Tuesday, May 7, 2024

THE (mostly) UNSUNG HEROS of PUBLISHING

 

A writing colleague who had beta-read for me (and I for her) and who, like me, had been on occasion paid to freelance edit, let me know one of the books she had edited had won an important award.

When she mentioned the title, I gasped. It’s one I had read because it came recommended and it is an exquisite literary novel for middle grades. Aside from the mentioned award, this novel had garnered accolades from all the sources that matter in publishing.

 

The glory, rightly, goes to the author. The financial gain goes to the publisher. But what goes to the editor who guided it to the mature version the world got to read?

 

No glory, or even a smidgen of recognition, will attach to this all-important arm of the publishing journey. Some writers will mention their editor’s name in the acknowledgement page. But the public at large only knows editors when the latter write their memoires, and this they get to publish only if they had edited well known writers, plural.


 

Try not to chuckle as I confess this reminded me of intelligence officers as part of national security. Few know what battles they fought so we won’t have to. Editors are like the CIA field agents whom the public will never know.

 

Unsung heroes are a special breed. They work for the job at hand and not for a pat on the back.

 

To the editors:


5 comments:

Evelyn said...

Well said, Mirka.

Vijaya said...

So true! I've been blessed with wonderful editors and I'm glad many of their names are on the copyright page. It's teamwork!

Barbara Etlin said...

You're so right, Mirka. One superhero editor I admire is Robert Gottleib, who wrote his memoir, Avid Reader: A Life.

Mirka Breen said...

Yes, Robert Gottleib is known because he edited John Cheever, Doris Lessing, Chaim Potok, Charles Portis, Salman Rushdie, John Gardner, Len Deighton, John le Carré, Ray Bradbury, Elia Kazan, Margaret Drabble, Michael Crichton, Mordecai Richler, and Toni Morrison. He also edited non-fiction. He was Bill Clinton's editor, and said that every president's memoire was in fact not written by them but by a ghost writer,(OOPS!) save Ronald Reagan who wrote his own.

MirkaK said...

I had a fantastic editor at Bantam Books who was renowned and beloved by those of us who worked with her. We all acknowledged her excellence. But, no, she did not appear on the title page. But because she has been held in such strong regard, she has been paid well for her editorial guidance ever since, though Bantam “retired” older editors when Bertelsman bought up U.S. publishing houses.