I used to spend the late portion of many evenings in the gigantic Tea Lounge on Union Street in Park Slope, along with a few dozen other people perched over their laptops and the occasional Orthodox couple on a date. Eventually I noticed a woman who was there pretty much every time I went in, and probably a lot of the times I didn’t, usually until midnight, with what were obviously manuscript pages, reading and reading. She did not look particularly happy to be doing this. I now realize she was an acquiring editor, reading submissions.
There are several levels of editor at a publishing house. There are assistant editors, who deal with minutiae such as line edits, editorial correspondence, and press quotes for the paperback edition of a book. And there are very senior editors, who have graduated to managerial roles—they are no longer very much on the lookout for new book projects, having their hands full running the publishing house. But the editors in between, which is most editors, are acquiring editors. Like agents, and for the same reason, they need to eat a certain number of lunches, introducing themselves and their tastes and interests to those agents so that they will receive their best submissions when the time comes. Some editors, like agents, read the better literary magazines; many young writers have received encouraging notes from Tim Duggan at HarperCollins, one of the savviest editors in the business, after publishing a short story in some obscure but well-regarded venue. Some leave this kind of scouting to the agents. All acquiring editors, however, spend an inordinate amount of time reading submissions. They get perhaps 10 agented submissions a week—meaning someone in the industry has staked his reputation on this being something the editor will like; receive enough bad submissions from an agent and you will stop reading submissions from that agent—and they must read them quickly. … [E]ditors have no way of knowing who else has the book “on submission” or what the other editors might be willing to do. And if they want to bid for a book, they need to get a certain number of other people in the company to agree.
In a sense the publishers function like investment banks—albeit very scrupulous investment banks in which five or six people have to read an entire novel before the bank puts down any money. Young editors have to get their boss’s go-ahead for even the tiniest, $5,000 advance, and whereas at some houses the very senior people don’t technically need to go to their corporate superiors unless they’ve gone over some established “level,” for the most part they still do. As one former editor in chief put it to me, “Even if you don’t need to get permission from the publisher to spend $400,000, if all it takes is a walk down the hall, why not do it?” Of course before you go to the very top, you may want to run it by your assistant, to make sure you haven’t lost your mind; you may want to run it by someone in sales, since they’re going to have to sell this thing to booksellers. At some houses the editor of the paperback division needs to read the submission; and why not show it to your spouse, whose judgment in other matters has been sound? And so in addition to lots of reading, the life of an editor involves constantly trying to get others to read as well. This makes sense, since eventually, if the book gets bought, the publishing house has to convince a whole lot of other people to read it, too.
Transcribed by me from section VI (“Investment Publishers”) of my Kindle edition of How a Book Is Born: The Making of The Art of Fielding, © 2011, Vanity Fair.
Tweet: And you thought you read a lot? Think again.
Tweet: Reading, reading, reading—acquisitions editors gotta do it.
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