Re: Authors Who Should Retire

On Tue, 11 Mar 2008 11:25:12 -0500, Taki Kogoma <quirk@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
wrote:

>On 2008-03-11, Joseph Nebus <nebusj-@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
>allegedly proclaimed to rec.arts.sf.written:
>> 	I'd guess what-can-be-edited would be the tighter bottleneck, 
>> but then a clearly promising new author would probably be a better use 
>> of the editing budget (time, money, staff, etc) than the Established 
>> Author would be anyway.  
>
>Since when do Established Authors get anything beyond prefunctory
>copyediting?

Since always.

The thing is, editing is suggestions -- "I think this scene would work
better if you gave Coral a letter opener instead of a stiletto; why
would a stiletto be lying on the desk?"

And the author can then say, "Oh, of course," and change it, or say,
"No, it has to be a stiletto because of how that fits my personal
cosmology that I won't explain until eight books from now."

If the author choose Option No. 2, the normal editorial response is to
shrug and say, "Fine, it's your name on the cover, not mine."

New authors are more likely to choose Option No. 1, because they're
eager; established authors are more likely to go with No. 2, because
we're lazy.




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