Opinion: Editors should get real

Written by Graham Coster

Wednesday, 20 January 2010 10:08

Graham Coster responds to Stephen Guise's article on the downgrading of editorial skills: we're not trained editors at Aurum, and we're doing very well, he writes

The career prospects for the non-fiction editor who hopes to be promoted to a commissioning role are, if I read Steve Guise's piece in last week's Bookbrunch correctly (Who'd be an editor?), in crisis. Not only are sales of non-fiction significantly down, and imprints like Headline pulling out of it altogether and letting editors go, but when houses are advertising for new talent to acquire and publish tomorrow's non-fiction they're not even hiring editors any more, but rather marketing people, or (in the case of Ebury) advertising for people who can tell their Danii from their Cheryl.

I don't recognise half of the dystopian world Steve paints – but I do recognize the other half, and I’m pretty relaxed about it. I'm the Publisher at Aurum, one of the very few houses devoted entirely to serious non-fiction, and also publishers of the "indie non-fiction bestseller of the year" (Am I Alone in Thinking: Unpublished Letters to the Daily Telegraph - 70,000 copies since October and counting). In the teeth of the worst recession since the 1920s, and the collapse of Britain’s second-biggest bookselling chain right before Christmas, we seem to have had an excellent year, with UK sales well up on 2008 and the bottom line showing a similarly substantial improvement. Could at least part of the secret of our apparent success lie in the nature and approach of our editorial department?

Well, for a start, neither of the individuals who commissioned and acquired last year's books is an editor - at least, by Steve’s definition of the term. Before Aurum I was a journalist, and my colleague Sam Harrison a bookseller. Neither of us had any book publishing experience before we joined (bar a month's work experience at Chatto for me 20 years earlier, when Caroline Michel and I plonked away on manual typewriters in the publicity department). Historically, of course, there is nothing unusual about this: many of the most dynamic publishers have come from outside editorial. Tony Godwin arrived at Penguin as a bookseller; Carmen Callil started as a publicity assistant. But why is it that, if I had to recruit another commissioning editor now, I'd be minded not even to advertise in the Bookseller or contact a book publishing recruitment consultant at all? That -contrary to what Steve seems to imply - it might it be a positively good thing for a commissioning editor not to be appointed from within "editorial", especially to acquire non-fiction?

At least 50% of the serious non-fiction I commission (and over the years around 90% of the biggest successes) has come from inside my own head: as original ideas. It is, of course, more fun that way, than waiting for a proposal from an agent to land on your desk, and avoids the likelihood of one of the big houses blowing you out of the water with an opening offer of 50 grand - but it's also second nature. As a freelance journalist, if I didn't constantly come up with ideas for features and pieces, I’d starve. We headhunted my colleague Sam from Waterstone's, where he was an experienced buyer responsible for sport and entertainment. He brings to his acquisitions a first-hand understanding of what that chain and the wider retail book market are able to sell in significant quantity.

This sounds so obvious and ungainsayable as to be hardly worth writing down. But the problem comes if, counter-intuitively, one elevates - as I wonder if Steve's thesis does - literary knowledge, or the ability to "edit", into the primary qualification for a commissioning editor. I can certainly point to a former Managing Editor of ours who left Aurum for a commissioning role at one of the top university presses, so the kind of promotion prospects Steve fears for are still there - but in this case it was because an excellent structural and line editor was hired to come up with lots and lots of ideas for viable books, which she's still successfully doing. But if 10 years of commissioning have taught me one thing, it is that a good book, and a book that sells, have no necessary relation to one another. Of course you always want, and endeavour, to publish the best possible book, for which you need to know how to collaborate with an author to end up with a piece of writing that fully achieves what it sets out to do. (Some of our authors are indeed initially rather alarmed at the amount of re-casting and re-working we ask them for: no one elsewhere appears previously to have taken such a forensic interest in their books.) But to do that you have to be, most of all, simply the best specimen reader for that book. No mystique about it. There's no point, however, in publishing a fine work that won't sell because no one out there in the world wants to read it.

This is where I don't have much of a problem even with Ebury's much-mocked advertisement for a celeb-specialist. If those are the kind of books they want to publish (though perhaps the final audit of celeb memoirs for 2009 might lead to a re-appraisal of that market), then who better - who else? - to go and get them? A marketing person might well make an excellent commissioning editor - because s/he can envisage what that finished book will look like, and how, crucially, it will worm its way into the public consciousness so that people become aware of it and thereby able to buy it. I don't have any training in marketing, but if I can have an idea in my mind of what the title and jacket design will be for a book before I've even commissioned it, so much the better. That's how potential readers will, and need to, discover it.

A couple of final musings. First, I've been rather staggered, more than once, to meet non-fiction commissioning editors who, it has turned out, don't in their spare time actually read non-fiction (but only novels). If you, who are acquiring them, aren't the market for your own books, then who will be? And secondly, the idea that the books you acquire (even if you buy them from an agent or another publisher) originate from other literary people is a delusion. Journalism was a good training for being an editor in another respect: it was only after you got back from talking to ex-coal miners in Kent or watching a 24-hour Citroen 2CV race in Dublin (been there and done both) that you could report on what you'd heard or seen - that the writing could start. That's why Am I Alone in Thinking? has been such a successful book. It was newspaper readers out there, all over the country, being spontaneously witty, outraged, preposterous - themselves - in response to the events and mores of the day. Everything that gets written about in books comes from out there, beyond books, in the real world. That's where a non-fiction editor needs to live, and come from.

Graham Coster is Publisher at Aurum

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