BookBrunch

The people who tend to the words are the most endangered contributors to the publishing process, Stephen Guise writes

At the end of March 2008 I left Little, Brown, where I had worked as an editor and then a commissioning editor for some six and a half years. There were a number of reasons for my leaving, but quite significant was Hachette’s decidedly cautious approach to serious non-fiction, in which I had come to specialise. That caution was, it is now clear, quite justified. This article, however, is not a contribution to the endlessly rehearsed literary-commercial debate (on which my views are relatively straightforward: yes, it’s always been like this; and, no, it’s never been as bad as this), but about some of the implications for the career prospects of editors.

Which is one thing to be said for freelance work - especially when you haven’t got any: it leaves time for reflection. And so, speaking to a prominent publisher-editor at a launch party towards the end of last year, I commented on the number of commissioning positions that were going to people with marketing or publicity backgrounds.

One recentish example is that of Colin Midson, a publicity director at Bloomsbury who is now a commissioning editor at Simon & Schuster. Another example: Matt Phillips, who is now editorial director at Yellow Jersey and was, says the Bookseller, a creative manager at CCV. (The names thing is invidious, and I hope it goes without saying that this isn’t ad hominem, and that it will become clear that this isn’t about the non-editors who are promoted into commissioning roles, but about the editors who aren’t.)

And so we turn to Ebury’s advertisement of what is now last year for a commissioning editor. It began, "Amy, Lily or Cheryl – who would you choose?" To quote selectively (but not unrepresentatively): "Whilst experience within a book publishing environment would be an advantage, it is not essential as full support will be given." And "[Answer] the following questions in less than 100 words each: 1) Why are you the right person for this job? 2) Who you believe is the most influential pop culture figure of 2009? and 3) What do you think is the next big thing?" To the uninitiated, this may well seem to be an advertisement for an internship at Teen magazine. (For another time: are there really so few people already in publishing, who know how the business works, who can answer these questions?)

But at least the advertisement offers some insight into the point of editors. To begin with, the question should be, "whom [not "who"] would you choose?" As for "whilst" - why not just "while"? It’s like saying "dost thou" when you could say "do you". And of course it should be "fewer than 100 words". Question 2) is in fact, and quite obviously, not a question at all, but do away with the redundant "you believe" and it becomes one. And that should probably be "pop-culture figure", shouldn’t it, though the intention is clear enough that the omission of the hyphen is venial. And don’t kid yourself that the majority of authors don’t need saving from themselves just as much as the writer of this advertisement did; need saving, that is, from being wrong. As for the mistakes in this piece ...

No doubt this all seems somewhat, well, trivial - who (or is it "whom"?) cares? Of course it is trivial, in commercial terms at least: it doesn’t matter to the people who matter. Proposals are rarely argued through acquisitions meetings on the grounds of quality alone (far less punctilious grammar): track records are adduced, and angles, and the likelihood of TV and radio interest, of contacts, of precedents, and so on. If a book "needs work" (real work, not just i-dotting), all well and good, let the editor go off and do it; it is unlikely to be much remembered, a sentence in the acknowledgements perhaps if the author sees fit. And even if how well a book is edited affects how well that book goes on to sell - and let’s assume that it does - it isn't likely to be decisive (how could we possibly know? A problem, for editors, in itself), and, more significantly here, it will never make a book more saleable: it will not be mentioned on the AI or in the jacket copy, and "The New Martina Cole: Brilliantly Edited" is not coming soon to a Tube platform near you. Hidden work, lonely, dull at times, fraught with uncertainty, and undervalued - oh, poor editor, boo hoo. But even if this trend can’t be attacked on the grounds that it makes no commercial sense (though I’d like to see someone lay out the reasons exactly why a non-editor is more likely to buy books that will sell), here’s what it says to anyone embarking on an editorial career…

Appointment as a commissioning editor will typically represent the third or fourth promotion in an editor’s career: editorial assistant; assistant editor; editor; commissioning editor - something like that, give or take the nomenclature. The promotion to commissioning editor is by far the most significant, because now you’re buying books, or trying to. It might take an editor three years to make the leap, it might take 10 years, it might take for ever - most editors won’t commission, though it’s what brought them into publishing in the first place. Today, it’s more likely to take an editor for ever, because today editors compete against not only their editorial colleagues, but also their colleagues in other departments, and, increasingly, against people who wouldn’t know their arse from a verso. It would take a certain masochism for an editor to want to slog away for a decade on poor pay (some perspective please: people get paid far less to get killed in Afghanistan, and with far fewer opportunities for lunch at Joe Allen) to find that, in their early 30s, say, they’ve been leap-frogged by an 18-year-old with a subscription to Heat. (If you think this is only a joke, however unfunny, please see if you can find the Ebury advertisement - and, no, Ebury aren’t the first and they won’t be the last - and tell me why the job couldn’t go to an 18-year-old with a subscription to Heat.)

Let’s say this applies only to commercial publishing. And let’s not get sniffy either, because it’s commercial publishing that paid for much of my Xmas bonuses while I was at Little, Brown. Surely literary publishing is different? Yes and no. The commissioning on serious imprints will almost certainly continue to be undertaken by people who have done the reading and the editing. But how many of these people do we think there are going to be in five years' time? Is there a corporate publisher that has done anything other than lay off serious (and, for the most part, senior, presumably high-salaried) commissioning editors over the last 12 remarkable months? And you can get short odds about there not being many corporate publishers who take on serious commissioning editors after the recession either.

But if neither commercial nor literary publishing looks very promising for editors who want to advance, there is, for the sake of balance, another way forward: the managing editor route. It’s not for everyone though, and second best by some way if what you hoped to do was commission; more practically, there aren’t that many managing editors, and it’s a career path with a shallow upward curve. Failing that, well, it’s not as though editors are owed a career any more than midlist authors are - go freelance, young man. This, it seems to me, is what will happen in the future, one way or another. How many, for example, of those editors recently made redundant from Penguin’s Ed2 department are now freelancers? Again, Penguin’s decision cannot be attacked on commercial grounds. Many of the editors made redundant at Penguin and elsewhere - if they have not been fortunate enough to be welcomed by other publishers - will go back to their previous employers for freelance work. These editors’ skills and experience are at publishers’ disposal sans pension contributions, sans holiday pay, sans overheads, sans just about everything. In the short term at least.

What about the long term? If this piece is not too disconnected from reality, in the future there’ll be fewer editors in-house, and less editorial experience further up the greasy pole. Not only must this have an effect on the quality of books published today (disagree as you see fit, but don’t argue that fewer and less-experienced editors is likely to mean better books), it also suggests the question: to whom will the editors of the future turn for advice? I know how fortunate I was to be prodded in the right direction by Liz Faber, Anthea Snow and Alison Starling when I started at Mitchell Beazley some 12 years ago. You can go on as many editorial courses at the Publishing Training Centre as your HR department is willing to pay for, it isn’t the same as working alongside fellow editors who know what they are doing, and know because they care about knowing. There is some irony in the fact that Trevor Dolby wrote, laudably, to advocate the development of editorial talent (Opinion: The Peter Principles) in the same week that the Ebury advertisement appeared (although he might have been talking about shoppers rather than cooks).

My "solution" earns its quote marks by being so fantastical that I won’t waste much time on it. But here goes: the next time you parachute a non-editor into a commissioning role, take your best real editor and promote them to - let’s call it - Structural Editor and pay them most of what you are going to pay the commissioning editor in lieu of the kudos (and the rest of the salary); let them work hand in hand with the commissioning editor and take care of the editorial work that the commissioning editor isn’t really qualified to do. That is, open up a new way forward for editors who aren’t going to be able to commission and don’t want to manage. If you’re going to reward someone for not bringing editorial skills to the commissioning role, at least try to find some way of recognising those who do have these skills. God knows, many commissioning editors, whatever their provenance, will be grateful for a more legitimate way of sharing the heavy editorial work that they barely have the time to do between meetings.

No? I didn’t think so.

Anyway, to end, another quiz. 1) Can you imagine a large corporate publisher without a sales department? 2) Without a marketing department? 3) Without a publicity department? 4) Without an editorial department (other than a few editors to check catalogue copy and that sort of thing and send typescripts out to freelancers)? No. No. No. Yes. It seems, inescapably, a paradox that while - with apologies to illustrated publishing - books are words, the people who tend to those words are in danger of becoming the most disposable part of the process. It will get worse for editors before it gets better. And don’t hold your breath.

Stephen Guise was an editor at Mitchell Beazley, Cassell and at Little, Brown. He is now freelance.

Comments (2)

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A writer's view.
written by Nicolette Jones, January 12, 2010

I had the very good fortune to be edited by Steve Guise at Little, Brown. You can tell from the precision of his piece what an excellent editor he was. (The job may be undervalued, but I will always be grateful. Editors matter to writers.) It is chilling to think that the industry might lose skills like Steve's. Not to value editors is really not to value writers - it means publishers don't care whether books are well written or not, and assume that readers don't either. The issue here is whether publishing is losing interest in literature.

Best career suicide letter ever.
written by Bobby Nayyar, January 13, 2010

BUT I believe in life after death. Steve, you're always welcome to work with Glasshouse Books. (I used to work with him, for those who know neither of us).

Publishing has suffered a decline for a multitude of reasons, but the most obvious is that there are simply too many books being published, many of which are bought on the cheap and sent out like exiles in the hope that they might make a prodigious return. Sadly, very few of them do. On the non-fiction side, even less. We'd all love to have a Gladwell or a Friedman on our lists - no point trying to buy cheap imitations.

In a recession we often see a resurgence of, for want of a better phrase, 'old-fashioned' ideas. The concept of an editor who works closely alongside a small troupe of authors is sadly something of the past, but is certainly due a comeback as consumers become more discerning in their choices and start to focus more on quality as opposed to whichever book is promoted on the high street.

The problem is that this change will most likely come from the small independents because they are not encumbered by expensive offices or the pressures of agents and the need to find success on book club programmes. The small publishers that have a small but cultivated list. The mavericks know that the customer is always right, and that just because everyone else is doing, there is no need to tag along.

The film/cinema industry had a big year in 2009 but books have failed. The music industry has survived the crossover into digital. Newspapers and magazines are making the crossover into digital, with many casualties on the way. Books, those cherished objects that compelled us to join an industry like Dante to hell (lasciate ogni esperanza, voi ch'entrate indeed) are in real danger.

Sadly, it will be the larger publishers, those big, beautiful ships, that find it hardest to tack across this sea. Book buyers out there - check out your local independents, take a look at the lists of academic presses - you might actually find a non-fiction book that teaches you something new.

Best,

Bobby Nayyar