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Sunday, December 28, 2008

The Sad Devaluing of Editors in the Book Industry


This is disturbing.  It's an article from an interesting blog called Holt Uncensored. Here's an excerpt:  "As I recall, the ganging up against editors started in the 1970s, when Michael Korda of Simon & Schuster said that editorial workers should acquire marketing savvy so they’d get out of their ivory towers and stop mumbling about literary values at sales conference. Until then there was at least an attempt to separate Editorial from Sales & Marketing so that acquisition decisions wouldn’t be tainted by commercial concerns. The editors acquired the books independently; they told the marketing people what to sell. Sales and Marketing got to decide how to sell them, but there was no backing-and-forthing, no suggestions made to editors, no intrusion into the editorial process."

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

this Pat Holt chick is the shyt! I thing you should add holtuncensored to the ol blog roll.

Writer, Rejected said...

Right? Check it out.

Anonymous said...

What a great blog! Thanks for directing me there.