There is always a certain leap of faith that editors have made with their nonfiction writers. If the trust is broken, things can get very embarrassing for the writers and the publisher.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
The real literary editors have mostly been fired. Those that remain are all 'bottom line' editors; everything depends on the money.
In a world where everyone is a publisher, no one is an editor. And that is the danger that we face today.
Authors can get an attitude of us-against-them when it comes to publishers, but learning how authors and editors can work together taught me to look at my work in a different way and to make that work as solid as possible before it ever goes to the publisher.
I lived through a classic publishing story. My editor was fired a month before the book came out. The editor who took it over already had a full plate. It was never advertised. We didn't get reviewed in any major outlets.
That is the thing about being a writer; your subject matter may not stay your subject matter if you break their trust by revealing personal and editorialized information about them.
That's why editors and publishers will never be obsolete: a reader wants someone with taste and authority to point them in the direction of the good stuff, and to keep the awful stuff away from their door.
Every writer I've ever spoken to feels fraudulent in some way or other.
Publishers were ever eager for authors to do their own publicity because nobody else was willing to do it for nothing. But then it became clear that if you want somebody to champion the story, there's nobody better than the person who made it all up.
I believe my publisher has shown a great deal of faith in me over a lot of years but I'm not prepared to be so arrogant to say that the long-term literary value of my work would compensate them for a financial failure.
I think it would be a shame for any writer to let their publishers in any way corral them into a single genre.
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