A Praise Song to Human Editors

Will Chatty GPT ever learn to edit itself?

As I wrote in my last post, AI is extremely chatty. Any writer who’s received one of those spam messages urging you to connect with a famous author or get a book promotion package you never requested, will see that the fulsome praise of your work can take an entire page not to mention minutes of your precious time. Recently, I got an invitation from an AI generated scam focused on editing my published picture book Lucy and Henry Are Twins. The scam email is 144 words longer than the entire text of the book including the title. (How and why I would want to edit a published book is a mystery to me.)

I have been publishing traditionally for (eek) fifty years and through all those decades, I have been both challenged and supported by dedicated editors who love stories and readers, and who have spent their lives making good books better.

I sent my most recent manuscript, the fourth in my series that began with The Castle in the Attic, to Margery, the editor who has worked with me on the series from the beginning and who is a talented and prolific children’s book writer herself.

Margery knows all my quirks and with great patience, she points them out to me every time. She and I both prefer the penciled line edit to a digital program, so here is a sample of one of the more lightly touched pages.

I use the words just and even too often. I repeat words usually in the same paragraph and occasionally, in the same sentence. She cuts my unnecessary explanations, my long descriptive passages, and urges me to replace pronouns with the characters’ names. She is alert to my continuity issues. (Ex. See p. 88, line 8. William knows that Tolliver is not around.)

But more than that, she is attuned to what I’m trying to achieve in the story and how best to help me realize it. As every good editor knows, the way to get a writer back to the page with a sense of energy and excitement is first and foremost to tell them what they are doing right, what in the manuscript is working. I happen to love the revision process because I know it’s my opportunity to get closer to my original vision for the book. Once I’ve taken the time to absorb what she is saying, Margery’s editorial letters always send me back to page one with enthusiasm.

Every experienced writer knows that we are our own worst editors. We fall in love with our characters, our settings, our descriptions and when we type THE END on the bottom of the page/screen, there is a feeling of such joy and achievement that we have little objectivity left. That’s why I try to take weeks if not months away from the book to let it rest. With time off and the help of an editor like Margery, I’m able to see my work more clearly and cut more drastically so that the story moves as swiftly as it needs to do in this age of short attention spans.

Will AI replace the human editor? Many feel it already has, but I’m not one of them. AI is a mathematical tool without conscious awareness, an inner life or lived experience. Those are the qualities I look for in the editor casting her eye and wielding her pencil over my hard won words.

Guest Elizabeth Winthrop Alsop reveals the pitfalls of Hybrid Publishing

September 29, 2025 2 Comments

Jane Friedman, a publishing industry expert upon whom I rely for trustworthy information recently updated her very helpful guide to hybrid publishing. For anyone considering this publishing route, be sure to read this guide carefully as she outlines many of the warning signs when you consider signing with a hybrid publisher. I also recommend this list from ALLI, which analyzes the companies and individuals eager to help writers in all sorts of ways from editing to publishing to publicizing. This article in Publishers Weekly details the more successful hybrid publishers and their payment models. And finally, I always encourage writers to sign up for the regular emails from Authors Publish. Here is an article on what the author, Emily Harstone, calls the three kinds of publishing. To be clear, she does not distinguish between vanity and hybrid publishing.

But as a fiction writer, I always believe that “the devil is in the details” and so let me tell you the story of one writer’s experience with a hybrid publisher.

Geoffrey Douglas is an accomplished journalist and memoirist. You can sign up for his Substack newsletter, 5000 Bylines Later here. He modestly describes himself as “author and journalist, with six books and 100 or so magazine pieces behind me–about politics, people, gambling, migrants, murder, a town on fire, etc.” The five books he wrote before his current novel Love in a Dark Place, were all traditionally published, well-reviewed and one was turned into a movie. This novel certainly deserves to be. Kirkus Reviews calls it “…a moving, unflinching novel about human depravity, and the way love can coexist in its menacing presence… emotionally hard-hitting, with impressive psychological depth.”

However, when Geoffrey tried to interest an agent in this novel based on his real-life experiences in Atlantic City during the 1980’s, the heyday of corruption and criminality, he couldn’t get anybody to sign him on. Those who did take a look at the manuscript were unnerved by a white male author “daring” (irony all mine) to include a prostitute and a black boxer as two of the main characters, both seen through the eyes of the protagonist. (I could go off on a tangent about the politically correct atmosphere in publishing these days when writers are pushed to stay within their very narrow lanes and only write what they know personally. What happened to imagination? But I digress.) With the big 5 (as the traditional publishing companies are known) only reading manuscripts from agented writers, the doors to publishing the old-fashioned way are slamming shut. This has pushed writers like Geoffrey to seek other ways to get his work out to a wider audience and there are a multitude of companies eager to help writers frustrated with the current system. Some of these are reputable, others not so much. (Once again see the ALLI guide above.)

So, when I asked Geoffrey about his experience with a hybrid publisher, he gave me this overall view of Greenleaf, the company he worked with.

For me, there were two sides to the coin. On the one hand, Greenleaf is a solid, very professional publisher. The editing, design and production of my book were all fabulous: professional, collaborative and endlessly helpful–more so than anything I ever experienced with the mainstream guys who published me before. And the final product is as fine as anything I could’ve hoped for.

The flip side: Although everyone I dealt with was very straightforward, and there was no dissembling as such, the system itself seems almost designed to obfuscate. The numbers you see on the front end are nothing like the final reality. You’re given a set of prices and a menu of options, most of which seem reasonable enough–but no mention is made initially of printing, warehouse storage, delivery to bookstores or a number of smaller services–so, probably like many other authors, I was blindsided by a lot of it. Some of their promotional options don’t seem worth the cost; and the print-run they recommended was far greater than what’s been sold so far or what I now anticipate. But because the number was more or less in line with my past experience with traditional publishers, and because it was their “professional recommendation,” I took the advice, and am now stuck with a monthly storage bill for more than 2,000 books—not to mention the original printing costs.

So my verdict is mixed. Great service, not so great communication. The system, as designed, is almost certain to include some pretty big potholes, even for the most cautious of us. It’s a textbook case of Buyer Beware. I didn’t beware nearly well enough, so that’s on me.

And here’s an assessment of Greenleaf by ALLI (Alliance of Independent Authors) which seems in line with Geoffrey’s experience.

High pressure sales and staggeringly high fees for add-on services tarnish an otherwise excellent service.

These days with the proliferation of pitfalls for writers and the come-ons from AI generated “publicists and editors” as I wrote about recently, it’s sadly become a game of “gotcha!”

I now feel compelled to add a note at the end of this post letting my readers know that this newsletter is and always will be “human authored.”

Elizabeth Winthrop Alsop (www.elizabethwinthropalsop.com) is the author of over 50 works of fiction for adults and children under the pen name Elizabeth Winthrop. These include the award-winning fantasy series, The Castle in the Attic and The Battle for the Castle as well as the short story, The Golden Darters, read on the nationwide radio program, Selected Shorts, and included in Best American Short Story anthology, and Island Justice and In My Mother’s House, two novels now available as eBooks. She is the daughter of the acclaimed journalist, Stewart Alsop. Daughter of Spies: Wartime Secrets, Family Lies, a family history about her parents’ love affair during World War II and their marriage lived in the spotlight of Washington during the 1950s was published by Regal House, October 25, 2022.

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