A few decades ago I was sitting in a college seminar room listening to the professor discourse quite penetratingly on Thomas Mann’s monumental and once ubiquitous novel The Magic Mountain when my mind wandered to the question of just how this novel came to be published. Presumably, that callow and ignorant undergraduate in the basement of Goldwin Smith Hall thought someone — some editor — must have read the thing and recognized it for the great book that it was. And how hard could that have been anyway? Hell, even I knew it was a great book, if a bit long and occasionally opaque in meaning. I was a senior and the unpleasant prospect of graduation and the necessity to find some paying work was weighing on my mind. Why couldn’t I become that guy? I loved books, loved them even more than my other obsession, basketball. That might be a satisfying line of work. (...)
At the simplest, most basic level, I’ve been reading for a living for 37 years. I arrived at New American Library with a literary and intellectual sensibility formed by the unruly rebellions of the ’60s and the spiritual deflations of the ’70s, with a taste for the novelists and thinkers who had either helped to cause or best reflected and interpreted those rebellions and deflations. I’ve read thousands of books and proposals since then, and I believe I am a better reader than I was at age 27 — I know more because I’ve read more and my judgments are (I sure hope) better informed and more mature. But at the primal level where reader meets text and experiences emotions ranging from boredom and impatience to I-love-this-and-have-to-have-to-publish-it excitement, I think I am still that young man in the hunt and on the make, always searching for the big wow. This process takes place in the private arena of the mind and is entirely unrelated to the corporate arrangements of my employer. It is, quite literally, where I live, where I feel I am most myself.
As for the editing of those books that wow me when happy circumstances dictate that I get to acquire them, that process too takes place in a private arena. When I encounter a sentence that is inelegant or ungrammatical or inefficient or ambiguous in meaning, or a scene in a novel that is implausible or overdone or superfluous, or a plot that drags or goes off course or beggars credulity, or a line of exposition that falls short of the necessary clarity, or feel that some subject is missing and requires coverage, I point those things out to the author and with a carefully calculated mixture of firmness and solicitude suggest ways they might be remedied. I do this usually at nights and on weekends, sometimes on my bus ride to and from work, very occasionally in my office on slow days with my door closed (yes, I have an office with a door that closes), with a complete absence of business calculation beyond the largest context — that a book that is bad or just not good enough is a book that will embarrass me and my employer and be poorly received and will not sell.
But as I read those submissions and edit those manuscripts, on another cognitive plane I am reality testing what I am reading. What other books — the fabled and often tiresome “comp titles” — are like this one, and how did those books sell? (We are always fighting the last war.) Is it too similar to something we published recently or are publishing in the near future, or to a book some other house has or shortly will publish? Are there visual images in the book that might be utilized on the cover? What writers of note can I bug for prepublication blurbs? Is there something about the author, some intriguing or unusual backstory, some charisma radiating off the page (and maybe the author photo? Don’t act so shocked) that suggests that he or she will be a publicity asset? What might a reasonable advance be, given the amounts that have been paid recently for similar books, or might reason for some reason be thrown out the window? (A friend and colleague of mine refers to this feeling as “Let’s get stupid.” More on this matter shortly.) What colleagues in the company, in the editorial department, in marketing, publicity, and sales, could I ask to read the book to drum up support for it? What is my “handle” going to be — the phrases or brief sentences that briskly encapsulate a book’s subject matter and commercial appeal? These and all sorts of other questions will be popping up in my brain, and inevitably there is some crosstalk and bleed-through between the two cognitive spheres. If you want total purity in these matters, go join an Irish monastery and work on illuminated manuscripts, not a New York publishing house. Or at the very least a quiet and scholarly and well-endowed university press.
Nobody really knows how an editor works besides his or her authors and possibly his or her assistant. Yet I am quite certain that, allowing for differences in personal style — some editors go for close-in textual work, some prefer to hover somewhere above the text and make broader observations and suggestions — the process described above is close to the way that my fellow New York editors operate. And there really are not too many of us. I would say that, taking in the six major corporate houses and the handful of sizable independents, that there might be something like 250 editors at a rough count working in adult trade publishing. It’s a fairly clubby group. Most of us know each other either personally or by reputation, and we watch each other’s activities, especially acquisitions, obsessively, aided by our very own digital town crier, the website Publishers Lunch. The society of editors has, of course, its doppelgänger or shadow world in that of the literary agents with whom we deal and whose functions — chiefly the discovery and care and feeding of writers and creating the market for their wares — overlap considerably with ours. Let’s put the number of agents who count (sorry, but we think that way in this town) at 150, and you can grasp how really small-town and incestuous and ingrown the literary ecosystem of New York publishing is. In such a small and hyperconnected world, fueled by the twin forces of ego (our sense that we are at the top of the heap) and insecurity (our sense that we might vanish any year now under some technological Anschluss, that we are in economic terms pissants compared, to, say, the computer-game industry, and how many people in this country care about books anyway?), the arrival of a literary property that holds the promise of both review and publicity glory and substantial sales, can instantly engage the forces of irrational exuberance. And that brings me to the subject without which no consideration of the work of the New York trade editor can be complete: money.
Lord, we have a lot of it. And lord, we need a lot of it. I work in a 50-story mixed-use office and condominium complex in Midtown North, bordering on Hell’s Kitchen. When I approach this building arriving at work in the morning or returning from one of those storied publishing lunches, I look up at it and start doing calculations in my head as to what our offices must cost to rent, and to heat and light and air-condition, let alone the expense of paying the salaries and the benefits and the T&Es of all the people working here. Then I add on the cost of our humongous and totally up-to-the-minute warehouse and fulfillment center in semirural Maryland and all the folks who work there, and I ask myself what have I done to help my company cover the truly enormous nut that one day’s operation must entail and try to avoid the obvious answer that, whatever it is, it is not enough. So I head through the revolving door and up the elevator and tank up on the not-at-all-bad Flavia coffee in the common area that looks like it was decorated with fixtures from the set of some late-’60s Polish science fiction film and start answering the e-mails that have piled up since the day before. Welcome to my world.
At the simplest, most basic level, I’ve been reading for a living for 37 years. I arrived at New American Library with a literary and intellectual sensibility formed by the unruly rebellions of the ’60s and the spiritual deflations of the ’70s, with a taste for the novelists and thinkers who had either helped to cause or best reflected and interpreted those rebellions and deflations. I’ve read thousands of books and proposals since then, and I believe I am a better reader than I was at age 27 — I know more because I’ve read more and my judgments are (I sure hope) better informed and more mature. But at the primal level where reader meets text and experiences emotions ranging from boredom and impatience to I-love-this-and-have-to-have-to-publish-it excitement, I think I am still that young man in the hunt and on the make, always searching for the big wow. This process takes place in the private arena of the mind and is entirely unrelated to the corporate arrangements of my employer. It is, quite literally, where I live, where I feel I am most myself.As for the editing of those books that wow me when happy circumstances dictate that I get to acquire them, that process too takes place in a private arena. When I encounter a sentence that is inelegant or ungrammatical or inefficient or ambiguous in meaning, or a scene in a novel that is implausible or overdone or superfluous, or a plot that drags or goes off course or beggars credulity, or a line of exposition that falls short of the necessary clarity, or feel that some subject is missing and requires coverage, I point those things out to the author and with a carefully calculated mixture of firmness and solicitude suggest ways they might be remedied. I do this usually at nights and on weekends, sometimes on my bus ride to and from work, very occasionally in my office on slow days with my door closed (yes, I have an office with a door that closes), with a complete absence of business calculation beyond the largest context — that a book that is bad or just not good enough is a book that will embarrass me and my employer and be poorly received and will not sell.
But as I read those submissions and edit those manuscripts, on another cognitive plane I am reality testing what I am reading. What other books — the fabled and often tiresome “comp titles” — are like this one, and how did those books sell? (We are always fighting the last war.) Is it too similar to something we published recently or are publishing in the near future, or to a book some other house has or shortly will publish? Are there visual images in the book that might be utilized on the cover? What writers of note can I bug for prepublication blurbs? Is there something about the author, some intriguing or unusual backstory, some charisma radiating off the page (and maybe the author photo? Don’t act so shocked) that suggests that he or she will be a publicity asset? What might a reasonable advance be, given the amounts that have been paid recently for similar books, or might reason for some reason be thrown out the window? (A friend and colleague of mine refers to this feeling as “Let’s get stupid.” More on this matter shortly.) What colleagues in the company, in the editorial department, in marketing, publicity, and sales, could I ask to read the book to drum up support for it? What is my “handle” going to be — the phrases or brief sentences that briskly encapsulate a book’s subject matter and commercial appeal? These and all sorts of other questions will be popping up in my brain, and inevitably there is some crosstalk and bleed-through between the two cognitive spheres. If you want total purity in these matters, go join an Irish monastery and work on illuminated manuscripts, not a New York publishing house. Or at the very least a quiet and scholarly and well-endowed university press.
Nobody really knows how an editor works besides his or her authors and possibly his or her assistant. Yet I am quite certain that, allowing for differences in personal style — some editors go for close-in textual work, some prefer to hover somewhere above the text and make broader observations and suggestions — the process described above is close to the way that my fellow New York editors operate. And there really are not too many of us. I would say that, taking in the six major corporate houses and the handful of sizable independents, that there might be something like 250 editors at a rough count working in adult trade publishing. It’s a fairly clubby group. Most of us know each other either personally or by reputation, and we watch each other’s activities, especially acquisitions, obsessively, aided by our very own digital town crier, the website Publishers Lunch. The society of editors has, of course, its doppelgänger or shadow world in that of the literary agents with whom we deal and whose functions — chiefly the discovery and care and feeding of writers and creating the market for their wares — overlap considerably with ours. Let’s put the number of agents who count (sorry, but we think that way in this town) at 150, and you can grasp how really small-town and incestuous and ingrown the literary ecosystem of New York publishing is. In such a small and hyperconnected world, fueled by the twin forces of ego (our sense that we are at the top of the heap) and insecurity (our sense that we might vanish any year now under some technological Anschluss, that we are in economic terms pissants compared, to, say, the computer-game industry, and how many people in this country care about books anyway?), the arrival of a literary property that holds the promise of both review and publicity glory and substantial sales, can instantly engage the forces of irrational exuberance. And that brings me to the subject without which no consideration of the work of the New York trade editor can be complete: money.
Lord, we have a lot of it. And lord, we need a lot of it. I work in a 50-story mixed-use office and condominium complex in Midtown North, bordering on Hell’s Kitchen. When I approach this building arriving at work in the morning or returning from one of those storied publishing lunches, I look up at it and start doing calculations in my head as to what our offices must cost to rent, and to heat and light and air-condition, let alone the expense of paying the salaries and the benefits and the T&Es of all the people working here. Then I add on the cost of our humongous and totally up-to-the-minute warehouse and fulfillment center in semirural Maryland and all the folks who work there, and I ask myself what have I done to help my company cover the truly enormous nut that one day’s operation must entail and try to avoid the obvious answer that, whatever it is, it is not enough. So I head through the revolving door and up the elevator and tank up on the not-at-all-bad Flavia coffee in the common area that looks like it was decorated with fixtures from the set of some late-’60s Polish science fiction film and start answering the e-mails that have piled up since the day before. Welcome to my world.
by Gerald Howard, The Millions | Read more:
Image: Wikimedia Commons
