At the beginning of your academic career, your PhD just finished, you are starting a new position, maybe a visiting professorship, a postdoc, or on the tenure track — congrats! — and you encounter the realities of the job and the need to continually build your publishing record. Between the lesson planning, teaching, and grading, the meetings and committee work, and the never-ending email, you are swamped at a crucial point of your academic publishing career. You’re expected to start publishing fast, in respected journals, and even maneuver your first book under contract with an academic press, all before tenure review.

The reality is that in most academic institutions, although there might be some financial assistance toward building your publishing portfolio, there is little support for carving out time to get a manuscript into shape for publication, and few skill resources to help ensure your work sways difficult reviewers to your side. And time is precious.

Here’s where the expertise of an editor—like us at The Ingenious Editing Workshop—can be a real asset. Among our extensive editing services you can choose support from the initial stages of drafting all the way to formatting your paper according to journal-specific style guides. You are no longer in grad school, so you may even have start-up, research, or grant funds available for just this purpose. Here are some of the ways an editor can help — and clear your academic publishing path:

1. Before writing:

Meet with an editor or writing consultant, before even deciding in what format and venue you are going to publish, to gain valuable perspective and insight on what you already have, be it notes and ideas, dissertation chapters, or conference papers, and on how to make an existing text productive and publishable. The difference between a mentor or colleague and a writing consultant is that we focus on your publishing record, not necessarily your career trajectory or the complications of your subfield: that’s where you take over. In the pre-writing stage, we support your planning of a publishing record that could materialize your desired career trajectory. To get from point A to point C, you often need to go through point B (for Book).

2. Initial stages of writing:

As you begin drafting a monograph or transforming a conference paper into a journal article, an editor or writing consultant supports you in two main ways. First, with accountability and coaching, and second, with problem solving. A writing consultant — also known as a writing coach, though keep that name under your hat around the Dean — helps you set writing goals, keeps you on track, checks in, and keeps you accountable to yourself. You can schedule weekly, bi-monthly, or monthly calls or emails with your writing consultant in order to keep your writing muscles fresh and your mind on track. In these same formats you can solve writing problems large or small collaboratively with your editor or writing consultant. Academic institutions pull your attention in so many directions that you may be in desperate need of someone to create space for and re-focus you on this vital aspect of your intellectual life. And such revitalization may be the best single thing you can do for your publication record.

3. First drafts:

Congrats! You have a first draft, or perhaps a dissertation chapter you want to turn into an article. At this stage, an editor is your most likely need — but what of the many benefits of working with a writing consultant? The solution is developmental editing, to plumb your book manuscript, to refine your ideas and presentation, and to make the flow of your article or proposal match the call of the journal you want to publish in. Even without such a transformative solution, line editing and in-depth reading (manuscript evaluation) improves the mechanics of your writing structurally, formally, and rhetorically. And copy editing keeps your voice consistent and clear, and fine-tunes the rhythm of your piece, in addition to making sure the text matches the right style guide. This is usually one of the most labor-intensive stages for editors, and it’s where authors decide how much input they need. An editor can support you as much or as little, as aggressively or conservatively, as hands-on or -off as you want, when they apply the expertise they have: how to shape a text into a compelling article.

4. Final draft, ready to submit:

Almost ready to submit? We provide another set of eyes to catch the little things. As editors we can give you comments that flag writing issues reviewers may raise, massage the abstract, catch unnoticed mistakes through copy editing, perform minor fact-checking, and format the paper — including the bibliography — for the specific venue you’ve targeted. By formatting, we mean applying a style manual (MLA, Chicago, etc.) from title page to headers to tables to citations, and additional document design elements that you specify — for example, when re-publishing after rights to your work lapse, or when self-publishing, typeface, spacing, and text-box shape become relevant considerations. In this stage we can even guide query letters and other materials included in your query packet.

If necessary, this is also the stage to explore ESL smoothing or “natural English” copy editing for non-native writers and collaborators.

5. Revise and resubmit?

This can be dreadful news to receive: you’ve spent so much time on your paper, or even a whole book, just to get hit by Reviewer #2 with the dreaded “Revise and Resubmit.” While it may feel like a deep blow, especially early in your academic publishing career, we are here to tell you, Hey! It’s not all bad news. A writing consultant or editor can help you analyze reviewer comments and define a plan of action for resubmitting, or revising while changing journals or publishing houses. Depending on reviewers’ and publishers’ demands, and your own goals, you may need professional input to create a concrete strategy for resubmitting successfully, coaching to support you through revision, further development to evolve the writing project, or help in pivoting to a new venue. A harsh reviewer’s report is never the end of your publishing journey. 

6. On track and flourishing

So you already have several manuscripts going, a clear plan, and some semblance of a writing schedule: an editor can still support your writing. We minimize the time you spend on revisions to the structure and mechanics of your manuscripts with line editing, we fix formatting and bibliographies for you with copyediting, and we can even do some fact checking and flag copyright and similar issues. And we can help you develop a new writing project (for example, textbooks, meta-analyses, and popularizations require vastly different approaches). Building a trusting relationship with an editor can really keep your publishing career flowing!

Final thoughts:

There are many other ways an editor or writing consultant can benefit you in your early, middle, or consolidated academic publishing path. We focus on your manuscript so you can focus on your research and ideas. Especially if you feel that you have no time to dedicate to the publishing side of things, our support, and perhaps a measure of accountability from a writing consultant, makes all the difference.

If you’re looking to get your academic publishing career on track, email us at contact@ingeniouseditingworkshop.com and let’s chat!