Editors on Editing: What Writers Need to Know About What Editors Do (54 page)

For my part, I work on a list of between five and six original SF or fantasy novels a month, most published in paperback, some published in
trade paperback or hardcover. All these books need some share of editing, packaging, and marketing, and much of that burden must be borne by my office. I’m helped in this by an editorial colleague and an assistant we share. My department of three reads an average of forty-two new manuscripts submitted each month from agents or authors with some sort of introduction to our publishing house. Many more manuscripts get at least a cursory screening from the slush pile. We manage all this for the most part on our own time; office hours are devoted to merchandising the art our off-hours reading discovers.

The mathematically minded reader will swiftly conclude that my life is a misery of work and more work. It is anything but, in part because every book is a fresh experience to be savored, very often even if it is very bad, and because editing (any kind of editing)
is
a kind of treasure hunt that promises surprise and reward around every corner. Like most editors, I think my job should be fun and it often is.

When it isn’t fun that is almost invariably because what we laughingly call the author-editor relationship goes awry. I say “laughingly” because this isn’t a relationship, it’s a marriage, with all the emotional and contractual baggage that the term implies. Too often, I get the sense, the aspiring writer is so determined to be businesslike in his dealings with prospective publishers that he or she forgets we have some aspirations too. 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?
” As applied to the author-editor relationship I mean, roughly, that 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.

What I try to offer authors is attention to the shape of their books and careers. My attention is not always, or even often, expressed in lavish red-penciling. For obvious reasons I avoid like the plague books that need that degree of work. Today I try to buy books that need little or no line work and instead focus my attention on issues of structure, plot, and characterizaton. But even this has become a kind of step child to the more important (in terms of my sales and an author’s career) issue of author development. More than not, my editorial input is expressed in terms of a kind of loose career guidance. I try to steer my authors in the direction that I feel will best benefit their development as commercial authors, and in so doing benefit, of course, my list. This mirrors in many cases the direction or shape I seek for the list I publish as a whole. My guidance is not that of an avuncular Perkins, I rush to add. I urge my advice with the tools in my
hand—unequal leverage of persuasion, demonstration, and the power of exchequer. It’s all part of the give-and-take of what we might call the social contract between author and editor, as opposed to the legal document drawn up between Corporation and Proprietor. In any event, our shared agenda is growth.

It’s in this, I think, that the difference between editing science fiction and fantasy and editing anything else finally lies (if, indeed, there
is
a difference, because in most ways there is very little to distinguish between the two). For instance, I tell all my new editorial assistants (who, by the way, are
not
chosen for their knowledge of SF) that I want them to read genre submissions as they would read any book; and if they stumble over the often silly nomenclature of alien names, I tell them to call everyone Fred. By and large the advice works because, as with every work of fiction, whether set in the Bowery in 1960 or in Middle-Earth, each book must succeed on its own terms. So my advice to young SF and fantasy editors is to stop labeling themselves. My advice to young writers is the same.

But I said that I thought there might be a difference. If there is, it is in the SF editor’s relationship to his special little corner of the publishing list as a whole. I think, and I hope, that most SF editors are more than usually aware not just of each book
as
a book, but of the way it fits among a number of books published as each month unfolds. And, over the space of a year, and numbers of years, how each book contributes to the shape and direction that gives a publishing line its particular character.

I think that’s a good thing (though there may well be many authors who would fail to see the applicability to their own good), but I can’t say, and don’t want to say, that it is a trait reserved to science fiction. All good editors are, I think, empire builders in some quiet but forceful sense. I mean only to suggest that SF editors as a group are taught to think this way from an early age for reasons bound up in the history of SF publishing.

…

Some authorities name Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s
Frankenstein
as the founding document of science fiction. Others name H. G. Wells’s scientific “romances,” while others reach back to classic and medieval flights of fancy directed to ends quite different from what we intend now.

More provincially, maybe more accurately, many date the modern SF era from the day a journalistic hack named Hugo Gernsback turned his attention to the foundation of a new “scientifiction” magazine named
Amazing Stories
. Interestingly, an editor, not a writer, defined modern SF, at least literally, since he coined the phrase.

Today’s SF editors are the heirs in perhaps equal parts of Maxwell Perkins
(every
editor’s hero), Ian Ballantine (the editor as enthusiast and
entrepreneur, out of fashion but the best of our kind), and Judy Lynne Del Rey (the superbly proficient specialist). From these three, all successful SF editors, like Frankenstein’s monster bringing us back to first things, may be manufactured.

There were many others in the science-fiction universe that played equally important roles in fashioning a publishing genre from scratch. To name just a few among book publishers: Donald A. Wollheim (Ace and DAW Books), Lester Del Rey (Del Rey), Truman Talley (NAL), and Terry Carr (Ace). And of course from the pantheon of nearly legendary magazine editors, John W. Campbell
(Astounding, Analog)
, to name just one, probably exerts as much influence today as he did fifty years ago. Today their collective heirs (vastly more weighted toward books) continue, founding dedicated SF publishing companies (Tom Doherty at TOR and Jim Baen at Baen Books) and revitalizing older imprints (Susan Allison at Ace, Owen Locke at Del Rey, and Betsy Wollheim at DAW). Others convince corporate newcomers to form divisions dedicated to their beloved genre (John Douglas at AvoNova, Brian Thomsen at Questar, Lou Aronica at Bantam Spectra, David Hartwell, first at Pocket Books, then at Arbor House, then at William Morrow, or myself at Penguin/ROC Books). The point, of course, is that science fiction as a vital publishing genre has been proselytizing and refashioning some part of the publishing universe into a separate world of congenial editorial freedoms for many years.

Interestingly, individuals rather than corporations have truly defined science fiction as a genre. Just note the number of imprints that bear their editors’ names.

But whether fashioned by the entrepreneurial skills of practiced businessmen-editors or the marketing and managerial skills of equally alert corporate committees, the operative impulse has always been to set science fiction somehow apart. Unlike mysteries, romance, or westerns, science fiction seems to thrive best as a publishing category with a clearly drawn distinction between itself and the rest of all publishing.

Perhaps it is no accident that, as some have argued, the fissure between “high” and “low” culture that opened in the nineteenth century included the publication of seminal science-fiction novels and begins to close in the late twentieth with authors often published first in the SF field, such as Kurt Vonnegut, T. Coraghessan Boyle, J. G. Ballard, Ursula LeGuin, and others. Other quite clearly literary and also “mainstream” authors such as Doris Lessing, Margaret Atwood, and Mark Helprin unashamedly embrace SF techniques in their fiction. And of course South American fiction under the rubric of “magic realism” leads where once Poe and Lovecraft held sway.

Still other writers that seem to belong in both camps but remain somehow
obscure are Samuel R. Delany, Joanna Russ, Gene Wolfe, perhaps a dozen others. The gap, if not closed,
can
close, and the science-fiction editor is ever conscious of the leap in acclaim, revenue, and career that closure can afford (in a way that perhaps editors for westerns and romance are not and could not be). Still, on reflection it might be a very dicey thing that science-fiction editors and writers have one foot sunk in the mire (as all will acknowledge) and the other in the stars. There are altogether too many awards in the SF field and most writers would do well to heed them as little as their readers do, judging by the number of Hugo and Nebula Award-winning novels now out of print or the disappointing sales most such rewards leave in their wake.

Even more troublesome is the insistence and attention that this whole division occasions. Science fiction as an institution is too anxious to be included in the real world, and too proud to make an overture that would admit the truth: that we’re not there yet. The net result is a kind of editorial paralysis that fails to follow where our successes lead. After all, in the last five years science fiction, or what might be called so, has come to occupy a significant proportion of the major best-seller lists, has become a staple of “literary” fiction, and in sheer dollar figures has become respectable indeed. Though it will be hard and scary work, eventually this most exuberant of genres will take hold. In fact, I am convinced that the vigor of genre SF and fantasy publishing has already contributed mightily to current thought and debate. Certainly this is so in regard to our understanding of technology and its ramifications, or the pursuit of such metaphysics as human consciousness itself. 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.

Phyllis J. Fogelman

P
HYLLIS
J. F
OGELMAN
is president, publisher, and editor-in-chief of Dial Books for Young Readers. She began her career in children’s books in 1961 as production editor at what is now HarperCollins. In late 1966 she left her position as senior editor at Harper to join The Dial Press as editor-in-chief of the new children’s book department. In 1976 she was named vice-president, and in 1982 when the company’s name was changed to Dial Books for Young Readers, she became publisher as well. She was named president of Dial in 1986.

Some of the authors and artists Ms. Fogelman has worked with are Leo and Diane Dillon, Susan Jeffers, Steven Kellogg, Julius Lester, Mercer Mayer, Jerry Pinkney, Mildred D. Taylor, and Rosemary Wells
.

Ms. Fogelman’s knowledgeable voyage into the special world of the children’s book editor expresses her ardent dedication to the enrichment and expansion of the child’s imagination and understanding of the reality and diversity of the world. She describes the uniquely creative pleasure children’s book editors experience in working with artists
and
authors to fashion an interesting, well-written, entertaining book that will endure. (“In most cases, however, the author is not involved in the choice of who will illustrate the story and will never even speak with the artist as the book is being developed.”)

Aware that in choosing which books to publish for children the editor must also appeal to adults, who buy the books before they actually reach
children, she notes that “it is most important that editors of juvenile books have a sense of what
children
will like. It’s helpful if the editor can remember what it
felt
like to be a child
.”

Ms. Fogelman’s essay offers an expert review of the business, sales, and marketing components that determine whether to take on a book, but ultimately it’s her personal passion for a project that is the most influential factor. “If I’m excited by a project, interested in what it has to say, personally moved
, and believe it will appeal to children,
I will first make a decision that it should be published, and then figure out just how it should be done
.”

Ms. Fogelman sees publishing as one of the few fields remaining in which the individual has real impact in selecting and shaping the end result. “One reason I’m in this field is that I’m aware of how important books are to and for children. A good book can change their lives; it can affect how they think and feel about any number of subjects. It’s not only very interesting to be involved in that process, it’s also a great responsibility, one that is an integral part of publishing for children
.”

One of the most satisfying aspects of editing and publishing books for children is discovering the potential in an author’s or an artist’s work. When a manuscript comes to me, it is my job to evaluate its chances of becoming a fine children’s book, one that will stand the test of time. Part of this decision depends on personal taste, part on a knowledge of the market. But first and foremost I have to be emotionally moved.

Like children’s book authors, children’s book publishers become known for particular kinds of books. Publishing is one of the few fields remaining today in which the individual has real impact in selecting and shaping the end result. Nowhere is this truer than in the editorial process. And children’s books have the great advantage of allowing—almost requiring—that an editor also work with artists, a part of the job that I’ve loved from the beginning.