‘Moving to the Dark Side’ – An Editor Becomes an Author
At a panel at CrimeFest last year Maxim Jakubowski introduced me as a veteran editor now gone over ‘to the dark side’. Throughout my career it’s seemed that it was the editor who was considered the practitioner of the dark arts; part of a secretive cabal whose choices and business methods are viewed with suspicion and mistrust by outsiders. The truth of course is less interesting: publishing, like any other business, is run by committee and any person’s role in it, including an editor’s, is as a part of a hive mind.
I’ve been a commissioning editor for forty years. I acquired The Firm , Jurassic Park, Eric Clapton’s autobiography and hundreds of others. Unsurprisingly, the first requirement for my job is an appetite for reading. On the basis of reading one submission a day, that’s nearly 15,000 books in my career so far. But when I consider there are 200,000 annual publications in the UK (one for every 300 people) I realise how vast the industry is and what a small part I have hitherto played in it.
This year sees a role reversal: I will become one of the 200,000 with my first thriller, Caller Unknown published in January. What’s it like to find yourself as a tiny speck on this vast ocean of books? If you’re an industry professional are there any privileges afforded you when you take that first, nervous step to getting your book published? Is it easier if you have an insider’s knowledge of how things work?
The answers are ‘yes’ and ‘no’. Publishing is a business. Each person involved in the business, in whatever capacity, has to have what we call an ‘owner mentality’: they need to make their part of the business work, usually in terms of profit, thus safeguarding their job, their colleagues’ jobs, their pensions, the company’s survivability.
Though publishing is a sociable industry, the sociability only goes so far when roles are reversed and your book, now no longer your long-nurtured, secret passion but a commodity to be coldly assessed for saleability, goes out to your peers. No one is going to take it on just because they know you. Being in the shop window is very different to being the shopper.
Never having been an agent, I can only imagine the state of their in-trays. An agent brave enough to attend a crime convention is sure to be swamped by hopeful, unrepresented writers. These writers know the first rule: ‘don’t pitch to an editor, get an agent.’
So, first things first, the agent. The first thing to learn when the roles are reversed is how to pitch yourself. You are, effectively, a complete unknown. You have to think: ‘will this be an easy sell to the next person in the chain?’ How easy will it be to pitch to an agent, for the agent to pitch to the editor, for the editor to pitch to the acquisitions meeting, for the sales team to pitch to their customers, and the customers to pitch to the consumer? A clear mission statement is required throughout. Sentiment doesn’t come into it. You need negative capability: imagine you are not the creator but the one being pitched to: what would get YOUR attention?
Being known in the industry is an advantage, but not as big a one as you might imagine. It may not necessarily be the people you’ve worked and socialised with that you forge a business relationship with: I had never had a project with my agent, Jim Gill and somehow, though he must be the most sociable person in publishing, never met my editor, Wayne Brookes.
Editing. Some people might assume if you’ve edited countless books you’re not going to appreciate being edited. How much editorial advice have YOU dished out of over the years? Surely the physician can heal themselves? The answer is no. Once more, it’s a question of transference — getting out of your skin and seeing things from another perspective. One of my award-winning and bestselling authors once said to me: ‘though I don’t always agree with your editorial comments, I know if you’ve made a note on something it needs looking at. But I will always come up with my own solution to the issue.’
I’ve found this to be true in my own revisions. My editor will, mildly, ask for this or that. Maybe suggest a solution. In the end, the solution is in the author’s hands. So I found it with Caller Unknown.
The other major difference when you cross over is the silence. You’re exchanged a busy open plan office where you have been in the centre of a vast web of sales, marketing, publicity, production and art; where the noise levels are sometimes too high to think, let alone read a script; to a solitary desk where the phone doesn’t ring, the email doesn’t ping and the conversations are only with your cats. There are many quiet times and quietness can lead to introspection. You have to get used to it. This solipsism is, I suppose, the writer’s lot. Hopes skyrocket and fall. It’s a bit of a rodeo ride of emotions.
There are not many mysteries left in the process after forty years. I know what’s going on under the hood. This is not to say I don’t appreciate it. In fact, I’ve come to appreciate it more now I’m about to be published. After forty years you’d have thought I would have known what a huge effort it is to get a book from raw script to finished book and out there into the shops, both actual and online. But, for all those years, it was just my job, done efficiently. No awe in that. But, strangely, only now I stand outside it for the first time do I truly appreciate the beauty of the machine. And now I am but a passenger in it.
Like every other author, I await the ultimate verdict. Will my book find its place when it’s sent out into world on January 22nd?
Forty years in publishing cannot provide THAT answer.
Caller Unknown by Oliver Johnson is published by Point Blank on 22 January 2026, paperback £9.99
