How Words Get Good by Rebecca Lee

Becca Lee reveals

Why what is in a word and 

What words in a book

Publishing is of course interesting and entertaining in its own right, and you will find a neat overview in Rebecca Lee's rather entertaining How Words Get Good, with some nice turns of phrase embroidering a host of quotes and interviews to a long thread of industry experience.

How Words Get Good: The story of making a book

by Rebecca Lee

Profile Books 2022 ISBN 9781788166379

Rebecca Lee is apparently a bigwig at Penguin, so obviously I'm going to give this book a VERY good review. That out of the way, what a fascinating topic for a book: Where do books come from? As with anything else in life, it can be easy to take them for granted. Does the stork bring them? Some people seem to think so, especially of translations. Or films (not the product of spontaneous generation, indeed as a rule at some point someone had a hand in writing or even translating them – even that film you saw on Netflix). Where do books come from then, if not the ether or virgin-birthed on a streaming service? Rebecca Lee is about to tell us.

This handsome hardback from Profile books is divided into sections and subsections: Origins – authors, ghostwriters, agents, editors; Improvement – copy-editing, grammar and punctuation, spelling, footnotes, indexes; Expansion – translation, blurbs, covers, design, lost words, print, OOPs.

We are introduced to McLuhan's Gutenberg Galaxy, where Rebecca Lee "argues about how to present ellipses." Luckily for me, the way I punctuate is simply the correct one, so I don't have to worry about punctuation wars. Of course the point is that words are an ocean and we are attempting to organise and categorise an ocean. "Before I worked in the world of word, I gave very little thought to the integrity of the printed word. If it was in print, it must be correct." I used to think that! Of course, as we grow older and wiser, we are disabused of many things, and it turns out that banger of a book had a long and messy hinterland (apparently, The Medium is the Massage was a typesetter typo). We are led through a rather interesting physical history of the book: "One fold to a piece of parchment was a folio." And the admonition, the Prime Directive of Publishing. Use a 90s TV show inspired by a 60s TV show as inspiration? Yes, but also: "All the work that that goes into making words good is for nought if it ultimately doesn't persuade someone to read them." (Well ACTUALLY, I can think of plenty of books that I strongly suspect sold much better than they were read, but let's leave that aside). Or to put it another way, GOOD WORD, READ WORD. The "liberated... disseminated... encountered" word "the way the author imagined." Well, I can see what she means but to be frank, if I write a poem and six people I respect read it, and make of it as they rather than I imagine, I would be quite satisfied with that.

Lee then covers the genesis of books, Vonnegut's Shape of Stories and so on. It's over for the hero – then the hero is back. (Maybe that's Pep Guardiola's PR problem). Christopher Booker's Seven Basic Plots (is getting a book published a Quest or Overcoming the Monster?). Ronald Knox's detective commandments – the reader is a participant in unravelling the mystery (don't most mystery novels cheat you on some crucial detail, though? Like a video game you can't complete unless you picked up a potato when you were Level 5). What should the author reveal and when? (PROTIP: Don't set up an obvious twist, get spooked that readers have figured it out on internet message boards, then bodge an alternative together while insisting for a decade you planned it like that all along).

One BBC employee wrote of Enid Blyton, who wrote 6-10,000 words a day: "It really is odd to think that this woman is a bestseller. It is all such very small beer." As Lee puts it, "we love series of books that create a familiar, comfortable world." Such as Umberto Eco's dissection of the Bond formula. Like a regional detective series, it's good, people like it – why change it? (Bergerac ran for over 10 years, Bond is still going). Simenon completed most of his novels in ten or eleven days, cutting out anything that was too literary. (PETER SLOTERDIJK! CAN YOU HEAR ME PETER SLOTERDIJK?! Time to write a formulaic detective novel). Formulas may be frowned upon, but you wouldn't mess with the formula of aspirin, would you?

Now things get spooky: Ghosts. Was Homer Homer? Was Shakespeare Shakespeare? Was Carol Vorderman Carol Vorderman or a team of music academics? Many chose to publish anonymously, especially women. Do we need to know who Elena Ferrante is? Need parasocial relationships be cultivated? Elizabeth MacKintosh was the women with no name, Virginia Woolf wrote about women with no names. We learn the ghostwritten include JFK and Dick Francis as we enter the shadowy realm of the ghostwriter. Sometimes, people need a helping hand to tell their story. But they need to give to get as well. And perhaps endure some psychological torment. And true facts about celebrities may turn out to be – not true! The relationship between the ghost and the living can be turbulent. Mark Schwartz of The Art of the Deal regretted "I genuinely believe that if Trump wins and gets the nuclear codes there is an excellent possibility that it will lead to the end of civilisation." 

Yet spookier still: Agents. Parasitic transfer fee inflating middlemen or essential literary lubricants? According to Karolina Sutton, their job is to keep bad words away from editors – "A salesperson on behalf of each writer that you represent." (I wonder if any writers are represented by their brother, who has no other clients). Agents are the "problem-solvers of publishing" who shoulder the grunt work and grim detail so the writers can write. And they have a familiar, if unwritten, rule: no tapping-up. And they're also on twitter, under the hashtag #MSWL for Manuscript Wish List – apparently 'stabby feminism' and topical news stories are in. And writers use #amquerying. The life of an agent is not all martinis and baccarat, however – is it only a matter of time before they are replaced by proprietary gambling software? Do agents have a place in the age of the versificator? If the travails of rejected and runarounded writers such as e.e. cummings, JK Rowling, James Joyce, William Golding, etc are any indication, then perhaps yes. And the slush pile is, apparently, dead. Agent Chris Wellbelove: "What I am interested in definitely moves around, though mostly influenced by things I have been reading or watching, world events and the market." The secret formula: it's in the news and it's already popular. It's the season for strawberries, and who doesn't like strawberries? "I am interested in lots of subjects, but expert in none," – a valuable proxy for the reader – and there's a LOT of interesting things on the internet. "One of the interesting things about this job is that we spend most of our time working on books that are years away from being published." While publishing may move "about as fast as a glacier," it is possible to have a book translated in six weeks and publish a bestseller, believe me. 

Less spooky, more confusing now: Editors. What do they do? Apart from interrogating PIE for meaning, editors carve, compile, and commission. Even console. Fascinating: Ezra Pound edited Eliot – along with Vivienne Haigh-Wood Eliot. The question: Is it echt? Structural editors tidy everything up you might say, brevity being the soul of wit. Luke Brown: "There needs to be a pact of communication between the reader and the writer." That is, what is the MED for what the author is trying to say? And that being provided, with the help of the editor, it's up to the reader to let the medicine go down. Or in other words, the editor might need to take a machete to what the author has written to cut a path to what the author wants the reader to get from the book. The editor is there to ask difficult questions – so the readers won't be. Copy-editors are there to fill plot holes. "Correct, clear, coherent, and consistent." From regulating timelines, to fact-checking. A pub quiz brain is useful. Alas: "Fact-checking in non-fiction books is the exception, not the norm." And how do you fact-check a non-fiction novel? Much effort goes into i's and t's. Manuscript being written, copy edited, style sheets are a glossary of spelling and punctuation to be kept consistent, and once the copy has reached proof stage can be referred to by proofreaders. Online publishers, on the other hand, do a thing called "back-editing" – publish, and be damned to fix it if anyone points out the errors. As for editing software: anything more intrusive than spelling suggestions is asking for your work to be fixed even more laboriously by hand, in my experience. 

The same goes for grammar and punctuation. Do you wish to start a Hyphen War with your own computer? In my – correct – opinion, – and ; are king. And our American cousins are getting it horribly, horribly wrong... Italics are of course excellent, and this > is called a diple. Many eyes make light work when it comes to error correction, especially if a text has been OCR'd. "The proofreader is traditionally only there to point out where the typesetter may have introduced further errors." Fascinating: red pen is for typesetter errors, blue pen for copy errors, and green for printers. It's a hard proof – with many people involved, the opportunity for error increases. And British publishers often use typesetters in India apparently, which adds another layer of distance. There is an official name for 'fat-fingered' typos; and 'atomic typos' – the public and the pubic. "The Times used '-ize' until 1992." Personally, I prefer to sise things up. If sising things up is the wood, then the footnotes might be the trees, where one discovers, for example, that only one of Sherlock Holmes' train connections actually matched the Victorian timetable. Very importantly, footnotes are not endnotes. Notes, of whatever kind, might be considered proof of work – Anthony Grafton: "The text persuades, the note proves." Indexes are of course quicklinks to all the juicy stuff in the book. But not quick in the making  – a choreful business endangered at the last by "text reflow".

A term one might also apply to: Translation. "What do translators really do?" Not word for word, but sense for sense? Translator David Watson goes over some of the issues, Roundheads versus Cavaliers being a fundamental one. Of course, it all depends – and the translator will find a way. Even between American and English.

You've gone through all this business to make a book, now it has to be packaged and indeed sold: The Art of the Blurb lies in precision; yellow covers catch the eye, whether giallo or indeed our own yellowbacks. It seems that covers, too, are not without their own perils in translation, but productive borrowings also crossed borders, Penguin for example taking their cue from Germany. Inside those covers, text must be designed (which you can find in Tschichold's Treasury). If you didn't know what a 'running head' is or what 'running feet' are, this is your chance to find out. Marginalia make books (or newspapers found on the number 68) more entertaining still. Words can be arranged at Dutch Angles to emphasise emotion or other. Your good old Penguin is 'A format', known now as the 'mass-market paperback', and indeed there are several standard book formats, including the higher browed B format. When it comes to typefaces, beware of Eric Gill. Tom Etherington: "A typeface is a family of fonts." A masterful typeface allows the eye to 'punch through it', as it were. 

Lost words: many interesting asides. Lost works can tantalize. Ezra Pound claimed to write a sonnet every morning and rip it up. Censors can step in. As can self-censorship ("Publishable, but worth it?"). Pulping: "Books are cheap to make, and the financial rewards of publishing a bestseller are huge, which encourages overproduction." (VERY interesting). Remainders: too expensive to pulp. Rogue books – kidnapped. Print: The point is made that electronic books are more vulnerable than one might imagine. POD = Print on demand. "The lowest print run that was economically feasible would have been roughly 750 copies." POD can mean one copy. Digital printing is for less than 5,000 copies. "Like most of publishing, printers are geared towards a big peak peak from later summer through to Christmas for the Christmas market." (Remember to fill those stockings with Finding My Own Rhythm by Motsi Mabuse, available in hardback. Readers in 2024 can purchase the paperback from September 5th). Dorling Kindersley printed itself into a buy-out with the Prequels. OOP? Philip Larkin: "I want to set my teeth in the necks of various publishers and shake them like rats."

On that note, I must say how much I enjoyed Rebecca Lee's insight into the mind to word to page process, illustrated with a great deal that is diverting and enlightening, and to her experience in publishing was appended a great deal of research and interviews to broaden each step. Not only has Lee dug up some great information, she found some great quotes and provided some rather smart turns of phrase herself. If I were to be critical, so dense and detailed is some of the subject matter that at points it feels like it could be somehow smoother, and not that Lee doesn't tell her story in publishing, but I would have liked more. Perhaps she could provide us with a more personal, insider view of publishing as well, because I'd read it.

© Bryn Roberts 2023

DON'T inject books directly into your veins – harvest the pulp and take it in 30C dilution. This is how top jurists imbibe scores of longlist books.

Published 25 June 2023