the future of publishing: a note in honor of my up and coming friends

I am quoting now from a comment I received earlier this week from Liviania, one of my very first young friends in this blogging arena.  Her words, entire:

I'm at the Columbia Publishing Course right now, and one of the themes is that publishers need to be more transparent. They need to talk about what they do, so that authors understand the value of a publisher versus just putting an ebook on the internet themselves.

Your editor, your copyeditor . . . you blog so frequently and beautifully about the team behind your books. I'm sure they appreciate it even more than you can imagine.

I write about my editors, my copy editors, my dream editors, those collective teams because they matter to me.  Because they have changed the way I've thought about books. Because they have made room, from time to time, for my stories, while keeping me safe from myself.

Judging from the quality of the minds of my students and of those younger bloggers who have befriended me both on this page and off of it, I can say with absolute assurance that there is a rising class of editorial types—a stellar cadre of wordlovers and wordsmiths, grammatical giants, and opinionated tastemakers that will define our next generation of books if we, as a culture, remain open to them.

We must, I think, remain open to them.  Eric Felten, writing in the Wall Street Journal (which has lately emerged as a hotspot for book talk) is of that opinion, too.  Here he is, opining with a piece he's called:  "Cherish the Book Publishers—You'll Miss Them When They're Gone."