Prestige Traps in Fiction Publishing

Today's episode is all about how editors can get trapped in a cycle of satisfying and interesting but low-paid work for Big 5 publishers. #opensecrets

I call this cycle a prestige trap, and explore the allure of high-prestige, satisfying projects, despite the low pay. I describe what attracts editors to take on this kind of work.

In the second half of the show, I focus on the emotional aspects to this trap and how they link to editor self-esteem.

And finally, I offer possible ways of escaping the trap and encourage editors to be intentional about their career choices.

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction to Prestige Traps in Fiction Publishing
• 2:44 My Backstory with Big Publishers
• 3:38 Working for Big 5 Publishers: Positives
• 6:34 The Financial Prestige Trap
• 10:35 The Emotional Prestige Trap
• 15:10 Strategies to Overcome the Prestige Trap

Transcript

Hello and welcome, folks, to The Freelancer. This podcast discusses all things publishing through a social justice lens. My name is Andy Hodges. I'm a cultural anthropologist turned fiction writer and editor, and I own a book editing business called The Narrative Craft. Make sure you subscribe to the show, so you never miss an episode, and sign up for my newsletter in the show notes if you want more regular updates.

Today's episode is called Prestige Traps in Fiction Publishing. Now this episode is really aimed at editors but authors may appreciate the behind-the-scenes perspective that I'm going to provide here on traditional publishing.

If you do a lot of editing for traditional publishers, watch out for what I call a prestige trap. A prestige trap is a situation you can end up in if you do a lot of high prestige, low wage jobs for top publishers. And by top publishers I'm just referring to the big five publishers here. That's HarperCollins, Penguin Random House, Macmillan, Simon and Shuster and Hachette. I'm not sure how to say the last one. I've heard some people say hatchet but I don't... I don't know.

Anyway, that brings me nicely on to Pierre Bourdieu, a sociologist of taste and class. And if you're familiar with his work, you'll know that he came up with this idea of cultural capital. And he basically looked at things like prestige, as a bit like a currency that somebody has lots of or not very much of. And he said that high cultural capital, which often equates to high prestige, doesn't go hand in hand with being paid well. The more prestige something has, the fewer other benefits, like a good salary, for example, that thing often has. And that thing might be a company, a publisher, or a university, or something else. And this principle applies in fiction and academic publishing, certainly for copy editing and other editorial roles.

Today I'm just going to discuss fiction publishing. But if you work in academia, as I used to, then you will know a lot about this already. And that's why you see elite UK universities offering unpaid lectureships in exchange for food and board, for example.

I'll start with my backstory. What's my relationship with the Big Five publishers? So I've been editing fiction of all kinds for five years.

When I say all kinds, I do not mean all genres. I'm talking about self-publishing and other kinds of publishing here. But I've only worked for Big Five publishers over the past two years. And my experience tracks with what I've heard from other editors too. You don't just start editing and get a Big Five gig. And a lot of the Big Five gigs are given to people who used to work in-house for those publishers previously.

Now, I can't talk about the details of the work that I do, but I can say I've been regularly editing young adult fantasy and LGBTQ+ fiction, as well as adult genre fiction, for big five imprints in the US and the UK.

So before I switch to talk about prestige traps, what are the pluses, what are the carrots linked to doing this kind of work? I think this is really important to spell out, and I've got four of them for you. 

Carrot number one, these jobs usually (okay, not always but often) offer work on a highly polished and vetted text. And that's a big draw for editors. These texts, for instance, have almost certainly been reviewed and improved by literary agents and some of the people at the publishing press/the imprint.

I could say in my experience the US texts I've worked on have generally been a bit more polished than the UK ones and the pay I've received has been slightly higher, but maybe that's just my experience. That's not something I'm going to get into now, and like I said I can't tell you the details. 

Carrot number two. These titles look really good on a portfolio, and they're likely to be recognized by other potential clients. So if someone sees that you've edited, I don't know, The Hunger Games, then that can quickly help to build trust. They get a signal that you are a good editor who has been trusted with a big name book. This can really help an editor out in the long run. They can use these jobs as a marketing tool for their business.

Carrot number three. Publishers can offer editors a stream of work. You'll be working with the same people in the same workflows multiple times. So you'll know what you're getting. And that can really help, for instance, if you're worried about a quiet month, then you can just contact the publisher and see if they've got something available for you.

And carrot number four, and this is a big one. They [the production editors] know what good editing looks like. They know what quality copy editing looks like and through like agreeing with them and working with them, you are on the same page regarding things like the level of intervention and so on. 

Now we've got a whole little bag of carrots going on here and what all this means is that publishers can be choosy about who they take on and they can afford to pay these people lower rates and still get quality editors. 

Quick side note here, rates offered for editorial are often lower than rates offered in other departments such as marketing or publicity and I believe that's about the history of editing as being strategically undervalued, and there's a whole gendered dynamic going on here. It's a Victorian stereotype of the lady wife editing and proofreading her gentleman husband's manuscript.

Now on to the prestige trap. Well, I think it has two parts or there's two dangers here. The first one is getting stuck in a cycle of low paid work and the second part is an emotional dynamic where working on prestigious projects gives you a self-esteem boost that you sort of become addicted to.

So I'll start off by talking about the first issue. Experienced editors face this danger of getting stuck in a treadmill of fairly low paying work that is satisfying and high prestige, but whose rates aren't usually enough to comfortably live on. And that's the case, at least, if the household relies on the editor's income. So it's not a second income. And it's also the case if the household lives in the country where the publisher does.

This low paid work might not even be a trap if you're living and working in another country where you can live very comfortably off that freelance income.

Now let's talk about rates. So I'm going to talk in general terms here about what I have heard on the grapevine, and I want to say don't draw any big conclusions from the numbers I share about my business because everybody's situation is different.

I'm going to talk in a ballpark way about freelance editorial rates for Big Five publishers. Maybe I'm breaking a publishing norm of open secrets here, but you can basically find this info on various anonymized spreadsheets anyway. For Big Five publishers, what I have heard is that copy editing and proofreading in the UK generally pays between 20 and 25 pounds an hour.

That's a freelance hourly rate. And in the US, I've heard that it's typically between 30 and 40 US dollars an hour. So you can see that the US rate is significantly higher, maybe five dollars higher an hour, something like that, but not massively higher.

You can edit comfortably for five hours a day. Let's say you do six hours. Well, on the UK rates that's £120 to £150 a day, which would be working full-time but including a small amount of time for sickness and holidays etc etc. It would be around £2,000 a month or £24,000 a year.

Full time. I think that's quite a low rate for an experienced professional – because they don't take newbies, generally speaking. An experienced professional who has to pay pension contributions, sick pay, all their equipment and training costs, etc. 

Wow. Well, I've done my research and I know that to keep my business going, I need to earn a minimum of £200 a day.

And £300 is comfortable, like not megabucks at all. I have a friend who's a lawyer and she charges £175 an hour.

And my experience tracks with the CIEP's, the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading's, suggested minimum rates, which also landed at around £200 for between five and six hours work as a kind of minimum day rate. What this means is for me, if I rely on my trad pub [traditional publishing] income, my business will fail. 

And I can tell you, last November, I took on three trad pub books, and I started to get nervous about money by the end of that month. There's also an ethical issue here for me, which is true for me, it might not be true for you. And that is that if I choose to work for a lower rate, then I'd rather do that for a client who can't afford my regular services. With big publishers, they can afford to pay editors more, but they choose not to because they can get away with it. And this is extraction and editors should call it out.

Now to finish, I want to discuss the emotional aspect of this prestige trap linked to traditional publishing. So here's the issue. When you work in this way, you will receive a text, you will copyedit, or proofread it, you will receive a style guide and precise instructions, and then you'll send it back. 

Now project managers are very busy. And that's why they usually just pick freelancers who they know have been around for a while, like, through their networks. And for most copy editing and proofreading jobs, in my experience, you don't get feedback. In fact, the only form of feedback you really receive that's positive feedback is them sending you more work. But even that isn't reliable. Production editors move on all the time, and if your contact leaves, you won't necessarily be asked as much by the new one when they take a look at, you know, the freelancer spreadsheets. They might have other favourites. Who knows?

Sometimes you do receive some feedback, but in my experience that has been quite rare, and it's usually been when I've been working on very high profile projects.

All of this can create a difficult dynamic when you're starting out in that trad pub, Big Five world. Especially if you've not come from the in-house background where you've been working closely with that team already. 

Now, there are roughly two kinds of people out there. The kind of person who is convinced they always do an amazing job, and the other kind of person who often feels like an imposter when they're doing that job. And I'll go out on a limb here and say that the majority of people working in editorial are the latter. They're often dealing with these imposter sorts of feelings. All it takes, especially for a copy edit, is somebody commenting on a hyphenation decision and doing it a little bit different, that kind of thing. And then you can be second-guessing yourself all day. There's something, I think, about the nature of copy editing that promotes this kind of thinking.

So if you are one of those more imposter-y types of people, then this lack of feedback can be scary. You can send a job back and then you can be just asking yourself for a day, did I suck? Or did I do a good job? You can then start second-guessing yourself. Was that comma in the right place on page 52? Should I have hyphenated half-heartedly or not? And that can continue until the next job request arrives in your inbox and then that job request boosts your self-esteem. Yay, I did a good job.

Now this can end up being a kind of cycle of self-esteem boosts linked to getting more work in this environment, these kind of high prestige jobs. And if you don't watch out, you can end up getting hooked on them. You know, the self-esteem boosts linked to the prestige of working with these big name authors, et cetera, combined with the lack of feedback, which is ... well, I don't think anything intentional is going on here.

I don't think publishing decided to set up its systems in this kind of way. I just think it is a side effect of these current arrangements.

And I also believe it relates a little bit to the undervaluing of editing, too, because there are workflows that would stop these problems from happening, where you might get feedback on a sample for every job that you did, for instance. And I've seen examples of that in publishing more generally, but it's not the common way of doing things for Big Five publishers, at least in my experience and my network's experience.

So this self-esteem trap, even if the publisher did pay well, this could still be a dynamic, an unpleasant dynamic. But when it's combined with low wages, it can lead editors into an emotional cycle of taking on low paid work.

And what I'll say about this, and I've said it once already: I don't think the publishers are doing something deliberately here, but the whole system sort of promotes scarcity, a life of scarcity, through the low wages. And it makes you feel thankful and boosts your self-esteem when you receive certain crumbs from it. 

And that, my friends, is how the prestige trap operates. Now sure, after a while, you know if you decide to stick with this kind of work, you know you're doing a good job. All of that repeat work and these feelings will diminish somewhat. But this setup can still last for years and if you've experienced these kind of feelings, send me a message and let me know: I'm curious to hear about other people's experiences as well, and I think sharing experiences is also powerful.

Now to the ways in which you can solve this problem, to finish off. Well, number one, you can do a small number of jobs for your portfolio and then move on. And this is what I did in a, well, in a past editorial life. I was doing, I started off doing a lot of academic editing, including copy editing. And I just moved on from an academic press very quickly in year one of freelancing because of the low rates that were on offer.

And they were about half the rates we've been talking about above, so not much more than minimum wage. Another approach is to work loads of hours. However, that is a fast track to burnout. It might work for six months. You could even make a deal with yourself for six months and then decide to, you know, put an end to that way of living and those kinds of jobs, but it's a fast track to burnout, working loads of hours. You can't really edit for more than six hours a day, in my opinion. And a comfortable day for me is five.

You could accept the rates and keep taking the work. But this approach favours people who do not rely on the wage that they earn. So I think it's elitist because of that. It's preventing people from lots of economic backgrounds who rely on their income to live from working in that area. And it feeds into the gendered and classist stereotype of elites editing for top publishers being Oxbridge-educated women who don't rely on that income.

Number four, you could have a quota of such jobs, especially if you find them really fulfilling and interesting, and make sure that you find other work that compensates for the lower pay and conditions.

If you can be picky, you might combine that with some kind of activist role. So I tend to just take on jobs that I see as giving back to the LGBTQ+ community in some way.

And option number five, and this is an interesting one for further down the line, you could take that experience and switch to developmental editing, either for publishers, which tends to pay better rates than copy editing per hour, or for those authors directly. I've heard stories of this, of editors who used to work for top presses building up a reputation with top authors, and then they would often do like developmental edits, manuscript critiques for them and so on.

I've given you five options there, but we're going to exclude option three. So think through this situation and this trap carefully and, you know, plot your way forward with intention. If you need to, practice making your no stronger when those requests for work arrive in your inbox, and stick to your boundaries if you have a quota. And I will say that despite all of this, I do find these kinds of jobs fulfilling and interesting to work on and I do like to have a small quota of them in my schedule.

So thank you, folks, for listening. Don't forget to take a look at the show notes for all of the useful links. If you want to keep in touch, sign up for my newsletter, subscribe to this, rate and review it. And I look forward to seeing you next time. Thank you very much.