And to be clear, I don’t think it is. If one can afford Martin’s editorial services, then I’m sure there are authors who have and will benefit from them. The blog post in question is entitled Buyer Beware, Vetting Services for Writers. It is all well and fine to warn writers against scam services (and how to recognize them) but where she goes off the rails is in making the assertion that no amount of money will ever make an author a success. She is so pleased with the quote that she turns it into a pull quote:

💐 Will you be paying cash, check or charge for that advice? 💐

The problem, of course, is that Martin is in the business of selling a product, her editorial services, intended, if not to make you a success, to at least contribute to the same. Why else offer the service? Clearly she thinks that some amount of money spent (namely on Tiffany Yates Martin) will benefit you in the making of your success. But will it? Rather than address this question she makes some vague analogies to acting classes ( and that also contradict her pull quote).

If one searches with the query “Does hiring an editor help writers?”, the first search result expresses the opinions of—wait for it— editors for hire. All three editors make money off authors and none of them actually address the question (which possibly only a publisher is going to be able to answer): Did spending money on their editorial service actually contribute to landing a book deal? I have, in the past, found some answers to this question (answered by actual publishers) and the answers are inconclusive at best. There’s also the problem that a sizable portion of these editors-for-hire are probably well-connected and anyone in the industry is going to be loathe to criticize them. Also, hiring oneself out as an editor is obviously lucrative. Former editors do it. Former and current agents do it. Former and current authors do it. So who’s going to critique an income stream they themselves might want to panhandle?

And that brings me to a great comment made in response to Martin’s post, pointing out that the men who made the most money from the California gold rush weren’t the pan handlers, but the handlers who sold the pans.

“Leland Stanford. Yes, the founder of Stanford University. Leland never panned for gold in his life. But he became richer than anyone who did because his focus was on selling supplies to the hopeful.”

And Martin is definitely one of the Leland Stanfords. Wouldn’t it be interesting to know how much money is being spent on private editors relative to book-deal payouts? If more money is being paid to editors-for-hire, then that would seem to argue that something is out of whack. At minimum, it would suggest that Yates might be on to something: Spending money on an editor-for-hire will not contribute to one’s success.

But let’s say that it does? Then that puts monied writers at a significant advantage over those who can’t afford a private editor. Life isn’t fair. Maybe that’s just the way it is. And arguably (historically) this has always been the case. It’s always been easier for monied and well-connected writers to get their work before the public. Then again, maybe editors-for-hire are ultimately ineffectual and proffer little to no advantage to the mediocre but monied author competing with the underfunded but talented author.

And that brings me to an article appearing in The Guardian just today—‘It was a deflating experience’: the novelists who nearly gave up. The article states that earnings for published authors has fallen by 60%:

“A 2022 report from the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society (ALCS) found that the median income of full-time authors had fallen by more than 60% since 2006, to £7,000 a year.”

Has the asking price for private editors fallen commensurately? From what I can tell, their prices remain the same. This means that authors are paying increasingly more for less. It’s the Leland Stanford’s of the publishing industry that are making bank. One might almost argue that no amount of success you achieve is going to make you money. One might almost be tempted to make a pull quote out of that in a nice shade of #028989.

As the linked Guardian article writes:

When he won the BBC national short story award earlier this month, Raisin had been “wondering whether writing is still a viable thing for me to continue doing”. The £15,000 prize will “fill in some financial gaps, to hopefully see me through the next couple of years of writing a book”, he says. But he has come to terms with the fact that succeeding in publishing is “a roll of the dice”. Meanwhile, university teaching is his main source of income.

So, I have no answers, except to write that the whole industry is discouraging and that I don’t know what “success” means. I would like one of my books to be financially successful, but that seems increasingly unlikely—even if I were to land a book deal with deep-pocketed publisher having a deep-pocketed marketing department. And I definitely won’t be spending money on an editor-for-hire. I’m left writing wholly for the love of writing, I guess…