There’s also the question of timing a release. The November release date is perfect for getting the book out for Christmas that year. November 2009 would not be enough time, but by waiting for November of 2010 they’ll have a blockbuster to lead off the Christmas season.
My daughter is a copyeditor and I resent that insinuation. You should see what garbage she gets and you would not like books that were not copyedited; trust me on that.
However, I once published a book in England and the copyeditor had no notion of subjunctive. He (or she) would take a perfectly good sentence such as, “A necessary and sufficient that a complex have a contraction is…” and he wanted the “have” changed to “has”. I have since discovered that the subjunctive has disappeared from British usage.
It is pretty clear that you don’t know what Little Nemo does, but somehow I expect that if “every product [he] turn[s] out will be out the door in one third the time”, he’d have a lot less work to do, rather than more.
Huh? If it takes x amount of work to get a product out the door and someone has 1/3 the time to do it in, then that someone has to work three times the usual workday during that interval. If not, then quality suffers. And if so, people suffer.
And for what? Say that the company manages to get the Bujold book out six months early. It’ll get them nothing, because that won’t sell any more books. And now they have a huge hole in the October list.
And Hari Seldon, it’s a JOKE. Writers say much worse things about editors. Editors say much worse things about writers. We both say much worse things about agents. Agents say… And on and on. Do you really live in a world and work in a business that is any different?
It might help if you think of publication as a very long assembly line, with a few built-in bottlenecks.
At any given time the publisher I work for, which is small, has about 20 projects in the pipeline, so that I might be working on four or five manuscripts at the same time, and usually what I’m working on is prioritized in the order that we received the manuscripts. After I’m done with it, the ms. gets sent back to the author (or authors), and sometimes we don’t get it back for months, particularly if there are multiple authors. So this can be a bottleneck.
Then we make our changes and set it up for typesetting, after which the books get reviewed by my boss, and there is one bottleneck for sure, as there are several editors, but only one person reviewing the mss. Then decisions are made about the cover, and to whether it will be printed in-house or sent away, and if in-house, the books are printed one at a time, so there’s another bottleneck.
When I wrote novels, again, there were various editors, but there was always one senior editor who had to approve everything.
And then there’s the marketing department, who decides when would be the most optimal time (for the publisher) to release the final product.
The sales people work at least six months in advance getting preorders.
So, yes, you can push one project ahead and get it through in less time, but this always means that other projects have to wait. A big New York publisher might do it for a time-sensitive book, mainly when a topic is hot for some reason. The publisher I work for has a big push in the spring and early summer for books that people will want in classrooms in September.
But you can’t do that for all the books without seriously readjusting your assembly line.
It’s like the thing about how you can actually build a house, from framing to whatever the end of housebuiding is, in a matter of hours if the coordination is there, but usually houses take a lot longer. (I don’t think you could do a book in a matter of hours, though, unless you only wanted one copy and it was already written and you didn’t care if it was edited.)
Exapno, we seem to have different ideas about how a discussion works. It’s not a situation where a bunch of us gather in ignorance until one person shows up to reveal the Truth. I see it as a conversation between people with varying amounts of knowledge. Some of us know very little about the subject and some know quite a bit about the subject. But nobody knows everything. Which means there is not going to be a point when one person can say “I’ve settled this issue. No further discussion is needed.”
If you feel my attitude is an indication that I am too foolish to perceive the heights of your vastly superior experience correctly, then so be it. Accept that I am incapable of receiving the knowledge you are offering and don’t feel obligated to try to inform me in the future. You won’t be troubled by my ignorance and I believe my ignorance is more likely to be diminished by others.
I am SHOCKED and APPALLED that a copyeditor would tamper with the crystal clarity of that prose!
I think that LOL is greatly overused and has lost its original meaning, but you did indeed make me laugh out loud this morning.
NOTE TO COPYEDITORS: This doesn’t mean I hate copyeditors. Copyeditors make me look good by catching my stupid mistakes. I only hate the copyeditors that don’t realize that (a) copyeditors make mistakes, too, sometimes and (b) sometimes clarity requires breaking punctuation rules.
As an example of (b), I discovered long ago that if you follow the (American) English convention of placing commas and periods inside of quotation marks in a computer book, and those quotation marks are surrounding something the reader is supposed to type into a computer, they will type the punctuation.
Your cynicism is quite justified. A friend had his book release slipped by four months to move it away from competing titles and bring it out when there were fewer distractions.
True. The hot-button issue, especially. But being well-regarded has nothing to do with it. As an example, the 17th book in my animal scat series for kids required just as much vetting by the Park Service as the 1st. If I want the rangers in the park where the book is sold to promote it, then I have to give them an opportunity to get involved in the prepublication process.
Having worked in that business, let me explain the difference. Your typical novel will have one author and a few other people working on it when the writing is complete (editor, copyeditor, proofreader, cover designer…). A typical complex computer book will have multiple authors and a myriad of others working on it in parallel. I have picked up fast-turn tech books that had three editors, dozens of authors, and an acknowledgment list that went on for two pages. This is one of the reasons that a paperback novel costs $14.00 (less in MMP) but a paperback tech book costs $30.00 and up (my last tech book sells for over $70).
Timing the release date for prime, book buying season, can give even a ‘sell itself’, well known, author a bump in sales that can get them onto the Best Seller’s list or, even, onto the long list for an award.
Let the professionals do their jobs, they know the market.
I was jesting, Hari. I noted so later, and later suggested that copyeditors were as worthy of contempt as a long-extinct Italic civilization and a near-extinct ursine species, and after that noted that my own deathless prose was needed incineration more than editing, so I thought it was pretty clear I did not mean to be taken seriously. Plus I’m me.
Good hell.
Editor checking in:
That’ll be $75.00. You can just drop it into my Paypal account. 
Just send me the digits and the Benjamins are yours. Really. You can trust me. It’s not like I’m a super-villain looking for some subtle ingress into your life.
Incidentally…
At myself, author of the bolded mistake: :smack:
At the various editor types: :eek::p:D