A Day in the Life of a Book Editor

by Brit Hvide, editor at Orbit

9:00AM — Settle into your cube with a nice cup of tea. Note: Tea must be caffeinated; you have a long day ahead of you. Note 2: Mug must be Orbit-themed; you really like your imprint.

9:00–10:00 AM — Morning is your most productive time of the day. Take the opportunity to review an author’s space opera manuscript. Your author is brilliant, but sometimes forgets that their character has no experience driving a space ship and has written a scene where that character is suddenly behind the wheel and expertly avoiding flying space debris. You correct the error and tell your author to add some backstory about the character’s flight skills. Maybe you should phrase your comments in the form of a question and add a happy face? :) Up to you!

10:00–11:00 AM — Answer emails. Nothing is certain but death, taxes, and emails from your managing editorial department reminding you that your jacket copy is late. (You really should keep more on top of that, you know. Also, it now occurs to you why that department is called managing editorial…)

11:00 AM-12:30 PM — The cover meeting is one of your favorites. This time, your art director has brought in gluten-free cupcakes in honor of a colleague’s birthday. You take two and don’t feel bad about it. You discuss the cover for your new grimdark fantasy debut. Would it look better with more blood? Blood on the sword? Maybe some bloody footprints? Should the title be dripping blood? Can we make the whole cover out of blood???

12:30–1:30 PM — Eat a salad at your desk and talk to your colleague about her dog. Tell her about your dog. This is your dog:

This is your colleague’s dog:

1:30–2:30 PM — Write an article for the Hachette Medium blog. You are very creative. And very meta. Everyone likes it.

2:30–3:00 PM — One of your authors is concerned about their marketing. The whole team is excited about the book and has been focusing a lot of effort on online advertising, so you pull together a snazzy email with pictures and numbers to let your author know how much the team cares. The author responds back right away with a thumbs up, and a picture of their dog. You really like dogs.

3:00–3:30 PM — Brainstorm titles for your fantasy author’s second book. The first book was called Soul of the World. Should you keep the same format? Maybe you should call book two Eye of the Gods? Heart of Revolution? Armpit of Solace?? On second thought, maybe it’s best for you to switch things up…

3:30–4:00 PM — You’ve recently had a training session about the importance of metadata. You are excited about it — which is a sentence you never thought you’d say — so you do your best to update the metadata for one of your author’s backlist titles and make a mental note to check how it affects sales next week.

4:00–5:00 PM — Answer emails again. You put out several fires and pat yourself on the back for reducing your inbox from 11,872 emails to 11,798 emails. (Also, you manage to turn in that copy man. ed. asked you about. Good for you!)

5:00–6:00 PM — Get on the subway and get ready for your hour-long commute home. Good thing you brought some submissions with you to make the time pass. You pick out one with a spiffy title and get to reading. You laugh, you cry, and before you know it you’ve missed your stop. Oh well. At least you know that you’ll be buying that book tomorrow.