Written by Janice Love; copy edited by Emma Caplan
Does your editing career need an edit? Are you doing the kind(s) of editing you want to do? Are you gaining the value, whether monetary or otherwise, you want from the editing work you do?
These are all questions I had, and so Lana Okerlund’s offer to help via her guided strategic retreat for editors was worth the winter trip to Vancouver from Vernon!
Written by Carl Rosenberg; copy edited by Lydia du Bois
On Saturday, November 30, Editors BC presents Lana Okerlund’s professional development seminar, “Do the Work You Want (and Earn More Doing It): A Guided Strategic Retreat for Editors.”
This six-hour seminar is designed as a guided strategic retreat to help you envision your ideal editing career, understand your current situation, and develop a plan to close the gap. Through stimulating discussion and hands-on activities, you will:
Whether you’re an experienced editor or new to the editing world, you will come away from the seminar with a draft strategy for taking charge of your business or career so you can steer it in the direction that you want it to go. Freelance editors will find this seminar most useful, though in-house editors can also benefit from thinking about career goals in a more strategic way.
For this seminar, Lana draws on her experience as a freelance editor and as a former business consultant, when she spent nearly a decade working with clients on strategic visioning, business planning, performance measurement, and other business improvement projects. She has found tremendous value in applying these business concepts while building her own editing career. A partner with West Coast Editorial Associates, Lana edits, indexes, and writes non-fiction books and teaches editing and business writing courses.
Carl Rosenberg, a volunteer on Editors BC’s communications and social media committee, spoke to Lana about her forthcoming seminar.
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What: Editors BC professional development seminar
When: Saturday, November 30, 2019, 10:00 am to 5:00 pm
Where: Room 481, 4th floor, BCIT Downtown Campus, 555 Seymour Street, Vancouver | map
Cost: $165 for Editors Canada members ($135 early bird), $230 for non-members ($200 early bird), and $100 for student affiliates. Advance registration required. Registration closes November 26; early-bird rates are in effect through November 12.
As an editor, are you doing the work you want (or do you know what that is)? Are you satisfied with what you earn? Are you working as much, or as little, as you wish? Are you keeping up with professional standards and work practices? Do you ever have the time to properly think about these questions, let alone figure out what to do so you can say “yes!” to them?
What: Editors BC professional development seminar
When: Saturday, April 27, 2019, 10:00 am to 5:00 pm
Where: Room 381, 3rd floor, BCIT Downtown Campus, 555 Seymour Street, Vancouver | map
Cost: $165 for Editors Canada members ($135 early bird), $230 for non-members ($200 early bird), and $100 for student affiliates. Advance registration required. Registration closes April 23; early-bird rates are in effect through April 9.
Serves: A room full of editors
Time: 6 hours
Cookbook editing can be a satisfying niche with a feast of opportunities. Calling for equal amounts of editing skill and culinary knowledge, the recipe for successful cookbook editing can be mastered by those willing to put in a little time in the editing kitchen.
Written by Carl Rosenberg; copy edited by Chris Baxter
On Saturday, February 24, Editors BC presents Lana Okerlund’s seminar, “Crunching the Numbers: Using Performance Measures to Manage Your Editing Business.” The seminar will introduce the performance measurement cycle—a widely used concept in the business world—and help participants apply it to the business of editing.
A partner with West Coast Editorial Associates, Lana Okerlund edits, indexes, and writes non-fiction books and teaches editing and business writing courses. In her former career as a business consultant, Lana spent nearly a decade working with clients on business improvement projects, including performance measurement.
Carl Rosenberg, a volunteer on Editors BC’s communications and social media committee, spoke to Lana about her work on performance measurement.
What: Editors BC professional development seminar
When: Saturday, February 24, 2018, 10:00 am to 5:00 pm
Where: Room 420, 4th floor, BCIT Downtown Campus, 555 Seymour Street, Vancouver | map
Cost: $165 for Editors Canada members ($135 early bird), $230 for non-members ($200 early bird), and $100 for student affiliates. Advance registration required. Registration closes February 20; early-bird rates are in effect through February 6.
Is your editing business successful?
If you’re like a lot of editors, you may have a hard time answering this question with any specifics. You may have a vague sense of how your business is doing, and you might even feel comfortable with that level of uncertainty. But having real, hard data about how much you work, where your work comes from, and how much you earn for different types of projects or clients can empower you to take charge of your business and steer it in the direction that you want it to go.
What: Editors BC monthly meeting
When: Wednesday, November 16, 2016, 7:00 pm (program begins at 7:30 pm)
Where: Welch Room, 4th floor, YWCA Health + Fitness Centre, 535 Hornby Street, Vancouver | map
Cost: Free for Editors Canada members, $10 for non-members, and $5 for students with valid ID. Registration at the door.
All editors must consider the needs of the writer, the reader, and the publisher or client when working on material, but this can be a particularly delicate balancing act for the poetry editor. What is considered? How does the editor navigate issues of poetic licence or the idiosyncratic use of writing mechanics? What are the desirable characteristics of a poetry editor, and what is happening in this publishing sector? Join us for a stimulating conversation about these and other topics as Talonbooks poetry editor and poet Shazia Hafiz Ramji speaks to moderator Lana Okerlund.
Shazia Hafiz Ramji is the poetry editor at Talonbooks and an interviews editor at Canadian Women in the Literary Arts, and she co-edited the “Intersections” issue of Poetry Is Dead magazine. Her poetry has been nominated for the 2016 National Magazine Awards and is forthcoming in The Capilano Review and the “Augmented Reality” special issue of Letters to the Editors. Shazia’s chapbook of poetry will be published by Anstruther Press in 2017, and her first book of poems will be out with Talonbooks in 2018.
On April 25, EAC-BC co-hosted PubPro 2015, an unconference for managing editors and publication production specialists. We previously featured a recap of the event and part 1 of the session summaries. Part 2 of the session summaries follows.
Written by Amy Haagsma; copy edited by Meagan Kus
Chantal Moore is communications manager at the BC Council for International Education, a Crown corporation that facilitates international student exchanges. She was interested in discussing best practices for managing change.
Reprints, Revisions & Print on Demand
by Megan Brand; discussion led by Jo Blackmore
Reprints are straight printings, ideally featuring corrections to any errata in the first run. Publishers may use colour inserts in offset reprints or print them on the digital press as black and white photo sections on regular stock, which don’t have to be tipped in. Friesens was said to be perfecting its digital colour-printing technology. Economies of scale for offset reprints kick in at five hundred units, whereas it’s cheaper to print lower runs digitally. According to Library and Archives Canada guidelines, “a work is considered to be a ‘new’ publication if there is a relevant edition statement, if there has been a change in title or a change of publisher, or if additional information appears in the work.” Therefore, they may require a whole new edit, proofreading and index. Commonly used print on demand (POD) and fulfillment providers include Lightning Source (Ingram), which was thought to be user unfriendly; BookMobile (Itasca), with good customer service; and CreateSpace (Amazon), which offers higher revenue per unit.
The Flying Narwhal: Single-Source Workflows for Small Magazine Publishers
by Lana Okerlund; presented by Shed Simas
With tongue in cheek, Master of Publishing (MPub) student Shed Simas pitched his presentation to PubPro participants by explaining the origin of his project’s name, The Flying Narwhal: “a hybrid that’s part real, part magic, part myth”—not unlike the project’s vision of single-source multi-platform publishing.
“The Flying Narwhal puts a bunch of components together in a way that is affordable, robust and accessible for multiple people in multiple locations,” Simas said. In essence, the system he and fellow MPub collaborators Kaitlyn Till and Velma Larkai designed would allow small magazine publishers to accept submissions from contributors, access the system from multiple computers, share files between staff and authors for collaboration on edits and revisions and manage version control. Once editorial is complete, documents flow into a hub, from which they can be output into multiple platforms: InDesign for print, a PDF digital edition, Padify for a digital magazine and a WordPress website.
With a rather dizzying list of other technologies involved in the solution—Submittable, Google Drive, Dropbox, cloudHQ, Neutron Drive and pandoc—the presentation revealed a truism in publishing (and editing) today: it’s an increasingly high-tech business. While not all publication professionals will feel comfortable with all the moving parts behind the scenes, more and more of us may soon be users of new solutions like The Flying Narwhal to do our everyday jobs.
In Short: Workflow Systems for Managing Large Projects with Multiple People
by Megan Brand; discussion led by Eve Rickert
Google Drive: Gantt chart-like workflow spreadsheet, task lists, timelines, and revision histories. Wiki-esque: great for real-time collaboration but not for version control.
Teamwork: More automated than Basecamp and can set up dependencies. Cloud-based with messaging systems and task lists, but time-tracking feature can’t do time estimates for entire projects, just tasks.
Smartsheet: Gantt-based, cloud-based, and allows for multiple contributors. Can send it out to users and assign them to different tasks. Would ideally create a snapshot showing users’ black-out periods. Free up to a certain amount of tabs.
SharePoint: Website document repository using Excel for tracking and MS Project for scheduling. Source documents populate timelines, with Gantt charts and dependency and reporting features, but it’s not user-friendly.
JIRA: Sophisticated code repository and project-management and collaboration tool. Sets up contingencies and updates continuously.
Tom’s Planner: Online Gantt charts for workload management. Fast, easy, and free (except for printing), it shows freelancers’ schedules. Doesn’t require programming like Excel but needs constant management and updating.
The Shift to Digital at MEC
by Lana Okerlund; presented by Merran Fahlman
In 2009, MEC (or Mountain Equipment Co-op) published four print catalogues annually and one CSR (corporate social responsibility) report biannually, updated its website monthly and sent emails to customers weekly. Fast-forward to 2014, when 100% of its published content appears in digital-only formats, including the MEC website, a WordPress blog, a journal microsite, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and emails. The company has shifted from centralized to decentralized contributions, and while still relying on a core group of two writers and two editors, as well as freelancers and subject expert contributors, the team now includes a social community manager responsible for content curation and a brand engagement manager to help ensure that all that content upholds the MEC brand.
The company’s publishing environment has changed so much that managing editor Merran Fahlman wonders if her title shouldn’t be altered as well. “I’m more like brand engagement or content strategy manager now than a managing editor,” she said.
The shift to all-digital publishing has come with challenges, Fahlman said, including potentially unbalanced content themes, difficulties with overall planning, hard-to-access tone and style standards and the need for flexible quality standards. On the last point, no one reads tweets, for example. “We edit blog posts and site content, but there’s a whole lot of content that no one reviews,” Fahlman said.
As one PubPro participant pointed out, these challenges are “all about the change from push to pull. All of these issues have to do with loss of control. The customer is ultimately shaping the information, telling us in the moment what is important.” That may be so, but if you’re a managing editor used to editorial checklists and doing all you can to put out (you hope) perfect content, and what you’re now consumed with are Google Analytics, webmaster tools and HootSuite, it’s a brave new digital publishing world indeed.
West Coast Editor 