The Mercenary Editor Trouble
I keep track, as best I can, of what happens with mid-sized publishers in the United States, the U.K., and Germany, the three nations which host the vast majority of publishers the world over. Often I'm a couple of weeks behind on major movements and changes, but I also prefer to double-check the stories I read or hear regarding the industry to ensure I'm not being fooled.
Publishing is one of the few fields that has continued to make changes at a relatively slow pace, even with the advent of ebooks and online-only entities. The Internet doesn't make people write faster, it just gives some folks quicker access to a marketplace; they still have to take the time to compose their works, after all. But another recent development among mid-sized and larger publishers has enhanced the speed of production and distribution even more than the use of digital distribution, and it's a topic seldom discussed-
Mercenary editors.
The actual term favored in the industry is 'freelance third-party editors', which takes some of the sting out of what is being rightly pointed at as a sort of callous disregard on the part of publishers toward their authors. These mid-and-large-sized publishers, many having already laid off dozens of their own in-house editors to save on overhead, will contract out a batch of titles for editing with these freelancers, who in turn don't really care about the authors' efforts, careers, or narrative voices; they just want to basically provide line-editing as quick as possible so they can claim they've fulfilled their contract, get paid, and move on to the next assignment. Stylistic adjustments, internal logic and narrative consistency be damned, these folks only care to put in the minimal effort required to finish the job and get paid.
This sort of problem has been around for a while, and it is getting consistently worse. It's also creeping up from the indie and small press scene, hitting more mid-sized and large publishers than ever.
Most folks who aren't deeply involved in the literary arena can't be blamed for not seeing why this is a problem. 'An editor is an editor, right? What's the big deal if a publisher uses a third-party outsider?' The main problem, as I mentioned above, is that these mercenaries aren't actually providing effective editing services. They are, at best, going one or two steps beyond a standard software spell-check, and nothing more. For anything of real value or depth, these third-party editors are not a solution. And the publishers, well, they're usually relying on those editors' thumb's up to publish the book as presented after their services are rendered: they pull the trigger even if the book still should get more worked over.
The accelerated rate of ebook publication has helped enforce this 'crunch' feeling publishers experience, more and more, to shove volumes of work out the door to market, and the result of lackluster editing and this heightened pace has resulted in a notable decline in quality, even among mid-sized and larger publishers.
None of this is to say that all freelance editors are like this, or that they are entirely to blame. However, to ignore the rise of the mercenary editor trouble is to invite the continued erosion of narrative quality, until all anyone gets to read are first drafts with no editorial efforts put in.