Shawna Hampton and Magic Words Editorial Services

From an English Degree to a high school grammar teacher, to a master’s in communications, to coding, to a degree in interior design, Shawna has had a long and interesting career! After a layoff prompted by COVID, she re-evaluated her career and regained her passion for reading and her career in editing was born.

Let’s take a look at Shawna’s thoughts on her career and the advice that she’d give women looking to break into the industry!

Q: Who has been your biggest supporter(s) throughout your editing career?

A: I’m lucky to have friends that I made on my journey to becoming an editor who still support and encourage me now, specifically my colleague, Jo. She and I met in an editing class from the Editorial Arts Academy, and that professional connection grew into a years-long friendship. My mentor, Susannah Noel, who began the Editorial Arts Academy, still gives freely of her time to talk me through editing or professional situations. Other editors in Discord networking groups and on Facebook are immense wells of support. But my biggest supporter of all is my partner, Chris, who shows me every day how proud he is of my success.

Q: Professional editing can be a hard industry to break into, especially for women. What was your path like when you knew professional editing was the direction you wanted to go?

A: Although I majored in English in college (waaaay back in the ’90s), I had a winding path toward editing. After a brief stint teaching high school, my first career was in website design and development, and later, I went back to school to become an interior designer. While I loved these careers, after a decade in each, I burned out and started dreaming of a job that I could do from home, on my own terms, centered around my first love: books. The pandemic was also a huge wake-up call. I was laid off from my last ho-hum design-related job, the world was looney, and I realized it was now or never. I wasn’t getting any younger, and I wanted my future to be self-directed.

Finally, in 2021 I launched my fiction editing business, working with indie authors of horror, fantasy, and sci-fi. And in 2023, I took and passed the Macmillan editing test and began copyediting and proofreading for Tor, Nightfire, Forge, St. Martin’s Press, and all of their various imprints.

Q: Editing is often a thankless job when it comes to the wider fanbase of an author. What does it mean to you to be a professional editor?

A: My job as an editor is to make my authors look good. Especially with indie authors, I see my role as helping ensure their books are just as well-written, well-told, and well-edited as anything released by a traditional publisher. For trad clients, my goal is to uphold their standard of excellence. I honestly don’t want to be thanked by fanbases; if I’ve done my job, all a reader should notice is how awesome the book is. A great review of the author’s book from a reader is all the thanks I’d ever want.

Q: How do you keep yourself focused when undertaking lengthy editing projects?

A: I’ve developed a system over the years that helps by taking long projects and breaking them down into short, manageable stints. Typically, an editor can only do focus-intensive editing work for a part of the day; my max is six hours, but I’m at my best for four. Knowing I have a stopping point keeps me going, and I take short breaks to stretch or get a snack every hour or so during an editing run. And, of course, wanting to know the end of the story pulls me along!

Books and reading have been such a soul joy my whole life. I will never, never get tired of diving into a story, living in a richly imagined world, getting a brain massage from the thoughts a book provokes.

Naturally, then, writers have always seemed like superheroes to me. The sheer magic of taking an idea and developing it into a whole world, a whole adventure, is awe-inspiring. I take the honor of shepherding an author’s magic toward publication seriously. It’s not easy to make that dream come true – I’m still trying myself! – and leaving that dream in my care for a bit of time is a matter of deep trust for an author. I think about that every day.

Q: What has been the hardest part of your career as a professional editor so far?

A: Seeing authors trust the wrong people with their work. Whether that’s an inexperienced, untrained, or unkind editor, another unprofessional “service” provider, or even unscrupulous beta readers, it hurts my heart when an author reports being ripped off or treated poorly. Especially with editing – it’s an unregulated profession, and literally anyone can call themselves an “editor.” In the US, there’s no governing or certifying body that confers credibility to someone in the field. So, a person with very little training in The Chicago Manual of Style or manuscript conventions or how to write kind, helpful queries in in an author’s draft, or who still relies on outdated rules for grammar or spelling, can charge unsuspecting authors money to “edit” their books. I’ve worked on too many manuscripts where a previous untrained editor returned the book in worse shape than it was.

The hardest part of that is it’s so easy to verify an editor’s credentials and bona fides through a Google search: what editing training they’ve had, what references they can provide, what books they’ve worked on, what other authors say about them. All on the internet (or should be – if it’s not, that’s a red flag).

Q: What do you consider to be your greatest strength and weakness as a professional editor?

A: My greatest strength is my kindness. I’m an aspiring author myself, although it’s not my priority, so I understand how easy it is for one stray word to crush someone’s self-confidence. Even when I have to deliver some tough feedback, I try to do it as kindly and constructively as possible. My clients tell me this is what they love about me.

My weakness is that I struggle to keep up with social media trends and current culture. I’m forty-eight, a solid GenXer (I don’t mind sharing my age; it’s nothing to be ashamed of to have lived this long, and I believe we should normalize women growing older), and I sometimes feel out of touch with what’s going down on BookTok or the latest bookish internet craze. That might not be a bad thing – my mental health is too important to me to chase those rabbits – but I do worry that younger clients might feel I’m out of the loop. I ask for their help a lot to keep me relevant.

Q: Who is on your radar as someone you’d love to work with?

A: I’ve already had the privilege of working with a couple of my favorite authors through Tor, so that was fun (and nerve-racking, lol). My fingers are crossed that one of these days I have the honor of working with Chuck Wendig, V.E. Schwab, Catriona Ward, Cynthia Pelayo, Sequoia Nagamatsu, or Stephen Graham Jones.

Q: At some point in our lives, we’ve all heard the negative comments: “You’re not good enough.” “you’ll never make it.” “This is the worst thing I’ve ever seen.” “You don’t belong.” How do you move forward when faced with negativity?

A: Whew, boy. This is the lesson of a lifetime, how to remain true to yourself and confident in your efforts when other people have opinions about you or your work. I wrote a whole blog post about this, geared toward helping writers overcome their fear of sharing their writing (Jordan here: you can find that post here.)

The gist of the post is what I live by in these situations: My work/writing is not me, it’s just results – meaning that what the person is criticizing is not who I am, it’s just something I did, and who I am, the core of me, is something pure and beautiful that outside opinions can’t change or affect. What people criticize and their negative words are more a reflection of them – their emotions and fears and internal makeup – and not my work.

Keeping faith in my vision helps a lot, too. The certainty that what I do and how I do it is best for me tones down those outside voices. That takes a lot of self-knowledge, though, which is something that’s only come with age, maybe. I certainly never had it when I was younger.

Q: What advice would you give to women who are wanting to get into professional editing? Is there a certain degree or experience level that they should have?

A: My advice would be to start with editing-specific training. Degrees don’t really matter; editors have a wide variety of degrees. But very rarely does anyone receive editing training within a degree, even an English degree, and a lot of prospective editors believe their high school grammar classes prepare them for editing. Sorry to say, they don’t. I was an English major and taught high school grammar. It wasn’t until I did editing-specific training that I realized just how much I didn’t know. At the very least, classes on The Chicago Manual of Style are a must. (Or the style guide of the editing field you want to go into: journalism uses AP, medical editing uses AMA, etc.)

Then I’d say, join an editing association, like the Editorial Freelancers Association, to gain some credibility. And start networking! Editors are really friendly, and we love mentoring and supporting newbies to our cause.

Once those two things are under your belt, dive in! Do it before you’re ready. Jump in with both feet and see what happens. Even if you have to do it part-time on weekends, get some experience working with manuscripts and authors. This is a very “learning by doing” field.

Honestly, both of these books sound great, and so does Shawna’s recommendation: Black River Orchard by Chuck Wendig, a story that follows the transformation of a small town called Harrow when seven strange trees start producing magical apples that change you in ways no one could have anticipated. It’s a massive book, coming in at 640 pages, but who doesn’t love a good chonky book?

Check out Shawna’s website for her editorial services and follow her on Instagram and Facebook for updates on what she’s working on! You just might discover some cool new authors like I have!