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You can't put a balance-sheet value on editorial skills, which is why the  nurturing of nascent editorial talent has for too long been neglected, suggests Trevor Dolby. But is the tide now turning? 

I found myself talking to a couple of important publishing folk in the last week or so – both board members of their respective top publishers – and we gravitated to the same subject: both were saying how small the pool of editors and acquiring editors now was in the industry.

Mentally roaming around, there are, of course, some very good young things up-and-coming, but not enough. It also seems to be the case that when a young editor has a hit they are bombarded with offers from rival houses, sometimes flattering them into jobs which are out of their skill set and which don’t allow them to grow.
 
I’m ashamed to say it is largely my generation who have neglected our responsibilities in creating an environment within which talent, particularly in the editorial area, might flourish.

At the bottom of the list was the name of one of the best "desk editors" I have ever worked with. John would arrive in the morning with his snap-box of sandwiches, settle down at nine and work through tending to manuscripts like a quiet gardener. He could turn something terrible into something serviceable, and something good into something with real merit. But his balance sheet didn’t reflect this and he was signalled for the chop. I protested and they suggested I give him a freelance contract: if he was that valuable, he didn’t have to be in the office to do what he did. He was good and. of course, at the end of the year the word had got round that he was available; soon he had more work than he could cope with and we were eased out, scrabbling around for good freelancers in the melee with others. The quality of the books suffered and I believe sold less without his skill.

I was very privileged to be taken under the wing of a remarkable man a few years ago. Peter Mead is one of the great advertising men of the post-War era and one of the triumvirate who set up Abbot Mead Vickers. A down-to-earth East Ender, Peter would take me to the Ivy and we would chew the fat and laugh a good deal. An extraordinarily modest man, he would tell me he had no talent other than a fierce belief that business should always be about staff: their recruitment and the ability to create an environment in which they could flourish. He told me about the his genius creative partner David Abbott and how Peter believed his job was to make sure that David and his team were given the environment to do their best work. Peter was proud of the fact that during the recession in the late 1980s, when the London advertising industry laid off nearly a quarter of its workforce, he actually took on some of the best creatives who were coming loose from other agencies even though at times they lacked the business to support them. The agency’s stock actually rose when the City heard this. When the financial situation eased, AMV were staffed up ready to take advantage of account moves.

By and by, Abbot Mead Vickers became the most successful advertising agency of the 1990s. It was taken over in 2004 by Omnicom. Peter is now Vice-Chairman of this 13.4 billion-dollar company.

Cultivating creative talent is now thankfully back at the top of the agenda. Random House held probably the best creative day I’ve been to for a long time last week, and HarperCollins have their excellence scheme. But we have created an incredibly big mountain for ourselves to climb. We simply must develop an environment within which talented editors can flourish. With all the myriad ways people can now read and with the internet allowing everyone to become either a published author or a critic - of sorts – as a minimum, we need to set ourselves apart as professionals by the quality of the content of the books we produce.

Trevor Dolby is Publisher of Preface

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The Peter Principles
written by Gill Davies, November 13, 2009

I am very pleased to see this topic being raised by Trevor Dolby. I worked in the industry for 26 years, but now run a postgraduate degree course in publishing. I also do freelance training for publishers,and for the Publishing Training Centre, on the work of the commissioning editor. At my university, I see bright young people wanting to work in editorial, as they see it as the most interesting part of publishing. They believe they will be working on books and with authors and it is going to be challenging but inspiring. On training courses, I am sometimes taken aback by innocent comments made by delegates about how things are run in their companies. The Editor as Drudge seems to be the new role, and it's clear that these young editors are reporting up to 'Publishers' and 'Editorial Directors' too young and too inexperienced to be occuping those positions. How else can one account for a 'Publisher' who doesn't know the difference between a reprint with corrections and a new edition, for example? I feel slightly anxious, therefore, about the kind of publishing world into which I am introducing my students. Many comments have been made about the rise of importance of the literary agent, often now taking on the work of the editor. This is very useful work that is being done, but it should not be to the exclusion of the in-house editor, who appears to think that now that work is done, they need not concern themselves with it. If agents are doing so much content and textual work, what are the editors doing? An important, but blindingly obvious, point seems to be overlooked these days. Publishing is not like most industry. The people who create the content, the authors, are freelancers. Their relationship with the publishing house is not the same as that between employer and employee. Managing that relationship is central to the good health of the house, whether that is about finding new authors or supporting and developing the work of existing authors. So, why is there a shortage of editorial staff, let alone good staff? Probably because the role of the editor has been downgraded, possibly in formal terms, or even sublimally. The balance must be redressed if publishers wish to find and nurture real talent on the editorial side. Experienced and successful editors will always be in demand but most houses, at some time, need to replace them. The pot of potential talent will run dry if the role of editor is continually seen as not worth the candle, and that life is much more fun in marketing.