What Does An Editor Do?

Posted by Colin Harvey Apr 19, 2009

Following on from yesterdays blog, I promised an insight into what an editor actually does. As both editor of the anthology Future Bristol and one of the contributors I had a dual perspective of the process of editing an anthology.

There are actually two -even three if you count non-fiction-- types of editor. Book editors within a publisher have a different remit to that of a magazine or anthology.

Within a publisher an editor's role will be that of champion. They must talk up the book to the sales force, argue with Marketing Directors over whether it fits the company strategy, and provide an interface between author and publisher. They may assign the actual line, copy or content editing to specialists in those fields.

A magazine or anthology editor will have a vision. They may express it through magazine guidelines at market guides, or they may allow previously published editions to speak for them. In the case of Future Bristol, I simply said, "I want stories set in Bristol, set in the future."

When the stories come in, there is the scary moment of Will I have nine different versions of the same story?

Fortunately, in my case the answer was no.

But there are wide variations in the amount of work still to be done. In some cases, only one or two lines may need changing, where a word or a paragraph is not quite right. In others, whole rewrites may be needed -- at times the editor is making suggestions, guiding the author --even acting as uncredited collaborator. There are as many variations as writers.

Sometimes a story is well written, but does not fit the editor's vision. An author submitted a story for Killers that overlapped in setting with another story, and in theme with yet another; for Future Bristol I received one submission where the future was only token, the nature of the cataclysm left unspecified, and the characters didn't speculate. When the author refused to make changes, I had no option but to reject it as not fitting the book -- it would have distorted the final work.

Which brings me onto the last duty of magazine / anthology editor. The order of the stories in the final work is as crucial as the order of the paragraphs in the story. Different editors have different ideas, but the result is rarely random.