Monday, June 4, I will be attending the BEA Bloggers Conference. The regular Book Expo America (BEA) is from Tuesday, June 5-7, but first I’m looking forward to hearing from and meeting many other book bloggers. I’ve been attending this convention virtually every year since 1978, and it’s always a thrill. This year is going to be an exciting one, and it all starts in a few hours.
As an in-house editor at more than a half-dozen publishing companies over twenty-five years, one of my biggest challenges was always to try and keep somewhat current with the enormous volume of printed submissions (full manuscripts and proposals) that was continually flooding in across my desk. And once the Internet fully entered the workflow, the volume–owing to the greater ease with which agents and authors could submit material–took an exponential leap. The required reading, to borrow a phrase from school days, was enormous and punishing, and sometimes it really did feel like homework. My colleagues and I fought a mostly losing battle to read it all in timely fashion, while maintaining an appreciation of the vision and imagination with which the work had been created, and then deciding if it was something we could acquire, edit and publish with a fair chance of critical and commercial success.
I always kept a log of incoming submissions, and to impose organization on the printed material I used shelving units with cubby holes alphabetized by author or agent last name, at least in theory helping me keep a visual and mental track of it all. But even with good intentions, and frequent resolutions to do better, we inevitably fell behind. This meant that first weeks, then months, and sometimes many months, might go by before we’d let an author or agent know if we wanted to pursue a project, or that we were declining it. I knew it was hard for agents and authors to accept the situation, but the truth then–and still–is that the dynamic generally favored buyers not sellers. And given the many in-house duties that editors must shoulder, there just was no way to be more on top of that part of our job.
I have not been an in-house editor for the past three and a half years, and while I am still working as an editor, now independently (and sometimes as an author reprsentative or agent)*, among the very best things about my self-employed life has been gaining some control and a level of choice over my reading life. I began reflecting on this yesterday after reading two recent opinion articles by a pair of young publishing professionals who happen to be in Britain–one an agent, the other an editor–each of which shines an up-to- the-moment light on this perennial issue in publishing. In the first article, by the agent, pseudonymously calling herself Agent Orange, “Do editors not say no because they can no longer say yes?” she laments the absurd difficulty of getting any answer at all from many editors, even a decline on a project. In anger, she writes,
In a direct response to the gauntlet thrown down by Agent Orange, the editor, Francesca Main,** avers that “Working 9 to 9 Editors are More Accessible than Ever”. She writes,
For the record, both these commentaries were published in the online publication edited by Porter Anderson, *** Futurebook, described as “a digital blog from Europe in association with Bookseller,” the publishing magazine. Both make fair points, and if you care about these challenges each piece is definitely worth taking a few minutes to read. Taken together, they pretty well sum up the dilemmas and the challenges of working as an agent or an editor in our business today. The challenges of the agent I have come to learn recently, as I represent the handful of authors with whom I’m working. Were I still working as an editor in-house, or if I end up working in-house again at some point, I can only imagine, and sympathize, with the pressures that acquiring editors operate under nowadays, even compared to when I was last on staff.
I know there are authors among the readers of this blog, and I want to say I recognize how disappointing it is when you sense that your work is not read with the attention it is due, nor with the level of intention and focus that led to its creation. One of the toughest things about publishing is that it is a ‘cultural business’–those conjoined words create a veritable oxymoron. But, for better and worse, that is the hand we’re dealt–editors do the best they can under difficult circumstances, as do agents. As the two articles by the young British professionals attest, I hope we can all cut each other a bit of slack, and somehow make our work and creative lives a bit more rewarding and fun.
*Ethical full disclosure: Generally speaking, authors who pay me to edit their work are not authors I represent as agent, except in unusual cases, and even then only first explaining to the author this isn’t normally done to avoid conflicts of interest. These circumstances are rare.
**Though Ms. Main’s article does not reveal the house where she works, it is discoverable online that she appears to be an editor at Picador. Agent Orange, so as far as I know, has remained anonymous since posting her piece. In fact, Futurebook‘s editor Porter Anderson, makes an appeal to Ms. Orange in a comment below her published post, asking that she consider revealing her name, at least to him, so that he might continue publishing her commentaries.
*** In a comment published below Philip Jones of Bookseller clarifies the relationship of the magazine to Futurebook, and Porter Anderson’s role.
While devoting much time and attention to this blog of late, I am also working as a manuscript editor so it was gratifying to find yesterday that on my LinkedIn profile one of my editorial clients left this blushingly good recommendation of the editorial services I provided him:
My now sadly gone parents–Earl Turner beaming and his pretty wife Sylvia Shiff Turner, with a gardenia in her hair. They were on a trip in June 1948 from Cleveland, to Niagara Falls and Hamilton, Ontario, in Canada, and to Detroit. The Turners liked Canada even then. Happy Mothers Day!
As some of my book biz friends know, in the 90s I had a good long tenure as an editorial executive with Kodansha America, the NY office of the largest Japanese publisher. Although we published some Asian-oriented titles, it was a mostly U.S. list with such books as the national bestseller al bestseller Having Our Say, by the centenarian Delaney sisters, and A Diary of the Century:Tales From American’s Great Diarist by Edward Robb Ellis, which sold well and got lots of coverage, including a rare hat trick when the author appeared on all three network morning shows the week of publication. I just blogged about Eddie a few weeks ago, on the anniversary of what would have been his 101st birthday.
During my five years with Kodansha, I also started a trade paperback series that in some ways anticipated the fine list published nowadays by the New York Review of Books Classics imprint. Kodansha Globe combined titles in cross-cultural studies, anthropology, natural history, adventure, narrative travel and belle lettres. I developed the program with my astute and affable Japanese boss Minato Asakawa, with valuable contributions from talented editorial colleagues Paul DeAngelis–who introduced me to the work of Owen Lattimore, whose 1950 anti-McCarthyite broadside Ordeal by Slander I would republish in 2003–and Deborah Baker, about whom I’ll say more below. By the time I left Kodansha in 1997 we had published more than ninety Globe titles, including the first paperback edition of Barack Obama’s debut book Dreams From My Father
The Globe list included revivals of notable books that had fallen out of print: Man Meets Dog, on the origins of the human-canine bond, by Konrad Lorenz, Alone, a harrowing account of survival near the South Pole, by Admiral Richard Byrd, Blackberry Winter, the youthful memoir of Margaret Mead, and All Aboard with E.M. Frimbo, a classic of train culture by New Yorker stalwarts Rogers E.M. Whitaker and Tony Hiss; originals like Sarajevo, Exodus of a City, a biography of the besieged city by Bosnian playwright Dzevad Karahasan, which the Voice Literary Supplement made a year-end best book during the Balkan Wars; and reprints of current hardcovers from major houses like Peter Canby’s The Heart of the Sky, on the resilience of Mayan culture in the Americas and Alex Shoumatoff’s The Mountain of Names, chronicling the history of human kinship and genealogy, which before dying last year Christopher Hitchens made the springboard for one his last columns. We also developed a strong list in books on Central Asia, including four books by the master chronicler of the region, Peter Hopkirk, whose The Great Game: The Struggle for Empire in Central Asia was the top-selling Globe title.
// more w/illustrations . . .
Last month, on January 14, I published a blog essay Three Years Ago Today, on my layoff from a publishing house job in 2009. It elicited widespread reaction, measured in sheer numbers of responses on Facebook and Twitter; on this blog, altogether totaling more than 200; in the engaged remarks from many friends and colleagues; and in the new contacts and readers it’s attracted to this website. The essay’s also attracted interest from a website that my friend and author Michael Goldfarb, former NPR correspondent, had referred me to, Over and 50 and Out of Work: Stories of the Great Recession. This a remarkable site and I’m very proud they’ve now published it on their site, among the company of extraordinary people featured on their web pages. You may see it here, and while you’re there, view some of the videos they’ve posted, with personal testimony from individuals like myself. Additionally, a magazine called NY______, or NY Underscore, is running a condensed version of the essay in their upcoming ‘Jobs’ issue. Clearly, the piece has struck a chord with many readers, and at least two web and magazine editors.
I should add that the essay also elicited one remark that wasn’t so kind, which I learned about from a friend. A person I shall not name, though I will say it was someone with a fulltime job, said to this friend, “He should stop talking about getting fired.” This was evidently meant as free advice, as if I should refrain from damaging my chances of regaining employment by being too open about my experience. I felt like a person with a serious illness might feel, who’s told not to speak of their malady in public, to spare those not afflicted the discomfort of learning about it. At first, I was stung by this, as if I’d been told to “Shut up,” and then I realized this person’s reading was so reductionist and witless that they didn’t even register the difference between getting “fired” and being laid off–of being one employee in a group of dozens in a corporation who’re all relieved of their jobs on the same day. After a few days, I laughed about it, and am now just bemused. It reminded me of Mitt Romney’s plea, made on January 11, just a few days before I published the essay, that income inequality and unfair tax burdens on the middle class may be discussed, but only “in quiet rooms.” Clearly, I haven’t entered any quiet rooms, I’m not “shutting up,” and the essay is proving to have an emerging afterlife; that is very gratifying indeed.