Editors On Editing

An indispensable guide for editors, would-be editors, and especially writers who want to understand the publishing process. In this classic handbook, top professionals write about the special demands and skills necessary for particular areas of expertise--mass market, romance, special markets, and more.

Essays from twenty-seven leading book editors: “Honest and unflinching accounts from publishing insiders . . . a valuable primer on the field.” —Publishers Weekly Editing is an invisible art in which the very best work goes undetected. Editors strive to create books that are enlightening, seamless, and pleasurable to read, all while giving credit to the author. This makes it all the more difficult to truly understand the range of roles they inhabit while shepherding a project from concept to publication. What Editors Do gathers essays from twenty-seven leading figures in book publishing about their work. Representing both large houses and small, and encompassing trade, textbook, academic, and children’s publishing, the contributors make the case for why editing remains a vital function to writers—and readers—everywhere. Ironically for an industry built on words, there has been a scarcity of written guidance on how to approach the work of editing. Serving as a compendium of professional advice and a portrait of what goes on behind the scenes, this book sheds light on how editors acquire books, what constitutes a strong author-editor relationship, and the editor’s vital role at each stage of the publishing process—a role that extends far beyond marking up the author’s text. This collection treats editing as both art and craft, and also as a career. It explores how editors balance passion against the economic realities of publishing—and shows why, in the face of a rapidly changing publishing landscape, editors are more important than ever. “Authoritative, entertaining, and informative.” —Copyediting

Writers write—but what do they do for money? In a widely read essay entitled "MFA vs NYC," bestselling novelist Chad Harbach (The Art of Fielding) argued that the American literary scene has split into two cultures: New York publishing versus university MFA programs. This book brings together established writers, MFA professors and students, and New York editors, publicists, and agents to talk about these overlapping worlds, and the ways writers make (or fail to make) a living within them. Should you seek an advanced degree, or will workshops smother your style? Do you need to move to New York, or will the high cost of living undo you? What's worse—having a day job or not having health insurance? How do agents decide what to represent? Will Big Publishing survive? How has the rise of MFA programs affected American fiction? The expert contributors, including George Saunders, Elif Batuman, and Fredric Jameson, consider all these questions and more, with humor and rigor. MFA vs NYC is a must-read for aspiring writers, and for anyone interested in the present and future of American letters.

The work of «editing» is by and large something that happens behind the scenes, noticed only when it is done badly, or not done at all. There is not much information about what editors do. The result is that editing is not often talked about in its own right - not even by the people who do it. This collection of interviews attempts to fill some of the gaps. The author, a former editor herself, interviews practitioners at the top of their game - from newspapers, magazines, broadcast news, book publishing, scholarly editing, academic publishing and digital curation. The interviewees think out loud about creativity and human judgment; what they have in common and what makes them different; how editing skills and culture can be shared; why editing continues to fascinate; and why any of this might matter.

The essential resource for aspiring and professional editors Whether you are a student of the craft or a working editor, you need The Complete Canadian Book Editor. From building and managing author relationships, through acquiring and developing manuscripts, to every level of text editing and proofing for print and ebooks, editors play integral roles in the operations of a book publishing house. In The Complete Canadian Book Editor, veteran editor and professor Leslie Vermeer sets out both the concepts and the processes that an effective editor must command. Dr. Vermeer guides aspiring editors in presenting themselves successfully to employers and clients, and working editors will recognize the voice of a mentor in her advice about career advancement. Editors at all levels—along with authors and self-publishers—will find in The Complete Canadian Book Editor all of the step-by-step editorial tools they need to take projects from promising beginnings to their full potential. With exercises throughout, The Complete Canadian Book Editor reinforces key concepts, and builds your skills as an expert editor. Topics include: Manuscript acquisition and book contracts. Editorial stages, from development to proofreading. Design and production, including digital workflow. What every editor needs to know about marketing. The state of book publishing in Canada today. The future of publishing, and why editors are more important than ever before.

Hundreds of books have been written on the art of writing. Here at last is a book by two professional editors to teach writers the techniques of the editing trade that turn promising manuscripts into published novels and short stories. In this completely revised and updated second edition, Renni Browne and Dave King teach you, the writer, how to apply the editing techniques they have developed to your own work. Chapters on dialogue, exposition, point of view, interior monologue, and other techniques take you through the same processes an expert editor would go through to perfect your manuscript. Each point is illustrated with examples, many drawn from the hundreds of books Browne and King have edited.

This anthology assembles the comments of prestigious editors to provide an introduction to the multifaceted responsibilities of the working editor. The book portrays the editor as an individual and a skilled professional and reveals the editors' various personalities and temperaments, their attitudes toward literature, their educational backgrounds and thei r involvement with or detachment from their authors. The editors also detail how manuscripts are obtained and selected, criteria used in evaluating a manuscript, and the revising and rewriting of the manuscript, and the intricacies of dealing with authors and agents. Well-known editors offer opinions on the philosophy of editing and discuss the specific skills involved in being a science fiction editor, a literary editor and a mass-market-paperback editor. Also displays the art of editorial letter-writing by some of its classic practioners such as Maxwell Perkins, John Farrar and Pascal Covici. ISBN 0-06-091120-4 (Pbk.) : $14.95.

Information: 1st Macmillan paperbacks ed. Includes bibliographies and index.