Behind the scenes of making a book

Through the lens of a managing editor

I always write about writing and reading, which are things I care deeply about. Early this year, I was going to add some texture to the newsletter by diversifying the kind of stories I told. Specifically by sharing some perspective about being a managing editor - a title I’ve held in various industries for the past five years. I was going to start a new vertical and call it something like ‘Letters from an Editor.’ But you know how the year has gone for this newsletter. So, only now, in August, am I deciding to share some notes about being an editor. I’ll continue this over the next couple of weeks or months. 

In today’s newsletter, I'll focus on the magic a managing editor does in making a book. 

editor by chance or choice 

It’s helpful to start this letter with some context: how I got into publishing after five years of studying law at uni and one year of law school. It wasn’t by accident or exclusively because I was consciously and subconsciously running away from the law. 

Although I never expressly said I wanted to work in publishing or be an editor, I remember reading tons of magazines like Reader’s Digests for years as a child. In primary school, a few classmates and I got the idea to make magazines - write stories with illustrations on paper - and sell them (wondering why we didn’t just call them comics now). I think we did make and sell a few. I’m not sure. 

I found more success in secondary school when I was president of the press club and was instrumental in determining the entire universe of our media: reporting school and global news on assembly, writing out stories on bulletins pasted on billboards, etc. 

These might seem ‘juvenile’ - things that didn’t mean anything in the grand scheme of things. But they did add up. I’ve always been interested in making things people might find valuable and entertaining. Even when I didn’t know the word for it, being an editor was my way of expressing that desire. 

In university, a couple of friends and I set up the now defunct arts and africa - a publication of new writing from young Africans. Although it ran only for a few years, we published writers from almost a dozen African countries. Part of my role involved thinking through the structure of the publication, innovating around how we could distribute stories and receive quality submissions from talented African writers across the continent, reading submissions, assigning stories to editors, editing, and more. Of all the different experiences, it was my most formative venture into editing and running a publication. We also organised community events, and one of the most successful was Ajinde in 2017 - a mixed media event to celebrate the rebirth of our magazine. 

All of this preceded the stroke of luck I had when, in late 2017, I decided I didn’t want to practice law - even though I had just been called to the bar. I even begged the law firm that accepted to take me in as an intern (youth corps member) to turn me down because I wanted to pursue my creative ambition. This had just been an excuse. I would’ve taken anything that wasn’t the stiffness of a law firm. And the 50-something-year-old partner understood. He said he was also a writer but recommended that I practice law during my NYSC year, and if I was certain afterwards that law wasn’t for me, I could go with the wind. His advice seemed reasonable, but I was adamant about taking my future into my hand. Lucky for me, a publishing company needed a managing editor, and I reached out to the publisher. I had never worked in publishing - had only done extensive research about the industry for a top-media guru who had been looking to hire a research assistant a year before but only kept giving me tasks to complete. And that was the beginning. 

content manager vs managing editor - potato vs potato. 

Any company that publishes content needs a managing editor. Almost the same way that products need product managers. With a managing editor on the ground, writers can focus on writing, knowing that their editor will help beat the work into shape and help think about the other things most writers might not have the headspace to bother about. 

Managing editors cut across industries. You’ll find them in tech (where I currently work), book publishing, media, academia, creative agencies, and more. Across these industries, the goal is consistent: to manage the constant production of content. The tactics will vary the same way the content will vary. Still, the managing editor must create and implement the necessary structures and workflows to achieve the company’s desired result.

In book publishing - one of the lower paying fields for managing editors - I enjoyed the kind of access being a managing editor gave me. 

As a book lover, I got to decide what stories needed to be told in line with the company’s mission. I was discovering new talent, giving them validation, and meeting with world-class writers looking for a local home for their work - more often than not, having been published internationally. This meant I was also interacting with some of the most prominent literary agencies in the world, getting a sneak peek of their processes and taking part in the gruelling negotiation conversations that led to the purchase of book rights. In a nutshell, my role involved participating in these tasks (and more):

• Reading manuscript submissions and responding to them (rejection or acceptances).

• Assigning submissions to readers to provide detailed literary criticism and other notes on the quality and marketability of manuscripts from the slush pile.

• Preparing author contracts and negotiating rights with authors and literary agents.

• Creating production timelines and working with other stakeholders on the entire book production process.

• Editing (developmental, structural, copyediting and proofreading).

I also helped develop different tactics to sell and market books: helping to organise book readings, open mics, and festivals. 

I’ll go even deeper into the BTS of publishing a typical book in a different newsletter, but it typically looked like this:

• Reading the manuscript and knowing deep down that this would make an amazing book.

• Sending an acceptance to the author (because we don’t have literary agents in Nigeria. In other countries, I might be interacting with the agent, not the author).

• Buying the book (contract et al.) and editing the book with the author (several tedious stages of editing and back and forth which might take several long months).

• Once the book has been edited, read, and proofread several times, it goes into production: layout, cover design, etc.

During the 18 months, I edited and saw through the production of a few books, including children's fiction and bought the rights to fiction, nonfiction and poetry collection.

Here are a few lessons from this time: 

Writing a book, like building a product, takes a village. 

One person writes the book, and most of the time, they get all the credit for its beautiful sentences and solid storyline. But from my experience as both a writer and editor, I understand just how much the editor has to do to bring the story to life, either by using prompts and suggestions to help the writer come up with better sentences or by suggesting characters to kill off and several untapped roads to take. And even after the editing is complete, thanks to the developmental editor, structural editor, copyeditor, and proofreader, the designer needs to create a compelling cover design, and the marketing team needs to develop a strategy to get the book in front of readers.

Publishing teams need better internal tooling to be way more efficient. 

One of my biggest frustrations working in publishing was how manual most processes were. Right from the moment a submission hits the submission editor's inbox (which I doubled as) until the moment the book is published, there’s little cohesiveness keeping the process together. It’s all connected by duct tape - to put it mildly. Anyone thinking of working in publishing should consider paying close attention to the tools that’ll make their life easier and ditching the archaic systems of the publishing world. Imagine if I could submit my manuscript and pitch via an Airtable form on the publisher’s website? For an editor, all the information I need about the novel is already stored in a database, and I can update the ‘status’ column to show what stage of the process the manuscript has gotten to. 

Be openminded…

If you’re biased against a certain kind of writing style or theme, you’ll limit the kinds of books you can publish. This is especially worrying if your biases do not align with the company. 

… but know the kinds of stories you want to be known for 

It might be selfish, but editing is a thankless job. So it’s important to choose stories that will help your career grow. 

Be kind. 

You’ll need to send several rejection letters, some to friends, exes and enemies. Don’t be cheeky and rude even when the manuscript was a precious waste of time. 

Create structures and templates.

They’ll save you time. Document your style guide, so you don’t always have to scratch your head to answer the question: Oxford comma or not? Create checklists for everything. What needs to happen after the proofreader has wrapped up proofreading? Create templates. Imagine creating a new rejection letter each time you need to send one to an author. As much as you’d like to be personal with your correspondence, it’s helpful to have a template you can adapt to different cases.

Know your publication and what you stand for.

You need to know what kind of books your publisher is keen on, the books that bring you money and go after those.

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Making a book is so much work, but it can be worth it. I hope you found this useful or interesting. If you have any questions about publishing or editing, feel free to write to me or leave a comment. I’ll be more than happy to answer.

That’s all for now. All errors can be credited to Grammarly. Have a good weekend ❤️