Professor turns into accidental editor, builds successful business

Dr. Linda Tucker provides insights into the immensely competitive and rewarding editorial world.

By Owen Mantz

Linda Tucker has a doctorate in English from the University of Alberta and is the founder and editor of Cup & Quill Editing and Publication Services LLC. She also serves as professor of English literature with more than 20 years of experience. She authored “Lockstep and Dance: Images of Black Men in Popular Culture (2007).” Besides her academic career, Tucker is a certified life coach and CrossFit enthusiast. In 2003, she moved to the United States after her parents raised her in Canada.

Q: Did you know from the start what you wanted to do with your life?

A: No, I had started out as a physical education major. In my sophomore year, I had to take a required course called “Zora Neale Hurston and the African American Literary Tradition.” I loved it and made the decision by the end of that year to switch to English and pursue graduate studies eventually in African American literature.

Q: At what point did you know you wanted to become an editor?

A: Three years ago, one of my former students said that she started writing romance novels. I read one and told her she needed a new editor because I found all kinds of errors, so she hired me to edit the next one. I thought that was kind of fun, so I put a profile up on thumbtack.com and next thing I knew, I had more work than I could handle. I started hiring all my professor friends, which gave me a business model, and now we have a full range of editing, publication and marketing services. We edit and publish all genres, and I have a dedicated academic editor and a dedicated children’s literature editor. I thought I’d do mostly academic work because of my background, but I tend to do most of the memoirs. I have people who are experts in areas of poetry and fiction.

For a while people said, “What’s your business model?” and I said, “I don’t have a business model, I have a hobby!” I had to do a lot of learning on the fly, and that involved a lot of mistakes. My publishing team and I took the approach that York University took to putting in sidewalks when they first started. It was a relatively new university in the late 1960s, and before they put in sidewalks, they waited to see where people would naturally walk and then laid sidewalks there. We wait until we make our mistakes, and then we decide what we need in place to avoid making them again because it’s impossible to anticipate some things.

Q: What was the most challenging part in starting out like that?

A: Finding a balance between what we wanted to earn and what people would be willing to pay for the services regardless of our credentials. The Ph.D. is nice, but I’m not sure it means quite as much to people as one might think. It is challenging to find the kinds of clients who we really want to work with while still meeting the needs of those who are maybe not quite as impressive as writers, but we still want to help them realize their own goals.

Q: What does a typical day look like for you?

A: As the owner of the company, I fill all the leagues. I make appointments and we work remotely. I have clients all over Canada and the U.S. I have conversations with them and hopefully sell, but I don’t think of it as selling — more as finding out whether we’re a good fit for their project.

It still amazes me that people talk to me on the phone and then send me thousands of dollars on PayPal; That blows my mind because we live in a world where it’s hard to trust people. It gives me a little bit of faith in humanity that someone is still willing to trust someone. And that makes it important to maintain the integrity of the business, the work that we do and the quality of the client relationship.

I build time in for editing or whatever I happen to have in my own queue. I talk to my publishing team usually every other day — they are based in Bend, Oregon. Other than that, it’s really just building leads, invoicing clients, following up on invoices, keeping in touch with the editors who have projects on the go and collecting payments from clients whose work has been finished.

Q: What is the most rewarding experience you’ve had in your line of work?

A: We do a lot of faith-based narratives, and I do a lot of memoirs — the stories reflect some kind of hardship they’ve been through, some kind of experience related to God in whatever capacity they practice religion. Sometimes people say things to me like, “I think God sent me to you.” To have someone say that is very flattering and touching because it’s said in a heartfelt way. That means a lot to me when someone is excited to see how much of a difference quality editing can make in the end. You feel like you’ve worked together in pursuit of a goal. I love that. And it’s fun when the books come out on Amazon, and you get to see them at that point.

Q: What’s the worst thing you’ve experienced?

A: Today I had a poetry manuscript, and the client thinks very highly of herself as a poet. She’s not bad and her poetry is pretty good, so I sent it to one of my poetry editors who provided really good feedback. The editor made some suggestions for the language, made changes to some line breaks and then commented more on the overall developmental angle about the work. I sent it back and the client was very offended by the fact that the editor had recommended word changes. I reviewed them and thought I liked the recommendations. The client said it was “sophomoric feedback,” the editor could have gotten it out of a college textbook and was using her opinions. But the editor is using opinions based on 12 years of university education in the field. You can accept or reject the feedback, but you’re paying for opinions. This client just has a bit of an ego, and the challenging part of that is I don’t want bad reviews, but I also don’t want to refund the money because the editor’s already been paid. The editor put in the work, and she didn’t shirk her duties. The client is demanding that another editor go through it. That would mean I would have to pay another editor out-of-pocket. My dilemma is how to best deal with this so that the client doesn’t walk away angry, and I don’t walk away down $1,000.

I had a client who paid for a coaching package. It was $3,500, and a couple of weeks in, she lost her job and her husband left her. And she said: “I can’t afford it. I need the money back.” We usually don’t refund them, and I didn’t have to — our contract didn’t make it necessary for me to refund them. But I don’t think I couldn’t have lived with myself knowing that she had lost her job and was in dire straits financially. Someone said to me, “Well maybe she’s lying; maybe she didn’t really lose her job.” I would rather believe someone than second-guess them and leave them in dire straits.

Q: What advice would you give to aspiring writers?

A: For aspiring writers, I would say workshop your work every chance you get. Get in a writing group, pass it before as many sets of eyes as you can because sometimes we get manuscripts and the only person who has seen it is the author. They really are just submitting a draft, and the appropriate time to submit a manuscript is after it’s been workshopped, after you’ve revised it. A lot of people who have written something for the first time don’t know what revision means; they think it means proofreading. Find a community of people whom you respect and who can give feedback that helps your work get better. Then before you publish, get good quality editing and be prepared to pay for it because there’s not a writer on the planet who doesn’t use an editor. That’s just part of the game. It takes a village.

Q: What is some advice you would give to aspiring editors?

A: Practice on some people, practice on giving feedback, start offering your services and don’t get carried away about price at first. Offer a little bit cheaper than the going rate, so you can just get some reviews. Get experience under your belt and know that reviews matter a lot. Trust your own skills and voice when providing feedback. Work really hard to be as much of a cheerleader for your clients as you are an editor because even if their writing is crappy, there’s always room to do something with them.

For example, we had one manuscript that came in and it was so bad — honestly, I couldn’t make heads or tails of the organization of it. I had an editor who was the kind of person who could look at a garage packed to the roof with crap and figure out exactly what it would look like when it was finished being organized. This editor ended up coaching the writer to rewrite the whole manuscript from the beginning. That person has now published three books with us, and she’s become a pretty solid writer. It started not by saying “this is crap” and sending it back, but saying “we need to step back a little bit and let me show you what the writing process looks like.” Many of our clients say they appreciate a one-on-one engagement — they feel like they’re more than just a word count.

Q: Would you recommend starting out with indie publishing, self publishing, rather than going the traditional route?

A: The downside of that is you don’t have the marketing. Marketing is everything — figure out how you’re going to get your book in front of an audience. We started out just doing layout and design for people and uploading their books to Amazon. A good layout design is more than just uploading a Word document; the cover is important and we do custom cover designs. If you’re techy, want to put in the work, can make it look like a good quality book, then why not. But if you’re not techy and you’re just trying to wing it, it’s worth it to pay someone to do that work for you. Play to your strengths; you be the writer, let someone else be the publisher. It’s worth paying for some marketing help because Amazon is a great place — 60% of the world’s book sales happen there, but your book will be lost if there’s no avenue for it to reach the appropriate readers. The cover blurb, the search word, the key words that we use for searches, so people who are looking for a certain kind of book can come across it. The devil’s in the details.

Tucker says that every editor is a writer, but not every writer an editor. Mistakes are an integral part of building an editorial business, but persistence and hard work continue to be the window to success.