Okay, I came late to the train wreck that is the Jacqueline Howett/ Books and Pals fight, but a comment on one of my discussion lists stuck with me. One author said she’d stopped editing self-pubbed authors because, like Howett, they were just too hard to work with. This was her polite way of saying they were writers who considered their words to be pearls and their editors to be swine.

I’ve worked with a few writers like that myself, including a couple of academics who were so arrogant they refused to allow any changes to any of their words, no matter how bad those words were. But editors and reviewers have at least some things in common. And I’ve gotta say, I love good editors because I’ve been through the worst myself.

For most of my twenty-five-year academic career, I specialized in textbooks. In my field of professional and technical writing, textbooks were considered a legitimate type of research and I enjoyed writing them. Now notice, I said I enjoyed writing them, not revising them. That’s because of the way textbook publishers handle the whole editing process.

Rather than hiring editors who acquire the books and then work with the author on revisions, as fiction publishers do, textbook acquisitions editors hand the actual editing off to contractors, other academics in the same field who are hired to read and comment on the manuscript. That would be fine and a good idea (since the acquisitions editor may have no expertise in the field) except for one thing: some of those contractors secretly believe they should have written this book themselves. In a worst case scenario, these contractors have, in fact, written a similar book, but they haven’t yet published it. In this case, they have every reason to want to see the book they’re reading consigned to the deepest, darkest part of limbo.

Imagine what that’s like, if you will. Rather than being charged with helping you make your book as good as it can be, these “editors” are gunning for you. They don’t really want your book published. They want your publisher to offer them a contract instead. Fortunately, publishers are well aware of this tendency. My editor never forced me to accept hostile revisions, but he did require me to explain my reaction to what all of these “editors” had to say. I developed several tactful versions of “this guy is a total moron who doesn’t know what he’s talking about.” Sort of what Jacqueline Howett wanted to do but didn’t.

In contrast, my editor at Samhain is trying to help me make my book better. I usually don’t argue with her recommendations, I just do what she says (or I try to). If the copyeditor tells me to change some punctuation, I’ll do it unless I know for a fact that it’s wrong (and I can find the passage in The Chicago Manual of Style that backs me up). Working with textbooks taught me a big lesson—your words aren’t actually engraved in gold upon celestial tablets. They can be changed, rearranged, and sometimes dropped altogether and the result may be better. And if you don’t want to change them, you’d better have a much more effective argument than “My writing is fine.”

I suspect that Jacqueline Howett wouldn’t accept this advice. She’s already sold lots of books as a result of this controversy. But the question is, will she sell any more? If she’s satisfied with being a self-pubbed author, she may not have any problems. But if her real ambition is to be published by a real publishing house, I’d say she can kiss that particular dream goodbye. If you want to write, you have to learn to accept criticism. Otherwise, you can just keep those golden words clasped to your generous bosom.