ACP 2070
Editing Principles and Practice
Semester 1 2014
Footscray Park
Lecture 2
Introduction to editing
Everything you have read today so far has gone through a process of editing: from newspaper to signposts. But what is editing? In a sense it's something that is hard to define because when it's done well it tends not to be noticed.
And when it's done badly it is noticed. Much like cleaning. The Oxford Dictionary defines the verb Edit as: 1. to prepare (written material) for publication by correcting, condensing, or otherwise modifying it.
2. Editor Noun
We can see from these definitions that editing is not one clear activity conducted in one single realm. Think about the difference between the relatively minor task of text alteration, for example, you correcting the grammar and punctuation in an essay you have written, and that of running a major newspaper – the difference between being a proofreader and the editor of the Herald Sun .
There are also specific areas of editing that have particular contexts, conventions and requirements, such as:
What follows is a list of some of the kinds of editorial roles.
They are more or less listed in order of their relative influence. Another way to think about these editing categories is in terms of the kinds of organisation they are linked with
This unit is geared conceptually towards the first three of these categories. People employed in newspapers tend to go through either cadetships or journalism degrees
In this unit we are focussed on teaching you the ‘practical' side of editing in tutorials, and the lectures look at ‘contextual' issues like newspaper and publisher ownership and the ideological bias and function of the mainstream media – because these issues have an impact at the practical level we will be focusing on. The Publishing Organisation On page 4 of The Australian Editing Handbook is a schematic diagram of the typical set of relationships and flows within a publishing organisation. You can see that the box representing the editor is placed in a structurally central role – more arrows emanate from or enter the editor's box than any other point in the process.
Discuss the tiny publicity/sales box – do you think this is how things work in publishing now?
for the sake of simplicity, let's deal with the issues pertaining to a fair sized publishing company. Other than the editor, there are 4 significant individuals involved in the production of a book, upon whom the book's success rests:
There are lots of different ways an editor might communicate with other staff or with authors and this is changing with the increasing use of email and digital media; however, there are some specific types of communication that editors have often relied on including:
It's a complex web of relations that should see the editor at the centre. (What about the author?) Too often in present day publishing, the marketing department has become the central point. Contemporary publishing is characterised by conflict between the marketing and editorial wings of companies – and it's a conflict that the marketing wings are winning. The emergence of a number of small presses is a sign of this. Quality editors and publishers interested in new and challenging material are being displaced into the smaller companies. In Australian book publishing there's effectively domination by a small handful of major publishing houses. This has a tremendous effect on what gets published (Penguin, for example, is strident about ensuring commercial – economic – success, and broadly speaking, has little interest in publishing first-time literary novelists or books of short stories and certainly not poetry). This increasing monopolisation and concentration in the industry doesn't just apply to the commissioning and production of books but to their distribution. At Borders bookstore, for example, almost all the end shelfs and displays are purchased not arranged by staff on the basis of what they'd like to do! Just as in supermarkets, the space is open to bidders, ensuring it's the most established and financially dominant companies that are promoted. Yet many of Australia's well-known authors were given their starts in small or independent presses or in literary journals (think of Peter Carey). Amanda Lohrey, who is an Australian author, has talked about how she couldn't find a publisher for her first radical and political novel in the early 1980s but then later, when she wasn't sued and the book sold well in its small print run (when, as she puts it, “the bomb didn't go off”) Picador picked up the rights to it. Some people have flagged how small and independent companies take a risk on an author's early work while the more conservative publishing houses step in down the track and offer substantial advances to secure the author once her reputation is growing. It's true to say, however, that not all small presses are challenging this paradigm. There are such things as ‘vanity' presses that charge the author to publish their work regardless of quality! There are also conservative journals and small presses that don't want to challenge the logic of economic rationalism, or independent presses that would love to become major publishing houses! Aviva Tuffield (The Age, 2006) writes, ‘According to Annette Barlow, fiction publisher at Allen & Unwin, "It is a much trickier proposition to get the word out and about when the literary fiction author is not so well known or is even unknown. This does not stop you from publishing an unknown author who you feel has a future but, publishing being a business, you do have to look at the balance of the list and predict your bottom line for the year." ‘But' Tuffield says, ‘Even for first-time authors things are looking up. A number of small publishers have just established fiction lists and some are focusing exclusively on new novelists and literary fiction.' What do you think are some of the challenges a small press would face in today's publishing world?
For further news and opinion about what is happening in the changing world of publishing, have a look at www.publishingtrends.com , a Market Partners International website, and in the world of editing at www.socedvic.org (The Society of Editors [Victoria] Inc.) So in our idealised organisation, what does the editor do?
To recap, the editor liaises with
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