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LC: I can answer your questions from our point of view ... Timeline from submission to publication? It varies from under one hour to over 50 years!. There are manuscripts in the files that David P. Morgan purchased before I was born, that no editor since that date has found a way to use. Our goal today is to purchase no feature unless we're very sure we can use it within six months, because we don't want to (1) waste our limited budget (2) frustrate a contributor. Stories also perish as time goes on, and it's increasingly hard to resurrect them. It can happen, though. If you recall the Sunnyside Yard article last spring, that was purchased in 1956. How long does editing take? The process starts early. Usually before we schedule the article there's already been a lot of discussion on story development, and the author and I and the story editor have already reached agreement on the major aspects of the story. Are contributors consulted on editing? Of course! Rarely will there NOT be a lot of discussion between myself, the editor assigned to the story, and the writer. From the time the story is first proposed, assigned, or invented, to the moment we're finished and it goes off to production, we might talk to the author 20 or 30 times. In some cases there's a lot of involvement. I looked into my e-mail sent file on the December 2003 cover feature, and author Chris Livesay and I sent each other over 100 e-mails discussing the story as it progressed from concept to publication, plus we talked to each other on the phone over a dozen times. That's fairly typical for a cover story. We send a galley to all feature authors at the point where it is copyfit and edited, and in most cases we pick up all of the changes and comments made by the author. The exception is when the author wants to add something, like a whole paragraph of explanation or detail, that results in a net change in the length of the story by more than a sentence or two, because it's already copyfit. In that case we'll be on the phone with the author looking for a place we can cut a paragraph out. With more experienced writers like Don Phillips, Tom Murray, or Fred Frailey, generally the galley will come back with maybe 10 tiny changes marked on it -- a word change here, a comma there. That's partly because their articles are "pat" to begin with, partly because they know what we need and have already supplied it, and partly because they know that editors never, ever, change anything if they don't have to (because we have plenty of other things to do, like maybe go home on time instead of working evenings of unpaid overtime.) I should add that in the case of most features there are outside experts looking at it as well. Most experienced authors have a set of reviewers they use during the process of writing the story, and by the time the author has a final manuscript put together, I'll have seen several progress versions and I'll know who on the outside has seen it too. If it's a subject that we're not conversant in ourselves, we'll usually send it out for review as well. It beats making mistakes. Railroad Reading is different -- from a magazine production point of view it's a department, not a feature, because it shares space with ads. We don't know how many ads will be sold until very late in the game. Usually we only have 48 hours from when ads are finalized until Railroad Reading has to be finished, and in that period it has to be laid out and edited. Thus the exception to the galley rule is Railroad Reading. But generally, because these are short, first-person accounts, the only editing we have to do is for spelling, grammar, fact, length, and organization, so there's not been a problem in my experience. The key point is that putting together a magazine like Trains is a collaborative effort (but not a committee effort) of a lot of people. Every editor at Trains sees every story at multiple points along the way. Experienced authors have built a group of experts around them (not just friends, but experts) that advise them along the way, and they rarely go wrong. In a cover story, there might be 30 or 40 people that have had a hand in the article in some way before you see it.
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