Nahno McLein

It's still quite hard to believe that I spend my summer starting a publishing company in Germany. After applying at an amazing online literature magazine called "www.buchbesprechung.de" (alternative German for book review), they asked me to get involved in their second project - the publishing company: PepperBooks.

After having two written children's book waiting for a while they figured it is time to get someone full-time to take care of all the publishing matters - the website takes up a lot of energy by itself. This was maybe the luckiest conjuncture of my life.

So this is me all summer:

I would say the fact that I am studying creative writing helped a lot with the books that we were planning to publish. I read several books on publishing companies, strategies and layouting. Meanwhile I edited the books to the best of my knowledge, trying to highlight the fantastical atmosphere for the children and of course working greatly on grammar and punctuation. Luckily, the author of the two books is an academic and quite skilled with the rules - only one minor problem: the author had fallen for the wide belief that a soup of exclamation marks makes up rich ingredients(!).

Editing someone elses work in a business kind of way made me struggle. There are so many sides you have to consider and be aware of. It's hard to fall into the habit of thinking about it as your own work, but it's not. You have to edit in a way that still sounds like and suits the original author. At the same time - at least in my case - I had some deeper knowledge about the needs of stories, the crucial elements and the common "mistakes" from my course.

In the end I think I managed to get good results that both pleased the author and maximized the readability of the stories. As this was my first work as a proper Editor, though, I think I tended to be more legere with things - I guess it's natural to be a bit self-critical. As a writer myself I had to take back my own desires and ideas and keep telling myself: this is not my work, I just want what is there to be a little more clear/perfect&rounded up.

We'll see how it sells.
Did you ever edit someone elses work? Next time I'm gonna talk about co-operation and managing.