Editors on Editing: What Writers Need to Know About What Editors Do (8 page)

It is harder for authors to control errors in paperback originals and reprints, however, because tight publication schedules make it prohibitive for publishers to furnish galleys for review by authors in many cases. Also, authors rarely get to see galleys of paperback reprints of their hardcover books. But authors and their agents can and often do demand the right to examine galleys in exchange for a promise to turn them around promptly. Thus, even paperback authors have a chance to bring out unblemished books.

The development of computerized editing and word processing hardware and software promises to eliminate many problems for authors and editors. Although numerous technical, financial, labor, and other obstacles have impeded the automation of some important editorial functions, I’m reasonably certain that these will be overcome in the foreseeable future, making clean copy in both manuscript and galley an everyday occurrence. The same is true for style, design, composition, and other aspects of the publishing process that are now in the hands of a diminishing number of expert craftspeople. In short, emerging technology will replace a good deal of the mental and manual labor involved in producing books.

What do all these changes leave for editors to do? The answer is, just about everything. Unlike those of the older generation, today’s editors must master an entire gamut of disciplines including production, marketing, negotiation, promotion, advertising, publicity, accounting, salesmanship, psychology, politics, diplomacy, and—well, editing. But into that last designation goes a bewildering variety of activities, many only remotely connected with the stereotyped one of sitting in a monastic office hunting for typos. “I don’t know what
you
mean by editing,” one editor said to me,
“but among the responsibilities found in
my
job description are proposing ideas and subjects to authors, soliciting authors and experts for projects I’m developing, dealmaking, line editing, packaging, lobbying in the house for books I love, boosting those books to anybody in the trade who will listen, preparing profit and loss projections, and … well, how many hours do you have to listen to what else I do?”

The dizzying pace and complexity of modern publishing make it neither possible nor desirable for editors to sit all day reading or conversing with authors. They must be worldly and sophisticated, capable of shepherding the projects they sponsor through a gauntlet of technical, financial, political, and other hazards. Though editors are often criticized for being corporate animals, in this respect at least we should thank our stars that they are. For they and they alone understand how to work their systems, to maneuver, coax, and sometimes ram their beloved books—
our
beloved books!—through the corporate obstacle course. Today’s editors are professional company men and women, and if they don’t have a problem with that characterization, I don’t see why we should.

Jennifer Brehl, a young editor known for her ardent advocacy of the projects she sponsors, expressed what she believes an editor’s role today must be. “I don’t care how many editorial functions agents have assumed, authors still need someone in the house to see their books through at every stage. We must work, and work well, with every department. Among the many things we are, we are expediters and facilitators.” When I asked her if she thought her attitude was typical of her generation of editors, she nodded vigorously. “Lord knows we’re not in it for the money. You can’t be a disinterested party when it comes to writers. You have to love books; a writer needs someone in the house who loves his or her work.”

I believe she has identified the critical factor in the makeup of all good editors, and though her style of dealing with books and authors may be light-years apart from that of Maxwell Perkins, he undoubtedly would recognize the underlying passion.

There are many editorial qualities that are irreplaceable. Among them are taste, discrimination, personal emotional response, a sense of order and organization, determination, devotion, and tender loving care. In these respects, no one has discovered anyone or anything that can remotely take the place of an editor. Agents can’t do it because they’re outsiders. Computers can’t do it because they’re heartless.

But none of those virtues means anything if editors are lacking in courage. The biggest threat to the health of our industry is not mergers and acquisitions. It is failure of nerve on the part of its editors. The evolution of publishing from a profession run by individuals to a business managed by committees has created a population of editors preoccupied with holding
their jobs. The pressures they live under are constantly forcing them to lower the common denominator when selecting the projects they wish to sponsor. This means that it is easier to say no than yes.

The way that this attitude manifests itself for me is editors’ resistance to acquiring books that are even slightly flawed. It was not long ago that the prevailing attitude among editors was, “This book has some problems, but the author is so talented that I’d like to buy it and work with him.” Today such words are rarely heard. A book with problems is a book rejected, and more and more one hears editors say, “Let the author revise it, then we’ll decide if we want to buy it.” Many of them have confided in me that they would love to buy the book, but the prospect of bucking the system is simply too daunting.

“In order to acquire a book I love,” another editor told me, “I have to fight. I have to fight with my colleagues, my bosses, with a battery of naysayers telling me, This will never work,’ ‘That will never work,’ ‘This doesn’t fit our formula,’ ‘That’s too hard to do.’ A person can get weary and beaten down. Sometimes we all wonder if it isn’t easier to say the hell with it and turn the damned thing down.”

Also, editors have a tendency to shrink from editing the work of established, and in particular prominent, writers. Their timidity may be exacerbated by the bullying of egotistical authors and their agents, who feel they have outgrown the need for criticism by publishers. Once a writer has “arrived,” editors may assume that he has mastered his craft and that their role is simply one of messenger between author and printer. The assumption is often reinforced by publishing executives eager to get the book out in order to start recovering their investment as soon as possible. It takes courage for an editor to resist this trap and point out the deficiencies in the “emperor’s new clothes.”

It takes as much courage to love a book, in many ways, as it does to love a person, and sometimes there is as much at stake. But there can be no love without responsibility, and no responsibility without fortitude. “I’m responsible for my books,” editor David Wolff, formerly with Macmillan, proudly declared to me. “And I
want
to be responsible for them.”

When I asked an agent colleague of mine, Betty Marks, whether she thought editors were necessary, she quipped, “Of course they are. Who else can take agents to lunch?” If editors are to remain more than entertaining luncheon hosts, if they are to be not merely necessary but indispensable, they will have to continue resisting the pressures toward homogeneity and mediocrity that are arrayed against them by the monolith of Big Publishing.

I sincerely wish them luck.

Putting his tongue firmly in his cheek, Mr. Curtis answered his own question, “Are Editors Necessary?,” in this spoof of the work habits of editors he wrote for
Publishers Weekly
around April Fool’s Day several years ago
.

Why aren’t good books published anymore? Critics know
when
the last good book was published (1978) but they simply do not know why. Some say the answer lies in the eclipsing of creativity by television. Others say the flower of our youth was decimated by war, drugs, and general messing around. Still others attribute the problem to the siphoning off of literary talent by the advertising business, and still others blame our teachers. None of this is true.

The answer is simply that editors no longer work.

Shocking though this statement may seem at first, it has been amply demonstrated in a recent exit survey undertaken by a literary agent outside the Grill Room of the Four Seasons, who offers the following data:

H
OW
E
DITORS
S
PEND
T
HEIR
T
IME
P
ER
Y
EAR

Total number of days in year …………………………. 365

From which are subtracted:

Weekend days …………………………………….. 104

Legal and religious holidays ………………………….. 20

Thursdays, Fridays, and Mondays taken off for long holiday weekends ………………………………………. 6

Vacation days, not including weekends ………………….. 15

Fridays during summer, Memorial Day through Labor Day …… 14

Jury duty ………………………………………… 10

Preparation for American Booksellers Association Convention …. 5

American Booksellers Convention ……………………… 5

Recovery from American Booksellers Convention ………….. 5

Preparation for Frankfurt Book Fair ……………………. 5

Frankfurt Book Fair ……………………………….. 5

Recovery from Frankfurt Book Fair ……………………. 5

Preparation for, attendance at, and recovery from Jerusalem, Canadian, Third World, Latin American, Moscow Copyright and other fairs and conventions…………………………. 30

Business trips to London, Milan, Paris, and the Coast ……….. 30

Preparation for, attendance at, and recovery from two semiannual sales conferences …………………………………. 30

Illness …………………………………………… 10

Personal emergencies ……………………………….. 5

Funerals …………………………………………. 3

Total days out of office annually ………………………. 307

Leaving:

Total days actually at office…………………………… 58

We have demonstrated that editors actually spend only 58 days out of any given year (except leap year) working in their offices. But—do they really
work
there? A second survey, this one a poll of 460 former editors-in-chief of major publishing companies, taken at the Midtown branch of the New York State Unemployment Office, revealed something that most authors have always suspected but never until now had confirmed:

H
OW
E
DITORS
S
PEND
T
HEIR
T
IME
P
ER
D
AY

Total number of hours in working day (9
A.M
. to 5
P.M
.) …….. 8.00

From which are subtracted:

Time trapped in traffic ……………………………… 0.15

Lunch (including travel time) …………………………. 2.15

Editorial board meetings, publication board meetings, staff and other meetings ………………………………….. 2.00

Just going into a meeting ……………………………. 0.05

Just getting off a call ……………………………….. 0.10

Just running out the door ……………………………. 0.10

Just down the hall …………………………………. 0.15

Coffee breaks …………………………………….. 0.20

Personal phone calls ……………………………….. 0.25

Industry gossip ……………………………………. 0.20

Keeping up with the industry (reading
Publishers Weekly, Variety, New York Times, Newsweek, Playboy)
…………………. 0.15

Taking things up with the powers that be ………………… 0.10

Noodling with the figures ……………………………. 0.05

Seeing what the sub rights people say …………………… 0.05

Checking with legal ………………………………… 0.05

Running down one last figure from production ……………. 0.05

Locating the check ………………………………… 0.15

Locating the manuscript …………………………….. 0.15

Typing up, photocopying, and mailing résumés to other publishers. 0.30

Total hours occupied in not editing anything ……………… 8.00

Leaving:

Total hours devoted to advancing the cause of literature …….. 0.00

John F. Thornton

In his last full year as a trade book acquisition editor, J
OHN
T
HORNTON
purchased breakfast, lunch, drinks, and dinner for, by his count, 107 literary agents. It is all the more lamentable that, within a year of his departure for the Book-of-the-Month Club, where he is now editorial director, the publishing division that employed him was dismantled, Lego fashion, and redistributed. His fond hope is that the many best-seller proposals he was promised will eventually come into his purview as finished books to purchase for his club members
.

April Fool’s jest or not, Mr. Thornton, then associate publisher for Facts on File, rose to the defense of his editorial colleagues, put
his
own tongue firmly in
his
own cheek, and sent off to the “Letters” column of
Publishers Weekly
the following satiric parry to Mr. Curtis’s satiric thrust
.