On Editing I

Now that I’m pseudo entrenched in the editing process I thought it might be time to say something about editing. And when I say pseudo entrenched, I mean I made a few changes to book one, finished part five of book two, felt highly discouraged reviewing part six, and decided to work on a completely different book. This will get done by September, I swear…Though I suppose all this does tie in nicely to the first thing I want to say about editing. The writing and publishing industry are crap at editing and on a whole seem to ignore it.

Let me explain.

There’s a huge focus when it comes to editing on getting the grammar right. While that is important, and we’ve all known that one asshole who goes around catching every single grammar mistake and making a BIG DEAL out of it, grammar mistakes are almost inconsequential compared to the greater editing mistakes being made. Don’t get me wrong, grammar is important, and I’ll come back to it in a later post, but for now I’d like to talk about content editing, and the lack of good content editing in the last sixty years.

I’ve seen many posts about how books seem to be getting fatter with no real reason to be except, something, something, publishers not doing their job. In particular, people often point to the Harry Potter series as an egregious example of lack of content editing toward the later half of the series. This is true, and there’s an obvious reason why. Most debuts are going to be short and tightly written because the author is untested. Once the author has blown up in popularity and their books sell on name alone, there is a bias from the customer to prefer lengthier books as it feels like more ‘worthwhile.’ To the publisher, an extra one hundred pages doesn’t cost them anything, but to the reader, since the book is going to cost $15 regardless of length, a four hundred page book feels more worth it than a two-hundred fifty page book. (Oooh, my editing brain is showing, I’m writing out my numbers.) This is the simple economics of it all, but I would also make the argument that most writers after writing one book do get wordier. I know for myself that my ‘concise’ writing habits have gone out the window as I now automatically add the things the reader needs to know that I used to just ‘assume.’ Hence books get longer. One can also expect with a series like Harry Potter, as Rowling expanded upon the story, the books would get longer regardless. The Prisoner of Azkaban was about a hundred pages longer than The Philosopher’s Stone. But that doesn’t account for why The Goblet of Fire was a whopping three hundred pages more than the previous book.

To Be Continued…