More books than ever will be published in Australia this year. Jacqueline Kent explains why many will be badly edited.

Here’s a cautionary tale. An Australian publisher has just signed up a well known novelist. Both parties are very pleased with themselves: the author because it’s a better deal than any previous publisher has offered, the publisher because getting this author is a bit of a coup, despite the cost. They part with great cordiality and a few months later the author delivers the novel.

The first person to read it – apart from the author – is the editor. She is surprised to find that the manusript needs a lot of work. This gives her a problem: if she considers what she considers the necessary amount of time on editing, the book will appear late. If she doesn’t it will suffer.

She takes her worries to the publisher. He has given the author a publishing date and doesn’t want to break his word. On previous form, the author’s name guarantees a sale of at least 8000 copies. ‘I respect your literary judgment,’ he tells her (publisherspeak for ‘I think you are being a bit precious’) and says she must do only the work required for the book to appear on schedule.

The editor feels bruised and frustrated. But she squashes her editorial instincts by telling herself that her niggles are probably matters of taste: maybe she is being precious and alarmist. She edits the manuscript very lightly. As the author considers her mildest queries to be full frontal attacks, she’s thankful she didn’t ask for more. She still isn’t happy, but 10 other books are lined up on the editorial tarmac and she doesn’t have much time for regrets.

The novel appears on schedule. Because of the author’s stature it is reviewed in the Herald, the Age and the Australian, plus the major literary magazines. All reviewers point out errors of fact, clunky language, other slips of various kinds.

Most say that ‘the author has been very badly served by the editor’. The book bombs.

Publisher and author both blame the editor. She feels like calling Jack Kevorkian for an appointment. Why was she such a wimp, why didn’t she stand up for what she knew had to be done? Judging by my own experience, plus colleagues’ anecdotes, almost every experienced book editor in the country has had this or something like it happen.

It’s one reason why the statement that ‘standards of editing are slipping’ seems so unfair Reviewers who say this probably don’t realise that there are a couple of good reasons why editors may fail to insist on the right to do the job properly. One, as we’ve seen, is lack of time: the other is lack of status. If you’re being paid less than the publisher’s secretary – and many editors are – what hope do you have that you’ll be listened to? Besides, what hope do you have if your employer really doesn’t now very much about your job? A surprising number of publishers don’t know how difficult it is to estimate the time and work required on a manuscript until the editor starts on it.

At a Christmas party once, I asked a multinational publisher what exactly he thought editors were for. He gave me the impression that an editor is a combination of Cosima von Bulow and Mother Teresa with a reasonable grasp of English grammar.

Publishers, of course have their own problems. The whole issue of more books plus less time is a worrying trend, and it seems to be getting worse.

This is what seem sto be happening. The big multinationals, who basically own the publishing game here, need to increase profit while economising at a time of rising costs. And like good economic rationalists everywhere, they look at the staff first. As far as they can see, editors sit around reading all day; they’re not actually helping make profits. The books would appear whether they were edited or not.

So a few editors lose their jobs and the rest give work out to freelancers, cutting down on overheads. Everything’s fine for the first year but by the end of the second, the schedule is slowing down. The two remaining editors, doing the work of five, are like Alice Through the Looking Glass, running faster and faster to stay in the same place. They’re exhausted, burned out. Mistakes happen. By the beginning of the third year, sloppily edited books are common. Reviews notice.

The publisher is now failing to attract well known literary authors, so he approaches agents. Naturally they want the best deal for their clients so they ask for good advances The publisher knows sales probably won’t cover the outlays, but he agrees. The book loses money that the publisher now can’t afford.

It’s a horrible cycle and, as usually happens with short-term thinking, it’s very expensive to break.

One management axiom states that an employee’s responsibility in a company is directly related to the amount of forward planning his or her job entails.

Someone working in a warehouse, for instance, has only to ensure that x number of books are unpacked per day; a managing director plans for up to five years.

But in publishing companies it’s the editors who are the long-term planners, scheduing and developing books tht may not appear for a year or two. It’s their bosses who are grabbing the short-term sellers for the sake of a quick buck, and editors and readers who have to cop the results – burnout, frustration, mediocre and badly produced books.

Of course this problem is not unique to Australia and I’m not saying that all publishers suffer from it. But it is increasing, with consequences for the future of Australian publishing. It’s worth asking: Why ar we letting economic rationalism swamp quality control? Sydney Morning Herald, 6 July 1996

ONE of my least cherished memories is the first exam I took as a flute player. There I stood, my fingers trembling, facing a woman in a bobble-fringed poncho calmly scribbling comments as I piped way through bits of Handel and Elgar. It was an awful experience and I was so relieved to have reasonably well that I almost went back and thanked the examiner. I didn’t, partly because I was older than she was.

When you take up something new as an adult, especially if it involves a test of some kind, you’re being told how brave you are. It’s like being Poland. But I doubt that any adult who takes up a serious interest wants to win points for courage. More often it’s to satisfy a childhood ambition, to show that, despite your misspent adult life, you can do what you’ve always wanted to: play the cello, the the piano, become a dramatic soprano, tango dancer or whatever.

But you have to face something pretty disconcerting: at first you’re likely to be really, really bad at isn’t easy to accept, especially if you’ve been reasonably successful in other areas of life. Your ego insisting that you should be better.

In the case of a musical instrument, you know what good playing sounds like: call it the tyranny Sure, you’re making progress and working more intelligently than you would have done as a child, sometimes this isn’t enough. You know that, in the words of that smug Greek philosopher, there road to learning, the process is the important thing, the journey and not the arrival matters. But what ought to think or feel is irrelevant. Some of this came back in a dismal rush when, having spent a fair chunk of my professional life editor, I went over to the dark side and started to be a writer.

I know this probably doesn’t sound like much of a switch. Writing involves editing, or should: you need to take another look at something once you’ve drafted it. But there are pitfalls in the changeover, they’re every bit as frustrating as trying to get a good legato sound on a flute.

The problem is that editors are supposed to know about writing. That’s their job. As an editor, you’re supposed to be able to pick up a writer’s rhythm, to make suggestions that will improve the finished product on its own terms, not yours. You’re a kind of literary ventriloquist. You know about tone and how to analyse all that. But when you try to write, you find there is all the difference in the world between helping someone do it and doing it yourself. Just as hearing the CD of the Poulenc sonata several times doesn’t help you one bit when you pick up your flute and try to play it, being a reader critic of other people’s work does not make you a better writer, or even a good one.

So you have to forget what you have learned about helping other people free up their natural writing and struggle — like everybody else — to find your own. And all the time on your shoulder, like a gargoyle a Dore engraving, crouches you-as-editor, a small black imp that whispers into your ear: “This could better, no don’t write that, it’s bad, this is wrong.” This creature is, of course, the sort of editor you have never been and would never think of being, you know how demoralising are words such as these. You wouldn’t in a million years say things any of your authors. Only to yourself.

This is the sort of stuff you don’t hear much about at writers festivals. People sometimes go on about hell of writing, the horror of confronting the blank screen or sheet of paper first thing in the morning.

Somebody even said that writing is easy: you just stare at the paper until beads of blood form on forehead. Anything to convince audiences that you don’t just sit down at the computer, flexing your suggestively, and after a few weeks or months have a finished novel shoot out of your head. But still a kind of mystique about the process. Writers don’t often admit that before anything good can a lot of time has to be spent in being bad. Time in fiddling, writing utter drivel, the sort of stuff you’d anything to stop anyone getting hold of. They may pay lip service to biographers’ and librarians’ these mucking-around, early thoughts usually don’t make it through to posterity. They have to be but they’re nobody’s business but yours.

The good news is that you do get more involved in the process. But you have to learn to play. It fun, even. Just as you’ll never get that semiquaver passage exactly right by playing it 150 times stressing out each time, the thing is, as with words, to play around with it, try other stuff, be silly, back to it.

I have found that the more writing I do, the smaller and fainter that gargoyle becomes. (Not always, mostly.) Eventually on good days it becomes possible to imagine picking up that little black incubus, dropping it into a jar, sealing it and watching the creature pressing against the glass, glaring at you, mouthing its malignant words. You can’t hear a word it’s saying and you just watch it, satisfied for before going back to work.

Weekend Australian, August 2007

Paper Empires: A History of the Book in Australia 1946-2005

Edited by Craig Munro and Robyn Sheahan-Bright

University of Queensland Press

For a fascinating occupation, book publishing has generated some very dull books. Histories of publishing companies plod glumly through details of turnover, staff appointments, successes and books that got away, then there are the booksellers’ or publishers’ memoirs that refight old battles about difficult authors, contracts or distribution problems. Completely missing in most of these are the rich characters, the eccentrics, the impossible or wonderful authors, the great or fatheaded decisions, the jokes, the moments of glory, the gems of ad hoc brilliance that make up so much of the story.

They also fail to point out that most people who work in the book industry find it, despite moderate remuneration and often ridiculous hours, richly satisfying.

But now we have Paper Empires, the third and final volume of a collaborative history of print culture in Australia. The first two parts dealt with publishing, bookselling and reading from 1788 to 1890, and then from 1891 to 1945; in this volume 66 contributors take the story from the end of World War II to the present day. Crammed into the book’s 430-odd pages are dozens of subjects, including the fortunes of significant publishing companies, the nurturing (or otherwise) of writers, the process of making books (including editing and design), the retail book trade and technological challenges to the book.

With so much information in a relatively small space, there is an element of  “Pay attention, class!” to some of this, largely softened by the book’s most striking feature: a series of short chapters or essays, described as case studies, focusing on particular aspects within general discussion. These include brief biographies of key players, analysis of Aboriginal publishing and editing, the role of writers’ centres, libraries and much else, and they greatly increase the book’s vitality. True, they also make the book feel rather bitsy – this is a book to delve into rather than read straight through — but it is hard to see how else such an overview could have been organised.

At the beginning of the period, local publishing was largely confined to textbooks (anybody else remember the horrible Betty and Jim primary school maths books of the late 1950s?). There was also the behemoth of Angus&Robertson, which was not only a publisher but a bookseller and printer. A&R’s sclerotic publishing and business practices came under challenge during the ’60s by a generation of younger publishers, some larrikins, all eager to make their mark.

There is a fascinating chapter by David Carter about the influence of They’re a Weird Mob, published in 1957. This small book describing the absurdities of Australian life allegedly through the eyes of Italian migrant Nino Culotta (in fact a pharmacist named John O’Grady) had sold 940,000 copies by 1981 and stayed in print until 1999. Weird Mob was the first of many books chortling at the peculiarities of the Australian way of life, though while Let’s Stalk Strine described the way Australians really spoke, the national broadcaster insisted on choosing announcers whose vowels maintained a BBC-like purity.

In the ’70s, local publishing really took off: the nationalistic mood culminating in the election of the Whitlam government encouraged a sense of possibility and released much creative energy. Offset printing was replacing letterpress, so books became cheaper and quicker to produce. Small independent publishers could start up much more easily, and they did “with a gusto difficult to imagine today”, according to Morrie Schwartz, founder of Outback Press. Outback, like Lonely Planet, McPhee Gribble, Currency Press and others, found and published books on feminism, politics, theatre, fiction and history for a young, thoughtful readership who wanted to read about their society, their experiences. And the British publishers who had taken advantage of the lucrative Australian market began building local lists, too.

During the ’70s and ’80s classics came from small publishers: A Fortunate Life and My Place from Fremantle Arts Centre Press, Helen Garner’s first fiction from McPhee Gribble, Mother I’m Rooted, the first significant Australian anthology of women’s poetry, edited by Kate Jennings and published by Outback Press, the playtexts of David Williamson, Jack Hibberd and others from Currency Press.

All these companies flourished for a while; some grew, some declined, smashed between the Scylla and Charybdis of Australia’s small, scattered population and the high cost of book distribution. Technology has made producing books easier and cheaper, but getting them to an audience is just as difficult and expensive.

These days successful publishing is largely in the hands of conglomerates and multinationals. The paperback is king; Australian-produced educational material has all but replaced imports. But, as ever, being a book publisher is no way to get rich: in 2001 the 20 largest publishers in the country generated no less than 76 per cent of the industry’s total turnover and they had extremely small profit margins. “We are all more business-like these days because we have to be,” writes Robert Sessions, publishing director of Penguin. But it’s cheering that Lonely Planet and Allen & Unwin, two locally owned companies, are among the big players.

Paper Empires tells an exhilarating story, though unfortunately the lunatic energy of the book business fails to emerge in much of the writing. Some omissions are glaring: there is very little about scholarly and reference publishing, for instance. However, it highlights areas that are often overlooked: the discussions of indigenous publishing are particularly interesting. But I would have liked to see more evaluation of the subject, perhaps even a final summing-up of the place of books in Australian culture.

So much narrative does give the book a scattered feel; the Frank Moorhouse cover quote that this “tells the intriguing story of Australia’s exploration of itself through books” is not entirely accurate. But still, as part of the first and most comprehensive general history of books we have had, Paper Empires deserves to be applauded and celebrated.
*
Australian’s Review of Books, 6 September 2006

Churchill and America by Martin Gilbert Winston Churchill loved the United States unashamedly. ‘This is a very great country my dear Jack,’ he wrote to his brother. He took pride in his American blood – his mother was born in Brooklyn – and his US connections helped him make his fortune. During the 1920s and 1930s he undertook several series of staggeringly lucrative lecture tours throughout the US – Churchill always made a great deal more as a writer and speaker than he did in politics – and cannily purchased cheap American stock during the Depression.

Above all, Churchill loved the idea of America. Its wealth of possibility invigorated him, and he was dazzled by the country’s sheer size and power. Until the end of his life, he never ceased to extol the wonders of what he called his ‘adopted country’. Martin Gilbert unobtrusively contrasts this romantic view with Churchill’s experiences in dealing with US politics and politicians.

As First Lord of the Admiralty and Minister for Munitions during World War I, Churchill was often frustrated by President Woodrow Wilson’s reluctance to supply war materials and to be an active ally. And he always regarded the US Senate’s 1919 vote against accepting the Treaty of Versailles – thereby making the US turn its back on the League of Nations – as a turning point in the prospects for European and global peace. He believed that the rise of Hitler was entirely preventable.

The bulk of Gilbert’s book is taken up with World War II. Heartened by his warm friendship with Franklin D Roosevelt – elected US president in the same week Hitler became chancellor of Germany – Churchill as prime minister from 1940 thought he could count on US support. He even observed that, where Britain and the US had been ‘walking out’ together they were now married. Without stretching a coy metaphor that Churchill often used, it was always a difficult relationship. Gilbert describes Roosevelt’s tricky behaviour in the desperate early days of the war, providing support for Britain but stopping short of actual help and, at one point, like a calculating lover, coming across with wat was required and immediately demanding full payment in gold.

Churchill’s relief when the US entered the war was always tempered by anxiety about the consequences of Lend Lease for the Bfritish economy and the fear that Roosevelt would abandon the US commitment to the war in Europe and concentrate on the Pacific. He knew how much Britain needed the US and found the role of junior partner – sometimes even mendicant – frustrating and humiliating.

Churchill once told Roosevelt when the latter found him stark naked in a bedroom dictating to a secretary, ‘You see, Mr President, I have nothing to hide from you.’ It was a joke, but he meant it.

Roosevelt was not similarly open. He sometimes failed to share information with his wartime colleague, not telling him, for instance, of the US’s plans for the atomic bomb and arranging with Stalin behind Churchill’s back to abandon Poland to communist rule in 1945.

Gilbert writes that after the war ‘Avoiding estrangekent with the United States and seeking ‘easement’ with the Soviet Union remained the twin pillars of Churchill’s world view’.
Churchill repeatedly clashed with Eisenhower and his intransigent secretary of state John Foster Dulles about Russia: Churchill was all for seeking rapprochement with Stalin’s heirs, or at least entering into dialogue. Dulles wouldn’t hear of it, the Russians were also reluctant and Churchill watched helplessly while the standoff deepened into Cold War.

Yet despite this, Churchill always publicly expressed admiration for the IUS. Indeed, it sometimes seems that the less important he and Britain were to America’s fortunes, the more florid became his rhetoric.

Gilbert is almost a one-man academy of Churchill studies: he wrote six of the eight volumes of Churchill’s official biography and is the author or editor of at least 20 other books about him. He is clearly not in the business of messing with his subject’s reputation and anyone who wants a critical appraisal of Churchill’s politics and beliefs should not look to Churchill and America. Gilbert mostly lets Churchill’s words – in a wide range of letters, articles, speeches, interviews and memos – speak for themselves.

The effect is oddly one-dimensional: some analysis or even speculation about US policy and attitudes to Britain and its place in the world would have been welcome. Clearly Gilbert is a classic historian of the old school who is less interested in motivation than in who did what when.

But there are other books on the subject of Churchill and America, and this is a useful and interseting summary of a relartionship central to European history during the 20th century.

Sydney Morning Herald Spectrum, February 2006