My last post in this series is about a lot more than just editing. You see, publishing is not a business with wide and generous margins. Certainly authors can’t expect to earn a tremendous amount of money directly from publishing. But even the biggest wigs in publishing aren’t running around making the Fortune 400 lists.
Now that so much good content is published online for free, these margins are only going to get narrower.
But those of us called to publish and write and edit still have to put food on the table. How does that work? Here’s the last question:Â
4. Is it, do you suppose, financially feasible for a single person to live in the suburbs of a major city, with only an entry-level publishing job and very part-time work in the food industry?
I’m not sure what the copyright armageddon is exactly, but it sounds bad, right? We should run screaming from it, right? We should be afraid, very afraid, right?
A reader wrote to me recently. (Okay, it was Eve Nielsen. Stop twisting my arm.)Â
She said, “I’ve been reading a book on how to write and just discovered that there are various kinds of editors. How necessary do you think a copy editor is?”
Let’s start with the strong warning. Caveat emptor. Seriously.Â
I found this Robert Silverberg quote in the Nebula Awards Showcase 2006. They called him “Master” not me, but it made for a punchy post title. Silverberg explains the need for caution in publishing:
Each new book usually stands alone, unsheltered by the other titles its publisher may have issued, and if it sells badly, its author will very quickly find himself in commercial trouble, because everybody knows everybody else’s figures. One conspicuous failure from a big house can doom a writer…
