Frequent Questions: How do I work with an editor?

Q: How can I get the new editor to stop crapping up my work?
A: [sigh]

My friend Abe has been writing blog posts for their tech startup—very successfully. But as the company has grown, it’s added a marketing person. And that marketing person believes the intentionally informal tone Abe has cultivated for the blog doesn’t represent the company in its best light. He’s taken Abe’s work and sanded all of the personality out of it. “I don’t even want to write blogs for this company anymore,” Abe said.

While the question above isn’t quite verbatim, it’s certainly what Abe meant. My answer, however,  is verbatim. Many business writers have asked me similar questions over the years, and they all get the same response: a long, deep sigh.

As I ghostwriter, I don’t face this kind of challenge often. If I feel my client is making a grave mistake—taking out a key story at the beginning of a speech, because they’re too eager to get to “the facts”—I will tell them. But if they insist—hey, it’s their speech. My name isn’t on it, so it’s easy for me to release any pride of authorship.

Which is not to say I love it when clients crap up my work. I remember arriving to see a presentation I’d spent weeks putting together. As soon as my foot hit the pavement, the presenter rushed over to me crowing, “I was up all night rearranging the slides!” And of course he’d rearranged all the sense out of it. But I knew that as the presenter, he’d take the heat. And indeed he did—with the audience calling out the lapses in reasoning he’d created. In retrospect, I guess the hardest part of that experience was hiding my grin from the rest of the people in the room.

But Abe doesn’t have the luxury of anonymity. They’d cultivated a particular style and voice and it was being chopped to shreds, turned into something more appropriate for an SEC filing than a blog post.

The bad news, Abe, is that as long as the editor has license to crap up your work, that’s not something you can control. If the company hired the marketing guy because they wanted a change of voice in their blog, then you need to defer to his style. But you can ask for future blog posts to be unsigned. You may have to learn to write in the marketing guy’s preferred style, but no one can force you to put your name to something that doesn’t represent you.

One final piece of good news for Abe: the CEO looked at the marketing guy’s rewrite and bellowed, “This sounds so bureaucratic!” So at least someone over there has a sense of what their readers want. Abe should probably practice some grin-hiding techniques.