Milo Can You Go?: Editing Across the Aisle

Last week, news broke that controversial internet commentator and Breitbart News editor Milo Yiannopoulos had received a $250,000 advance from Simon & Schuster for his forthcoming book Dangerous. The deal sparked outrage among readers and those within the publishing community who accused S&S of pedaling the views of a hatemonger and attempting to profit by selling books to bigots. Several urged the publisher to withdraw the contract; others threatened a boycott. The Chicago Review of Books announced it would not review any S&S books for all of 2017.

These reactions inspired a number of interesting conversations about the role publishers should play in public discourse. Is S&S doing a public good or spreading hate by providing a platform for this inflammatory figure? As a for-profit business, do they have a moral obligation to uphold when deciding what to publish? If so, who decides what those morals should be?

While as an avid reader, liberal, and member of the publishing community, I could discuss these issues all day, they also made me reflect on something much more personal, something that doesn’t make headlines but still has the ability to influence the messages authors—particularly controversial ones—convey to their readers. Namely, how do you edit a manuscript when you fundamentally disagree with its author?

My first job in publishing was in the editorial department at Sentinel, an imprint of Penguin Group (now Penguin Random House) that specializes in publishing books with a conservative agenda. It was not the dream job I’d hoped for as a recent college grad with starry-eyed notions about editing the next great American novel. But it was the end of 2007, I knew no one in New York City, and I desperately wanted to be an editor at one of the major publishing houses.

During my interview for the position, my would-be boss (one of the few actual Republicans in publishing) asked me how I would tolerate working with people who might disagree with me politically. “Let’s say you have to talk to Ann Coulter on the phone? How would you handle the conversation?” (Sentinel did not publish Ann Coulter at the time; she was just using her as an example.)

“It’s my job as an editor to help people convey their arguments in the best way possible,” I said. “It’s not my job to have a political debate with them.”

It was the right answer. I got the job and for the next five-and-a-half years, I worked very closely with dozens of authors whose politics did not sit well with me at all. Before long, I was acquiring and editing manuscripts of my own and becoming more directly involved in the publication of the books I was working on. I never once got into a political debate with an author, and while some of them may have figured out my leanings over time, they never mentioned it and (at least to my knowledge) our difference of opinion never once interfered with my professional relationships. In fact, one author told me, essentially, that he felt comfortable with any changes I made to his manuscript because “it’s your job to make my book better, not worse.” Music to an editor’s ears!

That, of course, didn’t mean that the process wasn’t challenging. I am not the most active or outspoken person when it comes to politics, but I do have strong convictions about certain issues and there were times when I had to set them aside in order to look at a project more objectively. This naturally came into play when deciding what to acquire—how does one determine what sells to a particular audience when she is not part of that audience?—but, this is part of any publisher’s job.

No, the real challenge came during the editorial process itself. How do I help an author make sense of an argument that I don’t actually think makes sense? How do I push an author to support and defend her opinions without compromising her right to communicate those opinions freely and openly?

Obviously, as an editor at a large publishing house, I was responsible for making sure that anything we published was written to the highest standard possible. The books I was working on weren’t Shakespeare—they didn’t need to be—but they needed to be well-written and they needed to be factually correct. One time an author wrote that Al Gore had won the Nobel Peace Prize for his film An Inconvenient Truth; when I pointed out that one does not win Nobel Prizes for making movies, he changed the wording, and that was the end of the conversation.

Other times, the process was not so straightforward. On one occasion, I was editing a passage in which the author was discussing the importance of the Golden Rule—treating other people the way you want to be treated. It was all fairly innocuous until he started using the Golden Rule as an argument against gay marriage. I don’t recall the exact reasoning he used, but to me—a staunch supporter of gay rights—the entire argument didn’t make sense. Isn’t denying others the right to marry a prime example of not treating others the way you want to be treated? How was I going to retain the message the author was trying to convey to his audience (an audience I knew would agree with him regardless) while upholding my own standards of editorial quality

All in all, the argument took up no more than a few paragraphs of text, but I spent the better part of an hour (if not longer) editing it. It was clear to me that the author felt this argument was important, so while I could have made a case for picking another example that was, perhaps, more relevant to the subject at hand, I instead constructed a new argument that I felt was more appropriate in the context of the book as a whole. As a liberal, I still wasn’t satisfied by the logic, but as an editor, I was confident I had done my job in helping my author articulate what he was trying to say.

I know there are people—perhaps even some in publishing—who feel that one’s personal moral code should outweigh her professional demands and ambitions. According to those people, I should have refused to work with authors whose opinions I felt were dangerous to society. The books will get published without me, after all, so why compromise my integrity?

But I have always believed that, as an editor, I am responsible for upholding another moral code. No one forced me to take a job at a conservative imprint; just like no one forced Kim Davis to take a job as a county clerk in Kentucky. And if I, as a progressive, expect people like Davis to do their jobs despite their personal or religious beliefs, then how can I not hold myself to the same standard? Yes, Davis is a government employee who was denying citizens something they were entitled to under the law, while I was working for a for-profit company and merely debating semantics with myself. But one could make the case that Davis took her job before gay marriage was legal, whereas I took my job knowing what my responsibilities would be.

As I said in that first job interview, it is not my job as an editor to argue with people; it’s my job to help them make their books as good as possible. No one forces me to do that; I choose to and I’m proud of it. I became an editor because I believe passionately in the power of the written word and the right of the freedom of expression. In the age of social media, fake news, and filter bubbles, it’s easy for us to tune out anyone we don’t agree with politically—or engage them in endless rounds of “here’s why you’re wrong” that end up making everyone feel more entrenched in their beliefs than ever before. But the experience of forcing myself to step inside the mind of someone else, to try and understand why people I disagree with feel the way they do, is an inherently empathetic one, one that acknowledges the rights of each of us to hold opinions, that made me appreciate the importance of free and open discourse—of the right to disagree that we so often take advantage of in America.

I eventually left Sentinel because I knew I ultimately wasn’t cut out to edit conservative political books for the rest of my career. Now, as an independent writer and editor, I have more freedom to work on books that I truly believe in. And, while I probably won’t opt to edit any Breitbart contributors anytime soon, I firmly believe that my experience working at Sentinel has not only made be a better editor but a better citizen as well.

This post was originally published at www.GothamGhostwriters.com

Honesty and Trust: The Keys to a Great Editor/Author Relationship

I recently read the book Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces that Stand in the Way of True Inspiration by Ed Catmull. Catmull is the co-founder of Pixar Animation, though his name is not as well known as his fellow founders John Lasseter and Steve Jobs. But Ed was there from the beginning, a precocious young man whose dream was to create the first fully digital animated film, a goal he accomplished several times over, revolutionizing the industry and raising the bar for animators everywhere along the way. 

I picked up the book for a few reasons. 1) I love Pixar and have always been fascinated by the inner-workings of innovative companies, especially ones involved in creative pursuits. 2) When the book project was originally being shopped to publishers a few years ago, I tried bidding on it. Before I did, I met with Ed Catmull, and that meeting remains the best pitch meeting I've ever had. Without any ego, Catmull regaled us with behind-the-scenes stories of the making of some of my favorite Pixar films, explaining the complicated, sometimes frustrating, and often heartbreaking decisions that go into making one of those truly great films. I was flabbergasted, and even though I didn't end up working on the book, I was eager to hear more about what Ed had to say.

The book is, at its core, a business book. It's not so much about unlocking the creative process or a primer on how to tap into your own creativity as it is a book on how to effectively manage creative people, especially at a large organization. Because that's what Ed does. He's not the guy coming up with story ideas or creating characters; he's the guy responsible for making sure the movie gets made well, on time, and on budget. 

A lot of what Ed discusses in the book has to do with the core values of a creative organization. I'm not going to go into detail on those here because 1) this is not a book report 2) you should read the book and 3) I've misplaced my copy at the moment and can't quote from it. However, as I was reflecting on the book and thinking about how I could apply Ed's wisdom to my own career, I realized that at the heart of his advice is a commitment to two related ideas: honesty and trust. 

Let's start with trust. Part of being creative means trying new things, and people are generally terrified of new things. When creative people work for a large organization and are managed by people whose goals are not simply to do the most creative or exciting thing but to do the most creative and exciting thing they can while still making money, things can get tense. It's therefore the job of the manager to trust their creative talent and give them a safe space for generating ideas, trying new things and, at times, failing. 

Creating a trusting environment involves communicating expectations clearly, offering feedback, and encouraging people to keep going. At the same time, in order to manage creatives, you need to practice the flip side of trust, which is honesty.

Trust cannot exist without honesty. In his book, Catmull talks at length about what he and his colleagues at Pixar call "The Brain Trust." This consists of a group of higher-ups who aren't working directly on a particular project, but who check in on the progress of a film at critical points in its development and offer candid, honest feedback about what's working and what isn't. Sometimes the conversations are difficult, and whole story lines or characters or even the entire narrative arc of the film need to be reworked. But the Brain Trust works because everyone understands that they have the same goal: to make a great animated film. No one is trying to gain favor with someone else. No one is trying to undermine someone else's ideas. No one is trying to sabotage the project. Everyone simply wants to make the best film possible. By offering honest feedback in a constructive and controlled way, Pixar engenders a culture of honesty and trust that pervades the entire creative process.

So, it's about giving ideas a chance to breath but not being afraid to question them if they're not working. 

It's clear how this concept would work at a large corporation and how important it would be to have a formalized structure in place to ensure that trust and honesty are sustained, but I was also thinking about how this works in the more intimate editor/author relationship.

I'd never really considered it before, but one could say that an editor is a creative manager. I don't manage large teams of people, and my authors don't work for me, but the relationship is not unlike the ones described at Pixar. There is a creative person, the author, and then there is the manager, the editor, who is in charge of helping the author hone their ideas and bring them into the world. And, yes, the pressure of deadlines and budgets are often looming in the background, sometimes more ominously than others.

There are two things I always do when editing a manuscript, especially during the early developmental stages when, generally, a manuscript still requires a lot of structural and conceptual work. The first thing I always do is present my feedback honestly. Of course, I try to do this as constructively as possible, but I have, at times, told an author point-blank that they need to start over, that the structure isn't working, that their thesis is confusing, that this draft simply isn't living up to their idea's potential. Of course, I also believe in encouraging authors, so I try to point out what is working in addition to what's not.

The second thing I do is to point out that any of the suggestions I make are just that: suggestions. Sometimes I might suggest a completely new outline for the book, or I may ask them to develop their argument about a particular subject more while playing down another. But the last thing I want is for an author to feel like they need to do exactly what I'm telling them to do. If they start rewriting in that mindset, they stop trusting their instincts and will quell their own creativity in an effort to do what they think I want them to do. Any suggestion is merely designed to get an author thinking about something differently. Maybe it ends up working, maybe it doesn't, but hopefully it helped them figure out what was best. By explaining that they don't need to take all of my suggestions at face value, I am telling them that I trust them to take this feedback to heart and understand where I'm coming from. They are still empowered in their role as author, in their role as the creative force behind the project.

A big part of promoting honesty and trust is only expressing opinions when you actually have a fully formed opinion. So often people want their voices to be heard, or they want to look like their contributing, so they speak up when they have very little to say. They criticize things they know nothing about, they nitpick, they try to assert control over things they shouldn't be controlling. I once, for instance, worked with an author who insisted on designing his own table of contents page rather than leave it to our professional in-house designer who had been designing book interiors for decades. Needless to say, that author did not inspire trust in anyone he worked with.

Understanding one's role is a big part of this as well. As an editor, my role is to help the author communicate their ideas. The operative phrase here is "their ideas." Not mine. For the first few years of my career, I edited conservative political books even though I am a pretty staunch liberal. I worked with authors whose views completely opposed my own. If I had edited these manuscripts so that they pleased me or so the arguments lined up with what I believed, I would not have been doing my job. It was difficult sometimes, but I did it, and I think my authors were grateful. I don't know if they ever guessed at my political affiliation, but I can guarantee it never came up in any editorial conversation I ever had.

Editing is a solitary process, so I can't speak to what other editors do, but I would bet that the best ones operate, consciously or not, based on this philosophy of trust and honesty. Our job is to help the author write the best book possible, and we do that by creating a dialogue, a partnership where we are free to communicate our ideas, try new things, experiment, brainstorm, and riff without judgement or fear of reprisal. The best editor/author relationships are the ones where this works both ways: where the editor not only trusts the author, but the author trusts the editor. This means they take the editor's suggestions to heart, even if they don't end up implementing every one, and that they trust the editor's instincts and expertise. When honesty and trust are reciprocated in the editor/author relationship, magic happens.

If you're an author looking for an editor (or an agent who will function as  your creative manager in the process leading up to selling your book), I encourage you to keep this idea in mind. Obviously, it's impossible to know if an honest relationship is possible until you really begin to work with someone, but there are ways to figure it out before you sign a contract. For instance, if you're meeting with editors prior to selling the book, ask them candid questions about the structure you propose. If they have concerns, make sure you understand them and their vision is in line with your own. If they love it and have no suggested changes, you should understand what they like about it so you can keep it in mind as you move forward. It's easy to get swept up by advance numbers (and I'm certainly not suggesting you ignore those) and the reputation of the publisher itself, but having a good working relationship with your editor is priceless because it will make you a better writer and also reassure you throughout the long, painful, emotionally draining process of writing a book. And if you're lucky,  you may end up finding an editor you can trust for the rest of your long, very successful career.

Happy writing!

How to Write a Book Proposal: Part I: Comps

This is the first in a series of posts I intend to write over the coming weeks about how to write a book proposal. Given that I have worked for a major publishing house for the past seven years and that my job entails reading and vetting dozens of them on a weekly basis, I feel qualified to write this post, and, if you're an aspiring author, I hope you find it useful. If you're not an aspiring author, maybe you'll find it interesting. 

A quick disclaimer: the How to Write a Book Proposal series will not consist of step-by-step instructions on how to write a book proposal from start to finish. If you Google "how to write a book proposal," you will find dozens of websites with info on how to do just that. If you're looking for deeper information, check out one of the many books on the subject. 

Rather than giving you the soup-to-nuts skinny on writing a great proposal, I'm writing this series to talk about some of the things I, personally, pay attention to when reading a new submission. You know how some employers say that they throw out resumes with spelling errors on them because it indicates the job applicant lacks attention to detail? I don't do that (because we all make mistakes), but I do judge you harshly if your proposal does, or fails to do, certain things. I also laugh about you to my colleagues, but you will never know this because when I reject something (most often via your agent), I send a polite note saying I'm passing because "I don't feel this is a good fit for my list" or "I felt the subject was too narrow to attract a wide audience." These are, generally, my true reasons for passing on something, but they certainly don't let on that I spent a good 15 minutes reading portions of your proposal out loud to my assistant in order to entertain us both during a mid-afternoon energy slump.

Okay, to be fair, if your idea is fantastic or I love your writing style or you have a huge built-in audience who will trip over themselves to be first in line to buy your book, I would never pass on your project simply because the proposal did something that irked me. But, if you want to be safe, you will read what follows, take it to heart, and remember it when you get to writing. Okay, here we go.

In our first installment, we'll be discussing...

THE COMPS SECTION

Otherwise known as "Competition/Comparisons." In this section, you list books that are similar to your own. Generally, an author will list 4-5 similar books and include the publication information (title, author, year published, publisher, ISBN) and a paragraph explaining what that book is about and why it is a good comparison to yours. This is a section you should always include in your book proposal, for two very important reasons:

1. It makes the editor's job easier
2. If you do it correctly, it shows the editor you know your audience, understand the market, and have done your homework

First, let me explain #1. A good comps section makes my job easier because part of any editor's job is convincing her publisher (and, if she is able to acquire the book, her publicity, subrights and sales departments) that there are people out there who like to read books like this. If the editor can say, with a straight face, that this new book is similar to other successful books that have been published, it is easier to convince those around her that they should pay attention. I know every author likes to think that their book is different that it's special that there's no book quite like this one. If that's true, which it rarely is, it generally means no one wants to read it. If they did, someone would have written it already. There is a book on the market called The Idiot's Guide to Submarines. There is also a book called Crafting with Cat Hair, which I can't, for the life of me, determine is serious or ironic. So stop it. There is definitely a book like yours out there. 

Remember, publishers are businesses. Yes, they are often run by English majors who got into the business because they loved books (that is a stereotype, but it is often true), but we also have to feed ourselves. There is no real way to know if a book will sell or not sell, but one indicator that a book has a chance of selling is the fact that books like it have sold in the past. Do yourself and me a favor: include a good comps section.

Now, #2. What does it mean to do a comp section correctly? It means a few things.

• It includes books that are actually similar to yours
• It doesn't only include books that were major, category-busting bestsellers

The first item should be obvious, but you'd be surprised how many people cannot seem to do this basic thing. If you're writing a memoir about your mother's depression, you should not comp it to Angela's Ashes. Yes, they are both memoirs, but that is not the point. 

If, however, you're writing a book about growing up poor in Ireland...you still may not comp it to Angela's Ashes.

"Wait! But WHY?" you ask. "Because," I say, "Angela's Ashes was a publishing phenomenon that transformed high school teacher Frank McCourt into a literary sensation." Comping your book to it is not useful because of the second bullet above. 

As I mentioned earlier, part of the editor's job is to convince her publisher to let her acquire the book. One of the ways she does this is by positioning it within the marketplace to show that there is a potential audience out there for this very book. The second step in this process is figuring out how much to pay for the book. If you're writing a book proposal, you're likely familiar with the concept of an advance. For those who aren't, look it up, but for the sake of context, an advance is a sum of money a publisher pays an author in exchange for the rights to publish his or her book. An advance is determined by a number of things--most dramatically the number of other publishers interested in publishing the book who compete for the rights by offering higher advances than their competitors. But before a publisher offers an advance, they have to figure out how much they think the book is worth, which brings us back to comps.

Like I said, it's impossible to know exactly how much any book is worth before it is published. I have no idea how much Scribner paid for the rights to publish Angela's Ashes, but I'm sure it was a lot less than the book was actually worth considering how well it sold. On the other hand, there are countless books that receive high advances--sometimes millions of dollars--and don't end up being worth that much at all. It's a crapshoot.

The reason you should not comp your book to a huge bestseller is because it's like saying to the publisher "I think this book is like Angela's Ashes, which means I expect it to perform as well as Angela's Ashes, which means I expect a lot of money for it." This may not be your intention, but it communicates that you are either delusional or simply don't read that many books and therefore can't think of another comp except for the one that everyone already knows. 

It is much better to list 4-5 comps that have sold reasonably well and are genuinely similar to your book than to list a bunch of huge bestsellers. We go back to the first two reasons why a comp list is useful: it helps the editor and it shows you know your market.

If I have a book I want to buy and can point to a handful of books that have sold reasonably well--say between 30,000-50,000 copies--I am in good shape. That is a nice number of copies for a book to sell, so I can tell my publisher there are similar books that have sold well but they have not sold so well that they aren't useful in helping me determine how much I should spend on the advance. This number will allow me to justify spending a fair amount of money on the book, but not so much that my publisher will, say, "No way!"

So, what does a good comp section look like? I used to work on business books and got a lot of comp sections that listed books like The Tipping Point, Freakonomics, Predictably Irrational, and Good to Great as comps. This was stupid for a number of reasons. For one, these books are nothing like one another except for the fact that they are often lumped together in the business section. It's like saying your novel is like The Kite Runner and The Client because they are both fiction. NO!

Also, all of these are huge bestsellers that defied the publisher's expectations in every imaginable way, so, for all the reasons I already mentioned, they are useless. 

Okay, so what should that misguided business author have done? Let's say Mr. Business Author is writing a book on running a small business. He should only include comps that are about that very thing. Some good comps he might mention are Small Giants by Bo Burlingham or The Pumpkin Plan by Mike Michalowicz or Built to Sell by John Warrillow. [Full disclosure: all of those books are published by my old employer, and I worked with each of these authors at some point in my time there. I'm only calling these to attention because I know them well. There are dozens of other great books on entrepreneurship out there.] 

Mr. Business would also likely include The E-Myth by Michael Gerber, which is pretty much the go-to book on starting your own business, no matter what kind of business it is. It is a business classic and a huge bestseller, so it's not really useful for my purposes, but I wouldn't be annoyed if Mr. Business listed it because it is not so far removed from his book and shows that he (or at least his agent) understands the genre. An author is allowed to list one (maybe two) bestsellers if they are truly complementary and if he or she also lists others. Use your judgment. 

If you're writing that memoir of growing up poor in Ireland, and really can't stop yourself from mentioning Angela's Ashes, though, I still wouldn't recommend listing it in the comps section. Idea-driven non-fiction is very different from fiction or literary/narrative non-fiction, which is, generally, as much about the quality of the writing as it is about the subject. Comparing yourself to Frank McCourt is a bold move, and you will likely come off as cocky. The only acceptable place to mention this comparison is in, perhaps, the overview where you can say, "My goal is to pick up where Frank McCourt left off with Angela's Ashes. McCourt described life in Ireland in the 1930s, but in Dirty in Dublin,* I describe growing up on the outskirts of the Irish capital in the punk-fueled haze of the 1980s."

I would read that book.

I think this about covers everything I have to say about comps, except for this: read them. Before you set out to write a book, familiarize yourself with the other books out there. This will not only ensure  you have a good comps section, it will make your book better because you will know what a successful book looks like. Also, an author--especially a non-fiction one--is expected to be an expert on his or her chosen subject. A good comps section will illustrate that you actually know your audience and feel like you can write something they'd be interested in reading.

Next up, Part II: Who Is this Book For?

*Feel free to use the title Dirty in Dublin for your Irish memoir. You're welcome.