What does it take to be a competent editor in the 21st century? You might imagine a publisher’s Human Development interviewer saying something to you along these lines:

“I don’t see on your resume any proficiency in XML programming, statistical analytics, e-book formatting, metadata management, Web design, information architecture and app development. Surely you are aware that these are the skills that editors must bring to the modern publishing process.” (See Book Editors Wanted: Editorial Experience Optional)

One qualification we omitted was bean-counting, or what is popularly known in the book trade as “running the numbers.”  Editor Rich Adin reminds us that that skill is greatly in demand. “At one time in my career as an editor my function was crystal clear,” he writes. “Everyone understood and agreed on the role a copyeditor played in the publishing business. But as the years have passed and the traditional publishing industry has consolidated into six megacorporations whose decisions are made based on bean counting, what was once clearcut has become fogged.”

A recent assignment was so fogged that Adin felt obliged to turn it down.  As any freelance editor will tell you, in this economy it has to be The Job From Hell to walk away from it.  But Adin did.  Read The changing face of editing to see why.

And for an in-depth analysis from the British viewpoint of what qualifies today’s editors, you might want to check out How the Publishing Job Spec is Changing in The Guardian.

Richard Curtis

Can a single typo or grammatical error spoil a book? Ann Patty, a distinguished editor for several big publishers and now a freelance editor, says absolutely. The latest offense is what professionals call a howler. Patty cites an incorrect use in the runaway bestseller Go the F*ck to Sleep.

The offensive line is: “The lambs have laid down with the sheep.”

It should of course be “lain”. Given the fact that confusion about the use of the verbs lie and lay is one of the commonest in the English-speaking world, the goof comes as no surprise. But what appalls Patty is that the editor didn’t catch it, an oversight eliciting this outburst: “The written word, when printed and bound, must be held to the highest standards. Editors, copy editors, and proofreaders, please clean up your act, do your job, and learn the f**king rules!”

It is dangerous to be too high-minded about such things, however, as was exemplified not long ago in the “Metropolitan Diary” feature of the New York Times:

Visiting an editor at Random House, I stepped into a crowded elevator and found myself pressed close to the control panel.

”Has everybody got their floors?” I asked.

After a moment’s silence, a young female voice from the rear said, ”His or her.”

”I beg your pardon?” I said.

”His or her. It’s ‘Has everybody got his or her floors?’ Your pronouns don’t agree.”

”And shouldn’t it be ‘his or her floor’, not ‘floors’?” a young man piped up. ”Each of us gets off at only one floor.”

”And wouldn’t it be better to say ‘Does everybody have?’ rather than ‘Has everybody got?’ ” a third voice chimed in.

I stood corrected — and red faced. But I was glad to know that good grammar is alive and well.

The unfortunate perpetrator of those gaffes was… yours truly.

Read Ann Patty’s rant in full: Learn the F**king Rules!

Richard Curtis

Jofie Ferrari-Adler, an editor with Grove Atlantic Publishers, has taken it upon himself to conduct, for Poets & Writers, a series of lengthy Q&A’s with distinguished editors and literary agents whose careers exemplify values and virtues that are rapidly fading from the daily discourse of the publishing business. It is absolutely incumbent on every member of our community 40 years old or younger to listen to their voices and imbibe their experiences so that you can understand what publishing was like when men and women of charm, taste and integrity walked the earth.

Ferrari-Adler’s most recent interview is with literary agent Georges Borchardt, who has represented and in some cases discovered such towering figures as Marguerite Duras, Eugène Ionesco, Jean-Paul Sartre, Michel Foucault, Samuel Beckett, Elie Wiesel, John Gardner, Charles Johnson, and even General de Gaulle.

A brief excerpt or two…

J F-A: Let’s talk a little about the industry. You’ve been in it for several decades, over the course of which it’s changed a lot, or at least that’s what people seem to say. What’s your take on that?

GB: It has changed. Mainly it’s the shift from individual ownership to corporate ownership. The individuals who owned the firms were, for the most part, the sons of millionaires. They didn’t need to take money out of the firm. They lived well before, they lived well during, and they had something very valuable afterward. Knopf became very valuable. Farrar, Straus became very valuable. So the heirs, I suppose, got a good amount of money. But the purpose [of founding those firms] wasn’t really to make money. The purpose was the excitement of publishing. It’s totally different now. Not so much at Grove/Atlantic or Norton—those are two firms for which what I’m saying doesn’t apply—except that they are competing against these giants. So if Grove/Atlantic has a book that becomes a major best-seller, it can’t hold on to the author, even if the author has made lots of protestations about how he will never leave the firm because he’s in love with all the people who work there. Either he, or his agent, or both, will decide that rather than taking a million from little Grove/Atlantic, they’re better off taking six million from somebody bigger. So they are affected by it too. The corporate thing has sort of poisoned the whole industry.

J F-A: What has that meant for writers?

GB: It’s mainly meant that they’ve become products. And that their main relationship is more with their literary agent. In a way it has worked well for the agents. Their main relationship is much more seldom with the editor because the editor’s position is very precarious. You’ve already changed jobs like four times. That was most unusual when I started in publishing. If you were an editor at Knopf, you stayed an editor at Knopf. There are still editors at Knopf who have been there forever: Judith Jones; Ash Green, who just retired; Bill Koshland, who was not an editor but more the business person. When Bill was chairman emeritus, well after Alfred had died and Bob Gottlieb had taken over, he would still take all the royalty statements home and look at them to be sure they were right. Now there’s no one on the editorial side of a publishing house who even sees the royalty statements. They have no idea what’s on them. They have no idea whether the reserve for returns is outrageous or justified. The person who decides on the reserve doesn’t know either. The whole climate has changed.

Ferrari-Adler has also interviewed literary agents Molly Friedrich, Nat Sobel and Lynn Nesbit, editors Janet Silver, Pat Strachan and Chuck Adams, plus a host of young editors and agents. Each Q&A is a gem, and their cumulative effect is to transport us to a culture that is every bit as worth preserving and revering as the our rapidly dwindling glaciers and forests.

Richard Curtis