The Three Jobs of the Modern Editor, or 36 Plates

And the Myth of Summer Fridays

Happy first Summer Friday week to all those who celebrate. The “Summer Friday” is a tradition in book publishing (and other media fields) where the whole industry has a truce to take half the day off on Fridays. In peak old-money publishing, historically, this was meant to give you time to get out to the Hamptons. But nowadays, in the corporate era of publishing, it’s mostly for a vacation from email rather than time spent on the water.

Summer Fridays are a nice perk, don’t get me wrong, but as a full-time editor and even late into my assisting years, it is more of a good opportunity to catch up on work of reading and editing while others are offline than to fully relax. Between a friend’s wedding and having family visit New York this long Memorial Day weekend, every spare moment has been spent crashing an edit (it sounds like what it is), and writing this newsletter (why it’s two days later than usual).

Recently, a friend who asked how many books I work on at any given moment and I stumbled my way into the real answer. It is no secret inside the industry that editors are more overloaded than ever. An editor’s job used to be more of a gentleman’s profession. It was more about reading and editing, and maintaining relationships with literary agents and authors. Picture Roger Sterling, reclining on the couch with a manuscript and third martini of the day in hand.

Now, along with exactly everyone else in almost every other industry, book publishing is in its profit squeeze era. Every job in the publishing pipeline from production to publicity to marketing to sales is now 1.5+ jobs. As the axiom goes: the more culturally desirable and interesting a job is the more work it is. A modern editor’s job therefore is the epitome of a pie eating contest where the reward is more pie. The answer for my friend was this: an editor works on roughly 36 books at the same time, that’s 36 plates of pie all spinning and waiting to be consumed. But here’s how it breaks down:

Project Manager – This Year, the First Twelve

In an editor’s job description, we get some kind of title mandate to publish 8-12 or 10-12 new books a year. This is a guideline, a baseline. There are also conversions (when books come out in paperback, typically a year after they’re published in hardcover) that entail less work than new books but still add to the workload, along with timely projects that get dropped in last minute and need to be rushed.

This adds up, in recent years as publishing has become more consolidated and corporatized, to an editor becoming more and more of a project manager rather than a sort of creative director-slash-schmoozer of the old days. Editors field questions from their publishing, production, marketing, sales, publicity teams, as well as authors and agents, and give answers or relay information between these parties all day long. As a result, the majority of an editor’s 9-5 day for most modern editors consists of air traffic controlling for books being published in the given calendar year. Making sure books happen on time, that plans are executed, and every party along the chain is informed of everything that is happening. Polishing marketing copy (book descriptions, pitches, etc.), hitting final production deadlines, organizing marketing meetings, attending marketing meetings, sending out advance copies (and finished copies) to industry contacts, and on and on. Roughly twelve of an editor’s projects on a rolling basis are extremely active and require tons of administration, and still a bit of involved editorial work too.

Editor – Next Year, the Next Twelve

If project managing is about this year’s twelve, then editing is about preparing next year’s twelve. This means editing manuscripts, as you might imagine, anywhere from 3-5 or more times each. From a pure hours perspective, editing could easily eat up a 40-hour work week on its own. However, the editing phase doesn’t just mean putting in the time with the manuscript and the author, it entails getting dozens of other ducks in a row: writing materials for sales, giving presentations, meeting with the art department and author to help envision a cover (getting your author to agree to a cover design), writing authors and agents for blurbs, and about a dozen things. Frankly, it’s hard to keep it all straight enough to even make a checklist off the top of my head.

As you add this year’s twelve books to next year’s twelve books, the Faustian bargaining of modern editing begins. Every hour spent editing for tomorrow is taken away from an hour spent executing on the projects of today. So naturally what you do is just double the hours—the majority of editors spend weekends and those summer Fridays, when they have them, or nights to edit. Basically, anytime you can escape the distraction of email to get the focus required to edit.

This isn’t always possible of course. If an editing deadline needs to be met to keep an important publishing schedule, then it’s time to go into triage mode, ignore administration as much as possible, and edit while keeping one eye on the email inbox. Which is about as unglamorous as it sounds.

Editors wish.

Investor – Next Two Years, the Final Twelve

If you hear the sound of plates shattering that’s because if the first twelve books as project manager makes the job busy and editing the second twelve makes it unwieldy, then the final twelve makes a modern editor’s job certifiably unreasonable. The final core job of a modern editor is to acquire new books, so that after you’re finished doing this year’s twelve and next year’s, you can do the same for the year after and the year after that, and so on and so on. Oftentimes, you have to drop everything to read a full book overnight when an agent sends it, and spend the better part of a week chasing a project, frantically juggling editing and project managing your other projects on the side, just to lose the book at auction and never actually acquire and work on it. Now, this was always an editor’s job. But, as project managing eats into editing, what used to be the free time left on weekends and nights for reading submissions is now eating into editing, which brings us to the final level of Faustian bargaining.

If you hear authors and literary agents gripe that “editors don’t edit anymore”, it’s because it’s becoming more and more common. A lot of editors have chosen to do two of their full-time jobs and let the third, the one the job is named after, slide a bit. You’ll often hear people throw around the term “acquiring editor” in book publishing. This can connote a style of editor who prioritizes acquiring and making good bets on projects over developing projects and adding value by editing manuscripts. Acquiring editors are always chasing the “big” books, talking with literary scouts, going to lunch with agents, and splashing money around in auctions.

Maybe it’s my having come from an economics background, maybe the corporatization of publishing has soaked into the language of the profession, but the modern editor really does resemble an investor or portfolio manager in this era. An editor’s job has always been to pick the right writers and convince their publishers to invest in them. Although editing has always been the cultural crown jewel of the profession, the toil and the magic, the investing portion of the job— identifying talent and marshaling the resources to secure it — has slowly taken over as the most important piece in determining an editor’s success. Because of the aforementioned squeeze of an editor’s expanding role on their time, it can be more advantageous to spend time making the biggest, most important decision — whether to work on a project or not — rather than obsessing over line-edits and execution as in the days of old (and maybe it always was this way to a certain extent). As such, many editors pour energy into the submission stage rather than the editing one. This is probably editors responding to the results, which is that this strategy works. Focus on buying something good and publishing it rather than improving it in the editorial stage, an improvement most lay readers won’t notice, realistically.

A knock-on effect of this 36-plate job is that, just like an editor’s responsibilities pile up, work that they once would do becomes the work often of literary agents and the authors. Generally, authors are asked to publicize more and literary agents are asked to edit than in the halcyon days of publishing when all three could just hang out in the Hamptons and talk about the work they were going to get to later.

*Cat Herder – Perpetuity, ∞

Okay, bad news for any aspiring editors, it’s actually more than 36 plates. At any time, any previous author or book you’ve ever worked on could reach out with something they need you to do— a movie is going to be made based on their book, they want sales figures, they have a new project for you to look at. If you are successful and you last long enough, your reward is…more plates with more pie.

How to be a Modern Editor

Then how do you do it? What if you want to do all three jobs and be good at them? Not be an email black hole, edit properly, and chase exciting new writers? My dad is fond of recounting a Terry Gross interview in which she presses an ultra-marathoner, who went to the hospital only to return to finish (and win) an insanely long race, on what makes him tick. His answer: you got to love it. What is your secret though? Gross presses on. How do you find the mental capacity? What spiritual, philosophical, or metaphysical set of rules could you possibly pull from to find this reserve of energy to do something so mentally and physically taxing??? Well, he responds, pausing…You just got to love it.

Now this is a joke, but remembering our axiom—the more culturally desirable and interesting a job is the more work it is— you really do have to love doing the work and find energy in it. A good modern editor has to find joy in all three stages of the process. Even though the emails are endless, there is lots of fun to be had planning and plotting with your publishing colleagues, hyping each other up about a great book and the clever ways to tell people about it. There’s a thrill to watching long years of work start to come together and snowball around publication.

I may have a sickness, but editing, mostly, doesn’t feel like pushing a bolder up a hill. Working with authors is often the most fun part of the job for me, engaging in complex, often digressive and always interesting conversations about their work. Getting a glimpse at many forms of expertise and knowledge I don’t posses. Getting let in on their passions. Watching writers become authors and change and improve as artists. And, at risk of sounding cheesy, quite often help fulfill their dreams.

Discovering new talent is always exhilarating. And being the investor-slash-schmoozer exercises a whole different set of skills. It’s always energizing to meet with literary agents, who are generally the similar but more extroverted versions of editors with many stories, interests, and backgrounds.

Doing all three jobs at once is rarely possible, but if you don’t take joy in any of the three it will feel impossible. My advice to any modern editor or anyone really doing a job where the work at times feels limitless, unfinishable and uncatchupable (hi, writers). Wake up, do as much as you can that day until you have to stop. Wake up and do it again. The key is not to neglect your personal relationships or family or down time in some false pursuit that catching up is even possible (it’s not), but knowing when you have to sacrifice for something important and, crucially, not getting caught up in the burnout cycle of working extremely hard and then checking out for days. The key to balancing 36 plates is being consistent, eating your pie one slice at a time, and even… really loving it.

Daunting Classic Tracker: The Book of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin | Page 296/992 (The Tombs of Atuan)

Careful readers will notice this daunting classic tracker has not ticked up in two weeks. A) Your attentiveness is appreciated B) Please refer to the above.