Each year, Southern New Hampshire University’s (SNHU) Word for Word Literary Series dedicates an event to a panel of creative writing professionals. This year, the spotlight was on the role of the editor in the publishing industry, with editors Ellen Datlow and Joe Monti, and copyeditor Deanna Hoak.
Ellen Datlow has been editing speculative short fiction for over four decades. She was fiction editor of OMNI Magazine for 17 years, then editor of SCIFICTION, the fiction arm of the SCIFI Channel’s website for six years. She currently acquires short stories and novellas for Reactor Magazine (previously Tor.com) and Tor’s horror imprint, Nightfire.
She has edited numerous anthologies for adults, young adults, and children, including “The Best Horror of the Year” annual series, “When Things Get Dark: Stories inspired by Shirley Jackson,” “Body Shocks: Extreme Tales of Body Horror,” “Screams From the Dark: 19 Tales of Monsters and the Monstrous”, and “Christmas and Other Horrors.”
Datlow has won multiple Locus, Hugo, Stoker, International Horror Guild, Shirley Jackson, and World Fantasy Awards, plus the Splatterpunk Award. In 2012, she received the Il Posto Nero Black Spot Award for Excellence as Best Foreign Editor. She was named recipient of the 2007 Karl Edward Wagner Award, given at the British Fantasy Convention, for “outstanding contribution to the genre” and was honored with the Life Achievement Award given by the Horror Writers Association in acknowledgment of superior achievement over an entire career. She was also honored with the World Fantasy Life Achievement Award at the 2014 World Fantasy Convention. The Shirley Jackson Awards, Inc. recently presented her with a special award in recognition of the anthology “When Things Get Dark: Stories inspired by Shirley Jackson” (Titan Books, 2021).
Datlow runs the Fantastic Fiction at KGB reading series in the East Village, New York City, with Matthew Kressel. She can be found on the website EllenDatlow.com, and on X and Facebook.
Deanna Hoak is a freelance copyeditor specializing in fantasy and science fiction. She is the only copyeditor ever short-listed for a World Fantasy Award. Hoak has been in publishing for over 30 years and holds a BA and MA in English (with concentrations in composition and linguistics, respectively), and has copyedited books ranging from young adult to complex, four-color college textbooks with massive art and photo logs. She has worked in almost every genre.
Speculative novels she has copyedited have been finalists for (and have sometimes won) the Hugo, Nebula, Arthur C. Clarke, Endeavour, Golden Spur, Locus, Philip K. Dick, John W. Campbell Memorial, British Science Fiction, British Fantasy and World Fantasy awards.
Joe Monti is the Hugo and World Fantasy award-nominated editor and founder of Saga Press, an imprint of Simon and Schuster. He has worked as an agent and as a book-buyer. His clients (as an agent) and authors (as a publisher) have been awarded the National Book Award, the Michael L. Printz Award, the Alex Award, the Bram Stoker Award, the Hugo Award, the Lambda Literary Award, the Locus Award, the Nebula Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the World Fantasy Award.
The following is Part I of an edited transcript of the panelist interview:
W4W: Can you describe your journey into the publishing industry and how you ended up where you are today? What did you do as aspiring editors and copyeditors to create your careers?
Joe Monti: I am co-opting a phrase that another editor used: I’m a feral editor. I started as a bookseller, and I rose up. This was at B. Dalton, if anybody remembers those, which got co-opted by Barnes and Noble. I ran a couple of stores outside of New York and then in the city. Then I became an assistant for 13 months and six days to one of the VPs.
From there, I became a buyer. I bought children’s books, mostly concentrating on middle grade and (young adult). I was at the right place at the right time during “Harry Potter” and the rise of YA. If you go to a Barnes and Noble and you see that the teen section is in between science fiction and romance and mystery, that’s because of me.
From there, I went to Houghton for a year and a half to end up being a sales rep, just to get into the publishing side of things. Then I went to Little, Brown Books for Young Readers for a year and a day. I was a literary agent for four and a half years.
Finally, I got my dream job at Simon and Schuster. [shows tattoo] I got the colophon on this arm because this is what I always wanted to do since I was 17. I’ve spent 11 years at Simon and Schuster, and I got to found a science fiction imprint. So yeah—I grinded my way in.
Deanna Hoak: I got my first job in publishing more than 30 years ago straight after finishing my master’s. I was working for Harcourt Brace College Publishers. I did that for three years.
Science fiction and fantasy had always been what I truly loved. That was what I read since I was 11 or 12 years old. After about three years of working on college textbooks, I looked up all the publishers who published my favorite books. I started cold calling around to the publishing companies and asking about copy-editing jobs. I got into freelancing. I stayed at Harcourt for about another year, and then I left and have been freelancing ever since. I love what I do.
Ellen Datlow: I always was interested in reading science fiction, fantasy and horror, but I figured I would try to get into publishing. And I looked at the phone book, the yellow pages, and sent my resume to every magazine and book publisher. But I didn’t want to get into science fiction. I didn’t want to be pigeonholed. So I worked in mainstream publishers for about five years, getting nowhere slowly.
My early jobs were at Little Brown, Holt Reinhart and Winston, Crown, David McKay and Charterhouse. None of that worked out. But then I found out about this new magazine that was launching called OMNI. And one of my colleagues from Holt Reinhart Winston asked me to try it out. They publish science fiction and science.
I met the editor, then I met Ben Bova, who was the fiction editor at the time. I persuaded him to let me read the slush pile [unsolicited manuscripts] while he was away in England for a Worldcon in 1979. I read the slush, and he offered me an associate fiction editor role under Robert Sheckley. And that’s really how I started at OMNI—nagging them to death and being in the right place at the right time. I was there for 17 years.
After OMNI online was killed, my former colleagues and I started Event Horizon for about a year and a half, where we had fiction, interviews, chats, a column by Lucius Shepard, just all kinds of various stuff. We funded it ourselves; couldn’t get advertising. This was back in ’96. Then I got hired by syfy.com to create sci-fiction for six years, and that was in 2006. I’ve been freelancing ever since. I’ve worked for Tor.com and have been editing anthologies since around the late ’80s, mostly specializing in horror.
W4W: I think the takeaway is that it was not a straight pathway to where you are now. You took the opportunities that arose when they came. So take any opportunity that you can. But Joe, you also mentioned that things are different now. Would the type of career trajectory that each of you just shared be possible today?
Joe Monti: Mine was a little weird because of being at Barnes and Noble as a buyer. This is when Barnes and Noble had ascendancy and was at least 40% of the market share at worse. So I knew a lot of folks in publishing because of that. My current assistant went to a prestigious school and went to a publishing program afterwards. My previous assistant did the same thing. So you’re looking at a six-year degree in order to get an editorial assistant position. And it’s hard. 400 people applied. It’s not easy.
W4W: At the same time, there are more small press opportunities for an editorial career. Even though you might not be able to make that your sole source of income, you can still be exercising that desire to be involved in the game.
Joe Monti: Practical experience goes a long way. I mean, the reason why my assistant, Caroline, stood out was because of her experience doing another job that was related. So if you can find opportunities, again, whether it’s internships or whatever, absolutely take them, because that counts more than the academic experience. It’s about connections and networking, which I’m sure we can all agree is so much in publishing. If you’ve ever heard of the Malcolm Gladwell connector-type person, you’re looking at one of them right now. Ellen Datlow knows everybody.
Ellen Datlow: Well, I mean, short fiction is very different in getting into. It’s always been difficult, and I think it still is, but there are so many people starting new magazines. It’s hard to make a living out of writing short fiction and editing. There aren’t that many magazines that pay their editors or publishers, like F&SF, the four Dell Magazines: Ellery Queen, Alfred Hitchcock, Analog, and Asimov’s. Most of the others are started by people who are scrambling to make a living out of it, like Neil Clarke and the Thomases. It’s very hard. And the way to get into anything is to read slush, whether it’s novels or short stories, if you can get a job or an internship. You often don’t get paid to do that, but it’s experience, and you make connections and contact anyone you ever heard of.
One thing I learned very early is that if someone—a book editor or a major editor or publisher or anybody else—says “There’s no job, but I can talk if you’d like to come in,” always say yes. If anyone professional offers to have a drink with you, coffee with you, just talk with you in their office, say yes, because they may know some other job available, and they’ll give you insight into the whole publishing industry. It goes back to the connections and networking aspect of the whole thing. You have to put yourself out there.
W4W: I know not everybody in our audience is a speculative fiction writer, but speculative fiction writers, romance writers, there’s a whole culture out there of conventions and conferences, and that’s one way that you can begin this kind of networking process that we’re talking about. You can go up and meet Ellen. You can go say hi to Joe and buy him a drink. And you can say hi to Deanna and begin the relationship. Deanna has sent me a lot of freelance copy-editing work over the years. Ellen, I don’t know if you remember this, but I’m pretty darn sure that I read slush for you way back in the day at OMNI. It’s just to say that these are valuable connections that will pay off in ways that you can’t really predict.
Let’s talk a little bit about distinguishing the different types of editors that we have here tonight.
We have Ellen, who’s primarily known for magazine fiction, editing short fiction, editing anthologies, acquiring for Reactor (formerly Tor.com) and so on and so forth. Joe works on novel-length projects. And Deanna, you’re copyediting mostly novels. Can each of you talk a little bit about what is the difference between the types of editing that you do?
Deanna Hoak: What Ellen and Joe do is very much more big-picture type work. What a copy editor does is very extraordinarily detail oriented. A lot of people have the impression that copy editing is nothing but correcting grammar and correcting spelling, and that could not be farther from the truth. Those things are important, but it’s so critical when you’re copy editing to pay attention to all the little details, to look for plot holes, to compare the timeline, to make sure that everything is adding up.
If they mention a full moon in chapter two, and then a certain number of days have gone by, and what phase is the moon at now, you have to pay very close attention that it’s correct. And there are things like a character had green eyes in chapter three, but then all of a sudden, they have blue eyes in chapter 18. And authors are sometimes very bad about killing off some minor character and forgetting about it, like the character walks through a scene later. You just have to be very aware of all these tiny little things.
Joe Monti: My favorite was the main character was naked for like, half the book in the first draft. They came out of the ocean naked and stayed that way. There was no mention that they ever got dressed.
Ellen Datlow: To me, it’s two different parts: the acquisitions and the actual editing. It’s different for websites that I acquire for and my anthologies, but I’ll just talk about the websites and working for Reactor and the novellas and Nightfire.
People will send me stories. If I don’t reject them, if I want them, or if I like them enough but they may not be good enough for me to buy immediately but I think I can get the author to fix it, I will work with them on several drafts to get them to fix it. I will ask them a lot of questions. The short stories, I just buy. And when I do that, I do a final line edit for three months before the story has to go into production for copyediting.
Basically, the copy editor is our safety net because the author and I will hopefully catch all the problems with continuity, but if we miss things, I depend on the copy editor to do that. So it’s both acquisitions plus the actual substantive editing—working with the author back and forth, back and forth.
Joe Monti: I’m going over the major stuff–the overview of the manuscript and what the character motivations are doing, the overall plot, the dialogue and talking back and forth with the writer about all parts of the overall editing. But there are absolutely parts of the manuscript that I don’t touch because I know the copy editor is going to do it.
So my job is really the bigger-picture stuff and getting it all together. I have to look for consistency in voice. Like with Stephen Graham Jones, every novel uses different voices. And sometimes I have to ask if it’s a vernacular thing, if he has a sentence that in my ear sounds wrong. If he does it more than once, like three or four times, I’m usually thinking he’s doing it on purpose, but it’s my job is to ask him if he’s doing that on purpose. And if not, to fix it.
Ellen Datlow: There are also other facets. There are also managing editors, who are not just project managers, but who are also looking over and proofreading as well. There’s probably four to five people looking at a manuscript every time it goes out. So when a typo ends up in the manuscript, you get really pissed off. Neil Gaiman has this thing he does where he opens a book that just got published and he finds a typo on the first page. It happens. You get 100,000 words. You miss them a couple of times. But generally, we get most of it.
W4W: Hopefully not on the first page, though.
Ellen Datlow: “The Atlas of Hell,” by Nathan Ballingrud. My mom caught a typo in the first page of the book, in the first printing of one of my anthologies. I have no idea if it’s been fixed ever since.
This concludes Part I of the panelist interview. Continue reading Part II here.
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