Editors on Editing: What Writers Need to Know About What Editors Do (52 page)

Is it worth it? Editing certainly does not make most editors rich or famous. However, when you deal with nonfiction subjects, the material is literally as broad as the world around you, and your reward as an editor is to have the opportunity to continue to learn: every day you are bombarded with stimulating ideas—the luxury of multiple majors in a university of subjects. You also meet, and get to know for the duration of the book or books, fascinating, quirky, well-informed authors who are usually more crazed, charming, and accomplished than most people. Above all, you are among the lucky few whose life’s work does make a difference: the books you publish will affect their readers.

And there are some delightful perks in an editor’s life. Sometimes you must travel to where the writer is—and perhaps once a year, if you are fortunate, she’s in Los Angeles and not Boston. And sometimes you do, indeed, take authors to glamorous restaurants for lunch. One of my favorite acknowledgments, from the anthropologist Lionel Tiger, appeared in his recent book,
The Pursuit of Pleasure
. Referring to the article in the
New Republic
that caused a furor in our business by dividing editors into those who literally edit the manuscript versus those who only “acquire” the work at lunch at the Four Seasons (and then turn the line editing over to an anonymous assistant editor), Lionel said “… for the sake of histories of modern publishing, I am happy to record the wholly eccentric fact that my entire benign cooperation with F.S.F. was not once catalyzed by a publisher’s lunch.” Not to be outdone, I called him and said immediately, “Lunch, Lionel—your choice.” He said, “Lutèce.” Lutèce it was, wonderful it was. And best of all, by dessert we had planned the next book.

Is that a true story? Buy Lionel Tiger’s next book, read the dedication—and judge for yourself!

The Importance of Calling Everyone Fred

John W. Silbersack

J
OHN
W. S
ILBERSACK
has been an editor of one sort or another since the age of thirteen, when he prompted Everett F. Bleiler at Dover Publications to reprint Montague Rhodes James’s
Collected Stories
and was paid in copies. In 1992, after the deadline for this article, he became editor-in-chief of Questar, a division of Warner Books. He was the founder and former editorial director of ROC Books, the science-fiction division of Penguin Books, and also coordinated the science-fiction program of the Berkley Publishing Corporation from 1978 to 1981. He is the author of several books, including the best-selling science-fiction pastiche
No Frills Science Fiction.

“
During 1991, science fiction and fantasy became a two-billion-dollar-plus commodity in the United States alone,” writes John W. Silbersack in this all-inclusive, often controversial essay that examines the varied roles, problems, pleasures and pains, fulfillments and frustrations of the science-fiction editor and the importance of SF and fantasy in our culture. “Take science fiction and fantasy out of the equation of the last fifty years (itself a science-fictional concept) and the world we would find would be not only very different but very limited as well
.”

Among the many aspects of contemporary science fiction Mr. Silbersack discusses are editing SF writers (“What I try to offer authors is attention to the shape of their books and careers”), the opportunity given to SF writers “to experiment with plot, theme, character, and idea in a publishing climate that has otherwise all but abolished experiment, at least of the trial-and-error
sort,” the freedom granted an SF editor to build an imprint within a larger corporate framework, the special way SF is marketed to its author-driven readers, and the impact of SF on the American culture, and vice versa
.

“
New writers seem to spend a lot of time worrying the editor-author relationship to death—in most cases before such a relationship exists. I have only two criteria for that relationship, and they are the same criteria I use to buy books for publication:
‘Is it worth the effort?’
and
‘Will it work?’….
I must have some sense going in not only that the book is good and marketable but that the author and I have something we can offer each other, other than, of course, a sizable advance and a stack of manuscript. … So my advice to young SF and fantasy editors,” Mr. Silbersack offers, “is to stop labeling themselves. My advice to young writers is the same.”

The Importance of Calling Everyone Fred

During 1991, science fiction and fantasy became a two-billion-dollar-plus commodity in the United States alone, according to statistics compiled by
Locus: The Newspaper of the Science Fiction Field
. As science fiction marches on toward that icon of the future, the year 2001, the numbers are bound to grow past understanding, just as they have since the days, over fifty years ago, when, with revolutionary effect, mass-market paperbacks were first launched on the world.

Until the motion picture release of
Star Wars
in 1977, this science-fiction juggernaut was, in effect, propelled and controlled by a handful of dedicated SF specialist editors at no more than six publishing houses worldwide, most here in the United States. Fifteen years later, the juggernaut is on a roll, uncontrolled by those creative and editorial pioneers that led SF out of a desert of neglect, and the future booming along is in the hands of no one man or group. Financial and popular success has shaped a transition from science fiction as an insular culture dedicated to the future into, paradoxically, a multicultural (and multimedia) celebration of science fiction’s own success. In the process, what science fiction
is
—or, for that matter, what an editor like myself comes to call science fiction—has become so elastic as to have little meaning except as a marketing convenience or a way to define a disappearing average. For anyone interested in writing, publishing, or reading
science fiction, particularly for aspiring writers, understanding the process by which this came about is crucial.

Once confined to the ghettoized world of pulp magazines, ratty paperbacks, and the literary equivalent (if literature needs one) of secret handshakes, SF has become truly global since World War II. Equally to the point, the language peculiar to science fiction and fantasy, the apparatus of thought and concept required to understand it, has become part of the cultural vocabulary of nearly every literate person on earth. In fifty short years SF has developed from a minor, limited cult to full-blown cultural acceptance. Ironically, this acceptance is in every sphere except where it all started—among the core of the true believers who today are more concerned with defining science fiction in terms of what it isn’t rather than what it is. As a publishing genre, SF is still unassimilated, still relegated to a ghetto. Except when it isn’t.

To discuss SF and fantasy without reference to the media explosion that has attended its fortunes since the mid-1960s is to miss the whole point of one of the most marked (and least remarked upon) evolutions of mass culture since fiction attained a truly global reach. The growth, the truly astonishing emergence of SF as a multi-billion-dollar industry, has been almost entirely in what are called the electronic media, encompassing everything from television to video games. Today, the forces that propel science fiction as a literary genre are often quite alien to the written word, or at best they are distant cousins. Yet like most editors, perhaps more than most, all SF editors I know got into this line of work for pure love of books. As book publishing gives way to other media, and as purity gives way to pragmatism and commerce, I try to keep my balance as I send myself warily into the path of the juggernaut.

It didn’t start that way, or at least agility wasn’t uppermost in my mind as I embarked on my editorial career. I knew science fiction as a reader does, not by virtue of any special study or even interest. SF was just one area that my precollege reading had covered. Still, like most readers of science fiction I had read what I
had
read attentively, even though all of this was in my early teens. I had read all the acknowledged classics of the literature called SF; had a pretty thorough knowledge of the major authors and their careers; even had an inkling as to who had published them. (And here let me pause to say that throughout this essay, unless I distinguish between them, I think of science fiction, or SF, as embracing fantasy as well. Though it might actually be more accurate to claim that fantasy embraces SF.) I had done all this not with an early eye toward an editorial career but merely because I fit the model for the core SF reader: my reading patterns are author driven.

That simple phrase—“author driven”—it turned out, was enormously
important in publishing terms, and important too, I found, for my career.

It means simply that certain readers are given to paying attention to who wrote the book they last read and (if they liked the book) make at least modest efforts to find something else by the same author. The very notion is a publisher’s dream at any time, but particularly so in this age of conglomerated and corporately modeled publishing. Why? Because it overcomes the one obstacle that publishing has traditionally presented to big business—the virtual impossibility of mass-merchandising its wares.

The marketing of anything in a country of 250 million is an expensive proposition. The things that get sold effectively are dishwashing soaps and candy bars, major appliances and soda. Even though it costs millions a year, you can afford to advertise Coca-Cola; you know that next year and ten years later the same old Coke will be there to reap the benefit (that is, if they don’t decide to change the formula again).

By comparison, Joe Writer’s first novel, complete with over-the-top reviews and the praise of literary lions, may be a work of art, but money invested in it for advertising or promotion
may
pay dividends during a two-month on-sale period in a few major markets. The formula, quoted
ad nauseam
in all introductions to publishing—and more often noted with approval than disfavor—observes that publishing is one of the very few industries where
every single product
—i.e., each title—is unique, to be sold from scratch. The ascendance of “best-selling authors” proves a powerful exception, but in the world of midlist fiction everyone still seems to be anonymous. And today, “midlist” means everyone who hasn’t come to own the
New York Times
best-seller list—perhaps twenty authors own it all.

A year from now, or two or three, depending on the rate of Joe’s creativity, you, as Joe’s editor, must start from scratch, if you are lucky. An unfortunate trend among booksellers that have computerized—a relatively recent phenomenon—is to order from net, i.e., to base their order of an author’s newest book on what they actually sold of the author’s last. Strictly followed, this pattern sends the gross distribution bar graph plummeting into the depths of print-order hell.

But SF is different.

Science fiction attracts author-driven readers. The sale of one book and the money spent on it by the publisher
can
be built upon by the author’s next, and so on down a long prolific line, culminating in an appearance on the best-seller list of your choice. There are plenty of other publishing categories that share this trait. But SF seems to stand out for the flexibility the readers allow the writers—and, I must add, their editors.

What SF offers is the freedom of a genre that seems peculiarly unable to define itself. Some of the terms bandied about—speculative fiction, fantasist, technothriller, scientifiction, horror, dark fantasy—only begin to suggest
the confusion even SF’s most determined codifiers have shared. As I write this, the Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA) has just renamed itself the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFFWA), but not without a fight. For good or ill, confusion over what SF
is
means that SF is what the ambitious SF writer or editor says it is. I trust that all my colleagues push the limit, as I try to do. Gatekeepers we are (to invoke a thesis applied compellingly to my own former company);
*
no censors we.

It’s a running joke that every ambitious new SF novel is labeled by its publisher (and before that by the agent) as on the “cutting edge.” Fantasy, similarly, breaks ground—or tries to—by introducing unfamiliar backgrounds or elements or by striving for an untraditional degree of characterization. Yet, SF in every daily respect—and that goes fivefold for the editing of it—is a deeply conservative enterprise. Actually, the science-fiction editor lives his or her life (by 1990 the sexes finally achieved parity in science-fiction editing) in the midst of oppositions, familiar in their absurdity but rather startling in their
fin de siècle
portentousness. On the one hand, SF offers the writer greater freedom than any other publishing niche I can think of; on the other, that freedom is often more than anyone is comfortable with. It is a freedom squandered on the often irrational hope (it could hardly be considered a likelihood) that the next book can earn its writer and publisher a fortune—or even a decent living. Too many writers, in part fearful of editorial censorship but also in part greedy for the golden ring of commercial success, seem to turn from the experimentalism (both conceptual and stylistic), the political and social critique, and the inspired deviltry that the field still offers (and that editors still publish) in favor of much safer and potentially more lucrative novels crafted for the popular taste. As all wage earners know, nothing is more calculated to make a fellow careful than a predictable check.

It’s ironic that while every category of publishing has its stars—best-selling authors who transcend not the subject matter but the average sales of their genre—only SF seems to support not only best-sellers but also a wide cadre of midlist authors who can make a living off their writing. The prominent success of SF’s most original and idiosyncratic thinkers (both authors
and
editors) seems to promote a copycat mentality geared to the lowest common denominator. The best that can be said for the copycat mentality is that it does ultimately celebrate creativity, and support it, too. The worst: that it distracts us from the originality of the real thing, the groundbreaking work itself.