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Few events in the life of a book are as thoroughly invested with magic and mystery as its publication date. Although the season, month, and day of publication are, as often as not, selected merely to satisfy the expediencies of a publisher's schedule, many authors and even some publishers assign kabbalistic value to pub dates, and a great deal of myth and nonsense has come to surround the process. One hears such platitudes as, "January is a lousy month to bring out a book," or, "Nobody buys books in August," or "Can you believe they released my book on Friday the thirteenth?"
As tens of thousands of books are published annually, you may safely assume that a day does not go by without one being officially launched somewhere. I know of no records correlating the success or failure of books with their pub dates, but I daresay that if someone were crazy enough to trace the fates of bestsellers back to the dates on which they were published, it would be demonstrated that successful books debut on just about every date on the calendar - including Friday the thirteenth. It would also be discovered, I'm sure, that just as many books flop as triumph whose pub dates are agonized over and deliberately selected for maximum impact.
A few words about the differences between hardcover and paperback distribution might be pertinent here. Hardcover books are for the most part shipped directly from publisher to bookstore (though the advent of powerful hardcover wholesalers and jobbers is changing this, it should be noted). Hardcovers can be, and are, shipped on any date, but traditionally they are categorized by season: spring and fall. Sometimes Christmas is designated a third "season." Hardcover publishers hold spring and fall sales conferences to introduce books scheduled for the following season, and they issue spring and fall catalogues. A hardcover published in July will probably be considered a spring book; one published in February, a fall book.
The rise of the paperback industry created a very different distribution rhythm. Until relatively recently, when the great bookstore chains made direct distribution of paperbacks a significant factor in the publishing industry, paperback books were carried only by the same distributors who stock magazines in newsstands and drugstores, and this form of distribution is still the dominant mode in the paperback industry. But because distribution of magazines follows a monthly cycle, the scheduling of paperback books became a monthly affair. Catalogues issued by mass market publishers are for the most part monthly, and, unlike their hardcover counterparts, paperback editors refer to pub dates by month, not by season. And while it is impractical to conduct a sales conference every month, paperback publishers do consult with sales staff and distributors on a monthly basis far more extensively than hardcover publishers do. The lingo of paperback distribution is closer to magazines, too: hardcover books are published, but paperbacks are released (or issued).
In an earlier era when novels and general nonfiction were affordable only by a wealthier segment of society, the summer was undoubtedly a dead time for booksellers as the carriage trade fled the cities for favorite rural watering spots. A book published in July or August could very well die, and it's easy to see where the notion arose that August publication is the kiss of death. In September the affluent returned to the city, presumably hungry for good books to read and mindful of the impending Christmas holiday, when books make excellent gifts. That is why fall has always been considered the best time to launch a book, and for the most part that remains true, because a book that goes on the bestseller list in the fall has a good chance of carrying into the Christmas buying season. And if January is considered a lousy time to publish, it's because bookstore owners are preoccupied with post-holiday returns, budget deficits, and winter vacations to recover from the intense business of the previous few months.
Mass market publishing and marketing have smoothed out many of the hills and valleys of bookselling, making the business a year-round enterprise. The capital required to feed a mass market maw allows for no downtime. Every month must carry its share of the annual business, and every book, whatever its publication date, must be considered a source of maximum profit potential. "People used to say things like 'July is a good month for publishing but August is bad'," Robert A. Gottlieb, former president of Alfred A. Knopf said in a New York Times article. "All those maxims are true until books come along that disprove them, then the opposite is true." Gottlieb added that Knopf published most of its books "at the first rational moment," and I would say that many of publishers do the same.
Some books definitely do have seasonal pertinence. Sports novels or nonfiction books come to mind, for they are often dependent on the start of playing seasons or tournaments. It makes common sense to bring a baseball book out in March and a football book in August. And sometimes there are excellent strategic reasons for publishing a book in a specific month.
The scheduling of books for publication on a specific calendar date is usually aimed more at gratifying whim or superstition - publisher's or author's - than at achieving any significant commercial advantage. It is flattering for an author to have his book published on his birthday, but from that day forward the book is on its own. It seems logical to bring out a biography of Lincoln on Lincoln's Birthday, or an account of the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, or a study of the John F. Kennedy assassination on November 22, for these dates possess a certain degree of promotional cachet. But that's as far as it goes.
Quite clearly, a book's publication date is nowhere nearly as important as some other factors on which publishers spend a great deal of time and energy during scheduling meetings. Possibly the key one is what the competition is doing. If, for instance, Simon & Schuster knows that Crown is going to be publishing a new novel in September by its blockbuster author, S&S might well think twice about scheduling its own fall leader around the same time. Information about the pub dates of major books is usually available from a variety of sources such as publishers' catalogues, Publishers Weekly, and the free exchange of information among friendly competitors (to say nothing of gossipy agents). And occasionally, when the exchange of information is not so free, friendly competitors have been known to resort to subterfuge.
If, however, two lead books scheduled for the same time are not really competitive - a literary novel, say, versus an international thriller - the publishers might not be afraid to go head to head, because two different audiences can support both books and simultaneously boost them onto the bestseller list.
Publishers may not be so gentlemanly if they get caught up in a race to be first out with a book on a hot subject such as an unfolding high-profile criminal trial. Dramatic news events will occasion rivalries that are anything but friendly, for now the competing publishers are committing a great deal of capital to getting their books into the stores first. In some cases both books do well, but on many occasions the second book across the line suffers grievous losses.
You can see, then, that unlucky pub dates can occur on any given page of the calendar, and the circumstances attending the birth of your book are far more auspicious or inauspicious than the date. Any day is Friday the thirteenth for the author whose publisher goes bankrupt on his pub date, or the one who finds himself on pub date without a sponsoring editor because the one who originally acquired his book left six months ago to take another job, or the one whose pub date was unheralded by a single ad because the whole advertising budget for that month was allocated to a blockbuster on the same list.
But such misfortunes are not reserved to the lowly. Not long ago a superstar author reportedly blew a gasket because her publisher hadn't had the prescience to realize that another publisher had scheduled a book by an equally illustrious name for the same month as hers, and she dressed her publisher down in terms usually reserved for marine recruits.
One of the least pleasant duties that agents are obliged to perform is explaining to their clients why their books have flopped. And there is no dearth of reasons: the editor was fired, the company was taken over by a conglomerate, the salesmen didn't understand the book, someone stuck a lousy title on it, they didn't advertise it, they didn't advertise it enough, they underprinted it, they brought it out too soon, they brought it out too late, there was an Act of God, there was an Act of Satan - an agent's files are a veritable Grand Guignol of publishing horror stories.
The one thing it does not always occur to agents to tell their clients, however, is that their books have not really flopped, at least not from the publisher's viewpoint. Maybe your book wasn't a bestseller, but that's not to say your publisher didn't make money on it. Most authors and a great many agents tend to equate the earning-out of an author's advance with the recoupment of a publisher's investment. It's an understandable misconception, for to authors, royalties are profits. If their books start earning profits, they assume the publisher has started making profits too; and conversely, they figure, if the advance doesn't earn out, the publisher must have lost money on the book.
Seldom is this equation true. Although royalties are a gauge of success or failure for an author, publishers use an entirely different system to determine how well or badly a book has done for them. In that system, authors' royalties are only one element of the profit picture, and it is entirely possible for a publisher to make a big profit on a book whose advance has not earned out, or to lose money on a book whose advance has earned out.
Because I have never worked for a traditional publishing company, it took me a long time to grasp this distinction. But because it's a terribly important one, explaining as it does why publishers often seem to be doing everything they can to lose money on their books, I've tried to educate myself in basic publishing economics and would like to share my findings with you.
In most cases today, publishers prepare profit-and-loss projections for books that they are considering acquiring. The calculations differ widely from company to company, from type of book to type of book, and even from book to book. The database for an illustrated book is quite different from that of a hardcover novel, which in turn differs from a paperback novel; and even within the genus paperback novel are such species as lead novel, category novel, movie tie-in, etc.
Many staff members may be involved in producing these estimates: editors, production people, sales managers, sub-rights directors, advertising and promotion personnel, the company's treasurer, the art director, and so on. Each tries to factor into the profit-and-loss worksheet the best-case and worst-case numbers that will help their firm formulate as accurate a picture of a book's potential as is possible in our unpredictable business. The worksheets are really a tool, and their data may be manipulated and negotiated so that costs trimmed from one area may be applied to another in the hopes that enthusiasm for the book will not be dampened by discouraging figures from one or two precincts. If, however, all or most of the committee members come in with poor profit projections, it's unlikely that hearts will prevail over heads when the votes are cast at the editorial meeting.
I may be romanticizing the past, but these complex formulations don't seem to be much of an improvement over the intuitive judgments reached by the founders of such illustrious houses as Knopf, Harper, Scribner, Random House, and Simon & Schuster. Be that as it may, publishing decisions today are reached by computers, consensus, and committee, and we may consider ourselves lucky if someone remembers the love factor when the bottom line is being examined. Love aside, what are the elements of a profit-and-loss projection? What kind of "P & L" figures are resting at your editor's elbow when he phones you or your agent to commence negotiations on your book?
The key figure on the positive side of the ledger is revenue to be realized from sales of the book. You get this by multiplying the number of copies sold by the wholesale price of the book, that is, the actual price received by your publisher after he discounts it to the book trade. If the list price of the book is $20, and the average discount offered by your publisher to the stores is 40 percent, the actual price received by your publisher will be $12 per copy.
"Copies sold," remember, means net sales after returns, for in the publishing business books are sold on a returnable basis. So, if a publisher prints and distributes 25,000 copies of a book but 30 percent of them are returned, the actual number of copies sold (what publishers call the "sell-through") will be 17,500. Multiply that 17,500 by the $12 per copy that your publisher is getting and you get the publisher's gross sale. In this example, that comes to $210,000.
To this figure is added the publisher's anticipated share of subsidiary revenue: book club, paperback reprint, first or second serial, foreign rights, etc. Depending on how liberal or conservative the firm's fiscal policy is, these numbers range from wishful thinking on the one hand to zero if the publisher doesn't want to count on income that is not absolutely guaranteed at the time the book is acquired. More and more publishers tend to take a highly conservative position in prognosticating sub-rights income. The most important reason is that agents have grown tougher over the last few decades about permitting publishers to participate in that income. So, to play it safe, some publishers leave subsidiary revenue off the ledger sheets when preparing their projections.
Another source of revenue for publishers is the sale of remainders. If the undistributed or returned copies of a book, such as the 7,500 copies in the above example, are sold to remainder jobbers they will bring in a few thousand dollars for the publishers, and that goes into the plus side of the P & L.
Now for the minus side. From the income generated by book sales, remainders and sub-rights income, your publisher subtracts its costs. These fall into several categories that are reckoned by formulas drawn from company and industry experience and the counsel of the firm's financial officers and accountants. One category is plant costs: typesetting, color separations for the cover or for color illustrations, preparation of halftones for black-and-white illustrations, and all other procedures up to the actual printing of the book.
The second category is manufacturing costs, lumped together as "PPB": printing, paper, and binding.
A third is overhead. Included here are rent or mortgage payments on the publisher's offices, electricity, salaries, telephone, office supplies, the cost of money, warehousing, sales commissions, insurance, and the many other expenses required to run a business. Because each publisher includes or excludes different items when calculating overhead, the fluctuations in overhead allocations differ widely from one publisher to the next. A safe guess is that most houses allocate between 30 and 40 percent of gross sales.
The next category is author's royalty. This figure is fixed by contract. Royalties represent a big chunk of a publisher's costs. An 8 percent royalty on a $6.95 paperback comes to about 56 cents. But remember that the publisher sells that book to the trade at a discount. If the discount is 50 percent, or $3.50 a copy, the royalty will absorb about 16 percent of that revenue.
Then there are some miscellaneous costs such as outside design, cover art, copyediting, indexing, illustrations, and the cost of free and review copies.
And, finally, there is the cost of advertising and promotion.
As I mentioned, accounting practices vary widely when it comes to allocating costs to specific books on a list. Should the publisher allocate the same share of his total costs to every book regardless of its importance, profitability, and actual share of the company's investment? Or should big books carry a proportionately larger share of the cost load than routine ones? Because publishers don't agree on the fairest way to deal with the question, their allocation formulas vary widely, and a good example of this is advertising and promotion. Some publishers simply average out the cost of advertising and promotion for all books on their list and add some percentage points to the overhead charge on each book. For other publishers, it makes no sense to allocate to a routine book a percentage of the enormous cost of pushing a bestseller. These publishers therefore "break out" the advertising and promotional cost of each book and show it on their profit-and-loss worksheets as a separate item from overhead.
Okay, we're ready to do some calculations. Take the gross sales of your book, add remainder income and anticipated subsidiary rights revenue, and you have an income projection. From this you deduct your plant and manufacturing costs, overhead, royalties, advertising and promotion, and miscellaneous costs. What you end up with is projected profit or loss.
The final figures are educated approximations, of course, and don't take into account many factors on both the income and outgo sides of the ledgers, such as corporate taxes, inflation, damaged copies, losses due to strikes, fire, and flood, interest earned on royalties banked between semiannual royalty periods and on reserves against returns, and much, much more. Still, on the average, paperback publishers earn something like 15 to 20 percent pretax profit on routine books. And, because unit costs go down and sales volume goes up on bestsellers, the profit on major books is even higher.
What do the numbers tell us? For some of us, they only bear out our worst paranoid fantasies that publishers are battening on the lifeblood of authors. These fantasies are fueled by the fact that publishers do not share their profit-and-loss projections with authors. Some conceal vital sales information when reporting royalties. And, because many publishers are owned by larger corporate entities such as entertainment complexes, they are not required to disclose financial information to stockholders or the public. One of my western-writer clients says writers are like mushrooms: "They're fed a lot of horseshit and kept in the dark."
Others among us may realize that publishing is a tough, unpredictable, and treacherous business, and perhaps the people who play for such high stakes deserve a handsome profit for the risks they take and the capital they invest (though it must be said in all fairness that 15 or 20 percent is not exactly a windfall profit). I don't know the answer. But I can safely say that the profit-and-loss worksheets of most authors I know are a lot more depressing than anything I've seen from publishers.
What Happens at Your Publisher's Sales Conference and Why it Matters Desperately to You
Twice every year, around mid-May and mid-December, a curious lull befalls the frenzied lives of literary agents, like those abrupt silences that occasionally muffle a party when everybody, inexplicably, stops talking at exactly the same time. I've experienced enough of these semiannual brownouts that I ought to expect them by now. Yet they always take me by surprise, and I can predictably be heard at these times barking to my staff, "Is there something wrong with our phones? Is this a mail holiday or what?" At length it occurs to me: it's sales conference season. I then take advantage of this hiatus to catch up on paperwork.
Sales conference is the time when a publisher's list of forthcoming books is introduced to the company's staff and in particular to the its commissioned sales representatives, who then go forth to the stores in their territories and line up orders. Since this is the point where the editorial process interfaces with marketing and distribution processes, it may literally be said that the fate of your book, and possibly your career, is cast at sales conference.
For the people who work at publishing houses, these convocations are red-letter days, major events in their corporate lives. For the past six months they have been sweating, suffering, beating their breasts and rending their garments over the books they have acquired. Now they are going to pitch them to the folks who actually get them into the stores. This is a time of intense anxiety, for the presentation of the list is by no means a matter of handing the sales reps a set of proofs and saying, "Read it, it's terrific." Indeed, it's uncommon for the reps to read any but the most important books on their publishers' lists. Nor is it necessary.
If they don't need the book itself, however, they do need information about it, and in the weeks leading up to the conference editors scurry frantically about the halls of their companies, rounding up cover proofs, advertising copy, promotional notes, author-tour itineraries, and anything else that will make their books look and sound irresistibly tempting to sales people, store buyers and distributors, and ultimately to consumers.
The conferences are held in different locations around the country. Many companies hold their winter conferences in Florida, Puerto Rico, and other tropical climes, giving participants a chance to relax in the sun after work sessions and making the event in part a paid vacation. Other publishers hold conferences closer to home, in resort hotels within easy driving radius of New York City. Some publishers conduct them in the city itself. The more distant the conference, the fewer employees may be permitted to attend due to the costs of airfare and accommodations, and therefore the privilege of attendance is one of the ways an editor's status at a publishing company is determined. Conferences held in New York City enable all staff members to participate. From the viewpoint of sales reps these may be great fun, entitling them to a week in the Big Apple with a publisher picking up the tab. But for the publishers themselves, New York City-held conferences are harder work, as there is little letup from the grueling labors of conferring and ingratiating themselves with the sales representatives.
Each publisher has its own style, format and strategy for sales conferences, but typically the days are divided into morning and afternoon sessions. At these, the editors sponsoring the books, or perhaps the heads of editorial divisions, present each title with a brief description of the contents and salient sales features. What successes have the author's previous books enjoyed? Is the book tied into some trend or fad, some event such as an election, opening of the baseball season, a disaster, a war, a trial, a scandal? Is there a movie or television adaptation in the works? Are author appearances planned? Is the author engaging, promotable, famous?
The editor's spiel is fortified by a variety of supplementary material: cover proofs, bound proofs of the book itself or excerpts or condensed portions, inside illustrations, an agenda of the author's tour, posters or mock-ups of advertising copy, plugs by famous authors or other celebrities, trailers from movie or television tie-ins, slide shows, video and audio and Web presentations, and all manner of gimmicks such as buttons, pens and bookmarks. Sometimes the publisher will stage a real dog-and-pony show, with professional entertainment, elaborate skits written and performed by the publishing staff, and even cameo appearances by star authors.
If the publisher's list is a big and multifarious one, the work sessions may be broken down into specialized seminars in which the sales reps, distributors, or chain store buyers may educate themselves as to the nature of such categories as science fiction, travel, cook books, or romances, or focus on strategies for one or two blockbuster lead titles.
All of this activity is designed to impress and enlighten the sales reps, help them to understand the publisher's aims and problems, give them an opportunity to offer feedback garnered from experiences in their territories, and inspire them to get behind the publisher's list with every fiber of their being.
What makes these sessions so critical to the success or failure of your book is that they bear directly on the number of copies that will be printed and distributed and on the energy that will be expended on the marketing. Thus, sales conference is the week of reckoning for the list, during which time it is inscribed which books shall fly and which shall bomb, which shall be raised up to the bestseller list and which cast down to the remainder bins, which shall be stacked near the cash registers in pyramids of pharaohnic dimension, and which secreted spine-out in quantities of two or three in the wrong department of a bookstore.
Broadly speaking, there are two ways in which printings are determined by the activities at a sales conference. At the one extreme are those books for which printings and sales goals are somewhat nebulous in the publisher's mind. These books are presented as vigorously as possible in the hopes the sales reps will get turned on and bring in a surprisingly large number of orders. At the other end of the spectrum are those titles for which the publisher has set specific sales goals and the sales reps are expected to fill their quotas.
Most of the books on any given list fall somewhere between these two approaches, and not all the books get fair shrift. This is particularly true of first novels, midlist books, experimental works, and books that are part of a series. There is only so much you can say about a first novel, or about the latest Regency romance, or a book about costumes of Colonial Virginia, and there's no sense in trying to tell these highly sophisticated sales people that such books are going to leap off the shelves by the score. On the other hand, as there is a steady market for such books, it can be expected that a minimum number of copies will sell without undue effort on the publisher's part. Still, it's easy to see how the bestseller mentality can affect your book in a sales conference situation as it does in the editorial boardroom, the review media, and in the bookstores.
Armed with all this information, with press kits, cover proofs, promotional gimmicks, and inspiring editorial pep talks, the sales reps go forth to the stores and sell, sell, sell. Although the publisher may have outlined a sales strategy for the list, the handling of sales is largely left to the discretion of the reps. Conditions in each territory vary widely: Consumers may buy westerns by the truckload in the southwestern region, but the same books will lie in great untouched stacks like dead fish in the bookstores of the Northeast. They may adore Patterson in Cleveland and ignore him in Topeka. A book on the hottest new rock group may march out of California stores in regiment strength, but in Bible Belt bookstores will molder in unopened cartons.
The sales reps servicing these territories understand the tastes of the readers there, and know how to "play" the books in their sales kits like so many cards in a rummy game. Like authors, agents, and publishers, the salesman or woman makes the most profit on bestsellers, and so these titles may be expected to muscle out the rest of the list. The salesperson may make all sorts of bargains to induce store buyers to take that quota of the big book: special discounts, relaxation of strict return policies, a little coaxing here, a little coercing there, and some trading off of little books for big ones elsewhere. Among the little ones may be your book. Or maybe it's the other way around, and you're the lucky author whose big book will push the little ones off the boards. This is, you must realize, a jungle, however civilized the product being sold. Someone once said that the wise man never looks too closely at what goes into his laws or his sausages; perhaps bestselling books should be added to that list.
Although business is not conducted around the clock at sales conference, it is never far away at breakfast, lunch, or dinner, at cocktail time, out on the beach or the golf links, or in the evening at the theater or floor show. Sales conference is a time for everybody to get to know everybody else a little better, creating a sense of teamwork and harmony. Many editors tell me they come away from these occasions with an enhanced sense of "family" about the people they work and deal with. You may know next to nothing about someone in an office down the hall from you, but in the relaxed informality of a resort setting, that person may tell you something about himself or reveal aspects of his character that have been held in tight check by the requirements of office decorum and the hurly-burly of the business day.
Sales conference is the place where an editor can bestow a personal touch on a sales campaign, and that can make the difference to a book's success. "I know books like this don't ordinarily work in your region," an editor might say to a sales rep he or she has buttonholed at the bar, "but this particular novel has some aspects that will appeal to the stores you service." It works the other way around, too. Sales reps, knowing their particular market a lot better than the publishers do, will pull an editor or sales manager aside and say, "My customers can't keep science fiction in their stores; are you going to increase the number you publish?" Or, "Everybody in my territory wants to know when the next book in the Hieronymus Bosch detective series is coming out." Or, "St. Martins and Berkley are doing really well with a certain kind of romance, so how about our starting a similar line?" In short, sales conference is the time and place for important dialogues among staff members of publishing houses, among sales people, and between publishers and sales reps, distributors, or bookstore and chain store personnel.
Is there any place for authors at sales conference? Except for the very biggest names, authors are seldom invited to the ones held outside New York City, and because of the expense of bringing authors to New York, any that are invited to the conferences held in the city are usually people who live in or near the city to begin with. Invitations are not automatic, however, as few authors are dynamic, attractive, and promotable enough to make a strong positive impression on the sales reps. There is still much you can do, though, to cooperate with your editor in furnishing him or her with information and sales features about your book, anything and everything that will enable your editor to highlight your book when the presentation is made.
Maybe, then, you too should become aware of the onset of sales conference season, and instead of writing it off as a period of downtime in your calendar, get yourself involved in the preparations. It need not cost you a lot of money. One of my clients, the author of a tragic romance novel, bought a small carton of tissue packets for her editor and urged her to hand them to the sales reps with the other material in the promo kit for her book. "Tell them to have a good cry," the author said. It proved quite effective.
Perhaps you can think of something equally creative. After all, why on earth would you want to go to a tropical resort, all expenses paid by your publisher, anyway?
The paternalistic treatment of authors by editors in earlier times, however, produced its own set of inequities, for publishers took advantage of many authors who were too ignorant, shy, or well-bred to demand good terms of their editors. Knowing that most authors write for love, publishers tended to assume that they didn't care about writing for money.
Resentment toward publishers over their exploitation of authors created the conditions for the rise to power of literary agents, and though new authors today are still at a disadvantage, the balance eventually shifts when they engage agents and become more successful. Good agents often insist on a large measure of control over the author-editor relationship, holding authors at arm's length from their editors to protect them from being taken advantage of. And what has happened in the four or five decades since this transformation occurred is that the agents have begun to take over the role formerly played by editors.
Today's agents nurture authors, work closely with them in the development of their work, perform a great many editorial tasks, and lend strong emotional and psychological support. And, perhaps most important of all, in a turbulent world of publishing mergers and takeovers and editorial musical chairs, agents have become the islands of stability and reliability that were once the province of editors. So, if the importance of editors in this respect has diminished, the loss has not necessarily affected authors for the worse.
Or, take the tasks of copyediting manuscripts and proofreading galleys. Although these still fall upon the employees of publishing companies, the high costs of running businesses have caused a shift from in-house line editing to freelance work done at home. Many copyeditors are former employees of publishers who have managed to adapt their responsibilities to their domestic schedules. But the pressures of producing large numbers of books annually have forced publishers to overload editors with work or to seek less experienced people to do these highly demanding jobs. Some publishers just can't afford the time or expense to train copyeditors, supervise them closely, review their work, and instill in them a grasp of house style, a knowledge of company tradition, and a sense of pride. English is not even the first language for many copyeditors. And those who are fluent in English may not have the patience, precision, and skill to be good editors.
Whether we like it or not, the responsibility for well-edited books is shifting to authors. Actually, they have always borne much of that burden. In hardcover publishing particularly, most authors are given the opportunity (if not the contractual right) to review copyedited manuscripts and to proofread galleys, and if an author doesn't care enough to double-check every fact, every dubious grammatical construction and spelling, indeed every word of his manuscript and galleys, he has no one to blame but himself for a flawed product.
It is harder for authors to control errors in paperback originals and reprints, however, because tight publication schedules often make it prohibitive for publishers to furnish galleys for review by authors. Also, authors rarely get to see galleys of paperback reprints of their hardcover books. But authors and their agents can and often do demand the right to examine galleys in exchange for a promise to turn them around promptly. Thus, even paperback authors have a chance to bring out unblemished books.
The development of computerized editing and word processing hardware and software promises to eliminate many problems for authors and editors. Although numerous technical, financial, labor, and other obstacles have impeded the automation of some important editorial functions, I'm reasonably certain that these will be overcome in the foreseeable future, making clean copy in both manuscript and galley an everyday occurrence. The same is true for style, design, composition, and other aspects of the publishing process that are now in the hands of a diminishing number of expert craftspeople. In short, emerging technology will replace a good deal of the mental and manual labor involved in producing books.
What do all these changes leave for editors to do? The answer is, just about everything. Unlike those of the older generation, today's editors must master an entire gamut of disciplines including production, marketing, negotiation, promotion, advertising, publicity, accounting, salesmanship, digital technology, psychology, politics, diplomacy, and - well, editing. But into that last designation goes a bewildering variety of activities, many only remotely connected with the stereotyped one of a tweedy pipe smoker sitting in a monastic office hunting for typos.
The dizzying pace and complexity of modern publishing makes it neither possible nor desirable for editors to sit all day reading or conversing with authors. They must be worldly and sophisticated, capable of shepherding the projects they sponsor through a gauntlet of technical, financial, political, and other hazards. Though editors are often criticized for being corporate animals, in this respect at least we should thank our stars that they are. For they and they alone understand how to work their systems, to maneuver, coax, and sometimes ram their beloved books - our beloved books! - through the corporate obstacle course. Today's editors are professional company men and women, and if they don't have a problem with that characterization, I don't see why we should.
There are many editorial qualities that are irreplaceable. Among them are taste, discrimination, personal emotional response, a sense of order and organization, determination, devotion, pride, and tender loving care. In these respects, no one has discovered anyone or anything that can remotely take the place of an editor. Agents can't do it because they're outsiders. Computers can't do it because they're heartless.
But none of those virtues means anything if editors are lacking in courage. The biggest threat to the health of our industry is not mergers and acquisitions. It is failure of nerve on the part of its editors. The evolution of publishing from a profession run by individuals to a business managed by committees has created a population of editors preoccupied with holding their jobs. The pressures they live under are constantly forcing them to lower the common denominator when selecting the projects they wish to sponsor. This means that it is easier to say no than yes.
The way that this attitude manifests itself for me is editors' resistance to acquiring books that are even slightly flawed. It was not long ago that the prevailing attitude among editors was, "This book has some problems, but the author is so talented that I'd like to buy it and work with him." Today such words are rarely heard. A book with problems is a book rejected, and more and more one hears editors say, "Let the author revise it, then we'll decide if we want to buy it." Many of them have confided in me that they would love to buy the book, but the prospect of bucking the system is simply too daunting.
When I asked an agent colleague of mine whether she thought editors were necessary, she quipped, "Of course they are. Who else can take agents to lunch?" If editors are to remain more than entertaining luncheon hosts, if they are to be not merely necessary but indispensable, they will have to continue resisting the pressures toward homogeneity and mediocrity that are arrayed against them by the monolith of Big Publishing.
