and freelance. Since 2019, I’ve been a freelance developmental editor, line editor, and fact-checker for academic and trade nonfiction. Though it’s impossible, my editorial effort seeks to be equal to the author’s labors.
How I Work
My approach depends on the status of the project: whether it’s under contract, how much has been written, and what the author thinks it needs. A project sometimes needs a structural edit, a line edit, or both, and usually it’s a combination of the two. The former is about conception, the latter about execution.
When a book calls for it, I offer structural edits in a kind of epistolary form alongside line edits, often with phone calls to work through the edits together, though that’s not required if you’re not inclined. At each stage of the manuscript, I give my general impression of how it’s developing while offering comments and direction on the writing itself. The letters encourage an ongoing correspondence as you revise and continue to envision the whole project.
The structural edit
The structural letters address overarching issues of argument, frame, flow, pacing, and the like, to build out the conceptual frame and focus the arc of the manuscript. They question matters of coherence, corroboration, and evidence; give due attention to the formal elements of the writing; and offer more relaxed observations on mood, tone, and style. My commentary is all about determining how things hang together best. Sometimes that means reorganizing or cutting existing material, or asking for more, depending on what is most essential to the manuscript and its unfolding. That, in turn, means assessing each chapter, its argument, themes, and topics, and its place in the whole.
The line edit
The line edit is concerned with small-bore implementation. Working in track changes, I make inline changes for sense and grammar and attach comments for questions and observations: identifying habitual repetitions and omissions, querying uncertainties, sharpening arguments, and refining syntactical and stylistic choices.
Edits to particular passages reflect the structural edits, and vice versa. If it helps, think of structural edits as “form” edits and line edits as “content” edits, though they can’t be so neatly distinguished.
I also do fact-checking and research, and I help shape book proposals.
Where I’ve Worked
As a freelancer I’ve edited and checked books for presses, for examples, from Duke University Press, MIT Press, Fordham University Press, UNC Press, and Haymarket Books.
On staff, I was trained as a book editor at Basic Books; I served as deputy editor of Parapraxis magazine; and I was the story editor at Drop Site News, where I edited investigative reports, dispatches from Palestinian journalists in Gaza, and the daily newsletter. Before that I researched, fact-checked, and copyedited for Condé Nast, The Baffler, Lapham’s Quarterly, The New Press, and In These Times.
My areas of expertise in non-fiction are politics, sociology, critical theory, history, literary criticism, psychoanalysis and psychology, philosophy, and journalism. I’m always open to reading and editing other varieties of writing.
Rates
I’m sensitive to the material problems in people’s lives and the vicissitudes of the political economy. I try to tailor my quotes for precarious academics who don’t make enough on which to live. I’m generally not in the business of bilking people (unless they are wealthy or celebrities, in which case separating them from their money is actually good for their souls). That said, I do make a living off editing, so I start my quotes at a competitive rate, and we can negotiate until we find a price that is mutually amenable.
Get in Touch
Write to me at colstonalex3[at]gmail.com. It helps to know where the manuscript stands and what you think it needs, the editorial schedule you’re working on and any deadlines you have to meet, and whether research funds are in the mix.
