Is There a Place for Editors in Publishing Today?

Publishing today is either (a) breaking wide open with exciting new platforms that give unknown authors a chance for their voices and ideas to be heard or (b) spewing ill-conceived, badly written goop all over our beautiful world in the literary equivalent of an environmental catastrophe.

I happen to think publishing is both opening (in a good way) and spewing (in a disgusting way). There are exciting new platforms, but many of them are piled high with literary goop. More specifically, they’re piled high with unedited literary goop. Editors can make the piles less goopy, but where do we fit in?

I’m thinking specifically of the world of self-publishing and the many forms of online writing where even the most basic tasks of copyediting are sometimes treated as a luxury not worth indulging in. But “real” publishers and online sources also let a disturbing number of typos, misstatements, and other forms of goop slip by. Recently in the UK, a judge for the Guardian First Book award lamented the lack of thorough developmental editing in many of the books short-listed for that award. So, at least from that judge’s point of view, the goop is bubbling up all over.

What’s to be done? Hire editors. Then let us edit. Yes, editors cost money, but consider what we provide: a goop-free reading experience. I think that’s worth a few bucks.