Quote:
Originally Posted by radleyp
The New York Times yesterday published a very good piece by Jonathan Galassi, chairman and editor in chief at Farrar Straus & Giroux on the need for (good) editors. Few writers have what Hemingway once declared a necessity, a "built-in shit detector", so good editors are required.
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Galassi is correct but Galassi fails to state that FS&G's attitude towards paying editors is a major reason why FS&G doesn't always have good editors. Like all of the major publishers, the approach to editing is to outsource to a packager who pays virtually nothing for editing because the packager's profit center is the physical production, not the editorial. And for those editors directly hired by publishers, in many cases the pay they are offering today is less than they were paying in 1995.
I just blogged about my experience this week with a packager wanting me to edit some STM (science, technical, medical) books. You can read it at my
American Editor blog or at
Teleread.