Where have all the book editors gone? They've gone freelance!

John Barber - From Saturday's Globe and Mail, Feb. 05, 2011

What did the most famous, sought-after woman of her time do in order to escape the limelight forever and basically cease to exist in the public eye? Simple: She became a book editor.

Only now, more than a decade after she died, is the world finally learning exactly what Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis did for the last 20 years of her life. All is revealed thanks to two books – Greg Lawrence’s Jackie as Editor: The Literary Life of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and William Kuhn’s Reading Jackie: Her Autobiography in Books – that this month joined the 80-odd other Onassis biographies currently in print.

But if the Queen of America succeeds today where she failed while alive – to make book editing glamorous – it will be thanks to nostalgia for yet another vanished Camelot. With the publishing industry in turmoil, beset by competitive challenges unknown a decade ago, the long-lunching gentlefolk who once managed the mysterious process of literary midwifery are being replaced by fast-paced production workers, paid by the paragraph and often operating from home. If Jackie O were still in the game, she would likely be outsourced.

Among the recognizable Canadian publishers that have laid off editors since the economic downturn are Penguin Canada, McClelland & Stewart and Key Porter, which stopped publishing altogether early in the new year. Even plucky Gaspereau Press, the Nova Scotia publisher that brought out Johanna Skibsrud’s Scotiabank Giller Prize-winning novel, The Sentimentalists, has laid off its only full-time editor.
“We just couldn’t afford it,” said Gaspereau co-publisher Andrew Steeves, adding that he is happy to do the work himself. At the same time, he worries about the ultimate effect of industry-wide downsizing. “How do you cultivate a professional publishing ethic it you’re farming everything out?”

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.”

Full story here.