What did the most famous, sought-after woman of her time do in order to escape the limelight forever and basically cease to exist in the public eye? Simple: She became a book editor.
Only now, more than a decade after she died, is the world finally learning exactly what Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis did for the last 20 years of her life. All is revealed thanks to two books – Greg Lawrence’s Jackie as Editor: The Literary Life of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and William Kuhn’s Reading Jackie: Her Autobiography in Books – that this month joined the 80-odd other Onassis biographies currently in print.
But if the Queen of America succeeds today where she failed while alive – to make book editing glamorous – it will be thanks to nostalgia for yet another vanished Camelot. With the publishing industry in turmoil, beset by competitive challenges unknown a decade ago, the long-lunching gentlefolk who once managed the mysterious process of literary midwifery are being replaced by fast-paced production workers, paid by the paragraph and often operating from home. If Jackie O were still in the game, she would likely be outsourced.
Among the recognizable Canadian publishers that have laid off editors since the economic downturn are Penguin Canada, McClelland & Stewart and Key Porter, which stopped publishing altogether early in the new year. Even plucky Gaspereau Press, the Nova Scotia publisher that brought out Johanna Skibsrud’s Scotiabank Giller Prize-winning novel, The Sentimentalists, has laid off its only full-time editor.
“We just couldn’t afford it,” said Gaspereau co-publisher Andrew Steeves, adding that he is happy to do the work himself. At the same time, he worries about the ultimate effect of industry-wide downsizing. “How do you cultivate a professional publishing ethic if you’re farming everything out?”
Authors, finding today’s downsized publishers increasingly unwilling to invest their own resources in the often laborious process of polishing rough diamonds into marketable gems, are now often forced to hire their own editors – before even before submitting their manuscripts for publication. Toronto literary agent Anne McDermid saw the landscape changing two years ago, when a publisher told her, “I cannot purchase a book I need to spend 40 hours editing.”
As a result, McDermid added, “we are now advising our authors that the material they present has got to be closer to the final draft than it ever used to be.” Sometimes the agents themselves act as pre-editors. “Or, for those authors who can afford it,” McDermid said, “the biggest-growing sector in Canadian publishing is the freelance editor.”
Along with booming self-publishing services that offer various levels of editing as value-added options, a cottage industry of independent contractors is quickly replacing the fabled tastemakers who once shaped literary destiny, and the effect on its quality is an open question.
Typical of the new trends is author Chevy Stevens, pen name of former Nanaimo real estate agent Rene Unischewski, who hired freelance editor Renni Browne while preparing the manuscript of her first novel. Successive rewrites for Browne, author of Self-Editing for Fiction Writers, landed the manuscript in the hands of New York literary agent Mel Berger. Successive rewrites for Berger promoted it to the desk of Jennifer Enderlin, in-house editor at St. Martin’s Press. More of the same there resulted in Still Missing, an outstanding critical success and international bestseller.
Toronto’s Barbara Berson, a former in-house editor at Penguin Canada who lost her job in one of the many waves of downsizing that has swept Canadian publishing in recent years, says she is now busier than ever as a leading member of what she calls “the editing diaspora” – with much of the new work now referred by literary agents trying to sell slightly lumpy manuscripts to noncommittal publishers.
