Awhile back I found myself wondering how I could best tell the author of a manuscript I was working on that I was his editor, not his editorial assistant. There’s a difference—and, as an aside, I’m not talking about the position a publishing house calls “editorial assistant.”

No, I’m talking about Important Author and his editorial assistant.

“Kitty?” He leans out of his office door expectantly. “Do you have those research notes on the leather dye industry in seventeenth-century Portugal? And have you heard back from the permissions people at Random House yet? I really want to use that bit from Mary Oliver, maybe the whole poem.”

“I’ve got your notes right here,” she says, rising. “No word from Random House yet. But I’ve just finished cleaning up all the citations on Important Nonfiction Book for you, including year of publication on all the sources.”

“Thank you. And have you looked over the third draft of Personal Side Project?” BNA says. “I’m worried about running out of time to source and verify all those epigraph quotations.”

“I’m on it, boss!”

One has these little fantasies. 🙂 Because, you see, I’m an editor. An editor collaborates with an author, and it’s a collaboration of equals. I am hired by the author’s publishing company to help him make his book better—but not to do his “dirty work,” such as research or filling in incompleteness in citations (footnotes).

Those things fall into the author’s purview; managing editors routinely send manuscripts back to authors with polite requests to provide documentation or with questions about whether permission to quote has been pursued. I can type “Where is the citation for this?” (alternately: “Where did you get this quote?”) in my sleep. When an author sends me a breezy little email—“Take a look at it. I know it may need a little work.”—I start to hyperventilate. I don’t own a magic wand, kids. Why don’t you finish the job now, before you send it? It will save us both time later.

Here’s what the Chicago Manual of Style says the author is responsible for providing with or as a part of his manuscript:

• Title page (Don’t laugh; you’d be surprised how often I send an email that begins “What is the title of this book?” I like to know!)
• Dedication
• Epigraph (Please do your research to make sure you’ve quoted it correctly, and provide the source to the editor.)
• Table of contents (Again, you’d be surprised how often I end up building a TOC.)
• List of illustrations (Remember, too, that these illustrations or photos should not be inserted into the manuscript; we are only working on words right now. Send illustrations separately; they should be high-resolution files.)
• List of tables (Same goes for tables, charts, or diagrams: separate files.)
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Any other front matter
• All text matter (the manuscript!), including introduction and part titles
• Notes (By this they mean, you know, footnotes or end notes. How to do that is a whole other blog post.)
• Appendixes
• Glossary
• Bibliography or reference list
• Any other back matter
• All illustrations and all tables (See? Separate.)
• Illustration captions
• A list of special characters used in the manuscript
• An abstract
• All permissions, in writing, that may be required to reproduce illustrations or previously published material or to cite unpublished data or personal communications

Chicago goes on to say, “All elements should be final and up to date—including any URLs cited in the work.” Again, these are things the author and his editorial assistant should have nailed down. You say you don’t have an editorial assistant on hand? Neither do I. 🙂

Tweet: You say you don’t have an editorial assistant on hand? Neither do I.
Tweet: According to CMOS, here’s what the author is responsible for providing with his manuscript.

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