PATRICIA NELL
WARREN—copyright. Reprinted with permission.GETTING
THAT FIRST EDITING OR
PUBLISHING JOB
PUBLISHING JOB
A letter to a reader, about working in publishing: I can share my own experience getting started. In 1959 I got the "big job" at the Reader's Digest. They hired me NOT because of my B.A. in English lit, or even my writing skills, but because of my nuts-and-bolts experience. I had worked in high school and college publications—newspaper, yearbook, and editor-in-chief of the campus literary magazine. I knew a little bit about working with temperamental writers (campus celebs can be very cocky), and putting a publication together...and wasn't afraid to get printer's ink on my fingers. Plus I caught a typo on the Digest's proofreading test, that the magazine's own copy editors had missed previously (a misspelling of someone's name). The value of practical nuts-and-bolts stuff was high in those days. The job I landed led through several promotions on the magazine and Condensed Book Club staffs, and 22 years with the company. Today things are somewhat different. Your daughter won't be limited to the corporate route. There are free-lance editors—a relatively new trade. Their ads appear in most every trade magazine. They work as independent contractors, usually on single-job book projects, and have to carry all their own overhead. Every freelance I know is working very hard at it and not always making steady money. They all have "day jobs." Today, in the in-house area, there are thousands of jobs available with independent publishers and specialty companies. But your daughter should know that today the book industry is in something of a crisis, with a downturn in sales and a growing obsession with blockbuster books, as against midlist books whose sales are more modest. Publishers want a new frontlist title to make a ton of money, in an industry where the profit margin per copy has always been narrow. So the pressure on editors to produce this kind of book is terrific. As the economic risks grow, we're seeing book companies go under more often...or go more and more into buyouts and mergers with larger entities. As when Random House was sold to Bertelsmann in Germany, and Harper Collins to Murdoch in England. So turnover is higher today. So your daughter should spend an afternoon or two in a library, reading recent issues of Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, ForeWord, Independent Publisher, to get an idea of the world she's stepping into. Once she's hired, she should keep her resume polished, and be prepared to jump ship if her current employer gets shaky. continue next column...
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Nuts-and-bolts practical stuff is
still important today...yet the run of publishing skills are more
highly specialized now than when I started. So your daughter might want
to think about what aspect
of the book business she's interested in. Does she have a knack for
working
with writers, packaging book ideas with the "right" author? (many book
ideas
are dreamed up over lunch). Does she like doing publicity? Or is she
interested
in the design or production end of the book business? Working with
cover
artists, book design, jacket design, etc? (Some books, like children's,
art,
travel, involve an intensive design process.) Or the actual
manufacturing process? Then there's working climate. Does your daughter prefer the big corporation with all its benefits? Or the smaller independent publisher that might not offer a lot of benefits, and might not pay her much for a while? Or the university publisher, where she'll be dealing with strictly academic material? All of these are around. They all have their attractions...and their risks. Only your daughter can know how much security she wants in her early years on the job. The clearer she is at the outset, about what exactly she wants to do, the easier it will be to target her job search. Plus it helps to have a knack for bringing viewpoints together, since everything is so specialized now, and she may be called on to get two hostile departments to work in harness together. About editing itself: Like world-class figure-skating or golf, editing is one of those things that you get good at by doing it...and doing it...and doing it. Basically, the art of editing is two-pronged: (1) being able to see what's wrong with the piece of writing, and (2) knowing how to fix it. Your daughter's ability to do this should include a good working knowledge of English-language spelling, grammar and sentence structure. Good editing skills are less in demand today, and too much reliance is placed on computer software. Software can't do it all. What a living human book editor does can be as important as what a film editor does...which is why Oscars are given to film editors. Yet many books are still badly in need of editing when they hit print. How does a young person learn how to edit today? It's a good question, because editing is not taught the way it was 40 years ago when I was young and green. The media are very visual-driven, because of movies and TV, meaning they're not as word-driven as they once were. I am often stunned at the spelling and grammar mistakes in TV newscast text, for example. But editing is more than just copy-edit stuff. It can go deep, affect the total content of a piece...make the difference between whether a book or article "works" or not. It can change the pace, the overall focus, the style...everything. Editing also includes cutting, and completely reorganizing, the book—which has to be done like diamond-polishing, if the book is to escape harm. |
I apprenticed with some of the
best editors
in the business, and got to see each of them in action. Articles and
book
condensations in-process got circulated around the Digest staff. There
was
the managing editor (no names mentioned) with "itchy pencil," who had a
compulsion
to re-write everything that other people did...and it wasn't always
better
when he got done with it. And there were the old masters, like
executive
editor Harry Harper, who could fix a major problem with a few deft
touches. Your daughter might want to try finding out which of the companies she's considering will actually provide training and support on learning to edit. Or she can try for an editorial assistant job with an editor who is a known genius and is willing to teach and train. There are books about editing, of course, and it takes self-discipline to get anything out of them. Most importantly, I think, your daughter has to know and love books if she is going to make it in today's publishing market. With so much competition from TV and movies, it's really important to have a passion for books—plus some sort of talent for giving them an edge in today's world. Personally, in spite of high tech, I think that books will always be around. They're attractively low tech in a world where high tech is getting to be less and less reliable. As I write this, southern California is having a power crisis, and my computer might get shut off at any minute! But books can't "crash" on you. They're totally portable. Their batteries don't need to be recharged. They don't run out of RAM. They don't self-destruct if you spill coffee on them. With luck a good book is worth more used than new. The Harry Potter phenomenon is interesting. As "literature," these books are no great shakes, IMHO, but young boys are ready to be told that they too can have the gift of magic. For centuries young girls were getting all the credit for magic! Even adult men are reading Harry Potter books! That revelation about male juju, and a smart PR campaign, has meant that Harry Potter books have set the world on fire...at a time when books were supposedly on their last gasp. In a nutshell, editing and publishing jobs help bring spirit into substance. Spirit is everything creative—the fiction story, nonfiction data, the cover art, the type style, etc. and how they are married with the substance of paper and ink and film and the mechanical stuff in the press-room and bindery, to make the finished book that a customer picks off the bookstore shelf. You can spend a lifetime learning how to do any part of this process well. I've always loved it...which is why I'm still doing it. Hope I've been some help. Good luck to both of you! Let me know how you make out. Warmest best regards, Patricia Nell Warren |
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