The State of the Editing Profession Today

The book publishing world has been lamenting since about the 1950s the decline in the editing profession. It simply isn't what it used to be. In 1989, Gerald Howard, a prominent editor in New York publishing houses, wrote an essay, "Mistah Perkins, He Dead," which is a landmark essay among many that have bemoaned the plight of today's editors in the major conglomerate publishing houses. Their days are filled with meetings, correspondence, phone calls, appointments, luncheons, and administrative work. As far as editing goes, they have to take work home with them, and they simply don't have time to deeply edit anything any more. It's true. Conglomerate publishers don't accept manuscripts that need a lot of editorial work. The ones they accept, they line edit and copy edit under a demanding timetable and then move on.

Literary agent Richard Curtis wrote a spoof for Publishers Weekly for April Fools' Day several years ago in which he analyzed the work day of an editor. He took the time trapped in traffic, time for lunch, for editorial board meetings, coffee breaks, personal phone calls, industry gossip, taking things up with the powers that be, noodling with the figures, running down one last figure from production, hunting for manuscripts, sending out résumés to other publishers, etc., subtracted all those chores from the length of the typical work day, and concluded: "Total hours devoted to advancing the cause of literature ... 0.00" It's funny because it rings so true.

Larger publishing houses want manuscripts that are nearly ready for publication, that don't take a lot of time to make into great books. They generally don't accept unsolicited manuscripts, but depend on agents to weed out all but the very best, and may even depend on the agents to get them edited before they are even submitted.

On the other hand, many smaller independent houses, who might have the time and the inclination to edit carefully, have trouble getting truly talented editors.

Mapletree has sought to address this problem by using the "virtual office" business model that several publishing houses across the country are trying. Rather than work in a central location, we recruit people to work from their homes. These are often talented, highly-trained professionals who love editing but for one reason or another want to stay home. Office expenses are thus minimized, editors don't become embroiled in administrative work, and the quality of the editing increases. Our talent pool is the entire country—we're not confined to the talent we can find in any geographical area.

Authors working with Mapletree often find that our editorial process is different from what they're used to. Our editing is more rigorous. Editors who have come to work with us are pleasantly surprised at the attention we give to editing. More than just superficially editing the way they have seen in some other publishing houses, we actually ask them to take time to work with authors to raise the level of their writing.