About the Editor

At a glance:

  • Education. I earned both a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature and a Bachelor of Science in Journalism from Boston University, where I studied one-on-one with top scholars in literature and contemporary criticism. I also studied advanced literary theory in an intensive program at Saint Anne’s College at Oxford University.
  • Publishing Experience. Experience includes manuscript evaluation for Zachary Shuster and Harmsworth agency in New York and Boston and editorial positions at John Wiley & Sons in Hoboken and Jones & Bartlett in Boston.
  • Precision Editing Experience. Before settling into the book publishing world, I was a full-time reporter and copy editor for several newspapers. I remain in touch with journalists and publicists across the country.
  • Freelance Success. My editing experience includes years of editing academic texts and countless non-fiction and fiction manuscripts. See the Testimonials page to learn more!

Bio:

Lindsay Murdock, editor of Murdock Editing, found her calling working for writers after studying the publishing industry from the inside. After working for literary agencies as a reader and manuscript evaluator, she decided to start a company to work directly with authors to polish and prepare their manuscripts for the big time.

Why I do what I do:

Manuscript Evaluation has become the bedrock of my business, and I love working directly with authors. Many years ago, one of my clients sent me an e-mail. He had completed his revisions and was ready to start sending queries out to agents (he landed one of his first-pick agents a few months later). He wanted me to send some recommendations, but he also asked if I had ever thought about getting back into the agenting game, because he wanted me to be his agent.

I don’t want to be an agent at this point in my career for one VERY important reason.

I like my authors (and I know their agents do too!). I like working with my clients to shape their characters and stories. I like being able to take a manuscript that would clearly not make it out of the slush pile at a big agency and help the author turn it into something that gets attention. You can’t always do that as an agent. Agents make money on commission, so if the book doesn’t sell, they don’t get paid. And in the publishing world today, that means most agents can only really afford to take on clients who have manuscripts that are at least 80% ready to go.

Once upon a time in a land not so far away (actually, my first agency job was at a firm only a few miles from my current office), I worked as a literary agent’s assistant. My job was to sort through all of the queries, picking out only the very best and most likely to be what my agent was looking for. I requested those few partials, then had to send simple form rejection letters to the rest. It seems cruel, but that’s all we could do—every day another batch of 50-100 queries arrived in the mail.

Of the partials, I was told to read the first ten to twenty pages. If the manuscript didn’t grab me right from the start, another rejection letter went out.

Once we got to the full manuscript stage, I read it through and completed an evaluation, then wrote an evaluation report for my agent, either recommending that he take a read through himself, or that we send out yet another rejection letter.

In the second two stages, I was already close enough to the manuscript that I could, more often than not, have told the author exactly what he was doing wrong—and exactly what he needed to do right to make his manuscript ready to sell. But by then we’d moved on to trying to find the next manuscript—the next book that might actually bring dollars into the firm.

And that is why I do what I do. That is why I’m not a literary agent. Because when a manuscript comes to my door, or an author contacts me about fixing up his or her manuscript, I don’t have to turn anyone away. I don’t have to send out rejection letters just so I can move on to the next big thing. I have the opportunity to sit down, read the entire manuscript, and provide the author with the tools he or she needs to realize his or her writing dreams. Would I make more money as an agent? Probably. But would I give up the relationships I have with my authors? Or the sense of accomplishment I get when I receive the signed early reviewer copy editions of a book that was languishing under the author’s bed before I stepped in and helped guide her journey to publication?

Absolutely not.

 

 

For more information, please e-mail me at editor@murdockediting.com.