Editors on Editing: What Writers Need to Know About What Editors Do (6 page)

In the eighties, as many publishing houses were subsumed into a new group of international conglomerates, the individual editor became less and less familiar to the public. Editors who were known at all gained fame more for their own novels, their social lives, or their media appearances than for their labors on texts. With millions of dollars riding on big-name authors, it became more important to a house that a book appear on a list than that it be in perfect shape. Editors simply had less time to edit and had to concentrate on hot new acquisitions. The actual work of line editing then fell to a variety of people, including assistants, agents, copy editors, writers’ groups, book doctors, packagers, and well-meaning friends. In some respects this diffusion of editing to many out-of-house helpers was similar to the turn-of-the-century networks of free-lance readers. Today the editor is asked to think like a publisher, taking on many other tasks in addition to editing; as a result, authors and agents are pressured to turn in more polished work. Editing in the day of the media conglomerate looks more like antebellum “puffery,” or the “reading” of the late nineteenth century, than the “heroic” labors of the middle twentieth.

…

What is the future of editing? The skills of identifying authors, negotiating with agents, recognizing the strengths and weaknesses of texts, guiding a manuscript through the politics and perils of a house, and adding body English to its passage into the marketplace will continue to be important to publishing. The distinct image of the editor as the one person who discharges all of these functions out of some combination of professional pride and personal passion may not survive. Publishing, it has been said, goes through a standard twenty-year cycle including an initial phase, in which there are many small houses; a middle period, when these upstarts collapse, merge, or are bought out by larger houses; and a final stage, when the large houses falter, breaking apart once again into many small units. Today’s large conglomerates may be about to break up, but there is another alternative that would create new possibilities for editors.

…

The Japanese model of commercial organization—many small, often-competitive units working within a loose larger structure—is gaining popularity as a way to organize former nations like what was once the Soviet Union, as well as large corporations like IBM. This structure is especially attractive for publishing now because computer networks make it increasingly possible
for authors to share and edit each other’s texts, while the design capabilities of work stations blur the boundaries between editors and designers. Some publishers already mate editor, author, designer, and computer as a team entirely devoted to one project. The image of a house as made of distinct departments that report “up” to publishers and CEOs may give way to congeries of teams that share jobs and are responsible only for what they produce. In that loose structure groups of authors, such as a consortium of MFA students and faculty, or the members of a writers’ group, might craft their texts electronically and function as a sort of allied imprint of a major house. Taking the current idea of an imprint to an extreme, a house would offer only technical support, distribution, and marketing, while the acquisition and editing of books would take place entirely in these semiautonomous teams whose only responsibility would be to meet some agreed-upon fiscal goal.

Instead of integrated hierarchies, publishing houses would be archipelagoes of diverse units, each with its own strategy and agenda. As multimedia options, including cybertexts, interactive home computers, and electronic books, become more prevalent, houses would offer the expertise, capital, and access to a broad band of media options that creative people will need. In exchange, the creative teams would be the avenue through which houses would keep in touch with the rapidly changing tastes of a public increasingly attached to the electronic media. Under these conditions, editing would come to mean anything that could be done for a book on a computer, including turning it into a multimedia extravaganza.

In the electronic-networked world of future publishing there will be as many editing styles as the distinct units require. Fully computerized editing programs could take quantified focus-group studies, mix them with marketing figures, and generate genre paperbacks from text through bound books untouched by human hands. On the other hand, small literary lines that rely on the taste and devotion of motivated individuals will be able to revive the editing of Perkins’s day for those authors who require it and those readers who enjoy the results.

If editing ended the nineteenth century with an auction, it will enter the twenty-first with an electronic bazaar. As the tenth edition of this book is transmitted to your hand-held electronic page, you, the reader/editor, will have the option to compare all of the editions and edit the raw text for morals, language, market, art, mass taste, or some future alternative, and to clip in whatever art you like. The electronic editor will give you those selections, like rhythm buttons on electronic keyboards, and then offer you what some team has chosen as its own, time-saving best choice. We will all
be editors when we choose to be, and, I’ll bet, that will make us appreciate all the more those teams of hackers, pencil pushers, and typists who take the first crack at shaping our info-glut: the masters of multimedia, the captains of the cyberstream, the editors of the future.

M. Lincoln Schuster

M. L
INCOLN
S
CHUSTER
, along with Richard L. Simon, founded Simon & Schuster in 1924. They gambled everything on their first book—Margaret Petherbridge’s first compilation of crossword puzzles—and won! That kind of imagination and innovation was typical of Mr. Schuster during his long reign at Simon & Schuster (1924–66)
.

“An Open Letter to a Would-be Editor” was written for the first edition of this anthology, in 1962. It is really a collection of
pensées,
their sum total being a distillation of Mr. Schuster’s many years as one of trade publishing’s most creative and unconventional editors. In just twenty-four trenchant comments, he offers a lifetime of advice to any young editor ready to read them, remember them, and, when possible, act upon them
.

Since their first appearance over thirty years ago, I have heard many of these comments quoted at publishing seminars, sales meetings, editors’ symposia, and wherever publishing people meet to discuss the latest metamorphosis of the publishing industry. Except for a reference to “the moment of truth … when you ask yourself the $64 question,”
*
they have not dated; they could have been written this year, this month, or this week. Even in our current age of bigness and emphasis on the bottom line, some things in publishing just don’t change—things like editorial integrity, taste, and dedication. And I hope they never will!

The great danger in applying for a job is that you might get it. If you are willing to take that as a calculated risk, I will set down some possibly helpful suggestions in the form of a few
short sentences
based on
long experience
.

You ask for the distinction between the terms “editor” and “publisher”: An editor selects manuscripts; a publisher selects editors.

An editor’s function doesn’t begin with a
complete
manuscript formally submitted to him, all neatly packaged and ready to go to press. Almost the first lesson you must learn is that authors (or their agents) frequently submit not manuscripts, but ideas for manuscripts, and give you the privilege of “bidding blind.” You are lucky if you can see an outline and a sample chapter first. Sometimes you
don’t even see a single word
.

A good editor must think and plan and decide as if he were a publisher, and conversely a good publisher must function as if he were an editor; to his “sense of literature” he must add a sense of arithmetic. He cannot afford the luxury of being color-blind. He must be able to distinguish between black ink and red.

It is not enough to “like” or “dislike” a manuscript, or an idea or a blueprint for a book. You must know and be able to tell convincingly and persuasively
why
you feel as you do about a submission.

Don’t pass judgment on a manuscript
as it is
, but
as it can be made to be
.

Forget all clichés and myths about a “balanced list.” If you think in such terms you will soon be stricken with
hardening of the categories
.

The greatest joy and the highest privilege of a creative editor is to touch life at all points and discover needs
still unmet
—and find the best authors to meet them.

There are times when you must finally say: “Although this is a bad idea, it is also badly written.”

Learn patience—sympathetic patience, creative patience—so that you will not be dismayed when you ask an author how his new book is coming along, and he tells you: “It’s finished—all I have to do now is write it.”

Master the art of skimming, skipping, scanning, and sampling—the technique of reading part of a manuscript all the way through. You will have to learn when you can safely use this technique, and when you
must
read every single line, every single word.

Learn to read with a pencil—not simply to note possible revisions and corrections, but to indicate both to yourself and to your colleagues ideas for promotion and advertising that may be activated many months later. Such ideas will be infinitely better if you spell them out while you are excited and inspired with the thrill of discovering the author or the book.

Deliberately practice the art of reducing to a short sentence or two the basic theme or impact of a book. You will have to learn to put the quintessence of the book on the back of a visiting card. This will later give you the nucleus for your editorial report, your jacket copy, your publisher’s preview, your letters to reviewers, opinion-makers, salesmen, and booksellers.

Don’t worry too much about mistakes you make deliberately; that is, disappointments and failures that may come from taking a calculated risk. Editing and publishing are risk-taking professions—sometimes they are wild gambles.

Don’t follow current vogues and fads, and never think of doing “another” book imitating the best-seller of the moment. Start trends, don’t follow them.

Give great weight to an author’s potential for growth—and to the long-life “survival value” of a given book for your backlist—a criterion far more crucial than immediate sales appeal.

If you are prepared to cast your affirmative vote for a book because of its prestige value—treating it realistically as a
succès de fiasco
or a
flop d’estime
—spell out the
reasons
for your enthusiasm, and calculate the fiscal arithmetic, so that you know just how much you are willing or prepared to lose.

If you feel you must enlist the aid and advice of a recognized authority or specialist on a given subject, remember that an expert frequently avoids all the small errors as he sweeps on to the grand fallacy. A truly creative editor must become an expert on experts.

Don’t be dismayed or disheartened if you learn that another publisher is getting out another book on the same subject. Far more important than being the first, be willing to settle for the best.

Welcome suggestions and recommendations from your sales staff and your promotion and advertising colleagues, but resist any pressures that will be exerted by them for “sure things” and easy compromises.

Forget or disregard any glib oversimplifications about “the reading public.” There is no such thing as one reading public.

Learn to win the confidence of your authors
before
the book is published,
during
the publication process, and
after
the book is released. Unless you inspire and enlist such confidence and cooperation, you will find yourself going back to the early days when the booksellers were also publishers, and the relationship between an author and a publisher was a relationship between a knife and a throat.

For an editor the moment of truth comes when you ask yourself the $64 question: Would you buy this book if it were published by some other firm? This challenge, this test, can be expressed in many rule-of-thumb formulas, such as these: Stab any page and see if it bleeds. Do you feel that if you skip a paragraph you will miss an experience? Does it make the hair on the back of your neck stand on end (this test was suggested by A. E. Housman). But all these criteria come back to the two basic questions: Would you put your own money on the line to buy the book you are considering and, even more important, would you want to keep it in your own library—so much so that you will be happy to find it there years later, and look forward to the joy not only of reading it but of rereading it?