Editors' little pranks {WAS: Re: [HPFGU-OTChatter] Re: Book 5 release date/UK end of term?}

[Andrew MacIan]

Greetings from Andrew!

Quoting from Barry Longyear (the feture article in the
Winter/02 SFWA Quarterly):  "...Gene Fowler, who once
said: 'An editor should have a pimp for a brother, so
he'd have somebody to look up to.' "

--- blpurdom <blpurdom at yahoo.com> wrote:
{snip}

> And what
> happened to 
> that scary statement from the publisher around New
> Year's that if 
> she didn't turn in a manuscript like, yesterday, it
> wasn't going to 
> appear at all this year?  Were they just trying to
> light a fire 
> under her to get the rewrites on those two chapters
> finished?  Kind 
> of a nasty technique, IMO.
{snip}


This is, alas, one of the more common tricks that
editors use to get the MS from an author who
wants/needs to re-write a huge swath of it...or worse,
just needs to tweak it 'a bit more'.  John Campbell
polished this to a high art at 'Astounding/Analog';
Shelly Shapiro, when she was running a stable at Del
Rey inherited John's laurels.  Having watched one of
my best friends go under the harrow whilst red-lining
galleys for Shelly, I understand the necessity for the
process of ripping the MS from the hands of the author
at some point in time.

It can be seen to be nasty, but if you consider that
production schedules can take up to three months for a
novel-- and Longyear has a *very* good discussion of
what goes into getting a book from MS into stores,
from a production POV-- any time saved by the editor
'up front' will mean the book is is our hands all the
sooner.

Cheers,

Drieux

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