Editors on Editing: What Writers Need to Know About What Editors Do (41 page)

One of the major things I’ve learned toiling on trade paperbacks is not to count on the big best-seller reprints. Some of them work, but some of them will bite you on the butt a year later in paperback. I discovered this the hard way with two big hardcover best-sellers that we almost bought for reprint, Kevin Phillips’s
Politics of Rich and Poor
and Peggy Noonan’s
What I Learned at the Revolution
. Both books were sold at auction for a lot of money and both books didn’t sell well in paperback. Most likely, the vast amounts of media attention these books received at the time of hardcover publication helped create a buying frenzy at one concentrated time, which
resulted in the bookstores reporting to the people who compile best-seller lists. The reprinters acquired paperback rights in the heat of the moment. The real audience for these books were people who could afford the hardcover and wanted to read them right away. One year later and people were interested in something else.

If you look at paperback best-seller lists you will see books that didn’t show up on hardcover best-seller lists and seem to have come out of nowhere.
Don’t Know Much about History, What to Expect When You’re Expecting
, and
The Road Less Travelled
are examples of this. Since I worked on both the hardcover and the paperback of
Don’t Know Much about History
by Ken Davis, I think I know why it succeeded in paperback. This popular Q&A about all the things we should know about American history hit a responsive chord among a generation of Americans who either were bored by what they learned in school, forgot what they learned, or doubted all the myths and misconceptions, like George Washington and his cherry tree. With a slightly humorous tone Davis presented everything in small bites. This appealed to a large group of people who, despite busy lives, still felt they needed to know and learn. The hardcover sold a fair amount of copies. Reviews and word of mouth were strong, but the book was often out of stock, it was expensive, and, although it had a handsome jacket, it looked serious.

When the paperback came out at half the price, it had a tongue-in-cheek cover and didn’t look nearly as intimidating as the hardcover. It was portable and it was packaged with wonderful quotes. The booksellers ordered a lot of copies in paperback since they hadn’t been able to get the hardcover and there was pent-up demand. The paperback, published in June, was promoted by the stores as a perfect gift for dads and grads, and together with fun advertising and extensive publicity campaigns that revolved around national holidays, the book made it onto best-seller lists and stayed on for months.

An editor also thinks like a publisher when he looks on his company’s list of trade paperbacks as a program, searching for ways to build on strengths and looking for opportunities. For instance, if he has done well with a book on the Soviet Union, he looks for other books on the subject. He thinks, too, of series that he can do. After our success with the aforementioned
Don’t Know Much about History
, we signed the author to do
Don’t Know Much about Geography
and
Don’t Know Much about World History
. The possibilities are limited only by our imaginations and by the popularity of the series with the public.

Even if a book didn’t do too well at first, the author may be active later on doing speaking engagements or getting attention in the media. It is the editor’s responsibility to keep tabs on these opportunities and alert his sales
department to go out again with a book that may work the second time around.

Returning for the last time to Mr. Thornton, when he wrote his essay, the nonbook, impulse-buy trade paperback, like the previously mentioned book about Rubik’s Cube, was all the rage. Now, with the exception of brand-name humor and a few quirky, trendy, short-lived titles, these disposable books have fallen by the wayside. Personally, I’m trying to stay away from fads; by the time you get the fad-oriented book into the stores, the fickle public is following another fad.

As I write this essay, we’re in a recession. As a result we’ve probably lost the occasional impulse buyer. But I believe it doesn’t matter what economic climate we’re in: there will always be serious readers going into bookstores to find good books that contain real information and that cost less than the hardcover. This, I am convinced, is the real audience for trade paperbacks, now and in the next millennium—a mere seven years away. If corporate owners learn to be patient they will see what so many have seen before them, that the only way to build up strong companies is with strong backlist titles that contribute to the bottom line every year. Slow and steady
does
win the race. The mission of trade paperback editors is to recognize this but also not to turn their noses up when a rare chance for opportunism comes along (for example, an instant book on a popular rock band).

There is a large audience whom we used to call yuppies, who have aged into what we now sometimes call the baby boomers. I identify them as the Cultural Literacy Generation. This generation is becoming more sedate, turning inward, raising families, and staying at home more. These readers are looking for good serious fiction, a “liberal arts” program of nonfiction titles, and popular books on a wide variety of subjects that are not too dry or academic in content. Trade paperbacks and the editors who have published them for four decades reflect this generation. I suppose these books and editors have become less daring and more practical. But as always, a new generation of editors and readers will come up from the ranks who will be innovative and bold and will inject new life into trade paperbacks. One of these editors will no doubt inherit this space in the next edition of
Editors on Editing
. It will be interesting to see what the latest “truths” about trade paperbacks will be at that time.

The Question of “Political Correctness
”

Wendy M. Wolf

W
ENDY
M. W
OLF
is a senior editor at HarperCollins and was previously a senior editor at Pantheon Books. She edits books in history, popular culture, music, sports, biography, science, and humor. The authors she has published include Barry Commoner, Robert Christgau, Vine Deloria, Jr., Tom Lehrer, and Matt Groening, as well as John Cleese, Michael Palin, and the other members of
Monty Python’s Flying Circus.

What role should the nonfiction editor play in the current debate over P.C. (political correctness)? Should the editor “otherly label” controversial words, opinions, and political, social, and personal situations and relationships to suit the trend toward using currently fashionable euphemisms for these difficult and problematical aspects of our culture? Or should the editor maintain the traditional role of the facilitator of the author’s intent? And what if that intent differs from the political, sexual, or social beliefs of influential areas of the literary or academic establishment, or even those of the editor?

Wendy Wolf approaches these controversial issues by recognizing her editorial responsibility to her author, her publisher, “to some vague notion of the world or Western civilization at large, and to myself. … The key to sane survival, to my thinking and in my experience,” she writes, “is to focus on the word ‘responsibility’ and to try to see how the balance of my conflicting obligations affects various major and minor editorial issues
.”

Eloquently, passionately, and provocatively, Ms. Wolf considers all the ramifications of the pressures and impact of political correctness on her choice of nonfiction books to edit, on her relationships with her authors, her
publisher, the reading public, and on her own integrity, conscience, and humanity
.

“
Difficult ideas,” she writes, “have to pass scrutiny so that their arguments hold up against the evidence amassed. But we can’t surrender our responsibilities either from fear of the bottom line, fear of associating ourselves with a disturbing thought, or fear of mere dissent from the prevailing wisdom. Writers may owe us a great deal, as their stalwart editors and defenders of their faith, but we owe them something, too
.”

The Question of “Political Correctness
”

Most of my friends who started out with me as editorial assistants saw the light and went on to something sensible like real estate. A few hardy souls, however, decided to stay in for the long run. Remember that word, “decide.” Any editor who doesn’t own up to that initial act of free will sooner or later find herself in trouble when she tries to clarify one of the murkier but unavoidable aspects of our work: facing up to the constant query, “How do I choose what to publish?”

My answer is actually simple. As an editor, I have responsibilities in a number of directions: to my author, to my employer, to some vague notion of the world or Western civilization at large, and to myself. Nine times out of ten I don’t know or worry about where one begins and the other ends, because the ends of each are jointly served. It’s when they fall out of synch, and conflicts of interest and responsibility result, however, that I wonder if the role of the editor is anything more than cultural bureaucrat or literary cipher. The key to sane survival, to my thinking and in my experience, is to focus on the word “responsibility” and to try to see how the balance of my conflicting obligations affects various major and minor editorial issues. It’s in this context that I think about the question of “political correctness,” now ubiquitously dubbed “P.C.”

An editor is an active participant in a great chain of choice. When you take on a book, you have to answer to yourself why you’re doing it and be willing to live with the consequences. The chain operates in different ways over time—at the moment you decide to work for a particular company, over the course of your tenure with them, as you generate a track record (and you see which races are counted on that ledger), and over the historical performance of your employer in the long and short run.

I—like, I suspect, most of my colleagues—choose a book after I consider
how that book can fulfill one of a myriad of different goals or expectations that I have set for myself. It might be to win a prize, to make the news, to attack an enemy, to uncover a crime, to make money, to amuse, to annoy, to bring down a government, to please the eye, to create an object I can give my mother for Christmas, to present a new argument, to refute an old one, to offer a useful synthesis of a broad topic, or to explain how to fix a broken steam pipe. Not every book starts a revolution, and I’d be the first to list the many, many books I’ve published over the years that serve no more sophisticated purpose than to give a few laughs. No one can say that, for sure and forever, any one of these reasons is more or less valid than any other. I have my priorities, both for my own list and for the industry as a whole; others have theirs. I wish we all agreed; we don’t. At best we can agree to respect each other’s decisions, and that no one factor—profitability or current political vogue—is, a priori, a
necessary
element in a book’s potential profile.

More often than not it’s some quirky combination of several of these categories that encourages me to pursue a book, and I’m often hard-pressed to say precisely toward which one or toward what valence my brain is being drawn. It’s a source of delightful frustration to the computer-systems folks who strive valiantly to come up with a data base that would reduce the editorial decision-making process to a set of variables and programs. We sit in conferences gladly urging them to create these informational resources, and then politely add, “But of course that’s not really how it works.”

I don’t entirely accept the increasingly popular argument that editors have been stripped of all responsibility in the decision chain, that their job—the reason they’re paid—is just to pump out what sells, content or impact notwithstanding, that we are neutral facilitators, not gatekeepers whose job includes deliberately regulating the flow of ideas. Some would in fact argue that we have no right regulating—who are we, after all, to determine what will and what won’t pass into the marketplace of ideas? Shouldn’t all views, all writers have unfettered access to the reading public? Publish what the public wants, or what sells; they try to claim it’s a neutral, nonjudgmental stance we should be taking. But deciding what the public wants is not as easy as it looks, as we’ll see. The rage over cultural disenfran-chisement, control of the canon, and that much-debated new hegemonic force, “political correctness,” sends off clashing and often contradictory messages about exactly who the “public” is and what they want, or should want. Interestingly, the war over the canon seems to have been waged by armies other than those that fight the battle of the best-sellers.

You can like a book for as many reasons as there are to write one, but to pretend that, as an acquiring editor, you’re not standing in judgment and making a choice is a dangerous and self-deluding stance. Even those who
claim that they’re just providing, as a public service, “what the world wants to read” have in fact judged, this time not just one author, one project, or one’s own interest on one day, but a large and usually unknowable broad taste in the world at large. So much for neutrality.

My point here isn’t to assign some divine order to which kinds of reasons are better or worse; the point is simply to acknowledge that an editor must, in the end, take responsibility for the decision to take on a book or an idea, to fund it, to see it through execution, to help the publishing company position it in its dual journey through the world of ideas and the world of commodities. Just saying “I’m doing it because it’s what the world wants to read” isn’t, to me, a satisfying explanation. You’ve made a conscious calculation. There’s a whiny complaint lurking in the comment that the editor is a victim of the marketplace, forced by circumstance to take on a distasteful project against his or her will. I find this rarely borne out in reality. Books don’t fall out of the sky and land on you like smelly albatrosses (though many quickly become just that in the process). No one publishes a book utterly against his will and against his better judgment. Somewhere inside, some voice is whispering that there’s a reason.