After Jim’s post yesterday about rejection letters, I started to think about expectations and how, for many authors, that is the hardest thing to manage. Your expectations when you send out that first query letter (a thousand calls to represent you!), your expectations about the acquisition process (everyone will fall in love with the book instantly!) and then, of course, the expectations once you are published (immediate bestsellerdom and movie deals by the fistful!). When I started out I had no real idea what to expect from any element in the publishing process. I certainly had no idea what to expect from my editor. Thankfully, I was pleasantly surprised and I remain very grateful to have had three great editors – yes, three…so that was one part of the process I hadn’t anticipated- that two of my editors would fall pregnant, have babies, and then leave the publishing house! All this before my second book had even hit the shelves!
So what should we expect from an editor? At the very least I think you should receive professional support and editorial guidance but in an ideal world, I believe an editor should be:
- Your greatest champion within the publishing house. This is easiest when your editor is the one who acquired your book, but even when an editor takes over a project, I think authors should feel like their editor is the one singing their praises and going in to bat for them.
- Your greatest and most constructive critic. A great editor can help transform your work into something better than you thought possible. Editing itself though is only part of the process, I also think a great editor should be able to communicate her thoughts as constructively as possible so an author truly feels as though she has a partner in the process.
- Your Organizer/Juggler Extraordinaire (or the one who makes sure all the work that needs to be done gets done on time!). An editor is like the foreman on a construction site, supervising all the work that needs to get done within the publishing house: from blurbs to jacket/cover and layout. I also think an editor who can effectively juggle all the other department needs (publicity/salesforce etc.) to make sure the author’s interests are served is worth her weight in gold.
So how do these three ‘ideals’ measure up to your expectations when it comes to an editor? What do you want to see and have you received the level of support you wanted in the past or not? I suspect many authors’ expectations differ from what their publishers/editors expect – so, for all you editors and writers out there, how do you deal with mismanaged expectations? What should a writer realistically expect from an editor and what can an author do to make sure the partnership between editor and writer runs as smoothly as possible?