By Taylor Steed, 29 May 2026
When I got my Certificate in Editing, a large portion of the curriculum was focused on technology. How do you use editing tools in text processors? How do you interact with clients online? How can you use modern tools in your workflow? These skills are undoubtedly paramount to a successful career in editing. However, when I was hired to edit a novel last spring, I discovered a glaring hole in my training: how do you edit when your client’s idea of modern technology is a typewriter? This is my story of working with my favourite client, Mary.
The meeting
Our technological troubles began when our partnership did. We were located at opposite ends of the country, so correspondence was limited to the virtual variety. And so began the first hurdle. Video chats? Impossible. Mary didn’t own a camera. Email? Sporadic. They somehow kept disappearing from her inbox. And so our relationship became a series of phone calls, interspersed with long voicemails and voice notes, as we strove to identify a project plan. Mary printed our contract and mailed me the signed copy. Likewise, manuscripts, photographs and maps were sent via snail mail.
In and of itself, these were hardships hardly worth noting, especially given that we were both old enough to have once lived in a world where they were commonplace. Where their presence was felt was in the bottom line. Communication took far more time than expected, and timelines and budgets had to be adjusted to account for the postal system and the occasional lost letter.
The material
Mary provided me with several Word documents, each containing a separate section of her manuscript. My first task was to combine and organize the sections, ensuring I had the most up-to-date version of each part (spoiler: I did not). To ease Mary into the process, I used Word’s track changes to revise the first three chapters and sent them to Mary for review. I’m sure you’ve guessed where this is going.
Mary responded to my comments with unbridled and unorganized joy. To show her agreement with my changes, she either accepted the change, rejected the change, changed the font colour, or some combination of all three. If she disagreed with my revision, she took an identical approach. And she somehow hid the comment bubbles, which, to this day, we have been unable to get back.
In the spirit of insanity, I decided to try again. We went through a track changes training, and I provided Mary with a Word document of instructions. The results were no less enthusiastic and no more successful.
So we went back to the drawing board and found a solution that allowed Mary to give her feedback and me to preserve what little mental fortitude I still possessed. I gave her a document with track changes (comments were now in parenthesis and highlighted). Mary reviewed with pen and paper, and then we had a call in which she walked me through each change she contested and every question either of us had.
What started as the ultimate test in patience for both of us became one of my favourite parts of our project. So often, as editors, our discussions with authors are limited to one-sentence notes in the margins. Yet with Mary, I was able to gain deeper insights into her priorities and to help her bring added life to her anecdotes as she remembered details she’d forgotten while writing. We were also able to discuss how to make changes that enhanced the structure and flow of her book without losing her voice or message. At the end of the process (albeit far longer than I anticipated), we were able to create a final manuscript that Mary loved.
The manuscript
Did I mention that I was also hired to help her self-publish the book? Yes, I buried the lede. If you’ve ever self-published, you know that it can be a herculean task even when you understand the systems. More so when your author can’t find her Amazon password.
Knowing that neither Mary nor technology could be removed from this process, and having learnt from efforts thus far, Mary and I were prepared. She let me log into her accounts and, after a 20-minute patience-testing call in which Mary couldn’t find the one-time password once her phone notifications disappeared, I was in! With Mary’s blessing and overflowing relief that she didn’t have to do it herself, I was able to get the book published.
Once Mary was ecstatically clutching the first copy in her hands, I had one more task to complete. Amazon, unfortunately, doesn’t respond to phone calls as well as I do, and it certainly doesn’t take requests for author copies of books via snail mail. So I wrote instructions, full of links and screenshots, on how to order author copies and how to help others find her book online. And, of course, I still stay in touch with Mary every few months when she needs me to send the instructions again.
Whether it was the success after tireless perseverance, the reward of overcoming new challenges and learning new skills, or the infectiousness of Mary’s enthusiasm and love of life pouring through every phone call, this book became the project I am most proud of, even more so than my own published works. I am forever grateful for this project and that Mary trusted me to bring her words to the wider world.
However, in the spirit of honesty, I did make sure my next client could use Word.
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Blog post by: Taylor Steed |
