Authors don’t get edited — it’s the kind of straw man that gets repeated ad nauseum. But even if it’s true, longtime editor Michael Fishwick finds it has some long-ago antecedents:
“BOOKS JUST DON’T GET edited any more, everyone knows that.” We suffering book editors hear these words all the time. The difference was that my dinner companion continued: “Callimachus had it about right: ‘A long book is a bad thing’.” Not only caustic, then, but caustic in Greek. Beat that.
Of course, Fishwick would claim the sentiment is vastly overrated, but he does take the time to explain how it could have happened:
There is one straightforward reason for this, and it came into play in the Eighties, when publishing perestroika was in full swing. To survive in the new corporations, editors needed to acquire big books, to get their name on the revenue generating successes. As Clare Alexander, who has been both editor and agent, says: “Editors are noticed by what they buy, not how they edit.” They had to down pencils and enter the marketplace, becoming entrepreneurs and opportunists and backstabbers and gamblers. They also had to become authors’ champions in a new and more urgent way within their companies, indomitably promoting their books in the teeth of grinding corporate scepticism. They had to bully and cajole to get the best jackets, the best campaigns, the most sales attention. They became ever more aggressively political. Their Achilles’ heel became the books themselves, with authors complaining, often with justification, that they weren’t getting enough attention, and agents claiming, also often with justification, that they had taken over the editor’s role.
Then again, I’ve always believed the following: a good editor knows when to make changes. A great editor knows when to leave well enough alone…