A two-way process

The role of an editor from me a couple of weeks ago, the part played by agents from Alison this week… It’s no use, I can’t stop myself, even though I know I risk making myself unpopular. I have to talk about authors.

 

Let me say this right at the start: guys (and female guys, which mine mainly seem to be, though not by design) – we couldn’t do it without you. Authors are the beginning of the process, the foundation upon which publishing is built. If there was no urge to put words on paper, there would be nothing to turn into books.

 

Let me say this too: most authors I’ve worked with, and an awful lot more I’ve encountered along the way, are down to earth, sensible and businesslike about their work. They realise that turning their dreams and vision into piles of books doesn’t come free of charge; someone, usually the publisher, has to invest hard cash to make it happen; so the books have to appeal to enough readers to earn back that cash.

 

This applies especially to a small indie publishing house like Crème de la Crime. All our authors – make that all authors, not just ours – dream of making the breakthrough, becoming the summer’s most talked-about name, topping the bestsellers. Indie publishers have the same dream; we believe wholeheartedly in every book we publish, and really, really want them all to hit the big time. But without a huge pot of money to spend on marketing, we know that realistically it’s only going to happen by accident; the day to day reality for us is keeping our heads above water until that happy accident occurs. Our larger and more prestigious competitors can afford to wait till an author fulfils his/her early potential; one Dan Brown pays the bills until quite a few promising newcomers come good. We can’t. Every book we publish has to pay its own way.

 

So we sometimes have to make tough decisions when the sales figures come in. And we also have to look hard at the authors themselves, not just at their work. Big publishing houses have publicity departments. (Is that wry laughter I hear from some of their authors whose sales figures don’t quite match Dan Brown’s, and who don’t hear from an in-house publicist from one year’s end to the next?) Our authors are our publicity department. We do everything our shoestring budget allows – press releases, review copies, bookshop promotions, events – but we have to rely on the authors themselves to get out there and raise the book’s profile.

 

Most are wonderful. They visit bookshops, host library events, give talks, run workshops, appear at festivals. Others are less so. Some have day jobs, of course, which make it hard to find the time. But just occasionally the subtext of ‘I wouldn’t know how to start promoting my book’ turns out to be ‘Why are you asking me to do this? I do the writing; it’s your job to make sure it sells.’ It doesn’t happen often; usually that attitude is easily identified at a much earlier stage – like the cover letter I received with a manuscript a few days ago, in which the author announced baldly that he had no contacts in the media and no marketing expertise – but he was sure the book spoke for itself. Actually it did, almost as loudly as the letter.

 

I’ve just realised I haven’t even touched on the subject I meant to write about: the sense of connection which makes author and editor a team. Or not, as the case may be. Again, mostly the authors I work with are brilliant; they’re self-aware enough to know that a fresh pair of eyes on a manuscript can spot tiny errors and inconsistencies, pick up little details that don’t hold together, and generally polish off any rough edges so that the final version can glow with pride.

It doesn’t happen often that an author fights back – just once, in fact, in thirty titles, and when the book came out even he conceded it was better after editing.

 

Someone commented last time I visited this terrain that a good editor is an author’s best friend, a bad one his/her worst enemy. Agreed, one hundred percent. I’ve suffered under bad editing. There was the time a local paper sub-editor on auto-pilot made a nonsense of a review of a Gilbert & Sullivan opera by changing 1897 to 1987. And the worse time when a new broom editor straight from college inserted about a hundred commas into a short story I’d contributed to an anthology, thus wrecking the pace and in some places the meaning – and when I took most of them out at the proofreading stage, promptly put them all back! If I set out along that road, I hope my authors will feel free to jump on me, hard! 

 

After all, all the best relationships are a two-way process.