Please enjoy this interview with editor Frank Kresen. Frank's interview can also be found on the All Writers Facebook group I launched in June of this year. You can find editors like Frank, illustrators, authors, and more in the group. The main focus of the group is to help writers connect, learn, and grow. If you'd like to join this closed group, please send me a message and I'll happily add you!
1. Tell us a little about yourself. What are your favorite hobbies, favorite movie star, tell us one crazy thing about you, etc.
CONTACT INFORMATION:
Frank W. Kresen
proof positive
frankkresen@hotmail.com
5901 Grand Ave.
Kansas City, MO 64113
816 523-6482
Kimberly Walsh
Artisan Graphic Design
artisangraphic@sbcglobal.net
5901 Grand Ave.
Kansas City, MO 64113
816 444-0476
My wife and my 12-year-old granddaughter are the most important things in the world to me.
Music and creative writing have always played a very important role in my life (see below). I have written and recorded about 20 songs. I also have a special place in my heart for basketball — both playing and watching.
I edit, proofread, write, sing, play rhythm guitar and harmonica, and write songs.
2. Why did you decide to start your editing career?
In college, I studied to be a minister in The Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod. I graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1967, with a major in Theology and Classical Languages and a minor in English (Composition and Literature). The next step in that system would have been four years of post-graduate seminary training — a step that I decided I didn't want to take. It was the mid-1960s, and the whole country was changing — Civil Rights, Women's Rights, the Vietnam War, radical protests against the government — not to mention the assassinations of people I'd looked up to in politics. I became more than a little disillusioned about politics and life in general, and I decided that being a minister was more my mom's dream for me than my own.
But when I was no longer studying for the ministry, I lost my deferment from being drafted into the Army and faced the very real prospect of being sent to fight in Vietnam. So, I took a church-sponsored job teaching English as a Second Language in Japan for one year (1970).
I'd been a social worker in Chicago for Cook County, Illinois, before I left for Japan.
I re-entered the social-work field when I moved to Kansas City at the age of 27, working for the Division of Family Services in Jackson County, Missouri.
My particular area was abused and neglected children. It was an extremely stressful way to make a living. I saw some terrible things, the caseloads were too heavy to keep up with, the state/county bureaucracy was as antagonistic as some of the abusive parents, the pay scale was embarrassingly low, and it was the type of job in which you never got any closure. Cases would drag on for years — sometimes even decades. A lot of the work entailed writing reports on abuse and neglect cases and testifying in Family Court, providing testimony so that the judge would have a basis for placing the child with relatives or in the foster-care system.
Another thing I did when I got back to the US from Japan was to resume trying to make a go of it as a professional musician — a pursuit that lasted 46 years (1963 to 2009).
But I never gave up my day job, as my musical talents were only good enough to allow that pursuit to be a semi-professional career. If that semi-professional career can be said to have had a "peak," it would have been in August 1992, when the acoustic trio I was in at the time [Hug Squad] opened for The Lovin' Spoonful at Crown Center in Kansas City, in front of 20,000 people.
The Vietnam War was over, so I didn't have to worry about being drafted. But I knew that I wanted to decrease the stress in my life that social work produced.
I had always been good with the English language — good enough to teach in Japan.
Sometimes, people will ask me, "What qualifies you to be an editor/proofreader? You can't get a college degree in either of those subjects."
So, I answer, "I paid attention in third grade." It's the truth. If my questioner presses the issue, I respond, "39 years in business."
Also, during my social-worker years, I had self-published two books in the BC Era (Before Computers). In 1977, I published a collection of the best of my poetry to date, Vanishing Into the Haze. In 1979, I gathered up the best prose and poetry of five friends of mine and acted as editor/critic/annotator/anthologist for As They Were: A Small Circle of Friends.
I did attend a formal, two-day "Proofamatics" proofreading seminar offered by the publisher McGraw-Hill. In 1980, while I was still a social worker during the day, at night I worked as a Tutor in Writing, at the University of Missouri at Kansas City Writing Laboratory. I tutored individual students in writing skills and taught a series of group workshops on grammar, spelling, punctuation, and syntax.
Feeling confident that I could make a living in copy editing and proofreading, I decided to make a drastic career change. So, from 1981 to 1985, I worked in-house for several different typesetting companies in Kansas City. In 1985, I established my own freelance/independent contractor/vendor/outsource-model copy-editing and proofreading business, which I called "Proof Positive."
The rest is history. I finally was able to enjoy what I did for a living, and I never looked back. I successfully made the transition from hard-copy to computers in the late 1990s — about the same time that the "self-publishing revolution" began to take hold. Today, my business is about 80% literary clients and 20% corporate.
3. How many authors have you worked with?
I average about 100 books per year.
Many of those books come from a single source, 1106 Design in Phoenix, AZ. They are a company that fills the niche that was created by the fact that many self-published authors need help with the editing, proofreading, cover design, and interior layout/formatting of their books. The people at 1106 Design are extremely professional, and they're some of the nicest people you'll ever meet in the publishing industry. To be clear, they are not a publishing company, per se. They are what can be called a "self-publishing assistance" company, offering the services I mentioned above.
The rest of my literary work comes from individual authors — from coast to coast and from all around the globe — who find me on LinkedIn or by word of mouth and hire me for my copy-editing and proofreading services for their books. (I have no time to be active on any social-media platform except the one for professionals — LinkedIn. Please visit my LinkedIn Profile Page ["Frank Kresen"] for much more detail and a photo of me and my beautiful wife, Kim Walsh, who is a stone-cold professional graphic designer with 25 years of experience and a specialization in book covers and interior layout/formatting of books. From time to time, author clients of mine will choose Kim for the design aspects of their book, and Kim and I will find ourselves working together on a book project.)
4. What has been your favorite project so far?
5. Are you working on anything new?
My personal creative-writing projects take the form of poetry, songs, and non-fiction.
Works-in-Progress:
1. When It Rains, It Pours: Fifteen Chronologies From the Dawn of the Eighties
Essays/Experimental Non-Fiction based on autobiographical experiences.
2. Johnny, They Hardly Knew Ye…
Commentary on the Life and Career of the Late John Stewart, an American Musical Original
(I've been working on this off and on since 2008. It is an extraordinarily in-depth essay on John Stewart (1939-2008), simply one of the most gifted and talented singer/songwriters this country has ever produced — "The Best Singer/Songwriter You've Never Heard Of," as I like to say.
6. Tell us about your services, in as much detail as possible.
a. What do you expect from the author when you start a project with them?
I expect that they'll be honest and forthright.
I expect them to be serious about their writing.
I expect that they will pay me on time.
About 10 years ago, I went through about a one-year time period in which three separate authors failed to pay me after I'd sent their completed manuscript back to them.
That made me change my policy about that. Now, my terms state plainly that I will hold on to the manuscript until my invoice is paid in full.
b. What should the author expect from you during the project?
This is a very important question, and I'm glad you asked it.
I always strive — right from the beginning — to make the author aware that I limit my services exclusively to line-by-line copy editing and character-by-character proofreading.
I am not what people would call a "Developmental Editor," which is a term that describes an editor who will work with the author on sharpening the development of characters and plots.
I don't do that.
If that's what an author is seeking, I have a list of Developmental Editors to whom I can refer them.
I concentrate solely on guaranteeing that the author will be able, following my work on the book, to take their manuscript to anyone, anywhere, confident that it displays the highest standards of commonly accepted norms for correct English-language usage. Even with limiting my services to this narrow range, I have always had almost more work than I can handle.
c. How long does it usually take to finish a project?
My average copy-editing and/or proofreading speed is 10 pages per hour.
But that factor doesn't come into play very often, for two reasons:
1) I charge by the word.
2) I always allow the author to set the deadline date. I have found that it simply works out better that way: Expectations — on both sides — are clear. It's my responsibility to schedule the amount of work I have intelligently and to allot a certain number of pages to complete per day in order to meet the author-established deadline. I have become a very savvy scheduler — and I have never missed a deadline.
d. Do you offer different types of editing services? If so, what are they?
See above.
e. What is the best advice you can give to make the project go smoothly?
It's helpful to me if the author submits a "Style Preferences" list — that is, a list of how they prefer how to handle different "Matters of Style."
"Matters of Style" cover the entire range of non-critical ("soft") compositional issues: Use of the serial comma; capitalization of certain terms; periods in acronyms; American English vs. British English; how to express dates, etc.
f. Can you give us pricing?
My basic rate is two cents per word. Using the multiplier "$0.02/word," authors can do the math themselves, if they want to.
But most authors will ask me for a quote, based on the word count.
The advantage of a pricing structure based on word count is that it is a "fixed-rate" approach.
Charging by the hour, by the page, or by the project are all "variable-rate" approaches:
VARIABLE-RATE APPROACH:
BY THE HOUR: Different editors and proofreaders have different editing and proofreading speeds.
BY THE PAGE: Not all pages are equal when it come to the number of words on them.
BY THE PROJECT: There is simply too much diversity among projects to be able to quote an accurate price in advance.
The advantage of a pricing structure based on word count is that it is a "fixed-rate" approach.
FIXED-RATE APPROACH:
Once a quote is given based on word count, it will never change (unless the word count changes). There are no "surprises" at invoice time. The price will be exactly as quoted.
This is important, because some unscrupulous editors/proofreaders will "pad" their invoices, claiming it took much more time than it actually did or that the project, in general, was more complicated than the author made it out to be at the beginning. The result is much like "Sticker Shock" when buying a car.
That will never happen with my business.
DISCOUNTS:
One of the things — beyond expertise and experience — that attracts authors to use my services is my unique system of discounts. I offer four categories of discounts:
2. Volume — Simply put, the higher the word count, the higher the additional discount.
1 – 32,499 words, regular rates; 32,500 – 64,999 words, 5% off; 65,000 – 97,999 words, 10% off;
98,000 – 129,999 words, 15% off; 130,000 – 162,499 words, 20% off; 162,500 words or more, 25%
off.
3. Non-Profit: proof positive is happy to discount its services by 10% for clients who can substantiate
their status as a registered non-profit entity.
4. Multiple-book Discount
Last but not least, if the author will sign a written agreement to give me at least one other book to
work on in the near future, I will offer them the highest discount available under my pricing
structure: 50% (!!!) Both the first and second books will enjoy the 50% discount.
g. Would you like to share anything else about the editing process?
7. What advice would you give upcoming authors?
Be patient. Writing and publishing a book is a marathon, not a sprint.
Read the classics and other great works of literature. See what great writing looks like.
Write about things you love or are highly important to you. Your readers will be able to tell if your heart is not in it.
Trust your editor — and give him/her the tools he/she needs to work with, such as the "Style Preferences" list, described above.
Write, write, write — and then re-write, re-write, re-write.
CONTACT INFORMATION:
Frank W. Kresen
proof positive
frankkresen@hotmail.com
5901 Grand Ave.
Kansas City, MO 64113
816 523-6482
Kimberly Walsh
Artisan Graphic Design
artisangraphic@sbcglobal.net
5901 Grand Ave.
Kansas City, MO 64113
816 444-0476
My wife and my 12-year-old granddaughter are the most important things in the world to me.
Music and creative writing have always played a very important role in my life (see below). I have written and recorded about 20 songs. I also have a special place in my heart for basketball — both playing and watching.
I edit, proofread, write, sing, play rhythm guitar and harmonica, and write songs.
2. Why did you decide to start your editing career?
In college, I studied to be a minister in The Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod. I graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1967, with a major in Theology and Classical Languages and a minor in English (Composition and Literature). The next step in that system would have been four years of post-graduate seminary training — a step that I decided I didn't want to take. It was the mid-1960s, and the whole country was changing — Civil Rights, Women's Rights, the Vietnam War, radical protests against the government — not to mention the assassinations of people I'd looked up to in politics. I became more than a little disillusioned about politics and life in general, and I decided that being a minister was more my mom's dream for me than my own.
But when I was no longer studying for the ministry, I lost my deferment from being drafted into the Army and faced the very real prospect of being sent to fight in Vietnam. So, I took a church-sponsored job teaching English as a Second Language in Japan for one year (1970).
I'd been a social worker in Chicago for Cook County, Illinois, before I left for Japan.
I re-entered the social-work field when I moved to Kansas City at the age of 27, working for the Division of Family Services in Jackson County, Missouri.
My particular area was abused and neglected children. It was an extremely stressful way to make a living. I saw some terrible things, the caseloads were too heavy to keep up with, the state/county bureaucracy was as antagonistic as some of the abusive parents, the pay scale was embarrassingly low, and it was the type of job in which you never got any closure. Cases would drag on for years — sometimes even decades. A lot of the work entailed writing reports on abuse and neglect cases and testifying in Family Court, providing testimony so that the judge would have a basis for placing the child with relatives or in the foster-care system.
Another thing I did when I got back to the US from Japan was to resume trying to make a go of it as a professional musician — a pursuit that lasted 46 years (1963 to 2009).
But I never gave up my day job, as my musical talents were only good enough to allow that pursuit to be a semi-professional career. If that semi-professional career can be said to have had a "peak," it would have been in August 1992, when the acoustic trio I was in at the time [Hug Squad] opened for The Lovin' Spoonful at Crown Center in Kansas City, in front of 20,000 people.
The Vietnam War was over, so I didn't have to worry about being drafted. But I knew that I wanted to decrease the stress in my life that social work produced.
I had always been good with the English language — good enough to teach in Japan.
Sometimes, people will ask me, "What qualifies you to be an editor/proofreader? You can't get a college degree in either of those subjects."
So, I answer, "I paid attention in third grade." It's the truth. If my questioner presses the issue, I respond, "39 years in business."
Also, during my social-worker years, I had self-published two books in the BC Era (Before Computers). In 1977, I published a collection of the best of my poetry to date, Vanishing Into the Haze. In 1979, I gathered up the best prose and poetry of five friends of mine and acted as editor/critic/annotator/anthologist for As They Were: A Small Circle of Friends.
I did attend a formal, two-day "Proofamatics" proofreading seminar offered by the publisher McGraw-Hill. In 1980, while I was still a social worker during the day, at night I worked as a Tutor in Writing, at the University of Missouri at Kansas City Writing Laboratory. I tutored individual students in writing skills and taught a series of group workshops on grammar, spelling, punctuation, and syntax.
Feeling confident that I could make a living in copy editing and proofreading, I decided to make a drastic career change. So, from 1981 to 1985, I worked in-house for several different typesetting companies in Kansas City. In 1985, I established my own freelance/independent contractor/vendor/outsource-model copy-editing and proofreading business, which I called "Proof Positive."
The rest is history. I finally was able to enjoy what I did for a living, and I never looked back. I successfully made the transition from hard-copy to computers in the late 1990s — about the same time that the "self-publishing revolution" began to take hold. Today, my business is about 80% literary clients and 20% corporate.
3. How many authors have you worked with?
I average about 100 books per year.
Many of those books come from a single source, 1106 Design in Phoenix, AZ. They are a company that fills the niche that was created by the fact that many self-published authors need help with the editing, proofreading, cover design, and interior layout/formatting of their books. The people at 1106 Design are extremely professional, and they're some of the nicest people you'll ever meet in the publishing industry. To be clear, they are not a publishing company, per se. They are what can be called a "self-publishing assistance" company, offering the services I mentioned above.
The rest of my literary work comes from individual authors — from coast to coast and from all around the globe — who find me on LinkedIn or by word of mouth and hire me for my copy-editing and proofreading services for their books. (I have no time to be active on any social-media platform except the one for professionals — LinkedIn. Please visit my LinkedIn Profile Page ["Frank Kresen"] for much more detail and a photo of me and my beautiful wife, Kim Walsh, who is a stone-cold professional graphic designer with 25 years of experience and a specialization in book covers and interior layout/formatting of books. From time to time, author clients of mine will choose Kim for the design aspects of their book, and Kim and I will find ourselves working together on a book project.)
4. What has been your favorite project so far?
5. Are you working on anything new?
My personal creative-writing projects take the form of poetry, songs, and non-fiction.
Works-in-Progress:
1. When It Rains, It Pours: Fifteen Chronologies From the Dawn of the Eighties
Essays/Experimental Non-Fiction based on autobiographical experiences.
2. Johnny, They Hardly Knew Ye…
Commentary on the Life and Career of the Late John Stewart, an American Musical Original
(I've been working on this off and on since 2008. It is an extraordinarily in-depth essay on John Stewart (1939-2008), simply one of the most gifted and talented singer/songwriters this country has ever produced — "The Best Singer/Songwriter You've Never Heard Of," as I like to say.
6. Tell us about your services, in as much detail as possible.
a. What do you expect from the author when you start a project with them?
I expect that they'll be honest and forthright.
I expect them to be serious about their writing.
I expect that they will pay me on time.
About 10 years ago, I went through about a one-year time period in which three separate authors failed to pay me after I'd sent their completed manuscript back to them.
That made me change my policy about that. Now, my terms state plainly that I will hold on to the manuscript until my invoice is paid in full.
b. What should the author expect from you during the project?
This is a very important question, and I'm glad you asked it.
I always strive — right from the beginning — to make the author aware that I limit my services exclusively to line-by-line copy editing and character-by-character proofreading.
I am not what people would call a "Developmental Editor," which is a term that describes an editor who will work with the author on sharpening the development of characters and plots.
I don't do that.
If that's what an author is seeking, I have a list of Developmental Editors to whom I can refer them.
I concentrate solely on guaranteeing that the author will be able, following my work on the book, to take their manuscript to anyone, anywhere, confident that it displays the highest standards of commonly accepted norms for correct English-language usage. Even with limiting my services to this narrow range, I have always had almost more work than I can handle.
c. How long does it usually take to finish a project?
My average copy-editing and/or proofreading speed is 10 pages per hour.
But that factor doesn't come into play very often, for two reasons:
1) I charge by the word.
2) I always allow the author to set the deadline date. I have found that it simply works out better that way: Expectations — on both sides — are clear. It's my responsibility to schedule the amount of work I have intelligently and to allot a certain number of pages to complete per day in order to meet the author-established deadline. I have become a very savvy scheduler — and I have never missed a deadline.
d. Do you offer different types of editing services? If so, what are they?
See above.
e. What is the best advice you can give to make the project go smoothly?
It's helpful to me if the author submits a "Style Preferences" list — that is, a list of how they prefer how to handle different "Matters of Style."
"Matters of Style" cover the entire range of non-critical ("soft") compositional issues: Use of the serial comma; capitalization of certain terms; periods in acronyms; American English vs. British English; how to express dates, etc.
f. Can you give us pricing?
My basic rate is two cents per word. Using the multiplier "$0.02/word," authors can do the math themselves, if they want to.
But most authors will ask me for a quote, based on the word count.
The advantage of a pricing structure based on word count is that it is a "fixed-rate" approach.
Charging by the hour, by the page, or by the project are all "variable-rate" approaches:
VARIABLE-RATE APPROACH:
BY THE HOUR: Different editors and proofreaders have different editing and proofreading speeds.
BY THE PAGE: Not all pages are equal when it come to the number of words on them.
BY THE PROJECT: There is simply too much diversity among projects to be able to quote an accurate price in advance.
The advantage of a pricing structure based on word count is that it is a "fixed-rate" approach.
FIXED-RATE APPROACH:
Once a quote is given based on word count, it will never change (unless the word count changes). There are no "surprises" at invoice time. The price will be exactly as quoted.
This is important, because some unscrupulous editors/proofreaders will "pad" their invoices, claiming it took much more time than it actually did or that the project, in general, was more complicated than the author made it out to be at the beginning. The result is much like "Sticker Shock" when buying a car.
That will never happen with my business.
DISCOUNTS:
One of the things — beyond expertise and experience — that attracts authors to use my services is my unique system of discounts. I offer four categories of discounts:
- Introductory — 25%
2. Volume — Simply put, the higher the word count, the higher the additional discount.
1 – 32,499 words, regular rates; 32,500 – 64,999 words, 5% off; 65,000 – 97,999 words, 10% off;
98,000 – 129,999 words, 15% off; 130,000 – 162,499 words, 20% off; 162,500 words or more, 25%
off.
3. Non-Profit: proof positive is happy to discount its services by 10% for clients who can substantiate
their status as a registered non-profit entity.
4. Multiple-book Discount
Last but not least, if the author will sign a written agreement to give me at least one other book to
work on in the near future, I will offer them the highest discount available under my pricing
structure: 50% (!!!) Both the first and second books will enjoy the 50% discount.
g. Would you like to share anything else about the editing process?
7. What advice would you give upcoming authors?
Be patient. Writing and publishing a book is a marathon, not a sprint.
Read the classics and other great works of literature. See what great writing looks like.
Write about things you love or are highly important to you. Your readers will be able to tell if your heart is not in it.
Trust your editor — and give him/her the tools he/she needs to work with, such as the "Style Preferences" list, described above.
Write, write, write — and then re-write, re-write, re-write.
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