That’s why editors and publishers will never be obsolete

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That’s why editors and publishers will never be obsolete: a reader wants someone with taste and authority to point them in the direction of the good stuff, and to keep the awful stuff away from their door.

~ Walter Jon Williams

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24 thoughts on “That’s why editors and publishers will never be obsolete”

  5. Good Editors will never be obsolete (even Indies need them).

    Great Editors will likely freelance to a select list of clients.

    The definition of Publisher is changing all the time.

    The rest is has a kernel of truth as we all know. But it’s still word of mouth that helps us find the best stories. If we could just get the average reader to leave reviews!

    • The fallacy is conflating a necessary function with an optional way of carrying it out. Going tradpub is only one way to get editing services and bringing a story to market. Others exist.

      It’s like saying fast food joints are the only way to get a good hamburger.

  6. Unfortunate but true. My little sister had been writing her magnum opus for about 10 years and a few years back I was talking to her about self publishing it since she’d shopped it around a bit but nobody had bit yet. She kind of winced and looked at me like I was a clueless moron and told me that she preferred to have a professional publisher take a look at her book instead.

    Like I said, that was a few years ago. She’s still not a “published author.”

    • That might be fine for her though. She might only want to write the one big book and see it on the bookshelves. And she wants the external validation.

      (Maybe she’d be willing to write a quick 10K story and self pub it on amazon. Use a penname. This might help her get over her fear of publishing and her need for validation. JA Konrath did the 8hr story contest several years ago on his blog. …something like that)

  8. When I first read the quote I dismissed it as something from perhaps the 20’s or 30’s on to about the 50’s. When reading the comments I questioned my unconscious assumption. This bloke was born in 1953! Unbelievable.

    What is “Taste” and “Authority” in this context. We each have our own tastes. Some of us have authority within our own circles. There are no objective standards which make my love of, say, Science Fiction any more tasteful than your love of boring endless works of literary fiction. Should we accept the good taste and authority of often self-appointed strangers or strangers in a particular group that because of access and other circumstances have achieved wide circulation of their views?

    How much these people are needed is becoming ever more apparent as all of these books which would never have been published attract an ever greater share of sales.

    • If you’re enjoying reading a book, it’s obviously not refined, uplifting, or pretentious enough to matter.

      The truly erudite read only LitFic. Or, like Robert Oppenheimer, reading works like the Bhagavad Gita in the original Sanskrit.

      • That’s what he did for fun. His day job was stellar nuclear physics, his war job was changing the world.

  10. Mm-hmm. Sure, buddy. Whatever.

    *goes back to reading yet another enjoyable book that Amazon’s algorithms recommended for me*

  11. He’s not totally wrong; books need an editor and they need somebody to click “upload”. 🙂

    These days, both functions can be carried out/overseen by the author and, increasingly, are.

  12. Sorry, Walter Jon Williams, but editors’ and publishers’ taste isn’t always the same as my own.

  13. LOL Yeah, sure. That explains some truly horrid traditionally published books I’ve read over the years. Bad editing and even worse prose. Gatekeeper FAIL.

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