I find this post to be your finest to date. I know editors who, in the present editorial battleground, have become writing “coaches” – a position that used to be within the domain of “editors”. They foster fiction writers from the ground up: sometimes on finished ms., sometimes chapter to chapter. But, the author pays out of pocket for this “service”. Authors are also being asked to write marketing plans for their books. Milked for more value, writers are paid less and less to do more and more.

But I’m not here to push the plight of the writer; the editors are the missing link between the current literary wasteland and a future full of good books and avid readers. The point is that every book sale is the culmination of many hands. If any of these hands is not given the proper job to do, the finished product is junk. Writers, editors, and marketers forge culture, they don’t respond to it (OK, they do right now, but ideally they should not). The authors have their hands full, the editors have their hands cut off, and the marketing/sales people might as well be selling cars.

Your “Pipe Dream” is not as dreamy as you might think, Pat. As the old towers and walls crumbling, a growing class of working writers, editors, and literary marketers are gaining confidence and inertia outside the citadel gates. There has never been such opportunity in publishing for those with creativity and business savvy to drive positive change forward.

We here at Blue Throne Creative hear you loud and clear, Pat, and thank you for the wisdom you have… and share!

Change is coming…

I think the entire universe between writer and reader is completely up for grabs now. Everyone in between—agent, editor, sales, marketing, publicity, production, designer, wholesaler, retailer—has to justify to the creator and to the reader why their intervention facilitates the writer/reader relationship. That is truly the only one that matters, every other relationship legitimates itslef only to the extent that it foster that one.

For this is be done right, I think we have to abandon the old models, which were largely predicated on old retailing, and old manufacturing structures. In particular we need to drop nouns, and focus on verbs. A writer does need editing, and a writer needs help finding readers, and connecting to readers, and the words need all sorts of different packaging, and framing. Which people perform those roles, and what companies they work for, and which are hitched together (ie is editing and packaging done by the same company? Is packing and reader development done by the same company?) and which are not hitched together (ie all done by separate companies), that’s what we need to figure out.

I don’t necessarily know that many people who called themselves editors in the past, and have that title in the current disappearing iteration are necessarily going to be performing the action of developmental editing and/or line editing, AND reader/audience development. I certainly aim to do that myself, and see my role as very much the connecting of the writer and the reader, but a LOT of editors eschew the latter role. Personally, I do think that someone must do it, and who better than the person who has really gotten under the hood of the book.

It seems negligible until you consider that writers like Philip K. Dick or Jonathan Lethem or Ursula K. Le Guin or Neal Stephenson might never have seen the light of print, were they trying for a first sale in today’s atmosphere.