Questions about the sci-fi publishing industry

Cafe Society
1

Asking as a disillusioned reader of sci-fi/fantasy…

I see so many typos and grammatical errors - one author had its/it’s mistakes, a glaring “the guard’s ran down the hallway” (oh yes? the guard’s what?) and mixed up effect/affect the whole way through the book.

So Q1 - do publishers not hire proofreaders anymore or was it always the authors’ responsibility and they’re not doing a proper job anymore? (eg I notice far fewer mistakes in sci-fi/fantasy from the 70s).

My second question relates to the humble trilogy. It seems every fantasy book I pick up in the bookstore proclaims itself as the first book in a <insert overblown adjective> new trilogy. It’s like 3-parters are the new single book and 5 or 7 or 9 parters are the new trilogy. I wouldn’t mind so much if there was enough plot to fill three books, but of the new authors I tried recently, there hasn’t been.

I know why the publishers prefer trilogies, but my second question relates to official policy surrounding it - if a publisher is considering two new authors, will they pick the one with the average trilogy over the one with the single above-average book? Will they say to an author, I like it but make it a trilogy or I won’t publish it?

(It seems this would backfire in the long-term - of five new Australian fantasy trilogy authors I read recently, I only finished the trilogy of one of them - the rest I found so full of filler I just couldn’t be bothered with the next 2 books and I certainly won’t bother with those authors again. Not that they were necessarily bad, but they were just average and I don’t want to waste my precious reading time).

2

The major publishing houses used to be family businesses, but now they’ve most all been bought out by international corporations whose only concern is profits. That’s why you see fewer new authors and you also see more mistakes: they no longer hire line editors to check spelling. They expect the author’s agent to do that.

3

Publishing (and not just SF publishing) used to be run by people who loved books and cared about their product. If a book made money, they were happy.

However, their were invaded by aliens by the planet MBA. The current philosophy (in nearly all businesses) is not to make money, but to make A LOT of money. So a 5% profit is ignored if there’s a chance for an 8% profit. Worse, the item making a 5% profit is discontinued so that you can sell more of the 8% profit items.

As far as the copy editing is concerned, all publishers have cut back on staff. There’s even a believe that, due to spell checkers, copy editing is not really necessary. Also editors have heavier loads, so they can’t give their books the care they need.

As far as the second question is concerned, trilogies sell. However, nearly all editors will take a better than average stand-alone novel over an average trilogy. They might suggest sequels (I prefer stand-alone sequels to a trilogy, myself), but if the book is good, they’ll publish it.

4

I’m confused about the work load on editors. I’m circulating a manuscript now, and all the articles I’ve read suggested in the strongest possible terms that I have the manuscript entirely ready for publishing. No mistakes.

If it’s harder for new authors to get published, editors are focusing on the few proven money-making authors, and the editors don’t have to edit anymore, what the hell is it they’re doing?

Is it just that there are now fewer of them? Or perhaps the job should be renamed, since what they’re doing now isn’t editing, but selecting.

As for longer forms of entertainment, I’m entirely in favor, as long as it’s good entertainment. Music CD’s aren’t long enough. Movies aren’t long enough, and I never want good novels to end.

5

Nangleator, I read this a few months ago:

http://groups.google.com/groups?q="editor's+day"+group:rec.arts.sf.composition&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&selm=G2qG44.7Io%40kithrup.com&rnum=1

It should more or less answer your question.

6

Thanks for the link, Bren.

It is as I suspected. There are so many people who think they’ll strike it rich as writers that an editor’s job can no longer be editing a good book into a perfect, good book. An editor must sort the slush pile into loads of trash and a few saleable works. An editor must also make lots of marketing choices, and perform many chores the agents should be performing.

Plainly, editors are outnumbered and performing too many duties. It will stay that way unless it becomes profitable to have books error free. Guess when that will be. cough

So, if the first pages of a book are so important for catching an editor’s eye, how come the first chapter of every published book isn’t attention grabbing and fascinating? Perhaps they are, but only when the manuscript comes from the slush pile.

7

A friend of mine who was a slushpile reader said he could tell if a book was publishable in the first ten pages of a manuscript. And I don’t think I’ve picked up a published book that didn’t start out with something interesting happening.

And you do have one common misconception: that editors edit books, in the sense of fixing all the errors in them. They don’t, and (almost) never have. The book has to be publishable when it crosses the editor’s desk, or forget it.

The acquiring editor (and the manuscript goes through a first reader or an agent before getting to her), reads the manuscript as a reader would. She doesn’t highlight errors because it isn’t her manuscript (though if the manuscript is disposable, then she may fix a few just in case). The main concern is to determine if this is a good book and the if there is a place for it at the publisher.

The issue is mostly in the use of copyeditors, whose job is to go through a manuscript line by line and eliminate errors. As I said, some think copyediting is not as necessary because of spell checkers, but copyediting is a lot more than just proofing the spelling.

8

Just how could I have come up with that notion? :wink:

I know my manuscript has to be flawless, and I guess I’m lumping copyeditors and editors together in my mind.

Just a frustrated outsider, just beginning my rejection letter collection.

9

One of the thing that boggles my mind about Sci-fi Publishing is the cheesy cover art. I’m not made of wood - I judge books by their covers. I remember having to tell my brother to get past the cover of “Ender’s Game” and read it.

10

You’re extemely lucky then. I’ve come across far too many books, particularly by successful authors, that have extremely boring opening chapters.

11

One thing that hasn’t been mentioned about the SF (not sci-fi; never sci-fi) world is that virtually all manuscripts purchased by the few remaining major publishers have come in through agents.

These days the editing chores that used to be the province of the house editor has been pushed back to the agent. A good agent will work with the author to improve the manuscript before it is sent in.

When I submitted my first novel, my agent told it was too long and needed to be cut way back. I took an objective look at it and was embarrassed to realize that I had had such a good time developing my world that much of the exposition was unnecessary to the plot and large chunks of it could be removed.

You couldn’t tell this by the opening chapters, because that’s not where the bloat was. If an agent doesn’t provide this service it’s very possible that an editor could be seduced by the beginning and acquire a book that still needs work. This must happen often, because way too many books I see are way too long.

Was my agent right in this? I don’t know because the manuscript is still making the rounds. See above for why it takes so long to hear back from an editor, even though it’s an enormous problem for everyone.

The opposite tends to happen in non-fiction. My agents have never commented on my non-fiction manuscripts, but my editors have always had a lot of questions, even to the point of having an outside expert vet one book.

A manuscript also good through many steps before publishing. The editor sees it and probably marks it up or asks questions that must be answered.

Then it goes to a copyeditor. Copyediting has almost entirely been pushed outside the company to freelancers. These range from OK to horrible.

The marked-up manuscript goes back to the writer, who must decipher all the scribbling and notes and decide what to change and what to fight for.

Then the manuscript is put into galley proofs where all the changes must be put in and hopefully no new mistakes added and sent back to the writer.

Then the manuscript is put into uncorrected proofs where all the changes must be put in and hopefully no new mistakes added and sent back to the writer.

Then the manuscript, with all the additional emendations, is sent to the printer, where it is hoped that no new mistakes will be made, because nobody can catch these before it hits the stores.

It’s a horrible process but it does make for better books than would be the case if the original manuscript were put directly into the hands of readers.

But that’s exactly what happens with all these electronic “publishers” like iUniverse or FirstBooks or Xlibris. And that’s why writers who are already in the industry scream and yell and put up a fuss that this is not real publishing, merely a new form of vanity press (unless you pay huge amounts extra for their “editing services”). Giving people raw manuscripts to read is not the same as publishing and those going this route are finding out from their sales – i.e. their lack of sales – that people can tell the difference.

12

Amen. The art (both cover and for stories) in whatever sci-fi mag I get (the one that’s not Asimov) is cringeworthy sometimes. Tasteful and understated is an unknown concept I think. I’ve seen school newsletters with better design.

13

Analog, possibly?

I love that magazine, but I turn out better stuff for urological surgery products every week.

I’d love to do a cover for them, cheap, but art for publishing is another industry I’m an outsider of.

14

Oh, I don’t know. Sci-fi wouldn’t be sci-fi without cheesy pulp art. :slight_smile:

15

Re: cover art: There is the Jim Frenkel theory of paperback cover art:

Paperback covers are not designed to attract the reader. They are designed to attract the eye of the truck driver who load them into the racks at the supermarket. Because if you don’t get the books into the racks, it’ll never sell.

Of course, nowadays, few supermarkets have paperback racks and you’ll rarely see SF in newsstands. But once a practice begins in an organization, it goes forever.

16

As a (budding) sci-fi author and artist I’ve been on both sides of the equation here.

The written work I’ve had published has gone through a fairly long process of editing and checking. My first draft (which is, of course, gammatically flawless) is read and amended first by my editor and then passed to a proofreader before coming back to me for checking. I then read it through and make a few minor changes such as substituting a word here and there and correcting the odd error of punctuation (that, and lets be clear about this, they introduced. Yeah, that’s it). After that it goes back for typesetting and is read by yet another proofreader.

I got a call at work yesterday from the publisher because the proofreader had never heard of tabi socks and thought it was a mistake.

Sci-Fi covers, I think, suffer because it’s often difficult to come up with an original looking image that captures the frequently abstract themes of the book. Let’s face it, there are a million books with a spaceship and a planet on the cover so if you’re going to stand out you’re faced with a tough challenge.

Quality of the artwork can overcome this, which I think is the case with Chasm City by Alastair Reynolds. A pretty generic theme nicely done.

At the lower end of the market where many cover artwork disasters occur the images may be produced by friends of the author or people at the publisher. Quite often it’s given a pretty low priority. But these problems aren’t just confined to science fiction - a lot of non-genre titles have appalling covers.

The cover artwork I’ve done (for books and CD audioplays) has always been based on a thorough understanding of the piece it’s representing. I’ve listened to the plays and read the books I’ve produced covers for, and I think this is an important step that can be overlooked if deadlines are tight. A great many covers are so generic they could pretty much go on any genre title.

Anyway, rambling over with. If anyone’s interested, you can see some of my stuff here (and that concludes my shameless self-promotion as well).

17

Everybody in the field will agree that there are huge differences in cover art between US books and UK books, and I expect that most people think that UK books hve classier and less cliched covers.

Look at what the US market considers as standard for generic space opera and fantasy covers.

You’ll see these multiplied by a million in a US store. I like even your bad examples better than these.

18

Some of the worst cover art has got to be on Heinlein’s stuff. Granted this stuff was put out when everything was cheesy but the covers for alot of his stuff hasn’t been ravamped (those that have are pretty cool though).

19

Science fiction has always been a cheap-ass venue of publishing. Barry Malzberg, in his book “Engines of the Night” confessed that during his decade-long tenure as editor of a couple of the major SF mags he handed out just $250,000 in payments for stories of all kinds. This was to the top SF authors of the day – Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, etc.

There just isn’t any money in it for anybody but a few publishers and a fortunate few authors. Everybody else lives on beans and hope. You shouldn’t be surprised by ANY level of cheapness in SF pubishing, if it was possible the current set of MBA publishers would make the authors pay to get published and make the readers pay to re-read books as well as read them, and print the books on crap with water-soluble ink. They’ve always relied on the authors, editors and fans to put whatever might be worthwhile into the genre.

20

Well that’s nice to know.

So… how DO you get a job as a slushpile reader?
And Exapno Mapcase - but if we all call it SF then no-one will be able to find the sci-fi threads with the search function :wink: