Editorial 193: March 2012
Once upon a time when I was at HarperCollins children’s books, one of my colleague’s authors won a prize. How lovely! Except that she (and the author) knew that his ms had needed such extensive editorial help that the she was in effect his co-author… But this unsung backroom role is not one, of course, that editors resent. It’s part of their job to make a ms the best that it can possibly be.
In an after-dinner speech at a recent event hosted by children’s booksellers The Book People, Anthony Horowitz asked whether writers still need publishers, adding that he had thought of calling his talk ‘Thank Christ We Don’t Need Bloody Publishers Any More’ – but had felt that sounded ‘too partisan’. Horowitz’s beef with his publisher (Walker Books) is that he initially felt nervous and infantilised. Twenty years later he thinks he makes Walker nervous.
I’m not sure why the dynamic of someone having to feel nervous and someone having to make the other feel nervous should be either inevitable or desirable in the relationship between author and editor and my experience of such encounters both as a writer and as a publisher has been very different. Horowitz did acknowledge that his editor, Jane Winterbotham, is ‘brilliant’ and when they disagree, ‘normally right’. He added, ‘without Walker, Alex Rider would never have seen the light of day and I still remember my first editor, Wendy Boase, with great fondness and gratitude’. Publishers, it seems, have their uses.
But, in these self-publishing days (Horowitz is tempted to go that route), what are these uses? Horowitz cites Jane Winterbotham as saying that they are ‘all the peripherals: the promotion, the marketing, the editing and the advance’. Absolutely, and the greatest of these is editing: writing is a craft and a craft that has to be worked at. And to Jane’s peripherals I would add the legal and contractual expertise publishers provide, not to speak of the relationships built up over years with the booksellers, librarians, teachers and critics.
No less important are the intangibles of literary culture – the implicit branding, for example, provided by being published on a particular list. The fact that a work has been chosen to rub shoulders on a respected list with works of the same genre or category means something in terms of its likely quality and appeal. Readers, even in these online days, look for and pick up on these clues when selecting the next book to read.
Of course the clock can’t be turned back. Ebooks are here to stay but they can be published without skipping the, to my mind, vital ‘peripherals’ as witness the emergence of epublishers such as Unbound for whom ‘publishing’ means just that – making well edited, well designed and original books.
Reading for pleasure?
Research at Dundee University funded by Renaissance Learning into children’s reading habits examined data on 213,527 pupils. The children used Renaissance Learning’s monitoring software to take an electronic test about each book they read and the happy conclusion of all this activity was that boys are now as likely as girls to read challenging books and read them for pleasure. What the Renaissance study did not comment on, however, is that many children ‘chose’ books that they have to read because they are on the curriculum. Of Mice and Men, for example, is cited as the most-read book for Year 9-11s. Was this really ‘reading for pleasure’?
