How Important Is It To Have A Close Relationship With Your Editors?

By Dan Smith

Last week, my post touched on the topic of familiarity, explaining that when a writer contacts me, I generally prefer them be relatively social. I don’t want them to be telling me all about their life story and I don’t want to see an e-mail scattered with ‘text speak’ or general typos, but I want to feel as though the writer is talking to me personally.

One of the reasons I like this approach is it builds an instant relationship between the two of us. It may not be a great, in-depth relationship, but it’s one that puts both of us at ease in what could be a particularly formal situation. For example, everyone feels comfortable greeting someone by name and so as soon as you’ve got past that first e-mail or telephone call, knowing you can call someone by their first name in a laid back way in future removes some of the potential worry or concern that many people often have.

But as a writer, how far should you go to build upon this relationship? Should you stay at arms length to your editors (and we’re not just talking magazine editors here — it could be anyone who you submit work to, whether that’s another writer or a business owner) or should you try to develop your relationship further?

Personally, I’m in the latter boat and strongly believe that generally speaking, a close working relationship can help to develop your career substantially, both instantly and continually and it can make the whole writing process a lot more hassle-free.

Take my relationship with Sharon, the owner of this blog, as an example. I’ve been writing here for almost two years now and we’ve known each other a little longer, almost purely through commenting on writing discussions.

A few weeks ago, we had a chat and the outcome was we’re going to share the mid-week writing responsibilities between the two of us, rather than me simply provide the blog post every week. If we didn’t know each other well, it could have resulted in the discussion turning a bit sour for either party, but it wasn’t — Sharon talked about a few different options, I talked about a few different options and we came to a decision that suited both of us within a matter of minutes. It was easy.

The benefits can be seen outside of your standard working agreement with the editor, too.

Looking at my relationship with Sharon once more, a few months ago she approached me asking if I could take on some work at the last minute. It was just a quick e-mail. Sharon knew I could deliver the work to the standard she needed and was confident that I could meet the deadline. I accepted the work and delivered it by the time she needed it. The client then had a few questions, I made the edits and sent them back — and this resulted in more work from the same client the next month and the month after that, too.

I’m not saying this approach is perfect, however and it does have its downfalls, with one of the most common in my view being your writing rates, particularly in terms of increases.

When you become friends with an editor, you want to continue to deliver the best work you can for them, but you also want to be receiving the right pay for the job. From the editor’s point of view, they want to be getting the best work they can whilst paying as little as they have to. This isn’t two parties trying to get the better of each other financially, it’s just standard business sense — buyers want to pay less and sellers want to receive more.

In this position, you’ll no doubt work at a happy medium for weeks, months or even years, but there’ll come a time when as a writer, you’ll want to ask for an increase.

Working with an editor who you don’t have such a close relationship with, asking for a rise isn’t overly difficult. Yes, it can still leave you with that feeling that they may turn you down and take their work elsewhere, but you don’t feel overly concerned about their personal feelings — if they say no, they say no.

With an editor who’s a friend, if you ask for an increase to your rates, what if you offend them? What if you put them in an awkward position? What if they want to give you a rise, but they can’t financially?

Given the option, I’d always run with trying to develop close working relationships with any editor and take the negative aspects in my stride, because for me, there are more positives that negatives.

But what about you? Looking at some of the comments on my post from last week, I was surprised at how many people generally look to formality rather than a more conversational approach to the type of communication I was talking about and so I wouldn’t be surprised if I was in the minority here!