Via Pete Simon, I found this essay by Jeff Norton about making raising the visibility of editors as part of a larger effort to educate people (or maybe just authors) about why publishers exist, and should continue to exist.

I believe the most important role that publishers perform is the one they are strangely reluctant to celebrate: the editor and the process of editing an author’s manuscript into a readable book.

The editor doesn’t just champion a manuscript from printed page to finished book (or digital file) but shapes the core creative asset by working with the author to get the very best version of the book down on the page.

In the film world, this would be the equivalent of the producer and the film editor combined, and in that world, both roles are credited on the poster!

And yet the book editor’s role remains anonymous, obscured in the wings whilst the author takes centre stage… reducing the publisher’s perceived functions to fronting advances and shipping physical books to physical shops.

Having worked as an editor and now being more or less a full-time writer, I agree that the work of editors is tragically overlooked and under-rated. There are a few editors who are famous, but I think it’s safe to say that newspaper and magazine editors are better-known than book editors (who outside the profession knows the brilliant Jenny Uglow, for example?), and often they’re more famous for their politics (Henry Luce), spotting talent early on (Wallace Shawn at The New Yorker, John Campbell at Amazing Stories) or being outsized personalities (Anna Wintour).

Some of it has to do with, as Norton says, “the incorrect sentiment that books are created by only one person”; but neither publishers nor editors have seen a lot of need to promote editorial work until recently. If you were a publisher, you could just assume that any serious author would come into the fold; self-publishing had zero respectability.

These days, I think it’s taken more seriously for two reasons. First, enough publishers have stopped doing serious editing to call into question whether any publisher adds value to the enterprise of writing a book. Second, self-publishing has gotten a LOT easier and cheaper, and the print-on-demand (or better yet, download to your Kindle) model has changed the economics for self-publishers. If you self-publish and you sell a lot of copies of your book, you can trumpet that on your Web site; if your project sinks like a stone, you can put it down the memory hole.

I thought about self-publishing the contemplative computing book, but decided to try working with an agent and publisher. I’ve never regretted the choice, because my agent and editor have made the book much better.

My agent Zoë Pagnamenta pushed me to think more commercially about my project, without dumbing it down, and as a result I wrote a book outline that I was much, much happier with. (As a futurist and consultant, I learned the difference between making challenging ideas useful and accessible, and throwing together a bunch of jargon that let you look good. I did both.) She got a far larger advance than I ever would have been able to negotiate on my own, which made it possible for me to work on it full-time (though I have to write quickly– kids are expensive!). My editor, John Parsley, (here’s a pretty good profile) has helped shape the tone and style of the book, and will do even more when I give him the complete manuscript.

In other words, what I get out of the deal is an organization that’s committed to the success of your project. You’re getting access to a lot of detailed knowledge about the industry; editorial expertise; design expertise; and the attention of lots of other people whose jobs depend on making your book a success.

This does not mean that this apparatus is built only to amplify my your personal muse. In fact, I don’t see myself as a creative genius whose vision must be unsullied by the marketplace. I’m a craftsman. I learned a ronin samurai-like attitude to writing as a consultant: you pay me, my work is yours. No smart client would want to dictate conclusions– they pay to have their horizons expanded– but the work was often improved by knowing what they were really interested in. (Someone recently described Southeby’s as successful because “the auction house is unshackled from intellectual pretense by its pure attention to the marketplace.” I would love to have that lack of intellectual pretense.)

For me, my relationship with my editor and publisher falls right into this client model. The publisher has paid for a manuscript, and our mutual understanding is that so long as the checks cash, they have the right to change it to make it more salable.

And I’m confident that the book will be much better for that intervention. I know I’m better for working within this machinery. I’ve really enjoyed working on the book, precisely because it’s forced me to stretch myself: I have to write faster, focus harder, and write in a more personal, accessible way than I ever have before. And the fact that I have a contract and an outline means I have deadlines, I have creative choices that we’ve already made and I don’t need to revisit, and I can focus on producing what I’ve agreed to produce.

Indeed, I suspect most books would be improved by this kind of back-and-forth. I know we all love the stories of books that are rejected by fifty publishers but go on to become classics, but those are very much the exceptions rather than the rule: for every Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance there are thousands of books that are made much better by good editors.

None of this structure would exist if I were self-publishing. At the very least, I’d have to build it myself, my up-front investment would be huge, both in time and money. I don’t particularly want to go out and find my own editor, and come up with the money to pay them, even if I got a larger chunk of the profits. (Plus I’m calculating that Little Brown can make me more money than I can on my own.)

So would I ever self-publish? If the book takes off, I can imagine having a personal imprint that handles things that a book publisher wouldn’t be interested in. Say, a book on contemplative spaces that’s heavy on pictures and relatively light on text (light in this case being 5,000-8,000 words, like a long journal article), but isn’t meant to be a Rizzoli-style coffee-table architecture book (I don’t have a good enough camera, but my pictures would look find in PDF). Or a small book in the 10,000-20,000 word range on a more focused topic within contemplative computing (say, contemplative computing and the academy). And these would be priced low, to help spread the word and encourage sales of the (printed) ur-text.

In contrast, if I had a longer project on contemplative computing and business, I’d definitely make it book length, and shop it around: not only would it be a better book if I worked with an editor and press that knew the business book market, I could charge a lot more for talks with a book from Wiley or HBS on my resume.

So what can editors and publishers do to keep serious authors working in the system? I think it may be possible to promote the public image of editors, not so much as gatekeepers, but more as Tim Gunn-like characters– people who know a lot, who have a distinctive voice, but who mainly are devoted to developing a critical eye and helping authors become better at what they do. (When I was an editor, my cardinal rule was to make the manuscript more like what they author wanted to write, not more like what I would have written.)

As for publishers, I think the key thing is to reveal how they support the development of this kind of talent in ways that the open market does not, and they can bring to bear resources that help the creative process. There are tons of freelance editors that a self-publisher could in theory hire; publishers need to make clear that they can build and support editorial talent and craft, and in so doing become a better place for authors as well.

Okay, back to real writing.