“BOOKS JUST DON’T GET edited any more, everyone knows that.” We suffering book editors hear these words all the time. The difference was that my dinner companion continued: “Callimachus had it about right: ‘A long book is a bad thing’.” Not only caustic, then, but caustic in Greek. Beat that.

A week later I made my annual pilgrimage to the Frankfurt book fair. It’s a good time for reflection, and this year I moved to the publishers Bloomsbury after 20 years at the monolithic but eternally restless HarperCollins. With me came the historian and travel writer William Dalrymple, whom I had published since the beginning of his career nearly 19 years ago. So as I caught up on both reading and editing I was even more ruminative than usual. And I ruminated, naturally, on Callimachus.

Publishing has changed beyond recognition in the past two decades, and the role of editors such as I has changed with it. Once we were gentlemen in tweed jackets and cardigans, with inkspots on our noses, humbly toiling over our manuscripts, pencils in hand, stopping for long and agreeable lunches over several bottles of wine (and sooner or later succumbing to liver failure). Ah, but Sir Billy Collins knew us by our first names, and the salesmen (they were always men, and so, mostly, were we) were addressed firmly as “Mr”. Then came one revolution after another, when first sales and then finance and then marketing was king. Last time I heard, the buzz was that content was king, which means books to you and me. So where does that leave the editor?

Though editors have slipped to the foot of the publishing scale of prestige, most editors I know are robust in their defence of their craft. Dan Franklin, the publisher of Jonathan Cape, blames the easy gibes of reviewers: “Whenever they say ‘If only the book had been properly edited’ some poor sod has usually spent two years cutting it from 300,000 to 100,000 words.” Modern publishing just doesn’t allow for the time needed to edit a book well. The brilliant and dedicated men and women who spent their lives transforming books and caring whether they were any good, whose work could add significantly to the sales of a book and who usually did it for peanuts, have come to be regarded as superfluous.

There is one straightforward reason for this, and it came into play in the Eighties, when publishing perestroika was in full swing. To survive in the new corporations, editors needed to acquire big books, to get their name on the revenue generating successes. As Clare Alexander, who has been both editor and agent, says: “Editors are noticed by what they buy, not how they edit.” They had to down pencils and enter the marketplace, becoming entrepreneurs and opportunists and backstabbers and gamblers. They also had to become authors’ champions in a new and more urgent way within their companies, indomitably promoting their books in the teeth of grinding corporate scepticism. They had to bully and cajole to get the best jackets, the best campaigns, the most sales attention. They became ever more aggressively political. Their Achilles’ heel became the books themselves, with authors complaining, often with justification, that they weren’t getting enough attention, and agents claiming, also often with justification, that they had taken over the editor’s role.

And yet, and yet. Publishing may be afflicted with short-termism, but books and authors are long term. One of the greatest virtues of an editor is patience. And diplomacy. Editors need to tide their authors through bad times when the fashion has changed, or when personal problems intrude, or when the book seems to be going in the wrong direction.

The editor has one of the toughest (and most pleasurable and rewarding) of jobs in publishing, keeping happy maybe a hundred wonderful, emotional, fractious, headstrong writers, people who are putting their lives and their careers on the line in their writing. That’s real management. Authors are not employees who can be whipped into line with a threatened P45; they are understandably demanding and anxious and life enhancing.

Opportunist, friend, champion, textual wizard; the editor has not diminished but on the contrary grown mightily. And there are many who achieve this complicated high-wire act magnificently. Penny Hoare, who has published Peter Ackroyd’s London and Richard Mabey’s Flora Britannica, has been editing Rose Tremain for 30 years. “I never make marks on paper with Rose. Trying to write it yourself is a sin against the Holy Ghost,” she says, “but we talk endlessly about her work, about the characters and the dialogue and the plot.” Rose Tremain is more explicit: “Penny is an absolutely vital stage in my writing; she reads the first draft, then she comes to stay with me for a 24-hour brainstorm. She tells me where things are working and where they are not, where the humour could be sharper or the text cut or expanded. Most writers I know agree that if you have an editor like that it makes a huge difference. It ’s all about helping a writer to think about their work.”

Tell that to Callimachus.

Michael Fishwick’s new novel, Sacrifices, will be published in the spring by Jonathan Cape

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