Or should that be ‘everyone’? I know there’s a difference, but which one is right? If they’re both ‘right’, which one is better? What do I really mean?

I am full of questions today because I’m fresh from a Copy-Editing Skills course at the Publishing Training Centre – which was absolutely marvellous, by the way – and it’s really got me thinking about the whole job of being an editor.

An editor’s role has been likened to that of a midwife in bringing a book into being. (I find it a bit of an icky analogy, but actually it’s pretty apt.) Editors support their authors during the conception and gestation of a project, providing a sounding board for ideas and nurturing the manuscript as it develops. Then, when the delivery date arrives, the editor is there to make sure the book gets cleaned up before it goes out into the world.

This is where I come in, in my current role. I get given a text which has been whipped into shape by a senior editor, so it has a nice, logical narrative progression, and I turn it into a physical book. Enlisting designers and typesetters, we make it look like a book (page numbers, illustrations, that sort of thing), proof-read for consistency,  Anglicise American texts, commission indexes, and make sure all the preliminary material like copyright notices are in their proper places.

It’s all important stuff, but this work should all be invisible to the end user: the reader. They are also all pretty obvious tasks that one would assume are carried out on a book before publication. Someone is charged with fact-checking (don’t want to get those dates wrong in a history book), someone checks the spelling, someone makes sure the index is set out in alphabetical order, and so on. As it should be – we want readers to get lost in the story and not stumble over incorrect spellings or be distracted by messy footnotes.

But as I begin to work on new titles, and the more I see of more senior editors in action, the more I appreciate just how much more invisible editorial work goes into each book up to this point, and how much authors need their editors. There’s a romantic notion of the lonely author toiling away over their script which is published exactly as is.

Not so. Good writing comes from serious reflection. Some writers think intensely before they ever put pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard, and others need someone else to do the thinking for them, after they have completed a manuscript. Plays are developed, revised and rewritten through workshopping to see what actually works. So editors act as the workshop for a book, reflecting back at the author what their readers will understand from their writing, and how to give them the best reading experience possible.

In a non-fiction work, this might mean doing research themselves to see what are the key content areas to cover in a given topic. Or, at a later stage in the writing, to suggest reorganising material with features such as graphics or fact boxes to make the information more easily digestible. In a work of fiction, it might mean serious revision to the structure of a work. One editor I know, for example, suggested an author rewrite their book from a different, different gender, character’s viewpoint. They worked on several new drafts and eventually the book got published.

This is the kind of serious, wholesale input that editors have to books, and yet their names are at most, if their authors are polite, mentioned in the ‘acknowledgements’ section. They have huge influence over a final text, but it remains the author’s work, just as actors in a play workshop are not credited with revising their playscript. Writers need outside input to improve their works. I for one know I could do with an editor – a good friend said that she enjoys my blogging but ‘doesn’t always know what my conclusion is’. Harsh, but fair. I have to try to be my own editor, to look at my work afresh, seeing what my readers will see and filling the gaps or deleting the repetition.

But it’s hard! It’s very difficult to get that objective perspective on your own work – you’re too involved, you’ve written it. Of course the story makes sense to you, it came from your head, but have you explained everything to your reader? A trained editor knows what the reader needs, and can help the two of you connect.

There was a rather gloomy article on Bookbrunch about how all publishers are getting rid of editors in favour of promoting from Sales and Marketing departments into Commissioning roles. Well, maybe we’ll never be made MDs, but editors are the ones who make the books you buy into books you love reading, so there’s a place for us yet in the publishing firmament. Even if we’re invisible.