A new book on publishing’s history tells us which writers need editors. You might be in the phase of your author quest that seems to leave out the editing eye that your book needs. Authors at the last Writers’ League of Texas Agents and Editors conference often stopped by to talk about books they were pitching. It was not unusual to find an author who’d never been edited.
Of course, most authors believe they’ve been edited enough. One author even had a dozen pages of evaluation from an editor already in hand. Making changes to the manuscript from an evaluation letter is genuine work. It’s not commonplace to enjoy the personal connection from the golden days of literature. Those would be the times of the 1930s and 1940s, when editors like Max Perkins plied their trade.
Perkins was the gifted editor who shepherded F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway into publication. Fitzgerald has a reputation as a poor speller, but the biography of Perkins puts his contributions into clear relief. The masterful authors needed a team member who could cheer them on and cajole them when needed.
It can be subversive to tip your cap toward an editor, but it happens in the majority of acknowlegements which authors write. In a New Yorker article about him, Perkins is quoted as saying that if editors were too well known the public would lose faith in writers, and that, above all, writers would lose faith in themselves.
That new publishing history, The Untold Story of Books, is called an economic history of book publishing. The author Michael Castleman has had an agent for 46 years. He also calls his brother Deke “the best editor I’ve ever worked with, an ace at all levels.” He also credits his wife “who rarely reads nonfiction but critiqued several drafts of this book.”
Some authors have a close relationship with their editors because they share a bed. A new memoir from Nicholas Kristof tells the story of his New York Times career that led to a Pulitzer Prize for Tiananmen Square reporting he wrote with his wife Sheryl WuDunn. I’m not sure how you have a spouse as your editor and stay married. WuDunn and Kristof share an editor who’s not part of the family.
Castleman’s book calls attention to the crucial nature of editing.
“Attention, self-publishers: Before you release your work, get it edited. Extensively. The great downfall of self-publishing is insufficient editing. Authors can revise manuscripts until they can’t see straight, but they cannot edit themselves.”
As writers gain experience, some believe they outgrow editing. Au contraire. Excellent writers need excellent editors who can discern minor deficiencies. It doesn’t matter if you’re an aspiring author or a big name, every manuscript needs more than one pair of eyes—and in my opinion, the more the better.
Castleman adds that when self-published titles are well edited, they can be great reads. I prefer to call these books author-published; the distinction is that an author who publishes knows enough to engage outside eyes in the enterprise.
The “insufficient” comment is what I hear publishing pros say about failed books. “It didn’t have enough editorial,” the pros will say, The longer you write books, the more obvious an editor’s contribution looks.
