Opinion: Who'd be an editor?
Stephen Guise writing for BookBrunch

The people who tend to the words are the most endangered contributors to the publishing process, Stephen Guise writes:

At the end of March 2008 I left Little, Brown, where I had worked as an editor and then a commissioning editor for some six and a half years. There were a number of reasons for my leaving, but quite significant was Hachette’s decidedly cautious approach to serious non-fiction, in which I had come to specialise. That caution was, it is now clear, quite justified. This article, however, is not a contribution to the endlessly rehearsed literary-commercial debate (on which my views are relatively straightforward: yes, it’s always been like this; and, no, it’s never been as bad as this), but about some of the implications for the career prospects of editors.

Which is one thing to be said for freelance work - especially when you haven’t got any: it leaves time for reflection. And so, speaking to a prominent publisher-editor at a launch party towards the end of last year, I commented on the number of commissioning positions that were going to people with marketing or publicity backgrounds.

One recentish example is that of Colin Midson, a publicity director at Bloomsbury who is now a commissioning editor at Simon & Schuster. Another example: Matt Phillips, who is now editorial director at Yellow Jersey and was, says the Bookseller, a creative manager at CCV. (The names thing is invidious, and I hope it goes without saying that this isn’t ad hominem, and that it will become clear that this isn’t about the non-editors who are promoted into commissioning roles, but about the editors who aren’t.)
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