Can you trust a friend with outsourced editing of your manuscript?Utsudo once gave a contracted manuscript to a friend who offered to help polish it. Three months later, the friend hadn’t read a single word, and had even shown it to her boyfriend for a “review” without permission. Utsudo notes that outsourcing editing is common in the industry, but you should still hire professionals for peace of mind.

Translated from Utsudo’s original Chinese column.

A friend offered to help polish my manuscript

　　I remember that years ago, I had a rather unpleasant experience with a friend.

　　Back then, that friend was preparing for the civil service exam. Her days were basically cram school, then going home to read web novels from across the strait to pass the time.

　　Meanwhile, after days of rushing and revising manuscripts, my eyes were so strained I went to see a doctor, who told me to rest my eyes more.But the deadline was right there. No matter how much I tried to rest my eyes, I still had to sit at the computer for most of the day.

　　I remember that day she’d just come back from Kaohsiung. We met up and chatted as we walked; I told her about this worry, and she was worried too, since she had no income and wanted to find a part-time job.

　　Later she called, saying she’d been reading web novels for over a decade and hoped to try revising my manuscript. Since she’d never done it before and it might take some adjusting, she hoped to do it unpaid, learning and improving as she went.

　　I was pretty happy at the time. The manuscript was already contracted, and handing it to someone else always made me uneasy — but having a friend I’d known for years help felt as reassuring as it gets.

　　But since I’d never entrusted someone like this before, I felt a bit uneasy and hesitated for a long time. She worked hard to convince me, promising she’d never leak the manuscript and saying she wanted to pursue this direction later. Seeing how sincere she was, I agreed.

　　Although my finances weren’t great back then, I still wanted to show some gratitude. So I said I’d first treat her to a meal and consider paying her part of a fee. In short, we’d see how the first collaboration went, then discuss a balance both sides could accept.

　　Then a few months quietly passed. I was busy with other things, and the publisher hadn’t pushed yet, so I let her take her time — after all, there are bound to be many issues at first. I’d only told her she could ask me anything anytime, and didn’t check on it after that.

The phone call three months later

　　Then one day, she suddenly called me.

　　She began with: “I need to tell you something, and you can’t get mad.”

　　Hearing that, I already had a bad feeling, but I decided to hear her out first.

　　“Your manuscript — I haven’t read a word of it so far, but my boyfriend read it and wrote a review. Interested?”

　　Hearing her tone — as if it were perfectly natural and she was doing me a favor — I absolutely exploded.

　　First, I took the risk of a possible leak and gave you a contracted manuscript almost three months ago, and you didn’t even look at it — and you showed my manuscript to someone else without my consent, then talk down to me about some “review”???

　　Of course appreciating a work is subjective, and I’m just an ordinary person — I wouldn’t dare say this manuscript is so great. But it was selected by a publisher by commercial standards and signed with their investment, yet she made it sound like I’d begged her for feedback.

　　Compared with how sincerely she’d pleaded before, she now left me feeling awful — and she even had the nerve to tell me not to get mad. I was speechless, and my opinion of her instantly hit rock bottom.

Hire professionals for outsourced editing

　　I was so angry that I’ve forgotten how it ended. Anyway, I told her she no longer needed to touch the manuscript and asked her to delete it completely. Because of this rift, we rarely kept in touch afterward and basically drifted apart.

　　After that, I never dared do this again (wry smile).

　　Outsourcing editing is very common in the industry, and publishers do it often too — but it really is safer to hire professionals QQ

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Further reading (in Chinese)

• Previous: #98 (in Chinese)
• Next: #100 (in Chinese)
• Start from the beginning: #01 — Utsudo’s debut
• Column introduction
• Utsudo’s books

About the author

Utsudo is a Taiwanese light novelist and novelist VTuber with more than ten years in the industry and 40 commercially published print books. Her novel 《遺失的情書》 received a 2022 Ministry of Culture youth creative award. The 《嘿！聽說妳在鬼島當作家》 series records her experiences as a novelist in Taiwan.

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