But I have to ask: Why do you have not just but four copies of Andrew's book?

One anecdote doesn't amount to data, especially because my one non-scholarly publication (an article about ancient mathematics in Odyssey magazine some years back) was hardly big-time stuff.

But my article was edited by a staff editor, it improved the quality of 'my' writing immeasurably, and my thanks to the editor were quite heartfelt. I wish I could have an editor on tap whenever I needed one.

So when book authors lavish similar praise on their editors, I'm predisposed to believe in their sincerity.

And what about Andrew himself?

I'm guessing some recent outlines &/or chapter drafts have been rejected as the drivel they no doubt are.

Editors? There aren't any proof readers anymore. Every new book has at least one typo, usually missed because spellcheck recognized it as a word, just not the wrong word.

You should have posted his whole comment. He was making a very valid point. When you have publishers who will publish crap like O.J. Simpson's book, that's what he is talking about I am sure. The ones out just for money, not to really contribute to society in anyway but to debase it.

I've always been sincere when I've thanked editors in my books; my relationships with both academic and trade publishers has always been good. But I'd remind people that we writers can be thin-skinned and that, from our point of view, editors are often doing their job best when they do it least -- leaving our prose just the way we wrote it. Too often we thank them for making the process easy for us, which isn't always easy the same as easy for the reader. (I'm not only a writer but also an editor, this time of a scholarly journal, and I've irritated quite a few authors by presuming to tinker with their deathless prose.)

Perhaps his editor wasn't American. That would explain the 'in the U.S' bit

I was going to say that many writers have huge egos, and because of this, they love editors who leave their copy alone. But Jack Lynch has said it quite well.

I would add that the best writers I've worked with have been the least sensitive about editorial changes, as long as the editor knows what he/she is doing.

I genuinely think my editor rocks.

"Joe Klein's conscience" is correct: Sullivan is going on about top-level editors printing anything they think will sell, regardless of whether it's not only a steaming pile of crap but a pox on the republic; the Simpson book is an excellent example. At the project and line editing level, there have been cutbacks across the industry, but those who still hold those jobs do indeed care, a lot, about the books they produce.

I have been through the process with four books and chunks of other books. Quite frankly, I left each with varying degrees of feelings of anger, exasperation and finally relief that it was all over. The worst without a doubt was my experience with an arm of Thompson Publishing, since sold to some other sucker corp for the general amusement. Contradictory instructions, imperative demands, editors getting fired or leaving in mid-stream, you name it it went wrong. I have been told more times than I can remember 'forget that, this is the new plan' or 'I can't imagine who told you that, certainly not my predecessor whom I have never met'. Second worst, Oxford University Press for mind changing, time wasting and general bloody mindedness.

My take? Poor education, unawareness of knowledge, and no on-the-job training for editors and publishers. Add the aversion to getting sued for any reason and pressure to produce a 20% return on equity each and every year and you have a system and the people almost guaranteed to produce mediocre junk most of the time. And does it ever work. Did I mention lurid postmodern cover art?

The publishers do not care what is in their books and neither, by and large, do editors.

That may be too often too true. That said, it's hardly unknown for editors to have written whole dang books for their 'writers.' At least in the business, technology and education fields.

Don't these editors largely decide whether you get published or not? Of course you praise them, they sign the checks.

Forget the four copies business; that shit can happen to anyone. But I do wonder why you spend so much time caring about what Andrew Sullivan thinks. What in the world has he done to warrant it? Or, to borrow a Drum standard: "What am I missing here?"

Andrew Sullivan, former editor of The New Republican, will be forever linked to Stephan Glass, the reporter who faked his stories.
Now, for some unknown reason, Sullivan is the editor of The Atlantic which was once edited by another rightist nutjob, Michael Kelly.
Conservatives, like members of the Bush family, always seem to fail upwards.

I agree with editer. The publishing industry has little engagement with the intellectual "big picture" any more; it cares about what sells. But there are lots of editors who still do a good job for their authors, once they've got a book to edit. Sometimes that's about staying out of the way. Sometimes it's NOT.

Or maybe it's just the same dynamic as "hate Congress, love one's Congresscritter."

A good editor for a good book tries to make the book more coherent.

If the book is not seen as "literature" or scholarly (e.g. cheap exposes, "romantic murder mysteries", fantasy or science fiction, etc.) than an editor may do what ever it takes to get the book out (and maybe jazz it up some).

Some tasks and editor may do can be like a lifestyle coach - figuring out how to get the damn author just to finish the manuscript. The other minimal editor's task is to avoid glaring grammar mistakes.

I recall reading some not very good novels where I'm sure that the author wrote a boring linear narrative. So the editor decides to jazz it up by putting the chapters in out-of-time sequence.

But as for checking if a book is coherent? If you are writing for the not-picky then it doesn't matter.

The DaVinci Code could have sucked a lot less if somebody had gone through and circled the clichés. The Corrections could have been fifty-hundred pages shorter.... That would be my comment on most modern modern novels I've read, from airplane stuff to better books, the writing often seems very undisciplined.

What's with the criticism directed at publishers for allegedly printing disgusting crap--with "the O.J. book" being cited as the number one example? Mind you, the O.J. book DID NOT GET PUBLISHED. The only reason it came close to being published is because the most controversial editor in the business, Judith Regan, commissioned it--and then got fired for it because she thereby offended even her otherwise shameless boss Rupert Murdoch. And no other publisher was willing to touch it with a ten-foot pole.

So if anything, the O.J. example demonstrates the relatively HIGH standards of the book publishing business, not the reverse.

If I sound heated it's because this isn't the first time I've seen book publishers attacked for supposedly making money off writings by murderers. Whereas actually it is tabloid newspapers, magazines, and cable networks that make big money off of crime stories--rarely book publishers.

Kevin,

You quote Andrew Sullivan:

"The publishers do not care what is in their books and neither, by and large, do editors."

Neither do the public, mostly. However, we do take the content of the blogs we read very seriously.

Re POSTSCRIPT: four copies? Are these Horcruxes?

"I own four copies of The Conservative Soul."

Are they like horcruxes? Who was The Soul's original owner? Was it Dick Cheney? I can imagine that he keeps killing people because he wants divide up his soul and hide the pieces in various secure locations.

That was weird; RS and I both thought of horcruxes almost simultaneously. I swear to god I didn't see his post before I submitted mine.

Based on twenty years of experience in the industry I would say that for the most part publishers do care about what they publish. All things being equal, most of them would prefer publishing good books to publishing crap. But as with the rest of life, all things aren't equal. There are so many other factors in competition with that desire -- competition from other sources of information and entertainment, the need to keep the parent company's share prices rising on the stock market, the continual squeeze on costs, the endless search for The Next Big Thing -- that it inevitably gets pushed down and down the ladder. The result is that silly stuff like copy editing and proofreading gets squeezed out in the process.

As far as editors go, many people who are called editors really aren't really editors at all; a lot of them are project developers, managers, packagers, etc. Actual editors generally do give a damn and work hard to help the author produce the best work possible. There is of course a range of quality among both editors and authors, but when a good author and a good editor establish a real rapport, they can still produce something outstanding. Bat of Moon and Jack Lynch both make that point.

Line editing is tough. For a lot of publishers these days that means running a spellchecker. Our lousy education system doesn't help either; I've been lucky to work with some extremely talented young people, but they were the exception to the rule. The majority of people I've seen take copy editing and proofreading tests weren't even close to being qualified. But some of them got hired anyway, just because someone has to do the job. And gone are the days when two people would sit side by side reading galleys to each other.

Indexing is a forgotten art. Don't even get me started.

Indexing is a forgotten art...that is done by the author these days. I have to assume that when it was an art, it was done by "indexers"?

My case: two books, one copy-edited, but not edited; the second, barely copy-edited. Nice people, but they aren't really editors any more.

I only buy books at the used book store. The last book I read was Mote in Gods eye.

Oddly it fit very well into today. The middle Easterners fit nicely into the Motie tribal clans who were continually destroyed their own societies. Armageddon over and over.

Anyway, there was a aspiring writer named Bob Hoffman over at Eschaton talking about his new book 'Challenge' He, of course was thanking his Publisher and Editor. Editors have become agents from what I gathered.

Yes, it is true that editors barely edit anymore. They spend 99% of their time wedged between marketing, production, and design instead of actually EDITING. They circle this and that here and there (or, rather, get their assistants to do it) then delegate the real editing to people who are still called "copy editors" but who do the vast majority of what "editors" used to do. Now it's all about doing lunch; it didn't used to be. At all. Under the circumstances -- i.e., people who buy your manuscript, buy you lunch, suggest this and that -- who wouldn't offer a heartfelt thanks to the editor? And, conversely, why do you think older authors never thanked their editors? Because THEY HATED THEM FOR SAVAGING THEIR WRITING.

Say wouldn't a Conservative Soul actually be like science fiction thang?

I wouldn't read Playboy if it weren't for the editors.

Have you ever seen them before they're Photochopped?

As one who has benefited greatly from editors in the course of publishing 20 books, I'm sorry to say that North American publishers in general are not doing the job they used to. Almost any book published in the last decade displays typos, grammatical errors, and simple incoherence. When I mentioned this to a publisher friend, he agreed. He was also damn mad about it.

Most publishers aren't mad. For them, it's just not worth the trouble to do even copy editing, never mind substantive editing like Max Perkins working with Scott Fitzgerald's awful spelling and Thomas Wolfe's logorrhea. Just dump the author's Word file into Quark or InDesign and forget about it.

It's really an accounting issue: If you can sell just as many copies of a badly edited book as of a well-edited one, why pay some wretched ex-English major $25,000 a year to clean up the author's writing?

[OT News of Import]:

In Violation of Federal Law, Ohio's 2004 Presidential Election Records Are Destroyed or Missing
By Steven Rosenfeld [AlterNet]

Two-thirds of Ohio counties have destroyed or lost their 2004 presidential ballots and related election records, according to letters from county election officials to the Ohio Secretary of State, Jennifer Brunner.

The lost records violate Ohio law, which states federal election records must be kept for 22 months after Election Day, and a U.S. District Court order issued last September that the 2004 ballots be preserved while the court hears a civil rights lawsuit alleging voter suppression of African-American voters in Columbus.

The destruction of the election records also frustrates efforts by the media and historians to determine the accuracy of Ohio's 2004 vote count, because in county after county the key evidence needed to understand vote count anomalies apparently no longer exists. ...

Simple answer: When dealing with authors who don't specifically ask for help, many editors barely look at manuscripts before passing them on, with plenty of praise for the author. No surprise that authors love this. But those same authors (e.g., Andrew Sullivan) are also readers of other books, and they find it all too obvious that no one has edited those other books. I copy-edited manuscripts for Random House for three years, and in a few cases the editor hadn't even opened the manuscript before passing it on for proofreading.

No, Sullivan is right.

The printing companies are more and more owned by larger companies, with contracts to put out n books a month to their store chains... Editing for content, accuracy in wording and print, all of these have suffered.

For every technical or game book or article I read, there's more and more errors than for the stuff I read ten, twenty years ago. And yet more money is made.

It takes alot of digging through technical books to find one written by someone who's actually knowledgable about the topic, and not just regurgitating some marketing spoo which wouldn't actually be helpful.

And I can't actually point to a Hasbro product that has no errors in it (some often simple word or spelling, some worse like mathmatical errors) in the last five years.

(Just now on "Last Days of Disco" they're talking about the Scott Meredith best seller formula.)

It's about time someone does the old "Casablanca" scam: create a typescript of "As I Lay Dying" changing the names and omitting the first chapter; send it out to the publishers and wait for the rejection letters. Then write an article about it.

If Sully was talking about acquisition editors, he's probably right. Top houses put out more drivel all the time.

I've been making my living as a freelance copy editor and proofreader since the early '80s, and my sources of work certainly haven't been drying up. I've proofread my share of books, however, that have been poorly copy edited; and I am often asked to do line editing in addition to copy editing (which is fine with me; I enjoy it, and I'm good at it).

I also do more substantive editing for individual writers. I have one client whose hand I hold all the way through the publication process, from proposal to finished book. All his books have been copy edited and proofread, usually pretty well, by the publisher; and his manuscripts have received considerable developmental guidance from the publisher's editor in their formative stages.

For one thing, if you have a highly-illustrated book and tons of money, pay $30-40,000 to a book packaging company. Then they can broker the deal for you and maybe you'll get an advance of $50,000 or more.

It's probably even more true for illustrated books than for nonillustrated books that publishers are lying or self-deluded when they say they don't need to be presented with a finished product all dressed in ribbons--because they'll just naturally recognize quality when they see it, they're so insightful, so deeply clever.

100 or more agents expressed ZERO interest in my book. 100 or more publishers expressed nearly ZERO interest in my book. And of course virtually no letters of inquiry or submission go beyond some secretary or assistant who doesn't give a damn.

My "agent" ended up being a trainee-level jerk at a famous literary agency. He screwed me over and repeatedly lied to me for a year.

Harry N. Abrams is the only publishing house that gave my book real consideration, although a couple of others said that it provoked a "flutter of interest" or whatever.

But even Abrams wasn't interested in the book itself, they were interested in whether I, personally, was sellable enough--with a professorship or a famous name or connections or whatever. If you've never been published before and you look cross-eyed at someone or have the wrong astrological sign or whatever, they'll decide at their office meeting not to publish you.

Who cares that I write really well? Who cares that no one has ever written on this subject before? Who cares that I've been working on this for over 10 years? Who cares that my picture research is breathtaking, with thousands of high-quality slides and photography that I've paid for, all of entirely unknown paintings, prints, and family photographs of the artist? Who care's that I'm the world expert, and NO ONE else will ever do what I've done? Who cares that my subject is one of the world's most beloved and gives delight to millions? Who cares that famous people praise my work? WHO FUCKING CARES???!!!

So I pay $2,000-$3,500 for gang-printed color printing which will end up as 12 2-sided plates in the finished volumes. So I will do a THIRD OR FOURTH book design on my home computer. So I will get boxes of expensive coated paper to print up the effing book and its black-and-white illustrations on my crappy home printer which I have to gentle along by only printing one page at a time, and it still leaves tiny little dings on each page. So I will hope that the printing doesn't look TOO crappy. So I will pay $1,500-$2,500 to get 50 copies of the book bound and that's probably all the finished copies of the book that the world will ever see, and I'll be left with 1,150 sets of plates. So I'll HOPE that some major university libraries will at least buy that micro-super-limited-edition.

And THEN what will happen in the next decades is two things: one copy will get looked at by an undergraduate, who will do a term paper; and another copy will be used by an art history major or professor who will crib from my entire book and get the book deal that I SHOULD have gotten.

NONE of which will ever pay for the, I don't know, let's say $20,000 of research expenses over 10 or more years.

All for a book that could have been very popular, if only anyone had bothered to give a damn.

And I think my experience is representative. Unless your name is Paris Hilton. . .or you're a full professor at Harvard. . .or you're a graduate of a cheesy writing program that produces boring pretentious books. . .or you've written a cookbook. . .or you're simply very well connected. . .or you have $40,000 to pay for a book packager, no, you are not going to get published.

The reason I ask is that in virtually every book I read, the author praises the book's editor in glowing terms.

Ha, yeah, right. I notice that too. I don;t consider it a good use of my time to read prefaces or the portions of them like that anymore because it's the same thing every time.

I think it is heartfelt. I think the editors are people who spend their lives thinking about writing and are up to speed on how to word thingd best and organize things best- they're aware of it. Not all authors are writers- if you;re bringing a particular expertise of life experience to write a book about, then you spent your time acquiring that expertise or having that experience, that didn't necessarily have anything to do with writing. You don't have to like writing a lot or to have been stellar at it when you were taught it to decide to write a book. So a good editor can really make a great contribution to a book, I'd imagine, suggesting organization that really makes more sense or makes a better impact, and eliminating embarrassing and needless redundancies- stuff a non-writer really might not notice in his/her own work, after writing his/her first draft or two.

However, I've read a lot of books (but especially recently) that contain a lot of typos and don't seem to really have been read by an editor at all. Out of the universe of editors, I'm sure there are a class that only care about doing lines of coke at night and don't really read the books.

You can see how much I appreciate and know about writing- and also from my comments on word or grammar usage, when they come up every once in a while on a blog- but as anyone familiar with my comments will know, I don't write them that great (because I'm just writing them off-the-cuff and don't edit them- doesn't seem to be worth my time). So that's proof of the difference editing can make, if you know how to write well but don't apply it.

A logical corollary to the above revelation regarding the illegal destruction of Ohio's 2004 election records:

Will Bush cancel the 2008 election?
by Harvey Wasserman & Bob Fitrakis

It is time to think about the "unthinkable.

The Bush Administration has both the inclination and the power to cancel the 2008 election. ...'

[Must be read in full.]

Kevin, the authors I know are always grateful when an editor sends back a proof with very few edits. Less work for them.

So yeah, they're thanking their editors for saving them time with rewrites. Why not?

Also, what a lot of you are talking about is not done by editors--typos, style consistency, etc. That's the work of a copyeditor. I'm sure there are plenty of worthless copyeditors out there.

Editors are the ones who buy the books, edit them in terms of major rewrites, looking at the overall picture. Copyeditors are the ones who catch the nitpicks.

Andrew Sullivan is a hack.

While Sully can be differentiated by other conservative luminaries (ahem Glenn Reynolds ahem) by his rare forays into reason, history and empirical evidence -albeit occasionally- he is still a hack.

So then...while he's not as overtly stupid & blatantly dishonest as Jonah Goldberg, and not as insane as most of those in Kristol's stable, Sully remains a dishonest, no-talent hack. The fact that he can put sentences together in a way that makes reading him pleasurable means nothing: Christopher Hitchens is a better writer, he's smarter, and also full of crap AND a hack.

So I will pay $1,500-$2,500 to get 50 copies of the book bound and that's probably all the finished copies of the book that the world will ever see, and I'll be left with 1,150 sets of plates. So I'll HOPE that some major university libraries will at least buy that micro-super-limited-edition.

Try lulu.com. Worked pretty well for me. Color is not high-end, but really quite decent. Minimum order is 1.

Have you ever seen them [Playboy models] before they're Photochopped?

I once worked with some unretouched Playboy chromes. Veins, butt pimples, everything you'd expect on a real person. Granted they were attractive people, but nothing like what comes out the other end.

Run Paul

Mote in God's Eye is the best Niven/Pournelle collaboration, by a mile.

They took a cliched situation (stellar empire based on British Empire) and managed to make it workable. Even the characters are (somewhat) interesting although mostly stock (stoic German, clever Scots engineer, heroic space lord, kill crazy Russian admiral, etc.). I think that is mostly Niven's work: Pournelle has never been any good at aliens, nor at characterisation.

Due to contractual issues (until they finished the sequel, 20 years later, they could not publish another book jointly) their collaborations rather petred out after this.

I am not sure it really has resonances to the current day. I am sure Jerry Pournelle, blasting away his right wing screeds (but he's not a libertarian conservative, he knows a little too much history for that), would like us to think so (clash of civilisations and all that), but the book transcends that.

What it is, is a plea about malthusian traps, and about the cyclicality of civilisations. See H Beam Piper (an early inspiration for Pournelle) and Robert Heinlein.

And the aliens are some of the best in Science Fiction.

f'yunch (click) ;-).

I doubt that Sullivan is talking about the literal production values of the book industry. I think it's just the same old hand-wringing about the dumbing-down of the American mind that's been going on ever since Anne Bradstreet got that lightweight book of poetry published ...

sullivan's book was late by something like six years. and he's complaining about his editor?

Sullivan is an ass. It sounds like he's venting some personal frustrations--someone who he thought should not get published got a contract and his own MS went to trash, or something like that.

The problem is not with editors. Generally, if you have niche text, someone will pick it up (just look at the crap coming out Regnery on regular basis). And publishers will rely on recommendations of someone they work with to publish something that they normally would not--want to keep top authors happy. But, rejecting MSS is not the editor's job, nor is proofreading. Proofreaders earn considerably less money and have a single focus. Editors approach a MS as a whole, if they are any good. Proofreaders have no sense of style (except publisher's "house style" for use of specific words, expressions and punctuation). So sometimes editors have to "undo" proofreader's corrections.

Newspaper and magazine editors, on the other hand...

The publishing industry is not as well-organized, or as much a conspiracy, as people seem to think. At a small house, copyeditor/editor/production editor can all run together; at a big publisher (of which there are fewer all the time) they can work in separate buildings. Or increasingly, be outsourced.

My 2 cents: a good editor has to have skills, yes, but also must be trained in the "house style" of the people he or she is editing for. Science publishers do not use the same style books as fiction publishers, and a small house may decide to discard the Chicago Manual for their own idiosyncratic style guides.

Really, though you can sum up the problem with editing quality thus: publishing don't pay. Editors make shit wages, frankly; I was offered a fairly intensive position 3 years ago with Simon & Schuster in New York that started at 25k. Who the hell can live on that in NYC? At the time, I was working for a much less glamorous publisher doing production plus editing work, and getting paid more (though still, not much).

So you either get a) talented people who burn out/can't afford to keep working at those wages, or b) well-connected but clueless kids whose parents are friends of the publisher, and who have enough cash not to need much of a salary. Or c) crappy editors who will accept crappy wages. The money in publishing is not in editing, but in sales and marketing. And you can be an excellent editor for 20 years only to see your job outsourced to a contract editor who works for half as much.

Honestly, book publishing is going to get a shakeup along the lines of the music industry someday, and it needs to. It's a ridiculous, inbred, archaic beast of an industry, and I think a model where authors self-publish and hire their own copyeditors is as likely to replace it as anything else. I won't cry when it does.

I'm a writer and an editor and I don't know what this idiot is talking about. I don't think he does either, even in the extended article.

Possibly he's pissed because so many books he disagrees with are coming out; one wonders if he'd whine if lots of books he agrees with were coming out (yet still had poor editing).

One would be correct in assuming that he's just whining. Period.

Is anyone else here amused at how many writers there are on this blog? Jesus with all of us here we should be able to sway world opinion at the drop of a tab key. Oh by the way who cares what Andrew Sullivan thinks,says, or does. He's a mindless hack.

eh...publishing has different domains--trade is not the same as professional--nonfiction is not the same as fiction. I came into the business when it was already pretty corporatized, but there were still old-timers talking about the old days when schmoozing was done, alcohol flowed freely, the offices closed for a week in December, and editors actually had time to...edit.

All that changed when publishers were told that they had to actually--gulp--make a profit. So, thus, mergers, acquisitions, shufflings, not to mention a fair amount of employee turnover. Since, as we tell ourselves, we're in the "relationship" business as much as the data conveying business, it can be rough on everyone(see "anon"). The latest craze is to outsource as much as possible, and as much as possible of that to India and China--those pesky profits again.

But you know, we're not paid very much compared to some professionals (more in the teacher/librarian range than the lawyer/I-banker range), and most of us do take our work seriously.

I do like being acknowledged in books, especially when the acknowledgment is "personal" and not just a laundry list of everyone at the company who worked on the book. One of my favorites is an account of how I had to beat, threaten, and cajole a group of editors to finally finish their book--for which they thanked me. My authors are not "writers" by profession, though, so their eloquence varies greatly.

KathyF wrote: "Editors are the ones who buy the books, edit them in terms of major rewrites, looking at the overall picture. Copyeditors are the ones who catch the nitpicks."

This could only be written by someone who either doesn't know what s/he's talking about or is heavily invested in nomenclature. I've been credited as a "copy editor" in books that you've definitely read, and the combination of substantive rigor and formal precision - and diplomacy - I brought to them made them much, much better. It wasn't an accident that I was asked to work on those books: editors don't have the time to put that kind of care into the books they really value, so they hire - and rely heavily on - really good copy editors to do much more than nitpick.

There are people who do their work poorly everywhere - that's what makes the good stuff good. Duh.

JKR commenting on Today Show via their blog:
[...]
Rowling said her American editor suggested the moment when Harry conquers Draco should be more dramatic.

“But, no, I really wanted, very consciously, for the history of the wizarding world to hinge on this moment where two teenage boys have a physical [fight]. They don’t even do it by magic,� Rowling said.
[...]

:^) well, some folks mentioned Horcruxes up there, so anyway..... Kevin, are your pages in your copies of Andrew's book all in the right order???

I've published two non-fiction books with commercial presses, and no editor ever suggested any changes to either of them. A proofreader changed a couple of things.

They stopped editing at least 10 years ago, except the big books. I was trained as a copy editor 22 years ago. Books were edited for flow by the "real" editor, then a line editor went through to cut fat, then a copy editor made sure spelling and grammar were perfect. When I left book publishing 10 years ago. I was given books for publikation. That looked as if they were written by "3rd-graders. These were inspirational books by muckety mucks or trashy novels, but they were being given to the copy editor in this fashion, and I essentially rewrote them, as a ghostwriter would do. It blew my mind that I'd be given such crap so late in the game (and also that I had so little sense of self-worth that I'd do this for $22/hour...). But I was and I did. Not all books--most published people really can write. But the publisher just seemed to be chancing the authors would end with a conscienscious/sucker copy editor.

Re POSTSCRIPT: four copies? Are these Horcruxes?Posted by: RS

Excellent post not likely to be topped today. You can all go home.

Then again, I'm not sure Sullivan has a soul or the one he had was sold to the devil years ago in its entirety.

Authors who are having trouble finding a publisher among the big houses should check out the independents, which include a fair number of niche publishers. Most of them are deeply dedicated to quality and spend a lot more time with a book and its author, both before and after publication, than do the major houses.

Look on the Web site of the Indpendent Publishers Association
(www.pma-online.org) for a list of its members, searchable by category and keyword.

(Full disclosure: I copy edit the association's monthly newsletter.)

I'm reading "Desert Queen" by Janet Wallach, about the life of Gertrude Bell, who is held to be responsible for much of the English policy towards the Middle East after the Great War.

Near the beginning, there's a reference to the Ottoman Empire expanding from a beginning in Constantinople in the 13th Century. Constantinople was part of the Byzantine/Roman Empire until conquered by the Ottomans in 1453, and was thereafter renamed Istanbul. All of a sudden, my faith in the rest of the book plummeted.

Bad editor, bad researcher, bad writer, bad copy editor, or all of the above?

As a consumer, I've noticed 2 things since the 70s: many books I've read in the last 8 years or so contain 1 or 2 typos or grammar errors. As if the book was merely run through a spell checker, and something goes to print that an actual human editor could have detected (there vs their for example). Also, novels have gotten much larger, containing a lot of useless fluff that a good editor would have trimmed back in the old days.

I have had good and bad experiences with editors. In my most recent book, the editor is clueless and humorless, a deadly combo. But, yes, I thanked him in the acknowledgments. Why? He gets his hands on my manuscript and proofs last, and I don't want to piss him off. He's dangerous enough as it is.

From my experience, editing has suffered by going electronic. Publishers I have done work for rarely see a print-out of an author's work until the manuscript has been typeset and laid out. Even then, the proof is usually a PDF file. Thirty years in the business has given me a wealth of eclectic knowledge and almost daily I find errors that would be laughable if they ended up in print. My favorite example is the author who repeatedly identified J. Edgar Hoover as Herbert Hoover.

Not just books. Applies to scientific journals as well. Who does the editing and re-editing and re-re-editing? WE do, the writers. As far as I can tell the "editors" don't do anything at all.

Great pay for no work.

The only time I've really noticed an absence of editors is in mysteries. Linda Barnes is the worst - good writing up to the end, & then the finish will make absolutely no sense. If a human had read the thing before it was published, they would have been fixed.

Other books are probably just as bad, but without a plot how can you spot the holes?

I remember when Anthony Bourdain's best-selling "Kitchen Confidential" came out. The book was sadly in need of editing, which was a shame because it was a very funny and interesting book. However, the numerous typos and other glitches certainly detracted from my overall enjoyment of it. (A number of Amazon reviewers had this same complaint.) Another book I read more recently--by an ivy-league professor, no less--contains several instances of the phrase "hoards of people." I tracked down the professor's e-mail address to explain that the word should be "hordes," for which he thanked me, but why did such an obvious error make it past the book's editors? Being an editor myself, I would never have let that go by.

Oh but this is just Sully. Someone at a publisher didn't take his call right away and he spins it into this huge thing in his mind that it's the shallowest, dumbest, no ever editingest, worstest industry ever. Facts have nothing to do with what Sully writes. It's just his latest mood swings. Very excitable guy.

Can you PLEASE stop quoting, referencing, validating, promulgating this distaff termagant?!

He is our Jolly Mr. Kristol EXCEPT when his sacred bull is denied same sex stalls. He is loathsome and irreducible stupidity. He parrots (oh, it would be SO juvenile to use fellates) wingnuts, except when rainbow issues are involved. When has he taken the forefront -- again without his self interest -- in any progressive or liberal cause? I recall him advocating for the war, and so on, and so on. Geez, what's the use?

some publishing person: I wasn't using the term "nitpicks" in a pejorative sense at all. I love nitpicks myself. I can get quite carried away finding them.

Sullivan is correct. No one actually "edits" anymore. An "editor" is now someone who *acquires* the book. They are deal-makers or packagers.

As for heartfelt, be aware that most authors are happiest with an editor who does the least editing, because that means fewer changes/less rewriting demanded of the author, and thus less work.

That this also means the resulting book won't be as good is usually lost on authors, as they typically believe that what comes stratight out of their typewriters is genius-level product.