Via The Globe and Mail: Where have all the book editors gone? Excerpt:
Authors, finding today’s downsized publishers increasingly unwilling to invest their own resources in the often laborious process of polishing rough diamonds into marketable gems, are now often forced to hire their own editors – before even before submitting their manuscripts for publication.
Toronto literary agent Anne McDermid saw the landscape changing two years ago, when a publisher told her, “I cannot purchase a book I need to spend 40 hours editing.”
As a result, McDermid added, “we are now advising our authors that the material they present has got to be closer to the final draft than it ever used to be.” Sometimes the agents themselves act as pre-editors.
“Or, for those authors who can afford it,” McDermid said, “the biggest-growing sector in Canadian publishing is the freelance editor.”
Along with booming self-publishing services that offer various levels of editing as value-added options, a cottage industry of independent contractors is quickly replacing the fabled tastemakers who once shaped literary destiny, and the effect on its quality is an open question.
They're really shooting themselves in the foot. They're making it less and less appealing to traditionally publish. And that annoys me.
Posted by: SMD | February 05, 2011 at 07:04 AM