“There was a time when a publisher would say, ‘This needs a lot of work, but we’re going to go for it,’ ” Berson said. “Now what I have observed is publishers are saying, ‘This needs a lot of work, you take care of it.’ ”
Paying to have their work edited before banking an advance is undeniably rough on writers, Berson admitted. “On the other hand,” she added, “I’m hopefully providing a valuable enough service that they then get a book contract. That’s the goal.”
Typically that means bringing manuscript to a certain level – and no further. “Because I’m not representing a publisher, I’m not always going to take it all the way,” Berson said, adding she was once unsettled to see one such job – a literary novel – go straight into production. “It was very swift, put it that way.”
Rewards can be tangible for writers lucky enough to find their work in the hands of an in-house editor willing and able to take it all the way. Year after year, literary prize shortlists are dominated by titles edited by handful of acknowledged stars -- all of them women -- led Anne Collins of Random Canada, Louise Dennys of Knopf Canada, Phyllis Bruce of HarperCollins Canada and Ellen Seligman of McClelland & Stewart.
“In the very old days it used to be a gentleman’s game, then became a gentle woman’s game,” Bruce said. “Certainly it’s less leisurely. The books must come out much more quickly.”
All acknowledge the pressures. Although her company does not expect pre-edited manuscripts, said Nancy Flight of Vancouver’s GreyStone Books, in-house editors now have much less time than they once did to work on books. “We have to do everything faster, so maybe that means there’s a decrease in quality,” Flight said. “I hope not, because we are trying to meet the same standards.”
Faster doesn’t necessarily mean worse, according to Bruce, one of the elite few whose names appear on the title pages of the books they edit. “Perhaps you don’t spend as much time as you used to in the early stages of the book,” she admitted. “On the other hand, the production time is cut about 50 per cent with the new technology. Some of that time is fed back into the editorial process.”
Bruce is one in-house editor who welcomes pre-editing by agents and freelancers in some cases. “I don’t really want to take on a 1,000-page novel,” she said, but she will read it once reduced by two-thirds. “There are certain people who are good at that – lifting a smaller novel out of a larger one,” she said. “I’ve known a number of freelancers to be involved in very big jobs – shaping a novel so it’s manageable, before it ever gets to the editor.”
Despite the paucity of full-time jobs, there are more trained editors entering the trade than ever before, with at least two Canadian universities and several community colleges offering programs in the art of finding and shaping potential bestsellers. With more than 1,600 members, the freelance-dominated Editors Association of Canada is “the largest membership organization in the Canadian arts community,” according to executive director Carolyn Burke, with a certification program unique among English-writing countries.
“Our editors hold themselves up to very high standards and this is recognized in the rest of the world,” Burke said. “So there’s a comfortable flow of this service-based work into Canada.”
Has literary quality suffered in the editing diaspora? If so, nobody has seen it, according to Bruce. “Canadians have had a pretty good share of international short-listings in the last 10 years,” she notes. “Honestly, I think Canadian writing is getting better all the time.”
