I got shredded once by a review of a suspense novel. You read some mscripts and tell yourself, “The market won’t bear this.” The Canadian market has room for 200-page cosies and Mrs. Marple-type small-town mysteries, but a politically incorrect action-adventure story was never going to fly up here. In the United States, sure, maybe. The author was a first-timer but most of his tyro mistakes had been caught by his agent (who did that much right, anyway). I had a lot of fun working on it, until I met the author, who … more later.
A few months go by, and the book gets only one review in the Toronto papers, which was a total shred job, a lot of it aimed at the copyeditor. “The book is loaded with grammatical errors … They and me needed a hot bath … lay for laid …” and on and on. By God, whoever blighted the English language with this level of incompetence, whoever it was, should be shamed out of the industry. Track him down and tell him he’ll never be a copyeditor. I never worked for that publisher again. That’s okay. They’ve folded, and I’m still here.
The next manuscript I landed after that – for a different publisher – was by the same person who wrote that review. It was a business book. No, I didn’t say a word, I just did my usual job. I was younger then, and green, and scrambling, and only knew how to do one kind of job. I set out to correct/improve everything I possibly could, same as the last time. There was a lot of syntactical work to do, with some long stretches amounting to a rewrite. This was back in pencil edit days, and I basically painted each page with lead, line by line. Word came back that author was quite happy with it all, and her changes, when I reviewed them, were minimal. The book got middling reviews, none of which would have shamed me.
The time alignment of those two projects was too noteworthy (at this desk) for me to let it go unnoticed. So I wrote a column for the local trade paper titled, I think, “Editors Get Reviewed Too,” and revolving around the circumstance just mentioned: that I had been the copyeditor for the person who had had trashed my skills in a recent review. Here, I intoned, is what I would have told that reviewer. “They needed a hot bath and so did I.” Also, lay is a transitive verb and takes an object. And that the book’s agent pulled more strings and wasted more powder on the mscript than made any sense, given its quality and its prospects, but he was a Canadian publishing icon, so who was going to tell him to think twice? And that the author’s ego had been swelled to bursting by his agent’s reputation and a nonsensically high advance (upper five figures – really?). And that I had spent five hours one day sitting across from the author in the publisher’s conference room watching him erase the CE basically line by line (“I don’t like sentences that start with ‘The’, he told me at one point, with a sagacious nod. Oh yes, and “I want to take chances!” He said that a lot). And so on and so on. We actually ran out of erasers. Whenever I suggested that he might perhaps take a particle of the advice I had offered, his stare went blank – he wasn’t going to condescend to pay attention to his CE, that peon. Didn’t I know who his agent was? It amounted to a six-hour train wreck. And yes, I could hear the panic whistle blowing and warned the house about it.
My column came out, and I waited for the business book author to react, which she did. She was bound to catch on – the trade side of the industry is too small up here for its members not to drink each other’s bathwater all day. She also, BTW, happened to be the mystery novel reviewer for Canada’s paper of record. She wrote in one of her reviews soon after “When I think a book is poorly edited, I will d––––d well tell you!” Words to that effect. She’d been stung, which is what I had hoped. I’d got my own back, for a few seconds. And I’m still here. When the paperback of the adventure novel came out, it had been given a new title. I just checked Amazon to see whether it is still in print and am surprised and somewhat gratified that it is, from a different publisher, along with a couple of sequels. Because I confess, I liked the book. It wasn’t going to do well, and it was too crazily non-PC to ever get good reviews, but it was a guilty pleasure to read.