It’s time to ask the editor!

I’ve compiled a list of questions and my lovely editor at HarperCollins, HQ Digital, the amazing and super-intelligent, Abigail Fenton, has answered them! Read on to find out more about the work of, and some tops tips, from one of the best editors in the business!

Q. What do you, as an editor, expect from your authors?

Editing should be a collaborative process, so I always aim for my relationship with my authors to be one that works both ways – if they disagree with any of my suggestions I always want them to say so that we can talk it through and find an alternative solution! Apart from that, it’s much the same as you would expect from any working relationship: letting me know if they aren’t going to hit a deadline so I can rework the schedule at my end, being open to feedback etc. – and I aim to be the same in return.

Thanks, Abi! Before I got published, everything I read about querying and submitting made the publishing industry out to be really scary and super formal. If you missed a spelling error you might as well throw yourself off a cliff! In reality, I’ve never met a more friendly bunch of people. Even through emails, you can see it’s a friendly person who isn’t going to chastise you if they find a typo in your response. So don’t let the scary articles fool you. That’s not to say you shouldn’t work hard and ensure you’re submitting your best possible work, but just remember you are dealing with real people who, in my experience, are super nice!

Thank you so much to Abi for taking the time to answer my questions. Her workload is CRAY-ZEE! So I’m so grateful to her for humouring me and my blog!

Abi is Editorial Director, HQ at HarperCollins and before that was Commissioning Editor at Bookouture.

Cover photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash