More tales of publishing woe

Hey kids! We've got another article to enjoy that regales us with the horrors of book publishing and how the author is victimized. The Education of Stacy Sullivan in the Columbia Journalism Review is actually useful and informative (well, mostly) as opposed to the sob-fest of self-pity that was Jane Austen Doe's article on the same subject.

The article paints a sympathetic portrait. Yes, publishing is dominated by the bottom line and the coddling of bestsellers. But the article doesn't make a scene about publishing injustices, it just notes that they are there and authors have to deal with them. Except... about halfway through the article, after it makes a point of saying the author missed her deadline by two full years, the readers are presented with this "injustice":

Her new deadline was July 2003. After two more years of work, she managed to turn in a sprawling 600-page draft that she hoped her editor would then slice in half. It was all the material she had amassed, including a long digression in the form of a travelogue of her time on the road with the war photographer Ron Haviv. In short, nothing that was ready for publication.

A few weeks later, waiting for a call from her editor, Sullivan got a package in the mail containing her 600-page ramble — copyedited and with an attached index. She panicked. “I had turned in what I thought was a draft and I had gotten back this copyedited manuscript,” Sullivan says. “They were just going to print that. And it was so rough. There was no way.” But the book was already on the conveyor belt. It was listed in the next season’s catalogue and the sales representatives had begun pitching it to booksellers. Everyone, including her agent, told her there was really nothing to be done. But Sullivan insisted they pull the plug. “It wreaked such havoc,” she says. “They had to take it off the production train, where it takes on a life of its own.”

Now for the life of me, I can't imagine why anyone would even remotely consider it being okay to turn in a manuscript that isn't fit for publication. That's freaking prima donna behavior there. Maybe it's my journalism background coming through, where I faced tense nightly deadlines and didn't pass along my story to the editors until they'd been effectively polished. What Sullivan did reminds me of the the passive-aggressive behavior of a woman I used to date, who would secretly devise these bizarre "tests" whenever she thought I wasn't giving her enough attention. Sullivan didn't think her editor was giving her enough attention, so she tested that by turning in sub-standard material. Then threw a fit and cost the publisher much dinero by yanking the book from the schedule when they didn't respond the way she wanted.

If there's one lesson to be learned from this tale of woe, it's a pretty basic one: Don't turn in anything to your publisher you wouldn't want to see in print. Yes, you may not feel your manuscript is the best that it could be, but it has to be the best that your ability allows. If the editor can help coax you to better prose, so much the better. But you can't bank on it, and in this case it's pretty obvious that Sullivan expected the editor to do a lot of her work for her, and that's just not going to happen in this day and age, especially with non-fiction.

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