Why you should stay in touch with your tech editor during testing
Tech editing is often completed before the test knitting process begins. You design your pattern, you send it off to your editor, and once they’ve made all their edits, it’s ready to be sent off to test knitters, before finally being published.
But just because the tech editing process is over doesn’t mean you should stop communication with your tech editor!
Tech editors try their best to catch all the errors in your pattern, but we’re only human and some things may slip through the cracks.
If a tester finds what they believe is an error in a pattern I’ve edited, I would definitely want to be informed. Not only because I value the relationship with my designers and if I have missed something, I want to address it and also recheck other areas that might have related issues, but also because sometimes the tester is misinterpreting something or knitting the pattern wrong. I have definitely experienced the latter on several occasions.
By communicating with your editor, they can help you determine if something is an error and the pattern needs to be corrected, or if the pattern is right, but is written in a way that is causing people to knit the pattern wrong, in which case the wording needs work to make it more clear.
If your tester had presented you with an error that wasn’t a pattern error, but a user error, and you ended up changing the pattern, you might have just introduced an error into your pattern.
Tech editing is meant to be a collaborative process and one that doesn’t end with the end of the actual edit. I recommend staying in contact with your editor through publication so you can be sure that any changes you make after that process are cleared by the tech editor.
Many editors are more than happy to give your pattern a quick look right before you publish too. Just make sure to give them some notice so they can fit it into their schedule, and let them know what changes have been made so they know where to focus their attention.
And a quick note on payment – sometimes these things happen after your tech editor has been paid for their work on the pattern. I obviously can’t speak for every tech editor out there, but I factor these things in when I set my rates. There are lots of things I can’t directly bill for, such as invoicing, project management, marketing, and other admin tasks. All of those things, plus time spent communicating during testing, have already been factored into my rate, so as a client you should utilize this. Check with your tech editor before assuming, of course, but any freelancer likely sets their rates a little higher to cover this sort of stuff.
