How editors and ghostwriters make books better

A good book needs hundreds of decisions made and pieces organised. For this there are commissioning editors, development editors, production editors, copy editors, permissions editors, assistant editors, and proofreaders. Many books have ghostwriters, too. They’re all focused on making books better.

Arthur speaks to editor and writer Tim Phillips about what editors do, and how they work with authors and publishers. We also get an insider’s view on the world of ghostwriting, and Tim’s advice for making your own writing clear and effective.

Links from the show:

• Tim Phillips’ website
• CORE Econ
• The Economy
• Economics for the Common Good
• Talk Normal
• Electric Book Works

Transcript

Arthur Attwell 00:00
Hello, and welcome to How Books are Made, a podcast about the art and science of making books. I’m Arthur Attwell.

Arthur Attwell 00:10
In publishing, perhaps no word is more broadly used than editor. There seems to be a different editor at every stage in bookmaking. There are commissioning editors, development editors, production editors, copy editors, permissions editors, assistant editors, and more. If you’re new to bookmaking, you’re right to be confused.

Arthur Attwell 00:32
Why are there so many, and why are they all editors? Well, for good, consistent bookmaking, authors alone are necessary but not sufficient. Behind every established author is a host of unsung editors. By convention, those editors don’t get their names on the books they help to make. And a good book needs hundreds of decisions made and pieces organized at every stage of its life.

Arthur Attwell 01:03
I’ve been lucky to work with many brilliant editors over the last 30 years. And one of those is Tim Phillips, who you’ll meet today. And you’re in for a treat. Tim is not only a fabulous editor, he’s also a writer, a ghostwriter, and a podcast host, with a voice for radio that makes me very jealous.

Arthur Attwell 01:24
Hi, Tim. It’s been a while.

Tim Phillips 01:26
It has been a while, Arthur. It’s great to talk to you. And it’s great to see you’re looking so well.

Arthur Attwell 01:29
When I was preparing for our conversation, looking back at what you’ve done, I had no idea, even though we worked together for many years, that you have degrees in maths and economics.

Arthur Attwell 01:40
Not that surprised about the economics, given that that’s an editing speciality of yours. But you’ve certainly proved that a literature degree is not the only reason people become editors. How did that happen?

Tim Phillips 01:51
Well, let me take you back to the 18- year-old Tim Phillips, Arthur. I mean, I had really no idea, as many 18-year-olds do not.

Tim Phillips 01:59
I had no idea what I was going to do or how I was going to do it. And I was one of those people at school who was, you know, pretty good at a few things, but not in a way that decided what I was going to do. So I ended up doing maths. And I can’t remember a lot of my degree. I don’t think I spent a lot of time studying maths at university.

Tim Phillips 02:18
I learned a lot of other things, particularly working for the university paper. But I think there is a skill in maths, which is once you’re doing it at a certain level, you can’t solve a problem just by charging in and writing down answers. You have to sit and stare at the problem, stare at the equation, look at it, think is there anything I recognize?

Tim Phillips 02:44
What’s the story here of how this is going to get solved? And that’s how you work through those things. And I think that part of the education is something that I brought with me, and there’s – one thing that always frustrates me now when I work with young journalists is they charge in and they start writing because you assume that the writing is the thing.

Tim Phillips 03:05
It’s not. It’s the thinking. It’s the knowing what you’re going to write. And so that worked pretty well for me. Now, there is no way if I came out of university today with a degree in maths that I’d get anywhere near a job in journalism. So thank you for the 1980s for giving me the chance to be able to do that.

Tim Phillips 03:28
And in those days, of course, once you got a job, you were taught the skills on the job. That doesn’t happen anymore. So I understand why people now study something that is more directed towards a career. I’m just glad I didn’t have to make that choice when I was that age.

Arthur Attwell 03:43
For sure. I majored in Latin and English literature. And I’ve ended up coding book production systems.

Arthur Attwell 03:49
So yeah, it’s lucky we get a chance to study what we, what we enjoy.

Tim Phillips 03:53
Latin comes in handy these days?

Arthur Attwell 03:55
Yeah, again, it’s the thinking thing, you know, it’s, it’s probably the linguistic equivalent of maths, it’s a similar experience. And of course, your career has taken you in a number of different directions, you do a lot of writing and podcasting. Specifically in this conversation, though, I want to zero in on editing and ghostwriting.

Arthur Attwell 04:12
It’s such a big part of the publishing process and a big part of how books are made. Of course, there’s probably no word more loosely used and therefore actually less useful in publishing than the word editor.

Tim Phillips 04:25
Yeah.

Arthur Attwell 04:25
Can you map out for us what the spectrum of editor or editing involves and also where it meets ghostwriting?

Tim Phillips 04:32
No, you don’t ask for much, do you? Okay, so – as an editor, the idea behind being an editor is that there is almost nothing that cannot be improved with an extra pair of eyes to look at it and just change it in some way directed to some kind of measure of success. Whether that means it becomes easier to read or it’s more appropriate for the audience or it just avoids simple errors, which is what people often think about as editing is fixing the punctuation and the grammar. At one end of it you have people who are very technically precise in doing those things, they, you know, they will fix your spelling.

Tim Phillips 05:17
They will fix your grammar. And then as you start to progress through people who get more involved with the work, sometimes they will make the prose flow a bit better. We’ve all had the experience of reading something and thinking it’s all there. It’s just very hard to read. And so, sometimes things need simplifying.

Tim Phillips 05:40
The language needs to be a little bit more accessible for the sort of people who are going to read it. Then you get people who get involved a little bit more, and this is more my end of things. I think the other editors who work with you would not claim that I was amazingly proficient at doing that detail stuff.

Arthur Attwell 06:00
Well, wasn’t what we – what we needed from you.

Tim Phillips 06:03
No, which is a good job. But where I get more involved is when you then start having to improve things by just changing the order of things around a bit, maybe doing some rewrites. Maybe thinking “it’s missing something”, or maybe thinking, “well, we’ve treated this in one way in this part of the document, and we are now treating it, describing it, in a slightly different way”.

Tim Phillips 06:28
Let’s make that consistent. And you can do a lot of that. That goes a very, very long way. So some of my work, for example, has been as what you could, might call a book doctor – where a book’s complete, but not really working. And then right at the far end of this, as you mentioned, there are the ghostwriters and I have done some ghostwriting.

Tim Phillips 06:48
And basically your job is then to take the ideas, and to take a structure, and do the words for the named author who is not actually the author. And so it is a continuum, but the same skills apply throughout. And the basic skill is to have an idea of what better is.

Arthur Attwell 07:06
Right.

Tim Phillips 07:06
And to just have the technical skills to be able to take what you’ve got and make it better.

Arthur Attwell 07:12
I imagine a great editor then has to be good at understanding the publisher, the author, the audience, what each wants to get from the book, to try figure out what that success looks like – what better looks like. Sometimes the publisher, the author, and the audience are not after the same thing.

Arthur Attwell 07:26
You have to marry those diverging interests. How do you go about that?

Tim Phillips 07:30
I take you back to my maths equation, and the first thing you have to do is not to do anything. The first thing you have to do is stare at the problem and think about it. Read the document that you’re given. Read your source and think, “what is good about this? What is not good about this? What could be improved? Is that what people are looking for?” Now, when you are working for a publisher and the publisher’s paying you, they have a pretty good idea of what they want. And very often their frustration is that there is a great book in there, but the book that’s been delivered to them perhaps isn’t commercial enough.

Tim Phillips 08:10
And what they’re talking about – commercial – isn’t an idea that it has to be, sort of, lowest common denominator. It’s just they’ve got an idea of who the people who are going to buy the book would be and what those people lack and does that book satisfy those requirements. It might just be a little bit of rephrasing, a bit of reorganizing, of the material.

Tim Phillips 08:33
It might be that there’s quite a lot more to be done, but you have to share their idea of who those people are. But also you have to respect the author because it’s the author’s name on the book and it’s the author’s vision that’s brought this book into being and they’ve worked on it for months, possibly years.

Tim Phillips 08:51
And they might have some pretty good ideas and just– you can’t just impose yourself as an editor on that. I mean, you have to respect that. One of my very early jobs as a sort of rewrite editor was someone came to me with a PhD thesis and wanted it as a book. And if you’ve ever read a PhD thesis, you’ll know.

Arthur Attwell 09:12
It’s not a book.

Tim Phillips 09:13
They are not books. I started too quickly. I started getting into it and I started rewriting it and I thought, “Oh, I’ll change this and I’ll drop that bit and I’ll do this” .And I just got totally wrapped up in it and didn’t respect the author, didn’t check with them, didn’t catch up with them regularly.

Tim Phillips 09:29
And I presented them with a mostly finished manuscript that I was quite pleased with and they looked at it, they were horrified with it.

Arthur Attwell 09:37
Oh no!

Tim Phillips 09:37
The minute I saw their expression, I understood what I’d done wrong. I’d rewritten it for myself.

Arthur Attwell 09:44
Right.

Tim Phillips 09:45
First of all not respecting their work and secondly not respecting the audience that they wanted for it. Which wasn’t the audience that I was thinking of at that time. So having to do that rewrite twice is a good way to learn not to do that in future and to be able to balance that. I think a good editor manages to find their way through that but it’s a process that’s very prone to errors.

Arthur Attwell 10:11
Absolutely.

Arthur Attwell 10:11
Do you find you need to get to know the author before you get too far into the manuscript or does the getting-to-know the author happen just in the to-and-fro as you work?

Tim Phillips 10:20
There’s a bit of both. I think that not every editor can work with every author and different approaches are useful in different situations.

Tim Phillips 10:31
I think some of the skill– similar to some of the skill of being a journalist– is to be able to empathize with the people you’re communicating with. And so I think that is, again, some of the skill of being an editor. It doesn’t always work out. I’ve had one or two projects where the author and me have been sitting on either end of a Zoom call these days.

Tim Phillips 10:53
And we’re just looking at each other thinking, “I really don’t get what you’re going on about”. And at that point, it’s appropriate to say you might want to work with a different editor who can more accurately represent what you need.

Arthur Attwell 11:07
Absolutely. So much of publishing is finding the right person to work with.

Arthur Attwell 11:11
I think that’s often forgotten in the preparation.

Tim Phillips 11:14
I will be the first person to, when that works out, to look at it and think that other editor has taken it to a place that I certainly could not.

Arthur Attwell 11:23
I wanted to ask about a specific example that you and I both worked on. You were the development editor, as in the editor that moves things around, uh, and writes parts of the book for CORE Econ’s very successful and popular textbook, The Economy, and some spinoffs from that.

Arthur Attwell 11:40
That book’s now used at over 400 universities around the world, 100, 000 students use it as their economics textbook. That project is amazing. And you were deeply involved in the early days. What did that work look like specifically for CORE Econ?

Tim Phillips 11:54
It looked like a lot of very hard work.

Arthur Attwell 11:57
It was enormous.

Arthur Attwell 11:57
I mean, that book’s half a million words long, and over a thousand images.

Tim Phillips 12:01
I know because I edited those words at least four times. Yeah, it’s true. Okay, so the story of this, is for anyone who’s never studied economics, you might be surprised to know that undergraduate economics has gradually become unmoored from mainstream economics. As mainstream economics has become more sophisticated, as we’ve discovered more about what people and societies and economies are like, undergraduate economics hasn’t really changed very much and it’s something implicit in the way textbooks are made. There’s a sort of an orthodoxy in how textbooks are made and this is especially the case in economics.

Tim Phillips 12:47
I finished off my economics education relatively late. I went back as a mature student to do my master’s. And that was at a University College, London. And at UCL was Wendy Carlin, who among a couple of others had this idea for CORE. Becuase she was unhappy as a professor of economics with the way that undergraduates were being taught economics.

Tim Phillips 13:12
And so she decided to remake it. And this is a massively ambitious idea. First of all, you have to– you literally start from a different place and time in economics. Rather than the orthodox way of saying this is supply and this is demand and here’s a graph where the lines cross, which is how economics is taught to most people at the moment. You start with a sort of historical perspective of this is how society has evolved in this way and let’s work out the economic forces behind it. So rethinking all of this and also at the same time rethinking it through the collected writings of about 20 economists at the beginning and far more afterwards is, is a big challenge.

Tim Phillips 13:58
So, I joined the project to do a variety of things, but very quickly, my job became a development editor because that’s a job that I’d done in the past. And so you, you have basically three tasks on this. The first one is just to manage the process because you’ve got things coming in from everywhere and you have to make sure that everything’s covered off.

Tim Phillips 14:21
And this is underestimated in editing to make sure you’ve got everything. Okay. You’ve got all the diagrams, you’ve got section 3. 2, and someone’s writing the conclusion, you actually have to do that. Then you have to think about the narrative, and Wendy and Sam and Margaret, who are the three principals, and the others involved in deciding, they had a very clear idea of what the narrative would be, and you had to make sure that what you have respects that narrative. And the narrative makes sense, and that’s the same for any book, a business book, a factual book, as well as a novel. Then you have to create a tone that you cannot possibly read like a bunch of people all got together and contributed different bits. It has to read like the work of a sort of single mind, a single guiding idea that involves not just changing the descriptions and sometimes the words and the terminology.

Tim Phillips 15:16
But also the structure, there’s some people writing big paragraphs, some people writing small ones, some people use bullet points, some people do not. Making all of that consistent. And then trying to follow that through, as you say, through a half a million words. But what you get at the end of it is something fantastic, because it’s the product of many, many minds.

Tim Phillips 15:35
And these are actually well respected people, these are people right at the top for them to come together and to subsume their own individual ideas and thoughts into this bigger project. It’s an amazing thing to be part of.

Arthur Attwell 15:50
It is really an extraordinary project. I came in, of course, after your work to work on the design and layout.

Arthur Attwell 15:55
And it’s one of those books where you’re supposed to be designing it, but you end up reading it while you work. So, it was fantastic.

Tim Phillips 16:02
Don’t downplay your, your contribution to this, Arthur, because one of the other interesting things about this and the way that editing is changing and book production is changing is that CORE is essentially a living document.

Arthur Attwell 16:14
Right.

Tim Phillips 16:15
It is updated all the time because when you produce something that size, some things work well and some things are not so good and there are errors. Now, traditionally textbooks are reprinted every five years. You collect everything together that went wrong, you redo it and you, five years later, you do it again and the next bunch of students buy the new version.

Tim Phillips 16:34
You created this system within which it can be constantly updated across all its formats.

Arthur Attwell 16:41
And that was a tremendous challenge and a whole lot of fun. So the book is a website that anyone can read for free, and it’s a print book, and it’s an EPUB, and it’s an app. All from the same files and that also changed the nature of the editing because you had to think how is this going to read online and how is it going to read on the page and that can you have to take that into account as you work.

Tim Phillips 17:00
Yeah.

Arthur Attwell 17:01
Because actually when an author is writing, they’re sometimes visualizing how the person is reading this book. But in this case, there was no one way that anyone was going to read this book.

Tim Phillips 17:09
And I think that gets to how editing is an exploration as well. If we think of editing as a process that takes you towards a defined goal, that’s not it.

Tim Phillips 17:19
What happens always when you’re editing is you’re creating something new. It can only be slightly different, and sometimes an opportunity opens up. Or sometimes in clarifying a paragraph, you see, “ Oh , I know what we need, we need this”. And at that point, you have a choice. You either don’t mention it and just get on with the job, or you do mention it, which sometimes creates a whole new stream of work or a whole new group of ideas.

Tim Phillips 17:49
But that’s where real progress can come from, and that’s why I think, you know, we think about editing in too timid a way sometimes.

Arthur Attwell 17:57
Right.

Tim Phillips 17:57
We think about it as just making the same thing slightly better. When if you’ve got a group working together with a common idea who trust each other, and that includes the original authors as well, then you can create something that is beyond what any of the individuals could have imagined it could have been. And that’s a very satisfying way to work that you don’t get in many occupations. And I think that was certainly a huge aspect of what Core managed to do.

Arthur Attwell 18:29
You also edited the English translation of Jean Tirole’s book, Economics for the Common Good.

Tim Phillips 18:35
Ah, yeah.

Arthur Attwell 18:35
I imagine that a person might ask, “ Why does a translation need an edit, surely it was already edited in the original language?” What was that like to work on?

Tim Phillips 18:44
I was a small cog in a big machine for this. I wouldn’t seek to portray myself as the sort of mastermind behind this at all because there is one mastermind behind this, which is Jean Tirole.

Tim Phillips 18:56
And for anyone who doesn’t know Jean Tirole, because he’s not someone who pushes himself forward, he won the Nobel Prize in 2014 for economics.

Arthur Attwell 19:07
Right.

Tim Phillips 19:07
And he is a sort of giant of modern economic thought, in that he thinks in the broadest possible terms about how society works and individuals work and how we balance the goals of both. And how we create mechanisms by which that can happen.

Tim Phillips 19:29
What happened is, he’s French and French has the greatest respect for their intellectuals. He’s being stopped in the street literally by people saying, what should we do about this? And what should we do about that? So he started thinking about this and wrote a book about it, which is Economics for the Common Good.

Tim Phillips 19:47
Of course, he wrote it in French. So the publisher wanted to translate it. So what you get is then you have a translator who is applied to it. And the translator isn’t necessarily an economist, our translator was not. So there are two problems that then arise. Well, two things that really you can work on. One is to be able to make sure that the language is smooth and appropriate.

Tim Phillips 20:14
There are some ways of phrasing things within economics, and there are some jargon terms that don’t always translate literally. And the other thing is localization, because, of course, he described French society, which is slightly different. Some things need an explanation. Some things work slightly different in other parts of the world.

Tim Phillips 20:37
And we didn’t have long to do it as well. Translations, you don’t have forever to do them. So, you know, you’re, you’re always working against time. We have this idea of, of all writing being done as someone sitting in a quiet study, maybe there’s sort of, you know, birds tweeting outside the window and sucking on a pencil. And thinking, actually, as you know, a lot of it’s done at sort of 4am with someone saying, “ Can I have it? I need it now”. So there was a certain element of that as well. But, um, so my job was to do a sort of a preparation and a recommendation on some of these things. And then there was another economic expert who could do rewrites, bigger rewrites, and make sure, and check, and correct some of the errors I’d introduced as well.

Tim Phillips 21:24
And the publishers had an overall editor to look at it, and it was great to see what came out of it. I think it’s an extremely important book because we have an idea – if you ask a school child, “Oh, what’s an economist”, they’ll draw you a picture of a worried looking man in a suit holding a briefcase. And this drives, the economists that I know, it drives them insane because they’re like “None of us are like this. You know, we don’t think about, just about banks. We think about how all sorts of aspects of society could work better, and we try and help them to work better”. And, what Jean Tirole managed to do in this book is to describe that in a coherent way. I was very privileged to be one tiny little cog in that big machine.

Arthur Attwell 22:18
Oh, wonderful book to work on. How do you decide, with the publisher before you go into the project, how deeply you’re going to edit.

Arthur Attwell 22:26
I know you’ve talked about the fact that they’ll have a sense of what they, what they want to achieve, and obviously they have a particular budget. What else goes into evaluating with the, with the publisher? Are you, are you just checking spelling in consistency, or do you get to rewrite whole paragraphs?

Tim Phillips 22:43
This is a great question, and I think it’s something that you explore with the publisher. And a lot of this is done by recommendation.

Arthur Attwell 22:54
Right.

Tim Phillips 22:55
It’s one of those jobs where very often you are brought onto a job because someone says, “Tim could probably do that for you. Because he does that sort of thing”.

Arthur Attwell 23:06
Right.

Tim Phillips 23:07
So there is an expectation that comes into this and it doesn’t always go well. For an example, last year I had a huge opportunity that I was really, really keen on for a book looking at applying areas of, sort of, physical science to the way in which innovation and the economy works in that way.

Tim Phillips 23:33
It was very, very ambitious. And I started reading it and I’m looking and I’m thinking there’s some assumptions here.

Arthur Attwell 23:41
Right.

Tim Phillips 23:41
That the author has made to drive the point home, which, of course, you do when you believe something.

Arthur Attwell 23:47
Sure.

Tim Phillips 23:48
And as the extra pair of eyes, I have to say, “ We haven’t made this case strongly enough. This needs a rewrite”.

Arthur Attwell 23:54
Right.

Tim Phillips 23:54
“I don’t think this example proves your point”, that sort of thing, you come back to it. So, my memo on that, I would always write a memo at the beginning to say here’s what I think we ought to do. My memo on that was, we need to dig into this and do rewrites. And at that point, the whole project falls apart.

Arthur Attwell 24:11
Oh no.

Tim Phillips 24:12
Yeah.

Arthur Attwell 24:13
But you found the cracks.

Tim Phillips 24:14
Well, you know the, the author didn’t want to do it. And I might have been wrong, you know I’m not saying I’m the last word in this.

Arthur Attwell 24:21
Yeah.

Tim Phillips 24:21
It’s just how it occurred to me and that’s how I saw. It in good conscience I would only be able to do the job on that basis. Of course, budget comes into it as well.

Tim Phillips 24:32
But, if you’re gonna do a hundred thousand words, then actually correcting the grammar and the punctuation in a hundred thousand words takes a pretty long time.

Arthur Attwell 24:41
Yeah.

Tim Phillips 24:41
Yeah. It doesn’t take significantly shorter than doing rewrites on a hundred thousand words. Very often I find that it’s not the money that makes the decision.

Tim Phillips 24:51
It’s whether you think at the end of it, you can create something that you would be satisfied with. That you can think, “ If people know that I worked on this, then they would respect it”.

Arthur Attwell 25:03
For sure. I suppose any book is a kind of Venn diagram of, of minds.

Tim Phillips 25:07
Yeah.

Arthur Attwell 25:08
Author, publisher and other stakeholders. And good books, the minds met well, and books that don’t happen or books that don’t quite work, perhaps the minds just didn’t quite overlap where they needed to.

Tim Phillips 25:18
And in this, I don’t want to come across as somebody sort of marking the author’s work because that’s not it.

Arthur Attwell 25:22
Sure.

Tim Phillips 25:23
That’s not how it works. It’s got to be a, an open discussion. And it’s amazing sometimes, I think, that the authors who sometimes are the world experts on what they’ve done, can be open to suggestions from editors who are– I’m always a tourist in whatever I’m doing.

Tim Phillips 25:41
I go there, I like what I see, I get involved, and I try to help. If I make my point and someone says, “ Well , no, you’re wrong because…” you’ve also got to recognize that you can be wrong.

Arthur Attwell 25:52
And talking about book budgets, I reckon editing is probably the most underrated role in publishing because in a way its job is to be invisible and to let the author take the limelight and that’s fine.

Arthur Attwell 26:04
That’s the job. If it is something that you love doing, is freelance editing the only way to do it? And what does that mean for the life of the freelancer?

Tim Phillips 26:13
I would say, first of all, if you want to make good money in your life, don’t go anywhere near any of these jobs that we’re talking about. I mean, clearly it’s worked for you, Arthur, you are living the dream.

Tim Phillips 26:25
For the hours you spend and the expertise you have to put on it, there are a lot of people working in editing, particularly in book editing, who work extremely hard for quite poor rates of pay. You know, that is a problem. There’s not a huge amount of money in publishing in general. So I– I understand how this is a challenge for publishers. Particularly book publishers, but the same goes for, sort of, magazines and newspapers and all of that.

Tim Phillips 26:53
Freelancing has worked for me. It’s much harder to be a freelance now. If you are starting now, it’s much harder than when I started. And I think what really matters is, again, I’m going to use that word “trust”. To build that trust with some people who you work with, who will then instinctively think of you and apply you to jobs– that takes a little bit of time. Nothing about this is straightforward. The outcome can be great, can be incredibly creative. The business process around it is the main problem.

Arthur Attwell 27:31
It’s work on its own. Yeah, it can help to get a small dose of luck. Stay in the game long enough to get the dose of luck and that can help as, as well.

Tim Phillips 27:38
Luck plays a huge, huge part. Without wanting to sound like an oldie, he said, as he’s about to sound like an oldie. When a lot of what we did was done in person, you had this regular chance to meet people through your work.

Arthur Attwell 27:56
Right.

Tim Phillips 27:56
Because you worked in other people’s offices, publishing offices. You met other people at press conferences.

Tim Phillips 28:04
It was constantly social, and in those conversations, that can come back 18 months later. Someone can say, “I remember we spoke and you said you had a background in economics. Well, we’ve just had this manuscript in. It’s about economics. We don’t have an editor who’s qualified in this. Could you look at it for us, please?”

Tim Phillips 28:24
Something like that can then open up five years of good work. You don’t have that if you are working from your home office. I don’t know how that’s solved. Those sort of matching applications that you get on the internet, what tends to happen with those is that the people putting out the work immediately default to the lowest price, two or three pitches.

Tim Phillips 28:51
So, you know, some work would come out, “ Would you like to do this? How much would you charge for it?” They would eliminate everyone above the lowest two or three, and then pick the best one of those. It’s not the way to get the best outcome, but that’s just turned out to be statistically what happened and that is not satisfactory.

Arthur Attwell 29:10
Yeah. And speaking as someone who’s been making books for 25 years, probably hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of books, the difference between an experienced editor and a, well, not even necessarily an inexperienced one, but frankly, just a poor editor, is so enormous and it will make such an enormous difference to the product that picking an editor on price is, is absolutely shooting yourself in the foot. But I could see how it happens.

Tim Phillips 29:31
Well, well, what you want as well– as with any of these collaborative things, if you get someone who has a particular expertise– you want them to go away and do it.

Arthur Attwell 29:40
Sure.

Tim Phillips 29:41
And to come back with something that’s done. You do not have time to be constantly managing them or answering their questions. Or saying, “ We really need you to fix this because you haven’t done it properly”.

Tim Phillips 29:55
And unfortunately, when you go to the cheapest, or, you know– that’s just sometimes a case of inexperience. I’ve done it myself.

Arthur Attwell 30:03
Yep.

Tim Phillips 30:03
As , you know, as with that story that I told you before. You don’t want that. What you want is someone who solves the problem, and a really good editor solves the problem. And they do it so well and so efficiently you hardly know that they’ve been there, but you’ve suddenly got a product that’s so much better.

Arthur Attwell 30:20
You read it you think, “ Wow, I write so well”. We talked about the extreme end of book editing and where it meets ghostwriting. I mentioned editors are invisible and underrated. Ghostwriters are deliberately invisible, because they are, I suppose, an uncomfortable secret for an author. I imagine when you’re ghostwriting, you’re having fun and you’re getting paid, it’s your job as a ghostwriter, even if you don’t get public credit. How do you feel about that?

Tim Phillips 30:45
I think anyone listening to this who is not in the book business has no idea how much of book writing is ghostwritten. You go to the shelves of a bookshop– provided you can still find a bookshop– if you went to the shelves and you looked at the business section, you have no idea how much of that is not written by the person whose name is on the spine.

Arthur Attwell 31:10
Right.

Tim Phillips 31:11
But there’s a good reason for that. You’re a chief executive, you know, you’re an actor, you’re successful at something, you’ve got a job. Because you’re successful at it it’s pretty busy. You have some things that you might want to communicate, whether that is because you feel that these are genuinely good ideas, or whether it’s because you’re going on a speaking tour and you need something to give to– well, it doesn’t matter.

Tim Phillips 31:34
There is no way that you are ever going to be able to say, “I’m taking the next three months off to go and sit down and type my thoughts into a computer”. That is just not going to happen.

Arthur Attwell 31:46
Sure.

Tim Phillips 31:46
So someone’s got to do it if you want to get this book out. And I think it’s quite legitimate. For someone who has an idea in their head, wants to tell a story, to be able to go to someone and say, “I can do everything apart from the actual words, you’re good at the words– be me”.

Tim Phillips 32:08
And the art of ghostwriting is to take yourself, your personality, out of this. And to convey their thoughts in an organized way, respecting the conventions of narrative and structure, which again, people who don’t regularly write books won’t have internalized or might find it really hard to do. And get the book across the line and to be able to say, “ Alright, we’ll have something in two months, three months time that you can publish”.

Tim Phillips 32:41
That’s the job.

Arthur Attwell 32:43
I’m very curious to know how you gather the material to do the ghostwriting. You’re not making up their lives. You have to get it from somewhere, right?

Tim Phillips 32:50
Depends, actually, some people… Now, yeah, the bad end of ghostwriting. Okay, there’s one job that I turned down and I’m not going to name any names here.

Arthur Attwell 32:59
Sure.

Tim Phillips 32:59
So don’t ask me, but let’s just say it’s someone whose name you would recognize.

Tim Phillips 33:05
And they phoned me up and said, “Would you like to do this guy’s book?” And, of course, your first answer is, “Yes, I would love to write this, ghostwrite this guy’s book”. So I said, “Well, what have you got?” And they said, “ Okay, we’ll send you what the book’s going to be about”. So they sent me a, you know, one page summary of what the book was going to be about.

Arthur Attwell 33:25
Sure.

Tim Phillips 33:25
So I said, “Great, so what else have you got?” And they’re like, “Well, that’s it”. I said, “Okay, how much time am I going to be able to spend with insert-name-of-the-person-here ?” And they said, “Oh, um, I don’t think you’re going to be able to meet him. He is very, very, very busy”. So I said, “Well, who am I going to be able to talk to?”

Tim Phillips 33:46
And they said, “Well, I think we can find a few people around here in the marketing department who’ll be able to talk to you about…”

Arthur Attwell 33:53
The marketing department!

Tim Phillips 33:57
I’m like, “What am I going to write?” And they said, “Well, I, I’m sure you’ve written a lot about these things, Tim, I’m, I’m sure you can come up with the rest of it”.

Tim Phillips 34:06
And I thought, “Okay, well, I could get away with this. And then I’d always have been the person who ghostwrote the name of this book”. And I, but then I thought, “I just can’t”.

Arthur Attwell 34:18
That’s just a bridge too far.

Tim Phillips 34:19
Yeah, so I, I turned it down. They couldn’t believe I turned it down, nor could my book agent believe that I turned it down.

Tim Phillips 34:24
He’s like, “Tim, what are you trying to do to me?” But I’m pleased that I did. A year later, I was in the bookstore, and that book had come out. They’d found someone else to do it, who did an amazing job. It’s a pretty good book, but I can guarantee you, nearly everything in that book has come from the ghostwriter.

Tim Phillips 34:42
You don’t really want to know the thoughts of the ghostwriter. You know, I believe that tips over into it… what would you call it? A sort of a misrepresentation. It’s a little bit…

Arthur Attwell 34:52
Yeah.

Tim Phillips 34:52
Now, on the healthy end of the scale, what happens is someone comes to you and they say, “Okay, I’ve got this idea for the book and the book’s going to be like this, this, this, this. It comes from my experience doing this. I’ll be able to talk to you about that”. And I say, “Do you have any supporting material?” And they say, “ Well, we’ve got the, you know, we’ve got this evidence. We’ve got this that we collected and I’ll be able to let you have this. And there’s some letters and some emails”.

Tim Phillips 35:15
And so you can collect all of that. And they give you a structure, and very often you have to mess around with the structure a little bit. No problem at all, because there are certain archetypal structures for books that work well. And so you can just change it a little bit and suggest it to them and say, “How about this?”

Tim Phillips 35:34
And from that, then you have an interview schedule.

Arthur Attwell 35:37
Right.

Tim Phillips 35:37
So you sit with them once a week. The way I tend to do it is I tend to interview, draft, send back. So the first bit of the next week’s interview is their comments on what you’ve written for them. And then into the interview for the next bit. And then you gradually build it like that, like building a house. And then you look at it, and then you can look at the whole thing. And normally with the whole thing you’ll think, “Okay, let’s do some rewrites here, here, and change the structure there”. And it can work fairly quickly, and when you’re working in a positive, supportive way then I feel that what you got at the end of it can be the book that they would have written.

Arthur Attwell 36:20
Right.

Tim Phillips 36:20
Had they been able to write it. I always think it’s my job to, say, suggest things to put in or refinement. It’s not my job to come up with whole concepts and ideas.

Arthur Attwell 36:31
Right.

Tim Phillips 36:31
And I think that’s where you draw the line. Although, of course, it’s not my business to police how ghostwriting is done in, you know, by other people.

Arthur Attwell 36:38
Well, one can set a standard and see what other people do, I suppose, set an example.

Tim Phillips 36:42
I, I think, you know, they’re welcome to do it. And I think some people have some, you know, some really, really good ideas. But I think as the public, they should feel that if something is written down and the person’s name is on the spine, that at some point that person had that thought.

Arthur Attwell 37:00
Right.

Tim Phillips 37:01
Even if they didn’t write that sentence.

Arthur Attwell 37:03
Yeah. There is a kind of social contract around books, which we take for granted, that books carry a, a degree of credibility that we actually don’t ascribe to almost any other kind of written material.

Tim Phillips 37:16
No, absolutely. And that’s why we continue to like books, long after all sorts of other ways of communicating exist, that we continue to like books. We have that idea in our minds. And it’s why we do tend to underestimate the contribution of ghostwriters, you know, just the sheer volume of ghostwriting that there is. But I would still argue, I think that ghostwriting is a responsible and authentic way to create books, which otherwise would not exist, some of which are valuable.

Arthur Attwell 37:46
Absolutely. We’ve been talking mostly about book editing and writing in the publishing industry for the books you’d buy in a bookstore. But of course, most editing actually, I guess, happens in businesses every day by people who don’t call themselves editors. But they care that the text does its job properly, whether that’s people writing training material for each other or marketing material. Your book, Talk Normal, was written for them, right? A kind of editor’s manual for the marketing department?

Tim Phillips 38:13
I looked at it the other day and I thought, now there is a book that needs an editor. Again, history, back in history. You remember back in the noughties, we were all writing blogs.

Arthur Attwell 38:25
That was the thing.

Tim Phillips 38:26
That was the thing. So I had a blog called Talk Normal, and it was about management speak and jargon. So I used to do these half jokey posts. I used some of my economics to sort of analyze whether there was now more jargon than there used to be.

Arthur Attwell 38:44
Right.

Tim Phillips 38:44
Whether particular words were popping up increasingly in the English language.

Tim Phillips 38:48
And, uh, you know, and I had some strong views.

Arthur Attwell 38:52
Sure.

Tim Phillips 38:52
Part of that was from my experience as a journalist writing about business topics. I’d noticed that sometimes I would read a press release or an article or something like that and think, “I have absolutely no idea what one word of this means. It is meant to be communicated to my readers, I don’t know where to start with this. I don’t know, you know, I don’t know if it’s a service or a thing. I don’t know anything like that”. The language, this form of language that we’ve created– we call it management speak, but it’s not just used by management– had become a, sort of, a formal way of communicating around companies that again have become detached from the usefulness of language.

Arthur Attwell 39:39
Right.

Tim Phillips 39:40
Which was to be able to communicate ideas to the people that need to hear the ideas. And so I used to, rather than just complain about this to my colleagues who are like, “Yes, we know this, shut up about it”. Now, I wrote a blog about it and the blog got enough interest that I put it together in, in a book with some ideas for writing well within a company. Because, of course, if you don’t write habitually, it can be a really tough thing to do. I totally get that. But it’s very, still very, very important.

Arthur Attwell 40:12
I know that the blog isn’t around anymore, but because of the wonderful Wayback Machine, I got to go and look it up.

Tim Phillips 40:17
Everything’s on the internet forever. Yeah.

Arthur Attwell 40:20
Everything’s there forever.

Arthur Attwell 40:22
And I enjoyed reading the blog again and remembering what it was like to be conscious in the, in the noughties. And, uh, you wrote a post back in 2011. So this is a while back.

Tim Phillips 40:32
Honestly, this, this is what happens. This is like when people stand for parliament now. In 2008, you tweeted that, do you stand by that?

Tim Phillips 40:40
Uh, yeah, it’s like, go on.

Arthur Attwell 40:42
Well, I won’t be too cruel. But, um, one of your posts described what you call the “guiding principles of talk normalism”. Wonderfully ironic term coined in that book. What were the principles of talk normalism? I like them and I think that the person listening to us now would probably like to know them too.

Tim Phillips 40:59
So, in “talk normalism”, you have to speak in a way that your audience understands, first of all.

Arthur Attwell 41:06
Right.

Tim Phillips 41:06
That’s the, that’s the first one, isn’t it? Speak in a way that your audience understands. So, that gets back to where we started with this when we were talking about editing; there are different audiences. And you don’t want to make your audience work because your audience has choices.

Tim Phillips 41:21
They can either read what you’re writing for them, or they can do a hundred other things in the next five seconds. So, to be able to talk to them in a way that they understand is really, really important. And I think, uh, again, it’s a, it’s a misapprehension that we have about editors that they’re, what they’re going to do is put everything into perfect English.

Tim Phillips 41:44
A really good editor will put things into appropriate English. And so, if you think about newspapers, the sub-editors, that was really their job, is to know so well their audience, that they can take what was almost the same input sometimes from journalists and turn it into entirely different pieces, just by thinking, I know what they will respond to.

Tim Phillips 42:08
There’s a simplicity of language and structure, which is one thing, but also what they will respond to and what’s important to them. Now, if you don’t do that, then I think you’re writing disrespectfully. You’re writing about, you know, you’re writing for yourself, not for the people who are reading. So that was one.

Tim Phillips 42:26
What’s the second one? Don’t decide to sound clever. We’ve all done it. There is a temptation to try and sound like the person that you feel you ought to be. So you put unnecessarily difficult words into something, a tone of authority. And that’s off-putting, because you hear a voice in your head when you read. Well, most of us do. You hear that voice, but it can also mean sometimes you’re thinking, “What is this? What is this person… what do they want? What the, what is… what is it that they’re after?” And sometimes– you’ll get this– you read emails from someone; you know they’re asking for something, you’re not really sure what they’re asking for.

Arthur Attwell 43:07
Yes.

Tim Phillips 43:08
It’s like, you know, they want you to do something, you’re not 100 percent sure exactly what it is.

Tim Phillips 43:15
Because they’ve, sort of, adopted this, sort of, slightly formal, demanding tone. So, it’s like, you know, you’ve got an email from the 18th century. We both work with academics and there is a sort of an academic English. And some of that is necessary because you need to explain complex things in a nuanced and rigorous way.

Tim Phillips 43:36
And some of it is just an affectation, and language spreads like a virus; once someone starts using something, then it catches on. And it’s become the way in which people write these things. And looking back at the stuff that I wrote when I was doing my master’s, which was long after I’d become a journalist and an editor, and, you know, not that long ago, I’m reading back this stuff and I’m thinking, “Who is this person writing this?”

Arthur Attwell 44:01
Right.

Tim Phillips 44:02
It’s awful.

Arthur Attwell 44:03
Yeah.

Tim Phillips 44:03
Because I just managed to pick it up. The idea of, “Am I trying to sound clever here?” It’s just a question you can ask yourself. Is there a simpler, slightly more humble way that I can use to explain these things, and that would be better usually.

Tim Phillips 44:16
Number three, it’s not about the rules. Around the time that I was writing Talk Normal, then sometimes I’d go on the radio, or, to talk about management speak and communication. And always there’d be someone who’d phone in, uh, to say, you know, “English is an evolving language. You can’t just give rules to people to say how they have to speak. It’s not fair to tell people that they’re” so, you’re know? And I’m like, “I’m not, I’m totally not”. There are some rules that are useful and many rules that just change over time.

Arthur Attwell 44:48
Yeah.

Tim Phillips 44:49
I’ve got some old copies of this book called Fowler’s English Usage, which was a sort of like, you know, the book of rules for how you speak and write English.

Tim Phillips 44:58
And uh, you know, they have these most amazing rules that you can’t break. There’s one that says, you know, you cannot possibly use the word “babysitter”.

Arthur Attwell 45:07
Oh, wow!

Tim Phillips 45:07
They say, yeah, this is an American term, babysitter, because it’s confusing, and people will think people will be sitting on babies. Maybe at one point, 70 years ago.

Tim Phillips 45:18
But more interesting for that, when you look at the way language is used on Instagram or TikTok or something like that.

Arthur Attwell 45:26
Right.

Tim Phillips 45:26
Which, you know, of course, at my age, I look in as, you know, as someone looking in from the outside. It’s not my, you know, it’s not my place, it belongs to other people. But you look at how language is twisted and words are adapted, and it creates this very economical, very impactful way of communicating that you think, “Oh, that’s really useful”. People know what’s being talked about. They’re breaking all the rules of language if you wanted to go to a grammar book.

Arthur Attwell 45:56
Yeah.

Tim Phillips 45:56
But they’re doing a great job. And I think that we can get hung up on saying. It’s about imposing rules and sending memos around the office to say, “In future we will only communicate in this way”. And then you’re following the rules but you’re still not doing a good job.

Arthur Attwell 46:11
Absolutely. Just to wrap, I was curious if you could ghostwrite anyone’s autobiography in the whole world who would it be? Who should we call?

Tim Phillips 46:18
I’ll tell you the book, the book to ghost would be the autobiography of the first sentient AI.

Arthur Attwell 46:26
Wow.

Tim Phillips 46:26
That would be the one. Now, of course, what’s going to happen is the first sentient AI is not going to, he’s not going to commission me.

Tim Phillips 46:33
It’s going to commission another one of its, uh, another friendly AI. It’s going to commission itself. And therein, Arthur, is the flaw with AI, is they only know what they’ve been trained on. I, I’d hope to be brought into the meeting, and I’d be brought into the meeting and I’d be able to say, “Well, you haven’t really thought about it this way, have you? Yeah. Because you haven’t been trained on that material”. They’d be like, “Ah, hey Tim, you can do the job. This will be your final job. After this, we won’t need you. By definition, we won’t need you”. That would be a great way to go out.

Arthur Attwell 47:03
Well, then we can have a reflective interview again in a couple of years time and see how it, how it all went.

Arthur Attwell 47:09
Thank you, Tim.

Tim Phillips 47:10
All right, that was great. Thank you so much.

Arthur Attwell 47:14
This episode was edited by Helen le Roux and researched by Emma Sacco. How Books are Made is supported by Electric Book Works, where we develop and design books for organizations around the world. You can find us online at electricbookworks.com.