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What am I supposed to be doing?
I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but every time a new bit of technology arrives, publishers start waving their arms in the ether and hollering up and down the halls of Manhattan realizing again how little they know about what comes next: How do we publish “books” in the world of the new media? How will readers want their “books”? What are we publishers supposed to be doing?
In the high-hum of all this prognostic worrah, it was a relief last month to enter the part of my semi-annual work cycle that is actually, well, editing.
I set to work on a novel we’re slated to release in the fall of 2007, a sizable book, an historical novel. I had some questions about the early pages of exposition, questions about whether there was too much back story early on, even questions about punctuation. And then there was a bigger issue — about character, about what a woman would or wouldn’t do in this circumstance and that one over a troubled life in a difficult time.
My author and I began an email, UPS, and telephone exchange about all that, an exchange that lasted for days. I love the trajectory of the novel, but I felt one character might make decisions that were different from those the author had allowed. (I knew this was because I had fallen in love with the character, but I probably shouldn’t say that out loud.) And as I began to explain what I thought about her, I began to map out the novel — began to see how each character seems to relate to the terms of the story, what they might really want and need from one another, how the book as a whole appears to be structured — how, for me, it means.
All this to explain to myself as much as to the author why I feel this way.
In that process, I found myself saying things about the story that I didn’t know I knew. And then it struck me that, right or wrong, my own response to the novel had developed slowly over the course of reading it three times. Or was it four? And I remembered that the reward of publishing is to find the book that becomes richer each time you read it.
In the world of rapidly changing questions about publishing technology, I have the luxury to work with books that should be read more than once.
When I recalled that, I knew what it was that publishers are supposed to be doing.
— Fred Ramey
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