BOOKS
Thinking Like Your Editor
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Thinking Like Your Editor By Susan Rabiner and Alfred Fortunato. Norton 284 pp. $26.95 |
Lots of journalists want to write books. Some of those journalists think the process is relatively simple. Take an already-published newspaper article, magazine feature, or television segment, then make it longer.
Susan Rabiner, a longtime book editor recently turned literary agent, is here to tell those journalists it is almost never that simple. Assisted by her husband, the free-lance editor-writer Alfred Fortunato, Rabiner corrects misconceptions galore on the way to publishing one of the most useful books ever for would-be authors — and experienced authors, too. “A serious nonfiction book is not a piece of journalism writ large,” they observe. “It is a different animal with different markings and a different role to play.”
The Rabiner-Fortunato advice is a fine supplement to Betsy Lerner’s The Forest for the Trees: An Editor’s Advice to Writers (Riverhead Books, 287 pages, $21.95; see CJR review, July/August 2000). Like Lerner, Rabiner worked for many years as an editor in major publishing houses. Like Lerner, she decided to try agenting. Unlike Lerner, she decided to devote her book entirely to nonfiction, with lots of specific writing advice.
Some readers will probably be surprised to learn that writing style often plays only a tiny role in determining whether a proposal becomes a nonfiction book. Instead, the freshness of the idea and the size of the potential audience drive the process — the first three rules of book publishing, as stated by Rabiner and Fortunato, are “audience, audience, audience.” The authors explain, for example, why a book proposal about women who become murderers is unlikely to receive an offer from a publisher such as Random House, while a proposal about children who become murderers is much more likely to receive an offer. Who would buy a book about women murderers? Those likely to become such criminals? Maybe, but that is a small market. For other women and for men, the topic is too unthinkable to market. On the other hand, women and men who are parents might buy a book that explains how their children could go wrong. The Rabiner-Fortunato book is filled with illuminating examples of that kind.
Part one of their book, about submissions, suggests how to structure a book proposal and whether that proposal needs an agent. Part two, about the writing process, discusses the extensive research that undergirds all successful narrative. Part three focuses on how authors and editors can work as an effective team, starting with an author’s understanding that every editor has lots of other authors to deal with, too. A sample proposal accompanied by a sample chapter round out the book.
Novelists and short-story writers should start with Lerner, but nonfiction authors might start with Rabiner-Fortunato. Taken together, the books constitute an excellent short course in how editors operatence.
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