How Digital Should and Could an Editor Be?

Today, as a sort of Christmas gift 🎁, my publisher surprised me by sending our latest author contract to be signed electronically.

Looking Back to „Analogous Publishing“

When I was an intern at Piper's, an author contract was something which would make an author travel to Munich to have it solemnly signed and countersigned 📜. Authors generally delivered their manuscripts on paper. I remember one who sent every single page via air mail from Nicosia where he had typewritten it on ultra-lightweight paper using a really really worn ink ribbon. The editorial assistant had to photocopy every page before we gave it to the junior editor to work on it. Another manuscript I „rewrote“ using scissors and glue. Still another author, an emeritus of Byzantine studies 👑, told me he rewrote every book at least five times. The manuscript's quality was awesome! But needless to say, it was a short manuscript he delivered.

Enter the Word Processor

When I was a junior editor, the first translators started delivering printed manuscripts which obviously had been written with word processors. Some translators produced more than a thousand pages per year and were obliged to review the edits I did.

Manuscripts grew fatter and fatter and more redundant and fluffy meanwhile.

So, obviously they profited most from being able to incorporate the edits they accepted into the finished manuscripts as easily as possible. Authors followed suite in the years to come but still the main effect of using word processors was that, on average, the manuscripts grew fatter and fatter (and more redundant and fluffy meanwhile). The emeritus 🎓 mentioned above would have rotated in his grave at this.

The First Digital Manuscripts

The first book which had to be edited on-screen was delivered on a floppy disk and done on my private PC as the editorial department was one of the last departments which got computers. This was not considered necessary as, other than in sales, marketing, production, finance or legal heavy data processing and serial production were absent and there were assistants who did the typewriting for their editors.

Big Machines and Integrated Book Production

In my next job, editorial and prepress were tightly interlocked. Every one of them had a huuuge Mac and worked hand in hand to produce high-quality layouts for authors to review and approve them. Most authors were business people who had no time to waste on manual rewriting. So, they were easily persuaded to deliver on data carriers.

The administrative stuff, however, had to be done by a secretary to whom I dictated what had to be printed and mailed. E-Mail was not yet in use, and I was now the laggard without any device on my desk. I did my preliminary title planning on my private PC, printed it in list form and took it to the publishing director's secretary who fed the data into an AS 400 from where the IT staff once a week printed those huge green-and-white lists they distributed to every staff member. What was missing in those lists didn't exist for the rest of the people.

Influencing the Pace ⏰ of Change

In the next years, email and publishing software took over. I was temporarily out of that line of business, and I was confident what my former colleagues had practiced before was now standard.

So, I was really surprised when I read a bestselling author's account of a discussion with an editor who insisted to have each and every manuscript printed for no reason understandable to her.

Of course persons who engaged in manuscript processing did their work computer-based, shrinking the once-powerful typesetters to mere converters and bug chasers – at least as long as there were no pictures involved in the books-to-be. But the rest, although doing their everyday correspondence via email and thus saving administrative capacities, still seemed to venerate those fat chunks of paper attesting their authors' achievement.

If anyone is to change that cautious approach to digitization it's not the editorial staff itself.

It's easy to see that digitization enhances transparency. And transparency, in turns, is nothing an editorial department overtly profits from.

The Key to Really Engage Editorial to Digitize

Some of the reasons for this are easy to understand. Long-term creative processes play a much bigger role for the quality of their work's outcome than elsewhere, and not without justification they regard transparency as adversary to untroubled creative processes. Marketing creatives do their digital work as a part of what they see on their payslips end of the month, and they get two to five times the money an average author gets. Besides that, few authors occupy themselves primarily with their manuscripts but have a bread job which pays for their rent and food and allows them to do their writing exclusively in their leisure time which may or may not be undisturbed, the latter case being unfavorable to creating good text.

So, how could marketing pros understand an author's trouble when she or he is blocked by unforeseeable obstacles but doesn't have time to concentrate on overcoming them?

Other reasons are less closely connected to protecting the authors from the requests by other departments. The biggest of them may be a strategy to monopolize the relation between author and publisher in order to be able to interpret the authors' voice according to own vested interests. This interpretation may, at a maximum, amount to manipulation with the goal of easing the pressure which is considerable on editors.

We might infer that a glance at this pressure might be a key to having staff in general and editors in particular being more favorable to digital transparency. So, it's not just departmental culture which has to be influenced but first and foremost the division and proceduralization of work which should be analyzed and, if necessary, realigned to detect unnecessary steps and allocate the necessary steps to the departments which can execute them best in terms of quality and time.

Most editors will then gladly comply to all necessities digitization comes with because they too are vested in providing maximum success to their authors and rather report good bottom lines to them instead of bad ones.