The Woman in Me, Spare, and Celebrity Memoirs Humanizing Celebrities

In 2021, the world was captivated by Britney Spears’s story as she spoke out against her father and her management as the result of their abuse and for keeping her under involuntary conservatorship. The world applauded for her as the conservatorship was terminated. Now the world applauds her memoir, The Woman in Me, for reclaiming and humanizing her story. The book highlights the importance of Spears reclaiming her independence by sharing her story as a woman within the music industry fighting against the men in her life that sought to control her. 

Published on October 24, the memoir narrates a story that is described on the Gallery Books website—the publisher and a division of Simon & Schuster—as “a brave and astonishingly moving story about freedom, fame, motherhood, survival, faith, and hope.” Gallery Books reports that the memoir sold 1.1 million copies in its first week in the U.S, with the combined figure composed of sales of print books, e-books, pre-orders, and audiobooks. The publisher has also announced the memoir is going for a fourth printing, bringing the number of hardcover copies in print to about 1.4 million, making it the fastest selling book in Gallery’s history. The Woman in Me now joins other celebrity memoirs such as Spare by Prince Harry, The Promised Land by Barack Obama, Becoming by Michelle Obama, and Too Much and Never Enough by Mary Trump in selling over a million copies in their first week of publication.

What these numbers reflect is the support for the #FreeBritney movement that began in 2020 when rumors and personal accounts of the conservatorship and the effects it had on Spears’s mental health began to be uncovered. The internet has come out in droves to support Spears before the full extent of the situation and the implications of what that meant for the pop star’s life was even fully revealed. Of course, this also means that people have eagerly awaited for more news concerning Spears’s career under the authority of her conservatorship and what effects this had on her. And perhaps that reveals the harsh truth: the obsessive curiosity audiences possess when it comes to knowing and understanding the ugly and humane realities that lie beyond the persona celebrities present to the world. An almost desperate need to know that these larger-than-life figures possess larger-than-life issues that ground them back into reality and bring them to equal footing with us, humanizing them to us.

Another celebrity memoir that did exceptionally well was Prince Harry’s Spare, which was published earlier this year in January and sold 1.6 million copies in the U.S. during its first week. Spare followed the announcement that Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan Markle, would be leaving the royal family. Like Spears’s memoir, the success and reception of Spare could be attributed to the memoir’s debut following a huge news story.

The near-instant success of celebrity memoirs such as The Woman in Me following the dramatic revelation of such imperfections in these people’s lives seems to suggest readers crave these tragic stories that explore every human emotion that hides behind the smiles and carefully-crafted persona portrayed in public. Readers want to know the details hidden behind closed doors that humanize celebrities. In a sense, a memoir like The Woman in Me is the closest we can get to an honest portrayal of a human who has been placed on a pedestal.

John McPhee and “Greening” an Edited Draft

What kind of editing happens when a draft already seems finished?

In his book Draft No.4: On the Writing Process, American writer and pioneer of creative nonfiction John McPhee writes about the outlining, drafting, and revision phases included in the writing process. One chapter called “Omission,” also published in the New Yorker in 2015, discusses McPhee’s experience writing and editing his pieces for Time.

After rounds of back and forth with his editors on a piece and reaching a finalized draft, McPhee would come into work in the morning and find a final assignment with a note telling him to “Green 5” or “Green 9.” Essentially these notes would mean McPhee was supposed to condense his work by that particular number of lines so that it could fit into the print magazine format. He was supposed to mark his changes in green pencil so that his editors could add something back if they saw fit, which according to him, they rarely did. Editing values being concise.

This practice of “greening” his text was a task intended to reduce the piece in size, but change nothing about its voice, message, or tone. The piece needed to be left intact—just slightly shorter to fit publishing’s practical needs. Although used specifically for print needs in this anecdote, the importance of greening lines in a text expands to digital formatting as well (consider Tweets or the format of blog posts).

McPhee took this experience and ended up teaching it to his writing students at Princeton, asking them to green their pieces to think about every word placed in their work. This final phase of editing requires methodically rechecking word and line count while making careful changes—putting together a puzzle of a perfected draft.

When editors of the CambridgeEditors team work on copy edits, proofreading, or formatting, they employ these strategies to end up with final pieces worthy of McPhee’s praise. CambridgeEditors has experts in greening and polishing texts of all kinds. If you’re interested in making your pieces as polished and concise as they can be, reach out to CambridgeEditors or check out our website for more information on all the services we provide.

Tatiana Jackson-Saitz, Cambridge Editors Team

---

Active or Passive Voice?

By Hannah Voteur, CambridgeEditors’ Team

How do you know what voice would best serve your writing?

One of the most frequently repeated lessons from high school English class is that the passive voice should be avoided at all costs. It takes away from the clarity of the sentence and is questionably grammatical.

However, this isn’t entirely true. The passive voice is one of two grammatical voices in English, the other being active. Voice in grammar indicates the relationship between the subject of the sentence and the action; more specifically, whether the subject is performing the action (active) or being performed on (passive). Either voice can be applied to any tense since they don’t carry specific temporal information.

Although using the passive is often frowned upon by teachers, both of these forms of verbs are grammatically correct. However, as stylistic choices, they lend different tones to your writing. Choosing one over the other can be a way to highlight certain information or draw your reader’s attention to a different focus. Creative writers can particularly play with voice, selecting either based on their desired effect on readers.

Passive voice emphasizes the action over the participants, which is why it can be useful in news or scientific contexts. News articles are more apt to contain “The store was robbed,” to bring readers closer to the point of the story, the robbery itself, and not the presently unknown perpetrators. Scientific papers might use the passive to highlight the different steps of an experiment, leaving out the actors, the scientists themselves, because that information is already clearly established and doesn’t need to clog the
sentence.

Active voice is more decisive and declarative, directly stating the information for readers. Opinion pieces and other more definitive styles of writing would benefit from this voice type. It lends clarity and focus to your sentences, helping with conciseness and precision. Academic writing on history or other informational subjects tends towards using a more active voice for this reason, keeping the writing in line with the factual and informative content.

Either type of voice can enrich your writing, as long as it is properly utilized with your subject matter and audience in mind. If you’re looking for assistance deciding on the best way to make use of voice in your writing, or if you need any other helpful guidance, contact CambridgeEditors or check out our website for information on our full range of editing services.

Editors for Hire! Coming Soon to a Telephone Pole Near You!

Today I will be heading out of the office and hitting the streets of Cambridge to put up flyers for CambridgeEditors, advertising our many services to any and all academics, students, novelists, businesses, corporations and traveling circuses seeking professional editing help!

Although there are many clients who find us online, and there are even some of you out there who read this blog, it still seems that one of the most effective ways of bringing in lots of new clients is by traveling to the many colleges that Boston is home to and advertising all over academic bulletin boards, walls, benches, libraries, etc. Much like spamming social media, we shall spam the real world as well! Come one, come all!

In other news, as the weather slowly turns to fall and the residents of New England start pulling out their sweaters and pumpkin paraphernalia, we here at the CambrideEditors office are beginning very exciting projects! There will be small updates to our website coming over the course of the fall, as new editors begin to join our ranks. We will also be attending some job fairs and maybe even a book fair here and there! Who knows where CE will show up? Be sure to keep your eyes open for our logo, though.

We have also been receiving some responses to the blog in the past month! Most notably, my last post, ‘The Tangibility of Books’ has received a response by acclaimed blogger Eric Burns-White, who is perhaps best known for his website, Websnark.com. His blog post not only answers my musings on why people have come to prefer e-books to physical books (convenience, price, comfort, durability… I can’t argue with that logic!) but also provides incite into his own relationship with physical books, literature, and writing. Impeccably written, we are lucky to have received ‘The Intangibility of Books’ as a response to our blog! Here is a link to Burns-White’s blog: https://medium.com/@demiurgent/the-intangibility-of-books-b3da733a9775

Websnark’s beloved dinosaur, Snarky

I suppose it may be fitting to open up the discussion to you, our readers. Do any of you feel particularly strongly either way about your writing material? Paper or screens? The debate rages on…

Finally, in the spirit of working on my latest story for my advanced creative writing class, I will leave you all with yet another writing prompt, if only to get your imaginations going (although I hope some of you will feel inspired to write!):

“Describe a mortician’s meeting with a newly bereaved family. Remember that he isn’t just dealing with grief but selling a funeral package and getting necessary information about the deceased and the survivors.” — taken from 642 Things to Write About, by the San Francisco Writer’s Grotto.

If any of you need an editor for the story you write from this, you know who to contact.

-Hadley Gibson

Copyediting Lingo: What You Need to Know!

After hearing an NPR segment featuring an interview with Ben Stiller discussing movie lingo, a few of us here at CambridgeEditors thought this would make a great piece (or two) for our own blog!

Today, we are going to talk about copyediting jargon and what some of the more commonly used terms and phrases actually mean. Look forward to future posts delving into more terminology used by editors and publishers!

So, without further ado, here is a list we’ve created of some of the most popular copyediting lingo! Feel free to leave a comment if we missed anything important!

1. Live Copy: this one might be easy enough. This is the copy of text that has been sent to the printer and has been returned to the copyeditor. Typically this version is checked to ensure no errors were introduced during printing.

2. Dead Copy: not to worry, nobody died! The dead copy goes hand-in-hand with the live copy. The dead copy is what was originally sent out to the printer. This was the final edited version of whatever text the copyeditor has been working on. This dead copy is compared to the live copy. If there are errors in the live copy, the copyeditor must make the necessary corrections and inform the printer.

3. Callout: while nobody is getting called out in front of the teacher, the callout is important when it comes to design. A callout is used by editors and copyeditors to mark space where art will be placed. This is important so formatting stays in tact and an accurate page count can be determined before going to print.

4. Track Changes: this might be something that you are familiar with outside of copyediting, but this tool is crucial to anyone who edits or copyedits electronically. Track changes is a feature on Microsoft Word documents that allows users to see the changes that have been made to a document. Even more helpful is the feature in track changes that allows different users’ changes to show up in different colors so everyone can see exactly who changed what.

 

5. Folio: no, this is not short for portfolio. A folio is what is used by editors and publishers to distinguish page numbers. Folios may also be referenced as drop folios (where the page number is found at the bottom of the page).

6. Leading: pronounced like “led” this term refers to the space between each line. This is more important when it comes to the design of the text, but still important nonetheless. (Have you ever read a book where the lines were so close together your eyes had trouble focusing? If so, the leading was very small).

7. Orphan: copyeditors use the term orphan when they have a single line (first in a paragraph) that appears by itself at the bottom of a page.

8. Widow: this term, as you may have guessed, it the opposite of orphan. A widow is a single line (end of the paragraph) that is found at the top of the page.

9. TK: this is ultimately just a placeholder, short for “to come.” This is used in situations where material is not yet ready or is being added during a later stage of the production process. Watch out for publications that miss these placeholders during the proofreading stages: instead of a caption under a photo you may see “TKTKTKTKTKTK.” (You may also see Lorem Ipsum, which has a similar function).

The photo above came from a Singapore newspaper, in which the Lorem Ipsum was forgotten and published for readers in April of 2014.

10. Style Sheet: this is a very important document for editors and copyeditors. This lists every change or decision the copyeditor has made that is not standard. For example, if there is a unique spelling of a word, the copyeditor may add this word to their style sheet so anyone that looks at the document from then on won’t think this word is misspelled. The style sheet can also be used for grammatical choices such as whether or not to leave spaces after em dashes.

These are just 10 terms that copyeditors use in their work. There is so much jargon for the editing industry it is hard to pick just 10! Once again, if you think we missed something important or interesting, we would love for you to comment below!

Stay tuned for future installments on this subject matter as we delve into the jargon of the publishing industry and writers!

Hug Your Editor!

After working with one of our editors on a project, a client sends out an email expressing thanks.

“S, I’m sending a huge hug to you! Can’t thank you enough! How would you like me to send payment?”

When we get such positive responses from our clients, we can’t help but smile!

What is a Best Seller?

Have you ever purchased a book because you saw it was on the New York Times Best Seller list? 

Have you ever wondered what it takes to be a “best seller?”

The NY Times lists their methodology on their website, but I imagine most people haven’t taken the time to really look at it, so I am going to do my best to explain these methods.

The NY Times bases their bestseller list on the sales of books from independent book stores as well as national, regional, and local chains; they also include online retailers, supermarkets, and more. Ebooks are only included for adult categories of fiction, non-fiction, and advice, as well as all non-picture book children’s stories. What they don’t include, however, are required classroom readings, textbooks, and self-published books, among many other categories. They also differentiate between books that were ordered in bulk and those that are ranked so closely together that you can hardly see a difference in sales. What should be pointed out is that the bestseller list only shows the velocity of sales, not the cumulative number of books sold, as the list is updated weekly. If you want an accurate picture of how many copies a title has sold, I recommend using BookScan (if you have access). BookScan is a great, though expensive, resource to find out the sales figures from books; retailers send in their sales numbers to be computer and publishers use this information to find out how titles are really doing.

You many now be wondering what this all means. It probably sounds good and informative if you’re reading this for the first time, but now I want to share an article I found discussing a different aspect of the list, in hopes to give an alternate view to the coveted list.

Back in February of 2013, Forbes posted an article on how to buy your way onto the New York Times Best Seller list. Among their steps, they listed getting endorsements from Oprah Winfrey, or a movie deal from Steven Spielberg, but that’s not their most interesting method. Forbes recommended using companies like ResultSource because of their specialty in getting books onto bestseller lists. For enough money, this company will guarantee the No. 1 spot.

While I don’t have any problem with buying bestseller titles, I am glad that I have become well-informed on how these titles make it onto the list. As someone hoping to work in the publishing field in the near future, knowing accurate sales information is always beneficial. Now you are a little more informed as well!

We Love Our Editors!

When I asked an editor whether he could take on a rush job this morning, one of our editors responded with a reply worth sharing.

“Thanks, Dr. Weiner, for thinking of me when jobs become available. I always have some work on hand here from other sources to stay busy, but it is lower on the priority scale than anything I receive from CambridgeEditors. And I do understand that, for a variety of reasons, the client may change plans at the last minute. In any event, I’ll look forward to receiving the next job when it becomes available.”

Our editors our always so enthusiastic about taking on new jobs. They love to take on new projects and form relationships with clients in order to make them comfortable and pleased with the editing process. It is so wonderful to know how much our editors care about their work.

The Papal Enclave – James Stephen O’Brien

As 2013 comes to a close, our staff at CambridgeEditors has taken the time to gratefully reflect upon the numerous opportunities we had this year to witness the books written by our clients evolve from manuscripts into successful publications. One such noteworthy publication is James Stephen O’Brien’s The Papal Enclave:

The Papal Enclave, the first in a series of thrillers, is a riveting tale that begins when Harvard Law Professor and Criminologist Stephen Ripley finds his assistant brutally tortured and killed for exposing evidence of a murderous conspiracy against the Pope. The assistant’s shocking disclosure sparks the uncovering of a dark and complex web of international criminal activity. Collaborating with a Boston Globe reporter and members of the FBI and CIA, Ripley embarks on a dangerous quest for justice and truth—a quest that abruptly leads him to Rome and plunges him into a twisted world of pedophiles and assassins. Following Ripley on his momentous, six-day adventure, O’Brien’s narrative remains thoroughly engaging, witty, and astute, making The Papal Enclave a unique and memorable delight.

The Harvard Square Editions has profiled O’Brien’s book on their literary website, LitVote.com, calling it “a thoroughly researched mix of historical facts, recent events, and intriguing characters intertwined with an absorbing finale. The Papal Enclave […] weaves a tapestry of suspense utilizing fictional characters through actual current events while mingling them among authentic personalities of the famous and infamous.”

The book has also received praise from authors such as Stephen Boehrer, who describes The Papal Enclave as “a well-crafted tale where reality is woven tightly in the warp and woof of its words. I thoroughly enjoyed reading the book and hope it has great success.”

You can find the full profile of The Papal Enclave in The Harvard Square Edition’s “Literary Scene” section, located on the front page of LitVote,  http://litvote.com/.

And check out O’Brien’s book on Amazon at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1927890004/harvsquaedit-20.

Call for Submissions!

CambridgeEditors is thrilled to announce that in an effort to help promote young aspiring writers in Greater Boston area, we are calling for submissions! We would like to encourage creative writers and contribute to a more literary environment in Boston.  We’ve spent the early months of the summer planning and preparing for this, and we’re excited to read all your submissions!

We hope to become a major promoter of creative works in addition to our normal editing services, and a literary magazine may even be in discussion!

Submitting to CambridgeEditors is completely free, and accepted submissions will be displayed on our main website as well as this blog. We’ll be accepting all creative work, poetry or prose, including creative non-fiction.

For specific submission guidelines, please see our submissions page.

Hope to read from you soon!