Richard Eoin Nash

Yes, Mr. Ross’s article is very irritating. Especially when large corporate publishers threaten to pull all the editing from books if e-versions are to be sold for $4.00.

I’ve been seeing typos (homonyms particularly) in books for close to 20 years now, and widowed white lines where the author has fiddled with one part of a loooong Word document and the text hasn’t re-adjusted properly, and dropped words, and dropped lines… There are now typos in the New Yorker.

I’ve seen Australian publishers publish excellent books of non-fiction - except that the last paragraph undercut the entire premise of the book and should never have been included. The pipeline version of publishing means books that need rewrites must go out in September, as scheduled, regardless.

I confess, my friend, I am puzzled: what editing, fact-checking, or copy-editing remains? What’s left to cut? There’s no bone on that bone. (I read the same threat when David Baldacci was defending Amazon / Kindle-prices. Could there be … talking points?)

I used to work for a [famous name] book publisher and distributor of books, where, with all respect for both the dictionary and reality, the practice could only be described as price-gouging. When this family-held company arrived at the point of ushering an outsider onto the Board, this man sold the editing department (the only dept. that did consistently earn double-digit profits) so the company could make double-digit profits, like the television station he came from.

Which leads us, or at least me, to the related question of CEO craziness.

Sometimes the causes are organic. That one went quite quietly, after the diagnosis. But mostly the craziness is self-induced.

At the large book-related org where I work now, it became the fashion to say, about 10 years ago, “I don’t have to know what you do in order to manage you.” And so the CEO hired friends, and friends of friends, until, 10 years later, nobody in senior management has actually done what the organization is set up to do. CEOs’ terror of being behind the curve leads them into fantasias of self-regard every time another idea blows down the speaking-tubes.

It’s because no one in senior management can work a customer service desk or abattoir line that these orgies of organizational self-destruction are so hard to stop once they get started.

Immediately recent example: the major motion picture studios are now dismantling their distribution-chains, with nothing to replace them but some idea that people will go to their websites and order DVDs. The studios have never been brand;: the products were too variable, the actors were too fungible, and, after the collapse of the studio system, the deals too intricate. Nonetheless, the studios wish to be brands, and so they will be, and so the world will flock to their websites because –

Because, as we all know, major publishers are no better at buying books than Blind Freddie’s dog.

If major publishers knew what they were doing the 9-month no-circ list at your local public library wouldn’t be the fulsome document it is; if major publishers knew what they were doing there’d be no inspirational tales of [Famous Book] being “passed on” 23 times; they knew what they were doing they wouldn’t be bidding for books, one imprint against another from the same house; if they knew what they were doing they wouldn’t have laid off their editors and forced them to become new and noticeable costs as agents; if they knew what they were doing, they wouldn’t be forcing new / aspiring writers to go to independent editing services for actual editing, to eat the loss and lower their own earnings past sustainability.  (E-books can forgo editing. The majors have been for years.)

If major publishers are peopled by “idealists and lovers of literature” and still manage to be an astounding farrago of disrespect for the reader, the writer, and the ink, it could be that the owners of major publishing brands are no more “idealists and lovers of literature” than the publishers of major newspapers are left-leaning journalists.

I know all this is a response to Mr. Ross’s article. It echoes your own frustration.

    – MF (11/11 02:43 PM)

Richard,

Where are we in the next venture?

Need updates to pacify the book building masses, myself among them.

Require input reports from street level gang warfare aka publishing industry circa late 2009.

A.

    – A. E (12/09 09:38 PM)