
“We will still be reading books”: Six Questions for Six Publishers
A few months ago, I attended a book festival in a corner of downtown Toronto that has become nearly cocooned by a glitter of skyscrapers. Publishers were leaning behind makeshift tables stacked with books and trying their best to interact with the river of readers flowing by their booths.
Each publishing house at the festival had a unique aesthetic that informed the books they had chosen to publish. I approached a few of my all-time favourite publishers, curious about the steps in the production line that go into transforming an author’s raw first draft into a beautifully bound book of polished prose or poetry. I was perhaps most interested in the influence that an editor can have on an author’s work.
In other words, I wanted to find out how “the sausage gets made” (to borrow a term from another industry).
I asked each person for advice that I could pass on to aspiring writers. The questions I asked were straightforward: “How should a writer approach a publisher with his/her manuscript?” “What are you looking for?” “What are your pet peeves?” “How would you define the role of an editor?”
Their passionate responses were wildly different, always generous, and surprising.
Joshua Levy: Let’s say an author has just finished writing their first manuscript. They want to have it considered for publication. What advice would you give them?
Laurie Graham (Brick Magazine): It can be such a crapshoot, a nail-biter, and a slog all at once. Your focus should remain on the work as much as possible. Start on the next project while you send that first thing around. As much as you can, take your time. Make sure that first thing is ready to exist in the world, for you can’t readily unexist it.
Alana Wilcox (Coach House Books): Really think about who you want to submit to. It might be tempting to send a copy-pasted email out to a long list of publishers, which makes sense because you want as many people to see your manuscript as possible, but publishers really look for authors who are familiar with their house style, and know what they’re about. Prepare yourself for many rejections, but don’t just dismiss them: think about why you’re being rejected, and always consider starting new projects.
Alayna Munce (Brick Books): Brick Books is Canada’s only press that focuses exclusively on publishing poetry. In the poetry world (perhaps because there’s very little money involved, so agents don’t come into play!) publisher–poet relationships tend to be pretty direct. I would give all the usual advice: go out to events, talk to other poets, talk to publishers; submit your poems to literary journals and contests so that you begin to build a publication history and people like me may begin to notice your writing; read widely, do your research, feel out which presses feel like a fit. And when you begin sending the manuscript out, prepare yourself to be resilient, to keep revising and sending, think of it as a potentially fruitful part of the process.
Marc Côté (Cormorant Books): In preparing the query to the publisher, these things are important: (a) address the letter to the right person and not a general “acquisitions editor”; (b) refer to the one, two, or more books published by that company that he or she has read and enjoyed so that the editor or editorial assistant reading the letter knows it’s from someone who’s done his or her work; (c) keep the letter short—one page; (d) the description of the manuscript should be kept to one sentence or a very short paragraph; (e) make it pithy; (f) accompany the letter with a one-pager describing the manuscript more fully and with a short biography, including a list of prizes won in college or university and any publications; (g) remember that shorter material always gets read fully; (h) read everything over to ensure there are no typos or errors; (i) entrust your letter and accompanying material to the gods who control the Internet, email, or the postal system.
The most important advice: do not send your editor work that has been “edited” by friends or colleagues or professionals. The editors at literary houses are looking for authenticity, which can often be obscured by well-meaning comments.
Jack David (ECW Press): If you were buying a toaster or a car, you would do some research. You wouldn't buy the first one you come across. In figuring out where to submit, the author should understand which publishers match up with their manuscript. If the publisher doesn't publish cookbooks, then don't submit to them. Once you have a list of potential publishers, check out their website, and try to locate the acquiring editor who matches up with your submission; then, address your letter and sample to that person. The same applies if you are seeking an agent.
Paul Vermeersch (Wolsak & Wynn Publishers Ltd.): I usually answer this by saying that a writer should always work on their writing and not worry about publishing. The opportunity to publish will come along when the writing is ready. Assuming the writer has already heeded this advice, the next step is to understand that writing is a profession, so a writer has to be professional.
JL: As a publisher and an editor, what do you look for in a story? In a manuscript?
LG: I never quite know. There are people writing right now who are doing things that haven’t been seen before or conceived of or believed legitimate. The aliveness of the writing is crucial to me: does it astonish? Does it have its own sound and cadence and aesthetic? Is it angling for its subject in an exciting way? Does it clearly have some facility with its form? Is this the best and only form in which this story can be told?
AW: Not just something that sells. It’s hard sometimes to believe that there’s anything new under the sun, but at Coach House we really look for things that try to play with, if not redefine, genres and form. We’re looking for works that will challenge us and a wider audience without being condescending or obscurantist.
AM: We have an acquisitions committee at Brick Books, and increasingly we are trying to make sure that the poets on that committee represent a multiplicity of aesthetics and experiences, so that our list has a commensurate range. That said, I personally gravitate toward manuscripts that have some kind of urgency at their core. I also love to see manuscripts that smartly resist the limitations of genre.
MC: I look for authenticity in voice, outlook, story. The ability to say something no one else has said and to say it in an engaging manner. With a manuscript that I really believe in, the rest of the process is easy because I’m motivated by a great piece of writing. This may seem like I’m being vague, but that’s really all I look for.
The next thing is to observe myself reading the manuscript ... if I am involuntarily turning the pages to find out what happens ...
JD: The first thing I look for is competent writing and sentences that I haven't seen before. The next thing is to observe myself reading the manuscript, and see if I am drawn into the writing, if I am involuntarily turning the pages to find out what happens, to track down the narrative—whether fiction or nonfiction.
PV: I'm looking for originality and a strong style. To me, that's what makes a fun read. I'm not looking for the next Harry Potter or the next Handmaid's Tale. I'm looking for something I've never read before, something fully realized (or realizable), something innovative, something that demonstrates the strong personal style of the writer.
JL: What are your pet peeves about manuscripts submitted today?
LG: You can really tell when a writer has not read Brick before and doesn’t know anything about the magazine. Writing and editing is slow work, and publishing is slow too. Writers understandably get impatient but taking the time to sit down with the magazine you’re thinking of submitting to will equip you well in the long run.
AW: Unsolicited polyphony. We’ve been receiving a lot of manuscripts recently that hop back and forth in time, with chapters divided into different “voices” or perspectives. It seems to be a trend at the moment and granted, when it’s done well, it can really work. But a boring story with a quirky timeline is still a boring story.
... if I don’t see any evidence of a poet engaging with their work on every possible layer, it makes me wonder about the depth of their interest in and commitment to what poetry can do.
AM: It bothers me to read manuscripts by poets who haven’t bothered to hone the work technically or think about, for instance, employing consistent titling or punctuation conventions (or who haven’t even bothered to proofread the manuscript!). Those layers of work can be done in editing, of course, but if I don’t see any evidence of a poet engaging with their work on every possible layer, it makes me wonder about the depth of their interest in and commitment to what poetry can do.
MC: My biggest pet peeve is a lack of authenticity—manuscripts that are “clean” but have nothing to recommend them because when I read them the author’s voice is stifled or, worse, modified to conform to a common practice or standard. Too often I’ll talk to an author and ask why they wrote a specific character a particular way, only to hear “That’s what my writing group told me to do.” Argh. In such cases, if I’ve been able to catch a glimmer of the author’s actual voice or point of view or story, I’ll ask to see the first draft of the manuscript, praying as I do that the first draft still exists.
JD: People who address me by my first name, when they have never met me. People who submit pdfs when I ask for Word files (because they are easy to manipulate). People who don't look at our website before submitting.
PV: Aside from not following submission guidelines, my pet peeve is a submission that comes with a pushy sales pitch. Good writing will always stand out better than a hard pitch. Recently someone interrupted a conversation I was having at a public event to pitch his manuscript to me. He actually stood between me and the people I was talking to. I knew right away that I didn't want to work with this person. At the same event, a woman approached me with a printout of her manuscript for a book of financial advice, and she seemed offended that I declined to accept it. Never mind that I don't publish books on finance and would be woefully unqualified to do so.
JL: How would you define the role of an editor? What does your typical editing process look like?
LG: To me, the editor’s job is to focus on the bridge from the writer’s mind to the reader’s. What kind of bridge does the language on the page make? Would a reader be able to negotiate it the way the writer intends, and would the reader be surprised, propelled, enlivened by that negotiation? My goal is always to make sure a piece of writing is sturdy enough for the reader while not muffling the writer’s voice or style and to help the work execute the full wallop it intends.
The process is best when both sides arrive at it with openness, candour, and respect.
AW: The editor's role is to help the author make their book the best it can be. That means asking hard questions and having a big conversation with the author about intention and how it might best be executed. There is no typical process because every book is different. Some authors respond best to a long conversation, some to general notes, and some to very specific and detailed notes from the start. The process is best when both sides arrive at it with openness, candour, and respect.
AM: Stan Dragland, one of the founders of Brick Books, says that the editor should be the manuscript’s best friend, not necessarily the poet’s—though happily the two can, and often do, coincide. I approach editing as a deep conversation about the work. This involves several rounds of notes and letters back and forth on everything from very small word-choice and punctuation questions, the cadence of the line, and the line break, to the arcs and voices of individual poems and series, and the shape and structure and dimensions of the manuscript as a whole. My feeling is that the editor should bring up absolutely everything that occurs to her as she reads and re-reads. That’s why we build in a generous amount of time for editing between acquisition and publication at Brick Books.
MC: In many cases, the editing process involves substantive editing, where character and plot are reshaped. I do this in two ways that can best be described by children’s toys. The first is a game called Kerplunk which involves a tall tube, marbles, and straws or sticks. The dozens of sticks are inserted into slots half-way up the tube and the marbles are dropped onto them. The object of the game is to see how many sticks can be pulled from the tube before all the marbles fall through. Using this as the analogy, in my imagination I remove aspects of the manuscript to see at what point the story itself collapses. The second children’s toy is Lego, which, when I was a child, consisted of hundreds and thousands (in my case) of loose pieces and no map or directions for putting them together into a pre-conceived object. (Our imaginations when I was a child were given free rein; we weren’t expected to recreate characters, buildings, or scenes from movies with toys like Lego.) Back to the analogy—I think of the manuscript (post-Kerplunk) as disparate pieces to be put together in various ways.
Once the substantive edit is completed—and this might take two, three, four attempts working with the author—we move on to the line edit. My idea of a line edit involves characters and their dialogue, ensuring that no two characters sound alike in their speech patterns, diction, and language patterns.
JD: The acquiring editor is the gatekeeper, and has to be enthusiastic about taking on the manuscript. That includes enjoying the writing and understanding whether there is a potential market for the book. The substantive or structural editor helps the manuscript be more fluent and organized, and works with the author very closely. That editor allows the author to make the final decisions but offers constructive comments and solid rationales. The copyeditor cleans up the manuscript, for spelling, grammar, and accuracy. The proofreader is a separate person who provides a final checkpoint.
PV: No two authors are alike, and ideally no two books are alike either, so there's no such thing as a typical editing process. There are different roles to play: coach, teacher, collaborator, guide, or some combination of these—but even this is an imprecise analogy. The editor is the editor, and it's the editor's job to adapt to the needs of the book and the author, and to guide the book into its best possible form.
JL: In recent years it has emerged that Raymond Carver’s editor, Gordon Lish, invented much of the “less is more” writing style that made Carver famous and distinct. Has your editing ever significantly altered a writer’s final manuscript? Do you think it is sometimes fair to refer to an editor as a secondary writer of a finished manuscript?
LG: I am staunchly on the side of working in the service of the text, bringing out what’s already there, and aiming to be as invisible as possible. It is absolutely the writer who is the author of the work, not the editor. If I have significantly changed the intent or the shape or the voice of someone’s writing, I have failed as an editor. Story goes Carver begged Lish to pull What We Talk About When We Talk About Love from publication. It was no longer his work, but it had his name on it. What a mortifying situation that would be.
AW: Sometimes, over the course of a manuscript’s editorial process, a manuscript does change significantly. But that doesn't mean that the work is any less of the author’s, or that the editor is a kind of second author. It can be the role of the editor to make suggestions (some of which might be quite significant) and guide the writer, but we write feedback, we don't write the books.
AM: I’ve said elsewhere that a writer should feel their editor crouching beside them in their own particularity, trying to get a look along their sightline—that’s my take on the spirit of the role. I hope my suggestions and interventions help make the finished manuscript feel more like itself, make the voice more clearly and distinctly the author’s voice. (It seems to me that film editors are much more often secondary writers or directors of finished films, but that’s another conversation!)
An editor is an editor. All we do—and it is very important—is to help writers create their best possible books.
MC: I think of editors as something not unlike a medical professional. We shouldn’t discuss specific cases, unless we have the writer’s express permission. What I will say is this: any change an editor suggests must be embraced by the author, thereby keeping the entire work true to the author’s vision.
I would also say that Gordon Lish did not “invent” Carver’s style; he found it buried in Carver’s writing—it was there all along. Lish broke with professional standards when he revealed in the New York Times Magazine how he worked with Raymond Carver. Yes, Carver was dead. But, no, Lish should not have done what he did. I understand why he did it—someone else had taken the credit for the work that Lish had done and I’m pretty sure that the only reason Lish did what he did was to set the record straight. But it’s not something that I think is a wise thing to do—and even in Lish’s account, he had to agree that Carver himself agreed to all the edits and so became the master of the style that Lish helped him to find.
And, NO, in upper case letters and bold, NO, an editor is NEVER, in upper case letters and bold, NEVER a secondary writer. An editor is an editor. All we do—and it is very important—is to help writers create their best possible books.
JD: Sometimes this is the case but it is problematic to accept a manuscript that needs so much work. There would have to be a great unpolished manuscript waiting to be improved. Usually, I would tell the author to find a freelance editor and consider a rewrite.
PV: As an editor, I consider it my job to make suggestions to the author that can improve the book, but it's the author's decision whether to accept those suggestions and integrate them into the text. If the author disagrees with a suggestion of mine, then I need to make a better case for it. Sometimes my suggestion merely identifies a weakness in the manuscript, and the author has a different, often better, solution. My contribution to a book is highly variable from project to project, but in the end, the finished book is the author's work, not mine.
JL: How has the publishing industry changed in Canada over the last 20 years? Have the roles of publishers and editors changed since you began your career?
We also need to make it so that it’s not impossible for someone who wants to do this work to be housed and fed.
LG: Publishing is still an awfully white world, and the bulk of the heavy lifting is being done by women. But just in the past couple of years, I’ve seen that world start to change. I’ve seen the people getting published change, and I’m starting to see changes in who does the editing. We also need to make it so that it’s not impossible for someone who wants to do this work to be housed and fed. I just learned that Iceland has a granting system that pays writers a monthly wage for a portion of or an entire year. This would be such a wonderful thing to have. For editors to have too, and publishers, and translators ... For so many, entering this field still carries with it a myriad of risks—not just economic—and so far, part of the gig has been to figure out how comfortable you are negotiating these risks, how long you’ll be able to withstand or combat them. I hope one day to see those risks eliminated.
AW: This is an enormous question. Almost everything about how publishing works has changed in many ways, but the core remains the same: it's people falling in love with books, working to make them as good as they can be, and then evangelizing about them out in the world.
AM: I can’t speak to all 20 years, but my sense is that the most important and exciting recent change in the industry is only just beginning; namely, the deliberate clearing of space for a much broader range of voices and visions. I think publishers and editors need to become very conscious and active participants in this endeavour.
MC: From my first years in publishing to about the late 1990s, Canadian-authored books of real merit got a lot of attention in print and on radio and even on television. It was never enough, but it was a lot more than what we’re seeing these days. And it was effective.
Until the mid-1990s, there were around 2,000 retail stores across the country that styled themselves as independent booksellers. Sometimes a bookseller would get behind a book and recommend it to customers. If the book sold well, they’d share the information with their sales reps who would, in turn, pass it along to other accounts. Local authors could find their books in multiple stores in their cities and towns. Booksellers had more time to talk to or even argue with publishers and make considerable contributions to the industry.
I’ve talked about the media and booksellers, because that’s where the biggest changes have been. In my experience, the roles of publishers and editors haven’t really changed since probably the 1920s. How we execute those roles have changed, of course.
JD: The role of publisher is much the same as it was. The industry has slowed down; it's flat now, and advances have come down as sales have diminished. There are many fewer retail opportunities, so the publisher has to find special markets beyond bookstores and libraries.
Publishing is always in flux; by its very nature, it must be responsive to new technologies.
PV: Twenty years ago, Wolsak & Wynn only published poetry, and today in addition to our award-winning poetry we have top-notch fiction and creative nonfiction lists. Twenty years ago, the phoenix of Coach House Books was just rising from the ashes of Coach House Press. Twenty years ago, General Publishing was a juggernaut, the largest Canadian-owned publishing operation in history, and it was four years away from collapse. Twenty years ago, Amazon didn't exist, and we were only beginning to realize just how much the Internet and digitization would change the business model of traditional publishing. Publishing is always in flux; by its very nature, it must be responsive to new technologies. Twenty years from now, we will still be reading books, and we will still be publishing books, and everything else might be wildly different.
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Laurie D. Graham comes from Treaty 6 territory (Sherwood Park, Alberta), and she currently lives in Treaty 20 territory (Peterborough, Ontario), where she is a poet, an editor, and the publisher of Brick magazine. Her first book, Rove (Hagios Press, 2013), was nominated for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award for best first book of poetry in Canada. Her second book, Settler Education (McClelland & Stewart, 2016), was nominated for Ontario’s Trillium Award for Poetry. Poems from that book were also shortlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize, won the Thomas Morton Poetry Prize, and appeared in the Best Canadian Poetry anthology. A new collaborative project with artist Amanda Rhodenizer called The Larger Forgetting is out this fall, and recent work can be found in Vallum, Arc, and The West End Phoenix.
Alana Wilcox is the Editorial Director of Coach House Books, an independent literary publisher of poetry, fiction and select non-fiction. She is the co-founding editor of the uTOpia series of books about Toronto and the author of a novel, A Grammar of Endings. She lives in Toronto.
Alayna Munce is an editor and the production manager at Brick Books. Her novel, When I Was Young and in My Prime, was shortlisted for the Trillium Book Award and was a national bestseller. She lives with her son in a bustling house in the Parkdale neighbourhood of Toronto.
Marc Côté is the publisher and lead acquisitions editor of Cormorant Books, a 33-year-old literary publishing house noted for the discovery and development of Canadian writing talent. He has been nominated for the Libris Award for Editor of the Year numerous times, and has won it twice. Cormorant Books has been nominated for the Libris Award for Small Press seven times, and has won it three times. At Cormorant, Marc has acquired and edited many award nominated books, including but in no way limited to the Giller Prize-nominated BeyondMeasure by Pauline Holdstock; Home Schooling by Carol Windley; and The Perfect Circle, a translation by Sheila Fischman of Le Cercle Parfait by Pascale Quiviger. He has also acquired and edited the Charles Taylor Prize-nominated The Pursuit of Perfection: A Life of Celia Franc by Carol Bishop-Gwyn, and the BC National Non-Fiction Prize-nominated Pinboy by George Bowering. He acquired and edited the acclaimed picture books M is For Moose: A Charles Pachter Alphabet and Canada Counts: A Charles Pachter Counting Book.
Jack David is the co-publisher at ECW Press, a Canadian-owned general trade publisher. ECW publishes fifty books a year in categories such as sports, fiction, pop culture, memoir, and science.
Paul Vermeersch is a poet, professor, artist, and the senior editor of Wolsak & Wynn Publishers Ltd., where he created the literary imprint Buckrider Books. His latest book of poetry, Self-Defence for the Brave and Happy, was recently published by ECW Press.
Laurie Graham author photo credit to Jason Graham.
Paul Vermeersch author photo credit to Justice Darragh of Fossil & Bone Photography
