Andy Collins, Wizards of the Coast’s RPG Development & Editing Manager, wrote to us asking if we thought our readers would be interested in this job opening at WotC. We think you’ll be interested:
A new job posting for an RPG Editor just went up on the Hasbro job site.
This person reports directly to me, so I have a vested interest in (and significant influence on) the result of this hiring process.
I want to hire a talented, experienced editor with a love of games and at least a basic knowledge of D&D (or similar games).
I’ll be honest: I’m not looking to hire someone for their first editing job. I don’t require you to have professional RPG editing experience, but if you can’t cite something related to the job duties on your resume, I advise you to look elsewhere for your opportunity to “break into the industry.”
If you think you have what it takes, submit your resume now!
Good luck!
If that sounds like you, I encourage you to send in your resume.
Maybe you can help edit gnomes away from being anime hairdressers (scroll waaay down) and back into being felt-hatted mini-dwarf badasses while you’re there?
I’ve caught numerous errors in the first printings of WotC books for a decade. I don’t suppose that would qualify me to be an editor, but I often wonder how the obvious errata made it past a proofreading.
Ah well. I hope they get someone good. They need a good editor.
Glad to see WotC finally caved and decided to hire an editor.
In all seriousness, I almost feel guilty taking such an obvious pot shot at WotC, but I can’t say they haven’t deserved it. The editing on all WotC publications, from games systems to supplements and even in novels, has just been so notoriously, comically bad for so many years that my friends and I have seriously come to doubt that WotC even employs editors. So many of the mistakes they leave in their work regularly could have been caught by even the simplest of proofreading jobs, and one could (and should) demand more than just a basic proofreading for books devoted to rules text.
I guess applicants can see from the comments that it’s going to be a thankless job.
@Noumenon – Uffda! Yeah, no kidding. I worked as the RPG line manager (and since we were a small company, copyeditor) for a gaming company for a few years, and I gotta tell ya … more errors slipped by me than I like to admit. Even after two rounds of copyediting/proofreading.
I know that WotC employs proofreaders. I also know that scheduling demands, time crunches and industry limitations allow for a few errors to slip through. They do far better than most other technical publishers in terms of grammar and typo proofing, IMO; where they have some stuff slip through is in the gaming mechanics, and that stuff is very, very difficult to catch. If you’re a fresh set of eyes, you’re not intrinsically familiar with the nuances of whatever alternate rule or build or whatever is going on. If you’re not a fresh set of eyes, you have the background you need to know what’s going on … but you’ve probably read over the stuff so often that it makes your eyes blurry.
It’s not surprising that once a product gets released, thousands of rabid fans catch mechanical errors that a staff of 5 or 6 did not catch. It’s simply a numbers game.
Sigh.
Dream job. Hell and gone from all family and friends. Can only get into the industry if you’ve been in the industry already.
Fate, why must you mock me so?