Ask Paul: April 4 (Premium)

Happy Friday! It's been a curiously portentous week for our industry, and we have nothing but questions. So let's dig in.
? Microsoft is my Copilot. Or something
Anlong08 asks:

If you think to your favorite editor from your magazine and print book days and if money was no object, would have an editor today?

Short answer, no.

But we all need help. In The Shortest Path from Thoughts to Words (Premium), I glossed over that part of the writing process--it was more about a life-long goal of finding the most frictionless path between idea and expression, or whatever--but that's important, too, and often overlooked. In the early, paper-based days, the book and magazine publishers I wrote for each had a specific process that involved multiple stages of edits involving several people. And I also did tech editing myself, both for the publishers I wrote books for and for the magazine publisher (Duke Publishing, later Penton) that I worked for.

This is like so many things in life. I went into this just wide-eyed and accepting of whatever process, assuming that everything was in place for a good reason and that experts who came before me knew what they were doing. And then I came to resent the bits that didn't make sense. Ultimately, it all fell apart, and here we are.

The first book I wrote was about Visual Basic 3, but during that process, I also helped Gary, the professor who made this all happen for me, write, but mostly edit, an update to a previous Microsoft Excel book. So I don't remember which manuscript came back first from the publisher. But I do remember Gary telling me that I needed to prepare myself for the disaster that was about to unfold. We had sent a six-inch stack of paper printouts representing the book to the publisher, that manuscript would be reviewed by four different editors, each using a different color pen, and it would come back with more colored writing on it than what we had written. He told me that the first time he saw a manuscript marked up like this, he just started crying. It seemed so overwhelming.

Those first manuscript edits were exactly as bad as he had described. But we plowed through them, together, one page at a time. And we got through it. That this was being done on paper amazed me, it felt like something that could/should have been done electronically, even then. And over time, of course, that is what happened: Publishers embraced the track changes features in Word, and we handled multiple levels of edits--and all the comments, which even in the paper-based days, were out in the margins--that way. I don't remember when that started.

No one likes to be corrected. I'm sure I told the story of sitting across from Gary and him reading through some pages--yes, printed out, no one had laptops then--from the first (VB) book. He would scan each line, whether it was text or code, with his finger as he read, and he was going through some bit of code. And his finger stopped moving forward...