The art of skillful acquisition

Abstract

A lmost twenty years ago, I was a copy editor in my company's journal publishing program. I certainly could recognize the differences between good and bad scientific writing, and I knew how to structure a journal article~introduction, materials and methods, results, discussion, conclusion, references~but I did not know how to structure a book. Nonetheless, I accepted a promotion to a book editorial job and on the first day marched into the editor-in-chief's office and said, "Here I am. What do I do now?" He said, "Develop books" I said, "Yes, but how? What exactly do I do?" He said, "Oh, my dear, I cannot set it all out for you. That would be spoon feeding. You would retain nothing. The only way for you to learn how to be an editor and how to develop books is to learn it on your own. That way it will stick with you and you will learn from your mistakes." I said, "How long will this take, my learning it on my own?" He said, "Five years. It always takes five years to become an editoE I thought to myself, this is a dumb way to do it. We probably stay in business in spite of ourselves. At any rate, off to my office I went, armed with a company catalog, and I did eventually learn how to develop books. I did also learn from my mistakes, but it was an inefficient process. It took too long, because I had to reinvent the wheel that every editor before me had already invented. It cost too much money, because while I was learning on my own how to develop good books, I developed some bad books. I have one gem to my credit that sold a grand total of 511 copies out of a run of 8,000. Actually, though, that old system of learning the editorial process by osmosis and trial and error was as much a product of its time as it was of that particular editor-in-chief. The late 1960s and early 1970s were more leisurely paced for publishers than are today's times. The information explosion had not yet occurred. There were far fewer publishers. There were far fewer books and journals being written or published. There were virtually no electronic publications vying for the book or journal dollar. Then, during the early 1970s, the world changed; and it changed scientific, technical and medical (STM) publishing with it. The baby boomers had worked through the system, leaving el-hi and college publishers with vast investments in