Alberto Rollo: A few questions about e-books.
By REBECCA CARTER [Words Without Borders ] – As the digital revolution reconfigures the publishing industry, the role of editor will come under increasing scrutiny. What is a publishing house? Is it a machine for production, distribution and sales, or is it a nurturer of talent? For a long time now, publishers have aimed to keep all these attributes under one roof, but the task is becoming increasingly difficult. The “demise of the editor” has been a frequent lament in Britain and America over the past twenty years as the economic imperatives of large-scale publishing necessitate the prioritization of marketing over the costly, time-consuming process of working on texts to make them as good as they can be. The massive increase in the number of literary agents has been, in part, a response to the failure of publishers to give authors enough editorial time, itself in part a catalyst in the breakdown of close author-editor relationships. The editor’s role is threatened still further by the difficulty of generating income from e-books. When authors argue that their e-book royalties should be higher because productions costs are lower, they open a can of worms about overheads, because of course producing a text doesn’t just involve the cost of printing, paper, and postage: in the large organizations, where overheads are extremely high, those responsible for efficiency savings may well start to think that the often-invisible work done by editors is something that can be cut. As Alberto Rollo, who directs the Italian fiction list for Feltrinelli, said, when I asked him about the editor’s role in Italy: “There is no e-book without asking ourselves what writing means, what editing means, and, yes, what publishing means.” And so, at the beginning of the first post-iPad year, I thought it might be interesting to ask editors around the world how their work compares to that of editors in other countries, and how they envisage the future.
I should say, first, that I have chosen to concentrate on the creative editing of literary fiction, as opposed to genre fiction or nonfiction, or what one might call “copyediting” (the correction of mistakes). This is because such editing is the hardest to justify in a business environment. Not only is it difficult to prove that it sells more copies, it is not always appreciated by those it aims to assist: authors who create what they see as works of art are often reluctant to countenance changes suggested by an editor. Take Greece, for example, where according to Angela Sotiriou of Psichogios, very little editing of fiction goes on.
Continued at Words Without Borders | More Chronicle & Notices.
