I have never worked on the acquisition side, though I’ve been an interested observer. If you’ve got a mind to recommend an author to a house, my advice is don’t. It just isn’t your portion – you’re on the production side – and after the first time you try it, ever after you’re going to get the glazed-over look-away stare whenever you visit the office (“Is he going to try that again?”). So stay in your lane. You’re better off as the drone they keep in the cellar, and you should cultivate that.
On the trade side, well, leave me out of it. I don’t stare at car accidents either, or rubberneck at house fires. There was one occasion, which lasted for a year or two, when I was called in quite regularly to pass judgment on raw fiction mscripts. My comments were never heeded, and I watched some absolute dogs get published against the advice I gave, which generated horrifying bad reviews. Then once or twice, I read a mscript and told the same house, “This guy’s got it. You need to think hard about this one.” They never did. I swear I was right.
The academic side I know more about. I’m never quite sure what academic AEs do. I only know two things for certain. First thing: They’re the jetsetters of the academic world, always flying off to exotic locales and getting put up in five-star hotels for conferences attended by roomfuls of intelligent people who want to know them. They’re happiest when they’re doing that, instead of staying home where the pay is terrible – as bad as it is for MEs. Second thing: they’re always having to scour for funding for the projects they want to feed into the pipeline. They also spend a lot of time sending mscripts out for evaluation, which means scrambling for people who will do that for free.
It’s always a good idea for freelancers to befriend them. Once they know your skill set, and your strengths and weaknesses, they’ll steer projects your way: “This one needs Matthew,” they’ll tell an ME, who usually listens.
A warning: I’ve seen it happen more than once that an author has a complaint to make about a copyedited mscript and takes it to the AE. Nothing good can ever come of that. The only sensible reply the AE can make is to tell them, “The book is in production now – you need to take your concerns to the ME.” Sadly, some of them don’t.
There was an ESL Japanese author, years ago, who’d written a social policy mscript for an Ivy League West house. The book had been CEed before the house took it in for publication, but that had only notched it up to borderline acceptable. I conducted a standard CE, taking her ESL challenges into account. The damned thing just glowed by the time I was done. Yet the pushback was as intense as I’ve ever encountered – she didn’t just reject the CE, she rewrote long passages of the book out of some bizarre notion that she could show me her Engiish was better than mine. If there was ever such a thing as a rage review, this was it. Attached to her review was a long long screed basically accusing me of being a sabotaging incompetent. “I went to Harvard[!!!]?” (Sigh: “So what?”) “I sent this to a copy editor !!!” (Sigh: “The world, including Harvard, is full of tin-eared copyeditors.”) “I’m sorry if this makes you unhappy …” (Sigh: “No you’re not.”) “… but you should be ashamed of yourself. Don’t you dare change anything else.”
So I looked at what she did. There wasn’t a grammatical sentence in the entire rewrite. Literally, not one.
So I emailed the ME at the press and asked, basically, “Do you realize what’s going on here? She just blew up her own book, this way, and this way. She’s going to embarrass herself and the house.” The ME – a sweet old Bulgarian lady, who sounded just like Bela Lugosi, over the phone – replied with a review of her own exasperation: “I know what you’re saying, but this particular author has the distressing habit of taking her complaints to the acquisitions editor, who sympathizes with her, over and over.”
I’d point out that she might have been at Harvard, but she was back in Japan by the time I conducted the CE. Who could she trust over there to know English well enough to vet my changes for her? Nobody for a person with trust issues to trust.
I wasn’t going to let her wretched grammar stand. So I rewrote the mscript again, realizing full well that I wouldn’t be working for that house again. Even if they agreed with my re-edit, I was going to be star-crossed thereafter. I didn’t give a damn – if those were their standards and procedures, get me out of here. It was sheer idocy to let an AE override the production department that way.
A happy addendum. The mscript this house had sent me previous to that one was another ESL, this time ESL Chinese, who’d gone to an Ivy League school and was having her dissertation published. I did the same job, taking the same approach, and she was delighted with it. (Though, as I’ve mentioned before, the author isn’t the one who should evaluate a CE – only an experienced ME can do that.) A couple of years later, I heard from Hong Kong University Press, where this author was being published now. It seems she thought highly of me, and though they didn’t have any of her mscripts coming out in the near future, would I consider working with other authors? I enjoyed a steady trickle from HKUP for years after that.