Anna Genoese, Editor

So I'm assuming all of you who find me are also reading Anna Genoese's journal? No? Hmmm. Why should we? Well, first off, Anna's an editor for Tor Books. So if you're reading the Electric Velocipede journal, I assume you know who Tor is (they're the world's largest science fiction book publisher) and that being able to read the thoughts of an editor at Tor might interest you. Anna's also the person behind Tor's chicklit/SF&romance publishing interest.

OK, maybe I'm losing some of you. I knew Anna first when she was an intern at Tor while I worked there. You could tell at the time that there was something more going on with Anna than the typical intern. Anna knew the field. Anna cared about the field. Anna understood that the field was a business, and as such, you needed to treat books--at least at some level--like a product you would need to convince people to buy.

You should subscribe to her journal and read it from now on, but there are a few posts from the past few weeks that I want to point out to show you where Anna's brilliance lies.

First, Anna tries to de-mystify publishing. In this post, Anna speaks very frankly and plainly about the business side of publishing. She tries to explain how editors and published look at books. I think this is a great reference for new writers who find the whole business of publishing confusing.

Second, Anna works on defining what genre is to a publisher/editor. In some ways this reads like the advice you get about raising a baby: it all sounds practical and contradictory. What you need to take out of this post is that you need to have everything Anna says in mind when you think about genre, and then go pave your own path.

Lastly, here's her post on doing word counts (with the help from an incredible article by Teresa Nielsen Hayden). There are many...most...writers who don't know how publishers determine a word count. As I work more and more with small press people, most of them don't know how to do this either. And they don't know why it's important. It's important, so that the publisher can figure out how much they're going to spend to physically make your book. When it comes to magazines, it's vital so the editor can determine how many stories (and which particular stories) can fit in a given issue of the magazine. Deciding how long your book/story will be helps the publisher/editor decide how much they can pay you. If you, as the author, can give a an accurate word count from the get go for the publisher/editor, the more you endear yourself to their hearts. And trust, the heart of an editor or a publisher is not big to begin with, so do what you can to get as much of it on your side as possible.

So, what are you waiting for? Go read Anna!

Tags: publishing, editing, Anna Genoese, science fiction