In Decline

I just talked my way out of a job.  A big job.  A double-digit thousand dollar job.

Dimiter and I met on a show about two years back.  He’s a pretty extraordinary guy, a Bulgarian-born actor, director, acting coach, musician and gourmet chef, among other things.  Dimiter has written a book; a dual-purpose “how-to” manual for students of the Dimiter Method of Acting and “teacher’s guide” for Dimiter-trained instructors.  It just needs editing, and it’s ready to go to an agent, a publisher, or print.

If a basic edit would do the trick — a once-over to correct formatting, grammar, spelling and punctuation and a one-more-time to polish & tweak — we’d be in business.  But the ms. requires a heavy edit — a once-over to translate the English into English (a process that invariably involves substantial consultation/discussion time and copious amounts of re-writing (see “Bulgarian-born,” above)), a second-time-through to cover the basics, a third pass to polish & tweak.

A heavy edit means lots more time, lots more money.  The job would’ve been a boon to my bank account… if I hadn’t turned it down.

When people shell out for a professional edit, they want something in return.  What they really crave is assurance that once-edited, their work will sell, but few prospective clients are so naïve they actually expect me to provide them a guarantee of publication.  What they do expect is my honest assessment of their chances of seeing their words in print and at least breaking even on the deal.

If they’re not big-name authors, their chances are slim.  If they’ve written fiction, their chances are slimmer; if it’s genre fiction, they’ve whittled their slim chances down to slivers.  Publishers are looking for markets, not material.  Good timing, good connections, good luck and quality writing doesn’t hurt their chances.  Quality writing cleanly edited and print-ready definitely improves their odds, but it won’t garner them a sale if they can’t submit a viable mass readership along with their ms.

Dimiter’s readership may someday grow to include every wanna-be actor in the world.  If and when that time comes, publishers will descend on him in their numbers (it’s seven major houses in the U.S.A. at last count, isn’t it?) to vie for the rights to his book.  Just now, though, Dimiter’s anticipated audience is a bit smaller — a nice size, in fact, to consider self-publishing with a print-on-demand company.  But if it costs him upwards of $10,000.00 to get his ms. into shape and then he has to pay to publish, his book ceases to be an enterprising way to make a better living from his art and becomes a vanity publication.

I don’t mind profiting from a client’s vanity, as long as we’re both getting what we want from the deal.  I mind that Dimiter’s best chance of seeing his words in print is to sell the proverbial farm.  It adds weight to ideas I don’t like at all — the idea that literature is dead, that books are passé, that people don’t read anymore and that when it comes to nabbing a publishing slot, only potential bestsellers need apply.

I broke it down for Dimiter, the likely return he’d be getting for the hefty price he’d be paying, and declined to take his money.