Editor

There are certain advantages to working with a small (very small) publishing company. I have a great deal of autonomy, for example, which I'm usually quick to take advantage of. But so do many of the authors I work with. In fact, most of the projects tend to be author-driven, and this can become a source of difficulty.

Lots of people seem to think they have a book in them. What they need, however, is an Editor.

I occasionally work on books by and about celebrities you've forgotten (or have probably never heard of). Many of these are autobiographical, some are better written than others, but many of them are long — they often go on for hundreds of pages, past the end of career and visibility, into retirement and stories of family and friends. Detail that is, I've no doubt, important to the person writing it, though not necessarily of interest to the person reading. (I recently finished a book by a not-particularly-well-known actor that ran to 400 pages, only a third of those about his career in Hollywood.)

And then there are the authors who want their book to be the last word on the chosen subject. I was working on one of those last week, an exhaustive book on a long-running TV show. The series ran for 251 episodes over the course of eleven years, and that alone would make just about any book a labor-intensive project — but in the absence of any guidance, the authors seem to have given in to their enthusiasm.

This book is packed with incredible, almost unbelievable amounts of detail. It could be a truly useful and valuable resource, if only so many of those details weren't so much minutiae. There are entire sections, close to a hundred pages in total, of not much more than lists of the passing references in each episode that describe the various characters' personal histories, with observations on when something contradicts something someone else said somewhere else. That's interesting, I suppose (or at least, it could be) but these lists read like notes that were hastily scribbled while watching a DVD.

I admire the hard work that goes into an endeavor like this, I really do, but what this project needed was for someone to sift through everything and make the difficult decisions about what was truly necessary, and how and where it might best be used. (It fell to me to offer my own suggestions.) For want of that, this will likely end up as an 800-page book that purports to be thorough, but is leaden with fluff.

There are also, however, books that are so thoroughly and meticulously researched, so densely packed with detail that you wonder how it all fit into 500-odd pages — This is one of them, and this is another. (I put both of those books together, though I had nothing to do with the covers.) Those projects were a pleasure to work on, even under difficult circumstances (both had to be put together rather quickly) because so much forethought had already been put into them.

I think I become more involved in the books I work on than many designers — correcting errors, offering suggestions, often acting as a de facto Editor. It usually means more work for me, but it's much more interesting this way.