Is There Such a Thing as an Anticapitalist Developmental Editor?

If you’re an academic critical of capitalism, you might hesitate over hiring a developmental editor. Developmental editors, after all, operate in a commercial environment outside of academia. Might such editors flatten your arguments and prose to open your text up to a wider audience? Is there even such a thing as an anticapitalist developmental editor?

It’s undeniable that developmental editing is partly about enhancing the commercial potential of a book. Publishers of all kinds (trade fiction and nonfiction, not just academic) hire developmental editors (or use this expertise in-house) with the goal of selling more book copies.

Commerce is not capitalism

But first of all, commerce is not the same as capitalism. Commerce is the exchange of good and services at scale. This has been happening for thousands of years. Printing presses would exist, and have existed, in many noncapitalist societies, too, so there is nothing inherently capitalist about publishing as an industry.

Editorial alignment and ideological flexibility

Second, developmental editors are usually hired to work with authors on refining the author’s vision for the book, with the readership in mind. That means a developmental editor should definitely not impose their ideological agenda on a manuscript. Their task is to clarify the author’s ideology rather than impose their own.

For this reason, it helps if the developmental editor and author have some rough alignment on views, but developmental editors’ flexibility and author focus means they can and should be comfortable working with authors with a variety of views and approaches—although each editor will have clear lines in the sand. If a developmental editor doesn’t have that flexibility, then the role is not right for them.

Are some developmental editing interventions pro-capitalist?

To answer this, let me draw a parallel here with marketing techniques. The anticapitalist business consultant Bear Hebert makes the point on their marketing course that many small business owners, particularly in the creative sector, feel icky about marketing. They argue that marketing is at heart ethically neutral and involves letting other people know that you have a useful product or service to offer. It just feels icky for psychological reasons (e.g., impostor syndrome) and because lots of mainstream small business advice promotes the use of manipulative or coercive marketing tactics (e.g., fake urgency, emotional marketing) because the field (along with PR) was co-opted by capitalism during the twentieth century, if not earlier in some places.

As with marketing, there are certain developmental editing interventions that may be capitalist in intent, but my sense is that these are not very common in academic monograph publishing (whereas in fiction and trade nonfiction, market forces and trends are often a much stronger influence on a developmental editor’s recommendations). That doesn’t mean certain “capitalist-inspired” interventions never show up in a developmental editor's report. These might include, for instance, chasing trends for sales over intellectual value, reframing a critique to make it more palatable to mainstream audiences, or flattening radical arguments for broader market appeal.

Capitalism aside, is developmental editing inherently commercial?

If we understand commercial here as creating a book that will appeal as much as possible to a certain audience in order to sell that book to them, then yes, developmental editing has a commercial aspect to it.

The key words here are “certain audience.” Academic books often have a few disciplinary audiences in mind, and sometimes crossover appeal, but rarely mass-market appeal.

Conclusion: Is there such a thing as an anticapitalist developmental editor?

In short, yes. Developmental editors are human consultants with a wealth of experience, and you can expect each developmental editor to bring their human and work experience, including their political perspective, to bear on a book, without subsuming it to their own interests and approach.

When writers are working across cultural contexts (and markets), then the role involves striking an appropriate balance between the standardization aspects I’ve mentioned as being inherent in the editorial process, and the importance the author (and potential audiences) attach to retaining certain elements as they are. I call this approach Editing Otherwise.

If you’re working on a politically committed manuscript, need editorial support, and think we’d be a good fit, feel free to get in touch.