Editors on Editing: What Writers Need to Know About What Editors Do (64 page)

Mr. Tobin sees his responsibility as always to be “loyal to the ultimate decision maker on any book: the
reader.
He’s the guy who counts the most. Without
his
loyalty, I’d be out of a job
.”

My first job in book publishing provided the foundation for a career that has been an adventure—in more ways than one.

I came to New York City in the late seventies with the ambition to “break into the business” as an editor, and I landed a temporary job at a small, feisty mass-market house that published primarily category fiction in paperback.

What do I mean by
category fiction?
I mean westerns, mysteries, romances, horror stories, science fiction, war tales, and series of all kinds. Category fiction addresses the very particular needs of distributors and wholesale-supplied retailers such as drugstores, supermarkets, and newsstands. Category fiction also addresses the tastes of voracious readers who are looking for an exciting reading experience within a specific type of story but outside the norm: escape from boredom to exotic and dangerous places, identification with heroic but very human characters, clear choices and challenges in the realm of adventure and romance that make a difference, often a life-or-death difference.

Do you remember the experience of reading your first Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew book? Perhaps it was Jules Verne, Edgar Rice Burroughs, or Zane Grey who first transported you from the ordinary to an imagined
world beyond the known and expected. For me it was all of the above-mentioned books and authors—and more—but I gave little thought to who actually published the popular fiction that so many young people and adults devoured so passionately.

A college education and a reverence for western literature were wedged into my brain between my Conan Doyle days and my paperback publishing career. Today, I am still recovering from my formal education, even as I learn and relearn fundamentals of reading, writing, and publishing.

I began learning these fundamentals in my first job in the book business, a post that illustrates rather starkly just what publishing (and my particular niche therein) is all about. For me the experience was analogous to being a young ballplayer shipped to a Double A farm team for a few seasons before joining the perennial pennant-winning club. It was terrific training from day one because I had to do a bit of everything: from copywriting to proofreading to negotiating contracts to scheduling to policing advance and royalty payments to reading the slush pile. Occasionally—very occasionally—I even did some editing!

Of course, all of these functions are still very much a part of my job today. I work for a very large publishing corporation, but the basic process of making a salable book from a raw manuscript or the glimmer of an idea is exactly the same.

The crucial factor for me was this business of seeking and publishing books in very well defined categories. As I read submissions (agented and unagented) and worked on books already under contract, I discovered something that excites me and motivates me to this day: I found that some excellent writing was evident in war and horror novels, mysteries, westerns, and action-adventure series. My natural interest was in categories that seem to attract male readers and so I eventually carved out a position at the house that allowed me to “specialize” in these categories that—not incidentally—contributed significantly to the house’s income.

In other words, I was turned on. Intrigued. Hooked. The adventure of editing had commenced. I had made an irreversible decision: I was going to have fun at this. I had always enjoyed escapist stories—now I would be able to make them into books.

Let’s examine for just a moment one of the underlying principles that inform my approach to men’s-interest category publishing—and it is
my
approach. Others may or may not agree. But it works for me. Early on I asked myself this question: Is the solid writing and storytelling I find in these books
because
they are category books or
in spite of
that fact? In my opinion (then and now, with years of experience to back it up), category fiction is the
cause
of good writing as much as it is the beneficiary of good writing.

Why is this so? Any category imposes a discipline upon the author, whether it be particular conventions of plot that must be observed (or at least played against), whether it be demands of character and relationships (especially in the romance genre), or whether it be requirements of length (often imposed by the publisher, who seeks to keep the book at a certain cover price). These disciplines require a writer to develop his storytelling skills by working within a certain framework that is almost always more difficult than the budding writer realizes. These disciplines expose the writer’s shortcomings and bring out the best that is within him.

When I speak at writers’ conferences I recommend that every fiction writer try his hand at a mystery novel. I put it this way: In a “mainstream” novel you can get away with murder; in a mystery you cannot.

An example: One of our greatest best-selling authors of the past three decades, John le Carré, chose to channel his formidable skills through the mystery and espionage forms. You can’t do any better than that.

Further, category writing develops an author’s skills. It is a means by which many new authors break into the business, get their first one or two or three books published—get the kinks out of their writing, learn the fundamentals of the storyteller’s art. If an author brings some talent and ambition to the party, if he focuses on the story rather than on the money he is not making, if he reads and learns from other books and authors in the same category and is aware of what the marketplace can support—then I am very interested in those words on the manuscript page.

The category—be it mystery or western or novel of adventure—gives the writer, both the novice and the veteran, a framework in which to create a story for a given readership, and that is no easy task. There are no
formulas
per se, but, as I alluded to above, there are
conventions
, which the talented writer can turn to his advantage. Example: The action-adventure hero must, at some point in the story, summon a near-superhuman physical capacity to elude danger and kill an improbable number of the enemy, or he must turn to an improbable gadget or weapon to escape with his skin. Example: In a traditional western, similarly, the protagonist is morally upright (not necessarily uptight), with a black-and-white view of the world; the bad guys are
bad
. Example: In the mystery novel there must always be a crime or a puzzle to be solved—period—end of discussion.

In addition to advising the author on the shaping and content of the manuscript, a very important function of the contemporary editor is that of de facto marketing manager. In recent years, a poor overall economy has affected the book business as it has nearly every other business. Publishers have been forced to reduce the total number of employees and other expenses.

This new financial reality, coupled with a trend over the past decade or
more away from acquiring editors actually line editing books, has caused us to wear an extra hat or two in the office. In my case, it is fair to say that one of those hats is that of marketing “idea man.” The philosophy behind this is simple: The editor who acquires books in a given category surely knows the market for that category better than anyone in house—or else what is he doing there in the first place?

At first, the hat was an awkward fit. I have never been formally trained as a marketing expert and, because I have worked with a number of terrific marketing colleagues over the years, I appreciate the need for training and experience in that field. Besides, with all the other responsibilities an editor is expected to fulfill (just look at the other essays in this book), who has the time? Still, I kept an open mind.

At some point I realized that I also had never had any formal training to be an editor. I just picked it up as I went along from mentors and colleagues, borrowing and adapting editorial and negotiating techniques, breathing in the experience of others. I have since approached the marketing and editorial functions from the same starting point: determined to learn as much as I could and to learn by doing. This has more or less worked for me, and here’s how.

First, every book I acquire has to answer at least this one basic question: What overall market or segment of the market will buy this book? From that answer flow the editorial, publishing, marketing, and sales strategies.

A perfect example to illustrate this question-and-answer scenario is an action-adventure series that I acquired and published very recently. I remember vividly the first telephone call from the agent, which occurred a few days before our December sales conference. He described the series concept, which was to place two contemporary Special Forces veterans in a specially equipped eighteen-wheeler to conduct a war on crime (mobsters, kidnappers, drug lords, smugglers, bad bike gangs, and the like) on the open highways—fully sanctioned by federal authority that, in the books themselves, included a president very much like the current incumbent.

The idea appealed strongly to me on an editorial level for two reasons: First, the story line had action aplenty, good characters, and gadgets and techno-gimmickry enough to satisfy the tinkerer and fantasist in any red-blooded American male; and second, I was seeking a strong entry into the action-adventure series market, an area my company traditionally had not concentrated on as strongly as did many other mass-market houses. We saw this series proposal as one of three we were willing to take on and build an action-adventure publishing program around.

The idea appealed strongly to me on a sales and marketing level because my company had been the very first to exploit the truck-stop market as a nontraditional outlet for paperback book sales. Our sales reps, in years
past, had opened up truck-stop accounts for book sales and installed racks and filled those racks and maintained those racks with religious fervor. Of course, we published (and still do) Louis L’Amour, the best-selling western storyteller of all time, and a huge proportion of these truck-stop accounts sold that author even though they were not all that interested—initially—in increasing their book sales in general.

Clearly, the agent had called the right editor at the right publishing house (no dummy, he), and we practically concluded the deal over the phone right then and there. My gut was on overdrive, but I requested the proposal and told him I’d talk to “my people” and see what we could do. Well, instead of a proposal came a full and complete manuscript for the first book in the series.

Again, I remember that
feeling
upon reading the manuscript: I knew I held something very unique, written by an author who knew his stuff and could convey the authenticity of his experience (of vital importance in any of the categories I deal with). But
he had never written book-length fiction before
. This was painfully apparent—but, ah, therein lay the challenge! I attacked the manuscript with gusto and arranged to meet the author and the agent for an editorial discussion.

I flew to a major city in the mid-South, and the author and agent drove a sizable distance to meet me at a truck stop located near a major interstate highway, where we breakfasted (one terrific meal, I must say) and, over a dozen cups of coffee each, reviewed the manuscript page by page, line by line, in some cases word by word. It was one of my favorite publishing experiences because I remember how the light went on in his eyes when he made the leap—literally right before my eyes—from amateur to professional writer. He
saw
, he understood, he made the connections.

First, there were straightforward issues of spelling, grammar, and punctuation—which not every author has mastered, some even at much later stages in their careers. Then, most interestingly to me, there was the issue of “efficiency” in relating the story: Is every “he said” or “she said” absolutely necessary? Are three adjectives really needed? How can you delete clichés and create new ways to express very familiar actions and ideas? Does each sentence really say what you intend it to say?

The author did his job. From that point, the publisher had plenty of work to do, especially in the realm of cover “packaging,” since this book and the ones to follow would be paperback original novels. Here, the editorial content of the series lent itself beautifully to strong, high-tech, action-oriented images, and our art department “discovered” a new artist who had great rapport with the project and came up with a striking format and illustrations that perfectly targeted the books’ readers.

I was proud to see the first book, and eventually the entire series, develop
from concept to finished product. We broke new ground in the cover packaging, as well as editorially. The books attracted a cadre of devoted fans and delivered the escape entertainment they wanted.

P.S. The story does
not
have a happily-ever-after ending, however. The series sold strongly at first, but then began to decline until, after more than two years and a dozen books, we decided not to continue publishing it. This experience caused me to evaluate how and why it happened.

Ultimately I identified two direct causes. First, the action-adventure market had withered drastically. Mega-selling male-oriented fiction by authors such as Tom Clancy had brought men into the hardcover-buying cycle and was delivering bigger, more fulfilling story lines, thus creating needs and expectations that the category books could not fill. Hence, with the exception of very deeply established series such as Mack Bolan, sales of category-level books had tailed off into oblivion. A second cause was the fact that the sales structure of the publishing house had changed radically within that two-year span. No longer were individual sales reps opening new truck-stop accounts or servicing the truck stops as closely as they had in previous years; our company had merged with another and had become a huge publishing corporation.