Literary Editor

A literary editor is a specialist whose duties include providing the quality of the materials prepared for print on the highest linguistic and informative levels.

Usually, the original text is far from being perfect, comprising numerous mistakes, inconsistencies, unclear places, and so on. Since all this requires correction, each publishing house and/or website hire literary editors.

Duties of a Literary Editor

  • One of the main responsibilities of a literary editor is correcting grammar, stylistic, punctuation, syntax, and other errors, typos, tautologies.
  • A literary editor keeps track on the condition of the so called editorial portfolio. Usually it is a document, which contains information about the originals of authors’ manuscripts submitted to the publishing house and approved for publication; mainly, the information about authors, their works, and the amount of symbols in them is inserted in a special file. The record of the amount of symbols is counted in author’s sheet: one such sheet consists of 40 000 symbols with spaces, and depending on the number of these sheets a type of a manuscript is defined; for example, a regular novel starts with five author’s sheets.
  • A literary editor must attend meetings with a chief editor. These meetings are needed for discussing further short term perspective plans of a publishing house: searching for the new authors: approving their manuscripts for publication: deciding on the number of copies of a book, magazine, or a newspaper; establishing the sum of authors’ honorariums, and so on.
  • A literary editor performs several organizational functions; for instance he\she creates thematic plans of publications to be released in the nearest future, and controls their execution. In case of a periodical, a literary editor must develop the conceptions of the new rubrics and introduce them to the editorial team.
  • A literary editor supervises a team of regular editors, whose main duty is to perform the initial editing and proofreading of a text: correcting the most obvious mistakes and typos.
  • A literary editor often cooperates with authors, when it comes to editing the source text; for example, if there is a need to correct storyline inconsistencies, rename a novel’s characters, change some details of a plot – all these questions a literary editor often discusses with the author of a text.

Due to literary editors’ work readers can freely enjoy novels, or retrieve business and/or entertaining information they require, without stumbling upon mistakes and feeling confused because of an inconsistently presented material.

Literary Editor