How I Published My Poetry Book: Editing Collaboration Tips

However, there are still nuances in the human language that requires a human to sniff out. Knowing where to start and where to look is challenging when you’re a beginner. As awesome as having the internet with its wealth of information, it’s also paralyzing to identify what’s useful and roll with it. 

Luckily, I was already devouring the articles on Reedsy. Joanna Penn at Creative Penn recommended Reedsy for vetted professionals to aid authors of any experience level. It gave me the confidence to move forward with Reedsy. Then I stumbled upon a plethora of options with editing services on their marketplace.

What Type of Edits Are Available, and Which Do I Need

When I arrived at Reedsy marketplace, I underestimated the number of services available an author could feel overwhelmed by as I read through all the services available in these four categories: editing, design, marketing, and web design. I poked around and decided to set up shop and take my time to produce the perfect book if I had a massive budget. Unfortunately, that was not my current reality. 

On the Reedsy marketplace, you get to choose up to six services for editing: editorial assessments, developmental editing, copyediting, proofreading, indexing, and query letter view; the latter two are generally not part of the direct editing experience, so the focus for me was the former four and a picture to convey the difference about each service:

I knew I needed copy and proofreading edits, given that grammar is not my most vital skill. Weirdly, at the same time, I score high on tests, quizzes, and exams but fall short in the practical landscape in my written work. I do make occasional efforts to improve my grammar skills. However, I prefer the help of a professional editor, and software like ProWritingAid does help to an extent; instead, I combine the two where I first process the edit with ProWritingAid before submitting it to a professional and another pass with ProWritingAid after my revisions from the editor’s feedback. 

Although I knew I was creating a poetry book, I needed more confidence about its arrangement and, how to section it, whether the stories I was telling in some poems lacked cohesion. I needed a second pair of eyes. With time, I will understand the process well enough to judge better what is required and what I can handle on my own for a book. I proceeded with all four starting with the editorial assessment. I’ll go into detail about the collaboration process in this post.

So Many Options, How to Choose

If you still need professional help editing your book, I have some tips. If you’re already reading blog posts from a platform that offers the services, you’re seeking, that’s a logical place to start. You can ask within a writing community you trust or an author you follow as a referral. My experience devouring Reedsy articles and the Creative Penn recommendation: Reedsy has a vetting process to ensure you get the highest quality freelance professionals in the market, which ultimately influenced my decision to roll with Reedsy.

Book Edit Brief

Narrowing down a pool of qualified professionals to work with was foreign yet straightforward. I had never interviewed anyone before, so sifting through the collection of editors based on their ratings, geographical location, overview, experience, service offering, and portfolio was exciting and overwhelming. While I wanted to give everyone a chance, I knew this was unrealistic—I carefully analyzed their portfolios and overviews to determine whether they emphasized poetry. If they did, Reedsy allows you to select up to five professionals, and you fill out a book edit brief with the following criteria and questions:

• Book title
• Set a deadline to receive a quote by
• Set a deadline when you would like the project completed by
• Which services do you need?
• Manuscript length in word count
• Genre
• Introduce yourself and your book
• Book details
• Target market
• Sample work

One critical question that should have been mentioned was budget, and professional editors have different rates based on their experience. It’s something to keep in mind. The next part covers the interview phase.

Interviewing the Best Fit

As part of the nature of interviewing or researching and gathering enough information to make an informed purchase or decision, it comes along with making this additional effort to pay attention to both sides of the conversation. I have a way of asking many questions. I don’t easily part with my money until I’m confident enough to take the plunge on any commitment. As my first time working with someone on a book, I had no prior experience except articles and books outlining what to ask and expect to identify the right fit for both parties. 

After several back and forths with five professionals, one declined the project because they believed I needed more time. I explained this was my first time, which implied they wanted someone with a little more experience and knowledge than I had assumed. The remaining four had different engagement levels to my questions, and a few had rates that were a wee bit outside my budget scope—which you rarely find on their profile unless they specify it there. 

A professional who showed interest in the job rather than throwing in an offer letter became the deciding factor. This professional showed interest by asking well-considered questions. I felt the enthusiasm for their passion for poetry and several messages with questions I had. She always responded professionally and patiently, and we decided to proceed with the project collaboration.

Collaboration Process

Editorial Assessment 

Before my editor received my manuscript copy, I provided a few expectations about the manuscript format, along with the poem title and poetic form, and then I released it to her. About 11 days later, I received an editorial assessment that helped me to come up with novel ideas for how to present the book to readers based on the details and recommendations concerning the arrangement of poems by dominant themes and sections under these sub-themes. 

In her assessment, she included a recommendation for the title, which was the opening poem that helped introduce the rest of the collection. In the evaluation, there were also unpleasant parts, which is the nature of the profession; for example, some poems were part of a series where one was outstanding and overshadowed the other. She recommended a rewrite to bring it up to par with the complimentary poem. 

She mentioned some of the poems were not up to snuff with the rest in the collection, but I learned that’s just what’s expected in creative-artist work. It’s like how every album an artist produces will have very few songs that are the best singles. And the rest will be lucky if they achieve the same renown as those golden gems that hit the billboard top 100.

In poetry, some poems resonate more on a visceral level than others, some are more philosophical in a message than pure emotion, plus there’s a level of comfort and skill the artist has with various forms and elements, e.g., I feel more comfortable writing a Villanelle and Sonnet than I do writing a Free Verse. 

I understand the rules for the former, whereas the second depends on how well a writer knows their writing voice through style, diction, and tone. While my editor and I were involved in several exchanges about which poems to remove or keep in the collection, I tried to step back objectively to think about the quality and thematic relationships between the verses. 

I then removed the few I would not include and revised some into their thematic section that plays into the overarching theme of romantic love throughout the collection. I open and close with poems about love on a cosmic scale. I then drilled down into more earthbound shared themes of love, such as pining and heartbreak, which are explained in the book’s introduction section. You can read a copy of it on my website. Now onto the next part, the developmental edit.

Developmental Edit

Developmental editing is odd to encounter when poetry is not focused on narrative, characters, and plot arc, to name a few. In contrast, poetry is often image-driven with an emphasis on visual description accompanied by figurative language like metaphors, meter, and sometimes rhyming. 

Even though I had quite a few poems that told a narrative about mythological characters or stages of heartbreak, there were some good suggestions. Still, some of those that were recommended did not encapsulate my voice. 

I saw the advantage of developing my poem if I was writing narrative poetry, primarily an epic poem like The Divine Comedy or on a smaller scale like Venus & Adonis by William Shakespeare. However, I included this type of edit with copy editing, which I’ll discuss next.

Copy Edit

This is where my weakness lies—grammar, grammar, and grammar. I love to meet authors who can equally edit their work with precision because that’s a skill I’m still developing. When I opened up her copy edit and saw all those red lines, I thought, wow: I suck at grammar, and an opportunity to improve with tense, punctuation, and more-of-the-mill grammar on word structure and style. 

In the end, it’s a judgment call on what you keep or discard from the editor’s suggestion, and it’s learning what they see that you don’t; and most of the changes she suggested I revised. Also, I ignored some advice because I was experimenting with specific literary devices like asyndeton or colloquialism to develop my writing style. I was trying to convey an artistic message rather than be grammatically correct—it’s part of the sacrifice you have to make with art over what is literal in language. 

Once this was worked, I was happy to move on to the last phase in our collaboration proofreading. Still, before doing so, I made several sweeping changes to the collection.

Proofreading

By this stage, there was a lapse between copy and proofreading of about two months. I could make additional revisions and get caught up in the next phase of book production, collaborating with a book designer and publishing and marketing strategy. In this last stretch, I tightened what I needed in that gap, and proofreaders caught any grammar, spelling, punctuation, and layout errors. I read through her red pen corrections and was happy with most of what she spotted. I finally closed the chapter on the editing collaboration that spanned over five months.

The Gist

• When searching for an editor to work with, it’s helpful to run through your edits with software like ProWritingAid to clean it up as much as possible before the handoff. With that said, some of the most popular places to find an editor are closer than you think by the blogs you read or recommendations offered from existing writing communities or authors you admire
• When dealing with the marketplace, you must identify an editor who matches you and your book well. It’s a bit more involved compared to a site that doesn’t let you specify multiple professionals to choose from. Be specific in your brief, and it’s ok to ask questions even when you think you’re being unsure it’s worse to get stuck in a project with someone where the collaboration is more of a hassle than a teamwork base for the success of the book for the reader.
• The collaboration is where the magic happens—don’t treat it as a one-way relationship where you hand off, the editor makes the correction, and you accept everything thrown under the sun. The book is ultimately for the reader.
•  In the long-term interest of readers, both the author and professional editor create the best quality experience for them, including asking questions, bouncing ideas, and finding harmony in the end.