Quote:
Originally Posted by BearMountainBooks
I was at a conference when one author giving a talk (he was with the big six) said that after his original editor left, his book received no editing at any level. He got galley proofs and had only that chance to make his own final changes. No copyediting, not proofing, etc.
That is commonly known in the industry as "orphaning."
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Apparently "ophaning" is common enough to have a generally understood name recognized industry-wide.
Here:
http://indiereader.com/2012/08/war-s...-i-went-indie/
Quote:
Between 1985 and 2008, I published eight books of nonfiction with major publishers. Having fought in the publishing trenches for two decades plus, I have, not surprisingly, war stories to tell. Almost all of them involve editors, especially editors being fired. After an editor acquired one of my books, the publisher fired him, but he refused to leave. He kept coming in to his office week after week, month after month, carrying on his duties, without pay. Few people knew he was fired; he was so revered in the business no one dreamed his publisher would be stupid enough to fire him. Then, out of the blue, the way almost everything happens in publishing, he signed up a novel that became a runaway bestseller — and he was hired back instantly out of fear he might take his new hot author and move to another house.
I sold another book to an editor who was actually running the company, thinking there was no way this editor could be fired. Wrong again! From what I’m told, that editor exited the business altogether and ended up overseeing a pastry shop in one of New York City’s outer boroughs. Of the eight books I sold, only twice did the acquiring editor survive to see the book published.
When a book is “orphaned,” losing its editor, departments in a house are at a loss as to how to publish it. How do you market it? Publicize it? Then again, publishers grapple with those same questions for books that aren’t orphaned. Here’s the big secret about Big Time Publishing. No one ever really knows if a book is going to sell or not. Even with Stephen King, his publisher can’t predict which of his books is going to outperform or underperform his previous ones. This shouldn’t be surprising. Unless one has a crystal ball or a Ouija board, how can anyone possibly know what the public is going to buy?
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This one writer lost the editor on six of his eight trad-pubbed books.