Benjamin Tausig

Project Background

Benjamin Tausig, an associate professor of music at Stony Brook University, approached Flatpage with his second academic monograph, entitled Bangkok after Dark: Maurice Rocco, Transnational Nightlife, and the Making of Cold War Intimacies, which had already undergone peer review at a university press.

Flatpage was very strongly recommended to me by a colleague. I wanted the manuscript to receive focused attention from a smart reader outside my immediate disciplines, who would thoughtfully help me solve some complex problems with the draft manuscript.

Benjamin Tausig

He was concerned that the manuscript was complex and wanted to make sure that the various narrative threads integrated into one cohesive narrative as smoothly as possible. Furthermore, since the book is situated between music studies and Asian studies, it was important for him that readers in both disciplines would be engaged by the book as a whole.

This project required a line editor who was knowledgeable about the conventions of interdisciplinary writing and could help clarify the relationship between parts and whole without diminishing the substance.

The Collaboration

The author worked with Flatpage’s editor, who performed a line edit on the text. Line editing often entails deep rewrites to sentences and paragraphs in order to cut back on word count, improve sentence structure and word choice, and get to the heart of the author’s intended meaning.

Line editing was the perfect choice for this author because the editor had the liberty to make significant changes to the text at the line level, including significant cuts that might affect the structure of sentences. The editor was tasked with helping to improve the manuscript with an eye toward making the content more engaging for readers while still preserving the author’s scholarly voice.

Flatpage’s editor showed genuine care for the material, kept in regular contact with me, and offered fair critique and feedback. I was often floored by the depth and wisdom of their insights, and found them collegial throughout the process.

For this project, the sentence-level edits were concentrated in the introductory chapter and at certain transitional points; the remaining edits took the reviewers’ concerns into account without undermining the richness of the author’s interdisciplinary approach, for example by addressing the framework of the author’s argument. In addition to making stylistic edits to the text, the editor focused on revising scholarly commentary not specifically related to the book’s main goals and smoothing out language where the author brought together the two major narrative strands of the book.

The Outcome

Tausig’s book will be published by Duke University Press in spring 2025.

Any book manuscript needs an engaged reader beyond peer review, someone who invests in the material and thinks about it at every level, from the texture of the sentences to the flow of the argument, as much as the author does. The editor I worked with at Flatpage did exactly that. My book, Bangkok after Dark, was immeasurably improved by the editor, and by working with Flatpage. I’m convinced that working with a line editor, and especially someone as great as the editor I worked with, is the way to improve a manuscript.