I attended yesterday the talk at Barcelona’s Festival 42 by US horror author Grady Hendrix, a man who looks disconcertingly like actor Brady Cooper’s brother or cousin. Hendrix has made a name for himself as an author who combines the gruesome, the shocking, and the humorous in his novels, though I must confess that I could not finish the one I tried to read, The Final Girls Support Group. Too gimmicky for my taste. A friend who is much more into Hendrix recommended that I read The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires, which the author describes as a spiritual sequel to My Best Friend’s Exorcism. I don’t think this is going to be a priority.
I’m writing about Hendrix because, as happens, I quite enjoyed his talk with interviewer Natàlia Sánchez. The man is a charmer, talks non-stop, and is extremely candid about himself and his career. What is there not to like? I was struck in particular with how willing he is to discussing the role of his editors in the process of writing. Hendrix’s first novel, Horrorstör (2014), is a haunted house thriller set in, of all places, an Ikea store. The author commented nonchalantly that the idea was his editor’s, which did not seem for him to affect at all the value of his novel as an original work.
Along the interview Hendrix described his problems to get some of his novels off the ground, narrating how another of his editors almost cancelled the publication of a novel that he decided to massively rewrite in just nine days, or else lose the advance money and go bankrupt. My impression was that Hendrix is the kind of writer who does need an editor to make the best of his talent to write, a dependence that always surprises me, though I do know it’s positive. On the other hand, I’m fully aware that with a competent editor, the books by Stephen King, to name the current top horror writer, would be far better. Perhaps he does have an editor, but ignores their advice.
I also attended a talk (or interview) with Prof. Roger Luckhurst, who visited Festival 42 to present a cool volume Graveyards: A History of Living with the Dead, which made me very envious because it has 167 colour illustrations and 76 b/w illustrations. Luckhurst mentioned that the book had been commissioned by an editor at Princeton UP, which, again, makes me tremendously envious. I was once commissioned by an editor (and publisher), to write a book about The X-Files, and although I loved writing the book, the experience was a disaster, as I never saw a euro from the royalties (and I do know that the book did sell considerably well). I would have loved to collaborate with an editor/publisher in parallel to my academic books, but this never happened, not at least until I came across Maite and Ángel from Dilatando Mentes (a publishing house and a bookshop in Alicante), who had the immense kindness of issuing a revised version of the X-Files book, La verdad sin fin: Expediente X.
We all assume with no second thoughts that periodical publications need editors, that is to say, persons who make decisions about the contents of each issue, stay in touch with authors, review manuscripts, ask for revisions and changes and so on. Anna Wintour, the editor-in-chief of Vogue magazine from 1988 to 2025, is possibly the best-known editor in the world of commercial periodical publications. In my field, SF, John W. Campbell, editor of Astounding Science Fiction (later called Analog Science Fiction and Fact) from late 1937 until his death in 1971, shaped to a great extent the Golden Age of Science Fiction, for good or bad. In the academic world, we meet editors mainly as the persons heading the teams behind academic journals. I’m myself co-editor of Hélice: reflexiones sobre ficción especulativa, which I run in a rather old-fashioned way with my independent scholar colleague Mariano Martín (no relation!). This means we are also the journal’s peer reviewers, though in monographic issues we have authors peer review each other, too.
The editors that concern me in this post, however, are, rather, the book editors. I had heard so much of the excellent job that editors do in the Anglophone world that my disappointment with the academic editors I have come across so far is quite deep. They are not, to be fair, editors properly speaking, but commissioning editors, that is to say, persons who buy manuscripts to turn them into books, and who make sure that both the proposal and the final text are peer-reviewed. I don’t know what it’s like for other academic authors, but I would have liked to receive the help of proper editors, rather than peer reviewing. This comes at the end of a long process of years when you, as an author, are vey unwilling to accept suggestions. It’s different for an article, which does not take so long to write. Anyway, I’m disappointed and it’s taken me a while to understand that academic presses do not use editors as I expected, but, as noted, commissioning editors.
Just today I came across a post in @BlueSky by Elias Isquith (@eliasisquith.blog) arguing that “in all seriousness, the reason writers need editors—especially opinionated and charismatic writers with lots of ideas—is the same reason why a slave would whisper ‘memento mori’ to whoever was being celebrated during a Roman triumph,” namely, to stay humble. That’s a good point. What Isquith implies is that humbler authors, like Grady Henrix, are far more open to using professional help. Of course, non-professional writers, such as celebrities or other public figures, use editors to write memoirs and other books, if not collaborators and, in the less respectable cases, ghostwriters. The writers who most strongly resist the input of editors are, as Isquith writes “charismatic writers with lots of ideas” whom he calls, please note, “opinionated,” thus indicating that authors are too often blinkered about their own talent.
In Spain this matter is complicated by the fact that ‘editor’ means both editor and publisher, even though, of course, many editors are employed by publishing houses which they don’t own. When we think of Spanish editors we think mainly of persons who have discovered fine authors and eased their path to publication, names such as Carlos Seix Barral, Esther Tusquets, Jorge Herralde, and so on. They are not, however, editors in the Anglophone sense of the word, in the way Maxwell Perkins was the greatest possible editor (or text improver) for Francis Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Tobias Wolf; or Ford Maddox Ford for Joseph Conrad. Note that these and other big names never thought of their editor’s input as a black mark against their originality as literary authors. Our prejudice as readers, reviewers, and scholars is what taints collaboration with a negative reputation.
This raises the issue of literary originality, which was not compulsory until it was deemed so in Romantic times. Originality, by the way, is the value that inspired the idea of copyright, only fully embraced in the 20th century at an artistic and legal level. I’m not questioning copyright, which I fiercely protect even in the creative commons licensing of the texts I publish online (I use the most restrictive version). What I’m questioning is the still existing taboo (at least in Spain) against any form of contribution to a text. I quite like it when I see editors mentioned in author’s acknowledgements because this seems to me a guarantee that someone has been in charge of improving the text. The silence indicates either a lack of help, or, what is worse, a suppression of the helper’s names. I can think of several scandals in Spain involving ghostwriters which could have been easily avoided if the contribution of a collaborator had been acknowledged.
As a friend told me, if Anglophone style editors were more common in Spain the level of the national literary production would be much higher. I have to agree, and note, again, that if unambitious authors like Grady Hendrix are comfortable discussing in public the input received from authors, there is no reason why Spanish authors should be uncomfortable. When I edit other persons’ texts, from the exercises by my students to academic work by fellow scholars, for collective volumes, monographic issues or the journal Hélice, my aspiration is that the final text is as good as possible. When my own texts are edited in that spirit, I feel happy that someone has found a way to make my words sound much better. But, then, I’m not a writer with literary aspirations and I understand that the resistance to editorial intervention is possibly harder in that case, despite the example already mentioned of Fitzgerald and company. I find it peculiar, at any rate, that the prejudice against editors is still high in Spain, given the success of that type of collaboration in the Anglophone world.
A word of caution: editors cannot be supplanted by AI tools because these tools are not creative. I’m sure that an AI editor might make suggestions to improve some aspects of this very post, but in ways that tend to flatten personal voices and aim at an obvious standardization of language. This might work for non-literary writing, but might totally spoil the search for a singular voice by literary authors. For that, a human editor is always much greater help. The problem is, rather, where to find them.
Hendrix and so many other authors are truly lucky to have such committed editors.