The question at hand rarely needs to be asked. You are working for, and getting paid by, the house that assigned the manuscript to you. Of course. But at the same time, you’re working for the mscript and the person who wrote it. You can’t help becoming some kind of advocate for the mscript in front of you. And of course you are, rightly so. The author isn’t paying you but you’re being paid to take the book’s side in the sense that your task is to respect the author’s efforts and turn his work into the best book it can be.
This happened on the trade side of the industry (which I haven’t been involved in for years, so it was more than thirty years ago). A book packager had placed the mscript at a trade house, bringing me in as the developmental editor and also giving me an idea of what he and the author meant the book to be about. It sounded like fun – this guy was a writer. He had been on the team that wrote the questions for Trivial Pursuit. That was the hook, but it was about a lot else besides – it fell into the category of life essays. Those are popular enough now, but they weren’t at the time. Basically, they are about interesting people writing well about what interests them. That’s become a genre recently, and it’s a valid one. And in this case, he constructed his book around the shell of his experiences writing for Trivial Pursuit. I was happy to take that one on, and did as well as I could with it, to reflect what the author and the packager had in mind. I liked this guy.
The mscript now moved in-house, and the nightmare began. I remember sitting in on the meeting where it was discussed – in fact, it was not discussed at all – the packager and I made a presentation for the book, and the in-house ME just nodded and nodded, and said nothing.
Remember here that if they could, any trade publisher would turn any standard sort of mscript into a business book, or a leadership book, or, best of all, a business leadership book. Even when it can’t possibly be done, they can’t help wishing it could be and wondering how. (War and Peace – a commanding general tells you how he motivated his troops – 240 pp.; Les Misérables – an ex-convict tells you how he manages his assets to attain peace of mind – 180 pp.). The author I’m writing about here caught that attitude full in the face, and there was an easy path toward turning the content into a business success story (i.e., just cut out all the good stuff). The publisher made that the plan, and the packager could do nothing to stop them. The house would do that, or no go-ahead. That would have meant gutting the book. In the end, it wasn’t published (as far as I know). I remember that event mainly for the heartbroken calls I got from the author, wondering what he should do. The obvious and only thing I could say was trust the packager. But the packager, in this situation, didn’t have the clout to change anyone’s mind within the house, and obviously, I had even less. The author got to keep his advance, but in the end he wasn’t published. The question, then, is would he have been farther ahead letting them gut the book for the sake of his name on the cover (which would have been all that was left that was his own). I would say no, he wouldn’t have been, because he was was too good a writer to degrade himself that way.