Lots of Pennies for Your Thoughts

If you’re anything like me, you enjoy passing judgment. You love the passion you hear in your own voice as you critique a novel or film. You get a high from labeling things as “cliché” or “self-indulgent.” You’re not a bad person, you just know that you could make the wordy world infinitely better if someone would only listen. You know you could make everyone sound less dweeby if someone just gave you a chance. And maybe pay you for your insights?

Let’s assume that, along with dishing out blunt yet thoughtful critiques, you like to write. But maybe you don’t have any original ideas. Maybe you haven’t the attention span to stick with anything bigger than a haiku. Maybe you’re detail oriented—at your best when adding flourishes and accents to an existing text. If so, perhaps you’d like to be a developmental editor.


A developmental editor is hired to help a writer publish a good book and then take all the credit. Though certainly thankless, it nonetheless allows the editor to put their ideas to some use, rather than only making one sound pretentious at social gatherings. It’s no secret that writers become too close to their own work and are blind to their sentimental plotlines, their lack of focus, or their poor character development. The job requirements can range from slight tweaks to the word choice to a complete overhaul of the tone or point of the work. The author might have let friends and family read their manuscript, but they’re not going to tell their loved one that what they believed to be a masterpiece is in fact a gag-reflex trigger from page one. A smart writer will buy an unbiased opinion. A smart writer will pay you to make them feel bad about themselves temporarily because it’s better than an eternity of rejection letters.

 -Rosie Mckinlay-Mench