There is a society for young publishers, you know. Ingeniously, it’s called ‘The Society of Young Publishers’, or the ‘SYP’. They run speaker meetings, social events, and contribute to industry bodies as well as just being a group of like-minded (and like-pocketed) young people at the start of their careers in publishing. This month’s speaker meeting was entitled ‘Editing the Bestsellers and Trend-spotting’. I want to edit bestsellers and spot trends so, I thought, I’ll go.

It was one of the most worthwhile publishing events I’ve been to all year. The panel was made up of Suzanne Baboneau, publishing director of Simon and Schuster UK, Jon Wood, deputy publisher for Orion Books and Antonia Hodgson, editor-in-chief for Little, Brown’s Commerical Division. Real movers and shakers. They  started off (sitting ‘like Geography teachers’, in the words of Hodgson, on the edge of the stage, rather than behind the desk on it) with a quick ‘how I got where I am today’, and then addressed the topic of trend-spotting.

We immediately got into a spot of semantic difficulty as ‘trend-spotting’ seemed to be a rather sensitive term. No panellist liked to be thought of as jumping on bandwagons, though they all impressed upon us the importance of ‘market awareness’ in editorial decisions. Editors do look ahead to important events to inform their publishing programmes – for example, who isn’t looking at Olympic projects for 2012? And with the wonders of Nielsen Bookscan, they can also see if certain topic areas have a sizeable market before commissioning. Say they had received a compelling wartime love story in their submission pile. They can look up similar titles, or titles about that era, see what the sales figures were like and, if it proved popular, that would strengthen their case in pitching the book at a publishing meeting.

No one could deny that publishers do in reality jump on bandwagons. Been in a bookshop recently? Felt an overwhelming presence of vampire books with black and red covers? Twilight-inspired looks are unequivocally adhering to a trend that has been spotted, but our experts explained this was evidence of ‘market awareness’ in the packaging of a product, rather than a factor in the original commissioning decision.

Publishing policy is not decided by ‘what’s hot right now’. As it takes around two years to bring the kind of books they publish to market, from pitching and commissioning, writing and editing to producing the finished article and getting it into bookstores, anything ‘trendy’ when commissioned would by then be getting pretty sad and out of touch. The packaging decisions come much later in a book’s genesis, so can be influenced by whatever is flavour of the month. But in commissioning, editors have to trust their instincts about a good manuscript that they think will resonate with readers and, in the best-case scenario, it will take off and eventually start its own trend.

This was it. The moment we’d been waiting for, the confirmation of the editorial dream. That, as an editor, it’s your ‘eye’ that spots a great manuscript amongst the multitude which you then tirelessly and passionately champion through publishing meetings, through sales and marketing meetings and finally publish to great critical acclaim and spark a whole raft of wannabes, lookalikes that piggyback on your sales but never reach the dizzy heights of yours, your baby.

Admittedly, those pesky Nielsen figures of competition can crush your dream at the very first meeting:

‘A book about a boy wizard, you say?’

‘Yes, it’s completely brilliant, and completely different to anything anyone else is publishing at the moment – it will be huge!’

‘Sales show no one wants to buy books about boy wizards.’

‘But…’

‘Sorry, not good enough. Next!’

No, sometimes ‘editorial vision’ isn’t enough, but our gurus insisted that it is still the central tenet of their professional practice. Yes, they now have fancy sales figure machines at their fingertips, but the best publishing is as a result of strong editorial vision seeing a book through from commissioning to publication. One editor saw that vampire manuscript, saw that no one else was catering to lovestruck teenage girls in that way and started a global vampire love-in. How traditional.

(Interestingly, it was only at this point in the proceedings that we got on to ‘editing the bestsellers’. As high-up, top-dog, big-cheese types, all three panellists lamented that no part of their working day was spent actually editing books anymore. Office time is time for meetings and phone calls and emails. Editing still gets done, but it’s done at home, on evenings and weekends. A bit like Geography teachers marking their homework, but way, way more exciting.)

So I end 2009 on a high, an uplifting, galvanising call to a renewed commitment to quality, and trust in editorial vision for 2010. A return to the glory days, or is it simply semper idem?