Editors on Editing: What Writers Need to Know About What Editors Do (16 page)

Why do we delight in keeping things secret from our authors? So as to keep them secret from the competition? After all, given the fact that our survival depends on greater efficiency in the distribution and sale of books, such efficiency depends heavily on open access to information. Your competitor can get a pretty good idea of how many copies of a book you are selling by extrapolating from widely disseminated information: the sell-through reports of electronic cash registers. With the cash register mated to a computer, when the sale is rung up, the book is automatically deducted from the inventory carried in the store computer. One knows that the book is sold. In an age of electronic ubiquity, closed-information societies are rather hard to maintain, as witness what has become of the Soviet Union. Publishers don’t try to “cook” their royalty reports—it would probably lead to horrendous inventory control problems. Misinformation and concealment are inefficient.

But to educate your author, so that the full and correct answer makes sense, demands quite a bit of self-education. Editors have to learn a little about every area of the business. How, exactly, does the entire fulfillment process work? What are the usual terms and conditions of premium and special or bulk sales? What it comes down to is that you must know the basics about how other people in your business do their jobs. What are their problems, their realities? This is an endless process, this self-education. But it makes you a truly effective and capable editor. It not only informs your relationships with authors, it gives you better information on which to make acquisition and other business decisions.

All of this begs a large question: Is it necessary—ever—to lie for “good reasons”? We face the same question in our lives outside of business; we respond according to circumstance and conscience. At an early age we learn that truth prospers and untruth does not. Or some of us learn otherwise. If you find yourself in a publishing situation where there is a willful pattern of duplicity and misinformation, you will save your reputation (and much of your value as an editor) by getting out of it. My experience in publishing is that most lies told are small ones. Big ones lead promptly to disaster.

We sometimes withhold information because authors or agents don’t
have “a need to know.” Generally this is another way of saying that we don’t want to open things up for fear that authors or agents will be telling us how to do our business. Open and clear communication doesn’t mean you have to give up control over decisions and judgments that are properly the publisher’s to make. Publishers are quite right to guard those rights; heavy responsibilities come with them. (After all, it’s always our fault that the book didn’t sell.) Educating the author, informing him or her fully, doesn’t always lead to agreement. But you are morally and ethically obliged to make your best efforts and to stand by what you think is right.

If, after you have heard what author or agent has to say, and you have explained your position, then stand by it. I say “your” position, when in reality it is often a house decision, reached after deliberations by many concerned people or handed down by management. Often you may not be in total agreement with that decision. But your obligation as an editor was to do everything you could, given your understanding and opinion, to shape that decision, preferably in collegial, rational fashion. You may feel it necessary to tell your author you don’t agree with that decision. But if you find yourself in that position too frequently, consider that you might not be 100 percent right. You should also give some thought to the possibility that you are marching to a different drummer and maybe ought to march off elsewhere. (Before marching off, make sure the trip is necessary!)

If you are being honest about the book inside the house and with the author (a certain leeway for hype and flattery is human and allowable), then you are living up to your primary obligation—to the book. You are the best (usually) and often the only advocate the book has; and your clout is as good as your reputation for being realistic and honest. Your relationship with the author, based on full disclosure, has some things in common with a lawyer-client relationship. Confidentiality, for instance, is something that authors and agents have a right to expect. This is particularly important in a business that deals with intellectual property—ideas and the form in which they are expressed. Editors are frequently confided in, by authors and agents, with ideas, plots, and various notions, sometimes in written form, more often in conversation. You have an absolute obligation to respect the ownership of that idea.

Confidentiality involves your respecting the author’s rights in many ways; authors use the sympathetic ears of editors to sort out problems (often ones that have nothing to do with the book), and there are necessarily certain details of authors’ personal and financial affairs that editors are aware of. Because the author is often quite open with his or her editor, that editor has a grave responsibility not to use such confidential information in any way. An editor who talks indiscreetly about one of his or her authors to another author is generally wrong to do so and invariably foolish.

The nature of the friendship that grows between author and editor allows for many abuses—on both sides. Authors have agents for good reason; to use your friendship with the author to influence the business discussions that properly should take place between agent and editor is always wrong. An editor must always be alert to situations where friendship must stop and professional responsibility begin: when you are “doing the author a favor,” more often than not you are doing him or her and yourself a disfavor. You should not make promises that your house won’t keep. You cannot suddenly become a collaborator—you are on one side of the desk and the author is on the other. The agent represents the author; you represent the book.

It sometimes becomes necessary that you recuse yourself (i.e., step out of the line of fire) when you feel that you are not in a position to speak for the author. That’s the moment when an agent becomes a blessing. Agents can say things to publishers that would be awkward for authors to say to editors. Good cop, bad cop? Yes, that’s part of the negotiating game. But nothing relieves you of your responsibility for the book. The old Chinese proverb is not always right: “Victory has a thousand fathers; defeat is an orphan.” No, win or lose, the editor and the author and the book have enduring family ties!

…

I have elected to concentrate on certain general principles that should govern the conduct and attitude of an editor. The ethical and moral problems that can and do arise would require a book rather than an essay to give attention in any detail. But most problems stem from a lack of clarity about responsibility. The author entrusts his or her book to you in part because of your reputation and that of your house. You have a right to expect certain things of an author—and a duty to ascertain, insofar as is possible, that the author is capable of writing a book that you will be able to speak for, honestly and passionately. That doesn’t mean you are searching for authors of stellar integrity and character. (What would become of editors if
they
had to meet such high standards!?) But it does mean you are looking for certain professional “virtues.” That warranty clause in the contract does not absolve you from being sure that, while you may not believe and trust the author in all things, you can and do trust him or her in the things needful for this book. One can’t make a Solomon-like distinction, in many cases, between the author and his or her book. Your house rightly expects you to protect it against frauds, lunatics, and con men, even when they come with seemingly the most angelic credentials.
You
want to be as sure as you can of whom you are dealing with; you can’t hope for transcendent goodness, but you had certainly better find competence. You, more than anyone else,
are in a position to make this essential judgment as prelude to committing your house to publish any work.

If you are deceived, profit from the experience and hope it will not be repeated. If you fall into it too often, seek another profession. Beware, too, of thinking that your skills can make the book something it is not. If you wish to be a writer, be one. Never tell an author that you can somehow inspirit a book with qualities and essences that will somehow transform it. Be careful to keep a clear idea of your role; you are not the expert, not the creator. You are there to assist.

Remember whence your paycheck cometh—and why. If you have done your job properly, if you have really served the
book
, you will have served your employer
and
your author and behaved both morally and ethically. Remember: no matter how it sells, that book remains in your care until death or other employment do you part.

What Goes into Making an Editorial Decision

Richard Marek

R
ICHARD
M
AREK
started as the “backlist editor” at Macmillan, then became a senior editor there, in charge of the backlist but bringing in new titles. At Macmillan he worked with Bruno Bettelheim on
The Children of the Dream.
Moving to World Publishing, he first published Robert Ludlum, then went to Dial and published James Baldwin and Mira Rothenberg. Leaving Dial, he had his own imprint, first at Putnam’s, where he continued to publish Ludlum, then at St. Martin’s, where he acquired
The Silence of the Lambs.
In 1985 he became president and publisher of E. P. Dutton, where he published Peter Straub, Judith Rapoport, and James Carroll. When Dutton was folded into NAL/Viking, he assumed his present position, that of editor-at-large at Crown Publishers, a division of Random House
.

“When I’m asked by writers what I, as an editor, am looking for, my answer is, ‘Something I haven’t seen before.’ The reply may infuriate the writer—it is of little help to him—but it is true. The new idea, the new voice, the jolt one feels at the unexpected are what most stimulate the editor and the reading public,” says Richard Marek in his shrewd anatomy of the factors that make an editor buy—or reject—a manuscript
.

Mr. Marek discusses the favorable impact on the editor of such important factors as the fiction writer’s unique voice or vision, pacing, plotting, verisimilitude, gift for characterization, style, and dialogue. For the nonfiction writer, the way to tempt an editor is to display skills in the organization and presentation of original, relevant, interesting material in an entertaining, accessible way
.

Mr. Marek concludes his eminently practical essay with two pieces of
advice for editors that, if followed, will surely enhance their careers. They will also benefit writers seeking to work with editors who are intuitively empathetic with their work. The first recommendation is that “an editor must develop a sense for commercial books even if he might not read them on his vacation,” and the second is that an editor should not publish in fields he knows nothing about but should “go for what you know. Trust your instincts and your passions. And the readers will come—and they will buy.”

What Goes into Making an Editorial Decision

Acquiring editors are hired for one primary reason: that the books they buy make money for the publishing company that employs them.

This somewhat oversimplified assertion does not reflect a new conspiracy on the part of money-hungry conglomerates; it was just as true thirty years ago, when I entered the business, as it is now, and historians of publishing report that it was true from the creation of the printing press.

Nor does the linking of profits and books imply that the editor is hired to buy “bad” books, junk. I am told that the biggest money-maker in the history of Random House is James Joyce’s
Ulysses
, and numbers one and two at Macmillan are
Gone with the Wind
and
The Complete Poems of William Butler Yeats
. Yes, some junk sells, but much does not; best-seller lists are strange amalgams of down- and upmarket volumes that speak only of the diversity of American taste.

No matter, the first consideration that goes into making an editorial decision is a marketing one: whether the book will sell enough to make back its costs, including the advance to the author, and turn a profit.

In most cases, the answer is unclear; one doesn’t
know
. It is probable that a biography of Cher will sell more copies than a biography of Madame de Sévigné, that a novel with violent action and steamy sex will outperform a
roman à clef
about an adolescent’s slow progress toward maturity. But one must be careful in trying to generalize: perhaps the Sévigné biography will win the National Book Award and become a staple backlist book selling steadily over the years. Perhaps the
roman a clef
is by J. D. Salinger.

It’s a truism that “brand names” sell, and it is indeed true that the public is loyal to authors, particularly in the area of fiction. Thus the next book by Stephen King is likely to outsell his current one, even if it is not quite as
good, and Agatha Christie’s sales continued to grow and grow, though her skills in plotting diminished as she went on. One reason is that most hardcover fiction is bought as a gift for someone else, and the buyer does not want to take a chance on an unknown. But more important, the brand name author is
good
. He or she tells a story better than the competition, is more inventive, cleverer at surprise, more insightful in characterization, etc. It is generally true that the better a writer is at what he does, the better the sales.

So it’s certainly true that editors go after name authors. But they also remember that the fact that some writers are proven quantities does not necessarily negate the risk in acquiring them. Other publishers daily try to woo them as well, and since the lure is almost invariably money, brand name authors come high, even to the house that published them so well the last time. Eventually the money the publisher must pay in advance may exceed the author’s earning power, and a book that sells one million copies may turn out to be a terrific disappointment. It isn’t the number of copies the book sells that determines its success; it is the bottom-line profit the book generates.