To someone who has spent years in graduate school, the reach of a scholarly editor can seem tantalizingly broad. Publishing, after all, involves more learning than teaching, and the very nature of the business necessitates constant renewal.
Add to this the never-ending arrival of new and interesting manuscripts, hobnobbing with some of the liveliest intellects in the world, frequent travel to conferences and campuses, and in general the opportunity to live a life of the mind rather less cloistered than that offered by many university positions, and you have a pretty appealing profession.
It therefore makes perfect sense that scholarly publishing represents a viable alternative to frustrated aspiring professors. But can university professors or wannabe academics make good editors? Yes, of course.
Many of the most accomplished editors at some of the most prestigious presses in the land have higher degrees, among them many Ph.D.s.: Lindsay Waters and Joyce Seltzer at Harvard, Bill Germano at Routledge, to name a few.
Here's what academics should consider if they're considering a career as a scholarly editor.
In 4 out of every 5 informational interviews, the person sitting opposite me is invariably smart, articulate, educated, bibliophilic, earnest -- in a word, impressive. But six years spent plugging away on a dissertation while teaching undergraduates is not necessarily the best preparation for today's publishing world.
Skilled editors are often generalists as much as specialists, whose daily duties are the intellectual (and sometimes not-so-intellectual) equivalent of multitasking. As an American history editor, say, you must have a working knowledge of America's military experience, its political watersheds, cultural scene past and present, basic historical methodology, and perhaps of jazz and baseball to boot.
Also, the focused and often hermetic nature of graduate work exists in sharp contrast to the juggling of proposals, contracts, submissions, manuscripts-under-contract, prospective and veteran authors, book-jacket designs, descriptive copy, sales presentations, campus visits, dueling impulses of authors and colleagues, and assorted gruntwork that make up the editor's daily existence.
Publishing cannot therefore simply be a professional escape valve for those whom the academy has offered no home.
Additionally, at the entry levels, publishing tends to offer miserable wages. A former colleague tells of starting out as a marketing assistant, and sitting on a curbside munching his peanut-butter sandwich for lunch as a union march went past, with workers carrying signs that proclaimed their inability to live on a salary that my friend glumly realized to be almost twice his own.
While salaries vary by region, an editorial assistant in New York City can generally expect a starting salary between $18,000 and $21,000, while marketing assistants tend to do slightly better. Junior editors earn from $25,000 to $32,500, with raises generally depending on performance. The further into the heartland one ventures, the lower the wages tend to be.
So how can you break into scholarly publishing? There are no clear routes, no typical career paths.
I fell into publishing when a journalism internship on which I'd set my sights didn't come through and I finagled an interview via an alumni connection. It certainly helps to be well-read, to have a wide range of cultural references, to be able to handle a diverse workload, to work quickly and efficiently, and to be able to communicate well with other members of your species.
Depending on the position, it can be more useful to know a little about a lot than a lot about a little.
Most importantly, there's simply no substitute for hands-on experience. While internships and publishing courses are seen by many employers as a leg up, publishing remains an apprenticeship business, in which one slogs away for two to three years, drafting contracts and rejection letters, requesting checks, and calling reviewers, before trying to land a more independent position, usually at another house. Internships have always been a feature of the publishing world, and these days seem to have become a veritable rite of passage.
At N.Y.U. Press, where we are permitted to enlist only N.Y.U. students, many interns work on an unusually wide range of tasks and tend to have more responsibilities than at other presses. We've successfully placed most of the interns interested in a full-time position -- largely, I suspect, due to that training.
Publishing is in many ways a counterintuitive trade that takes some learning: University-press print runs are usually one-tenth or one-twentieth of what the uninitiated would suspect; prominent reviews simply don't always sell books; lowering the price often has no effect on sales; and so on.
And it can be complicated: At Oxford University Press, where I started, it took me a full year until I realized why I did certain things when I did them -- why, for example, I made three copies of each manuscript for the copy-editing department.
Most university press managers want editors with a basic understanding of the difference between a good book and a publishable one (we are after all in the business of saying no 19 times out of 20), between long and short discounts, and list and net royalties. They want an editor who can summarize a complicated book to sales representatives in two minutes, with passion, substance, and flair, and without vulgarizing the author's intent.
They also want editors who will play nice with their colleagues, who will engage in hardball contract negotiations, and who can advocate for their books in a firm but flexible manner.
In this equation, intellectual heft is a baseline consideration. Without it, you get nowhere. With it, you can still get nowhere if you're great in the library but have the social grace of a scorpion.
The best editors are those with a deep commitment to their subject and their books who combine that commitment with an interest in the economic foundations of their work. And that, as one of the recent slew of articles on The Crisis in Publishing pointed out, is the source of a genuine shortage in publishing. It's simply not easy to find smart, ambitious, affable people who are both intellectually lively and who have a head for numbers, and who are willing to accept low pay for long hours.
The flip side of this is that there are a limited number of positions in publishing, and people, once ensconced, tend to cling to them. The 116 university presses in the land generate about $400-million in book sales a year, significantly less if you knock off the two juggernauts, Oxford and Cambridge.
It's a small industry and jobs only open up so often. In the last five years, we've had only two openings for editors at N.Y.U. Press. At the risk of stating the obvious, large presses have more jobs and thus more openings, so your chances are statistically better there.
And so, if you enjoy listening to other people talk about themselves, if you're not threatened by conversations in which you often know less about the subject at hand than the person to whom you're speaking, if you can tolerate long hours and low pay, and don't mind disappointing hundreds of people a year by declining their work, all the while being happy to subsume your ego into another's, this may just be the job for you.
So I end where I began: It's a good trade, publishing, and likely to be around for a long while, doomsayers notwithstanding. But it isn't quite as easy or as one-dimensional as it might appear.
Mr. Pfund is editor in chief and director of New York University Press.
