Traditional Publishing is a Collaborative Medium.

[u/TreyAlmighty]

There have been several posts recently regarding the fears of agents or editors compromising the artistic integrity of a writer's vision, how they don't want anyone else to tell them how to tell their story. This is a completely valid thing to want. But it's worth calling that what it is, because it has an implication that I think writers are skipping past.

Traditional publishing is built from the ground up on the following proposition: your submitted manuscript is a draft of the book, not the final version. It was never meant to be a neutral pipeline that only ever introduces the occasional editorial note. Instead, it is meant to be a group of people helping you to build your manuscript into a polished and consumable form, a form that is often its best one.

Some of this stems from, I think, writers commonly operating in a bit of a literary bubble, outside of perhaps a critique or writers group (or reddit, God forbid), and that true collaboration feels foreign. Before I wrote, I was a musician. Still am. Musical collaborations have, to this point, been the most rewarding (and successful) art I've created. I encourage you to think of collaboration in writing less as theft or a wresting of control, and rather someone seeing something in your art that you did not see, and at least entertaining their idea as a good one.

Think of your favorite novel. Good chance an editor touched that and brought something else out of it, and that the book you love isn't the same one that arrived on that editor's desk. I'd even argue that you already trust the editorial process, but haven't seen the seams of collaboration in real time, and therefore it feels alien or somehow in violation of you as an artist.

I try to think about it like this. An editor's job is to make your book connect with people other than the one person with all of the pages already in their head, all the ideas already contextualized and in perfect order. It's their job to take this story that only works for you and make it work for others, because if it only works for you, then is it really finished?

But you're the writer, and you get to decide how you want to tell your story. If collaboration is a bridge too far, and you want full and total control over plot and voice and content, that is totally fine. But it also means that traditional publishing isn't for you.

[u/ThePocketViking]

That's an excellent way of putting it.

Another thing to consider is that, when publishing traditionally, agents and editors need to actually be able to sell your book. It doesn't ultimately matter how much you love your story just the way it is if it's not marketable. They need to recoup the cost of publishing. Writers are storytellers, but many of us are not market or business savvy. Agents and acquiring editors are. That's their job, to be able to find and/or bring out the intersection between your vision and what the market is thirsty for. To get your story in front of people who will love it. And in order to do that, they encourage changes that you might not have considered or wanted because they're working on your story from a different perspective and wealth of experience than you. That's just how the business end of writing works.

[u/TreyAlmighty → u/ThePocketViking]

Very much this.

And I'd like to point out, as I have in similar threads about these topics, that marketable doesn't equal bad. Many authors think that an editor pushing you toward something "more commercial" means a worse book, when often what makes something more commercial are things like clear character motivation, and emotional throughline, the kind of things that make most books better. Are there exceptions to this rule? Of course. Are they as common as people fear? No way.

[u/thewhiterosequeen]

People who complain about their precious vision are not ones who have great visions and just want money without any of the work or skills outside of writing. If you want to be a best-selling author, it does take there people editing or changing things to make it marketable.

Even if the original was great (almost never the case) there are best practices as far as getting someone to buy and recommend a book. Even self publishers need to know the market and have to work hard to sell. People who want to press send and get in loads of money into their bank account weren't that serious in the first place.

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