Last year on the Tor Books blog I wrote a piece about how frustrated I was that there were so few decent girl's figures for my daughter to play with. I even challenged a toy buyer I knew for one of the major chains as to why this was the case - she seemed not to have really given it much thought but suspected it may well be because the toy makers thought they wouldn't sell.
So I did a blog piece last week about the types and styles of editing there were. I concentrated predominantly on traditional publishing editors because that’s what I’d spent the last fifteen years doing!
Here I go into a bit more detail about what I used to do with an editorial report and get an author's perspective on how their experience of the process was.
So over the last few weeks I've seen a few discussions about the value of editors. Some authors decrying the need for such a resource and others passionately defending them. There also seemed to be quite a lot of confusion as to what it is an editor actually does. Do they do line work, structural, copyediting? What's the difference? And how do freelance editors differ from those working in a traditional publishing house? Let's find out . . .
So it's been a month or so since I left Tor UK and all my wonderful authors there. And I've been slowly going through the submissions that have been sent in to me. I have to say I've been hugely impressed by the quality! But, there was one that immediately captured my attention. Just with the first line. 'I was seven years old the first time my uncle poisoned me.'
Having worked in publishing I've been used to working in the evenings and at weekends doing submission reading. There was never really time to do this during office hours. Because of this and the limited publication slots where we could place things I became a really tough audience to satisfy. You develop quite a focus when it's your time you're giving up - and the pressure of publishing means that even if you love something you may not get it through a business meeting. So if you're not fully engaged within the first three chapters then you're probably not going to be.
So at this year's London Book Fair I was invited to moderate a panel to discuss this very question. Joining me were David Bradley, the editor and chief of SFX and Total Film magazines and Rosie Fletcher, the editor of Total Film. It was a lively discussion and the audience seemed to enjoy it but it did get me thinking. What is this 'mainstream'? Is it an invite-only club? What do you have to do to get this collective's attention? And is this 'mainstream' welcoming to genre or do they shun it?
