National Book Foundation Unveils New Science + Literature Program

Brian Gresko

The National Book Foundation (NBF), which celebrates literature through such prestigious prizes as the National Book Awards and 5 Under 35, recently launched an exciting new initiative: the Science + Literature program. A collaboration between the NBF and Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Science + Literature highlights three books a year that deepen readers’ understanding of science and technology. The author of each title receives a cash prize of $10,000 and will be featured at events in cities across the United States during the coming months.

That hip, web-savvy plus sign (+) in the program’s title is apt, as it speaks to its goal of bringing science-centric books to a wider audience. Dr. Morgan Halane, a biologist and cofounder of #BlackBotanistsWeek, who served on the inaugural selection committee of the program, spoke to that aim in an e-mail: “It feels like there’s often a disconnect between what we think of as ‘science’ and our day-to-day lives. The reality is that science affects us on a personal level all the time, something that the global COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted. I hope that the Science + Literature program will help break down some of the barriers still standing between science and the public’s engagement with science—de-emphasizing the idea of science as something being done behind closed doors by people in lab coats, and instead feeding our curiosity about how science affects us.”

From left: Dr. Morgan Halane, Margot Lee Shetterly, Aaron Yazzie, Lydia Millet, Rachel Pastan, Daisy Hernández, Saeed Jones, Doron Weber, and Ruth Dickey at the Museum of the Moving Image on March 3. (Photo: Beowulf Sheehan.)
 

That plus sign also signals the forward-looking nature of the program, which doesn’t focus on any one genre of literature, but rather highlights books across genres, and even books that boldly combine genre in hybrid form. Daisy Hernández’s The Kissing Bug: A True Story of a Family, an Insect, and a Nation’s Neglect of a Deadly Disease (Tin House, 2021), for instance, is part memoir and part investigative report on Chagas, a rare illness known as the “kissing bug disease” which disproportionately affects low-income Latinx communities, including the author’s aunt. (It also just won the prestigious PEN/Jean Stein Book Award.) The other two inaugural titles are Linda Hogan’s The Radiant Lives of Animals (Beacon Press, 2020), an exploration in poems and essays of the author’s relationship with animals, and Rachel Pastan’s In the Field (Delphinium, 2021), a novel based on Nobel Prize–winning cytogeneticist Barbara McClintock that explores sexism and discrimination in the scientific community.

The winning books were selected by a committee of authors and scientists: Halane was joined by fiction author Lydia Millet, UCLA Gender Studies and African American Studies professor Dr. Safiya U. Noble, NASA engineer Aaron Yazzie, and Margot Lee Shetterly, author of books including Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Who Helped Win the Space Race (William Morrow, 2016). On March 3, the committee members joined the public and this year’s awardees for the Science + Literature Program’s kick-off celebration at the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens. The in-person event featured the three inaugural prize winners in a conversation moderated by Saeed Jones, author of the memoir How We Fight for Our Lives (Simon & Schuster, 2019), the first of what promise to be many dialogues the prize will engender at the intersection of literature and science.

 

Brian Gresko is a writer and teacher based in Brooklyn. He co-runs Pete’s Reading Series, Brooklyn’s longest running literary venue.

Conservation Stories

by

Emma Hine

July/August 2021
6.16.21
In Print and Online

This spring, writer Susan Tacent co-taught a virtual workshop called The Art and Science of Migration to twelve writers interested in animal migratory patterns. By the last of the workshop’s five weekly sessions, Tacent says, students saw migration everywhere. They began thinking of poetry “as a migratory journey that isn’t complete until the reader reads the poem.” They talked about how, when writing prose, “you don’t know where you’re going, but you’re committing to getting there.”

The workshop was offered through Creature Conserve, a nonprofit founded in 2015 by Dr. Lucy Spelman, a zoological medicine specialist. The growing organization is dedicated to bringing together artists, creative writers, and scientists “to foster informed and sustained support for animal conservation.” Specifically, Creature Conserve seeks to address a failure of communication around conservation, encouraging discussion and collaboration between the people who study animals and the people who depict them in writing and art.

Spelman has been thinking about how to address this disconnect since serving as a veterinary medical officer and then  director of the Smithsonian’s National Zoo in Washington, D.C., from 1995 to 2004. There she realized that the research and range of animal behavior her colleagues observed “wasn’t something that the average visitor got to see.” As she worked closely with animals, she found herself asking, “How do we bring more people behind the scenes? How do we help them feel inspired and feel connected?”

She continued asking this question while serving as the field manager for the Mountain Gorilla Veterinary Project/Gorilla Doctors organization in Rwanda and then while teaching biology and conservation to nonmajors at Brown University and art students at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). It was in this role as a teacher, listening to her students “absorb, interpret, and critique” scientific information, that she realized how important thoughtful communication is to conservation. “Scientists do a download,” she says, and share information in a more clinical style, but they “don’t think as much about narrative or interest for readers.” Her students, on the other hand, were “making the material interesting to each other.” 

So in 2014, Spelman began work with her students on Creature Conserve, a website where they could display the visual art they created in her class. (“Conserve,” she says, sounds more like a personal action, while “conservation feels like something someone else is doing.”) Then, with support from the International Fund for Animal Welfare, she put together a call for art on the wildlife trade; the resulting exhibition premiered at RISD in 2016 and traveled to Ohio and Wyoming. Creature Conserve grew from there. From 2016 to 2020 the nonprofit supported more than sixty artists, creative writers, and scientists with scholarships ranging from $50 to $3,500, enabling community engagement, field studies, research, and other endeavors related to the intersection of storytelling and science. A second exhibit, Urban Wildlife: Learning to Co+Exist, launched at the National Museum of Wildlife Art in Jackson, Wyoming, in October 2020. Creature Conserve hosted or cohosted eight workshops for writers and artists in 2020 and several already in 2021. In addition, the organization offers regular artist talks, scientist Q&As, a community space on the online platform Slack, and a growing mentorship program.

Tacent’s co-teacher, poet Christopher Kondrich, says that the goal for their workshop on migration was to show participants how “science could inform new ways of writing (and new ways of thinking about their writing) about animal migration, habitat loss, climate change, and extinction.” Following Creature Conserve’s standard workshop model, each of the five classes featured a presentation by a scientist, meant to help participants better understand the science behind the topic and, in turn, improve the science in their poetry or prose. In this case the participating scientist was Spelman, who taught students about the energetic costs of migration, the means by which animals navigate, and the plasticity they need in order to adapt migration behaviors to changing environmental conditions.

This workshop format—a scientist presenting scientific information and an artist or writer guiding participants through a creative interpretation—is at the heart of Creature Conserve’s unique mission, and it is something that Heather McMordie, an artist currently working on a project related to salt marsh ecosystems, especially appreciates. “One of the goals of Creature Conserve is to help artists really connect with the science and have the opportunity to research,” says McMordie, who participated in the migration class. For too long, she says, “arts and sciences and so many different professional fields have been siloed, and it’s time to work together and collaborate in order to make real change.”

Spelman puts this same idea another way: “Celebrate, study, protect. If we don’t celebrate the creature, we won’t be motivated to protect it. But if we don’t understand it, we’re not going to protect it wisely.”

How does this emphasis on celebrating and studying animals lead to protecting them? Tacent illustrates the answer with, of course, a story: Peter Green, a Providence-based photographer in Creature Conserve’s network, found a pigeon trapped behind a net. Unable to move the net alone, he called his building’s superintendent, and when the superintendent refused to help, Green sent him a photograph of the female pigeon on one side of the net and a male pigeon on the other side looking in. “When the super saw the photograph, he rescued the pigeon,” says Tacent. “So that’s what Creature Conserve’s writing and art workshops are trying to do: to get that picture out to as many readers or viewers as possible.”

 

Emma Hine is the author of the poetry collection Stay Safe, which received the Kathryn A. Morton Prize and was published in January 2021 by Sarabande Books.

Emily Poole’s Trout Friendly Lawns (left) and Sophy Tuttle’s Colony Collapse. (Credit: Emily Poole and Sophy Tuttle)

Literature and the Environment

by

Maggie Millner

September/October 2017
8.16.17
In Print and Online

In 1992 in Reno, Nevada, a group of scholars and writers founded the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) to promote interdisciplinary research and conversation about the connections between humans and the natural world. Comprising professionals in both the humanities and the sciences, ASLE encourages collaboration, supports environmental education, and convenes a community around the twin goals of literary excellence and ecological sustainability. Now, twenty-five years later, the organization is more robust—and necessary—than ever.

The intersections of poetry and conservation biology, or speculative fiction and environmental activism, may not seem intuitive. But in the early 1990s many scholars working at the crossroads of these increasingly siloed disciplines sought a way to share ideas and enlist creative, scientific, and ethical advice from specialists in other fields. With the advent of ASLE, members gained access to a directory of multidisciplinary scholars, as well as environmental studies curricula, a list of awards and grants, mentoring programs, and a bibliography of ecological writing, among other resources. In 1993, ASLE launched the semiannual (now quarterly) journal ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, which publishes academic articles in addition to poetry, nonfiction, and book reviews.

Since 1995, ASLE has also hosted a biennial conference, each event held in a different U.S. city, at which intellectual cross-pollination and collaboration can happen in person. The twelfth conference, titled “Rust/Resistance: Works of Recovery,” took place in June and doubled as a celebration of ASLE’s twenty-fifth anniversary. Hosted by Wayne State University in Detroit, the 2017 conference featured more than eight hundred presenters as well as keynote addresses by writers and environmentalists such as poet Ross Gay and historian and novelist Tiya Miles. According to ASLE copresident Christoph Irmscher, these conferences serve as “sustained intellectual experiences in which an array of amazing speakers complements the serious conversations that take place in individual panels.”

ASLE’s quarter-centennial comes at a critical moment. As an organization committed equally to literature and to environmentalism, ASLE and its membership are doubly threatened by the massive rollbacks in arts and climate spending proposed by the Trump administration. The White House’s 2018 budget plan, unveiled in May, would slash funding to the Environmental Protection Agency by nearly a third, eliminating 20 percent of its workforce and leaving the agency with its smallest budget in forty years, adjusting for inflation. Predicated on a staunch denial of the urgent reality of climate change, the plan proposes crippling reductions to programs that clean up toxic waste, determine the safety of drinking water, and research and predict natural disasters, among others.

In June, President Trump announced that the United States will also be withdrawing from the Paris climate accord, an agreement between nearly two hundred nations to reduce emissions and mitigate global warming that was adopted by consensus in 2015. “As we have known ever since Rachel Carson, the environmental crisis can only be addressed globally, not within traditional national boundaries,” says Irmscher. Branches of ASLE have been established in nearly a dozen countries or regions outside the United States, including Brazil, India, and Japan, and this year’s ASLE conference drew around a thousand members from twenty-five countries. Irmscher describes the organization’s international, interdisciplinary conferences as its “pièce de résistance against Trumpian unilateralism.”

The Trump administration’s proposed 2018 budget would also eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities. Though such cuts seem unlikely at this point—Congress thus far having upheld federal funding for both agencies—the proposal itself is indicative of an attitude that devalues the importance of art and literature to American life and culture. In light of such threats, Irmscher looks to literature for models of political environmentalism. “Panels and presentations on Thoreau’s Walden—to mention one of the intellectual progenitors of ASLE—can no longer ignore the fact that his philosophy of resistance has assumed new importance in an era when the government systematically suppresses scientific evidence,” he says.

In a sense, the joint disavowal of both environmental protection and the arts can be seen as a confirmation of what ASLE has always known: that these disciplines are deeply linked and even interdependent—that, as Rachel Carson once said, “No one could write truthfully about the sea and leave out the poetry.” In the face of these most recent threats, ASLE will continue to serve as a meeting point. “In a climate that discourages innovation, scientists have adopted new roles as dissenters and protesters,” says Irmscher. “As they unite and march, they find new allies in the arts and humanities that have long spoken truth to power. ASLE, whose core mission is to promote collaboration and public dialogue, provides an organizational framework for such new alliances.”
 

Maggie Millner teaches creative writing at NYU, where she is pursuing her MFA in poetry. Previously, she served as Poets & Writers Magazine’s Diana and Simon Raab Editorial Fellow.              

Writers, Editors Resist

by

Sarah M. Seltzer

May/June 2017
4.12.17
In Print and Online

The Wednesday morning after Election Day delivered a political shock for just about everyone, including writers—but hot on the heels of the electoral surprise came an existential dilemma: How could writers attend to the quotidian concerns of sentence structure, agent-hunting, and sending out work when America was so divided on seemingly every major issue—from reproductive and LGBTQ rights to immigration laws and the environment? Like much of America that morning, many writers turned to their friends and colleagues for answers. “On Facebook, everyone was saying, ‘Now more than ever we need fiction, art, and books,’” says writer Anna March, who had spent time in Pennsylvania that week, knocking on doors for Hillary Clinton with her mother. “I got a little bit panicky. I thought, ‘Oh my God, are people really thinking that art is going to save us?’ Because it’s really about organizing and getting out the vote.” Similarly, fiction writer Paula Whyman, based in Bethesda, Maryland, described the morning after the election as a rare world-changing moment. “As a fiction writer I had a lot of questions in my mind about what would happen to fiction and how we would go on working,” she says. “Does it really matter now?”

Both Whyman and March reached for similar outlets to channel their doubts and reassert the power of writing. Whyman answered a call on Facebook by her friend, the writer Mikhail Iossel, for help launching a new publication and with a small group started Scoundrel Time, an international online journal intended to foster artistic expression in the face of political repression and fear. March, eager to harness the energy of the arts community for political activism, decided to start Roar Feminist Magazine, an online publication that would provide a platform for politically informed fiction, poetry, and essays—as well as a way to strike back against an election that frequently devolved into disrespectful language, most notably the leaked Access Hollywood tape showing Donald Trump making lewd comments about women. “We wanted to do something that was both literature and revolution,” says March. 

These efforts are part of a growing number of projects and events started by writers, editors, and literary organizations in response to the election and the current political climate. Poet Erin Belieu and PEN America organized Writers Resist rallies, which brought out thousands of writers and citizens in cities all across the United States on January 15, five days before the presidential inauguration, to “defend free expression, reject hatred, and uphold truth in the face of lies and misinformation.” Poet Major Jackson started a collaborative poem, “Renga for Obama,” at the Harvard Review, while the Boston Review released the poetry chapbook Poems for Political Disaster, and Melville House published What We Do Now, an essay collection focused on “standing up for your values in Trump’s America.” 

Roar and Scoundrel Time both launched in late January—Roar on Inauguration Day and Scoundrel Time ten days later—and have since produced an impressive body of work and attracted large followings in just a few short months. “The idea of starting a new journal would be laughed at otherwise,” says Whyman. “There are so many excellent journals doing beautiful work that I in no way want to compete. But I think of this as something entirely different.”

Indeed, the interest both magazines have received in terms of financial support and submissions suggest that the audience is engaged. With a very small inheritance from her grandmother, who died shortly before the election, March was able to launch the Roar website and with her collaborators held a successful crowdfunding campaign that raised $12,000 in just a few months. The Roar staff includes Sarah Sandman and  Bethanne Patrick as executive editors, Jagjeet Khalsa as production editor, and several section editors, including novelist Porochista Khakpour and humor writer Cynthia Heimel. The title is a play on the “pussy” motif that appeared on posters and signs, and in knitted hats, after Trump’s infamous Access Hollywood remarks were made public. According to March, the journal’s mission involves “roaring, not meowing.”

The most prominent feature of Roar, which publishes three new pieces each day, is a section called “My Abortion,” in which women relate their experiences with abortion. The daily column serves to remind readers of what’s at stake under the strongly antiabortion Trump administration. Other columns include the Roar Meter, which uses numbers to tell a story: “Number of votes by which Hillary Clinton won the popular vote: 2,864,974 / Number of Americans who receive Planned Parenthood services: 2,840,000” reads the beginning of one entry. A column called Fight This Hate highlights “a small selection of hate crimes and/or harassment,” alongside fiction, poetry, and art sections. “Think about if Guernica met the Nation or VQR met Mother Jones,” says March. “We want to be at the intersection of the finest writing and political activism.” The editors plan to expand in the spring by publishing six pieces a day and bringing on more explicitly political writers.

Scoundrel Time (named for the 1976 book by Lillian Hellman about the McCarthy era) is, in Whyman’s words, “a place for artists to respond as artists” to the postelection reality. “There are wonderful and thoughtful journalists and commentators, people at think tanks, and activists in every realm doing important things,” says Whyman. “But this is a place for artists to speak to what’s going on from their particular perspective. We can keep telling one another stories, and those stories will draw people in and give them some relief.” The journal is a registered nonprofit organization, and the all-volunteer staff plans to look into nonprofit partnerships. Slightly less confrontational in tone than Roar (though no less political), Scoundrel Time publishes fiction, photography, poetry, essays, and dispatches from around the world, with a focus on content that’s current. “The strongest argument I can think of for satire and parody is that despots and authoritarian regimes of all stripes hate it so,” Tony Eprile writes in a February essay tying recent Saturday Night Live sketches to a long tradition of political subversion through mockery. Fiction writer Jodi Paloni also spearheads an Action section, encouraging readers to make calls and show up to protests.

Scoundrel Time and Roar also drummed up support at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) Conference in Washington, D.C. in February. Whyman and her fellow Scoundrel Time founders gathered in the lobby of the Trump International Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue and read aloud from James Baldwin, Emma Lazarus, and Claudia Rankine. Meanwhile, Roar supporters wearing pink “pussy hats” handed out pink Roar-branded condoms and stickers at the bookfair. They weren’t the only ones making a statement at AWP: Split This Rock, a D.C.–based organization focused on poetry and social change, collaborated with organizations such as VIDA: Women in Literary Arts and CantoMundo to hold a candlelight vigil for freedom of expression outside the White House, during which writers such as Kazim Ali, Ross Gay, and Carolyn Forché delivered speeches about the importance of writing and art.  

Scoundrel Time plans to organize similar actions in the future, but for now it carries on that spirit of standing together and holding space, albeit online, for writers to freely speak their minds. With their new journals, both Whyman and March hope they can help writers to, as Whyman says, “hang on to our humanity and feel like [we] can gain understanding.” 

 

Sarah M. Seltzer is a writer of fiction, creative nonfiction, journalism, and ill-advised tweets. A lifelong New Yorker, she is the deputy editor of the culture website Flavorwire.com.

Protesters march on Trump Tower in New York City as part of the Writers Resist rallies in January.

(Credit: Ed Lederman)

Dear President: A Message for the Next Commander in Chief From Fifty American Poets and Writers

by

Staff

September/October 2016
8.17.16
In Print and Online

In a little over two months, we the people will choose the forty-fifth president of the United States. Between now and then, the nominees will present their policy proposals and debate the issues, shaping a national conversation about some awfully big and important topics. But before we get to those televised debates (the first of three is scheduled for September 26 at Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York) we wanted to give some of our most thoughtful and articulate citizens—poets and writers—a chance to offer their perspective. Because, as former U.S. poet laureate Rita Dove remarked, “Our nation needs to learn to value its independent writers and artists as the heralds of a richly textured, inclusive national identity.”

The request was simple: Imagine you are face-to-face with the next president—whoever that may be—and, in a few sentences, write about what you hope to see addressed in the next four years. It turns out something pretty great happens when you ask writers to convey, without a lot of political grandstanding, what is most important to them. The contours of some of America’s biggest issues—education, health care, gun violence, racism, immigration, and the environment among them—start to come into sharper focus, the collective discourse rises above the rhetoric of political pundits, and the pomp and circumstance of the political process falls away, so that we are left with a discussion of real problems, real concerns, and, if not solutions, then at least some honest ideas that may inspire action of real, lasting value. 

Dear President,

“The countless complex problems facing the world require complex critical thinking. Please reinvest in public higher education systems like UC, SUNY, CUNY, and the other once-strong and accessible state systems of higher education. Restore and privilege humanities and arts education at the K–12 and higher-ed levels. Reduce the military budget and make a real commitment to social and educational infrastructure.” —Kazim Ali

★

“Please listen to the stories being told right now by the scientists who study, and the citizens who live, amid the catastrophic changes taking place across the planet. They are not fiction; without courageous leadership they will become fate.” —Steve Almond

★

“Your critics, most of them, would have called me a superpredator back then, when the memory of the pistol was heavy in my palm—so that’s not my focus. But now, unlike then, you have power, and I’m left to wonder what you will call the young men and women lost in the system, those who walked down paths they regret. Do they earn your scorn, your mercy?” —Reginald Dwayne Betts

★

“I would like President Clinton to know that I support her and her agenda fully, especially as it relates to education, the arts, and the environment. The single greatest problem facing our species is the erosion of the environmental conditions that allowed us to evolve and thrive and tap out messages like this one on our phones and computers. We are doomed, yes, but later rather than sooner, I hope.” —T. C. Boyle

★

“Once the body arrives in the world it immediately becomes fragile—fragile in that it needs nourishment, protection, education, and endless chances; bodies of color, in particular, have had these basic human rights revoked, and it continues. I call for a protection of these bodies through a reassessment of the justice system and retraining of authorities who violate the civil liberties of citizens of color through racial profiling, stop-and-frisk, and abuse; human life is at stake, and my wish is that the next four years will reflect back the beauty and not the wreckage of our existence.” —Tina Chang

 

★

“America has often seen itself as a beacon of democracy, but the American project has always been about a settler project of inclusion and exclusion: democracy for those imagined as real Americans, and inequality for slaves, immigrants, black and brown bodies, and those who live in places the United States has colonized or destabilized, most recently Iraq and Libya. I hope that you can see yourself not just as a standard-bearer for a global economic elite, but as a force for equality and justice for all.” —Ken Chen

★

“There’s so much I could ask of you—a list of demands—but first to ensure our safety as citizens. Too many lives have been lost to gun violence—mass shootings, gang related, and otherwise—and now it is more than a false dilemma, it’s a reality that can no longer be ignored.” —Nicole Dennis-Benn

★

“There is no present or future without immigrants; white supremacy (and all of its sequelae) is one of the gravest threats to our democracy.” —Junot Díaz

★

“I want an America with tougher gun laws. I want an America that nurtures and embraces diversity.” —Chitra Divakaruni

★

“Eight million metric tons of plastic are dumped into the oceans every year. Our government has to get involved in legislation that reduces one-use plastics, invests in alternative-packaging ideas, and dramatically decreases pollution in the oceans, or by 2050 there will be more plastic in the sea than fish.” —Anthony Doerr

★

“If we are ever to attain our forefathers’ aspirations for ‘a more perfect union,’ educating our young—not only in the sciences, but also the arts—cannot, dare not, be neglected. If our children are unable to say what they mean, no one will know how they feel; if they cannot imagine different worlds, they are stumbling through a darkness made all the more sinister by its lack of reference points.” —Rita Dove

★

“I would say to the president that she should work to dismantle the global culture of corruption present at all levels of society, which prevents any meaningful change or accountability, and whose primary victims are the powerless and disenfranchised. This complicity is a symptom of larger systems of discourse and economy that exist to preserve the status quo, and I would say that in the absence of means to transform those systems outright, she should start, at the level of the law and of media, to model ways of addressing concrete problems with transparency and tenacity, showing that even at the most entrenched levels of corruption, change can be effected.” —Robert Fernandez

★

“The stakes are too high for you to ignore the grievances voiced by those of us who believed you when you spoke of progress and equality. We can’t afford for you to go slow.” —Angela Flournoy

★

“Climate change—stop dicking around. War—use only as the ultimate last resort.” —Ben Fountain

★

“I’d like our next president to know compassion and compromise. I’d also like her to know how thrilled I was when I received a thank-you note from her husband after I sent Chelsea a birthday card when I was fifteen.” —Carrie Fountain

★

“The occupation of Palestine by Israel—mass incarceration, presumption of guilt, withholding of resources, wanton destruction of human life, all underscored by the creation of physical barriers and the emotional propaganda of persecution, exclusion, mythmaking, and fear—are mirrored, one by one, in the policies of institutionalized racism in the United States. Unless we face this singular fact, and acknowledge our collective culpability as architects and sponsors of state terrorism here in our American cities, and in our foreign policy regarding Palestine (which is the bedrock of all other foreign policy), we will continue to be unable to fulfill the potential of our democracy for our people, and remain excoriated abroad for our impotence and hypocrisy.” —Ru Freeman

★

“Dear Madam President, our undocumented families are not silent or invisible in our hearts. May they be just as present in your actions as we continue to build this home, this country, together.” —Rigoberto González

★

“None of the problems of this country will be solved without things getting messy, and without your commitment to listen, truly listen, and to govern for the people who have the least in this country—black and brown women of color, undocumented women, trans and lesbian women, poor women, the people you usually wish to have behind you at a podium but rarely invite to the room where decisions are being made. Invite us in and listen and then act.” —Kaitlyn Greenidge

★

“President Clinton, after celebrating with a tall flute of Prosecco, please make gun reform your first order of business. In four years, I hope to live in a country where the pen is mightier than the gun (and the money that keeps it in power).” —Eleanor Henderson

★

“Ms. President, I want you to know that the power of having our first woman as president doesn’t escape me; I’ve been waiting for this my entire life. And I want you, as the first woman president of the United States, to place the liberation and justice of historically marginalized people at the center of your work—
terrifying, hard, necessary work. We need this more than ever.” —Tanwi Nandini Islam

★

“I would like the next president to know that the 2016 presidential campaign has awoken a sizable portion of this country’s electorate to the limitations of a two-party system that is beholden more to its own status quo than the interests of its constituencies; that we are more awake than ever to the corruption of politicians who claim allegiance to ‘the people,’ but whose votes and policies are purchased outright by producers of weaponry and manufacturers of economic disparity. I would like the next president to know that we will be watching and taking note of their promises to Wall Street and the military-industrial complex, that we will call out their positions on trade deals that betray American workers, their complicity with a prison-industrial complex that seeks profit from incarceration, their commitment to a justice system that frees criminals in uniform while killing people of color with impunity, and that we will organize beyond their scarecrows of fear to create a movement capable of replacing this oligarchy with the highest of this nation’s ideals: democracy.” —Tyehimba Jess

★

“Madam President, thank you for sparing us your opponent’s dismal and clownish stupidity, his blind and blinding hate. I’m still scared, though. I’m scared that you think beating him will be the hardest part of your job, and I’m scared of what’s happening to the environment, to our schools and water supply and our tolerance, scared of people being out of work and people being hooked on painkillers and people not being allowed to use the restroom where they feel most comfortable. I don’t give a rip if you’re honest or transparent or running a thousand different e-mail servers, but I need you to be compassionate and smart and clear-eyed, to be decent and flexible and open-minded, to be afraid with me—with all of us—and despite our fears, not least yours, I need you to be brave and resilient and, well, hopeful.” —Bret Anthony Johnston

★

“I’d like to talk about government subsidies for mental-health care. We tend to speak about mental health after some extreme event, like a shooting spree, but mental health is an everyday thing. So many people—especially poor people and minorities—are suffering in silent pain.” —Tayari Jones

★

“Make fighting bigotry a priority—bigotry of all sorts, from race to sexuality to gender to class. I feel it’s especially the responsibility of our candidates this time around, as this very election unleashed a whole new wave of intense bigotry directed at all sorts of minorities—so I feel like it is the urgent responsibility of the elected official to face this and work to increase the dialogue, education, and awareness required to heal and advance.” —Porochista Khakpour

★

“I watch my students invest in cultural, economic, and financial change despite their pessimism and frequent belief that we live within a system that profits from their disenfranchisement. How do we convince the next generation of thinkers that their engagement and participation in the political system matters as they watch so much of the progress facilitated by activists of the past dismantled?” —Ruth Ellen Kocher

★

“Madam President, please pay more attention to, support, and build up public education. Our schools are the democratizing cornerstones of our communities—and this country’s future.” —Joseph O. Legaspi

★

“I’d like to trust that the voice of any suffering person, regardless of category, had as much currency with you as some power broker. I’d like not to doubt you knew that suffering was of a piece with the planet’s emergency, the ongoing story of oil, water, war, animals.” —Paul Lisicky

★

“Your country is complex; it is hard to imagine a foreigner being able to fix it for you. Keep this in mind when you consider invading another nation.” —Karan Mahajan

★

“What’s really important to me is the radical reconceptualization of our broken criminal-justice system that targets young black and brown people—increasingly girls and young women—for arrest, detention, and incarceration, thereby continuing the program of relegating generations of people of color to second-class citizenry. It is clear to so many of us that the increased presence of police in daily life, alongside the militarization of police forces, is the wrong path to go down, and that we have to think progressively in our imagining of the future we’d like to create.” —Dawn Lundy Martin

★

“Please put climate change at the front and center of our national conversation, and follow up by funding initiatives toward developing and using sustainable energy.” —Cate Marvin

★

“Peace is a good word for politicians to look up, understand the meaning of it, use it once in a while, learn to practice it. You are committing environmental child abuse by poisoning our food, polluting our air, and totally destroying the environment so that a few of your cronies can make a few extra billion or two while the rest of us will not survive even to serve you.” —Alejandro Murguía

★

“The blight on ‘American exceptionalism’ is the recurring cycle of black youth raised in communities where poverty, inadequate education, and insufficient recreational and job opportunities exclude too many of them from the promise of the American Dream. It is urgent that you fund programs now to address this shameful problem.” —Elizabeth Nunez

★

“Dear Madam President, help us lift up the least advantaged among us. Put your strength and determination behind education, jobs, and equality. We have benefited greatly from the moral guidance of the last administration. Please keep the spirit of ‘yes we can’ alive. God bless you.” —D. A. Powell

★

“What the world wants, demands, deserves, and needs from you is that you guide your leadership and base your decisions on just one principle: love. Because isn’t that the whole point to it all—love? Isn’t that why we all keep on going?” —Mira Ptacin

★

“Madam President, the influence of the Israel lobby is not as valuable as the lives of the many Palestinians who have been living in degradation and increasing terror under the Israeli occupation for the last half century, just as the influence of the NRA lobby is not as valuable as the lives of the many U.S. citizens who have been injured and killed due to gun violence.” —Emily Raboteau

★

“There should be a new cabinet post—Secretary of the Arts. For the inaugural six poets: European, Hispanic, Asian American, African American, Native American, Muslim.” —Ishmael Reed

★

“I want the president to know that we are tired of having our voices silenced and our needs unmet. I want the president to know that we want better gun control, higher minimum wages, recognition of women’s rights, better education, and most of all a greater sense of our shared humanity—unity, not division.” —Roxana Robinson

★

“President Hillary Clinton, I live in Portland, Oregon, where every day I watch our homeless camps grow in size. Homelessness is a national crisis that has barely been discussed this election season. You’ve pledged ‘to direct more federal resources to those who need them most.’ As you do so, please don’t forget about some of your most vulnerable constituents: homeless Americans. It’s an issue at the nexus of economic inequality, joblessness, rising housing costs, lack of affordable housing, health care accessibility, and systemic racism. Please make connecting all Americans to safe, stable homes and services a priority.” —Karen Russell

★

“Madam President, where has all the funding gone for arts in the schools? Could those kuts be the reesen we are all getin dummer?” —George Saunders

★

“The growing disparity in wealth in this country undermines any hope we have for achieving social justice. Changing this won’t be easy, and will require more courage, conviction, and political leadership than you have exhibited in the past.” —Dani Shapiro

★

“Since arts and humanities programs enrich our American lives beyond measure, connecting and inspiring people of different backgrounds and inclinations better than anything else does, it would be reasonable to support them threefold or more, without question. The fact that Bernie Sanders, a Jewish American, found it possible to be frank about the injustice and criminal oppression that Palestinian people have suffered for the past sixty-eight years suggests other politicians might be able to do this too—injustice for one side does not help the ‘other side’ and everyone knows this but does not act or speak as honestly or honorably as Sanders did.” —Naomi Shihab Nye

★

“I would like you to know that we do not have any more time—at all—to postpone addressing the issue of climate change. And while you’re working to ensure the survival of the planet, please remember that some of us are dying at an even faster rate from poverty, lack of health care, gun violence, police brutality, war, and twenty-seven kinds of intolerance—so please use your authority to help ensure that we live to see (and help implement) the climate-change solutions you set in motion.” —Evie Shockley

★

“I want the next president to shout from the housetops that violence is not a source or sign of strength but of weakness, whether inside a home or between nations. I want us to address violence at all scales, from domestic violence and gun violence to our endless, failed, one-sided, expensive foreign wars to the subtle violence against the poor and the unborn among our species, against more fragile species, and against the earth and the future that is unchecked climate change and the brutal fossil-fuel industry.” —Rebecca Solnit

★

“Did you know we need to find more jobs for the unemployed? Also, Palestine and Israel need to work it out.” —Tom Spanbauer

★

“If you can’t do everything, at least do what you say. I just wanna live in a country that knows the difference between love and hate.” —Ebony Stewart

★

“Our public-education system is in desperate need of resources, specifically in marginalized communities, as well as a more learner-centered, diverse curriculum emphasizing perspectives across race, gender, class, nationality, sexual orientation, ability, and the multiple intersections therein to challenge all of us to be better human beings on this planet. And, Madam President, if I can focus our last few minutes on my beautiful, complicated city: Your support of Rahm Emanuel terrifies me. Thank you for listening. Please, keep listening. To all of us. Not some. All.” —Megan Stielstra

★

“Free Leonard Peltier. Free Chelsea Manning.” —Justin Taylor

★

“No language is neutral. To speak is to claim a life—and often our own. If more Americans speak to one another, in writing, in media, at the supermarket, we might listen better. It is difficult, I think, to hate one another when we start to understand not only why and how we hurt, but also why and how we love.” —Ocean Vuong

★

“The greatest threats facing the United States are not terrorism and illegal immigration but rather injustice, bias, inequality, and fear. To be a great nation we must focus on criminal-justice reform; the eradication of the vestiges of slavery; education; and human and civil rights for all.” —Ayelet Waldman

★

“Please stop separating families through deportation; let it be understood that they did not want to be in this country to begin with (which reminds me, please stop bombing children, stop invading countries, stop sending the young and poor onto the battlefields). Please create a path toward citizenship for everyone, not just the ‘dreamers,’ because we all learn to dream from our parents.” —Javier Zamora

★

 

Of the Diaspora, In the Spotlight

by

Jennifer Wilson

July/August 2021
6.16.21
In Print and Online

In the fall of 2017, Erica Vital-Lazare, a professor of creative writing at the College of Southern Nevada, was on the phone with her dear friend Brian Dice, a member of the board of the nonprofit publisher McSweeney’s. They were laughing and talking about Black literature, a familiar back-and-forth that has become the soundtrack of a friendship forged years earlier in the Nevada desert. The two had originally met in April 2017 at the Believer magazine’s literary festival in Las Vegas, where they bonded over a shared concern for overlooked works of Black literature, books that were under-reviewed, out of print, or otherwise obscured. Now, a year after a presidential election that still had her reeling, Vital-Lazare was sparked into action. She and Dice wondered aloud over the phone, what if they really did it: “We had this idea together—what would happen if we brought some of those works back?”

Five years later the fruits of that phone call are bearing out in a book series from McSweeney’s called Of the Diaspora. Edited by Vital-Lazare, the series shines a light on works of Black literature that were relatively overlooked or underappreciated by readers and critics alike at the time of their original publication by reprinting them in new, collectible hardcover editions featuring bold, eye-grabbing cover art by Sunra Thompson. The series debuted in April with Wesley Brown’s 1978 novel, Tragic Magic, the story of a young Black man, a conscientious objector, who has just gotten out of prison after serving a sentence for refusing to fight in the Vietnam War. The novel was edited by Toni Morrison, then working at Random House, who urged Brown to commit to the parts of the story that were most “difficult” or “unsettling.” For Morrison, he says, “that was when the most significant writing takes place.”

Tragic Magic came out in the midst of a newspaper strike that brought books coverage to a grinding halt at several publications. While that may have played a role in his novel’s fate, Brown notes that Black literature is historically under-reviewed. “In our society,” he says, “when you’re talking about embattled groups of people, of which African Americans are one, there is often a sense that the value of their artistic endeavors are not considered seriously, or they’re dismissed outright, or just ignored.” Forty-three years after the novel’s initial publication, its depiction of a country divided over questions of race, class, and gender still resonates, and Brown says he hopes its rerelease will do away with the notion that political polarization is a recent phenomenon in the United States: “I think this country has always been divided,” he says, “since its inception.”

Second in the series is Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow (Putnam, 1983), the story of a middle-aged woman from Harlem who travels to the Caribbean following the death of her husband. Marshall, the child of poor immigrants from Barbados, infused her novels with the unique culture and linguistic patterns of her West Indian upbringing. In that way her work is part of Vital-Lazare’s broader desire to publish Black voices from across the diaspora. She and McSweeney’s have plans to publish works by Afro-Caribbean and Afro-Brazilian writers in the coming years. “Much of our understanding of Black literature,” she says, “comes from our very particular lens of what is Black American life.” With Of the Diaspora, Vital-Lazare wants to both deepen that lens—bringing in African American voices from the Southwest, for example—and pan out beyond North America. 

The third book to be released from Of the Diaspora is Captioning the Archives, a collaboration between photographer Lester Sloan and his daughter, the writer Aisha Sabatini Sloan. The book, which comes out in August, features photographs from the elder Sloan’s twenty-five years working as a photojournalist for Newsweek and includes images from major world events like Pope John Paul’s visit to Mexico as well as scenes of everyday Black life in Los Angeles and Detroit; each is accompanied by a caption in which father and daughter discuss the image. The new edition underscores the significance of Black photojournalism at a time when we are inundated with images of Black people under duress, often at the hands of police, a topic Sabatini Sloan writes about in her essay collection, Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit (1913 Press, 2017). She recalls her father having “heated conversations with editors” who wanted Sloan to supply them with photographs of Black people that emphasized pain and suffering, which he found exploitative. She recalls the pushback he got over one image that captured the love of a Black father for his child. Editors, she says, often “had this stereotypical vision of Black people they wanted to perpetuate through the photographs they were publishing.” The captions in Sloan’s book provide a window into how people across the world interacted with the Black man behind the camera and fill in anecdotes such as the time Sloan was taking photographs during the fall of the Berlin Wall and heard East Berliners singing the gospel song and civil rights anthem “We Shall Overcome.” They walked over to him and said, “We learned from you.” 

In fact the Of the Diaspora series itself works like this, by filling in the overlooked pages of a literary tradition that has long fought to be seen holistically, beyond the achievements of a select few. As Vital-Lazare puts it, with these three books and more to come, she wants to give new readers a “360-degree view of Black identity.”

 

Jennifer Wilson is a contributing writer at the Nation magazine, where she covers books and culture.

Q&A: Cook’s Activism at Philly Bookshop

by

Jennifer Wilson

September/October 2020
8.12.20
In Print and Online

The first time Jeannine A. Cook tried to open a bookstore, the building burned down just after she had signed the lease. Cook, however, was undeterred. As an arts educator and writer raised by a librarian, she finds books central to how she understands her place in the world and the impact she wants to make in it. In February, Cook opened Harriett’s Bookshop, which specializes in the work of Black and women authors. Philadelphia’s close-knit literary community was eager to welcome Harriett’s to the small but historic coterie of Black-owned bookstores in the city. But, as the saying goes, there are our plans, and then there is 2020. Six weeks after opening, Harriett’s had to temporarily close its doors because of the pandemic. Cook has nonetheless begun to establish Harriett’s as a vital part of the city’s literary and activist scene; in May and June she could be found handing out books from the shop to protesters during the Black Lives Matter demonstrations. Cook spoke about how she and Harriett’s have weathered quarantine, the Black women artists and thinkers who have shaped her mission, and how books can be a vital part of liberation work. 

What you were doing before you opened Harriett’s? 
When I was in college I had a club called Positive Minds where we’d do outreach in the streets, teaching folks in the community how to use the arts as a tool for social change. I didn’t recall this until recently, but we actually sold books to raise money so that we could do these projects in the community. When I opened Harriett’s, a former classmate was like, “Wow, you’ve been doing this book thing for so long.” I had forgotten just how long.   

What is your vision for the shop? 
Toni Morrison said, “If there’s a book you really want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” There was a bookstore that I needed that I hadn’t found, so I decided I was the one to make it a reality. I see it as a spiritual sanctuary, a facilitative space where people can congregate and find communion. The decision to do this under the name of Harriet Tubman was about celebrating Black women specifically.

What was lockdown like for you as someone who had just opened a business?
In general it has been a lesson in how to pivot, how to be in the present and not think too much about the future or the past, because I don’t have those answers. I have what I have today, and I have to figure out how to make it work. 

How are you and Harriett’s connecting with the Black Lives Matter movement?
There’s no way we do the work we’re doing under the name of Harriet Tubman without being on the ground. I think Harriet Tubman is the ultimate in terms of how to do liberation work. At the protests we’ve been giving out an organizing skills guide and Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds by Adrienne Maree Brown. If you want to distribute books, if you want to make that part of your protest, reach out to us by e-mail. We have books that we can potentially send you. 

Is there any one book you find yourself returning to often during times like these? 
What I really don’t want to see happen is for us to commodify this movement and make it seem like if you read these “top five books” you now understand racism and you have the tools you need to undo it. It just doesn’t work that way. I’ve been suggesting books that aren’t on those lists—fiction, novels, poetry. One book that I keep returning to is Beloved by Toni Morrison. What she does in that book by asking the question “Would you prefer slavery or death?” is so profound. It makes the meaning of freedom much clearer. 

 

Jennifer Wilson is a contributing writer for the Nation, where she covers books and culture. She lives in Philadelphia.

Jeannine A. Cook (Credit: Brianna Bolden)

Save Indie Bookstores

by

Maggie Millner

July/August 2020
6.10.20
In Print and Online

Writers tend to have their favorite local bookstores. The one where the staff members are mostly poets. The one with the secret reading nook in which you can sit and sample the wares. The one that sells out-of-print titles from a discount bin. The one you can’t imagine your neighborhood without.

This spring, as stay-at-home orders swept the country and many such bookstores faced an uncertain financial future, best-selling novelist James Patterson partnered with the American Booksellers Association (ABA) and the Book Industry Charitable Foundation to launch Save Indie Bookstores, a campaign to support shops affected by the pandemic. The initiative, which began in early April, aimed to raise funds for direct grants to help stores stay solvent through the crisis. Reese’s Book Club, a virtual book group run by actor and producer Reese Witherspoon, championed the campaign; as part of the initiative’s rollout, the organization posted a video of Patterson on its Instagram channel—an account that reaches more than 1.6 million followers—publicizing Patterson’s personal donation of $500,000. (The donation is not Patterson’s first act of support for independent bookstores; since 2015 the author has given annual “holiday bonuses” totaling $1.35 million to hardworking booksellers at shops nationwide.) Author Rick Riordan, with his wife, Becky Riordan, also pledged to match donor contributions up to $100,000. By May 5, Save Indie Bookstores had raised $1,239,595, to be disbursed to all eligible bookstores that applied for grant funding. Privately owned businesses with a physical address in the United States or its territories, and that lost at least 50 percent of their sales and/or net income between March 15 and May 15, as compared with the same period last year, were eligible. The ABA says nearly one thousand shops will receive grants of at least $725 each.

Save Indie Bookstores is premised partially on the reality that many booksellers who closed their shops’ doors in response to the pandemic may never reopen them. “Given the razor-thin margins these stores operate on, you can imagine how devastating it is to be closed to the public for weeks and weeks,” says Allison K Hill, who became CEO of the ABA earlier this year, after working for over two decades as an independent bookseller. In addition to operating on slim profit margins, the indie bookselling industry has long faced fierce competition from corporate franchises and screen-based technologies. Still, local bookstores have gone through something of a resurgence in recent years. As e-book sales have fallen, and big chains have shuttered (like Borders) or been bought out (like Barnes & Noble), many indie bookstores have seen a sales growth over the past decade thanks to carefully curated shelves and community events and outreach. Last year the ABA reported its highest membership since 2009. Now the pandemic puts at risk not only booksellers’ individual businesses, but also the heartening broader uptick to which their hard work has contributed.

Greenlight Books in Brooklyn, New York, which had its strongest year in 2019, sent in an application for funding in April. “We had to lay off about three-quarters of our staff, which was utterly horrible,” says Jessica Stockton Bagnulo, who opened the store with co-owner Rebecca Fitting in 2009. Through the ABA’s e-commerce platform, IndieCommerce, Greenlight switched to online-only sales when New York City imposed stay-at-home orders; like many bookstores it also virtually hosted many of its scheduled readings and author interviews via Zoom. Stockton Bagnulo hopes federal aid and a grant from Save Indie Bookstores will allow Greenlight to eventually hire back all its staff and “reorganize very quickly.”

Second Star to the Right bookstore in Denver also applied for a grant. Before the spread of the coronavirus, the shop’s owners were finalizing plans to double the size of the store, adding a café and a new event space; since its closure in late March, they have started curbside pickup, adopted a new online business model, launched a GoFundMe campaign to offset staffing and occupancy costs, and begun hosting virtual story hours with authors. Britt Margit Hopkins, the store’s marketing and publicity manager, says that, even from afar, each staff member of Second Star to the Right is passionate about their work and strives to be “a good friend on the other side of the screen that continues to give back to their community, day after day.”

What the pandemic makes clear, ironically, is the abiding necessity of books, as well as the ineffable value of physical community. The local bookselling industry is facing an unprecedented trial at the very moment its services feel most starkly indispensable. Online conglomerates simply can’t meet the needs of an individual community the way an indie bookstore can; they can’t deliver books to elderly neighbors by bicycle, like Alsace Walentine, co-owner of Tombolo Books in St. Petersburg, Florida, has done, or offer a book recommendation hotline over the phone, like Deep Vellum Books in Dallas. “Indie bookstores keep jobs and taxes in their communities,” says Hill. “They also have passionate, knowledgeable booksellers who love reading and understand that bookselling transcends retail, that it’s about relationships and connection.” 

 

Maggie Millner is a poet, a 2019–2020 Stadler Fellow at Bucknell University, and a senior editor of the Yale Review. Previously she served as Poets & Writers Magazine’s Diana and Simon Raab Editorial Fellow.

Alsace Walentine, co-owner of Tombolo Books in St. Petersburg, Florida. (Credit: Andrew Harlan)

A Matter of Survival for Independent Bookstores

by

Michael Bourne

3.30.20
Online Only

The waves of lockdowns and shelter-in-place orders imposed across the country to slow the spread of coronavirus infections are a potential shot to the heart of independent bookstores, which have thrived in recent years by turning their shops into community hubs featuring cafés, classes, and readings. But even as scores of indie bookstores have shut their doors to the public and laid off staff, many stores continue to serve their customers via online orders and curbside pickup programs, and for now at least readers seem to be responding by buying huge numbers of books.

At Flyleaf Books in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, owner Jamie Fiocco closed her store on March 16 and switched to online sales, along with an elaborate system of curbside delivery. After North Carolina’s Governor Roy Cooper announced a statewide stay-at-home order on March 27, however, Fiocco ended the curbside delivery program, choosing to handle all phone and online orders by mail.

For the moment, the system seems to be working. Sales at the store are in line with what they were a year ago, though the expense of having offered curbside pickup as well as below-cost shipping to her customers is eating into Fiocco’s profits. She isn’t sure how long she can hold out, despite having laid off seven of her fourteen employees.

“What I’m trying to do right now is make enough money to keep my [remaining] staff paid,” she says. “At some point, I would not be surprised if we are asked to shut down by local or state government but we will keep going until then. We’ll try to keep a trickle of revenue in, but we’re really counting on government assistance to see us through to the end of this.”

Flyleaf Books is far from alone in struggling to outlast the coronavirus outbreak. The legendary Strand Book Store, located in New York City, the epicenter of the pandemic, had to shutter all of its operations, including its website, on March 15, forcing it to temporarily lay off much of its staff. Powell’s Books in Portland also shut down its five stores, but on March 27, CEO Emily Powell announced the store had one hundred staffers working full-time to keep up with online orders. At the Tattered Cover Book Store in Denver, the physical stores are closed, but a skeleton crew is still working to fulfill online orders. 

In San Francisco, Green Apple Books closed its three stores to the public on March 17 and furloughed all but nine of its forty employees, who have stayed on to handle online orders, according to co-owner Kevin Ryan. Sales from the website are ten times higher than normal, but, Ryan says, “all that web-order fulfillment is really low margin, and at first we were doing free freight which cost us three dollars for every book right off the top. Some books we even lost money on, so it’s not a great solution.”

The fallout from the virus isn’t confined to indie bookstores. As of March 27, Barnes & Noble, the nation’s largest remaining bookstore chain, had closed roughly 400 of its 627 locations, though its website has seen a huge boost in orders. James Daunt, the chain’s newly installed CEO, says he has laid off all employees with less than six months seniority and furloughed many of the rest, though he has retained a few core employees at each location to help refurbish the stores while they’re closed. (Read “Amid Pandemic, Barnes & Noble Pauses to Improve Its Stores.”)

Whether individual bookstores can survive the extended closings depends not only on how long the social distancing orders are in effect in their area, but also on how strong their balance sheets were before the outbreak, how receptive their landlords will be to delayed or reduced rental payments, and how much they’re able to rely on their websites to sell books during the closures, booksellers say. Booksellers are also counting on relief in the form of disaster grants and low-interest loans from the massive $2.2 trillion stimulus package passed by Congress, which includes $375 billion in aid for small businesses, along with $260 billion for unemployment insurance for laid off and furloughed workers.

In the meantime, a new digital bookstore, Bookshop.org, offers a way for readers to buy books online while supporting their local indie bookstore. Each time an affiliated bookstore directs a shopper to buy books from the site, the store gets a 25 percent commission on the sale. In addition, the site is putting 10 percent of all it sales revenue into a pool that will distributed twice annually to its 550 affiliated bookstores. As of March 30, that pool had grown to just under $180,000.

In the past two weeks, sales at Bookshop.org, which only opened for business in January, have jumped by more than 1,000 percent, says CEO Andy Hunter. “I think people are rallying around their local bookstores,” he says. “They understand that indies are not only important parts of their communities but really important to literary culture and the culture around books in general.”

Still, if the shutdowns last more than a few weeks, some bookstores will surely face a reckoning, says Fiocco, the ABA president. “I haven’t heard of any permanent closings yet,” she says. “There are sure to be some. I will say this, that it is as dire a situation as it could be. 

“I think there will be a lot of closings for stores that don’t have the operating capital to continue,” she adds. 

Fiocco hopes her own store can open for business as usual by June 1, though she knows the shutdown could last much longer. If the store does reopen in June, she is guardedly optimistic that she can survive.

“It depends on a lot of communications with publishers, with our landlord, and whatever governmental assistance we get,” she says. “I feel like the will is there, but I think a lot of bookstores don’t have that good will or landlords that understand the value of bookstores or have the ability to ride this out. I believe that we will be here. I don’t see the path yet, but I feel like the players are all working together to make that happen.”

In San Francisco, Kevin Ryan, Green Apple Book’s co-owner, says he’s heartened by the federal stimulus bill, which he hopes will allow the store to delay paying rent for a few months and help his staff weather the shutdown. “If all the money comes through like it sounds like it might and we’re able to rehire them in mid April, I don’t think they’ll miss a paycheck, he says. 

Like Fiocco, Ryan believes Green Apple will eventually reopen, but he remains uncertain how robust business will be in the wake of the economic damage the pandemic is sure to leave behind. 

“We’re a pretty healthy business,” he says. “If we’re closed, it means everybody’s closed, and I just don’t see that happening. One way or another we’re going to open. The bigger question mark is what it’s going to look like on the other side, with the massive unemployment and all that, if people are going to come back and buy books. That’s a real question mark.”

 

Michael Bourne is a contributing editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.

Authors Reimagine Live Events During the Coronavirus Pandemic

by

Michael Bourne

3.23.20
Online Only

Six years ago, when Emily St. John Mandel published Station Eleven (Knopf, 2014), her best-selling novel about a pandemic flu that decimated the world’s population, she couldn’t have known that her next novel, The Glass Hotel (Knopf, 2020), would arrive at the height of a pandemic flu outbreak that, if not as lethal as the fictional “Georgia flu” of her earlier book, is nevertheless upending the world economy—and, not incidentally, her twenty-five-city book tour.

“Yeah, irony, right?” Mandel says with a rueful chuckle. “I maintain that this is nowhere near as bad as the Georgia flu. We’re not going to end our days in traveling Shakespearean theater companies crossing a post-apocalyptic wasteland.”

Perhaps not, but the coronavirus pandemic has radically disrupted the book business, setting off waves of bookstore closures and book festival cancellations, making it nearly impossible for authors like Mandel to tour in support of their books. For now these closures and cancellations are only affecting books published this spring, but if the national lockdowns continue, it could send lasting shockwaves through the always fragile publishing ecosystem. 

Already, though, authors and booksellers are teaming up to shift canceled live events online using digital tools like Zoom and Facebook Live. Mandel herself will be participating in a live digital Q&A Tuesday, March 24, with author Isaac Fitzgerald, hosted by Brooklyn’s Greenlight Books, where Mandel was originally scheduled to launch her book in person. The same night, a new organization, A Mighty Blaze, run by writers Jenna Blum and Caroline Leavitt, will be featuring Facebook Live events for Laura Zigman’s new novel Separation Anxiety (Ecco, 2020) and Andrea Bartz’s novel The Herd (Ballantine, 2020), along with a slate of debut authors.

It remains to be seen how effective these digital book events will be, especially for smaller presses that rely on in-person events at bookstores and festivals to introduce their authors to readers, says Mary Gannon, executive director of the Community of Literary Magazine and Presses. “I think everybody is trying to pivot and reinvent as quickly as possible just to experiment with how these events might work,” she says. “So it’s hard to tell at this point if digital events can make up for canceled live ones, but there’s kind of nothing else to do.”

No matter how successful these digital events are, virus-related lockdown orders and restrictions on in-person gatherings will hurt authors and the book industry more generally, Gannon says. When fears of infection slashed attendance at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) Conference earlier in March, she says, many of the small presses in her organization saw sales for the month drop by as much as 20 or 30 percent, just from the loss of in-person sales from that one event.

“I think there’s going to be serious negative impact on both small and large publishers, but the smaller publishers are the ones that are more at risk because they have fewer resources,” she says. “It’s especially important right now for us to support literary magazines and small presses in any way we can. They’re essential to ensuring the health and diversity of the literary arts.”

Indeed, Paul Bogaards, deputy publisher at Knopf and Pantheon Books, offers a slightly more sanguine view of the disruption to live author events. At Knopf and Pantheon, imprints of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, which is a part of Penguin Random House, Bogaards says, all book tours have been canceled or postponed through the end of April, which impacts about a dozen titles at just those two imprints. “I can’t speak for the industry, but given the CDC protocols in place, no one is touring,” he says. “Physical gatherings are kaput. Boots-on-the-ground book tours are dead for the moment.”

But, he says, critics haven’t stopped reviewing books, authors continue to sit for interviews, and publishers are able to maintain their social media campaigns. “Touring is just one spoke in the wheel of book promotion and publicity,” he says, “and, in point of fact, publishers are doing less of it than they once did.”

Bogaards is encouraged by upticks in sales of commercial fiction and topical nonfiction, along with titles that touch directly on contagious diseases like Stephen King’s The Stand (Doubleday, 1978), Albert Camus’s The Plague (Gallimard, 1947), and Mandel’s Station Eleven. Publishers are hoping the enforced down-time will spark renewed interest in their classic titles. To that end, Knopf and Pantheon are launching social media initiatives designed to prompt readers toward its backlist catalog. “I mean, if you are under a government-ordered lockdown, what better way to travel than through the pages of a book?” he says.

In the meantime, authors at small and large publishers are exploring digital alternatives to live events. Blum and Leavitt, the organizers behind A Mighty Blaze, were among the first to see the need for a hub for writers whose book tours were stranded by the pandemic. The idea for the site came about after Leavitt, author of twelve books, including With or Without You, due out in August from Algonquin, learned that the Texas Library Association Conference, where she had been invited to appear, had to cancel and move its offerings online.

“I had spent a lot of time memorizing what I thought was a funny speech, with hand movements and everything,” she says. “I made a video of it and I sent it to Algonquin just for a lark, and they liked it so much they said, ‘Ooh, we can send that out.’ So I started the ‘Nothing is Cancelled Book Tour,’ where I told authors to make little videos and I’d post them as if they were in a bookstore. All I asked is that they shout out another writer and shout out an indie bookstore.”

The site took off, and Leavitt quickly joined forces with Blum, author of The Lost Family (HarperCollins, 2018). Calling themselves “two women writers in yoga pants trying to help other writers whose book tours have been canceled,” the pair has already attracted more than fifty industry partners, including Poets & Writers and two hundred author participants.

“It’s grown exponentially every day,” says Blum. “I would say it’s been growing faster than COVID. We’ve been having so many writers join us, and so many industry people from publishers to publicists to agents to indie bookstores to literary conferences and festivals—everybody wants to help.”

Still, digital events aren’t for everyone. Poet Tess Taylor is publishing two collections this spring, Last West: Roadsongs for Dorothea Lange, commissioned by New York’s Museum of Modern Art, and Rift Zone, due from Red Hen Press in April. Taylor was able to attend a reading for Last West at MoMA in February, but most of the subsequent events for that book, along with twenty-five more events planned for Rift Zone, have all been canceled.

The two books contained a decade’s worth of poems, Taylor says, and she spent a year organizing the events to support them. “It feels like building a sandcastle,” she says. “You know, you build it up and up and up and then a wave comes and it knocks it down. I don’t know if I’m sad or angry. I’m all those things, and then sometimes I’m just humbled because what’s going on is so much bigger than just us or me.”

Living as she does in California, which is currently under a shelter-in-place order, Taylor says she will be throwing herself a digitally streamed “imaginary book party” with fellow poet Judy Halebsky, inviting friends “to have a glass of wine and watch us give our reading” online, and plans to regularly post poems by poets she admires. But she admits to feeling ambivalent about moving her live events online.

“I’m using social media because I want to be in a community right now at this moment when we can’t go out in the world, but I love people,” she says. “I love human beings. I really miss them. I love bookstores and want to support them. I love the feeling of live poetry, having it read, being in a room where someone is sharing their words and their breath with you—in the most wonderful way, not in a toxic way. Poetry is a beautiful way of sharing breath, and I miss that.”

 

 

Michael Bourne is a contributing editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.

From top: Emily St. John Mandel, author of Glass Hotel; Caroline Leavitt, cofounder of A Mighty Blaze and author of With or Without You; and Tess Taylor, author of Rift Zone.

(Credit: Mandel: Michel Leroy; Leavitt: Jeff Tamarkin; Taylor: Taylor Schreiner)

Resources for Writers in the Time of Coronavirus

8.11.20
Online Only

As writers, teachers, publishers, booksellers, and librarians in our local, national, and international communities grapple with how to proceed in their creative, financial, professional, and personal lives during this time of uncertainty, we are compiling a list of resources we hope you will find useful. We will be updating this list as we learn of new resources and opportunities. (If you know about an opportunity, initiative, or helpful resource not on this list, please send an e-mail to editor@pw.org.) 

 

Financial Resources

The Academy of American Poets, the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses, and the National Book Foundation have established the Literary Arts Emergency Fund to help writing organizations outlast the coronavirus pandemic. With the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the three nonprofits will administer a total of $3.5 million via one-time grants of $5,000 to $50,000. Applications were accepted through August 7.

The Poets & Writers COVID-19 Relief Fund provides emergency assistance to writers having difficulty meeting their basic needs due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In the initial round of funding, Poets & Writers distributed 107 grants of $1,000 each to writers from twenty-six states. A second round of funding, in which the organization expects to be able to distribute grants of $1,000 to approximately thirty writers, closed on June 28.

The initiative Artists Relief, sponsored by a coalition of arts grantmakers—the Academy of American Poets, Artadia, Creative Capital, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, MAP Fund, National YoungArts Foundation, and United States Artists—will award a total of $10 million, half of which was contributed by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, to artists and writers “facing dire financial emergencies due to the impact of COVID-19.” Applicants who are twenty-one or older, able to receive taxable income in the United States regardless of their citizenship status, and have lived and worked primarily in the United States over the last two years are eligible to apply for $5,000 grants. Artists Relief will also serve as an informational resource, and will collaborate with Americans for the Arts to launch the “COVID-19 Impact Survey for Artists and Creative Workers.”

The Writers Emergency Assistance Fund, sponsored by the American Society of Journalists and Authors (ASJA), helps established freelance writers “who cannot work because they are currently ill or caring for someone who is ill.” Applicants need not be members of the ASJA but must have five published articles from regional or national publications or one book published by a major publishing house.

Authors League Fund offers assistance to professional authors, journalists, and poets who “find themselves in financial need because of medical or health-related problems, temporary loss of income, or other misfortune.” 

Carnegie Fund for Authors awards “grants to published authors who are in need of emergency financial assistance as a result of illness or injury to self, spouse, or dependent child, or who has had some other misfortune that has placed the applicant in pressing and substantial pecuniary need.”

The PEN America Writers’ Emergency Fund distributes grants of $500 to $1,000 to U.S.-based professional writers, including fiction and nonfiction authors, poets, playwrights, screenwriters, translators, and journalists, who demonstrate an acute financial need, especially one resulting from the impact of the COVID-19 outbreak. 

Artist Relief Tree is “set up to collect donations from those of us with the means to help. We intend to support artists, particularly freelance artists, in a small way. Unfortunately we cannot hope to replace artists’ entire fees or lost work, but we wish to provide hope, make a small difference, and show solidarity with colleagues and Friends.” A group of artists—Andrew Crooks, Marco Cammarota, Morgan Brophy, Rachel Stanton, Tehvon Fowler-Chapman, and Thomas Morris—organized the fund. Note: This group is not taking new requests for funds at the moment.

Queer Writers of Color Relief Fund, started by Luther Hughes, founder of Shade Literary Arts, seeks to “help at least 100 queer writers of color who have been financially impacted by the current COVID-19. Priority will be given to queer trans women of color and queer disabled writers of color, but I hope this relief fund will help as many queer writers of color as it can.”

The Creator Fund, from the e-mail marketing company ConvertKit, is offering financial assistance of up to $500 for artists and small business owners—the term “creator” is loosely defined. The mini-grants can be used for groceries, childcare, rent, mortgage or medical expenses. The Fund, which will disburse $185,300 in total, is now closed to new applications after receiving more than sixteen thousand applications.

The Dramatist Guild Foundation’s Emergency Grants are available to “individual playwrights, composers, lyricists, and book writers in dire need of funds due to severe hardship or unexpected illness.” The grants, which typically range between $500 and $3,000, are intended to support expenses related to healthcare, childcare, housing, disability, natural disaster relief, and other unforeseen circumstances. Applicants will be notified in two to four weeks.

Substack, an e-mail newsletter platform, will administer a total of $100,000 to individuals “writing, or thinking about writing, on Substack” through its Independent Writer Grant Program. Individuals who are experiencing economic hardship due to the coronavirus pandemic can apply for grants from $500 to $5,000, in addition to mentorship from the Substack team. Applications are open through April 7. (It is free to join Substack and start an e-mail newsletter; if you decide to charge your audience a subscription fee, Substack takes 10 percent.) 

The Freelancers Relief Fund, organized by the Freelancers Union, will offer “financial assistance of up to $1,000 per freelance household to cover lost income and essential expenses not covered by government relief programs” including food supplies, utility payments, and cash assistance to cover lost income. Freelancers who reside in the United States, derive most of their income from freelance work, and have experienced “a sudden decrease of at least 50 percent of income as a direct result of the COVID-19 pandemic” are eligible. Applications have been temporarily closed due to the overwhelming response the fund received from its community.

We Need Diverse Books (WNDB) will administer emergency grants of $500 through the WNDB Emergency Fund for Diverse Creatives in Children’s Publishing to “diverse authors, illustrators, and publishing professionals who are experiencing dire financial need.” Traditionally published writers and illustrators who have lost income due to canceled festival, school, or library visits, are eligible, as are furloughed publishing professionals—editors, agents, publicists, designers, and sales positions—who work in the field of children’s literature. Only U.S. residents are eligible. Applicants should receive a response in two to three weeks.

The Maurice Sendak Foundation has dedicated $100,000 to the new Maurice Sendak Emergency Relief Fund, which will be administered by the New York Foundation for the Arts. The fund will offer grants of up to $2,500 to children’s picture book artists and writers who “have experienced financial hardship from loss of income as a direct result of the [COVID-19] crisis.”  Children’s picture book artists and/or writers who have published at least one picture book in the last five years and are residents of the United States or U.S. territories are eligible. Applications will open on April 23 and close after six hundred applications are received; grantees will be notified by May 15.

As part of its response to the COVID-19 crisis, the Economic Hardship Reporting Project (EHRP) offers emergency hardship grants of $500 to $1,500 to professional journalists based in the United States. EHRP will prioritize the unemployed, single parents, members of one-income families with young children, and people with acute medical needs over the age of fifty-five. Applications are reviewed on an ongoing basis. EHRP also accepts pitches from independent journalists for stories on “the intersection of the coronavirus and financial suffering in America, with an emphasis on writers and photographers who are themselves experiencing significant economic hardship caused by the pandemic.” EHRP typically pays reporters roughly a dollar a word or $300 to $500 a day for photojournalists.

The Foundation for Contemporary Arts (FCA) has established a temporary Emergency Grants COVID-19 Fund to “meet the needs of experimental artists who have been impacted by the economic fallout from postponed or canceled performances and exhibitions.” Individual artists who make “work of a contemporary, experimental nature,” live in the United States or U.S. territories, and have a U.S. Tax ID number are eligible to apply for grants of $1,500. FCA supports artists working in poetry, dance, music/sound, performance art/theater, and the visual arts. Applications are open through May 31.

 

Location-Specific Financial Resources

The California Relief Fund for Artists and Cultural Practitioners program, created by the California Arts Council in response to the economic crisis and impending financial needs of individual artists resulting from the coronavirus pandemic, will award a total of $920,000 via unrestricted $1,000 rapid-relief grants to more than 900 individual artists and cultural practitioners in the state of California. “Grants will be distributed to reflect the cultural and geographic diversity of the state of California—including those who are of historically underserved communities who are especially vulnerable financially due to this economic crisis.” Applicants must be current, full-time residents of the state of California, artists or cultural practitioners; and must not be eligible for or currently receiving traditional California state unemployment insurance (UI) benefits. The application deadline is August 18 at 3 PM PDT.

Literary Arts in Portland, Oregon, has created the Booth Emergency Fund for Writers “to provide meaningful financial relief to Oregon’s writers, including cartoonists, spoken word poets, and playwrights.” Awards of $1,000 each will be given to 100 writers at the end of the application period, which runs through May 13. (If additional funds are secured for this purpose, Literary Arts may open up a second round of applications later in June.) Since COVID-19 is disproportionately impacting communities of color, Literary Arts is prioritizing funding “for writers identifying as Black, Indigenous, and/or People of Color.” Funds are intended to be used for (but are not limited to) recouping financial losses due to canceled events, offsetting loss of income for teachers, and support for artists working full- or part-time in the service industry “or other professions who have lost income.” 

The Boston Artist Relief Fund “will award grants of $500 and $1,000 to individual artists who live in Boston whose creative practices and incomes are being adversely impacted by Coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19).”

The Oregon Science Fiction Convention’s Clayton Memorial Medical Fund helps professional science fiction, fantasy, horror, and mystery writers living in the Pacific Northwest states of Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Alaska deal with the financial burden of medical expenses.

NC Artists Relief Fund, sponsored by Artspace, PineCone, United Arts Council, and VAE Raleigh, supports “creative individuals who have been financially impacted by gig cancellations due to the outbreak of COVID-19.” All donated funds “will go directly to artists and arts presenters in North Carolina. Musicians, visual artists, actors, DJ’s, dancers, teaching artists, filmmakers, comedians, and other creative individuals and arts presenters are experiencing widespread cancellations due to this global pandemic.”

The Safety Net Fund is offering financial support to artists who typically make their living offline, at in-person events and performances. To qualify, you must reside in the Bay Area (or near it, as some San Joaquin and Santa Cruz county zip codes are eligible), provide proof of an artistic endeavor in the last six months, cannot be eligible for unemployment insurance from the state, and must have earned less than $1,000 of income in the last thirty days.

The San Francisco Arts & Artists Relief Fund, cosponsored by the Center for Cultural Innovation, San Francisco Arts Commission, and Grants for the Arts, offers funds to “mitigate COVID-19 related financial losses that artists and small to mid-sized arts and culture organizations have suffered.” Individuals based in San Francisco who are eligible for, or currently on employment, are eligible for grants of up to $2,000. Organizations that conduct a majority of their work in San Francisco and operate on a budget of less than $2 million are eligible for grants of up to $25,000.

The Personal Emergency Relief Fund, sponsored by Springboard for the Arts, helps artists in Minnesota “recover from personal emergencies by helping pay an unanticipated, emergency expense.” Artists can request up to $500 for lost income “due to the cancellation of a specific, scheduled gig or opportunity (i.e. commissions, performances, contracts) due to coronavirus/COVID-19 precautionary measures.” 

Max Kansas City’s Emergency Grants offers grants of up to $1,000 to New York State residents who are professionals in the creative arts. “Individuals who have made their living through their art form either professionally or personally and demonstrate a financial need for medical aid, legal aid, or housing” are eligible.

The NYC Low-Income Artist/Freelancer Relief Fund, organized by Shawn Escarciga and Nadia Tykulsker, offers grants of up to $150 to “low-income, BIPOC, trans/GNC/NB/Queer artists and freelancers whose livelihoods are being affected by this pandemic in NYC.”

The New Orleans Business Alliance’s Relief Fund offers grants of $500 to $1,000 to “meet the needs of gig economy workers who have been directly impacted via loss of income.” Writers who live in New Orleans, earn more than 60 percent of their income via gig-work, and are below a certain income level are eligible.

Artist Trust’s COVID-19 Artist Trust Relief Fund offers grants of $500 to $5,000 to “artists whose livelihoods have been impacted by COVID-19” and are residents of Washington State. The grants are intended to help artists who are coping with lost wages and earnings, lost income from canceled events and performances, medical expenses, rent and mortgage payments, food, utilities, and other living expenses.

The Indy Arts & Culture COVID-19 Emergency Relief Fund, sponsored by a coalition of community funders and the Arts Council of Indianapolis, offers $500 grants to “individuals working in the arts sector and impacted by the current public health crisis,” especially those working at small to mid-sized nonprofit arts and cultural organizations. Applicants must live in Marion or one of the seven surrounding counties in Indiana.

The Cultural Relief Fund offers grants of up to $2,000 to individuals in the Seattle area for “emergencies related to the COVID-19 virus and to support the creative responses cultural workers offer in times of crisis.” The first round of funding was available April 1 through May 15. Applications are reviewed weekly; applicants will be notified within ten business days. 

The Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council Emergency Fund for Artists offers grants of up to $500 to artists dealing with financial losses due to canceled events, canceled classes, or school closures. Artists who live in Pittsburgh (in Allegheny, Beaver, Butler, Washington, Lawrence, Indiana, Greene, Fayette, Washington, and Westmoreland counties) are eligible. Applications are reviewed on a rolling basis.

The Canadian Writers’ Emergency Relief Fund, financed by the Writers’ Trust of Canada, the Writers’ Union of Canada (TWUC), and the Royal Bank of Canada, will distribute $150,000 to writers in Canada that have “seen contracted or projected income evaporate due to the current public health crisis.” Poets, fiction writers, nonfiction writers, and young adult writers with a track record of publication (or self-published writers who are members of TWUC) who will lose more than $1,500 between March and May 2020 are eligible to apply for grants of $1,500. The application deadline was April 9.

The Atlanta Artist Lost Gig Fund, administered by the arts nonprofit C4 Atlanta, offers grants of up to $500 to artists in the Atlanta area who “have unmet essential needs due to lost revenue from canceled upcoming events and gigs.” Artists who make their living from their practice are eligible.

The Culture Connects Coalition Artist Relief Fund, cosponsored by the City of Santa Fe Arts and Culture Department and the Lannan Foundation, will administer grants of $500 to artists who live in Santa Fe County and have suffered financial losses due to canceled events, including  readings, panels, and teaching opportunities. Priority will be given to requests from Black/Indigenous/People of Color, transgender and nonbinary artists, and/or artists with disabilities. The current round of applications is open until May 17; the next round of applications will open on June 1.

 

Resources for Working Remotely

Zoom: “How do I host a video meeting?”

Vimeo: “How to plan a virtual event: Vimeo’s live production experts tell all”

Creative Capital: “Thinking About Livestreaming as an Artist? Read This First.” Artists Yara Travieso and Brighid Greene describe how to approach livestreaming and survey platforms available to writers: Instagram, HowIRound, Vimeo, Twitch, YouTube, Facebook, and Zoom.

The Chronicle of Higher Education offers advice for teaching during the coronavirus, including Moving Online Now: How to Keep Teaching During Coronavirus, a collection of articles, advice, and opinion pieces on online learning; “The Quandary: How Do I Support a Student Who’s Sick With Covid-19?”; “Eight Ways to Be More Inclusive in Your Zoom Teaching”; and more.

The National Endowment for the Arts has put together a list of ways to create an inclusive experience for virtual and digital events. “Resources to Help Ensure Accessibility of Your Virtual Events for People with Disabilities” includes information about captioning, sign language interpretation, virtual platform accessibility features, and more. 

 

Resources for Booksellers

The American Booksellers Association’s Coronavirus Resources for Booksellers includes immediate steps to take during the outbreak, ABA initiatives during the outbreak, and opportunities for financial assistance.

Book Industry Charitable Foundation (Binc) offers assistance “for the medical expenses of booksellers and to help booksellers in specific cases where store closure and/or loss of scheduled pay leads to the inability to pay essential household bills for an individual or family.”

The #SaveIndieBookstores campaign fund—organized by James Patterson, Reese’s Book Club, the ABA, and Binc—will administer financial assistance to independent bookstores, “the hearts and souls of main streets in cities and towns all across the United States.” Applications will be open from April 10 to April 27.

 

Resources for Librarians

The Help a Library Worker Out (HALO) Fund, organized by the nonprofit EveryLibrary Institute, will administer grants of up to $250 to library workers, librarians, and library staff who are “experiencing personal or household financial difficulties during this time of crisis.” Individuals who reside in the United States or U.S. territories and have lost work or experienced a significant wage reduction—or are part of a household in which a member has lost their job or seen their income reduced—are eligible. HALO grants can be used toward personal expenses such as food, rent or mortgage payments, cell phone and internet expenses, medicine, or household needs. Grants are made on a rolling basis.

The American Library Association’s (ALA) Pandemic Preparedness page includes news on how librarians are dealing with the pandemic, professional development and training resources, and lists of federal, state, and local resources. The ALA also hosts free webinars on topics such as considering copyright during a crisis, navigating the impact of COVID-19 on library technical services, using a library’s virtual presence to reach users with disabilities, and more.

 

Resources for Readers and Writers

The New York Public Library is offering expanded access to its online research databases. Research librarians and curators are also available for online consultations.

Audible has assembled a free collection of audiobooks, including literary classics and books for young readers. 

Many university presses and other not-for-profit publishers are collaborating with Project MUSE to offer free access to books and journals. 

Independent publisher Archipelago Books is unlocking access to thirty e-books through April 2.

As usual, the Academy of American Poets and the Poetry Foundation, among other organizations, offer free-to-access poetry archives.

The editors at Brightly, a subsidiary of Penguin Random House, have assembled “Reading Through It Together,” a set of educational resources and reading exercises for children and teens.

In partnership with Simon & Schuster, the Folger Shakespeare Library is sharing resources from its video and audio recordings archive—including footage of the Folger Theatre’s 2008 production of MacBeth—through July 1. 

The Sequential Artists Workshop (SAW) in Gainesville, Florida, is making five of its most popular online courses in comics and graphic storytelling available for free.

Calamari Press has made digital copies of all its book titles, as well as back issues of Sleepingfish literary magazine, available for free.

Writer Suleika Jaouad has organized a daily creativity project, the Isolation Journals, through which she sends daily journaling prompts via e-mail from some of her favorite writers, artists, and musicians, including Elizabeth Gilbert, Erin Khar, Esmé Weijun Wang, Georgia Clark, Hallie Goodman, Ilya Kaminsky, Jen Pastiloff, Jon Batiste, Jordan Kisner, Kiese Laymon, Lily Brooks-Dalton, Mari Andrew, Melissa Febos, Nora McInerney, Rachel Cargle, Ruthie Lindsey, and more. 

The Authors Guild posted their webinar “Coronavirus Relief Programs for Authors and Freelancers,” featuring Mary Rasenberger and Umair Kazi, the Authors Guild’s executive director and director of policy and advocacy, respectively, and Marcum LLP partner Robert Pesce. The trio covers “how authors and freelancers can benefit from the government relief programs for economic assistance during the coronavirus crisis.” They discuss qualification criteria for unemployment, loan terms, and other information about the process.  

As usual, Poets & Writers offers weekly writing inspiration through The Time Is Now, which features writing prompts in poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, and Writers Recommend, through which authors share the rituals, art, books, music, movies, and habits that get them writing. 

 

Other Resources

NYC Covid Care, a volunteer network of more than 2,500 mental health professionals, life coaches, spiritual care providers, organizers, and crisis line operators based in New York City, offers free support to those in crisis. All essential workers and their families based in the New York City Metro Area are eligible to participate. Applicants will be contacted by a volunteer professional via phone or video-conference for a confidential consultation.

COVID-19 Freelance Artists Resources is “an aggregated list of FREE resources, opportunities, and financial relief options available to artists of all disciplines.”

Creative Capital’s List of Arts Resources During the COVID-19 Outbreak

Kickstarter’s COVID-19 Coronavirus Artist Resources

New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) Emergency Grants Page

BOMB magazine’s COVID-19 Artist Resources and Closing the Distance: New Spaces for Community, an “ongoing list of online tools, workshops, and livestreams to keep you company and engaged in the time of COVID-19.”

National Endowment for the Arts COVID-19 Resources for Artists and Arts Organizations

Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts has compiled a national directory of organizations that offer legal services to artists, some of which are provided pro bono. Membership and processing fees vary by organization.

The Community of Literary Magazines and Presses COVID-19 Resources for Indie Publishers lists emergency grants and resources available to independent publishers and other literary stakeholders.

Just Shelter, a project started by Evicted author Matthew Desmond and Tessa Lowinske Desmond, offers a state-by-state directory of more than six hundred organizations that work to “preserve affordable housing, prevent eviction, and reduce family homelessness.” 

The Authors Guild posted its webinar “Coronavirus Relief Programs for Authors and Freelancers,” featuring Mary Rasenberger and Umair Kazi, the Authors Guild’s executive director and director of policy and advocacy, respectively, and Marcum LLP partner Robert Pesce. The trio covers “how authors and freelancers can benefit from the government relief programs for economic assistance during the coronavirus crisis.” They discuss qualification criteria for unemployment, loan terms, and other information about the process. 

The Whiting Foundation offers notes from financial guru and artist Amy Smith’s April webinars “Unemployment Compensation for Freelancers and Self-Employed Individuals,” “Applying for PPP and EIDL Relief as an Organization,” and “Applying for PPP and EIDL Relief as an Individual.”

 

Cancellations and Postponements: Retreats and Contests Affected by the Crisis

6.19.20
Online Only

As event organizers across the literary community adapt and change plans to help keep us all well, we are compiling a list of canceled and postponed conferences, residencies, and award deadlines. (If you know about a cancellation or award not on this list, please send an e-mail to editor@pw.org.) Be sure to check back for updates.

 

Cancelled or Postponed Conferences and Festivals

The Bay Area Book Festival, originally planned for May 2 to May 3, 2020, has been rescheduled for May 1 to May 2, 2021. Beginning May 1, 2020, the festival will also offer virtual programming as the Bay Area Book Festival Unbound, featuring live and recorded events held through the festival’s YouTube channel.  Visit the festival’s website for additional information on both the rescheduled festival and this year’s virtual programming.

The Conversations & Connections conference, sponsored by Barrelhouse magazine and originally planned for April 18, 2020, has been canceled. In response to the cancellation, Barrelhouse staff have organized the Spring 2020 Read-In and Write-In, featuring an online book group and an online workshop with guest lectures from writers and editors as well as generative writing “sprint” sessions. Visit the Barrelhouse website for information on these online events, and visit the conference’s website for additional information on the conference cancellation.

The Granta & Wesleyan Writers Conference, originally planned for June 24 to June 28, 2020, has been rescheduled for June 23 to June 27, 2021. Visit the conference’s website for additional information.

The Iceland Writers Retreat, originally planned for April 29 to May 3, 2020, has been rescheduled for October 14 to October 18, 2020. Visit the conference’s website for addtional information.

The Indiana University Writers’ Conference, originally planned for May 30 to June 3, 2020, has been canceled. The conference will be held again in 2021. Visit the conference’s website for additional information.

The Iowa Summer Writing Festival, originially planned for June and July 2020, has been canceled. Visit the festival’s website for additional information, and visit its Facebook page for writing prompts from festival instructors in coming weeks. 

The Jackson Hole Writers Conference, originally planned for June 2020, has been canceled. In response to the cancellation, starting in late April 2020, select components of the originally scheduled programming will be offered online, including workshops, panels, and manuscript critiques. Visit the conference’s website for additional information on the cancellation and on alternative online programming.

The Los Angeles Festival of Books, originally planned for April 18 to April 19, 2020, has been rescheduled for October 3 to October 4, 2020. Visit the festival’s website for additional information.

The Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing Summer Writers’ Conference, originally planned for June 7 to June 13, 2020, and from June 14 to June 20, 2020, has been rescheduled for June 6 to June 12, 2021, and from June 13 to June 19, 2021. Visit the conference’s website for additional information.

The Nantucket Book Festival, originally planned for June 18 to June 21, 2020, has been canceled as an in-person event in downtown Nantucket, Massachusetts. A virtual festival featuring guest writers will be offered instead. A festival celebrating local writers will also be planned for later in the year. Visit the festival’s website for additional infomation on the cancellation as well as the virtual conference and local writers’ festival.

The North Carolina Writers’ Network Spring Conference, originally planned for April 18, 2020, has been canceled. In response to the cancellation, the North Carolina Writers’ Network will offer the North Carolina Writers’ Network Cabin Fever Conference from April 16 to April 18, 2020, a virtual conference featuring “630 minutes of high-quality, socially-distant instruction in the craft and business of writing.” Visit the organization’s website for additional information on the cancellation as well as the virtual conference. 

The NYC Writer’s Hotel Poetry Weekend, originally planned for May 21 to May 25, 2020, has been rescheduled for October 22 to October 26, 2020. Visit the conference’s website for additional information.

The NYC Writer’s Hotel All-Fiction Writers Conference, originally planned for June 3 to June 9, 2020, has been rescheduled for October 14 to October 18, 2020. Visit the conference’s website for additional information.

The Orion Enviromental Writers’ Workshop, originally planned for June 21 to June 26, 2020, has been canceled. The workshop will be offered instead in a reimagined, “more intimate” format from October 25 to October 30, 2020. Visit the workshop’s website for additional information.

The Poetry at Round Top festival, originally planned for April 24 to April 26, 2020, has been canceled. The festival will be held again from April 16 to April 18, 2021. Visit the festival’s website for additional information.

The Sarah Lawrence College Publish and Promote Your Book Conference, originally planned for June 13, 2020, has been postponed. Visit the conference’s website for additional information, including updates on rescheduling.

The Sewanee Writers’ Conference, originally planned for July 21 to August 2, 2020, has been canceled. Visit the conference’s website for additional information.

The Split This Rock Poetry Festival, originally planned for March 26 to March 28, 2020, has been canceled. In response to the cancellation, the festival will be offering online programming including a virtual bookfair, readings, and free workshops. Visit the festival’s website for additional information, including virtual event details.

The 50th anniversary Squaw Valley Writers Workshops, originally planned for July 6 to July 13, 2020, have been postponed to July 5 to July 12, 2021. The 2020 summer workshops in fiction, nonfiction, and memoir have been canceled; the 2020 summer workshop in poetry will be offered online as the “Virtual Valley” from June 20 to June 27, 2020. Visit the conference’s website for additional information.

The Tin House Summer Workshop, originally planned for July 12 to July 19, 2020, as an in-person event on the Reed College campus in Portland, Oregon, has been reimagined as a virtual workshop. The virtual program in short fiction and novel writing will be held from July 12 to July 18, 2020. The virtual program in poetry, nonfiction, and the graphic novel will be held from July 19 to July 26, 2020. Visit the workshop’s website for additional information.

The Wordplay festival, originally planned for May 9, 2020, as an in-person event at the Loft Literary Center and adjacent spaces in Minneapolis, has been reimagined as a virtual festival. The virtual festival will be offered from April 7, 2020, to May 9, 2020, and will feature events with more than 100 authors. This programming is offered in conjuction with the Boston Book Festival, Bronx Book Festival, Wisconsin Book Festival, Charleston to Charleston Literary Festival, and other festivals. Visit the festival’s website for additional information.

The Wyoming Writers Conference, originally planned for June 5 to June 7, 2020, has been canceled. Visit the conference’s website for additional information.

 

Canceled or Postponed Contest Deadlines

The deadline for the 2020 Crook’s Corner Book Prize, sponsored by the Crook’s Corner Book Prize Foundation, has been extended. The new deadline is June 1, 2020. Visit the foundation’s website for additional information.

The deadline for the 2021 Griffin Poetry Prize has been extended for books published between January 1 and June 30. Previously, books published during the first half of the year were required to be submitted by a deadline of June 30, 2020; this deadline has been waived. The deadline for all submissions is now December 31, 2020. Visit the competition’s website for additional information.

The deadline for the 2020 Lorian Hemingway Short Story Competition has been extended. The new deadline is September 1, 2020. Visit the competition’s website for additional information.

The deadline for the 2020 Montreal International Poetry Prize, sponsored by McGill University, has been extended. The new deadline is June 1, 2020. Visit the competition’s website for additional information.

The deadline for the 2020 PEN/Jean Stein Grant for Literary Oral History, sponsored by PEN America, has been extended. Thew new deadline is August 1, 2020. Visit PEN America’s website for additional information.

The 2020 Troubadour International Poetry Prize, sponsored by Coffee-House Poetry, has been rescheduled. The prize, originally scheduled this year as a spring contest, has been rescheduled with a deadline of September 28, 2020; visit the Coffee-House Poetry website for additional information.

 

Resources for Writers in the Time of Coronavirus
Authors Reimagine Live Events During the Coronavirus Pandemic

Amid Pandemic, Barnes & Noble Pauses to Improve Its Stores

by

Michael Bourne

3.30.20
Online Only

Can a pandemic that shutters nearly two-thirds of a nationwide bookstore chain’s locations have a silver lining? If that bookstore chain is Barnes & Noble, quite possibly it could.

The chain, which was bought out last year by New York–based hedge fund Elliot Management, was in the process of overhauling its stores before the coronavirus hit this spring, says CEO James Daunt. Now, with roughly 400 of the chain’s 627 stores temporarily closed to help slow the spread of the pandemic, that work can continue in relative peace.

“Our stores are pretty terrible, we know that,” Daunt says. “We don’t shy away from that fact and certainly I don’t shy away from articulating that fact. To make them better bookstores, we really have to do a lot of work and some of that is physical work, moving the interiors around and changing the layout and the presentation of the stores, making them more open, easier to navigate, and frankly just better looking bookstores. And that, ironically, is a lot easier to do when you don’t have any customers in the way.”

Not that Daunt looks upon the wave of temporary closures at Barnes & Noble as good news. He has had to lay off all employees with less than six months seniority and furlough many others, actions he calls “traumatic” but necessary to trim costs while the stores are closed to the public.

“It’s desperately difficult. None of us have any idea how long this will go on for. If President Trump is correct and we’re back in business by Easter, then really, we don’t have a particular problem. It’s a nasty shock, but it’s not a problem, and very few people, if any, will ultimately lose their jobs. If it extends further, then evidently they will,” he says. (Trump has since extended social-distancing guidelines through April 30.) “If you have no money coming in, then your liabilities become a significant issue and we have to cut costs to ensure the survival of the business, and that will include unfortunately our staff as well as all the other discretionary expenditures that we have available to cut back on.”

But Daunt, who also runs the bookstore chain Waterstones as well as his own smaller independent chain, Daunt Books, in the U.K., has retained a core team of experienced booksellers at many shuttered Barnes & Noble locations and plans to use the time provided by the enforced closures to spruce up the stores and improve the selection of books on the shelves.

“The backlist at Barnes & Noble has really deteriorated over the last decade and the cumulative impact is that we have pretty shockingly poorly stocked stores,” he says. “Before this crisis, we had already embarked on a process of using the holiday sales to empty them out to a degree just to give us space, and what we were intending to do with that liberation of space is then pile back in the backlist that was missing and start to re-curate the stores.”

This work has been seen by book-industry observers as desperately overdue for Barnes & Noble, which had to close 150 stores in the decade leading up to the buyout last summer in the face of competition from Amazon and newly resurgent independent bookstores. The enormous selection of books at its larger stores, which helped spur the chain’s growth in the 1980s and 1990s, had become a liability in an era when customers can buy books from a warehouse by clicking a few buttons on their smartphones.

Daunt, who oversaw a similar overhaul at Waterstones over the past decade, strenuously denies the make-over at Barnes & Noble will entail abandoning a large number of under-performing locations. 

“If I could get a dollar for every time I was told I would close a hundred stores I would be a very rich man, but in fact I have a huge motivation to keep as many bookstores open as possible,” he says. “I believe in the profession, I believe in the vocation, I believe in the purpose and worth of bookstores within communities. That said, there is a clear case for closing a reasonably large number of stores because they’re just too big or too old, too this, too that, but we’d only do that if we could relocate. What we’ve done at Waterstones is actually close a very substantial number of stores but open up a larger number of stores. We haven’t deserted any locations. We’ve just moved.”

Over time, Daunt hopes the chain can find new locations that will better reflect the market for books in a given area. “So often it’s driven by the property—what’s the right size of store for a particular location, and certainly there are a number of Barnes & Noble stores which are either in the wrong place and they should be down the freeway or across the mall or in a slightly better location, or they’re just too big,” he says. “We’ve got a 25,000-square-foot store when a 20,000-square-foot store would be a much better size to have.”

While the widespread closures will eat into Barnes & Noble’s revenues in the short run, Daunt says the chain’s deep-pocketed ownership group will help it weather the crisis. It helps, he says, that business was unusually brisk at many of the chain’s locations before the shutdowns and that sales via the company’s website are currently running three or four times higher than normal.

“Our financing is not as bleak as perhaps our financial situation might have led one to think,” he says. “We just have to be pragmatic and sensible and we need an owner who’s prepared to let us continue to invest.”

Michael Bourne is a contributing editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.

James Daunt was named Barnes & Noble’s CEO in August 2019.

A Matter of Survival for Independent Bookstores

The Future of Barnes & Noble

by

Michael Bourne

September/October 2019
8.14.19
In Print and Online

Can James Daunt save Barnes & Noble? This is the question on the minds of publishing insiders in the wake of news earlier this summer that a hedge fund had bought Barnes & Noble for $683 million and installed Daunt, who oversaw the successful turnaround of the British book chain Waterstones, as the new CEO of the largest surviving bookstore chain in the United States.

Daunt will certainly have his work cut out for him. Facing withering competition from the online retailer Amazon as well as from newly resurgent independent bookstores, Barnes & Noble has shuttered 150 stores over the past decade—at its peak, in 2008, the chain operated 726 stores nationwide—and seen its stock price plummet from $30 a share in 2006 to just $4 a share before it was bought in June by New York City–based Elliott Management.

But Madeline McIntosh, CEO of Penguin Random House in the United States, says she is heartened that the chain will now be helmed by Daunt, a former JP Morgan banker who founded Daunt Books, a small British bookstore chain, before taking over at Waterstones in 2011. “He was an independent bookseller in the U.K. and then became the head of Waterstones, and I think that having that depth of experience should give us all a sense of optimism,” McIntosh says.

Once pilloried for crowding out quirky independent bookstores with its mall-based superstores, Barnes & Noble is now viewed by writers and publishing industry experts as a bulwark against Amazon, the online behemoth that now claims more than half of all sales of books in the United States and has opened nearly twenty brick-and-mortar stores in the past four years. The survival of Barnes & Noble is doubly important to authors of literary novels and children’s books, whose success depends largely on the kind of leisurely browsing that is hard to do on a screen.

Online platforms like Amazon, where sales are largely driven by web searches and by algorithms designed to direct customers to books similar to ones they’ve already bought, can be hostile to debut fiction or creative nonfiction, which often isn’t in any obvious way similar to books a reader has already purchased. 

Novelist and journalist Douglas Preston, president of the Authors Guild, likens Amazon’s curation to “a kind of censorship of the market” that threatens to drown out unpopular opinions and underrepresented voices. “You walk into a physical bookstore, unlike Amazon, and you see all these books together, some of which you’re going to agree with and some you’re not,” Preston says. “With Amazon, they have algorithms. They’ll only show you the books they think you want to see, and that’s a serious problem because we’re becoming balkanized in our thinking. When you go into a bookstore, there’s no balkanization. All the books are right there.” 

Independent bookstores, which have thrived in recent years by tailoring their book selection to their local areas, emphasizing a personalized approach to curation, as well as adding cafés and wine bars and hosting readings and book talks, have picked up some of the slack created by the closure of Barnes & Noble locations and the 2011 bankruptcy of its onetime rival Borders. The American Booksellers Association now claims 1,887 members, who run 2,524 stores, up 53 percent from the 1,651 stores ABA members owned ten years ago, according to figures compiled in May of this year.

At Waterstones, Daunt seemed to draw on his experience as an independent bookseller, shuttering underperforming locations and giving store managers the power to order books that might not appeal to customers at other locations. In interviews earlier this summer, Daunt suggested he may try a similar approach at Barnes & Noble. “The main thing is that there isn’t a template; there’s not some magic ingredient,” he told the New York Times. “The Birmingham, Alabama, bookshop, I imagine, will be very different from the one in downtown Boston. They don’t need to be told how to sell the exact same things in the exact same way.” (Barnes & Noble directed press inquiries to Elliott Management, which did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)

But such a strategy can take the chain only so far, industry experts warn. Indie booksellers are local entrepreneurs who in many cases are choosing a pleasant working life among books over a potentially more lucrative career in another field, notes Mike Shatzkin, coauthor of The Book Business: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press, 2019). Barnes & Noble, on the other hand, is a national corporation with more than six hundred retail locations, most of them large and built for a mass audience. “That’s not going to change because they made the store look sprucier or because they changed the selection of books somewhat,” Shatzkin says.

Barnes & Noble’s core problem, Shatzkin says, is that its business model—drawing customers by having more books at better prices than smaller shops could possibly manage—has been outmoded by the e-tailing revolution, which allows shoppers to carry the world’s largest mall in their hip pocket. “I think the large store is a dinosaur,” he says. “It was built for another paradigm. It was built for, ‘I want to find what I need and I don’t want to go six places looking for it,’ which is not something anyone under thirty relates to.”

Still, authors and publishing houses alike have good reason to hope Daunt can make a nationwide bookstore chain work in an online shopping era. Barnes & Noble is a key player in the publishing ecosystem, industry experts say, because it has an efficient supply chain and sells books in parts of the country where indies may not thrive. At the same time, because its stores are brick-and-mortar, it encourages serendipitous purchases that help publishers break out new authors.

“We all want Barnes & Noble to continue and to be a thriving bookseller,” says McIntosh, the CEO of Penguin Random House in the United States. “When any location closes, whether it’s a single store or a set of stores, you lose a portion of sales. There’s no way to say exactly how many sales are lost, so our goal is to ensure there is a diversity of retail options and physical locations where a consumer could choose to go.” 

 

Michael Bourne is a contributing editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.

Inside Indie Bookstores: The Complete Series

by

Jeremiah Chamberlin

4.28.17
Online Only

Inside Indie Bookstores, a series of interviews with the entrepreneurs who represent the last link in the chain that connects writers with their intended audience, ran in all six issues of 2010, celebrating the passion, ingenuity, determination, creativity, and resourcefulness of the entrepeneurs who run the institutions that mean so much to the literary community. Below we revisit the unique personalities, the expert perspectives, and that intoxicating new- and used-book atmosphere of Inside Indie Bookstores.

 

Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi
by Jeremiah Chamberlin
1.01.10
In the inaugural installment of Inside Indie Bookstores, a new series of interviews with independent booksellers across the country, contributor Jeremiah Chamberlin talks with Richard Howorth about his initial vision for Square Books, how a bookstore can stay relevant in the twenty-first century, and the future of independent bookselling.

Powell’s Books in Portland, Oregon
by Jeremiah Chamberlin
3.01.10
In the second installment of our series Inside Indie Bookstores, Jeremiah Chamberlin travels to Portland, Oregon, to talk with Michael Powell, owner of Powell’s Books. The “City of Books,” as the four-story flagship store on West Burnside is known, occupies an entire city block, and carries more than one million books. The sixty-eight-thousand-square-foot space is divided into nine color-coded rooms, which together house more than 3,500 sections. From the moment you walk in, it feels as if you could find anything there.

Women & Children First in Chicago

by Jeremiah Chamberlin
5.01.10
In the third installment of our series Inside Indie Bookstores, Jeremiah Chamberlin travels to Chicago to talk with Linda Bubon and Ann Christophersen, co-owners of Women & Children First, which was conceived as a feminist bookstore three decades ago and has grown into a neighborhood shop popular with families and young professionals. Still, books related to women and women’s issues—whether health, politics, gender and sexuality, literature, criticism, childrearing, or biography—are clearly the store’s focus. 

Boswell Book Company in Milwaukee
by Jeremiah Chamberlin
7.01.10
In the fourth installment of our series Inside Indie Bookstores, Jeremiah Chamberlin travels to Milwaukee to talk with Daniel Goldin, owner of Boswell Book Company, which is named after James Boswell, the eighteenth-century British biographer, and is located on Downer Avenue in a diverse area of the city—close to both the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee and Lake Michigan. 

Tattered Cover Book Store in Denver
by Jeremiah Chamberlin
9.01.10
In the fifth installment of our series Inside Indie Bookstores, contributor Jeremiah Chamberlin travels to Denver to speak with Joyce Meskis, owner of Tattered Cover Book Store, which as become as much a destination for the local community as it has for writers. From the moment you walk in, you feel a sense of ease and peacefulness. The guiding aesthetic is a wonderful mix of the old (worn hardwood floors downstairs, exposed rafters and hand-hewn support beams) and the new (forest green carpet upstairs, a selection of organic and local options at the café). The place feels vital, vigorous.

McNally Jackson Books in New York City
by Jeremiah Chamberlin
11.01.10
In the sixth installment of our series Inside Indie Bookstores, contributor Jeremiah Chamberlin travels to New York City to speak with Sarah McNally, owner of McNally Jackson Books, located in a vibrant area of lower Manhattan—though technically in NoLita (North of Little Italy), it’s also on the eastern fringe of SoHo (South of Houston)—that is filled with boutiques, hip coffee shops, and trendy restaurants.

How to Make a Life, Maybe Even a Living

by

Jeremiah Chamberlin

January/February 2014
1.1.14
In Print and Online

In the spring of 2009, Michael Gustafson’s cousin e-mailed him to say she was granting him permission to date her best friend, Hilary Lowe. He was grateful, but there was one problem: He had never heard of Lowe, let alone met her. “I had no idea who this person was, but I e-mailed her and said, ‘I’ve been given permission to date you,’” Gustafson recalls.

“That was your opening line?” I ask. It’s February 2013, and Gustafson, Lowe, and I are sitting in a café in downtown Ann Arbor, Michigan, just up the block from the gutted storefront that the couple is trying to turn into a new community-minded independent venture: Literati Bookstore.

“Pretty much,” Lowe replies. Gustafson smiles, a bit bashful behind his glasses. She continues: “It was weird and goofy. What was I going to say? I loved it!”

At the time, Gustafson was living with his parents in Michigan, just outside Grand Rapids, having decided to leave Los Angeles, where he’d worked as an assistant on several television programs after finishing a film degree at Northwestern. But a few seasons in the business made him realize that his future wasn’t in Hollywood. Lowe, meanwhile, was living in New York City, working as a sales rep for Simon & Schuster. After their initial contact they began corresponding by e-mail, and within a few weeks they were sending each other books.

“That was our way of courting,” Lowe says. “We would just send each other books. I had never read Harry Potter, and so he sent me Harry Potter. And my favorite book was Too Loud a Solitude. It’s by Bohumil Hrabal—a book about loving books.” Six weeks passed before they ever spoke on the phone, while the words of authors—from Kittredge to Camus—passed back and forth between them.

“I fell in love with the way we communicated before I even knew what you looked like,” Gustafson says, the conversation shifting away from me and settling between the two of them.

“And it was never small talk,” Lowe tells him. “It was always just weird, nerd rants to each other.” She laughs. It’s a laugh that makes Gustafson smile again.

Sitting in a cozy café, a swirl of snow outside the 
frost-glazed windows and this young couple across the table from me, I suddenly feel as though I’ve stumbled into a Nora Ephron movie. The casting and plot are spot-on: Attractive, intellectual twentysomethings—of the earnest, nonhipster variety—fall for each other via an epistolary romance. Cue the film montage: Gustafson arrives in Manhattan a few months later, he and Lowe spend a romantic fall dating in New York City, and the following year they move in together. In November 2011 they get engaged (close-up of the ring), in July 2012 they move to Ann Arbor with the sole purpose of opening a bookstore together (long shot of a U-Haul on the highway heading west), and in January 2013 they sign a lease and begin construction (dial up the sounds of saws and hammers).

There’s also plenty of dramatic tension to this tale. Remember that Ann Arbor is the birthplace of Borders, which brothers Tom and Louis Borders opened in 1971, while students at the University of Michigan. In 2011, when the company went bankrupt, it closed hundreds of stores, including the forty-thousand-square-foot flagship in Ann Arbor. The city was also home to iconic independent bookstore Shaman Drum—the Drum, as it’s known to the locals—which closed in the summer of 2009 after nearly thirty years in business. Six years earlier, a small plaque had been erected by the membership of the State Street Area Improvement Project to honor the Drum’s owner, Karl Pohrt, stating with simple thanks: “He kept our eyes on the prize….” The plaque still remains, a bittersweet reminder that Pohrt was able to help revitalize this downtown, but unable to weather the increasingly harsh climate of bookselling, which over the course of the past two decades has swept away nearly 75 percent of the seven thousand independent bookstores that once existed nationwide—more than a thousand of which closed between 2000 and 2007. In the years since, hundreds more have gone out of business, including the Drum.

Perhaps the economic tide of the country as a whole has turned. Or perhaps, more likely, Lowe and Gustafson have chosen exactly the right city at exactly the right time with exactly the right sort of store to succeed. As of Literati’s six-month anniversary, they seem to be making a go of it. But for the couple, whose initial meeting and blossoming relationship seemed somehow preordained, the success of their store up to this point has been no accident. The owners of Literati Bookstore are filled not only with exuberant optimism and staunch idealism, but also with practical determination. And most important, they have a business model to back up each step of the process.

Last February, however, Lowe and Gustafson’s vision of the bookstore was still forming, and the success of Literati Bookstore, much less its opening, was far from certain. After finishing our coffee, we hike through the snow to check out the progress on the renovation of the twenty-six-hundred-square-foot storefront at 124 East Washington Street—most recently the 2010 campaign offices for Republican Governor Rick Snyder—a space split equally between two floors: street-level and basement. Prior to Gustafson and Lowe’s negotiating their lease, the building stood empty for several years. (When they first showed it to me, in mid-January 2013, it was a wreck—particularly the basement, which was to account for half their floor space. Torn-up carpeting lay heaped in piles of debris, an exposed gas meter poked out of the fieldstone wall by the stairwell, and the uneven concrete floor looked like something you’d find in an old barn. No matter how long I listened to the couple describe their vision for this space, when I looked around all I saw was a basement.)

When we arrive at the store a month after that first visit, kicking the snow off our boots, the changes are dramatic. The basement joists are painted a fresh matte black, recessed lighting is in place along with new ductwork, and installation has begun on the first bookcases of the fifty such units they salvaged from the downtown Borders. The look is urban and chic, and I realize that these two not only have a precise dream for their store, but also a healthy dose of the midwestern work ethic needed to make it happen.  

Of course, not everything is going according to plan. The wood floors upstairs have had to be torn out and are being replaced. Not only does this represent a significant cost that Gustafson and Lowe haven’t budgeted, but it’s also meant they’re having to push back their early-March opening. And with each delay, the complex calculus of how long they can stretch their seed money until the first book sales begin to provide even a modest cash flow is enough to make the most seasoned businessperson a bit fidgety. Inventory alone will account for more than a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars of their start-up costs—which they are paying for with a significant loan from Ann Arbor State Bank plus smaller, but no less significant, loans from family and friends—and that’s a modest number of books for a store this size (a number they will try to nearly double over the summer as they begin to sell and are able to increase their stock), to say nothing of the overall costs associated with building out the store.

The couple is also aware of the fact that in addition to trying to make a go of it in a town where neither Borders nor Shaman Drum was able to succeed, it’s not as though it’s an open market. Ann Arbor is home to specialty bookshops like Common Language Bookstore, Aunt Agatha’s Mystery Bookshop, Vault of Midnight, Bookbound, and Crazy Wisdom Bookstore and Tea Room; used-book stores like Dawn Treader, West Side Book Shop, and Motte & Bailey Booksellers; and even a general indie bookstore, Nicola’s Books, on the west side of town. Plus, there’s a Barnes & Noble. Each of these stores has loyal customers. So despite months of outreach to the local community, there’s no guarantee that, as a general (albeit well-curated) bookshop, their enterprise will see customers materialize when the doors open.

What, then, does Literati hope to be known for? How will it distinguish itself from these other places of business? “The goal is that every book in our store is carefully selected,” Gustafson says. “And that it would be a great book for whatever it is: a great kids’ tale, or a great biography, whatever. I often ask Hilary, ‘Do you want to read this?’ And if she says no, I’ll say, ‘Well, why are we ordering it then?’”

“Of course it’s not just my taste,” Lowe clarifies. “It’s balancing what’s selling and what I think the community would want with what I like. Those are the three things I base my decisions on. I’ve tried to go through every single title that we’re going to have.” When I ask how many titles they’ve ordered so far, Lowe estimates seven or eight thousand. It’s still only February.

Over the next month and a half I visit periodically to chat about progress and to take pictures of some of the milestones: the day the new floors are put in, the day the bookcases arrive upstairs, even the night Lowe and Gustafson paint the black-and-white checkerboard pattern on the floor, the two of them, in stocking feet, stepping carefully between each square they’ve mapped using blue painter’s tape, as they cover the entire grid, foot by square foot. When I drop in I typically find them in the basement: Lowe working on a laptop, placing orders, in what will one day be a sitting area; Gustafson in their small, six-by-eight-foot office in the back corner, working on the website or dealing with other business issues, such as the botched order of fifteen thousand book-marks that need to be returned. Or their proposal for an exterior sign for the storefront that was denied by Ann Arbor’s Historic District Commission, sending them back to the drawing board. But worst of all, they are informed by the city that their entire street will be torn up and closed for sewer and utility repairs during the month of June and part of July.

Despite these setbacks, by mid-March they’re excited about their progress—staffing, in particular. More than one hundred fifty people applied to work at the store, and they’ve brought in a range of talents and experience: several longtime Borders employees, one of whom, Jeanne Joesten, worked for the company for nearly twenty-five years; the former manager of Shaman Drum; two recent grads from the University of Michigan’s MFA program; and the executive director of the Great Lakes Independent Booksellers Association, who plans to work part-time so as to stay in touch with what’s happening day-to-day in independent stores.

“Every employee is doing something extra,” Lowe says—from finding used furniture at nearby Treasure Mart, to helping write store policies and procedures addressing issues such as shoplifting.

“Apparently you can’t tackle [people] until they get out of the store,” Gustafson says.

“You can’t even accuse them!” Lowe adds. “That was news to us.”

On March 26 Literati passes the city inspection, and a few days later, on March 30, the store debuts with a private party for members of the literary community. Despite the long hours, on this night Gustafson and Lowe both glow. She wears a black-and-white checked sleeveless dress with a black, bolero-style shrug, and her hair up in a bun. He wears a blue oxford. And the two never stop smiling. The store, too, has the soft, yellowed warmth that you imagine a bookstore having. Like burnished oak. Like varnished maple.

The vibe is equally homey. Writers and members of the university community, as well as local business owners and supporters, arrive for their first glimpse of the new bookstore. There is food and wine and good spirits. There are bright books filling the shelves. And for the first time, the community that Gustafson and Lowe have spent so much time talking with me about—a community of book lovers and readers—is no longer an abstract concept. It is here. I’m not sure what might be going through people’s minds, but all I can envision is the fact that a little over two months ago this space was vacant, and in the ensuing weeks it has been utterly transformed.

The following day is Easter, which comes early this year, as does the unexpected spring weather. It was forecast to be cool and rainy, but instead the day dawns feeling more like May. That evening I drop by Literati to check on preparations for next week’s opening, and when I arrive I encounter another surprise: a store full of people. Gustafson and Lowe have decided at the last minute to have a “soft opening” today. I find them in the downstairs office, ordering more books, and they are positively giddy. I ask what prompted this decision. “At noon we opened a bottle of Dom Pérignon that was dropped off last night,” Gustafson tells me, “and we had a toast with the employees who were here. Then we just decided to flip the sign to Open to see what would happen. We figured we could get some practice swiping a credit card or two. But in a minute and a half there were three people in here. In just ninety seconds! It’s been a steady stream of people since.”

“I’m just so happy we’re open and talking to people,” Lowe tells me.

“Today was absolutely incredible,” Gustafson says.

“Making recommendations, talking about books,” Lowe adds. “That’s why I wanted to do this.” I haven’t seen the two so energized since January, when they first showed me around the empty space and were explaining the vision of the store. The last few months have been hard ones for them, filled with endless financial calculations and guesses. They’ve been living on energy bars and take-out, leaving the store most nights after midnight. But here, finally, their business is a reality.

Gustafson says, “My favorite thing that happened today? Two college girls walked in. One of them said, ‘This is the best day.’ She didn’t say ‘of the week,’ or ‘of the year.’ She just said, ‘This is the best day.’ I loved that.”

It didn’t hurt that within the first six hours of being open, without any advertising whatsoever, the store sold more than two hundred books, bringing in over thirty-four hundred dollars in sales. In the middle of it all they ran out of receipt paper and Gustafson had to drive to OfficeMax.

A little more than a week later, however, Literati would come close to nearly losing the entirety of its first week’s sales—more than twenty thousand dollars—an amount far exceeding the figures for a normal week, as it includes the revenue from the grand opening and the store’s inaugural event with poet Keith Taylor, a reading that drew more than a hundred people. Such a loss would have almost certainly forced it to close.

Nine days after opening for business the store’s Internet went down. Thinking the router simply needed to be reset, Gustafson did so. But in the process he knocked out both the cash registers, causing the credit card processing machines to malfunction. Worried they might have lost that morning’s sales in the process, Gustafson called their credit card authorization company to double-check that the previous day’s transactions had cleared and were successfully deposited. What he learned was that there had been no deposits the previous night; in fact, there hadn’t been a single deposit since the store had opened.

“We’re engaged. So this isn’t just the business, it’s our relationship—and Hilary is furious,” Gustafson recalls.

“Meanwhile,” Lowe says, “customers are coming in, and regulars are coming down to chat.” They both laugh about trying to keep up a good front, about Lowe sobbing in the bathroom at one point, about Gustafson envisioning them bankrupt and on the street. It’s clear just how terrifying this moment must have been after nearly a year of solid work, how fragile the entire endeavor must have suddenly felt. 

It all turned out to be, of course, a simple mistake. The credit card company discovered that Literati had failed to complete the protocol necessary to send the transactions in for processing at the end of each night. “The directions were at the bottom of an ALL-CAPS e-mail that had no punctuation, something you could totally miss,” Gustafson explains. And the instructions had come in an account-set-up 
e-mail they’d received from the company nearly two months before they’d even opened.

But despite the ease with which the problem was solved, it was nearly an irrevocable loss. The credit card processing company explained that any transactions not submitted within ten days are void. They were on Day Nine.

“If you don’t batch out within ten days…” Gustafson begins.

“You lose everything,” Lowe finishes.

There are other missteps and disappointments throughout the summer—the books that don’t arrive for an author event, forcing Gustafson to drive to Barnes & Noble to pick up copies; the occasional angry customer who writes on Literati’s Facebook page that the store is “snooty”; the unexpected bust of football Saturdays—yet when we sit down in mid-October for our final talk, just after the six-month anniversary of the store’s opening, things are going pretty well. Although Lowe admits to being conservative with the business plan, sales have exceeded expectations. Both are realistic in acknowledging that some of this might have to do with the novelty of the store, that the goodwill from the community might not last. But already they have a solid community of regulars whose tastes in reading and whose personalities they’ve begun to get to know. And publishers are starting to reach out to them about events with notable authors.

They’re also aware that this is a particular cultural moment they’ve found themselves in. The independent bookstore dovetails nicely with the craft movement currently afoot in cities like Ann Arbor. It’s not simply because books are crafted, physical objects, but because in addition to a hand-selected inventory, quite literally everything in Literati has been touched by human hands. The hand-lettered window signs were drawn by a local artist, the chalkboard’s painted section headings were done by Gustafson’s mother, the shopping bags bearing the Literati logo were hand-stamped by employees, and the secondhand tables were picked up at thrift stores by the staff.

Perhaps nothing exemplifies this cultural moment more than the manual typewriter in the sitting area in the basement. Each morning Gustafson adds paper to it, and throughout the day people come down to type. Some come to the store to type. They leave love notes, dirty jokes, and the occasional anonymous plea for help. They leave poems and to-do lists and affirmations. One woman even proposed to her partner using it. Here, again, it’s about something tangible—something we can feel with our hands. And though the notes are seemingly ephemera, Gustafson reads them all and saves many, posting them on their basement wall—a record of the store’s days.

So the practice of curation at Literati is about more than just picking books. It’s about handcrafting an experience, from selecting the people who work for you and who bring their personalities and tastes to the store to the look and feel of the place. When I speak with Lori Tucker-Sullivan, the executive director of the Independent Booksellers Consortium, about why Literati is succeeding, she points to two factors: “First, they came into the market not only willing to work in the midst of other booksellers in town, but also actually reaching out to them and structuring their business in light of what those already established bookstores do well. Second, Hilary and Mike have a remarkable understanding of the Ann Arbor market, and it is well reflected in their inventory and events, which are a near-perfect mix of literary, scholarly, and popular titles. When bookstore owners are that smart it shows, and they tend to be successful. They also have a very good understanding of what they can be—and online cannot—in terms of the shopping experience, and they’ve done a wonderful job of developing that sense of discovery and adventure in a small space.”

In a sense, Literati is the opposite of Amazon: Lowe and Gustafson don’t carry everything, intentionally; their selectivity is a service. By carefully curating their selection, they save their customers the toil of having to wade upstream through an endless torrent of book marketing and hyperbole. After all, can every novel really be a tour de force? The recommendations here are genuine as well; there’s no algorithm that can determine what book you might like. Instead, each book appears on the shelf because someone believes it’s worth reading.

When I ask Lowe and Gustafson what additional advice they have for someone thinking about opening a bookstore, their suggestions range from the practical (make sure you have enough money; the cheapest option is not always the best; be tough on lease negotiations) to the more esoteric (maximize the talent of your employees; invest in what will pay off for the life of your business; trust your gut).

“Anybody who tries to open a business is going to be called a fool,” Lowe says, “no matter the endeavor. Yeah, a bookstore is risky. But if you’ve done your homework, you should feel comfortable with what you’re doing.”

Gustafson elaborates on Lowe’s extensive research into the bookselling market, the months she volunteered at Greenlight Bookstore in Brooklyn, New York, in exchange for shadowing the owners, her extensive business plan, and her unwavering vision for the store. There’s pride in his voice, and I watch her watching him as he tries to convey the scope of this to me. They’ve been married three months. The two days they took for their honeymoon in June were the first consecutive days away from the business since beginning this process a year ago.

Then, after a pause, Gustafson says, “We were talking recently about whether we would do this again, knowing—”

“God, no!” Lowe interrupts. “You couldn’t pay me enough.”

Both of them are roaring with laughter now.

“Neither of us would ever go through this again,” Gustafson says.

“Nope,” Lowe says. “I’d work as a waitress.”

“The nerves, the anxiety…we really did feel like we had one shot. We still do feel like we have just one shot. And we know we’re not out of the woods yet.”

But they both admit they’re happy. “We’re not ever going to have a lot of money,” Lowe says. “But that’s fine. I love our regulars. Just having conversations with them brightens my day. I wouldn’t have had these sorts of interactions with people sitting at my desk at Simon & Schuster.”

On my way out, I linger for a bit, browsing the fiction section. Two employees have finished their shift and are headed out. I watch Lowe come around the side of the cash register to hug each of them, thanking them for their work that day. It seems obvious that the employees are just as thankful to be there, to have found their bookstore.

Jeremiah Chamberlin teaches at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he is the assistant director of the English Department Writing Program. He is the editor of the online journal Fiction Writers Review as well as a contributing editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.
 

Literati Bookstore

Beginning in January 2013, Michael Gustafson and Hilary Lowe spent nearly three months renovating a twenty-six-hundred-square-foot storefront in Ann Arbor, Michigan, to prepare for the grand opening of Literati Bookstore. Not everything went according to plan: Unforeseen expenses and delays, a botched order of fifteen thousand bookmarks, and a near total loss of their first week’s sales threatened the bookstore’s success. But over a hundred members of the Ann Arbor community turned up for Literati’s inaugural reading, and now, more than eight months after the store’s grand opening, Gustafson and Lowe have built a successful community around their literary dream. The following images offer a behind the scenes look at the couple’s journey, which contributing editor Jeremiah Chamberlin chronicles in “How to Make a Life, Maybe Even a Living: Opening an Independent Bookstore” in the current issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

1. Basement of Literati Bookstore Pre-Renovation

Image: 

January 2013: The basement, which accounts for half the store’s floor space, covered in torn-up carpeting and debris prior to renovations. “No matter how long I listened to the couple describe their vision for this space,” Jeremiah Chamberlin writes, “when I looked around all I saw was a basement.”

3. Painting the Floor

Image: 

Gustafson and Lowe paint the black-and-white checkerboard pattern on the top floor of the store by hand, stepping carefully between each square they’ve mapped using blue painter’s tape.

4. The Store Makes its Debut

Image: 

March 2013: The store debuts with a private party. Writers, members of the University of Michigan community, as well as local business owners and supporters, arrive for their first glimpse of the new bookstore.

5. Literati’s Inaugural Event

Image: 

Over a hundred people show up to hear Michigan-based poet Keith Taylor read at Literati Bookstore, the first of what the owners hope will be many future readings and events.

6. Gustafson and Lowe Glow

Image: 

Despite the long hours, Gustafson and Lowe never stop smiling at the Literati Bookstore’s debut party for members of the community.

7. The Bookstore’s Manual Typewriter

Image: 

Each morning Gustafson adds paper to the manual typewriter in the basement’s sitting area, and throughout the day people come down to type. They leave love notes, dirty jokes, pleas, poems, to-do lists, affirmations, even marriage proposals.

8. Literati Bookstore Open For Business

Image: 

April 2013: The bookstore officially opens. A local artist draws the hand-lettered window signs, Gustafson’s mother paints section headings, and the employees hand-stamp the Literati logo on shopping bags. Chamberlin writes, “Quite literally everything in Literati has been touched by human hands.”

9. Gustafson and Lowe Outside Literati

Image: 

After many long and difficult months filled with endless financial calculations and guesses, overwhelming challenges, and a lot of hard work, Gustafson and Lowe stand outside their bookstore looking happy, energized, and inspired.

Tags: 
bookstores

Inside Indie Bookstores: Boswell Book Company in Milwaukee

by

Jeremiah Chamberlin

July/August 2010
7.1.10
In Print and Online

In 1927 Harry Schwartz opened Casanova Booksellers and Importers on Downer Avenue in Milwaukee. Ten years later he bought out his partner, Paul Romaine, moved the store downtown, and renamed it Harry W. Schwartz Bookshop. Over the next seventy-two years, the independent bookstore would operate as many as six branch locations in southeastern Wisconsin and northern Illinois, all the while remaining family owned and managed. In 1972, Harry’s son, A. David Schwartz, took over the business. And when David died, in 2004, David’s daughter, Rebecca Schwartz, and his wife, Carol Grossmeyer, retained ownership until the remaining four stores finally closed in March 2009.

During its many years in business, the iconic bookstore was notable not only for its longevity but also for its strong opposition to censorship. In the 1960s, under Harry’s stewardship, the store stocked titles like Ulysses and Tropic of Cancer, despite the fact that they had been deemed legally obscene. Similarly, even before David was running the business, he was an early proponent of civil rights, and years later he also took a prominent and vocal position against the section of the Patriot Act that could force bookstores to turn over customer records of book purchases to the government. Because of his long-standing advocacy, as well as his record of charitable giving, in 2004 Publishers Weekly honored Schwartz with its Bookseller of the Year Award. Yet, despite these laurels and the store’s lauded history, the business could not weather the recent economic storm.

However, the spirit of bookselling that Schwartz embodied hasn’t disappeared from the Milwaukee area. The Promethean fire has simply been passed on. Lanora Hurley, who once managed Schwartz’s Mequon, Wisconsin, branch, bought the store and reopened it as Next Chapter Bookshop in April 2009. That same month, Daniel Goldin, who worked as Schwartz’s longtime book buyer, reopened the Downer Avenue location as Boswell Book Company, named after James Boswell, the eighteenth-century British biographer, whose image graced the Schwartz logo, which Goldin retained for his store.

Downer Avenue is located in a diverse area of the city—close to both the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee and Lake Michigan. As such, it’s also home to multimillion-dollar lakefront mansions and cheap college rental houses, beautiful Arts and Crafts homes and college dorms. So the two-block commercial strip where Boswell is located—a mix of boutiques, trendy pubs, hip coffee shops, an independent theater, and a locally owned hardware store—is the hub where the lives of many different kinds of people intersect.

Goldin’s tastes as a bookseller—and the selection at Boswell—are just as eclectic. His interests range from urban planning to personal finance, fiction to photography, and he’s as comfortable talking about Cheever as children’s books. Likewise, the floor plan of the eight-thousand-square-foot store is almost completely open. There are comfortable nooks along the periphery, and the children’s room has its own area, but otherwise you can survey the broad expanse of the store from nearly any spot. This does not mean that the store feels overwhelming, however. Quite the contrary—it draws you in, and you soon find yourself winding past antique library card catalogues that display books about birds, and spindly legged side tables featuring literature about Africa. This is another characteristic of Boswell: Every part of the store feels cared for and hand selected; in every corner is an oddity or surprise you could easily miss. You come to a store like this to find what you didn’t realize you were looking for.

The same could be said for Goldin’s experience of Milwaukee. He grew up in New York City, majored in mathematics at Dartmouth College, and got interested in advertising after working at a college radio station. In the early 1980s, he took a job as a publicist for Warner Books. But after four years he felt he needed a break from Manhattan, so he decided he would move to a Midwestern city where he could spend one year learning about publishing from the other side of the business—from the booksellers themselves.

That city turned out to be Milwaukee, chosen in large part by a chance encounter that Goldin had with Schwartz’s then-manager, John Eklund, during a February 1986 visit. Eklund was putting out a new book by Andrew M. Greeley that day, and Goldin happened to be the author’s publicist. The two men struck up a conversation, which eventually led to a job offer. And in April of that year, Goldin moved. He never went back to publishing. His work as a bookseller turned into a job as David Schwartz’s assistant, and eventually he became the book buyer for the business, a position he would hold for more than two decades.

Like his store, Daniel Goldin is quirky and kinetic and whimsical. He is quick to laugh, and talks with the enthusiasm of someone who can’t wait to tell you about something new he’s discovered. For half an hour prior to our conversation, he led me through the store, pointing out changes he’s recently made and plans for those he hopes to accomplish during his second year of business. Goldin is both giddy and nervous about the future, ever aware of the tenuousness of his profession. Yet he is boundlessly hopeful, too.

But more than anything, Goldin is obsessed—a word he likes to use frequently—with books and book-selling. In particular, he is obsessed with the way in which the perfect book finds its way into the perfect person’s hands. Whether in the store or on his blog, this thought is never far from his mind. In that way, he is something of a matchmaker. And nothing makes him happier than making connections for his customers.

Prior to opening Boswell Book Company, you spent most of the twenty years of your bookselling career as a buyer. How is it different now running your own business?
In ’96 I ran our Mequon store, which is now Next Chapter. At one point David Schwartz had said to me, “You can’t really know the business until you run a store.” And it was really a great experience, though a very different experience from what I’m doing now because back then I was still sort of a faceless person. My customers didn’t really know who I was. I didn’t really meet people as much as I thought I would. But I liked doing it and I didn’t really want to go. But then they started talking about moving the downtown store here [to Downer Avenue], and John Eklund decided he wanted to be the person to open this store instead of buying. So they asked me to come back and buy full time.

What year was this?
The Downer store opened in 1997. But then John left to be a sales rep after three months, and I became disconnected from bookstores for a while. I mean, I was in the stores—I worked events, I worked Christmas, I worked sales, I pulled returns—but a lot of the time I was in an office. At one point we had six stores, and so it was just enough to get all the frontlists done. Sometimes I bought backlist, sometimes I returned. But it’s good because I did a little of everything.

Then, when David died, Mary McCarthy took over the stores and she ran them for a few years. David died in 2004; his mother died shortly afterward. He had already brought in Mary, but he didn’t know he was sick yet. I knew that I couldn’t run the stores. I couldn’t do it. I just didn’t have a broad enough skill set. I was very shaky with finance—I felt like I was very micro on the books. All I cared about was what books were coming out, how we sold them, and getting rid of the ones that didn’t work. That’s all I cared about.

I had thought about leaving Schwartz around 2000 to start a bookstore somewhere, but I thought, “I don’t know where I’m going to get financing from, and I don’t have the contacts, and I don’t have the media connections, and I don’t have the customer base.” How the hell do you build this? But by the time I knew Schwartz was closing for sure, I thought, “Maybe I’m ready to do this.”

At what point did you realize that Schwartz, as an entity, was under…
Under siege? Of course I didn’t believe it. I thought, “Maybe we can turn this around.” And the first year we cut our losses pretty substantially.

What do you mean by that?
I think we cut about a hundred thousand off our losses. We got rid of things like 401k matching, we got out of a partnership we’d gone into where we were managing the inventory for a hospital off-site gift shop, and we had to close the Bay View store. You know, we did various things to save money.

But when did this trouble begin? When did you start to see that you would have to start making serious changes?
I think we all knew when a Barnes & Noble closed for a year in Bayshore and we had a better year. Then, when they reopened, we were losing more money again.

Were they remodeling?
Yeah. The mall where the store was located went from a mall to a “style center.” They sunk maybe twenty million, thirty million—it could be two hundred million, three hundred million, for all I know—into the project. Whatever it was, it was a huge amount of money! It doesn’t even matter how many zeroes. It was so many zeroes that it was just unfathomable to me, a person who has to worry about, you know, a hundred dollars. I had to replace our accounting computer for a thousand dollars recently and I cried myself to sleep over it. [Laughter.]

So when they reopened and your sales fell once more, the writing was on the wall.
Right. We couldn’t compete with them. We used to discount books pretty aggressively, but we weren’t winning that war. And even though Barnes & Noble had cut most of their in-store discounting, between the Internet and the mass merchandisers we knew we had to get out of that side of the business. Because any customer who cared only about price would go somewhere else.

Speaking of costs, has the American Booksellers Association ever considered becoming a distributor for its members? If so, they’d be able to get the same discount structure as these big competitors. Or would the discount that you gain be lost in the administrative process?
Absolutely. It’s not big enough for it to be worth the while. And they’re not flush with cash; they have to decide what their mission is too. The number of stores has gone down in the last few years, and they have to see what gets the most bang for their buck.

And what is that right now? Where is the ABA focusing their efforts?
They seem to focus a good amount of attention on Winter Institute. It’s about three years old. They bring a minimal amount of people, they bring a minimal amount of authors, and there’s three days of workshops on topics like technology, profitable magazines, social networking, renegotiating a lease, buying strategies, etcetera.

Does it help your store?
The workshops really help us. And certainly the connections. I have a lot of booksellers that I’ve met at these events who I regularly email. In the last day I’ve talked to Marie at Vroman’s [in Pasadena, California]; I’ve talked to Kathy at Tattered Cover [in Denver, Colorado]; and I got an email from Miriam at Powell’s [in Portland, Oregon]. I also talked to Linda at Galaxy [in Hartwick, Vermont].

What do you discuss?
What books are working for us, mostly.

So there really is a lot of communication going on between booksellers.
Much more than there used to be. I don’t know if there’s more with Facebook than there was with e-mail, but—

But you definitely do make in-store decisions based on these conversations.
Absolutely. I always want to know what people are reading and what’s working. And that’s partly me. I just like being a connector. At Schwartz one of my favorite things to do was find out what everyone was reading and send that information to the publisher. Also, to tell people in one store what somebody else in another store was doing. We had become very, very successful at selling huge quantities of weird books.

For example, we helped make Elegance of the Hedgehog. There were four or five independent stores that just started selling the book like crazy, and pushing it. Newsletters and blogs and stuff like that. It’s really interesting how you can see some of these books move if you work really hard. If the book’s right, and it really delivers, and you’ve got enough people behind it, you can make this book jump to another market.

To me, that’s the whole idea behind a bookstore. I know that several of my friends at other independent bookstores don’t like this, but I feel like we’re a lab. We have to be ahead of the game; we have to move on to the next thing when everybody else is still selling it; we have to find the next thing. For the publisher to pay attention to us we have to be the specialty electronics store instead of Best Buy. We have to be the place where, you know, people say, “Wow! I have to go there because they’re going to tell me what to read. Because two years from now I’m going to hear from everybody about Water for Elephants, but I heard it from my independent bookstore first.”

What is the most exciting part of bookselling for you?
I have to say, focusing on a book you really love and think that other people will love is really cool. My favorite book of 2008 was Wrack and Ruin by Don Lee. I loved the book, but it was so hard to sell in hardcover. It’s still a slightly difficult book to sell in paperback, but I’m thrilled every time we do. I want to take the books I really love—that are offbeat—and make a difference with them. It’s a little harder now because I have too few booksellers on my staff to be reading broadly. But I love discovering a book that two or three people liked, especially when, say, this person reads this way [points to the left] and that person reads that way [points to the right].

Yet they both liked the same book.
Exactly. In the Woods by Tana French is a great example. We were one of its top sellers. It was on the best-seller list for about a year in paperback, but in hardcover there were only about five stores selling it. And the thing that was so cool was that mystery people liked it and fiction people liked it. I always look for things that are “high” and “middle.”

Do you think most people come into a bookstore knowing exactly what they want—or wanting something but not knowing what it is?
I think bookstores have really changed in that a much higher percentage of the customers who are left don’t know what they’re coming in for. The people who know exactly what they want are more likely to jump to the Internet. The Internet doesn’t browse that well compared with a bookstore. So my feeling in the store is that you have to find a lot of ways to sell people books that you like.

My other feeling is that customers need confirmation that this is a book they should buy. They don’t want to hear from just one person. They want to hear maybe two or three different ways that this is a book that’s important. This is one of the reasons that in the front of the store I have a book club section; I have the IndieBound best-sellers; I have my staff picks; I have Boswell’s Best, which is really like a buyer’s pick; and I have prizewinners and what’s in the media. My idea is that—especially with hardcover—I will put the same book in two or three different places if it belongs there. That way maybe someone will get confirmation from three different sources that this is the book that they want to buy.

Are there any recent books that were crossovers like this?
I love Chris Cleave’s novel Little Bee. I said, “I’m going to do anything to make this book work.” I got to read it really early, and I really liked the book. I think it’s the perfect book in that it allows you to read it to the level of your interest. You can be a middle reader and read it, or you can be a high-end reader and read it. And because the book leaves some things unsaid, you can interpret the ending in several different ways, which makes people obsess about it. Everything was perfect about it for me. I loved the jacket. Loved the jacket. I was so worried, you know, because the book has another name in England. It’s called The Other Hand. And I loved the cover of The Other Hand in hardcover, but I despised the cover of The Other Hand in paperback.

So you can judge a book by its cover? Or does this prove that you can’t?
A really good book with a really bad jacket is just 
really hard to sell. It gives the customer the wrong message.

Was there ever a book you’ve loved that you couldn’t sell because of the cover?
We were just talking about that. One of my booksellers just showed me one, and it had a very “merchy” cover.

What do you mean by that?
The British book business—the merchandise part of the business—is not driven by Walmart or Target. It’s driven by supermarkets. Tesco and Sainsbury’s do the big quantities. So when you sell lots and lots and lots of copies of a book in Great Britain, you sell them in the supermarket. They have bookstores, basically, within the supermarkets. The point being, I looked at that book jacket and I said, “That’s a very Tesco cover.” Then, when the author came for an event, he admitted that they’d just placed a really big order. [Laughter.]

So the cover is a bigger part of book buying than we’d like to admit.
Oh, I think publishers would say that it’s a big part of the decision-making process.

What about digital books, which don’t have covers?
I don’t know. Good luck! [Laughter.] But they have free downloads! Honestly, I have no idea. I hope to be getting some of the business. I hope so. I have customers who really want to do downloads through us. They want to come here and browse and then download the books from us. Just like they’re buying the books, in spite of the fact that they could buy them online. They like the space, they like the browsing, and because Schwartz just closed they get the idea that their purchases are connected to the store’s staying in business.

But I don’t take that goodwill for granted. And I feel that the way I can keep that goodwill is to continually try to make things better. I have to have very personal relationships with my customers, and I try to keep my personality very heavily in the store. I have a very distinct personality. I think I have a good sense of humor and I’m very quirky and I’m very respectful of differences and of people who like different things. I know what I like and I know what my customers like.

What about people who just moved to Milwaukee and have never heard of Schwartz? How will you bring them into the store?
It’s a tough thing. I feel like the store is interesting enough and there are fewer and fewer independent bookstores like this around, and so I feel I just have to keep it in the public eye. That’s why I do a lot of publicity. I throw out a lot of press releases. I do a lot of events. I try to do an offbeat spin on the events. For my first event last year I had the woman who owned the bookstore here [before Schwartz took over the space] introduce Jane Hamilton. She talked about what it was like being one of the first booksellers to discover Jane Hamilton, and how she’d once put together a bus tour to the apple orchard where The Book of Ruth took place.

There’s also a memoir about knitting coming out and I’m trying to get one of the knitting stores to come in and set up a table. We’ve talked about having some craft people come in too for something like that. For example, we had Scott Buer, who runs Bolzano Artisan Meats, the first dry-cured meat company in Wisconsin, come to the store and he did a sampling of his pancetta.

In addition to events and the eclectic selection of the books themselves, what do you offer customers that online booksellers, chain stores, and big-box retailers cannot? Is customer service what matters most?
People have pretty neutral feelings about the service at Amazon. It’s okay. Last year, in the customer surveys of chain stores, both Barnes & Noble and Borders came out in the top ten. Even if some of my customers think the service isn’t so good and complain that the booksellers there don’t know the books, it’s not terrible. Is my service spectacular? It could be better. I never overestimate my service abilities. Do I think I’m good at that sort of stuff, and do I think my booksellers are? Absolutely. Do I think I am effective 100 percent of the time? Nooo. I’m not.

This then brings me to the most important question. In this economic climate—
Yes.

Where a business with eighty-two years of history has already gone bankrupt—
Out of business. Schwartz didn’t go bankrupt. Don’t say we went bankrupt. [Laughter.]

And in the very same space that that iconic store has gone out of business, you thought it would be a good idea to open a bookstore. Care to explain?
I looked at the business and I said, “There is business here; it’s not like we’re not doing business. We just have a problematic cost structure.” And I thought a really nimble single-store business might work, because you don’t have that infrastructure level. Small chains are neither fish nor fowl. They’re not small enough to make decisions quickly, but not big enough to benefit from their size. When something’s not working here, I can just say, “Well, let’s not do that anymore.” But at Schwartz we had to go through committee meetings.

So it was hard to adapt quickly.
Right. And I thought, “If I don’t open right away, I’m going to lose that business because people are going to change their shopping habits. So I have to do this as quickly as possible.” And now we’ve gotten rid of the whole office infrastructure, which means that the costs to pay for another space, a dedicated marketing department, a lot of buyers, a working owner who got paid, and a percentage of rent—that all went away. I’m still me. I’m now doing the work that probably two or three people were doing before. Not as well! [Laughter.] And I took a pretty substantial pay cut to do it. But there are lots of little changes that I squeak through to try to cut costs, and I think we’re doing an okay job with that.

I also knew what my gross profit margin was at Schwartz, and I knew if I was really careful and watched everything and played with some of the things we were doing, that I could increase that a little. That was one of the problems with Schwartz—it wasn’t just the expenses, it was that our gross margin was on the low side.

Why was that?
I don’t really know. [Laughter.] But I know that I have friends with substantially higher gross profit margins. There’s all sorts of stuff I’m watching: damaged merchandise, throwing away things that can’t be used anymore, overly aggressive discounting—all that stuff. And so I worked on my business plan for three or four months, and I have to tell you, if I hadn’t gotten the numbers to work in a reasonable way…when I looked at my sales, I basically said, “I’m going to keep 75 percent of the Downer business, and then I will add to that 25 percent of the business in Shorewood [the neighborhood directly north].”

What has happened, in fact, is that more of the Downer business has gone away than I expected, because more of it was involved in the schools than I realized. They are in very bad shape, and they just changed the bidding process so we’re not getting quite as much Milwaukee public school business. On the other hand, we picked up more Shorewood business than I expected. So we’re close to where we want to be.

And you knew the numbers when you put together your business plan.
I knew the numbers and I also knew—

What you could do as an individual.
What I could do. Like I said, I feel like I have a very passionate personality; I can talk about books in a very nonthreatening way.

But it’s still a huge financial risk, especially considering the economy.
Yes. I had to bring my own money to the table. I had saved some money, but I am a bookseller—I didn’t save that much money! However, my family pulled together enough money so that with what I had saved, the bank would give me a loan. Actually, I still got rejected. I went to three banks: I was rejected by the first one, I got a provisional no from the second one, and then I got a yes from the third bank. The terms were very tough, but I got a yes. I took the yes and I went to the second bank and the second bank beat the other bank’s terms.

Did you ever say to yourself, “I had a good run, I enjoyed being a bookseller, but that phase of my life is over?”
What would I have done? What could I possibly do? [Laughter.]

So you haven’t second-guessed your decision.
I second-guess my decision every waking moment! I second-guess every decision.

Then perhaps I’ll close by asking this: What has made you happiest about this first year of owning your own bookstore?
Danny Meyer, who is a restaurateur, once said, “It’s not about service, it’s about hospitality. I don’t want to be the best restaurant, I want to be the favorite.” My favorite thing about Boswell is the emotional connection that people have with this store. Right before the holidays a pair of regular customers—loyal customers—came up to me and said, “When you first opened, the place was only so-so. At the time we said it was nice just to be polite, but now it really is great.” [Laughter.] I love that! I love that the place matters as much to them as it does to me. And I love that we’re headed in the right direction.

page_5: 

INSIDE BOSWELL BOOK COMPANY

On average, how many books do you carry in your store?
Bookstores have been fibbing about this question since Gutenberg. I recently saw a new store that opened say they have fifty thousand titles. We have twenty thousand individual titles, though it looks like we have three times as many books. The quest for having the most books is over. Amazon won, with virtual numbers. In short, I’m not telling, though I sort of already did.

What are the best-selling sections in your store?
We’re a general bookstore, so, like just about every general bookstore, we mostly sell general fiction. We’ve been able to improve sales of mysteries and science fiction since taking over Schwartz as well. We sell about as many books from our humor section as we do from our philosophy section. That seems funny, but really, what is funny?

What were some of the best-selling books at Boswell in 2009?
It should not be a surprise to any indie bookseller that we sold huge amounts of Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge, Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, and Muriel Barbery’s The Elegance of the Hedgehog. Probably our best-selling offbeat paperback fiction title was David Rhodes’s Driftless, which is a wonderful, prizewinning novel, as well as being quintessentially Wisconsin. In cloth, our most popular books were Kathryn Stockett’s The Help, Lorrie Moore’s A Gate at the Stairs, and Sherman Alexie’s War Dances. The latter two were helped by very high-profile events.

Are there any books you’re particularly looking forward to this summer or fall?
I’m hoping that my two spring faves, Brady Udall’s The Lonely Polygamist and Frederick Reiken’s Day for Night, turn out to be books that we can sell well through the holidays. I’ve already got booksellers clamoring for Great House, the new novel from Nicole Krauss.

How do you think the rise of e-books and digital reading devices will affect your future
I’m not an ostrich—of course it will cut into my sales. I think they will affect airport and textbook stores first. I also am hoping our smaller size will make us more nimble. Some folks think e-books will kill the hardcover, but I think the mass market is more at risk—it’s a short jump from disposable to virtual. It’s not all worry—advances in technology have brought down the cost of short-run printing, making it cheaper for publishers to adjust prints as the numbers change. I also believe that the trend will not mirror music. Our audience is older, and because you don’t need to keep a device for traditional books, I think there will be more crossing over between e and non-e. I’m hoping that publishers will get the message and improve the quality of their traditional books. There’s no better advertisement for an e-book than a book whose pages are so thin that I can see through them.

What is the most unique or defining aspect of Boswell Book Company?
People who don’t know me sometimes refer to me as Daniel Boswell. That’s of course not the case, but in a sense it is. The store is close to a half-century of my book and idea obsessions, plus the brainstorms and hard work of my booksellers, together with the whims of my customers. It’s very much me, but I hope it will also live on after me. All you have to do is say to yourself, “This is the most important thing you will ever do,” and it should fall into place.

What do you think most people would be surprised to learn about bookselling?
It’s no surprise that many of the details are like any other job. Paying book invoices is like paying clothing invoices. Opening boxes of books is like opening boxes of groceries. Satisfying your regular book customers is not dissimilar to satisfying your customers as a lawyer. Wait, it is different. Most other businesses have figured out how to sell information, but we still give it away.

What has been the single biggest challenge in your first year of business?
It’s a variation of the eyes are bigger than the stomach. I couldn’t get done as much as I hoped. There’s always year two.

Where would you like to see Boswell in five years?
I’d like to be in business, culturally relevant, and anchoring a somewhat thriving, traditional urban neighborhood. Not too thriving, of course, or all the indie stores will be replaced by chains. And I’d like the store to have expanded somehow, but not with more branch stores. I did that for the first half of my career.

Jeremiah Chamberlin teaches writing at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He is also the associate editor of the online journal Fiction Writers Review.

Boswell Book Company in Milwaukee

For the fourth installment of our ongoing series of interviews, Inside
Indie Bookstores, Jeremiah Chamberlin travelled to Milwaukee to speak
with Daniel Goldin, owner of Boswell Book Company.

Boswell Book Company 1

Image: 

Boswell Book Company opened in April 2009 in the Downer Avenue location of Harry W. Schwartz Bookshop, a beloved Milwaukee bookstore that had closed a month earlier after seventy-two years in business. Boswell’s owner, Daniel Goldin, was the long-time book buyer for Schwartz.

Boswell Book Company 2

Image: 

The floor plan of the eight-thousand-square-foot store is almost completely open. You can survey the broad expanse of the store from nearly any spot.

Boswell Book Company 3

Image: 

There are comfortable nooks along the periphery of the store’s open floor plan, and the children’s room has its own area.

Boswell Book Company 4

Image: 

Visitors to Boswell Book Company soon find themselves winding past antique library card catalogues that display books about birds, and spindly legged side tables featuring literature about Africa.

Boswell Book Company 5

Image: 

Every part of the store feels card for and hand selected; in every corner is an oddity or suprise you could easily miss. You come to a store like this to find what you didn’t realize you were looking for.

Boswell Book Company 6

Image: 

“I do a lot of events,” Goldin says. “I try to do an offbeat spin on the events. For my first event last year I had the woman who owned the bookstore here [before Schwartz took over the space] introduce Jane Hamilton. She talked about what it was like being one of the first booksellers to discover Jane Hamilton, and how she’d once put together a bus tour to the apple orchard where The Book of Ruth took place.”

Boswell Book Company 7

Image: 

Goldin’s interests as a bookseller range from urban planning to personal finance, fiction to photography, and he’s as comfortable talking about Cheever as children’s books.

Boswell Book Company 8

Image: 

“In the front of the store I have a book club section; I have the IndieBound best-sellers; I have my staff picks; I have Boswell’s Best, which is really like a buyer’s pick; and I have prizewinners and what’s in the media,” says Goldin. “My idea is that—especially with hardcover—I will put the same book in two or three different places if it belongs there. That way maybe someone will get confirmation from three different sources that this is the book that they want to buy.”

Boswell Book Company 9

Image: 

“People who don’t know me sometimes refer to me as Daniel Boswell,” Goldin says. “That’s of course not the case, but in a sense it is. The store is close to a half-century of my book and idea obsessions, plus the brainstorms and hard work of my booksellers, together with the whims of my customers. It’s very much me, but I hope it will also live on after me. All you have to do is say to yourself, ‘This is the most important thing you will ever do,’ and it should fall into place.”

Tags: 
bookselling

Inside Indie Bookstores: Powell’s Books in Portland, Oregon

by

Jeremiah Chamberlin

March/April 2010
3.1.10
In Print and Online

Few independent bookstores are more iconic than Powell’s Books. Even readers who’ve never been to Portland, Oregon, know about the store from its ads in places like the New Yorker, or from its prominent online presence, or from its reputation as the largest new- and used-book store in the world. The “City of Books,” as the four-story flagship store on West Burnside is known, occupies an entire city block, and carries more than one million books. The sixty-eight-thousand-square-foot space is divided into nine color-coded rooms, which together house more than 3,500 sections. From the moment you walk in, it feels as if you could find anything there. (And if you can’t, try one of the seven branch stores in five other locations throughout Portland, specializing in everything from technical books to home and garden.)

I was early for my interview with owner Michael Powell, so I decided to get a coffee in the attached café. Like the bookstore itself, the guiding aesthetic is simplicity—no overstuffed chairs, no fireplace, no decorations on the salmon-colored walls other than some taped-up flyers for local bands and a Buddhist meditation group. Not that anyone seems to notice. While I was there, every single person I encountered was reading. At the table nearest me a high school girl in cat-eye glasses and a ski cap read Lucy Knisley’s French Milk (Epigraph Publishing, 2000), with a stack of David Sedaris waiting at her elbow. A well-dressed elderly woman flipped through the Oregonian not too far away. And on the other side, near the windows, a young woman with black hair and piercings through both her cheeks was making a list of recipes from The Garden of Vegan (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2003). Filling the rest of the tables were hipsters in zip-up sweatshirts and Chuck Taylor All Stars, a young father in a shirt and tie with his two children, construction workers wearing Carhartt overalls, and women with trendy bags and knee-high leather boots. All were reading. Here was a microcosm of the store: A diversity of people and interests, sure, but what’s most important in Powell’s is neither image nor decor but the books themselves.

This is not to say that the store doesn’t have a unique vibe. Like Michael Powell himself, there is a straightforwardness to Powell’s that puts a person at ease. When the owner and I met, he was dressed casually in jeans and a pullover sweater. And though he had to attend a black-tie community event later that night, he was generous with his time, walking me through both the history of the business and the store itself—how the portion of the building with terrazzo floors had originally been an American Motors dealership; how when they built the newer sections of the store, more than a decade ago, they’d intentionally left the concrete floors bare because the industrial feel not only complemented the plain, pine bookcases but also added to the laid-back atmosphere; and how proud he is that their foreign-language section alone accommodates more than thirty thousand titles.

Michael Powell’s philosophy on bookselling is simple: He wants to provide people with books. He has no interest in telling people what to read. Nor would he ever judge a person by the type of books she purchases. New or used, dime-store paperback or first-edition hardcover, manga or metaphysics, all are equally at home on his shelves.

This sense of equality permeates every aspect of the Powell’s business model, from the practice of shelving used and new books side by side in each section, to the store’s long-standing advocacy on free-speech issues, to the fact that its five hundred employees are unionized and have a matching 401(k) plan. Likewise, Powell may be the boss, but it’s clear that he also sees himself as a fellow employee. When we left the downtown location and he drove me across town to the former ball-bearing warehouse that is now the site of the online bookselling operations, no one had to “look busy” when the owner arrived. Instead, they chatted with him as we walked through the facility, offering updates on their various ongoing projects, including ideas for how best to recycle used packaging materials. The warehouse, which feels like an airplane hangar but with the sound of jazz floating in the air, processes up to three thousand online orders daily. And 70 percent of those are single-title orders, a fact that amazes Powell, a logical man who never ceases to be surprised or impressed by his customers, even when they pay more than twenty dollars to have a four-
dollar book shipped overnight. It makes him wonder aloud how he can better meet their needs.

This, then, might be the trait that best characterizes Michael Powell: curiosity. He is endlessly curious about the world, about his employees’ ideas, about what his customers want to read, and about innovative ways to do business. It is a trait that has served him well during his last four decades of bookselling. And though he’ll officially hand over the reins of the business to his daughter, Emily, in July, when he turns seventy, one gets the sense that Powell will always be dreaming of how to connect books and people. Because it’s clear that he loves them both.  

How did you become a bookseller?
In the mid-sixties I ran a little student co-op [at the University of Chicago] where students could sell textbooks and other books on consignment. I also rode my bike around to various thrift shops in the general area and went to the Sunday morning flea market called Maxwell Street—which was very famous in its day in Chicago—to buy books and put them on consignment. Then I sold books by catalogue for a couple years to university libraries, mostly out-of-print social science and history, before I opened my first store in 1970, in Chicago.

Early on, I was thinking of opening a store in Santa Fe, New Mexico, because my wife and I had traveled to Santa Fe and saw it for the first time and everybody falls in love with Santa Fe the first time. She was being offered a job as a Montessori teacher there and I was going to open a bookstore when I got a phone call from a mentor in Hyde Park, in Chicago. He wanted to move his store because he’d been attacked by a customer.

He’d found a new location that was closer to campus, and the reason it was currently vacant was that the Weathermen had firebombed its previous occupant out of existence and he didn’t want to go back into it, he was too nervous. And the university—well, not exactly the university, but whoever was in charge of organizing these things—had approached my friend. However, the space was too big for him; he wanted to take only half of it. So he said to me, “You take half and do mostly paperbacks, and I’ll do hardbacks.” And I said, “I could do that, but I don’t have the money.” My wife says I was always good for twenty bucks but never for a hundred. And he said, “There are some professors who would like to talk to you about that; they’re kind of the patron saints of bookstores.” There were three of them: Morris Janowitz, Edward Shils, and the third one was Saul Bellow. Morris Janowitz, who was the lead, came to me and said, “What would you need?” I had no idea. So I said—and this is, remember, 1970—I said, “Probably three thousand dollars.” And he said, “We can do that. We can loan you three thousand dollars.” Then I said, “But, you know, I’ve got a problem. I don’t know how quickly this will get up and running. And there’s all the rent.” So he said, “We can help with rent, too, for a little while.” Rent was, I think, a hundred dollars a month. So, okay, now they’re rehabbing the building and there’s some time before I can occupy it. So my wife and I take a thousand of the three thousand and we travel across the country to Oregon to visit my folks. [Laughter.]

When we were back in Chicago, I took the remaining two thousand dollars and bought some books. A friend and I built some shelves, and we opened. Like I was saying, it was a small, small store. But we did well. The students, of course, liked used paperbacks. They thought that was great. At some point my neighbor moved away and I took his space. Then there was another business in the back…and when they went away I took that space. So, ultimately, it was about four thousand square feet.

And then my dad [who had come to Chicago to work in the bookstore] went back to Portland in 1971. He opened his shop, moved once into a space of about ten thousand square feet, and had begun to introduce new books into the mix, shelving them side by side with used books. In 1979 he said, “You know, now wouldn’t be a bad time if you’re interested in coming back.” I always thought I would come back. I always thought of myself as an Oregonian, always kept my Oregon driver’s license. And I said, “Yeah, I’d like to do that.” There had been a huge snowstorm in Chicago that winter; we’d had an infant—she was born in November—and we had to get out of the neighborhood we were in. It wasn’t suitable for raising a family, and I’d had it with the weather. So coming back to Oregon sounded great to me.

Well, the night before we left Chicago, my dad called. He said, “I’ve got some news: We’ve lost our lease.” Our landlord, which was a brewery, had wanted to take the space back and had given us a year to find a new location. So we spent that year searching, and we found the space that is currently Powell’s Books. In the mid-eighties, we started opening branch stores. I was always curious about new ways to do things with books; I didn’t want just to replicate anything. And one of the questions was if we could do our new-used mix and do it in the suburbs, where everybody’s perception was that it would have to be Borders or Barnes & Noble or something.

By that you mean nice carpeting and polished wood, soft lighting—
The whole nine yards. We weren’t getting women to our downtown location in the proportions that most people have women as shoppers, perhaps because our area was a little bit edgy.

It was a developing neighborhood?
It was an undeveloped neighborhood—mostly warehouses, wholesalers, and auto repair shops. Kind of funky stuff, but not retail. Not restaurants and bars. Now it’s all high-end national and local boutiques, and dozens and dozens of restaurants and bars. It’s quite fashionable, I suppose.

In any case, I wanted to see if we could capture a different audience if we opened the store in a suburb, and that went well. And each year for about six years we opened a store. First, we did a travel bookstore downtown in about 1985. Then the Hawthorne District stores in about 1986. Then the cookbook store…somewhere in there we opened a store in the airport, and a technical bookstore. So I was both interested in segmenting books like technical and travel and cooking, and I was also interested in demographics, like urban centers, suburbs, and airports. It sounds like it was planned, but it wasn’t. It was just opportunity and impulse. The only one of those that we don’t have any longer is the travel store. The Internet took that business away enough to justify not keeping a whole store solely focused on the subject. And the cookbook store sort of morphed into a lifestyle store, with gardening and cooking and interior design. And now we have three stores at the airport.

What did you find with the suburban store that you built to look like Borders or Barnes & Noble?
Well, we were going to build a fairly fancy store in the suburbs—nice white shelving, a tile floor, banners over the aisles, and colors, and so forth and so on. But the aesthetics weren’t right. So the first chance we got to get rid of all that, we did.

You shut the whole store down?
We moved it. And when we moved it, we moved it into a larger space. And at that point we went back to wood shelves. Pine wood, cement floor, more of an industrial look. That has always worked for us well downtown. That was my misreading of the 
suburbs—that I had to sort of pretty it up, and I was wrong. We’ve more recently moved that store into a space double the size—thirty-two thousand square feet. And once again we have a cement floor. In fact, the ceiling has exposed insulation as a sort of architectural touch. It looks very industrial.

Why do you think that works?
People want a calm background for the books. I don’t think they need…I think Borders’s and Barnes & Noble’s message is “Buy the book and get the hell out of here” in some subliminal way. It’s too bright, the shelves are low so everybody’s watching everybody. You feel very exposed. Our shelves are about twelve feet high. You live in these little alleys, and there’s a kind of cozy feel in that that makes it comfortable for customers. And you can sit on the floor, you know, you can spill something on the floor. It’s not a big disaster.

You don’t have to worry about messing up someone’s living room.
No. And the used books look more comfortable in that environment, because they look a little shabbier when they’re too exposed. So, that’s where we are. In 1994 we went on the Internet with the only inventory we had in the database at that point, which was the technical bookstore. I’d only been up for about a month when I got a letter from England from someone saying, “I was looking for this technical book, and I was told in England it would take six weeks to deliver and would cost me the equivalent of a hundred dollars. So I thought, ‘Well, I’ll just check out the Internet and see.’ You had the book for forty-five dollars and you could get it to me in three days.”

When I read this, I thought, “Holy hell! Here’s an opportunity.” So we got all our books into a database. We had what we called “the river” and “the lake”—there were all the new books coming every day that had to get entered, but we also had to back enter everything that was currently on the shelves. So it took a year.

Is that lake dried up now?
The lake is now part of the river. And we built up the Internet business to where it was about a fourth of our sales. So we were an early adopter for selling books online. Amazon came along, of course, and blew right past us. But we sell a lot of books via Amazon, and we sell books via eBay and Alibris and AbeBooks in addition to on our own site. We also carry inventories from England and Germany—our books are drop shipped to the customer. We do what we can.

I imagine that most people think of you as being in direct competition with Amazon. But, in fact, you’re actually doing a lot of partnership with Amazon?
Well, I don’t know. We are in competition at one level, certainly. I’m sure some of our business has turned over to Amazon. But I’m not foolish about it. If there’s an opportunity to sell books, I’m going to sell them. Amazon is my opportunity. And we sell some new books there, but mostly used.

So you ship to Amazon and then they repackage and ship them?
No, we package and ship. We can ship in our boxes with our materials inside. So we can brand that shipment. They’re good with that. And if somebody just orders a new book from us, we’ll usually have a wholesaler fill that order. Ingram or Baker & Taylor drop ship for us in our boxes, so it cuts out shipping to us. That works well. We do the same thing with Gardner Books in England and Lieber in Germany, both wholesalers. And it works. Some of it is hard. It’s not easy—a lot of infrastructure crossed with the Internet.

What are some of its particular challenges?
I think everybody, me included, thought the Internet was going to be this miracle way of making money, because for not very much money you could make all these books available around the whole world. Well, people didn’t count on all the software writers you need to keep your Web site hot and current, or the editorial work that has to go into maintaining a Web site both in terms of the tracking game and also making it sticky for people to visit and to find value there so that they’ll shop with us. Because we don’t discount the books, you know. It’s a small number—twenty, thirty books—otherwise it’s retail. You would think we’d have no business, that people are nuts for ordering books from us.

Because there are cheaper places?
There are cheaper places. And yet, the brand, the interest, whatever…we maintain a good new book sale. I won’t say it’s growing, but it’s steady. There’s a lot of price competition in both the used book world and in the new book world. So it’s been hard to build that business, but we think we can. We have a lot of people who visit the site but don’t stay, and we have to find a way to encourage them to stay. A small percentage of these customers mean a lot to our business. My daughter’s working with some consultants to redesign and redeploy our Web strengths. 

The site certainly has a wonderful array of resources—interviews with authors, blogs…
We Tweet; we do everything. We do everything we possibly can with the resources we have. I always say that the people I have working on our Web site are a rounding error for Amazon. Amazon would have thousands of employees dedicated to what I have twenty dedicated to. On the other hand, I have to say we go toe-to-toe with them. They have things we don’t have, but we have things they don’t have. Sometimes they have them pretty fast after we have them, but we think of ourselves as innovators.

One of these recent innovations is our online buyback. Anyone in the U.S. can go to our Web site, check via a book’s ISBN number to see whether or not we want to buy it, and then find out how much we want to pay for it. We’ll pay the freight; all you have to do is box it, print out our label and packing list, and ship it in. Once it’s received and we’ve checked the condition, we’ll pay you via PayPal, or you can get virtual credit, which you can spend as you will. That has given us a pretty hefty flow of books.

So even after paying shipping costs it’s still worthwhile for you to buy these books?

 

Yeah. In order to maintain our inventory, we can’t rely only on books bought in Portland. We’ve always relied on a certain number of books being bought elsewhere in the country, whether they’re from store inventories or private collections. Well, that’s an expensive way to buy books. You have to fly people there to look at them, then you have to fly people there to box them, and then you have to pay the shipping in. Also, you usually have to take everything, which means you’re handling a lot of books you don’t want. So the online buyback is great because theoretically we want all those books. And you don’t have to go anywhere to get them. And the customer boxes everything up. At the moment, Amazon doesn’t do that. There are some people who do, but they’re not major players. So that’s given us at least a temporary advantage in source of books.

 

I’d like to go back and talk a little bit about the operation of the main store. In addition to the industrial look and feel of the space, another way that Powell’s is different from most bookstores is that you mix new and used books on the shelves. Why did you decide to do this?
Well, we started as a used books company. My dad introduced new books in the late seventies, and his mantra was two of everything and three of nothing. So when a local writer like Jean M. Auel published her first book, we had just two copies. Then we bought a bunch of tables from Dalton’s, and they asked, “What are you going to put on these tables?” And I said, “Stacks of…something.” So that’s when we got into the new arrival business.

But now we have about three hundred thousand volumes in the main store, as well as however many in the other stores. It’s a substantial part of our business. In dollars, roughly 50 percent of our total business is new books, about 40 percent is used books, and then 10 percent is magazines, cards, and sidelines.

On average, bookstores make about 40 percent on each book they sell. Yet you’ve managed to nudge that up to nearly 44 percent. Considering that these percentages are before operational expenses, a small difference like this can mean the difference between staying open and going bankrupt. How did you achieve this?
You know, when you’re done, you’re always plus or minus. Your minus can be a lot, but your plus is hardly ever more than 2 percent after costs. And that’s before you make any capital reinvestment. Because we’re a larger business, we tend to order in volumes that allow us to get the maximum discount. And we do one other thing: We ship all our books to a central warehouse and then we distribute. I don’t know if it’s Borders or Barnes & Noble, but whatever the discount those stores got for shipping to a central warehouse, the publishers had to match that for us.

I’m sure that being your own distributor also makes things more efficient.
Yeah. We do all central receiving. Once the books are received, they’re labeled and then distributed out to each of the stores. So we have our own truck fleet that runs our books around.

With used books, on the other hand, you’ve said that your average is closer to 65 percent. Is that also something you’ve been able to nudge up in similar ways, or is that number static?
We have slowly, over time, pushed that up about five points, either by paying less or controlling inventory better, and by making fewer buying mistakes. In the used-book world the risk is that you’re going to buy something that you already have too many copies of, or that sales have evaporated for, or it’s a book you had once and never sold. Now computers can tell you all that, so while we don’t check every book we buy at the moment we buy it, if there’s any doubt about the book we can scan it and see its history, the current inventory level, sales history, and make a judgment based on that. So I think our rate of having to pull things from the shelves has dropped considerably.

What’s hurting us at the moment is this move away from people buying new hardbacks. You’ve probably heard this elsewhere, but in this downturn many people are avoiding a twenty-five-dollar book and moving, in our case, to used books. This has meant that we can try to keep our dollar volume up by boosting the units we’re selling, because used books are cheaper, but of course the labor involved doesn’t go away.

Or the overhead or the cost of the building.
Right. But the overall dollars have dropped because you’re not selling that twenty-five-dollar book. Fewer dollars are coming in. So it’s been a challenge. And we’ve had to do several things in the course of the last year to accommodate that.

Such as?
Well, we had to reduce the number of people working in the company, which we did through not filling positions when people left.

But no one was let go?
No one was let go, no. At one moment we were within two weeks of seriously considering it, but then the numbers looked like they maybe didn’t require it, so we backed off. You don’t do that casually. You don’t turn people loose in this economic environment. I really didn’t want to do it, and fortunately we didn’t have to. We had twelve months of down business. But [last] September we had our first up month, so that was certainly good news.

What do you think accounted for that?
People are buying more books! I don’t know what to say.

Are you a bellwether for the economic recovery?
Well, I hope so. It’s not like spending money on cars or houses, but if they’re feeling comfortable enough to do that…I mean, listen, they have an alternative. First of all, they can choose not to read. They can go to the library, they can buy fewer books, whatever. But the fact that the customers are back feels great.

Some people have suggested that it’s not the fact that Amazon or big-box stores like Walmart and Target are selling books that accounts for many independent stores’ losing their footing, but rather it’s a lack of readers. Do you feel that’s the case?
No, I’m not a subscriber to that. I understand the theory. The theory is that there are only so many hours in the day, and so if you’re playing computer games or tweeting or searching the Internet or going to a movie or watching TV, you haven’t got time left over for reading. And, yeah, that makes perfectly good sense. Yet we are selling more books. [Last] September we sold more books than we did a year [earlier] by a fairly sensational number. They were cheaper books, but there were more of them.

Long run? I’m not a predictor of the future. I don’t know. Will the Kindle and the Sony Reader, or print on demand, or some other phenomenon we haven’t thought of yet, erode our business? It’s certainly possible. Nothing is forever. And there’s no way to say that somebody’s new vision of the future won’t force us to reshape our vision. But I think as long as we’re alert and pay attention and find ways to adapt, then we’ll be okay.

Let’s talk specifically about electronic books. Do they affect your business?
We sell them. Been doing that for the better part of ten years.

Really?
Yeah. There just weren’t very many books and they weren’t great and we didn’t sell a lot of them, though there have been people trying to do this for a long time. And, you know, it’s a small part of our business. But we’re positioned to make it a bigger part if that happens.

Now, I want to go back a minute. People always say, “Well, there’s this way of doing business and then there’s Powell’s way of doing business.” But I want to point out that I got on the Internet because there was one guy on my staff who came to me and said, “I can put the technical books on the Internet. I need ten thousand dollars to do that.” The money wasn’t for himself, but for the technology. And I said, “Seems good to me.” At the time, Barnes & Noble and Borders were opening stores all around me. My wagons were circled and they attacked from the suburbs, these giant stores. And I thought, “If there’s any way to leap over those stores and reach a broader audience, there’s nothing better than this thing called the Internet.” And I was very enthusiastic. And so for ten thousand dollars—which is a lot of money, I appreciate that—and his time, we got to play. But it’s not like somebody handed me ten million dollars and said, “Here, go invest this in the book business.” We have built every brick, every stone—every element of the system is a result of organic growth.

In addition to building this business from the ground up, your family has always played an important role in the process. Your father came to Chicago to work in the first store, and now your daughter Emily is involved.
Yes. Emily is going to take over in July.

How long has she been moving into this role?
Probably four years now. She was director of used books for a while, and she worked to get our minds back into the used book world. 

What do you mean?
Well, when the economy started to go bad, we told ourselves that we needed to get more used books on the shelves. That meant changing some of the ways of channeling books to the stores and also boosting the volume. For the last year she’s been in charge of the Internet marketing world, with the goal of taking a fairly flat Internet business and seeing it grow. She just finished an executive MBA, and one of the faculty members from her program, along with another fellow he knows, are acting as consultants. So she’s been working with them to redirect the energies of staff, reorganize staff, and redesign the Web site, and to do things that make it easier to use, more intuitive. We’ve always won awards for the content on our site, but I don’t think anybody would ever give us an award for the smoothness, or the use of the page. Now we’re trying to make it a more intuitive process to use, and that always involves a fair amount of rewrite on software, so you can’t do it overnight. But you can do it. So she’s been working on that and doing a great job.

Having grown up in a bookstore, she must have a familiarity with this world that few people possess. To say nothing of her commitment, since it’s a family business.
There’s a great story about Emily. When she was about eight or nine, she and I were doing Christmas cash register work. I would open the book and read the price, and then she would key it in the cash register and make change while I bagged the book. A lady came up who was trying to be nice to Emily and said, “When you grow up, are you going to be a cashier?” And Emily, counting out her change, says, “When I grow up, I’m going to own this place.” [Laughter.] And by God, she is.

That was never in my mind, as a given. In this day and age, the world beckons. I just told her, “You’d be a damn fool not to kick the tires that had been good to us. I don’t ask or expect you to go in this direction, but I think you’d be foolish not to give it a shot.” And out of the blue one day she called from San Francisco and said, “You know, I’m ready to take that shot if you’re ready.”

Was she in college at the time?
No, she was working in San Francisco. She had a boyfriend down there and she was in a variety of things—she was an apprentice to a maker of wedding cakes, then worked as an assistant to the head of a law firm for a couple years. And, you know, she enjoyed San Francisco very much, but I think that gave her the motivation to say, “Well, I think it’s time to try the book business.” She had worked here for a year earlier, right out of college, but she needed to really get out and try something else in the world for a while.

How hands on or off will you be once you retire?
Well, I’ll tell you a story. I had someone like you come to interview me and he said, “So when you retire, what will you do?” And I said, “Well, you know, I’ll probably go out to the warehouse and process books, get them out of boxes. I like doing that.” And he laughed. So I said, “What’s funny about that? You don’t think I can do that?” And he said “No, no. I was out on the floor interviewing one of your employees and I said, ‘What will Michael Powell do when his daughter takes over?’ And he said, ‘He’ll go over to the warehouse and process books.'” So I guess I’m known for my limited talents.

Somehow I’d like to stay involved. You know, you learn a lot, and business is complex, and you can’t know everything and you can’t be everywhere. Just walking around you see things and you say, “I wonder why they’re doing it that way? That doesn’t seem as efficient.” Or, “Do they know that people in the other store are doing it differently?” So I think it’ll be helpful to have someone with an educated eye watching the business from the inside, to see where those opportunities are. For example, there are several things we’re doing by hand that we ought to be doing in a more automated way. At the moment, those are opportunities. You’re always working for productivity efficiencies because your costs go up and you’ve got to keep your costs and revenues in balance. The casual approach we had to the business fifteen years ago just doesn’t work. Certainly with the high investment in technology we have and the high investment in inventory, we better be very grounded in what we’re doing, and alert.

You came into this neighborhood when it was mostly just car repair shops and warehouses, and now it’s become more of a boutique area. Do you think Powell’s had a hand in that transition? I imagine that most people must think of you as an anchor in this community.
Well, I think we’re an anchor for the city. That may sound immodest, but somebody’s got to say it. If you have a relative come into town, or a friend come into town, and they say “What is there to do in Portland?” If you name three things, one of them is going to be Powell’s. Because the city’s proud of it. You don’t even have to be a reader—you just want to show it off. Biggest bookstore in America, maybe the biggest in the world. You know, if you’ve got the biggest ball of string, people think you’re kooky. But if you have the biggest bookstore, it says something positive about the community—that it supports a store that large—and people like that message. And we try to then earn the respect of the community by not just running a good business, but also being involved in the community. I spend a lot of my time on boards and commissions and planning efforts. I chair the streetcar board. We just created what will now be about eight miles of streetcar. We’re the first city in America to put new streetcars back in.

Like old-style trolleys?
No, they’re modern-looking streetcars, and they’re European built. They’re not San Francisco cute; they’re modern, sleek streetcars. And we move four million people each year. I’ve also been involved in dozens and dozens of committees and commissions, some in the arts and some in social services and some in politics. Not partisan politics, but political efforts to do things or to stop things from happening, all aimed at trying to fulfill the vision of a city that is a twenty-four-hour-a-day city, that works, that’s attractive and great to do business in, and great to live in. I think people respect the work that we do in that area. People will stop me and say, “I love your store,” but sometimes they’ll stop me and say, “I love what you do for the community,” and they’re referring to a broader level of involvement. People ask me if it ever gets tiring, being stopped by people. But I think no; when they stop, that’s problematic. That means we’re doing something that’s not working. I get involved in political things, but they’re almost always around censorship or involved with access to books. Oregon has a very strong constitutional defense of books, but we also have the same element of the population that would like to, for a variety of reasons, control that flow. You know: “Don’t put gay books in schools, don’t let anyone under the age of eighteen be exposed to bad books.” But we win those fights.

Still, they usually take a lot of energy and some money, and with the first anti-gay measure in Portland—Proposition 9—businesses were very closely involved. I have gay staff, of course, and friends who are gay, and they challenged me. There was an element of that legislation that involved not letting libraries, specifically school libraries, have gay-related materials. But we just turned the store into a poster board for that issue, and we won it, and we were very proud of that.

So you helped defeat it at the ballot.
Yep. There were two efforts and we won both of those. Not by overwhelming numbers, but we won. If we can define the issue as one of censorship, and they can define the issue as perversity, and you let that go in a challenge, they’ll win. But Oregonians don’t like censorship, and again I say not by overwhelming numbers, but we do win. And so we get involved in those issues and they seem to come along with certain regularity, every four or five years. Otherwise most of the stuff I get involved in is more planning. I don’t get involved in partisan politics as a company. In fact I keep the company very separate from that. Personally I do get involved, but I try to keep it as separate as I possibly can.

As a citizen, not an owner.
Yeah, yeah.

page_5: 

What do you think people are most surprised to learn about independent bookselling?
I think they’re surprised to know how hard it is. I think everybody—or the uneducated person who doesn’t know much about the business—thinks that as a bookseller you sit in a store, read books, and when someone comes in you have a nice conversation and then recommend and sell some things to that person. That you have a stock of books you believe in and know intimately. That you wear patches on the elbows of your sport jacket, and there’s a cat somewhere in the window, and there’s a fire burning in a fireplace, and there’s the smell of coffee and all that. That it’s a very relaxed and low-key kind of thing. The reality is that it’s extremely intense, whether it’s a small store or a huge store. You’re always pushing the rock up the hill, and it’s relentless, and an awful lot of people get ground down by it. That’s why you see stores close with the frequency they have. People give five or ten years of their lives and realize it’s not going anywhere. And that’s hard. It’s hard to be in an industry that takes so many casualties and that much stress.

The good news is you still get to work with books. And you get to work with people who really love books, both as customers and as staff. I’m sure people who love hardware love their hardware, but, you know, I wouldn’t. There’s a high level of gratification. I was trying to calculate how many books I had sold during my life under the Powell’s name. I’d like to think it’s coming close to a hundred million. You know, in chaos theory there’s this idea that a butterfly flapping its wings on one side of the globe can create a storm in Africa. Well, what about a hundred million butterfly wings? What has it done? You don’t know. People hardly ever tell you, “I read a book and it changed my life.” Most books are probably sold for entertainment, some are sold for information, and some are sold for inspiration. Certainly some are sold for all three at the same time. But I say to myself, “Well, at least when you’re reading a book it’s hard to rob a bank.” I like to think that some of those books have had a positive impact on people’s lives.

Jeremiah Chamberlin teaches writing at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He is also the associate editor of the online journal Fiction Writers Review.

INSIDE POWELL’S BOOKS
How many book sales are you processing a day as online orders?
About 2,500. Upward to 3,000. It spikes at Christmas, and it spikes when the school year starts, but otherwise it’s fairly steady.

How many books do you have in your warehouse for online sales?
About 380,000 in [the main] warehouse, and then there’s about 125,000 in another warehouse.

And how many books do you carry in your stores?
About a million in the flagship store, and probably another six hundred thousand scattered around the other stores. And then we support another two million in Europe. So online we support upward of 4.5 million titles.

How do you determine the price you pay for used books that you buy from online customers? Do you use an algorithm, or is there a person who works on each order?
No, it’s an algorithm. We have several million books in our database to match against, so we just take a percent of either the imprint price or the in-store resale price and pay that amount.

Powell’s Books in Portland, Oregon

For the second installment of our ongoing series of interviews, Inside Indie Bookstores, Jeremiah Chamberlin travelled to Portland, Oregon, to speak with Michael Powell, owner of Powell’s Books.

Powell’s Books 1

Image: 

The “City of Books,” as the four-story flagship store in Portland, Oregon, is known, occupies an entire city block, and carries more than one million books. 

Powell’s Books 2

Image: 

The sixty-eight-thousand-square-foot space is divided into nine color-coded rooms, which together house more than 3,500 sections. “From the moment you walk in,” writes Chamberlin, “it feels as if you could find anything there.”

Powell’s Books 3

Image: 

“People want a calm background for the books,” Michael Powell says. “Our shelves are about twelve feet high. You live in these little 
alleys, and there’s a kind of cozy feel in that that makes it comfortable for customers. And you can sit on the floor, you know, you can spill something on the floor. It’s not a big disaster.”

Powell’s Books 4

Image: 

When the newer sections of the store were built more than a decade ago, the concrete floors were left bare because the industrial feel not only complemented the plain, pine bookcases but also added to the laid-back atmosphere. 

Powell’s Books 5

Image: 

Among the 3,500 sections within the main store, one is devoted to literary journals and books published by small presses.

Powell’s Books 6

Image: 

“We started as a used books company. My dad introduced new books in the late seventies, and his mantra was two of everything and three of nothing,” Michael Powell says. “It’s a substantial part of our business. In dollars, roughly 50 percent of our total business is new books, about 40 percent is used books, and then 10 percent is magazines, cards, and sidelines.”

Powell’s Books 7

Image: 

Michael Powell is “endlessly curious about the world, about his employees’ ideas, about what his customers want to read, and about innovative ways to do business,” Chamberlin writes.

Powell’s Books 8

Image: 

The main warehouse, “which feels like an airplaine hangar but with the sound of jazz floating in the air,” Chamberlin writes, processes as many as three thousand online orders daily. And 70 percent of those are single-title orders.

Powell’s Books 9

Image: 

“I think we’re an anchor for the city,” Michael Powell says. “That may sound immodest, but somebody’s got to say it. If you have a relative come into town, or a friend come into town, and they say “What is there to do in Portland?” If you name three things, one of them is going to be Powell’s. Because the city’s proud of it. You don’t even have to be a reader—you just want to show it off. Biggest bookstore in America, maybe the biggest in the world… It says something positive about the community—that it supports a store that large—and people like that message.”

An Interview With Poet and Independent Bookseller J. W. Marshall

by

Lisa Albers

6.16.08
Online Only

For more than twenty years, J. W. Marshall has been recommending poetry to his customers while writing it himself. He and his wife, poet Christine Deavel, own Seattle’s Open Books: A Poem Emporium, one of only a couple bookstores in the United States devoted exclusively to poetry and a fixture in the city’s literary community.

In March, Oberlin College Press published Marshall’s first full-length collection of poetry, Meaning a Cloud, winner of the 2007 FIELD Poetry Prize. The collection includes poems that previously appeared in the letterpress chapbooks Taken With (2005) and Blue Mouth (2001), both published by Wood Works, an independent press in Seattle, and named finalists for the Washington State Book Award.

The poems in Meaning a Cloud reflect Marshall’s ecumenical knowledge of poetry, a boon to his work as a purveyor of literature in verse. Informed by poetic tradition but shaped by delirious risk-taking, his writing is unabashedly autobiographical, yet stoically refrains from mere confession. Marshall’s poetic gaze into the interior is motivated not by a need to define his own self so much as by a desire to understand all selfhood.

Marshall’s cultivation of poetic presence extends beyond Open Books, as he and his wife cosponsor the Seattle Arts and Lectures poetry series, which brings top-notch poets—Li-Young Lee, Lucille Clifton, and Edward Hirsch, to name a few—to read in the city’s Intiman Theater, often to a packed house. The couple also participates in poetry festivals and conferences and host readings at their shop, which, they say, pays for itself.

Marshall spoke with Poets & Writers Magazine at Open Books, located in Seattle’s Wallingford neighborhood. While Deavel readied the place to open at noon on an overcast Sunday earlier this month, Marshall described what it’s like to take part in both the creation and the dissemination of poetry.

Poets & Writers Magazine: After so many years of supporting the work of poets in a very direct way—by selling their books to readers—you now have a book of your own. How did you transition from bookseller to poet?

J. W. Marshall: Is it easy? No, it’s not. The one thing I’m very aware of is book sales, and so I get to look to see if Ingram is stocking my book, how many copies, and has anybody bought it. It’s a curse. You know, it isn’t a transition; in a way, it’s just two different worlds. They have this intersection. I’m glad to have the bookstore because it keeps my mind off my own book.

P&W: How so?

JWM: I come here, and I’m trying to sell books to people. I’m not trying to sell my book to people because that would get old pretty quickly, and you don’t want to bore folks with credit cards in their hands.

P&W: Did you learn things in the process of being a bookseller that you’re using now as an author yourself?

JWM: Oh, sure. There are connections I have through the bookstore that I very gently tug on to see if I can get readings or offer the book to people who’ve written reviews. I certainly do that. The thing that I’ve done that may be the most worthwhile, honestly [has to do with] Oberlin Press—God bless them; they’ve been very good to work with. David Young is a terrific guy, Linda in the office too. I like them a lot. But they offered their books at a 30 percent discount when the industry standard is 40 or better, and, through Ingram, they offered them at only a 10 percent discount. While I like my book, I was kind of heartbroken thinking that bookstores are not going to order it at 10 percent. So I politicked with them for months. Now [Oberlin has] changed. With next season, they will hit the standard 40.

P&W: It sounds like you reasoned with them on the basis of understanding the business.

JWM: It was the dreaded confluence of bookseller and author. Watch out, publishers! That’s an ugly one.

P&W: What has changed for you with the publication of Meaning a Cloud?

JWM: It’s changed my writing, I think, because now I know what it looks like in a book. The chapbooks were one thing, and those helped a lot, but to see it in a book that has some national distribution makes it seem more real somehow, less ethereal. It actually stopped me from writing for about two months. I try to write every day and was doing a pretty good job of that for years, and once the book came out, I don’t know; I guess there was this shadow cast over the typewriter. I couldn’t quite get there.

P&W: I’ve heard other people talk about that same phenomenon.

JWM: Yes, and you know, I have a counseling degree, and I can’t psychologize it. It’s post-partum something.

P&W: The first section, “Blue Mouth,” is about an accident you had that landed you in the hospital. I’m guessing that happened quite a while ago.

JWM: 1972.

P&W: The third section, “Taken With,” is about your mother’s death. More recent?

JWM: Right.

P&W: You and your mother inhabit parallel worlds during your time in the hospital and her time in a care facility, and the juxtaposition is remarkable, to have the poems bookended in that way. The two sections, beginning and end, had previous lives as chapbooks. What was your process for writing them in the first place for the chapbooks and then bringing them together for this collection?

JWM: In neither case were they written to be chapbooks. The hospital poems were published in 2001, and some of those were written in about 1984. It’s just a matter of writing a lot and then pawing back through and saying, “This goes with this.” I give credit to Paul Hunter, who was the publisher of both chapbooks, because he heard a reading and wanted to publish—there’s a prose poem in the hospital series, “The Nightshift Nurse Brought Her Shoes to Work in a Paper Bag”—he wanted to do that as a broadside. I said, “Of course.” He knew I had other hospital poems he’d heard at readings, and he said he wanted to see a manuscript, so I put one together for him. He gave me an idea about narrative arc; he gets good credit for that. The mom poems just came; she was in a nursing home, and I would visit once a week or more often, and it would spill over into the daily writing. After she died, at one point I just took two years’ worth of pieces of paper and pulled out everything that related to her, and tried to find another chapbook because I thought Paul would publish it.

P&W: The middle section, “Where Else,” is a cogent bridge between those two. The beginning and ending sections deal with inner battles, very personal battles, and then the one in the middle seems to contain echoes of the outside world at battle. In your poems, war filters in through the radio and news or manifests itself in a dream you’re having. Did you write “Where Else” later than the other two sections? How did the poems in that section come together?

JWM: Because I’m writing every day, some things just speak more loudly and ask to be followed up on. It’s probably true for some books that people actually sit down to write them with a set idea in mind. Unless it’s a verse novel or something, that’s not how I would write. But you’re right on it; those other two sections are internal, and I didn’t want to be just internal—I wanted to be part of the public. I wanted a voice that was with and among, not so interior.

P&W: When you’re writing daily, are you writing full poems, do you keep a journal, or do you just write whatever comes?

JWM: Whatever comes. More and more, the important part is, whatever’s in should come out. I don’t want to write the same poem. I could give all these other people’s descriptions, which is kind of cheating I guess. Mary Ruefle at Seattle Arts and Lectures said that she used to think writing was about speaking, and then she realized it is about listening. In a way, I’m up for that. I have language going in my head all the time, so I sit at the typewriter and press the keys.

P&W: It sounds like you weren’t necessarily seeking publication as much as publication sought you.

JWM: I sent to magazines for twenty years. The great thing about the Oberlin is, they publish FIELD magazine, and it’s a magazine I have liked a great deal since I started taking poetry seriously—that would be about 1980. I used to keep little index cards of submissions and rejections, and before I got into FIELD, I had been rejected by them for almost twenty years. Then they took one, they took three, they took another, so I thought, well, I should enter the contest. I’d been trying to get published before, just not rabidly. I was daintily trying to get published.

P&W: How did you get from chapbooks to Meaning a Cloud?

JWM: It was [Oberlin’s] competition, and it was Alice James, another good publisher. I’d put the two chapbooks together, with nothing in the middle, and sent that in for the FIELD prize four years ago. I got a nice e-mail back from David Young saying, “You’re a high finalist,” and that was very encouraging because it was the first time I’d entered a contest. I entered Alice James, and I was a finalist there. In each case, I felt a little guilty because they’d already been chapbooks. I had other work I liked, so I put it in the middle and tried Alice James again but didn’t get anything. Then I tried FIELD again and got it.

P&W: You said you have a degree in counseling—do you have formal training as a poet?

JWM: I have a BA and an MFA in poetry.

P&W: From the University of Washington?

JWM: The BA was here. The MFA is from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. I came back and got a degree in rehab therapy at Seattle University, which was the best education of them all. They were tough. Creative writing programs are not.

P&W: They’re tough in a different way.

JWM: Yes. Right. Socially. [Laughs.] At the UW, the person who got me to really love poetry was Nelson Bentley. Two times a week, he’d encourage us to write a formal poem. He’d say, “Write a villanelle; write a sestina.” As an impressionable, somewhat young person, I tried that, and I liked it a lot. I still look for some kind of iambic progression. I want to bust it up, but I want to know it’s there.

P&W: How would you compare those formal experiences with the informal experiences you’ve had since you’ve been able to read a lot of poetry and support poetry over the years?

JWM: That’s the best education, the bookstore and the customers and the books. I went through school just like everybody else, attending the classes but also attending to my fellow students and my ego and all of that stuff. Reading is by far the best education. We have some great customers who come in and say wonderfully profound, off-the-cuff things that make me look at other writers who I’ve never looked at. I was just reading an interview with Nathaniel Tarn, and he was talking about Language poetry and how he saw Language poetry against the “workshop” poem and the lyric and talked about people who are doing both. As I’m sure you know, [poetry] is a fairly balkanized art, probably all arts are. What’s good about the bookstore is we can’t be balkanized or we wouldn’t be in business. We each read fairly widely and think widely and don’t get into one school or another. That I hope comes through in the writing.

P&W: It does. Even though you’re writing daily and you’re running the bookstore, you have time to read books of poetry as well?

JWM: You have to in order to sell them. Much less reading just for pleasure: People want to know, “Is this like his first book?” “How is she compared to so-and-so?” If I don’t know, then they might as well go to any of our major competitors. We’d rather they didn’t.

P&W: That gets me to the next question, too, because you’re not just running the shop; you’re also supporting poetry in other ways. You’ve been involved with the Seattle Arts and Lecture series and the local poetry festival. Yours sounds like a dream job to many people, but especially for a poet. Is it all silver lining, or are there any clouds?

JWM: It’s retail. There are clouds. This is somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but I was just having a discussion with a wonderful customer, a great guy who was throwing flowers everywhere, telling us what great things we do for the poetry community, and I said, “You know, I’m a clerk. I could be at Les Schwab selling you tires.” There’s a hint of that that’s true. The Seattle Arts and Lectures work is great for us, but it’s economically great for us. While that’s supporting the community, it’s supporting the bookstore. Anything that supports the bookstore to some degree supports the community. At least it means that people can come here and find a relatively obscure book and find people willing to talk about aspects of poetry when it’s difficult to find people who will do that outside the academy, or even inside the academy in some cases.

P&W: Does that ever feel like a drag, the retail aspect: selling, staying profitable?

JWM: Once in a while. In a slow month. There needs to be income. There are clouds to the silver lining. But the silver lining: It’s lovely to be surrounded by poetry. And to have the customers who come in have an interest in poetry. That’s a godsend.

P&W: How do you choose the inventory?

JWM: That comes from two directions. If we have some knowledge about the writer. Some publishers we trust introduce people to us. We listen to our customers. I guess it’s just attentiveness. We’re open to failure. On the other hand, we’ve been in the bookselling business for more than twenty years, and there’s a learning curve. We’ve definitely learned some things.

P&W: Which poets have had the most influence on your own work?

JWM: Because of his love of poetry more than for his own poetry, Nelson Bentley. Bill Knott, and again, partially out of his poetry, which is just wild and liberating in its wildness, and he, too, was a teacher. He at one point asked me in a conference, “So what?” about a poem. That was devastating and was a great question. It’s a great question for all art. I’m afraid a lot of art doesn’t pass that question, not that there’s an answer you could know in advance. Bill was quite important. Then there are people I read, like Dickinson. Early James Tate. White guy American poets in the seventies and eighties.

P&W: What’s next for the poet J. W. Marshall?

JWM: I get to do readings in Michigan and Ohio in the fall. I’m still writing every day and liking some of the things I’m writing, and now, I fantasize about a second book. At the rate that I’m liking what I write, it will be a ways off.

Indie Bookstores Face Uphill Battle

by

Kevin Smokler

November/December 2006
11.1.06
In Print and Online

When fiction writer Barry Eisler heard last summer that Kepler’s Books in Menlo Park, California, would close after fifty years in business, his first reaction was a loud expletive. His second was an e-mail to owner Clark Kepler with an offer to help. “I used to see those big author photos in the window…and I was working on what would become my first novel,” says Eisler, the author of the Jain Rain series of thrillers. “My fantasies of literary success were all based on doing book signings at Kepler’s.”

Eisler was part of a cadre of Bay Area authors who offered to give benefit readings and drive as much business as they could to the bookstore. Their efforts, combined with an alarmed customer base and a group of Silicon Valley investors, helped Kepler’s reopen to cheering crowds last October.

Kepler, whose father Roy founded the store in the spring of 1955, expressed both delight and gratitude for the community’s generosity, but warned that Kepler’s future was far from secure. “I think we were like frogs in hot water,” he says. “The old way of buying books, putting them on shelves, and waiting for someone to come in isn’t working anymore.”

What will? Faced with increased overhead, diversified retail competition, and a dwindling reading population, venerable booksellers once thought invincible are changing locations (Denver’s Tattered Cover), downsizing (Cody’s in Berkeley, California, which was sold in September to Yohan Inc., a book distributor based in Tokyo), or closing altogether (San Francisco’s A Clean Well-Lighted Place for Books). And while the American Booksellers Association (ABA) reports that its membership has held steady over the last few years, dramatic rescues like those of Kepler’s and Brazos Books in Houston, which owner Karl Kilian sold to a group of community investors in March, are becoming increasingly visible.

“When you run an independent bookstore, someone inevitably starts a conversation: ‘How do you compete? How do you stay in business?’ As if things weren’t bad enough with the chains, now you’ve got Amazon,” says Kilian from his new post as director of programs for the Menil Collection, a Houston art museum. Several years ago Kilian wrote a letter to friends and patrons of Brazos warning that the store might be in trouble. Rick Bass, Richard Ford, Susan Sontag, and other authors each wrote back with an offer to give benefit readings. While it turned out not to be necessary, Kilian says that Brazos’s reputation for first-rate author events was a significant part of what made the store’s potential closing “a loss the community would not tolerate.”

One of the less fortunate independent bookstores was Bristol Books in Wilmington, North Carolina, which hosted many readings by students attending the University of North Carolina in nearby Chapel Hill. Bristol Books closed last year after fifteen years in business. A rescue effort, says manager Nicki Leone, was neither possible nor practical.

“I think what happened to Kepler’s Books is great, but has it proved its case yet? Is it a working business model?” asks Leone. That question weighs heavily on the owners of bookstores who have been given a second chance. Jane Moser, who ran a successful children’s bookshop in Houston in the 1980s, was recently hired as the manager of Brazos Books. She says she plans on expanding the store’s hours, increasing its children’s book and cookbook sections, and improving its online presence, as well as deepening the store’s relationship with schools, universities, and area corporations. “Brazos was already an institution,” says Moser. “But times change. You can always do more.”

The seventy-nine-year-old Grolier Poetry Book Shop in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is one of the two remaining all-poetry bookstores in the United States. In April poet and Wellesley College professor Ifeanyi Menkiti bought the store when its previous owner fell ill. Knowing that his teaching job both enabled the purchase of the store and prevented him from working there full-time, Menkiti hired a manager and declared that Grolier could not remain economically viable based solely on its reputation.

“It’s a wonderful little place, filled with great conversation, tradition,” Menkiti says. “Our goal is to move that cultural vision forward but still pay our bills and keep books on the shelves. Then the enterprise will have been worthwhile.”

Before closure looms, booksellers say, writers can help. Hut Landon, the executive director of the Northern California Independent Booksellers Association, recommends that authors include links to Booksense.com, the e-commerce arm of the ABA’s Book Sense program, on their Web sites. Kepler adds that authors can underscore the difference independent bookstores have played in their success when they give lectures and readings. Tracy Wynne, the owner of Cover to Cover Books in San Francisco, which was saved from closure by community activism and author donations in 2003, reports that many local children’s authors now use only Cover to Cover as their bookseller for events and school visits.

Just as authors can no longer publish and then wait for the sales to roll in, more and more booksellers have begun actively finding readers instead of waiting for readers to show up. “If the question is, ‘Can independent bookstores survive?’ part of the answer has to speak to finances,” says Dave Weich, director of marketing and development for the thirty-five-year-old Powell’s Books in Portland, Oregon. “We have to deliver more value than an ethical shopping experience and a community gathering place.… That might mean reaching out to local businesses or working closely with regional schools and authors.”

“You have to be really scrappy,” Weich says. “It is all about being proactive.”

Kevin Smokler is the editor of Bookmark Now: Writing in Unreaderly Times (Basic Books, 2005). He lives in San Francisco.

Faced with increased overhead, diversified retail competition, and a dwindling reading population, venerable booksellers once thought invincible are changing locations, downsizing, or closing altogether.

NJIT Grads Launch Bookswim: Think Netflix Without the Flix

5.25.07
Online Only

George Burke and Shamoon Siddiqui recently launched Bookswim, an online operation that allows readers to rent books much the same way Netflix allows people to rent movies. The two graduates of the New Jersey Institute of Technology posted a beta version of the Web site at www.bookswim.com.

Readers can choose from five rental plans that range in cost from twenty-four to thirty-six dollars per month. Once an account is set up, a customer can choose books from more than two dozen categories and place them in a queue. Bookswim then sends three to eleven books, depending on the chosen plan, to the reader, who can keep them indefinitely. When the customer is ready, books can be returned in a prepaid envelope and the next titles in the queue are mailed.

The new venture comes at a time when independent bookstores are struggling, Bertelsmann is cutting jobs at Bookspan, and voters in Oregon are choosing to shut down libraries. “Could the price of books possibly have gotten any more expensive?” Burke and Siddiqui ask on Bookswim’s Web site. “During any given week, the average bestseller lists for more than $20. Read three of these in a month and you’re spending over $60! What you’re paying for is the right to own the book…but is ownership what you really want?”

Bookswim members can review the books they rent and even rate them on a five-star scale. The “best rental” is currently The Tenth Circle by Jodi Picoult.

 

So Much Depends Upon a New Bookstore: Postcard From Paris

by

Ethan Gilsdorf

11.2.01
Online Only

On the evening of October 29, more than seventy-five people crammed into The Red Wheelbarrow, a newly opened Anglophone bookshop, to inaugurate a reading series and celebrate two literary magazines: Upstairs at Duroc, published at the Anglo cultural center WICE, and Pharos, edited collectively by poet Alice Notley’s workshop at the British Institute in Paris. The enthusiastic crowd spilled onto the cobblestone street, smoking cigarettes and craning their necks for a view of the proceedings.

The reading series, “A Blue Monday,” featured sturdy and in some cases spectacular readings by six writers-some Paris fixtures, others new to the scene, and all relatively unknown outside of the literary expat community. Highlights included Laure Millet’s “The Crying Bowler,” a side-splitting short story about suburban family disorder, and Amy Hollowel’s poems about September 11, which she prefaced by saying that “a poet’s voice is more essential now than ever before.” Srikanth Reddy, a fresh arrival in Paris thanks to Harvard’s Whiting Fellowship, read his poem “Corruption (II),” which features the following lines:

“Lately I have found some comfort in words like here. Here was a chapel for instance. Here is a footprint filling with rain. Here might be enough.”

An international crowd of English-language lovers, including students and professors from the Paris VII university across the street, had found its own “here,” a place to call home, at least for the evening. “The Red Wheelbarrow is my act against globalism, my anti-matrix,” said Penelope Fletcher Le Masson, the bookstore’s Canadian proprietor. “Bookstores will become shrines.” She expects her new venture to complement the existing competition. After two months in business, The Red Wheelbarrow has found its niche among Paris’s half-dozen Anglo bookshops-not as high-brow as The Village Voice, and less bohemian than Shakespeare and Company.

Later, at a nearby wine bar, a post-reading gathering brought together six writers, one teacher, a dancer, two artists, and four magazine editors. A zealous activist named Mark Feurst peddled his new anti-war rag The First Amendment. A sighting of the just-released Frank magazine was rumored, and two representatives from Kilometer Zero-after huddling at a private table to plan their Paris-based art and literary center-promised a new issue by the end of November. Their “KMZ Venue,” a series of six Sunday night variety shows in a bistro basement, kicks off November 4.

“The whole [Blue Monday] event was a confirmation that a bookstore makes itself,” Le Masson said the next day. “People are thirsty to hear what people have written. I especially welcome unknown writers to read, even if they don’t have books to sell.” Upcoming readings at The Red Wheelbarrow include British novelist Rupert Morgan, American poet Kathleen Spivak and, Le Masson hopes, Canadian-Parisian Nancy Huston.

Inside Indie Bookstores: Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi

by

Jeremiah Chamberlin

January/February 2010
1.1.10
In Print and Online

This is the inaugural installment of
Inside Indie Bookstores, a new series of interviews with the entrepreneurs who
represent the last link in the chain that connects writers with their intended audience.
Once the authors, agents, editors, publishers, and salespeople have finished
their jobs, it’s up to these stalwarts to get books where they belong: into the
hands of readers. News of another landmark bookstore closing its doors has
become all too common, so now is the perfect time to shine a brighter light on
the institutions that mean so much to the literary community. Post a comment
below to share your thoughts about a favorite indie bookstore.

The first thing customers notice when
they enter Square Books—apart from the customary shelves and tables
overflowing with hardcovers and paperbacks—is the signed author photographs.
There are hundreds of them, occupying nearly every vertical surface not already
taken up by bookcases. They cover the walls and trail up the narrow staircase
to the second floor, framing windows and reaching all the way to the
fourteen-foot-high tongue-and-groove ceiling. Most of the photos are
black-and-white publicity shots, the kind publishers send with press kits, but there
are also large-format, professional ones—of Larry Brown, Barry Hannah, Richard
Ford, and others. Many have that spare yet beautiful quality of something
Eudora Welty might have taken. Collectively, they comprise an archeological
record of this place’s luminous history—all the authors have passed through
these doors—as well as a document of the important role that this particular
institution has had in promoting writers and writing.

Richard Howorth,
the store’s owner, would modestly deny having had a hand in any of the number
of literary careers that have sprung from the fertile soil in this part of the
country, but the honest truth is that Square Books has served as a nurturing
place for writers—as a “sanctuary,” to borrow a word from William Faulkner,
another Oxford 
native—for more than thirty years now. He and his wife,
Lisa, opened the first store in 1979. Seven years later they moved into their
current location, formerly the Blaylock Drug Store, after buying the building.
Since then, they’ve opened two other shops: in 1993, Off Square Books, which
specializes in used books, remainders, and rare books and serves as the
venue for store events and the Thacker Mountain Radio program; and, in 2003,
Square Books, Jr., a children’s bookstore. Howorth also helped establish the
Oxford Conference for the Book, which brings together writers, editors, and
other representatives from the publishing world each spring for public
readings, roundtables, and panel discussions on writing and literacy. This
year, as part of the seventeenth annual event, the conference will celebrate
the legacy of Barry Hannah.

I made my first
literary pilgrimage to Oxford nearly a decade ago. At the time, I was running
Canterbury Booksellers, a small independent bookshop in Madison, Wisconsin.
Invariably, whenever authors visited our store, one of the topics we’d end up
discussing was where they were headed next or where they’d just been. Square
Books was always mentioned as a place they one day hoped to go, were looking
forward to going, or couldn’t wait to get back to. Partly this has to do with
its lineage, for few places can claim to have hosted readings for such varied
and important authors as Etheridge Knight, Toni Morrison, Allen Ginsberg, Alice
Walker, Alex Haley, George Plimpton, William Styron, Peter Matthiessen, and
others. And partly it has to do with the Howorths themselves, who, despite the
cliché about Southern hospitality, make all authors feel as if they were the
first to visit the store.

This was certainly
the case for me. Even though I wasn’t reading, and even though I hadn’t been
back to town in almost ten years, I was welcomed with enormous generosity when
I arrived. For two days I was given the grand tour, including a dinner with
local writers at the Howorths’ house, a walk through Faulkner’s home, a trip to
the Ole Miss campus to see the bronze statue of James Meredith under a marble
archway in which the word courage is carved into the stone, as well as an oral history of what took place
in Oxford during the Civil War as we drove through the shady neighborhoods of
town.

No person could
have been a better guide to the literary and historical roots of Oxford.
Howorth grew up across the street from Faulkner’s home (in the house where the
bookseller’s father, a retired doctor, still lives). Faulkner’s
sister-in-law used to chase Richard and his brothers off the property
for pestering her cow and causing mischief. All the Howorth brothers still
reside in town—one a judge, one a retired lawyer, one an architect, and one a
retired admissions director at the University of Mississippi. In addition to
his thirty years as a local bookseller, Richard, the middle brother, also just
finished his second term as mayor of Oxford.

It was with this
same generosity of spirit that Howorth agreed to talk with me at Square Books
one afternoon. We sat upstairs, at a small table in an out-of-the-way corner. I
chose the spot because it seemed secluded—though, coincidentally, we were
between the Faulkner and Southern Literature sections. Howorth commandeered the
espresso machine and made us cappuccinos before we settled in to chat, fixing
us our drinks himself. He is a man quick to laugh, and despite having spent the
past three decades as a bookseller and the last eight years in public office,
seems largely optimistic about the world. Or, rather, has learned to appreciate
life’s quirks, mysteries, and small pleasures.

How did you come to bookselling?
Deliberately. I wanted to open a
bookstore in my hometown, so I sought work in a bookstore in order to learn the
business and see whether it was something that I would enjoy doing, and would
be capable of doing.

The apprentice model.
Yes. Lisa and I both worked in the
Savile Bookshop, in Georgetown, for two years. In the fifties and sixties it
was a Washington institution. It was a great old store. The founder died about
ten years before we arrived. It had been through a series of owners and
managers, and by the time we were working there it was on its last leg. It was
also at the time that Crown Books was first opening in the Washington
suburbs—it was the first sort of chain deep-discounter. The Savile had this
reputation as a great store, but it was obviously slipping. We were on credit
hold all over the place. So it ended up being a great learning experience.

Then you came back here with the
intention of opening Square Books?
Sure. We opened the first store in the
upstairs, over what was, I think, the shoe department of Neilson’s Department
Store. Back then the town square was so much different from what it is today,
and commerce was not so terribly vital. It was certainly viable, but the
businesses didn’t turn over very much because the families that owned the
businesses usually owned the buildings. Old Mr. Denton at his furniture store
didn’t care if he sold a stick of furniture all day; it was just what he did,
run his store. So when I came home I knew I wanted to be on the square, and I
just couldn’t find a place. My aunt owned the building where Neilson’s had a
long-term lease on the ground floor, but there were three offices
upstairs—rented to an insurance agent, a lawyer, and a real estate agent who
were paying forty dollars, thirty dollars, and thirty dollars a month,
respectively, for a total of a hundred dollars. So my initial rent was a hundred
dollars a month.

Did you have a particular vision
for this store from the beginning, or did it change over time?
The initial vision is still very much
what the store is today. I wanted it to serve the community. Because of
Mississippi’s distinct history and character, as well as social disruptions,
the state—and Oxford, in particular, due to the desegregation of the
university in 1962, when there was a riot and two people were killed—was
regarded as a place of hatred and bigotry. And I knew that this community was not that. I knew that there were a lot of other
people here who viewed the world the same way my family did, and my instinct
was that people would support the store not just because they wanted to buy
books or wanted a bookstore here, but because they knew—not to overstate
it—that a bookstore would send a message. That we’re not all illiterate, we’re
not all…it said something about both the economic and cultural health of the
community.

Has that happened?
The university, for instance, has made
a lot of progress—there’s now a statue of James Meredith; there’s now an
institute for racial reconciliation at the university. And most young people
today know what the civil rights movement was, but they don’t know the specific
events and how tense and dramatic and difficult all of that was at that time.

You grew up in the midst of
that.
Correct. I was thirteen when
Goodman and Chaney and Schwerner were murdered [in 1964] and buried in Neshoba
County, Mississippi, and I was eleven when the riots at Ole Miss occurred. I
remember my mother crying when that happened. Her father taught English at the
university for years, and she knew that it was a tragic event.

As someone who’s spent most of
his life in this town, how did you see the place after having been the mayor?
My view of the community is
essentially no different from what it was before I was mayor. Except, I would
say, I really appreciate all the people who work
for the city. A lot of good public servants.

When you talk with writers about
places they hope to visit someday, they always name Oxford. Partly that’s
because this is Faulkner country—his house is here, and his grave is here, and
so on—but how did this place become such a literary destination in the last
several decades?
You know, it’s a lot of things. Beginning with Faulkner. But there were
people preceding Faulkner connected to the university, mostly. Stark
Young
was a novelist and a New York Times drama critic and an editor at the New Republic who helped Faulkner a little bit. Phil Stone was
a lawyer here, educated at Yale, who introduced Faulkner to Swinburne and Joyce
and a lot of the reading that was so influential to him when he was very young.
And primarily because of the presence of the university, there’s always been
something of a literary environment. But I think because Faulkner’s major work
dealt with this specific geography and culture so intimately, and because of the mythology he created, that
makes for a very particular kind of literary tourism. Hemingway didn’t quite do
that with Oak Park. It wasn’t a little native postage stamp of soil. And in
Mississippi in general there were also Richard Wright, Tennessee Williams,
Eudora Welty—these great writers of the twentieth century.

More recently,
Willie Morris moved to Oxford in 1980, within a year after we opened the store.
He was from Yazoo City, Mississippi. He was the editor of the [University of]
Texas student newspaper, and from there got a job with the Texas Observer, where he became editor at a very young age. He
was hired by Harper’s Magazine to
be an editor, and a few years later, in 1967, became its youngest editor in
chief. And while at Harper’s,
he really changed the magazine and was on the ground floor of New Journalism.
He published David Halberstam and Larry L. King; he published Norman Mailer’s
“Armies of the Night” [originally titled “Steps of the Pentagon”], the longest
magazine piece ever to have been published; and he published Walker Percy.

He also wrote a
book called North Toward Home,
which was his autobiography, published in 1967, that kind of dealt with this
whole ambivalence of the South and being from here and loving so much about
it—stuff about growing up in Yazoo City, and his friends, and his baseball
team, and his dog, and his aunt Minnie who lived next door—but also the
racism. The murders and the civil rights movement. And he had to get out of the
South ’cause he loved it too much and hated so much of everything that was
going on.

That sense of conflictedness.
Right, right. The book expressed all
that and was a touchstone for a lot of people my age. Then he got fired from or
quit Harper’s, depending on
the story. He got in a fight with the publisher and submitted his resignation,
believing that he wouldn’t accept it. But he did. [Laughter.] So he continued to write, but none of his
subsequent books were quite as big as North Toward Home. And Willie was a big drinker and he had kind of
run out of gas in the black hole, which is what he called Manhattan. But Dean
Faulkner Wells, William Faulkner’s niece, and her husband, Larry, raised money
to give Willie a visiting spot here at the university. So he came here that
spring as a writer-in-residence. And he immediately befriended us and the
bookstore. He said, “Richard, I’m going to bring all these writers, all my
friends. I’m going to bring them down here and they’re going to do book
signings at your store and we’re going to have a great time.”

The summer I came
back to open the store was also about the same time that Bill Ferris, who was
the first full-time director at the newly established Center for the Study of
Southern Culture at the university, came here. Bill was originally from
Vicksburg; he’d been to Davidson [College in North Carolina] and got a PhD in
folklore under Henry Glassy at Penn, taught at Yale. Bill was a tremendous guy
and very charismatic and bright and enthusiastic and full of ideas. Bill had a
tremendous influence on the university and the community and our store. On the
South as a whole. What he did was, despite this whole business of the South’s
being known for racism and bigotry and poverty and illiteracy and teen
pregnancy and all the things we’re still sort of known for [laughter], he took Creole cooking and quilt making and basketry and storytelling
and literature and the blues—all these aspects of Southern culture—and made
it fascinating to the public. So Bill had a tremendous influence on the
community and the bookstore. He also knew a lot of writers. The first book
signing we did was with Ellen Douglas, the second month we were open, October
1979. She had a new novel coming out called The Rock Cried Out. The second person to do a book signing at the
store was a black poet who was originally from Corinth, who had taught himself
to write while doing time at the Indiana State Prison: Etheridge Knight. [Laughter.] Bill knew Etheridge and he got Etheridge to come
here. Bill also knew Alice Walker, got her to come here. Knew Alex Haley, got
him to come here. And Willie got George Plimpton and William Styron and Peter
Matthiessen. All these people were coming and doing events in the bookstore.
So, really, from the time that we opened, we had this incredible series of
events. Then the store kind of became known. And in those days the whole author
tour business was nothing like what it soon thereafter became. In the seventies
and early eighties, publishers would send an author to San Francisco and Denver
and Washington and Atlanta. Maybe. But primarily they were there to do
interviews with the press and go on radio and television. Publicity tours, not
a book-signing tour. They didn’t go to bookstores. We weren’t by any means the
first store to do this, but there weren’t many who were doing this at the same
time as we were. The Tattered Cover [Denver] and Elliott Bay [Seattle] and the
Hungry Mind [Saint Paul]. I think that’s kind of how the circuit business got
started.

Then Barry Hannah
moved here in 1983 to teach creative writing. And his personality and writing
style particularly contrasted with Willie’s. Because Willie, he was kind of a
journalist. And even though he could be critical of the south, part of his
method in being critical was to get to a point where he could also be a
cheerleader for the south. And Barry I think kind of looked down his nose at
that sort of writing. You know, Barry was the Miles Davis of modern American
letters at that point. There would’ve been kind of a rivalry with any writer,
any other writer in town, I suppose. Plus, both of them had to struggle with
Faulkner’s ghost—there was that whole thing. But it was an immensely fertile
period in the community’s literary history.

So that convergence of events
helped create the foundation you would build the store upon.
Right, right. And then, you know,
Larry Brown emerged from the soil. His first book came out in 1988. John
Grisham: His first book was published in 1989.

Had John been living here the
whole time too?
No, he’d been living in north
Mississippi, by South Haven. He was in the state legislature. But when he was
in law school at Ole Miss, he heard William Styron speak. Willie had invited
Styron down for the first time, and that was when he got the bug. That’s when
John said, “Wow, I’m gonna do something with this.”

And now he endows a great
fellowship for emerging southern writers here at Ole Miss.
Correct. And he did that because he
wanted to try to build on what Willie did with all the people he brought in.

Speaking of nurturing young writers,
I once heard that when Larry
Brown was working as a firefighter he came into the store and asked you whom he
should read.
Nah.

Is that not correct?
No. [Laughter.]

Was he already writing on his own?
Firemen work twenty-four hours and
then they’re off for forty-eight hours. And then they’re back on for
twenty-four and they’re off for forty-eight. So all firemen have other jobs.
They’re usually painters or carpenters or builders or something. Larry worked
at a grocery store. He was also a plasterer; he was a Sheetrock guy; he was a
painter; he was a carpenter. He did all of this stuff. And he’d always been a
pretty big reader. Larry’s mother, especially, was a really big reader of
romance novels. So Larry had this idea that he could supplement his income by
writing a book that would make money. And he would go to the Lafayette County
Public Library and check out books on how to be a writer, how to get your book
published. He went through all of those. And I think he read that you start by
getting published in magazines, so then he began to read magazines—fiction
especially. He would read Harper’s and Esquire. Larry was
a complete omnivore of music and film and literature.

He took it all in.
Took it all in and he had an
incredible memory. You would talk about a movie; he knew the producer, the
director, the actor, the actresses, the location; music, the song, the group,
who was on bass, the drums. On and on and on. And at some point, yes, early on,
he came into the store. When I first opened the store, I was the only person
who worked there. So I was talking to everyone who came in. And we started
talking and, you know, I didn’t give him a reading list and say, “Read these
ten books and that’ll make you a writer.” Larry was already reading Raymond
Carver and Harry Crews. Cormac McCarthy very early, long before Cormac broke
out. Flannery O’Connor. So we talked about those authors, but Larry completely
found his own way. He was completely self-taught. And I did later on help him
in a specific way when he was kind of stuck. But he would’ve gotten out of the
jam that he thought he was in at the time.

What was that?
Well, he had had one or two stories
published and then he kind of couldn’t get anything else published. He kept
sending off these short stories and they kept coming back. Then he called me
one day—and, you know, I hadn’t read anything he’d written, hadn’t asked to; I
don’t go there with writers unless they ask me. It was a Sunday. He said, “I
don’t know what else to do. I’m sorry I’m calling you, I don’t mean to bother
you, but I think I must be doing something wrong. Everything’s coming back.” I
said, “Larry, I’d be happy to read them. Bring me a few of your stories. I’m no
editor or agent or anything, but I’d be willing to read them.”

So he came over
with a manila folder. It was raining outside. We sat down at the dining room
table and I opened this folder. He was sitting right across from me, and I just
started reading. The first story was “Facing the Music.” You know, I read maybe
four pages and I said, “Larry, this is an incredible story. You’re not doing
anything wrong.” And then I finished reading it and chills went down my spine.
Because I knew that it was a great story. It still is a great story. And I told
him, “This is going to be published. I don’t know when, I don’t know where,
just don’t despair.” Actually I was looking the other day at a note he’d sent
me. He thanked me for helping to make it better, that specific story. But I
don’t remember what that was. I may have said, “You might move this sentence
from here to here,” or something like that.

But mostly you were telling him
to keep the faith.
Exactly. Also, I suggested he
contact Frederick Barthelme and Rie Fortenberry at the Mississippi Review, who’d published his first serious publication, a
story called “The Rich.” I said, “What about this story? Where have you sent it? Have you sent it to the
Mississippi Review?” And he said, “No,
‘cause they’ve already published me.”

That’s a good thing! [Laughter.]
So he sent it to them and they
published it and he dedicated that story to me. And then later on I helped him
meet Shannon Ravenel, who published his first book.

It seems like so many of the greatest writers of American letters have
come out of the south: Tennessee Williams, Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Flannery
O’Connor. And, more recently, Tom Franklin, Larry Brown, Barry Hannah. All these
people whose work I deeply admire. They share something…an intimacy with place
perhaps?
It often gets explained in phrases
like that, but I think that for the moderns…well, Faulkner was a genius. But I
think he also realized early on what he could do and in contrast to the many
things that he could not do.

What do you mean by that?
Well, he was a failure as a
student. But I think with someone like Eudora Welty, who was an intelligent and
independent woman of that time, there were limited opportunities for things
that she could do. But writing, writing was one of them. And photography was
one. So I think it’s tied to economics in some way, but I also think that all
of the rich and conflicted history of the South has a lot to do with it, all
the various tensions. Because literature is built on conflict. There’s also the
whole war thing, the Civil War. Being the loser in that war makes us akin to
other literature-producing places—Ireland, Russia.

Do you see any collective
project happening as a trend in writing right now, in the same way that, say,
the modernists were trying to make sense of a new world?
No, but I think there are always
different schools in the same way that Updike focused on the suburban married
life, and I think other writers operate in certain other niches.

How about southern writers
specifically? How are they trying to make sense of what the south looks like
right now?
I think Southerners are mostly
concerned with just telling a good story.

The tale?
Yeah.

Since we’re talking about
contemporary southern writers, let’s discuss the Conference of the Book. How
did that start?
The Faulkner conference is held
every summer. I think it started in 1974. It’s always drawn a crowd—people
come from California, Japan, Canada, wherever. And over the years, people would
come in the store and say, “I heard about that Faulkner conference and I’d love
to come back here and go to that, but I don’t think I want to do Faulkner for a
whole week.” These are people who aren’t necessarily Faulkner fans or scholars,
but who want to come for the experience.

A literary pilgrimage.
Right. And at the same time, I was
going to conferences like ABA [American Booksellers Association] and BEA
[BookExpo America] and SIBA [Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance], where
you would hear not just writers but also publishers and agents and editors
talking about the process of publishing a book—all these great stories which
typically were not available to the public. And I thought, “What if we had a
conference in Oxford where people could get the local experience, but also a
more general thing about books?”

So I talked to Ann
Abadie, who was a founding director of the Faulkner conference. I told Ann,
who’s been a good friend for a long time, “I’ve got this idea. Instead of just
having the Faulkner conference, why don’t we do another kind of literary
conference? We can just talk about books and what’s going on with The Book and how it’s doing today. We’ll invite editors and
agents and people who have these conversations, but make it for the public.”
And Ann said, “Yeah, maybe soon.” Then, after about three or four years, she
said, “Let’s do this book conference thing.” And so we did.

Is it focused specifically on
Southern writers?
No. I was trying for it not to be just a Southern thing.

That would be too insular?
Yeah, and frankly I get tired of
all this stuff about the South all the time. And I thought that the university
and the community had the opportunity to create a one of a kind conference.

Where would you like to see this
conference five years from now? Ten years from now?
In an ideal world it would have a
larger budget to bring people in. For instance, Nicholson Baker wrote that
article in the New Yorker about the
Kindle. You know, that’s a timely thing. He could come and do a lecture,
perhaps even be on a panel with other people from the industry, people like
[Amazon founder] Jeff Bezos.

So you want it to explore all
the different intersections, not just publishing.
Right. Everything that’s going on
that affects books. We want to put this thing called The Book on the operating
table and cut into it and see what’s going on.

With developments like the Kindle
and Japanese cell-phone novels and Twitter stories, how does a bookstore stay
relevant in the twenty-first century?
I
think there are a couple of things. There are the technological developments,
which are interesting and positive in that they offer opportunities for reading
and the dissemination of literature and ideas in a way that might be greater than
the way we’ve historically done before. As Nicholson Baker pointed out in that New
Yorker article, digital
transference of text is much cheaper than disseminating literature through
books. So you have that, which in many ways, properly conceived, is a positive
development.

But the question
we need to ask is, How does the technology threaten this thing that we love so
much, and has been so critical to the development of civilization for so long?
And how do we, in terms of that threat, deal with and understand it? There’s
also the cultural threat of younger people who are growing up not reading
books. The way I see it, though, I think that digital technology will go on, on
its own path, no matter what. But in terms of books, I maintain that a book is
like a sailboat or a bicycle, in that it’s a perfect invention. I don’t care
what series number of Kindle you’re on, it is never going to be better than
this. [Holds up a book.] I
don’t see how it could be. I could be wrong. Who knows? But this thing is
pretty wonderful—and irreplaceable.

I think they can
coexist is what I’m saying. And by the same token, I think bookstores offer an experience to book consumers that is
unique. To be able to go into a place physically, to experience a sensation
that is the precise opposite of all that is digital, and to talk to people
about books in a business that has as one of its objectives a curatorial
function and the presentation of literature as another—that is, I believe,
irreplaceable. Of course, the question we all recognize is how the development
of technology, in reducing the industry that creates the physical book, will
change bookselling. Because there won’t be as many of these [books], and
therefore the cost will go up.

page_5: 

So what is the future for
independent bookstores? If their role is curatorial, will they become more like
art galleries? Should they have public funding? Or will bookstores become
nonprofit entities?
I don’t know. I hope not, though. It’s
a very difficult business. But in many ways, I like the fact that it’s a
difficult business. Otherwise, people who want to make money—by selling
crap—would be trying to get into the book business. [Laughter.]

This store specializes in
literature, especially southern literature, as well as books about this region
and this place. Do you think that specialization is part of the reason for your
success?
I don’t really think of it in terms
of specializing. I think of it in terms of giving our customers what they want.
If Nietzsche had been born here, our philosophy section would probably look a
little different. [Laughter.]

So what are bookstores that are
succeeding doing right?
Well, I think a lot of it has to do
with adaptation. The business’s ability to adapt in all kinds of ways to its
own market, to be innovative, to not ignore the technological developments and,
in some cases, take advantage of them. Thacker Mountain Radio was kind of an
innovation.

How did that come to be?
Ever since the bookstore opened,
there’ve always been people coming in wanting to have their art exhibit in the
bookstore, or to stage a play, or do a music performance.

So that really meets your vision
of a community place.
Yeah, except that I learned fairly
early on that you have to make it relate to selling books. You can’t just be an
all-purpose community center; you’ve got to make it conform to the mission of
selling books and promoting writers and literature. Because I did have art
exhibits and it was just sort of a pain. So I kind of got away from that. What
happened, then, was two graduate students who had been trying to develop a
little kind of a music radio show that wasn’t really working at one of the
local bars, came and wanted to use Off Square Books as a venue. I told them
that I’d done enough of this kind of messing around to know that I wasn’t going
to do something like that unless it could promote writers. I said, “Maybe if we
did a radio show that incorporated both music and writers it could be
something.” And that’s how that got started.

It’s been good for
our book business, mainly because writers really want to be on the show. And a
lot of publishers want their writers to be on the show because it’s broadcast
on Mississippi Public Broadcasting, so it reaches a large audience. Which is
always appealing, as you know, to publicists.

Do they just read? Do they do
interviews?
Depends on what the book is and how they
want to present it. They can read; they can talk about it. We’ve had a lot of
writers come up there and just tell stories. It’s performed, recorded, and
broadcast live on local commercial radio. Then we edit stuff for time, do all
the production work on the disc, and send it down to Jackson where they
rebroadcast the show.

It’s often really
great. And a lot of times we have musicians who’ve written books come on the
show, or we have writers who are musicians who like to play on the show.
There’s almost no writer who, given the choice early in their career, wouldn’t
have rather been a rock musician. [Laughter.]

Now that you’ve finished your
two terms as mayor, you’re returning to the bookstore full time again. What are
you most looking forward to? What did you most miss?
I just missed being here. I missed
being around the books, going down to the receiving room and seeing what’s come
in each day, talking to the customers, knowing which books are coming out,
being able to snag an advance reading copy of something that I know I’m gonna
be interested in. The whole shooting match. So what I’m doing now is really
kind of returning to my roots. I’m just going to be on the floor. I’m not going
to resume buying; I’m not going to be doing all the business stuff; I’m not
going to go running around to every store trying to control staff schedules and
training. I just want to—

Be around the customers and the
books.
Yeah. There may come a point when I
want to do something else. I don’t know. But that’s the plan now.

Where would you like to see the
store ten years from now? Is there anything you still want to achieve with it?
No. But returning to that whole
future of books conversation, one of the things that I should’ve added has to
do with what’s happened at Square Books, Jr. We’re selling more children’s
books than ever. The level of enthusiasm and excitement about books from
toddlers to first readers to adolescents and teens…if you go in there and hang
around for a few hours, you would never even think that there might be such a
thing as a digital book.

Jeremiah Chamberlin teaches writing at
the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He is also the associate editor of the
online journal Fiction Writers Review.

INSIDE SQUARE BOOKS
What were your best-selling books in
2009?
John Grisham signs books
for us—lots of them—every year, so his book is usually our number one seller.
Our best-seller list is dominated by local and regional titles—books about
Oxford or Mississippi or about or by Mississippians. Other than Grisham’s The Associate, I think our top 2009 sellers are The Help by Kathryn Stockett, The Devil’s Punchbowl by Greg Iles, and In the Sanctuary of Outcasts by Neil White. All three writers are from
Mississippi, and Neil lives here in Oxford. Two of the books are set in
Mississippi.

What
books did you most enjoy selling in 2009?
Lark and
Termite by Jayne Anne Phillips, A
Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore, The
Missing by Tim Gautreaux, and Waveland
by Frederick Barthelme.

How do you compile your Staff Picks section?
There are no constraints
on staff picks, except the book has to be in print, of course. And, after a
time, the recommendation has to have made at least a sale or two. Doesn’t have
to be paperback, but they always seem to be. Anybody can recommend anything
using any language, although I recently made one staffer change his
recommendation because he’d written in big letters, “It’s great! I’m serious!
Just buy it!” It was the exclamation points that really did it. I told him to
see Strunk and White.

Any
books you’re particularly excited about in 2010?
I’m excited about Jim Harrison’s new book, The Farmer’s Daughter; that
big, wonderful new novel The
Swan Thieves by Elizabeth Kostova, who has agreed to come to our
store; and Brad Watson’s new book of short stories, Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives, which has
one of the best stories I’ve read in years, “Vacuum.”

Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi

For the first installment of our new series Inside Indie Bookstores, Jeremiah Chamberlin travelled to Oxford, Mississippi, to interview Richard Howorth, owner of Square Books. For the past thirty years, the independent bookstore has been a cornerstone of Oxford’s literary community. 

Square Books 1

Image: 

Richard Howorth and his wife, Lisa, opened the first store in 1979. Seven years later they moved into their current location, formerly the Blaylock Drug Store, after buying the building.

 

Square Books 2

Image: 

The first thing customers notice when they enter Square Books is the signed author photographs. There are hundreds of them, occupying nearly every vertical surface not already taken up by bookcases. They cover the walls and trail up the narrow staircase to the second floor, framing windows and reaching all the way to the fourteen-foot-high tongue-and-groove ceiling.

Square Books 3

Image: 
The names of sections, grouped by topic, are painted on the stairs leading to the second floor of the stoor.

Square Books 4

Image: 

Most of the photos are black-and-white publicity shots, the kind publishers send with press kits, but there are also large-format, professional ones—of Larry Brown, Barry Hannah, Richard Ford, and others. Collectively, they comprise an archaeological record of this place’s luminous history—all the authors have passed through these doors—as well as a document of the important role that this particular institution has had in promoting writers and writing.

 

Square Books 5

Image: 

Jeremiah Chamberlin sat with Richard Howorth upstairs, at a small table in an out-of-the-way corner. “I chose the spot because it seemed secluded—though, coincidentally, we were between the Faulkner and Southern Literature sections,” Chamberlin writes. “Howorth commandeered the espresso machine and made us cappuccinos before we settled in to chat, fixing us our drinks himself.”

Square Books 7

Image: 
A bronze statue of Oxford native William Faulkner in front of the city hall, which is located near Square Books.

Square Books 8

Image: 
In addition to Square Books, Richard Howorth and his wife, Lisa, have opened two other shops: Off Square Books, which specializes in used books, remainders, and rare books and serves as the venue for store events and the Thacker Mountain Radio program, in 1993; and, in 2003, Square Books, Jr., a children’s bookstore.

Square Books 9

Image: 

“To be able to go into a place physically, to experience a sensation that is the precise opposite of all that is digital, and to talk to people about books in a business that has as one of its objectives a curatorial function and the presentation of literature as another—that is, I believe, irreplaceable,” Howorth says.

 

An Interview With Poet and Independent Bookseller J. W. Marshall
Indie Bookstores Face Uphill Battle
So Much Depends Upon a New Bookstore: Postcard From Paris

Inside Indie Bookstores: Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi

by

Jeremiah Chamberlin

January/February 2010
1.1.10
In Print and Online

This is the inaugural installment of
Inside Indie Bookstores, a new series of interviews with the entrepreneurs who
represent the last link in the chain that connects writers with their intended audience.
Once the authors, agents, editors, publishers, and salespeople have finished
their jobs, it’s up to these stalwarts to get books where they belong: into the
hands of readers. News of another landmark bookstore closing its doors has
become all too common, so now is the perfect time to shine a brighter light on
the institutions that mean so much to the literary community. Post a comment
below to share your thoughts about a favorite indie bookstore.

The first thing customers notice when
they enter Square Books—apart from the customary shelves and tables
overflowing with hardcovers and paperbacks—is the signed author photographs.
There are hundreds of them, occupying nearly every vertical surface not already
taken up by bookcases. They cover the walls and trail up the narrow staircase
to the second floor, framing windows and reaching all the way to the
fourteen-foot-high tongue-and-groove ceiling. Most of the photos are
black-and-white publicity shots, the kind publishers send with press kits, but there
are also large-format, professional ones—of Larry Brown, Barry Hannah, Richard
Ford, and others. Many have that spare yet beautiful quality of something
Eudora Welty might have taken. Collectively, they comprise an archeological
record of this place’s luminous history—all the authors have passed through
these doors—as well as a document of the important role that this particular
institution has had in promoting writers and writing.

Richard Howorth,
the store’s owner, would modestly deny having had a hand in any of the number
of literary careers that have sprung from the fertile soil in this part of the
country, but the honest truth is that Square Books has served as a nurturing
place for writers—as a “sanctuary,” to borrow a word from William Faulkner,
another Oxford 
native—for more than thirty years now. He and his wife,
Lisa, opened the first store in 1979. Seven years later they moved into their
current location, formerly the Blaylock Drug Store, after buying the building.
Since then, they’ve opened two other shops: in 1993, Off Square Books, which
specializes in used books, remainders, and rare books and serves as the
venue for store events and the Thacker Mountain Radio program; and, in 2003,
Square Books, Jr., a children’s bookstore. Howorth also helped establish the
Oxford Conference for the Book, which brings together writers, editors, and
other representatives from the publishing world each spring for public
readings, roundtables, and panel discussions on writing and literacy. This
year, as part of the seventeenth annual event, the conference will celebrate
the legacy of Barry Hannah.

I made my first
literary pilgrimage to Oxford nearly a decade ago. At the time, I was running
Canterbury Booksellers, a small independent bookshop in Madison, Wisconsin.
Invariably, whenever authors visited our store, one of the topics we’d end up
discussing was where they were headed next or where they’d just been. Square
Books was always mentioned as a place they one day hoped to go, were looking
forward to going, or couldn’t wait to get back to. Partly this has to do with
its lineage, for few places can claim to have hosted readings for such varied
and important authors as Etheridge Knight, Toni Morrison, Allen Ginsberg, Alice
Walker, Alex Haley, George Plimpton, William Styron, Peter Matthiessen, and
others. And partly it has to do with the Howorths themselves, who, despite the
cliché about Southern hospitality, make all authors feel as if they were the
first to visit the store.

This was certainly
the case for me. Even though I wasn’t reading, and even though I hadn’t been
back to town in almost ten years, I was welcomed with enormous generosity when
I arrived. For two days I was given the grand tour, including a dinner with
local writers at the Howorths’ house, a walk through Faulkner’s home, a trip to
the Ole Miss campus to see the bronze statue of James Meredith under a marble
archway in which the word courage is carved into the stone, as well as an oral history of what took place
in Oxford during the Civil War as we drove through the shady neighborhoods of
town.

No person could
have been a better guide to the literary and historical roots of Oxford.
Howorth grew up across the street from Faulkner’s home (in the house where the
bookseller’s father, a retired doctor, still lives). Faulkner’s
sister-in-law used to chase Richard and his brothers off the property
for pestering her cow and causing mischief. All the Howorth brothers still
reside in town—one a judge, one a retired lawyer, one an architect, and one a
retired admissions director at the University of Mississippi. In addition to
his thirty years as a local bookseller, Richard, the middle brother, also just
finished his second term as mayor of Oxford.

It was with this
same generosity of spirit that Howorth agreed to talk with me at Square Books
one afternoon. We sat upstairs, at a small table in an out-of-the-way corner. I
chose the spot because it seemed secluded—though, coincidentally, we were
between the Faulkner and Southern Literature sections. Howorth commandeered the
espresso machine and made us cappuccinos before we settled in to chat, fixing
us our drinks himself. He is a man quick to laugh, and despite having spent the
past three decades as a bookseller and the last eight years in public office,
seems largely optimistic about the world. Or, rather, has learned to appreciate
life’s quirks, mysteries, and small pleasures.

How did you come to bookselling?
Deliberately. I wanted to open a
bookstore in my hometown, so I sought work in a bookstore in order to learn the
business and see whether it was something that I would enjoy doing, and would
be capable of doing.

The apprentice model.
Yes. Lisa and I both worked in the
Savile Bookshop, in Georgetown, for two years. In the fifties and sixties it
was a Washington institution. It was a great old store. The founder died about
ten years before we arrived. It had been through a series of owners and
managers, and by the time we were working there it was on its last leg. It was
also at the time that Crown Books was first opening in the Washington
suburbs—it was the first sort of chain deep-discounter. The Savile had this
reputation as a great store, but it was obviously slipping. We were on credit
hold all over the place. So it ended up being a great learning experience.

Then you came back here with the
intention of opening Square Books?
Sure. We opened the first store in the
upstairs, over what was, I think, the shoe department of Neilson’s Department
Store. Back then the town square was so much different from what it is today,
and commerce was not so terribly vital. It was certainly viable, but the
businesses didn’t turn over very much because the families that owned the
businesses usually owned the buildings. Old Mr. Denton at his furniture store
didn’t care if he sold a stick of furniture all day; it was just what he did,
run his store. So when I came home I knew I wanted to be on the square, and I
just couldn’t find a place. My aunt owned the building where Neilson’s had a
long-term lease on the ground floor, but there were three offices
upstairs—rented to an insurance agent, a lawyer, and a real estate agent who
were paying forty dollars, thirty dollars, and thirty dollars a month,
respectively, for a total of a hundred dollars. So my initial rent was a hundred
dollars a month.

Did you have a particular vision
for this store from the beginning, or did it change over time?
The initial vision is still very much
what the store is today. I wanted it to serve the community. Because of
Mississippi’s distinct history and character, as well as social disruptions,
the state—and Oxford, in particular, due to the desegregation of the
university in 1962, when there was a riot and two people were killed—was
regarded as a place of hatred and bigotry. And I knew that this community was not that. I knew that there were a lot of other
people here who viewed the world the same way my family did, and my instinct
was that people would support the store not just because they wanted to buy
books or wanted a bookstore here, but because they knew—not to overstate
it—that a bookstore would send a message. That we’re not all illiterate, we’re
not all…it said something about both the economic and cultural health of the
community.

Has that happened?
The university, for instance, has made
a lot of progress—there’s now a statue of James Meredith; there’s now an
institute for racial reconciliation at the university. And most young people
today know what the civil rights movement was, but they don’t know the specific
events and how tense and dramatic and difficult all of that was at that time.

You grew up in the midst of
that.
Correct. I was thirteen when
Goodman and Chaney and Schwerner were murdered [in 1964] and buried in Neshoba
County, Mississippi, and I was eleven when the riots at Ole Miss occurred. I
remember my mother crying when that happened. Her father taught English at the
university for years, and she knew that it was a tragic event.

As someone who’s spent most of
his life in this town, how did you see the place after having been the mayor?
My view of the community is
essentially no different from what it was before I was mayor. Except, I would
say, I really appreciate all the people who work
for the city. A lot of good public servants.

When you talk with writers about
places they hope to visit someday, they always name Oxford. Partly that’s
because this is Faulkner country—his house is here, and his grave is here, and
so on—but how did this place become such a literary destination in the last
several decades?
You know, it’s a lot of things. Beginning with Faulkner. But there were
people preceding Faulkner connected to the university, mostly. Stark
Young
was a novelist and a New York Times drama critic and an editor at the New Republic who helped Faulkner a little bit. Phil Stone was
a lawyer here, educated at Yale, who introduced Faulkner to Swinburne and Joyce
and a lot of the reading that was so influential to him when he was very young.
And primarily because of the presence of the university, there’s always been
something of a literary environment. But I think because Faulkner’s major work
dealt with this specific geography and culture so intimately, and because of the mythology he created, that
makes for a very particular kind of literary tourism. Hemingway didn’t quite do
that with Oak Park. It wasn’t a little native postage stamp of soil. And in
Mississippi in general there were also Richard Wright, Tennessee Williams,
Eudora Welty—these great writers of the twentieth century.

More recently,
Willie Morris moved to Oxford in 1980, within a year after we opened the store.
He was from Yazoo City, Mississippi. He was the editor of the [University of]
Texas student newspaper, and from there got a job with the Texas Observer, where he became editor at a very young age. He
was hired by Harper’s Magazine to
be an editor, and a few years later, in 1967, became its youngest editor in
chief. And while at Harper’s,
he really changed the magazine and was on the ground floor of New Journalism.
He published David Halberstam and Larry L. King; he published Norman Mailer’s
“Armies of the Night” [originally titled “Steps of the Pentagon”], the longest
magazine piece ever to have been published; and he published Walker Percy.

He also wrote a
book called North Toward Home,
which was his autobiography, published in 1967, that kind of dealt with this
whole ambivalence of the South and being from here and loving so much about
it—stuff about growing up in Yazoo City, and his friends, and his baseball
team, and his dog, and his aunt Minnie who lived next door—but also the
racism. The murders and the civil rights movement. And he had to get out of the
South ’cause he loved it too much and hated so much of everything that was
going on.

That sense of conflictedness.
Right, right. The book expressed all
that and was a touchstone for a lot of people my age. Then he got fired from or
quit Harper’s, depending on
the story. He got in a fight with the publisher and submitted his resignation,
believing that he wouldn’t accept it. But he did. [Laughter.] So he continued to write, but none of his
subsequent books were quite as big as North Toward Home. And Willie was a big drinker and he had kind of
run out of gas in the black hole, which is what he called Manhattan. But Dean
Faulkner Wells, William Faulkner’s niece, and her husband, Larry, raised money
to give Willie a visiting spot here at the university. So he came here that
spring as a writer-in-residence. And he immediately befriended us and the
bookstore. He said, “Richard, I’m going to bring all these writers, all my
friends. I’m going to bring them down here and they’re going to do book
signings at your store and we’re going to have a great time.”

The summer I came
back to open the store was also about the same time that Bill Ferris, who was
the first full-time director at the newly established Center for the Study of
Southern Culture at the university, came here. Bill was originally from
Vicksburg; he’d been to Davidson [College in North Carolina] and got a PhD in
folklore under Henry Glassy at Penn, taught at Yale. Bill was a tremendous guy
and very charismatic and bright and enthusiastic and full of ideas. Bill had a
tremendous influence on the university and the community and our store. On the
South as a whole. What he did was, despite this whole business of the South’s
being known for racism and bigotry and poverty and illiteracy and teen
pregnancy and all the things we’re still sort of known for [laughter], he took Creole cooking and quilt making and basketry and storytelling
and literature and the blues—all these aspects of Southern culture—and made
it fascinating to the public. So Bill had a tremendous influence on the
community and the bookstore. He also knew a lot of writers. The first book
signing we did was with Ellen Douglas, the second month we were open, October
1979. She had a new novel coming out called The Rock Cried Out. The second person to do a book signing at the
store was a black poet who was originally from Corinth, who had taught himself
to write while doing time at the Indiana State Prison: Etheridge Knight. [Laughter.] Bill knew Etheridge and he got Etheridge to come
here. Bill also knew Alice Walker, got her to come here. Knew Alex Haley, got
him to come here. And Willie got George Plimpton and William Styron and Peter
Matthiessen. All these people were coming and doing events in the bookstore.
So, really, from the time that we opened, we had this incredible series of
events. Then the store kind of became known. And in those days the whole author
tour business was nothing like what it soon thereafter became. In the seventies
and early eighties, publishers would send an author to San Francisco and Denver
and Washington and Atlanta. Maybe. But primarily they were there to do
interviews with the press and go on radio and television. Publicity tours, not
a book-signing tour. They didn’t go to bookstores. We weren’t by any means the
first store to do this, but there weren’t many who were doing this at the same
time as we were. The Tattered Cover [Denver] and Elliott Bay [Seattle] and the
Hungry Mind [Saint Paul]. I think that’s kind of how the circuit business got
started.

Then Barry Hannah
moved here in 1983 to teach creative writing. And his personality and writing
style particularly contrasted with Willie’s. Because Willie, he was kind of a
journalist. And even though he could be critical of the south, part of his
method in being critical was to get to a point where he could also be a
cheerleader for the south. And Barry I think kind of looked down his nose at
that sort of writing. You know, Barry was the Miles Davis of modern American
letters at that point. There would’ve been kind of a rivalry with any writer,
any other writer in town, I suppose. Plus, both of them had to struggle with
Faulkner’s ghost—there was that whole thing. But it was an immensely fertile
period in the community’s literary history.

So that convergence of events
helped create the foundation you would build the store upon.
Right, right. And then, you know,
Larry Brown emerged from the soil. His first book came out in 1988. John
Grisham: His first book was published in 1989.

Had John been living here the
whole time too?
No, he’d been living in north
Mississippi, by South Haven. He was in the state legislature. But when he was
in law school at Ole Miss, he heard William Styron speak. Willie had invited
Styron down for the first time, and that was when he got the bug. That’s when
John said, “Wow, I’m gonna do something with this.”

And now he endows a great
fellowship for emerging southern writers here at Ole Miss.
Correct. And he did that because he
wanted to try to build on what Willie did with all the people he brought in.

Speaking of nurturing young writers,
I once heard that when Larry
Brown was working as a firefighter he came into the store and asked you whom he
should read.
Nah.

Is that not correct?
No. [Laughter.]

Was he already writing on his own?
Firemen work twenty-four hours and
then they’re off for forty-eight hours. And then they’re back on for
twenty-four and they’re off for forty-eight. So all firemen have other jobs.
They’re usually painters or carpenters or builders or something. Larry worked
at a grocery store. He was also a plasterer; he was a Sheetrock guy; he was a
painter; he was a carpenter. He did all of this stuff. And he’d always been a
pretty big reader. Larry’s mother, especially, was a really big reader of
romance novels. So Larry had this idea that he could supplement his income by
writing a book that would make money. And he would go to the Lafayette County
Public Library and check out books on how to be a writer, how to get your book
published. He went through all of those. And I think he read that you start by
getting published in magazines, so then he began to read magazines—fiction
especially. He would read Harper’s and Esquire. Larry was
a complete omnivore of music and film and literature.

He took it all in.
Took it all in and he had an
incredible memory. You would talk about a movie; he knew the producer, the
director, the actor, the actresses, the location; music, the song, the group,
who was on bass, the drums. On and on and on. And at some point, yes, early on,
he came into the store. When I first opened the store, I was the only person
who worked there. So I was talking to everyone who came in. And we started
talking and, you know, I didn’t give him a reading list and say, “Read these
ten books and that’ll make you a writer.” Larry was already reading Raymond
Carver and Harry Crews. Cormac McCarthy very early, long before Cormac broke
out. Flannery O’Connor. So we talked about those authors, but Larry completely
found his own way. He was completely self-taught. And I did later on help him
in a specific way when he was kind of stuck. But he would’ve gotten out of the
jam that he thought he was in at the time.

What was that?
Well, he had had one or two stories
published and then he kind of couldn’t get anything else published. He kept
sending off these short stories and they kept coming back. Then he called me
one day—and, you know, I hadn’t read anything he’d written, hadn’t asked to; I
don’t go there with writers unless they ask me. It was a Sunday. He said, “I
don’t know what else to do. I’m sorry I’m calling you, I don’t mean to bother
you, but I think I must be doing something wrong. Everything’s coming back.” I
said, “Larry, I’d be happy to read them. Bring me a few of your stories. I’m no
editor or agent or anything, but I’d be willing to read them.”

So he came over
with a manila folder. It was raining outside. We sat down at the dining room
table and I opened this folder. He was sitting right across from me, and I just
started reading. The first story was “Facing the Music.” You know, I read maybe
four pages and I said, “Larry, this is an incredible story. You’re not doing
anything wrong.” And then I finished reading it and chills went down my spine.
Because I knew that it was a great story. It still is a great story. And I told
him, “This is going to be published. I don’t know when, I don’t know where,
just don’t despair.” Actually I was looking the other day at a note he’d sent
me. He thanked me for helping to make it better, that specific story. But I
don’t remember what that was. I may have said, “You might move this sentence
from here to here,” or something like that.

But mostly you were telling him
to keep the faith.
Exactly. Also, I suggested he
contact Frederick Barthelme and Rie Fortenberry at the Mississippi Review, who’d published his first serious publication, a
story called “The Rich.” I said, “What about this story? Where have you sent it? Have you sent it to the
Mississippi Review?” And he said, “No,
‘cause they’ve already published me.”

That’s a good thing! [Laughter.]
So he sent it to them and they
published it and he dedicated that story to me. And then later on I helped him
meet Shannon Ravenel, who published his first book.

It seems like so many of the greatest writers of American letters have
come out of the south: Tennessee Williams, Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Flannery
O’Connor. And, more recently, Tom Franklin, Larry Brown, Barry Hannah. All these
people whose work I deeply admire. They share something…an intimacy with place
perhaps?
It often gets explained in phrases
like that, but I think that for the moderns…well, Faulkner was a genius. But I
think he also realized early on what he could do and in contrast to the many
things that he could not do.

What do you mean by that?
Well, he was a failure as a
student. But I think with someone like Eudora Welty, who was an intelligent and
independent woman of that time, there were limited opportunities for things
that she could do. But writing, writing was one of them. And photography was
one. So I think it’s tied to economics in some way, but I also think that all
of the rich and conflicted history of the South has a lot to do with it, all
the various tensions. Because literature is built on conflict. There’s also the
whole war thing, the Civil War. Being the loser in that war makes us akin to
other literature-producing places—Ireland, Russia.

Do you see any collective
project happening as a trend in writing right now, in the same way that, say,
the modernists were trying to make sense of a new world?
No, but I think there are always
different schools in the same way that Updike focused on the suburban married
life, and I think other writers operate in certain other niches.

How about southern writers
specifically? How are they trying to make sense of what the south looks like
right now?
I think Southerners are mostly
concerned with just telling a good story.

The tale?
Yeah.

Since we’re talking about
contemporary southern writers, let’s discuss the Conference of the Book. How
did that start?
The Faulkner conference is held
every summer. I think it started in 1974. It’s always drawn a crowd—people
come from California, Japan, Canada, wherever. And over the years, people would
come in the store and say, “I heard about that Faulkner conference and I’d love
to come back here and go to that, but I don’t think I want to do Faulkner for a
whole week.” These are people who aren’t necessarily Faulkner fans or scholars,
but who want to come for the experience.

A literary pilgrimage.
Right. And at the same time, I was
going to conferences like ABA [American Booksellers Association] and BEA
[BookExpo America] and SIBA [Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance], where
you would hear not just writers but also publishers and agents and editors
talking about the process of publishing a book—all these great stories which
typically were not available to the public. And I thought, “What if we had a
conference in Oxford where people could get the local experience, but also a
more general thing about books?”

So I talked to Ann
Abadie, who was a founding director of the Faulkner conference. I told Ann,
who’s been a good friend for a long time, “I’ve got this idea. Instead of just
having the Faulkner conference, why don’t we do another kind of literary
conference? We can just talk about books and what’s going on with The Book and how it’s doing today. We’ll invite editors and
agents and people who have these conversations, but make it for the public.”
And Ann said, “Yeah, maybe soon.” Then, after about three or four years, she
said, “Let’s do this book conference thing.” And so we did.

Is it focused specifically on
Southern writers?
No. I was trying for it not to be just a Southern thing.

That would be too insular?
Yeah, and frankly I get tired of
all this stuff about the South all the time. And I thought that the university
and the community had the opportunity to create a one of a kind conference.

Where would you like to see this
conference five years from now? Ten years from now?
In an ideal world it would have a
larger budget to bring people in. For instance, Nicholson Baker wrote that
article in the New Yorker about the
Kindle. You know, that’s a timely thing. He could come and do a lecture,
perhaps even be on a panel with other people from the industry, people like
[Amazon founder] Jeff Bezos.

So you want it to explore all
the different intersections, not just publishing.
Right. Everything that’s going on
that affects books. We want to put this thing called The Book on the operating
table and cut into it and see what’s going on.

With developments like the Kindle
and Japanese cell-phone novels and Twitter stories, how does a bookstore stay
relevant in the twenty-first century?
I
think there are a couple of things. There are the technological developments,
which are interesting and positive in that they offer opportunities for reading
and the dissemination of literature and ideas in a way that might be greater than
the way we’ve historically done before. As Nicholson Baker pointed out in that New
Yorker article, digital
transference of text is much cheaper than disseminating literature through
books. So you have that, which in many ways, properly conceived, is a positive
development.

But the question
we need to ask is, How does the technology threaten this thing that we love so
much, and has been so critical to the development of civilization for so long?
And how do we, in terms of that threat, deal with and understand it? There’s
also the cultural threat of younger people who are growing up not reading
books. The way I see it, though, I think that digital technology will go on, on
its own path, no matter what. But in terms of books, I maintain that a book is
like a sailboat or a bicycle, in that it’s a perfect invention. I don’t care
what series number of Kindle you’re on, it is never going to be better than
this. [Holds up a book.] I
don’t see how it could be. I could be wrong. Who knows? But this thing is
pretty wonderful—and irreplaceable.

I think they can
coexist is what I’m saying. And by the same token, I think bookstores offer an experience to book consumers that is
unique. To be able to go into a place physically, to experience a sensation
that is the precise opposite of all that is digital, and to talk to people
about books in a business that has as one of its objectives a curatorial
function and the presentation of literature as another—that is, I believe,
irreplaceable. Of course, the question we all recognize is how the development
of technology, in reducing the industry that creates the physical book, will
change bookselling. Because there won’t be as many of these [books], and
therefore the cost will go up.

page_5: 

So what is the future for
independent bookstores? If their role is curatorial, will they become more like
art galleries? Should they have public funding? Or will bookstores become
nonprofit entities?
I don’t know. I hope not, though. It’s
a very difficult business. But in many ways, I like the fact that it’s a
difficult business. Otherwise, people who want to make money—by selling
crap—would be trying to get into the book business. [Laughter.]

This store specializes in
literature, especially southern literature, as well as books about this region
and this place. Do you think that specialization is part of the reason for your
success?
I don’t really think of it in terms
of specializing. I think of it in terms of giving our customers what they want.
If Nietzsche had been born here, our philosophy section would probably look a
little different. [Laughter.]

So what are bookstores that are
succeeding doing right?
Well, I think a lot of it has to do
with adaptation. The business’s ability to adapt in all kinds of ways to its
own market, to be innovative, to not ignore the technological developments and,
in some cases, take advantage of them. Thacker Mountain Radio was kind of an
innovation.

How did that come to be?
Ever since the bookstore opened,
there’ve always been people coming in wanting to have their art exhibit in the
bookstore, or to stage a play, or do a music performance.

So that really meets your vision
of a community place.
Yeah, except that I learned fairly
early on that you have to make it relate to selling books. You can’t just be an
all-purpose community center; you’ve got to make it conform to the mission of
selling books and promoting writers and literature. Because I did have art
exhibits and it was just sort of a pain. So I kind of got away from that. What
happened, then, was two graduate students who had been trying to develop a
little kind of a music radio show that wasn’t really working at one of the
local bars, came and wanted to use Off Square Books as a venue. I told them
that I’d done enough of this kind of messing around to know that I wasn’t going
to do something like that unless it could promote writers. I said, “Maybe if we
did a radio show that incorporated both music and writers it could be
something.” And that’s how that got started.

It’s been good for
our book business, mainly because writers really want to be on the show. And a
lot of publishers want their writers to be on the show because it’s broadcast
on Mississippi Public Broadcasting, so it reaches a large audience. Which is
always appealing, as you know, to publicists.

Do they just read? Do they do
interviews?
Depends on what the book is and how they
want to present it. They can read; they can talk about it. We’ve had a lot of
writers come up there and just tell stories. It’s performed, recorded, and
broadcast live on local commercial radio. Then we edit stuff for time, do all
the production work on the disc, and send it down to Jackson where they
rebroadcast the show.

It’s often really
great. And a lot of times we have musicians who’ve written books come on the
show, or we have writers who are musicians who like to play on the show.
There’s almost no writer who, given the choice early in their career, wouldn’t
have rather been a rock musician. [Laughter.]

Now that you’ve finished your
two terms as mayor, you’re returning to the bookstore full time again. What are
you most looking forward to? What did you most miss?
I just missed being here. I missed
being around the books, going down to the receiving room and seeing what’s come
in each day, talking to the customers, knowing which books are coming out,
being able to snag an advance reading copy of something that I know I’m gonna
be interested in. The whole shooting match. So what I’m doing now is really
kind of returning to my roots. I’m just going to be on the floor. I’m not going
to resume buying; I’m not going to be doing all the business stuff; I’m not
going to go running around to every store trying to control staff schedules and
training. I just want to—

Be around the customers and the
books.
Yeah. There may come a point when I
want to do something else. I don’t know. But that’s the plan now.

Where would you like to see the
store ten years from now? Is there anything you still want to achieve with it?
No. But returning to that whole
future of books conversation, one of the things that I should’ve added has to
do with what’s happened at Square Books, Jr. We’re selling more children’s
books than ever. The level of enthusiasm and excitement about books from
toddlers to first readers to adolescents and teens…if you go in there and hang
around for a few hours, you would never even think that there might be such a
thing as a digital book.

Jeremiah Chamberlin teaches writing at
the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He is also the associate editor of the
online journal Fiction Writers Review.

INSIDE SQUARE BOOKS
What were your best-selling books in
2009?
John Grisham signs books
for us—lots of them—every year, so his book is usually our number one seller.
Our best-seller list is dominated by local and regional titles—books about
Oxford or Mississippi or about or by Mississippians. Other than Grisham’s The Associate, I think our top 2009 sellers are The Help by Kathryn Stockett, The Devil’s Punchbowl by Greg Iles, and In the Sanctuary of Outcasts by Neil White. All three writers are from
Mississippi, and Neil lives here in Oxford. Two of the books are set in
Mississippi.

What
books did you most enjoy selling in 2009?
Lark and
Termite by Jayne Anne Phillips, A
Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore, The
Missing by Tim Gautreaux, and Waveland
by Frederick Barthelme.

How do you compile your Staff Picks section?
There are no constraints
on staff picks, except the book has to be in print, of course. And, after a
time, the recommendation has to have made at least a sale or two. Doesn’t have
to be paperback, but they always seem to be. Anybody can recommend anything
using any language, although I recently made one staffer change his
recommendation because he’d written in big letters, “It’s great! I’m serious!
Just buy it!” It was the exclamation points that really did it. I told him to
see Strunk and White.

Any
books you’re particularly excited about in 2010?
I’m excited about Jim Harrison’s new book, The Farmer’s Daughter; that
big, wonderful new novel The
Swan Thieves by Elizabeth Kostova, who has agreed to come to our
store; and Brad Watson’s new book of short stories, Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives, which has
one of the best stories I’ve read in years, “Vacuum.”

Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi
An Interview With Poet and Independent Bookseller J. W. Marshall
Indie Bookstores Face Uphill Battle
So Much Depends Upon a New Bookstore: Postcard From Paris

Inside Indie Bookstores: Women & Children First in Chicago


by

Jeremiah Chamberlin

May/June 2010
5.1.10
In Print and Online

When I walked into Women & Children
First, the
feminist bookstore that Linda Bubon and her business partner, Ann
Christophersen, founded more than thirty years ago, the overriding
feeling I
experienced was one of warmth. And it wasn’t because Chicago was having a
late-winter snowstorm that afternoon. From the eclectic array of books
stacked
on tables, to the casualness of the blond wood bookcases, to the
handwritten
recommendations from staff below favorite books on the shelves,
everything
feels personalized; an atmosphere of welcome permeates the place.

In the back of
the store, a
painted sign showing an open book with a child peering over the top
hangs from
the ceiling, indicating the children’s section. Not far away, a similar
sign,
this one of a rainbow with an arrow below it, points toward the GLBTQ
section.
Despite these signs—not to mention the name of the store itself—Women
&
Children First carries more than books for women and, well, children.
The
literature section stretches down one wall; there are stacks of
photography
collections; books on writing fill an entire bookcase; and disciplines
as
diverse as cooking and psychology have healthy offerings. Though
conceived as a
feminist bookstore three decades ago, since moving in 1990 to its
current
location in the Andersonville neighborhood (an area originally home to a
large
population of Swedish immigrants in the mid-nineteenth century that has
since
evolved into a multiethnic community, and one with an equally diverse
range of
locally owned businesses such as Middle Eastern cafés, an Algerian crepe
house,
and, of course, a Swedish bakery), Women & Children First has become
as
much a neighborhood shop as a specialty store. And because the area has
become
popular with families and young professionals, the clientele is just as
likely
to be made up of men as women.

Still, books
related to women
and women’s issues—whether health, politics, gender and sexuality,
literature,
criticism, childrearing, or biography—are clearly the store’s focus.
Such
lauded authors as Maya Angelou, Alice Walker, Gloria Steinem, Annie
Leibovitz,
and Hillary Rodham Clinton have all read here. Many now-famous writers
such as
Sandra Cisneros, Ana Castillo, Julia Alvarez, Margot Livesey, and Jane
Hamilton
got their start at this store. Needless to say, Women & Children
First has
a devoted audience for its events, and many who attend are well-known
writers
themselves. So on any given night you’ll be as likely to be sitting next
to
authors such as Elizabeth Berg, Carol Anshaw, Rosellen Brown, Sara
Paretsky,
Audrey Niffenegger, Aleksandar Hemon, or Nami Mun as hearing them speak
from
the podium.

Like co-owner
Bubon, Women
& Children First doesn’t take itself or its mission too seriously,
despite
its long history and literary laurels. Twinkle lights hang in the front
windows
facing Clark Street; there are jewelry displays around the front
counter; and
tacked to the community bulletin board are flyers for both theater
performances
and burlesque shows. When I met Bubon, she was wearing a simple, black,
scoop-neck sweater and a subtle, patterned scarf in shades of red,
orange, and
cream. (She also wore Ugg boots, which she unabashedly raved about for
their
comfort.) Because Christophersen had to be out of town during my visit,
Bubon
took me around the store herself—not that I needed much of a tour.
Women &
Children First is only 3,500 square feet in area, most of which is one
large
open room. Still, the store carries more than twenty thousand books, as
well as
journals, cards, and gifts. And perhaps it is this combination that adds
to its
coziness.

But nothing
captures the
laid-back feel and philosophy of the bookstore better than the wooden
kitchen
table that sits in the back, near the children’s section. Around it are
four
unmatched wooden chairs. Bubon brought us here for the interview, and it
seems
a perfect example of the spirit of openness that pervades this place.
Several
times during our conversation customers wandered over to chat with her
and I
was generously introduced. And more than once Bubon excused herself
politely to
help a nearby child pull down a book he couldn’t reach. But never did
these
interactions feel like interruptions, nor did they ever change the
course of our
conversation. Rather, it felt as though I was simply a part of the ebb
and flow
of a normal day at Women & Children First. Nothing could have made
me feel
more welcome.

When did you meet Christophersen?
We met in graduate school. We were both
getting a
master’s degree in literature, and we became very good friends.

Was that here in Chicago?
Yes, at the University of Illinois. Our
class and
the one just above us had a lot of great writers—James McManus, Maxine
Chernoff, Paul Hoover. It was a very fertile atmosphere. So as we were
finishing the program, Ann and I started talking about opening a
business
together, and the logical choice was a bookstore. There was only one
local
chain at the time, Kroch’s & Brentano’s, and there were probably
sixty or
seventy wonderful independent bookstores in the city and the suburbs of
Chicago.

That many?
Yeah. There were a lot of independent bookstores.
It was a really great environment for booksellers. I mean, we all
thought of
ourselves as competing with one another, but really there were enough
readers
to go around. By the mid-1980s, however, we were feeling crowded—after
five
years we had outgrown that first place. So we moved to a larger store,
two
blocks away, at Halsted and Armitage.

Did you decide from the beginning
that you
wanted to specialize in books for women and children?
Yes. It was what was in our hearts, and
in our
politics, to do. We were part of an academic discussion group made up of
feminist teachers from all the nearby universities that met at the
Newberry
Library. Two of our teachers were part of this group and they had asked
us to
join as grad students. They were discussing Nancy Chodorow, whose book The
Reproduction
of
Mothering had just
come out. Also Rubyfruit Jungle. I was like, “Oh, my goodness!”
because I had never read any lesbian literature, and here was this group
of
academics discussing it. They discussed Marge Piercy and Tillie Olsen.
These
were writers whom, when I went looking for them at places like Kroch’s
&
Brentano’s or Barbara’s Bookstore, I wasn’t finding. Similarly, as an
academic,
I knew how much Virginia Woolf had written. Yet I would look for
Virginia Woolf
and there would only be To the Lighthouse. Maybe Mrs.
Dalloway. Or A Writer’s Diary. But we envisioned a store
where everything that was in print by Virginia Woolf could be there. And
everything by outsider writers like Tillie Olsen or Rita Mae Brown would
be
there.

It’s interesting to hear you
describe these
authors as being outsiders at one time, because when I was growing up
they were
people I was reading from the beginning.
Oh, back then you had to go lookin’,
lookin’,
lookin’, lookin’ to
find these writers. And they certainly weren’t being taught. Alice
Walker had written The Third Life of Grange Copeland, and maybe Meridian
had come out. But all the
stuff that you think of as classic women’s literature—Margaret Atwood,
Toni
Morrison—they were not a part of the canon. They were just fledgling
writers.
It was much different. And, again, there was no gay and lesbian
literature.
None. I mean, it just didn’t exist. We put a little sign on the shelf
that
said, “If you’re looking for lesbian writers, try Virginia Woolf’s Orlando,
May Sarton, Willa
Cather….” You know, writers who historians had discovered had had
relations
with women. [Laughter.]
Nothing public at all. We had a little list. Back
then our vision was about this big. [She holds her hands about eight
inches
apart.]
Now, thirty years later, it’s incredible to look back and see the
diversity of
women writers who are published, and the incredible diversity of gay and
lesbian literature, and transgender literature, that’s being published.

I
still think
women lag behind in winning the major awards, and they lag behind in
getting
critical attention. So there’s still a need for Women & Children
First and
stores like it that push the emphasis toward women writers. But, at that
time,
we had to work to fill up a store that was only a quarter of the size of
this
one. That first store was only 850 square feet, yet it was still a
challenge to
find enough serious women’s literature to stock the shelves. Because we
didn’t
want to do romances. And it’s not that we didn’t have a vision of a
bookstore
that would be filled with works by women and biographies of women and
eventually
a gay and lesbian section and all that. But I had no idea that there
would be
this renaissance in women’s writing. That it really would happen. That
women
would get published, and get published in some big numbers, and that I
would
finally be able to sell books by women who were not just white and
American or
British. I mean, the internationalizing of women’s literature has been
very
exciting, I think.

What precipitated the move to 
this
neighborhood and this bigger store, then?
In those first ten years we had
double-digit
growth every year. Ten percent up, 11 percent up, 15 percent up. I don’t
think
we even made returns until we’d been in business three years. We were
just
selling. I had no ordering budget. “Oh, new stuff by women?” I’d say.
“Great!
We need it.” Business was growing.

Was that because nobody else was
selling this
type of literature?
Yes, and because women’s studies was
developing as
a discipline. Also, I think we were good booksellers. And we had great
programming right from the beginning. Not so much big-name authors, but
interesting stuff.

So like the first store, you outgrew
the second
one.
We outgrew it. Our landlord had also
sold the
building and the new owner was going to triple our rent. So if we needed
any
more motivation to move, that was it. What was tough, however, was that
we’d
been ten years in the DePaul neighborhood, which is very central to
Chicago.
You can get there very easily from the South Side, from the West Side,
off the
highways…yet we couldn’t really afford to stay there, and we couldn’t
find a
new space that would suit us. But then we were recruited to move up here
by the
Edgewater Community Development Organization. Andersonville is a part of
Edgewater, which goes all the way to the lakefront and west to
Ravenswood. They
literally came to us and said, “The people in our community would love
to have
a bookstore in that neighborhood. There’s a lot of spaces that are being
renovated, and we wonder if you’re thinking of opening a second store,
or if we
could encourage you to.”

This happened by coincidence, while
you were
already considering a new location?
Yes! And we said, “Well, you know, we
need more
space. We’ll come up and look.” At the same time, there were two women
who were
opening a women’s arts-and-crafts store, and all their friends said, “It
doesn’t matter where you’re located as long as you’re next to or on the
same
block with Women & Children First.” So we came up to Edgewater to
look, and
they showed us this building, which had been a big grocery store. It was
being
renovated and gutted, so we could get in at the beginning and say, “We
want the
corner and we want this much space.” The arts-and-crafts store opened
next
door. They
stayed open for seven years, and when the partnership broke up, in 1997,
we
took over their space. In terms of our growth, business kicked up 20
percent
the first year we were here. We opened in July 1990, and that first year
people
came in and brought us plates of cookies and said, “Thank you for coming
to our
neighborhood.” It was just great.

But
the move itself is the best story. Remember, this was still a shoestring
operation. We had to rely on the community. So we organized seventy
volunteers.
Four different women rented or had trucks. And those seventy people
moved every
book and bookshelf out of the old space and into this space in one day.
We
organized people in groups of three or four, and we said, “Okay, you
have the
Biography section. You pack up all these books in these boxes, mark them
‘Bio,’
pull out that shelving unit, you go with that unit and those boxes to
the new
space, and there will be somebody here to help set it up.” We had other
women
who went out and bought three trays of sandwiches and fed all the
volunteers.
We started on Friday night, worked all day Saturday, and by two in the
afternoon on Sunday we were open for business. We were only really
officially
closed for one day. And women still tell me, “I remember helping you
move.”
They’ll come in and they’ll say, “That’s my section; I put this section
back together.”

Have readings and events been a part
of this
store from the beginning?
They’ve been a huge part of the store.
Getting to meet
all these wonderful writers whom I’ve read—in person—is also something
that’s
kept me motivated and excited. And, you know, the excitement of
discovering a
new writer is always great.

We have a lot
of local
politicians who shop here too. When Jan Schakowsky decided to support
Barack
Obama in his run for the U.S. Senate, she had a press conference here.
She asked if she could use
our store to make the announcement that she was throwing her support
behind him
in the primary. And I remember her saying to me, “If we can just get
people to
not call him Osama.” I mean, that’s where we were at that time. Nobody
knew who
he was.

So the store has been important for
the
community in many ways.
A political gathering place, and a
literary
gathering place, and a place where we have unpublished teen writers read
sometimes. We’ve developed four different book groups, plus a Buffy
discussion
group. And if you came on a Wednesday morning, you’d see twenty to
thirty
preschoolers here with their moms for story time, which I do. I love it.
I just
love it. It’s absolutely the best thing of the week. I have a background
in
theater and oral interpretation, so it’s just so much fun for me.

Has that grown over the years as the
neighborhood has developed?
Grown, grown, grown. For many years I
would have
nine or ten kids at story time, maybe fifteen. Then, about four or five
years
ago, it was like the neighborhood exploded, and I started getting twenty
to
thirty kids every week. In the summer, I can have fifty in here. That’s
why
everything is on rollers. For story time, the kids sit on the stage and I
sit
here. For regular readings, it’s the opposite—authors read from the
stage and
we have chairs set up down here. We can get a hundred, sometimes even a
hundred
and fifty people in here.

A year and a
half ago, we
started Sappho’s Salon. Once a month, on a Saturday night, we have an
evening
of lesbian entertainment. Sometimes it’s open mike; sometimes it’s
acoustic
music. Kathie, who does our publicity, generally runs it, and her
girlfriend,
Nikki, who is a part-time DJ, brings her DJ equipment. Then we set up
little
tables and candles, and try to make it feel like a salon. We’ve even had
strippers. [Laughter.]
But right from the beginning we conceived of having a
weekly program night. Author
readings weren’t happening much, so we decided we’d have
discussions on hot books that people were reading. We knew a lot of
teachers
from this Newberry Library group who were writing, and who were in the
process
of writing feminist criticism, so we invited them to come and do a
presentation
on an idea.

Then we
conceived of having
a topic for each month. For example, “Women in the Trades.” So every
Tuesday
night in March a woman who was working in a male-dominated trade would
come and
talk about how she got her job, or how women can get into engineering,
or what
kind of discrimination she’s experiencing on the job and what her
recourses
were. I think one of our very biggest programs in those early years was
on the
subject of sadomasochism in the lesbian community. And we had eighty or
ninety
women who would come and sit on our shag rug—we didn’t have chairs and
stuff
like that then—and listen to people who had differing viewpoints
discuss the
issue. It seems almost silly now, but it was a big issue at the time,
and
people were really torn about whether this was an acceptable practice or
not.
Also, whether we should carry books on the subject. There was one
pamphlet
available at the time: What Color Is Your Handkerchief? Because
you would put a
handkerchief of a certain color in your back pocket to indicate what
your
sexual proclivity was.

It’s amazing how subtle the coding
had to be.
It was so discreet.
I remember the first time I saw two
women walk out
of my store holding hands. I was walking to the store a little later
because
somebody else had opened that day, and when I saw them [pause] I
cried. Because it was so
rare in 1980 to see two women feel comfortable enough to just grab each
other’s
hands. And I knew that they felt that way because they’d come out of
this
atmosphere in which it was okay.

At
our thirtieth
anniversary party [last] October, the Chicago Area Women’s History
Conference
recorded people’s memories of Women & Children First. They had a
side room
at the venue where we were having the party, and people took time to go
in and
talk about, you know, the first time they came to the bookstore, or when
they
saw Gloria Steinem here, or how they met their girlfriend here, or that
when
their daughter told them she was gay and they didn’t know what to do
about it
they came here and got a book. People shared all these memories. And
that’s
going to be part of our archive too.

This celebration was
also a
benefit for the Women’s Voices Fund, which you started five years ago.
Can you
talk about its mission?
Several years ago, Ann
and I were
looking at the budget and, frankly, there wasn’t enough money coming in
for the
expenses going out. Meanwhile, we were planning the benefit for our
twenty-fifth anniversary—this party that we hoped would raise some
extra
money—and other people in the not-for-profit world who were advising us
said,
“People will pay for your programs. They will make a donation to keep
your
programming going.” So Ann sat down and calculated what it cost to print
and
mail out a newsletter, to put on these programs, to advertise the
programs, and
then to staff them. What we discovered was that is was about forty
thousand
dollars a year we were spending on programming. And we thought, “If
there’s a
way to remove that expense from the budget and use people’s donations to
fund
that, that would be a smart thing.” So that’s what we did. Now anytime
we have
an advertisement or a printing bill or expenses related to providing
refreshments at programs, that cost comes out of the Women’s Voices
Fund.

So the store’s not a
nonprofit,
but it has a nonprofit arm.
It’s not a 501c3 on its
own. We are
a part of the pool fund of the Crossroads Fund in Chicago. So you can
send
Crossroads a check, have it be tax deductible, and have it earmarked for
the
Women’s Voices Fund.

Few people realize
how expensive
readings and events can be.
Occasionally there are
readings that
are profitable. Occasionally. But very, very often, even with a nice
turnout of
twenty to fifty people, you still may only sell three or four books.
Maybe five
or six. But it’s not paying for the program. And from the beginning we
didn’t
want to look at everything we did in terms of whether it was going to
make
money: “If we have this author
we gotta
sell ten books or we’re not gonna pay for the Tribune ad, or the
freight.” No. Having the fund
means we
pass the hat at the program, and maybe we take in twenty or thirty
dollars. But
sometimes people put in twenties, you know? And we raised thirty
thousand
dollars at this benefit.

But
obviously something
changed in the bookselling industry or you wouldn’t have had to hold
this
fundraising event. You
said earlier that when you first moved into this neighborhood you had
double-digit growth. What happened?
Well, the rest of that story is that a
year and a
half later our sales dropped 11 percent. This was 1993. And the next
year, they
fell another 3 percent. So that was a 14-percent drop in two years, for a
store
that had never seen a loss. Borders and Barnes & Noble started in
the
suburbs, but then they gradually came into the city. In 1993, when this
hit us,
Barnes & Noble and Borders had put in stores three miles to the
south of
us—right next to each other—and three miles to the north of us, in
Evanston.
Then, about seven years ago, Borders put the store in Uptown, which is
just a
mile from us, and they put another store west of us by about two miles.
More recently,
B&N closed the store three miles south of us, and Borders announced
over
two years ago that they were trying to rent all the stores around us.

They overextended themselves.
When everybody else was starting to
downsize,
Borders opened several new stores in Chicago, including this one in
Uptown.
And, you know, we’d almost gotten past the point where the chain stores
were
affecting us, because they’ve had to stop widespread discounting. But
the month
this Borders opened that close to us, our sales dropped 12 percent over
the
year before. And then over the course of that year our sales were down 5
percent. But, you know, it’s been an underperforming store. They put it
in
between two underperforming stores in a neighborhood that was more
economically
depressed than Evanston and Lincoln Park.

Do you think five years from now
they’ll be
gone?
I do. I do.

Can you wait them out?
You know, from what I can observe,
Barnes &
Noble seems to treat their employees pretty well; they seem to put
stores in
locations where there’s actually a need, and to close stores down when
needed
and redistribute employees. It seems to me Barnes & Noble plans very
carefully. Borders, on the other hand, has changed hands several times
since
1990. I just don’t see how they are going to survive. When I go in there
now
all I see is…sidelines. Candy.

I think what’s been
particularly frustrating for independent stores like ours that have
developed a
reading series over the years in Chicago—you know, attracting more and
bigger-name authors, and more interesting authors, and conducting ten to
fifteen programs a month—is when publishers take an author who has a
real base
in our store, and for whom we have a real audience, and they say, “Oh,
but the
Michigan Avenue Borders wants this author, and that’s a better
location.”

Why does that happen?
They
don’t always realize
that our location is not downtown, and that it attracts a different kind
of
clientele. And I’ve seen situations where we’ll have a local author—one
who we
have a close relationship with, and who’s done every launch with
us—whose
publisher will now say to her, “You know, two thirds of your books are
sold in
the chain stores, and so you have to do your launch at the chain store.”
But
those authors try to figure out things to do for us to get us some extra
business.

The author tour itself seems to be
waning. I
don’t blame publishers for their reluctance to send a writer out on the
road—after all, it probably seems hard to justify paying for an
author’s
travel expenses when you see only eight or nine books sold at an event.
But
people always forget the long-term sales that readings generate.
Right. Because I’ve read the book, and
so has one
of my coworkers, and we’ll both put it on our Recommends shelf. We’re
going to
keep selling this book long after the event. And we do find, when we
look at
our year-end figures, that our best-sellers for the year are almost
always
written by people who have had appearances here. Or, if not here,
they’ve done
an off-site event that we’ve been in charge of. Those books turn out to
be our
number one sellers for the year.

So what does the future look like for
you?
I’m a bookseller, but I’m a feminist
bookseller.
Would I be a bookseller if I were going to run a general bookstore? I’m
not
sure. Sometimes I think, “What will I do if the store is no longer
viable?” And
I think that rather than going into publishing or going to work for a
general
bookstore, I would rather try to figure out how to have a feminist
reading
series and run a feminist not-for-profit. Because the real purpose of my
life
is getting women’s voices out, and getting women to tell the truth about
their
lives, and selling literature that reflects the truths of girls’ and
women’s
lives. Sometimes we’re abused; we have to talk about that. Sometimes we
take
the bad road in relationships; we have to talk about that. Sometimes
we’re
discriminated against in the workplace; we have to talk about these
things.
Violence against women in the United States and worldwide has not
stopped. We don’t
have a feminist army to go rescue women in Afghanistan—would that we
did.

The goal of my
life has been
to get the word out, to understand women’s lives. We have to continue to
evolve
and change if we’re to have a full share, and if our daughters are to
have a
full share of the world.

page_5: 

INSIDE WOMEN & CHILDREN FIRST WITH ANN CHRISTOPHERSEN
What were some of your best-selling
books in
2009?
Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout; Her
Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger; Yes Means Yes!
Visions of Female Sexual Power and
a World Without Rape,
edited
by Jaclyn
Friedman and Jessica Valenti; Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa
Lahiri; The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood; The
Sisters
Grimm
Book
1: Fairy-Tale Detectives by Michael Buckley; In
Defense of Food by Michael Pollan; Fun
Home by
Alison Bechdel; Hardball by Sara Paretsky; The Mysterious
Benedict Society by Trenton Lee Stewart; Everywhere
Babies by
Susan Meyers; Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins; Mama Voted For
Obama! by Jeremy Zilber; The Brief Wondrous Life of
Oscar Wao
by Junot Díaz; and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg
Larsson.

What is the best-selling section in
your
store?
Paperback fiction.

What do you look for in terms of an
author
event?
First we consider whether the book fits
with our
specialty—books by and about women—or ones that offer a feminist
perspective
on any subject. It is also important to us that we can provide an
audience for
the author. Finally, though we always want to host women writers with a
national reputation, we are strongly invested in supporting local
writers and
those launching their careers with debut novels, poetry, or nonfiction.

In what ways have your events
changed over the
years?
In the store’s early days, many of our
events
were feminist issue–based, sometimes with an author or book involved but
not necessarily. We were a hub of feminist and lesbian politics and
culture,
and produced feminist plays and women’s music concerts, sponsored
women’s
sports teams, and provided support for almost every women’s/lesbian
project in
our city. Over the past number of years, however, we have focused our
energies
and events on books and other written material, knowing that that was
our
unique role in the women’s movement.

What challenges do
women still
face that you hope your store can help address?
Women writers are still
vastly
under-represented in review vehicles, which means their books are less
visible.
This can be verified by keeping a gender tally of writers reviewed in
the NYTBR or the New
Yorker, for example, during any
given month. Though women
artists working in most mediums have certainly moved forward, they still
struggle for opportunity and recognition. Women in general have also,
obviously, made many advances since the seventies, but we still have a
long way
to go. Women’s right to control our own bodies is constantly being
challenged;
we are still paid less for doing the same job as men; we still have few
good
options for childcare; married women who work—which is the majority of
us—still do more than our fair share of taking care of home and
children;
women are seriously unrepresented in political decision-making. I could
go on,
but these are some of the reasons we still need organizations—and
bookstores—that focus on women.

How does feminism in
the
twenty-first century differ from when you opened this store?
The main difference is
that the
second wave of the feminist movement in the seventies was just hitting
the
streets and was brilliantly, feverishly, and obviously active. New
organizations were being created every day to deal with issues like
incest,
domestic abuse, healthcare, job opportunities, equal pay, the absence of
political power, and many others. The work that began then has become
institutionalized over the years since. It continues to advance, but
people
don’t always notice it now since it’s become deeper, more complex, and,
some
might say, mainstream. Another significant difference is that many of
the
growing pains have been outgrown: Feminism has been able to overcome
many of
the challenges posed by race, class, and national boundaries, becoming
truly
global. 

What role does technology play in
your store?
It has played an important role since
we bought a
computer and began using POS/IM bookstore software in 1985. We had a Web
site
for marketing purposes and then took advantage of the American
Booksellers
Association’s Web solution so we could sell books online; we switched
from
print to e-newsletters several years ago; we use social media, first
MySpace
and now Facebook and Twitter. And we have the technology—and desire—to
sell
e-books.

How do you think the rise of digital
reading
devices will affect your future?
The extent to which e-books affect our
future
depends on how large that segment of the market grows and whether there
are any
real opportunities for stores our size to get a share of online sales.
There’s
little to no local advantage online, and when your competitors are large
enough
to dictate market prices, it is somewhere between extremely difficult
and
utterly impossible to get even market share to scale.

Where would you like to see Women
&
Children First in ten years?
I would like to see us still finding
ways to serve
our community and fulfill our mission of giving voice to women.

How about feminism?
Continuing to make steady
progress toward
a world in which women are free to live an unobstructed, rich, creative
life.

What do you most love
about
bookselling?
Going through my days surrounded
by books
and the people involved in writing, publishing, selling, reading, and
talking
about them. 

Jeremiah Chamberlin teaches writing at the
University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He is also the associate editor of
the
online journal Fiction Writers Review.

Ann Christophersen photo by Kat Fitzgerald.

Women & Children First in Chicago

For the third installment of our ongoing series of interviews, Inside Indie Bookstores, Jeremiah Chamberlin travelled to Chicago to speak with Linda Bubon, who, along with Ann Christophersen, owns Women & Children First.

Women & Children First 1

Image: 

Founded more than thirty years ago in Chicago, Women & Children First is only 3,500 square feet in area, most of which is one large open room. Still, the store carries more than twenty thousand books, as well as journals, cards, and gifts.

Women & Children First 2

Image: 

Twinkle lights hang in the front windows facing Clark Street; there are jewelry displays around the front counter; and tacked to the community bulletin board are flyers for both theater performances and burlesque shows.

Women & Children First 3

Image: 

“In the back of the store, a painted sign showing an open book with a child peering over the top hangs from the ceiling, indicating the children’s section,” Chamberlin writes. “Not far away, a similar sign, this one of a rainbow with an arrow below it, points toward the GLBTQ section. Despite these signs—not to mention the name of the store itself—Women & Children First carries more than books for women and, well, children.”

 

Women & Children First 4

Image: 

The literature section stretches down one wall; there are stacks of photography collections; books on writing fill an entire bookcase; and disciplines as diverse as cooking and psychology have healthy offerings.

Women & Children First 5

Image: 

“Nothing captures the laid-back feel and philosophy of the bookstore better than the wooden kitchen table that sits in the back, near the children’s section,” Chamberlin writes. “Around it are four unmatched wooden chairs. Bubon brought us here for the interview, and it seems a perfect example of the spirit of openness that pervades this place.”

Women & Children First 6

Image: 

“The goal of my life has been to get the word out, to understand women’s lives,” says co-owner Linda Bubon. “We have to continue to evolve and change if we’re to have a full share, and if our daughters are to have a full share of the world.”

Women & Children First 7

Image: 

Co-owner Ann Christophersen says what she loves most about bookselling is being “surrounded by books and the people involved in writing, publishing, selling, reading, and talking about them.”

Women & Children First 8

Image: 

“I still think women lag behind in winning the major awards, and they lag behind in getting critical attention,” says Bubon. “So there’s still a need for Women & Children First and stores like it that push the emphasis toward women writers.”

Women & Children First 9

Image: 

“Though women artists working in most mediums have certainly moved forward, they still struggle for opportunity and recognition,” Christophersen says. “Women in general have also, obviously, made many advances since the seventies, but we still have a long way to go. Women’s right to control our own bodies is constantly being challenged; we are still paid less for doing the same job as men; we still have few good options for childcare; married women who work—which is the majority of us—still do more than our fair share of taking care of home and children….I could go on, but these are some of the reasons we still need organizations—and bookstores—that focus on women.”

Inside Indie Bookstores: Powell’s Books in Portland, Oregon
Inside Indie Bookstores: Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi

Inside Indie Bookstores: McNally Jackson Books in New York City

by

Jeremiah Chamberlin

November/December 2010
11.1.10
In Print and Online

In a recent New York magazine article about the renaissance of indie
bookstores in the city, Joe Keohane wrote, “New York’s independent bookshops
were supposed to be long gone by now. After a decade of slow financial
strangulation at the hands of the big-box stores, the web, the Kindle, and,
finally, the recession, the fact that there are still Strands and McNally
Jacksons standing seems positively miraculous.” Yet what is interesting about
this article is not just the fact that new stores are opening and thriving in
the city, but that McNally Jackson Books is likened to an institution like the
Strand, which has been in business since 1927. Although Sarah McNally’s
bookstore at 52 Prince Street in Manhattan certainly feels as though it’s
always been a part of the New York City literary scene, the truth is that it
was founded only six years ago, in December 2004.

Perhaps part of the
store’s sense of legacy has to do with the fact that McNally herself comes from
a bookselling family. Her parents own several McNally Robinson bookstores in
Canada—the flagship store in Winnipeg, and another in Saskatoon. In fact,
though always owned and operated by Sarah, the store in New York City
originally opened as a McNally Robinson. It became McNally Jackson in August
2008, both to end confusion about the store being independent from those run by
her parents and to commemorate the birth of her child with her then husband,
Christopher Jackson, executive editor at Spiegel & Grau.

It’s also clear
that this store is an integral part of the fabric of this neighborhood. It’s
located in a vibrant area of lower Manhattan—though technically in NoLita
(North of Little Italy), it’s also on the eastern fringe of SoHo (South of
Houston)—that is filled with boutiques, hip coffee shops, and trendy
restaurants. On the Thursday morning that I showed up, there were already
several people waiting for the place to open. One person sat casually on a
bench outside the bookstore’s café, others chatted together on the sidewalk,
and a few peered in the front windows at the beautiful display of arranged
books.

“Beautiful” is
perhaps the best way to describe Sarah McNally’s bookshop. The store is light
and open and modern, yet still warm. Similarly, the worn hardwood floors and
the gray slate tile in the café are a wonderful contrast to the glass and
brushed aluminum staircase that leads to the lower level, as well as the
sculptural “chandelier”—for lack of a better word—that hangs over the
staircase, a piece resembling an enormous bunch of grapes the size of beach
balls that has been constructed from bright, distorted, partially mirrored
globes. From the lighting choices to the side tables, everything feels
deliberate, unhurried.

It also feels
personal. Every display in the store has a bit of cloth and flowers, a touch
that McNally learned from her mother growing up. Similarly, the wallpaper that
decorates the café is made up entirely from pages of McNally’s own collection
of books. However, she jokes that it’s not quite as personal as she’d hoped it
would be. When she brought her books to the wallpaper company, she’d selected
specific pages that she’d written on, with the intention that after they’d been
scanned and printed her marginalia would be visible alongside the text—a
record of the conversation that she, like so many readers, has had with her
books. But company personnel, thinking they were doing her a favor, laboriously
erased every underline and scribble before they were finished printing. And
because the remodeled café was scheduled to reopen the following day, she
decided to hang the wallpaper anyway. Still, there is something comforting
about sitting in her café, surrounded by all those pages of books.

McNally herself is
a wonderful presence. When we met, she welcomed me into the store as if it were
her home. She introduced me to staff, made sure I had something to drink when
we settled at a long wooden table in the café, and asked me about my own
writing projects before we began. Her vitality and openness not only draws a
person to her, but also permeates the entire store. She is energetic yet
grounded, with a genuine excitement for new ideas. And throughout our
conversation she was quick to joke, never taking herself too seriously. Yet her
commitment to bookselling and literature itself is deeply serious. She has high
standards—for publishing, for her store, and for herself.

You grew up in a bookselling family
in Canada. Did you know you wanted to be a bookseller from a young age?
No. I moved to New York to work in
publishing, which always seemed so glamorous growing up in a Winnipeg
bookselling family. And I did that for a few years, but it didn’t ultimately
work well with my temperament. Perhaps I would be happier in an office now than
I was then, but at the time it was torture, which I think is maybe what a lot
of young people feel who work in offices. [Laughter.]

So while I was at
Basic Books and Counterpoint, I did a few African American books. I used to go
to the Harlem Book Fair every year and work at the publisher’s booth. Have you
ever been to the Harlem Book Fair? You would not believe the throngs of
people—you cannot move to get through the crowds. But people were coming up to
my booth and discussing books of mine that they’d read. And just that
electrifying moment of talking to a reader about a book that I’d edited made me
realize how far I’d traveled away from that experience.

When you’re in
publishing, your reader is so abstract. Your only readers are reviewers. Or
your sales team. In-house, as an editor, you’re often the only person to read
the book. I mean, when you get to be higher up you do books that people spend
hundreds of thousands of dollars on and other people read, but I was not at
that level. [Laughter.] So I
missed actually talking to readers about books, and I thought, “This is where I
want to be.” And I’ve never ever regretted that decision. The primary reason I
love my job is because of talking to readers.

So was it the solitary process of
editing that was difficult for that twenty-something version of yourself, or
was it the ethos of publishing that you found didn’t fit your temperament?
I always liked the editing. No, I found
the office environment very trying. Growing up I’d been working in bookstores
since I was twelve, so the thought of being stuck at a desk in an environment
where the only people you interact with are the other people who work with you
in the same office every day for years…I couldn’t imagine it! So that aspect of
it was very difficult. Also, the formality of meetings and the strict, strict
hierarchy is something I made sure that my store has never had. I never try to
make anybody feel that, just because I’m the boss, my opinion on something
stands. I always try to keep it a dialogue where everyone is putting out their
best ideas—from how a display looks, to how we’re going to take off in a whole
new direction for our Web site, or whatever it might be. I always try to have a
conversation. But in publishing, it’s a much more hierarchical environment. I
had bosses that were so high up that I’d never even met them. They’d never even
set foot in the office in all the years that I was stuck there with these
people, and yet one word from them would completely change what I had to do.
Similarly, my opinions—if I was even asked for them—would be filtered up
through three, four, or five people.

Do you think it might have actually
been harder for you to work in publishing because of your bookselling
background, considering how closely you’d been connected to readers before?
I do think so. I also came to see how
abstract the idea of a book can become around a conference table. Because that
can never happen in a bookstore—you’re constantly having readers come back to
you and say, “God, that book sucked.” Or, “God, this book was great.” And
before a person buys a book, many have to engage with it. They have to open it
up, read it. The first page has to be there.

Do you feel that publishers think
about getting books into the hands of customers differently than booksellers
do?
Hmm. They try different things with
different books, so there’s not really a single answer to that question. The
way that Algonquin gets its books into people’s hands, as with A Reliable
Wife or Water for Elephants, is very different from the way that Random House
tried to get Yann Martel into people’s hands. It’s a completely different
route. It’s also hard for me to answer because I’m in New York, so I interact
with editors in a way that I think the rest of the country might not. I mean, I
will have editors come to the store and put a book in my hands and say, “Please
read this.”

Not just a sales rep.
Right. And so there is that
difference. But the good editors are sending notes to booksellers around the
country, saying, “This is something special.”

Putting books in the hands of
readers is also more individualized in a bookstore. As a bookseller, you learn
your regular customers so well that you know their tastes. At the store I used
to run, for example, we’d often set aside new titles for particular
individuals.
I don’t know if I know my customers
that well. In some ways I do. The way I do is that I believe every person
contains multitudes, and so I draw on the multitudes within me even more than I
do the knowledge of the customers themselves. And I feel like that is what does
not happen in publishing enough—people do not draw on the multitudes within
themselves. Paying three, four, five, or six million dollars for a second book
by a writer that’s not a good book means you’re drawing only on numbers, and
that’s not what sells books unless it’s one by James Patterson. That’s why it
was so hard for me to stay in publishing. Obviously I’m doing a very particular
kind of bookselling, but I do feel that publishers should ask the book to speak
first to their own heart. I think that’s what readers are asking, and that’s
what buyers are asking. I’m sure you hear this from every bookseller you speak
to—that they’re selling the books that speak deeply to them.

Absolutely.
Also, something that people don’t think
enough about is that the future of reading depends on the present of reading.
The future of our industry depends on a healthy present. I’ve heard it time and
again from customers—and I’ve found it in my own life—that when you read a
book that’s not very good, you don’t rush out to read another book. But when
you read a book you love, you rush back to continue the trend. So every
mediocre book that’s pushed with great blurbs—

—is one more leak in the boat.
It is one more leak in the boat. [Laughter.] Great blurbs from the author’s friends when the
book is not that great is discrediting the entire experience, which is bad for
all of our futures. And there are so many ways in which I feel that publishers
are not really fostering that future. Do you know Richard Nash? Richard was the
editorial director at Soft Skull Press and he’s a consultant now. He was here
recently talking about how the paper in books gets worse and worse and worse
every year, and he called it “the endless shitification of the book.” [Laughter.] It’s so true, right? I mean, they’re publishing
on newsprint. Newsprint! Not the small presses, incidentally. Very few small
presses are doing that, despite the fact that they’re the ones that don’t have
any money. So I’m suspicious of these arguments by the mainstream that they
have to.

So it’s short-term versus long-term
thinking.
Which there is a lot of.

A few minutes ago we were talking
about multitudes. Do you consider this a general bookstore?
Yes. I mean, we are. I’m considering not being a general store anymore. I remember Karl
Pohrt [of Shaman Drum, in Ann Arbor, Michigan] saying to me once, “We sell
books. We only sell books.” And I sell all sorts of stuff—I sell wedding
planners, and I sell pet books, and I sell SAT guides. I sell self-help,
health, humor, business, sports. I sell all of this stuff. When I created my
business model, I articulated that we could be a destination bookstore in the
same way that Barnes & Noble is a destination bookstore. We would have
everything they did, but we’d simply be more selective—as a favor to the consumer, not a disservice.

And so I spent
years pushing that on the public and trying to get this idea across. But
increasingly, even in just the last five years, online retail has become
normalized. Everyone buys from eBay. And I’m sure there are regular customers
of ours who buy from Amazon.com. So I don’t even know if anyone wants that in a
bookstore anymore, if anybody wants a reliable general store.

I mean, think of
ten years ago—nobody bought online. Ten years ago my techie geek friends
bought online, and nobody else did. And twenty years ago, even fifteen years
ago, if you wanted a book you needed a bookstore. It was that simple. If you
want the book, you need the bookstore. And that seems sometimes prehistoric now
in terms of how far we’ve come.

In a city of bookstores like New
York, in an era where you don’t need a bookstore to buy a book, what was the
mission behind opening this store?
It was very much to be an event-driven
independent. I mean…my own vision is starting to seem so hackneyed and dusty at
this point. I really think I need to reimagine this store, and I’m in the
process of doing that. Imagine a community center for books that’s very event
driven. And we do still have four, five, six, seven events a week, as well as
story times and book clubs.

So it’s very much a neighborhood
bookstore.
Well, and more than that. I mean, a
place that is actually comfortable—there are chairs, it’s very spacious. That
might not seem like an important thing, but in New York it’s a big deal. We had
the radical idea of giving people chairs. [Laughter.] The chains took out all their chairs because
people were falling asleep in them, and literally dying in them. So we wanted to have a place, you know,
where you could sit and relax and look at books. It was almost like taking the
bookselling strategy that everyone else around the country had already figured
out and bringing it to New York.

Which seems so ironic.
Right, right. In retrospect I felt so
inspired, but when I look at my five-year-old or six-year-old vision, it was
really not revolutionary. [Laughter.]

And the café has been busy all
morning. Is it a part of the success of the store?
Not financially, but spiritually.

It brings people in and it adds to
the atmosphere.
And it brings so much energy. Just the
movement and the talking and the people bring real vitality to the
store—people don’t want to walk into an empty bookstore.

Why are you rethinking your mission
or your model? Is it an issue of overhead?
No, it’s an issue of staying ahead of
whatever is happening in the book industry, because right now we’re having our
best year ever. We’re doing really well. But my fear is that remaining a general
store, what people may actually want is an extraordinary literature section. So
maybe we should get rid of photography and art—because you see other places
selling it—and just have an enormous literature section. Maybe we get rid of
music and film and have an enormous poetry section. Maybe we really dedicate
ourselves to becoming the most extraordinary literary bookstore in the country.

Though remaining a more general
bookstore appeals to your mission as a neighborhood store.
Yes, exactly.

Whereas the idea of being the best
literature store in the country would perhaps be a large draw—
—to tourists, to the whole city.

There would be tradeoffs either
way.
Yes! I know. I’m feeling very torn.
One of my friends is the VP of marketing at Harper, and when we went out to
lunch last week I talked to her about this idea. She said, “What does that
mean, the ‘best’ literature section in the city? What does that mean?” She
said, “You’re never going to have more books than Amazon, so are they still a
better bookstore?” So I’m feeling conflicted.

But you’re talking about hand
selecting rather than carrying everything.
Yeah, that’s the idea. That was always
the concept in this store. But if you read Ken Auletta’s recent essay about
e-books in the New Yorker [“Publish
or Perish: Can the iPad Topple the Kindle and Save the Book Business?”] he
quotes [Carolyn Reidy of] Simon & Schuster as saying that in a three-month
period, online retailers sell copies of 2,500 of their titles that aren’t
stocked in bookstores anymore. So I haven’t seen the chains as my competition
since I opened. I don’t see Barnes & Noble as my competition.

Your competition is online.
Entirely. That’s partly because there
isn’t a chain near my location, of course.

So do you feel more pressure from
online bookselling or the digital book?
Online, online.

But what about e-books? Is that something that you have any interest
pursuing?
Yes? [Pause.] Yes. In typical
Sarah McNally fashion, though, I feel like I can’t do it until I figure out a
whole new exciting revolutionary way to do it [laughter], which I
probably never will. So I’ll just end up doing it off the ABA [American
Booksellers Association] Web site. We’re setting up on the ABA site now. Though
we don’t love any of the templates, so we have to do it ourselves from scratch,
which is a big hullabaloo.

But, yes, I
definitely want to do it. It’s just very hard. I mean, talk about comparing
competition based on price! When you start getting into e-books and you’re
selling online, people are a click away from platforms like Amazon that are
already established. I’ve never felt that as a bookstore you should rely too
much on the concept of loyalty, but maybe I’m wrong. I’ve always said, “Shop
from me because I’m better, don’t shop from me because you feel sorry for me.”
But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I’ve been wrong all this time and ultimately I’m
going to come back pleading for their loyalty. [Laughter.]

But if there are already
established online retailers like Amazon and Powell’s, do you think that
spending all these resources to develop a Web presence is the best use of the ABA’s
time and resources, or might Shop Local First campaigns and educational
programs like Winter Institute benefit booksellers more?
It’s an excellent question, and I don’t
know. Sometimes I look around the store and I think, “This is a good
bookstore.” We opened without knowing what the hell we were doing, but
somewhere along the line we’ve become a good bookstore. And I feel confident
that we’re a good bookstore. But who cares in 2010? Does anyone care whether
you’re a good bookstore? Is that enough? I don’t know. And if that’s enough,
then Winter Institute is more important. If that’s enough, then Shop Local is
more important. If it’s not
enough—and I don’t know whether or not it’s enough—then I think it’s
important that we at least try online bookselling.

And if loyalty is
based on some kind of chivalrous notion of sympathy with the culture, then
selling e-books is maybe irrelevant to that. I mean, you’ve seen my store. We
have seven thousand square feet in New York City. I’m obviously paying a lot of
rent. Clearly I’m not a completely incompetent businessperson, and yet every
day people come in and ask if we take credit cards. As if I’m just sitting here
stroking my cat, with my abacus. [Laughter.] So partly the idea of selling e-books is a symbol of something.

And one thing that
the ABA platform is great about is the ability to upload your whole inventory
onto its Web site every day, so you can have what I think is necessary: a
terminal in the store the customers can use to look up books themselves.

Like a kiosk.
Yeah, and from that kiosk you can buy
e-books. You can place your order or you can see whether the book is in the
store. Because I believe that for every customer who asks, there are a hundred
who get confused and leave. I mean, our literature section is broken up by
region—French literature is its own thing, as is Mediterranean, European,
African. If you can’t find the African literature section and you want The
Power of One, nine out of ten
people will leave. But if they have a kiosk, it will give them the confidence
to go to a staff person if they can’t find something. Or they’d be able to
download it on the spot.

And I am
someone who reads books on my iPhone. I started doing this because I only had
one hand when I was breastfeeding. [Laughter.] But I only read what’s in the public domain.
This is another thing that worries me—I won’t spend a penny on e-books. So I
end up reading old British stuff. I’m reading The Woman in White right now on my phone, but I’m finally buying the
book today because I can’t stand it anymore. While it’s great to be able to
read in the dark, there’s something really depressing about going to bed with
your phone and reading a book on it. [Laughter.] Although you do have moments of immersion where
the medium is lost.

That suspension of disbelief.
You do. You come in and out of it. But
it’s still depressing. Especially because I’ve realized how deep my
relationship is with books. When things get tense in a book, I think you start
doing things like stroking the edge of the pages. When you do that on your
iPhone, the next thing you know you’ve frozen the thing. [Laughter.]

But it has made me believe in multiple platforms. I
remember publishers once suggesting that if you buy the book you also get the
e-book and maybe the audio, too. I remember thinking, “That’s stupid.” But now
I don’t think so, because I’d love The Woman in White in audio for when I’m cooking, I’d love it on my
phone for little moments when I’m waiting in line or when I’m nursing—which
is, admittedly, a very specific situation—and then to also have the book for
when I’m sitting in my reading chair or in my bed. Have you read Lee
Siegal’s book Against the Machine?

No, I haven’t.
He makes an excellent point in it that
whether you’re buying sex toys or lawn mowers or books or clothes for your kid,
the retail experience is completely the same online. Whether it’s sordid or
boring, it’s the same. And that is what is so wonderful about retail—when you
buy something from a place, the aura of that place becomes a part of the
object. I’m sure if you went through your bookshelf you could remember where
you bought every single book, and somehow it affects how you feel about that
book forever.

Absolutely.
And I would love to be able to create
an online bookstore that actually felt like a unique experience. So I do have a dream of selling e-books and having
an online store that actually has ambiance. But we’ve been so focused these
past few years on renovating the physical space that I really haven’t had the
time. For the first couple of years it was such a tremendous act of creation.
Coming from a bookselling family, I had enormous confidence that I knew how to
run a bookstore. That confidence was almost entirely misplaced. I realized how
shallowly I had inhabited my parents’ business.

You didn’t know what they were
doing, or you didn’t realize the extent of what they had to do?
The latter. And the former. [Laughter.] Because I felt like I was doing so much, but I was
merely moving snow around the tip of the iceberg. When you work for other
people, you don’t realize how much you’re passing by.

How much thought goes into every
decision.
Yeah. Every square inch of a business.

So in what ways did you either
model yourself after or consciously decide to do different from your parents’
bookstores?
What I modeled after them was their
philosophy to be event-driven. That’s the engine of their marketing and
publicity. We also use our café—like they do their restaurants—as the event
space, whether that’s a good idea or not.

But what’s funny
is that my favorite bookstores that I’ve loved shopping in are crazy junky old
used stores with books piled everywhere, with the owners smoking, and all the
books smell like cigarette smoke. I love stores like that. Yet if my staff
leaves anything lying around, I’ll say, “Get rid of this mess! We have to keep
everything clean!” It’s so funny. You can sit in the quiet of your mind and
say, “I will be this sort of spouse, I will be this sort of friend, I will be
this sort of daughter.” Then you go into daily life and you are exactly the
spouse, friend, and daughter that you have no choice but to be. The dominant
personality is indomitable, and I believe that bookselling is the exact same
way. You can say, “I will have this kind
of bookstore,” but you can no more control that than what kind of person you
are.

So is what we see here the best
or the worst of you? [Laughter.]
It’s beyond my control. This is the
only bookstore I could have, I think. It can be no other way. It’s like when
you have to wear someone else’s shirt. Even though you think it’s a perfectly
nice shirt, somehow it’s humiliating. You wouldn’t think, “God, that person
shouldn’t leave the house in that shirt.” But your leaving the house in that shirt becomes totally
unbearable. It’s exactly like that with your bookstore. You can’t wear someone
else’s clothes and you have the only bookstore you can have.

Another thing I’d like to talk
to you about is China. In January of 2008 you
traveled to Beijing with several other American booksellers: Karl Pohrt of
Shaman Drum in Ann Arbor, Paul Yamazaki of City Lights in San Francisco, Rick
Simonson of Elliot Bay in Seattle, and Allison Hill of Vroman’s in Pasadena.
How did this come about?
Well, I’ll tell you. Mitch Kaplan
[of Books & Books in Miami] put together a bookselling panel at the 2007
Miami Book Fair and he brought us down. Allison
wasn’t a part of that, but the rest of us were. And afterward Karl said, “We
need to take this on the road!” Meanwhile, Lance Fensterman—who works for Reed
Exhibitions and who used to be the Director of BEA [BookExpo America]—was
talking to the Chinese equivalent
of BEA, which is enormous. He was asked for a list of booksellers to give an educational
panel to Chinese booksellers, and so he thought of us. He also asked Allison to
join the group because she’s an extremely impressive woman. She’s a very, very
smart businessperson. There were also several British booksellers.

So we went to
Beijing, and it was wonderful. The Chinese were so gracious and so hospitable.
We stayed for over a week, and for most of that time they had arranged every
single meal of every day, as well as tours. It was amazing. We met so many
people and we were fed so well.

In addition to the trade show,
did you also visit individual bookstores?
Yes. We met the CEO of the second
largest bookstore in the world, which is enormous—it was like ten Barnes &
Nobles. Their mandate is to stock every single book published in Chinese.
Period. I cannot give you a sense of the magnitude of this store. People had
shopping carts. You couldn’t even move in this store it was so crowded. And when
we went to the conference room to talk with the head of the store, the
conference table was so enormous that the far end of it was on the horizon
somewhere. [Laughter.] The place must
have been a hundred thousand square feet. It was enormous.

But that’s atypical.
Well, that was a state-owned store.
When you walk in, all the communist texts were right there in front—Marx and
Mao and Engles. But then we also visited the City Lights of China, which is now
state-owned but was not originally. They published all the Beats. We went to an
academic bookstore that was beautiful, run by a professor who’d been locked up
after Tiananmen Square and who now had this amazing bookstore.

Are all the bookstores
state-owned?
No, this is what is so interesting
about Chinese cultural control. Some of the publishing houses are state-owned,
some of the bookstores are state-owned, but not all of them. Still, it’s enough
that the government nudges the direction of the culture without having complete
control. We talked to the wonderful man who runs the academic bookstore, and we
said, “Why don’t you have more events? Because all of our stores use events to
get the word out about our stores.” And he said, “I have some, but I’m already
under surveillance. If I have too many then they’ll crack down.”

Other than the influence of the
state, how does Chinese bookselling compare to bookselling here in the States?
It was really like bookselling
twenty-five years ago. Remember what middle class retail used to be like? Go
back to our early teenage years. It wasn’t nice before the Banana Republicization of retail. I remember even when I
opened this store people kept coming up to me, saying, “It doesn’t feel like a
book store. It feels like a restaurant or a clothing store.” And I thought,
“Why can’t bookstores be nice?” It’s ridiculous. [Laughter.] So retail is changing in China. There are more and
more Western chains, and there’s a lot of money suddenly. So there are more and
more high-end stores that are beautiful. Retail feels very 1982 there.

So if you went back to China ten
years from now, do you think their stores will have evolved in the same way
that ours have?
I hope so. That’s what I gave my
speech about. Online retail is just now starting to impact their businesses. It really is
like a snap shot of our own history. So they are going to have to figure out
how to make their stores feel necessary. They’re about to come up against the
same challenge that we’ve been fighting. And the only way I know how to do that
is to create an attractive physical space. My customers tend to also say it’s the
staff.

What’s been the greatest challenge
in the first six years of business?
I don’t know. Everyone always asks me
that. Because it’s all gone so well, really.

For me I guess it
might be competition over author events. It’s really hard to get the A-list
authors in New York. Barnes & Noble always gets them. I also find management really a
challenge. It’s not, you know, native to my personality to tell people what to
do. I remember reading The Gospel of St. Thomas when I was quite young. There is a line in it that
says, “Jesus said, ‘Be passersby.’” And I thought, “What a wonderful idea, just
to be a passerby.” I mean, we’re all so meddlesome, you know? And I think being
raised by my mother, who was a retailer—once you’re a retailer you’re always
going into other people’s stores thinking, “Why would they choose that carpet?
Why would they have their staff do it that way?” Or constantly looking at ways
that things can be done better because that’s the only way to survive as a
store is to be always on the
lookout for any little thing
that you can do better. It’s a constant act of regeneration. If you stop,
you’re dead.

page_5: 

What would be the highest compliment
you could receive from a customer?
I think it’s always the same, which is
they found and loved books that they would never have otherwise found.
Ultimately, that is my service. That can be the only service that independent
bookstores provide, because we no longer are the exclusive purveyors of these
things. That’s the only reason why we should exist.

To put good books in the hands of
people.
Yeah. Matchmaking, you know? That’s
the bookseller’s role. If we do it well, we’ll stay relevant. If we don’t do it
well, we won’t.

And what do you most want to have
achieved in the next six years of business?
I want this store to really have a
feeling of being so deeply curated. Because I don’t want to exist just for the
sake of existing, but to really feel essential to the culture.

INSIDE MCNALLY JACKSON BOOKS
On average, how many books do you
stock?
Forty thousand.

What are the best-selling sections
in your store?
Literature, art, and design.

What books did you most enjoy
selling in 2010?
Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer has brought many customers
and booksellers to vegetarianism; Just Kids by Patti Smith, as she is our neighbor and was
wonderful about signing stock, and New Yorkers loved this book; Faithful
Place by Tana French is one of the
best mysteries we’ve read in a long time; and Nox by Anne Carson, whose writing I love deeply and
madly.

What is the most unique or defining aspect of McNally Jackson as a
bookstore for you?
Our focus on international literature,
which is part of a larger effort to create a bookstore that is as diverse as
New York City.

Is there anything special you look for in terms of an author event?
We try to avoid single-author readings
unless there is a pressing reason. We try panels, interviews, conversations,
political discussions—anything that avoids recitation and allows the spark of
creation to enter the store.

What would most people be surprised to learn about independent
bookstores?
That we don’t sit around all day
reading.

Where would you like to see McNally Jackson six years from now?
I aspire only to continue offering a
place where New Yorkers can celebrate the written word.

What do you love most about bookselling?
The customers.

Jeremiah Chamberlin teaches writing at
the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He is also the editor of the online
journal Fiction Writers Review.

McNally Jackson Books in New York City

For the sixth and final installment of our series of interviews, Inside
Indie Bookstores, Jeremiah Chamberlin travelled to New York City to speak with Sarah McNally, owner of McNally Jackson Books.

McNally Jackson 1

Image: 

McNally Jackson Books, located in the SoHo neighborhood of New York City, stocks about 40,000 books at any given time and sprawls over 7,000 square feet. Though founded by Sarah McNally in December 2004, it feels as though it’s always been a part of the city’s literary scene.

McNally Jackson 2

Image: 

The store has a sense of legacy, perhaps because McNally herself comes from a family of booksellers, and it’s clearly an integral part of the fabric of the neighborhood. It also feels personal. Every display has a bit of cloth and flowers. The wallpaper that decorates the café is made up entirely from pages of McNally’s own collection of books.

McNally Jackson 3

Image: 

“I want this store to really have a feeling of being so deeply curated,” McNally says. “Because I don’t want to exist just for the sake of existing, but to really feel essential to the culture.”

McNally Jackson 4

Image: 

The store is light and open and modern, yet still warm. From the lighting choices to the side tables, everything feels deliberate, unhurried. McNally Jackson Books is a neighborhood spot. There are plenty of places to sit, and lingering is encouraged.

McNally Jackson 5

Image: 

“When you buy something from a place, the aura of that place becomes a part of the object,” McNally says. “I’m sure if you went through your bookshelf you could remember where you bought every single book, and somehow it affects how you feel about that book forever.”

McNally Jackson 6

Image: 

“When I created my business model,” says McNally, “I articulated that we could be a destination bookstore in the same way that Barnes & Noble is a destination bookstore. We would have everything they did, but we’d simply be more selective—as a favor to the consumer, not a disservice.”

McNally Jackson 7

Image: 

The café is always busy, and while McNally admits it’s not a money maker, she says it contributes “spiritually” to the store. “It brings so much energy. Just the movement and the talking and the people bring real vitality to the store—people don’t want to walk into an empty bookstore.”

McNally Jackson 8

Image: 

“The future of our industry depends on the present of reading,” McNally says. “I’ve heard it time and again from customers—and I’ve found it in my own life—that when you read a book that’s not very good, you don’t rush out to read another book. But when you read a book you love, you rush back to continue the trend.”

McNally Jackson 9

Image: 

For McNally, the highest compliment is when a customer says they found and loved books that they would never have otherwise found. “Ultimately, that is my service,” she says. “That can be the only service that independent bookstores provide, because we no longer are the exclusive purveyors of these things. That’s the only real reason why we should exist…. Matchmaking, you know? That’s the bookseller’s role. If we do it well, we’ll stay relevant.”

Inside Indie Bookstores: Boswell Book Company in Milwaukee
Inside Indie Bookstores: Powell’s Books in Portland, Oregon

Inside Indie Bookstores: Tattered Cover Book Store in Denver

by

Jeremiah Chamberlin

September/October 2010
9.1.10
In Print and Online

On the morning I visited Denver’s
Tattered Cover Book Store, the place was bustling with activity. Customers
wandered up and down the central staircase, carrying books tucked under their
arms. They stopped to browse the spacious aisles, scanning titles on the
shelves. They lingered in the downstairs café, eating as they flipped through
magazines from the enormous periodical section.

The reason for the
crowds had partly to do with the influx of writers who had traveled to Denver
this weekend for the Association of Writers & Writing Programs Conference,
and partly with the fact that it was opening day of the Major League Baseball
season—the sidewalks were filled with fans headed to nearby Coors Field, home
of the Colorado Rockies, and before the game, many of them stopped at Tattered
Cover. The store’s location, in the LoDo (Lower Downtown) area of Denver, is a
success story of urban revitalization. This neighborhood is the oldest section
of Denver, and like the boom-and-bust economy of this western city, it has had
its fair share of downturns. In 1988, however, the city council created the
Lower Downtown Historic District with the mission to preserve the architectural
and historical assets of the area and to spur economic investment and growth.

Because of her
belief in this project and the need for community-oriented business districts,
Joyce Meskis, owner of Tattered Cover, purchased the warehouse building at 16th
and Wynkoop with a business partner in 1990, and subsequently moved her
administrative offices and the shipping-and-receiving operations for her Cherry
Creek store, which opened in 1974, to this location. A few years later, she
opened a second Tattered Cover store here, as well as a coffee shop and
newsstand. By 1996 the LoDo store had substantially expanded and today occupies
two floors over approximately twenty thousand square feet, including a café and
a dedicated special-events area that accommodates up to 250 people.

The store has since
become as much a destination for the local community as it has for writers.
From the moment you walk in, you feel a sense of ease and peacefulness. There
are overstuffed chairs and couches throughout both floors, as well as spacious
tables in the café area. The guiding aesthetic is a wonderful mix of the old
(worn hardwood floors downstairs, exposed rafters and hand-hewn support beams)
and the new (forest green carpet upstairs, a selection of organic and local
options at the café). The place feels vital. It feels vigorous.

The same could be
said of Meskis. Though soft spoken, she possesses an engaging and charming
personality that immediately put me at ease. She radiates a type of calm that
seems unflappable by the challenges of daily life. Yet in conversation she is
the first to poke fun at herself and the many obstacles she has faced in her
thirty-six years as a bookseller—not just in terms of running a business, but
also advocating for First Amendment rights and helping to nurture the social
and literary communities of Denver. In fact, Tattered Cover hosts more than
five hundred readings a year among its three locations. So it was fitting that
we sat down for our talk beside a fireplace at the back of Tattered Cover’s
expansive event space, surrounded by black-and-white photographs of many of the
authors who’ve read at the store during its nearly four decades of existence.

How did you come to bookselling?
I came to bookselling accidentally. I
was intent on teaching at the university level.

Here in Denver?
No, I didn’t have a place in mind. I
grew up in Chicago on the South Side, and I was very driven in terms of my
direction in life. I was determined I was going to get the zillionth degree,
and I wanted to have a life that was full of the usual things—marriage,
children. I could see myself at an excellent university teaching brilliant
students all day long, walking home with a briefcase in hand, kicking the fall
leaves as I approached my nice but not ostentatious house, hearing strains of
Chopin being played by my children through the open French doors. [Laughter.] It didn’t quite work out that way.

What year was this?
I graduated high school in 1959. Then
I went to college.

Did you go to school in Chicago?
No, I went to Purdue [in Indiana]. I
was a math major, believe it or not. It was always a toss-up, and I eventually
shifted to English. My parents didn’t have much money, but they were able to
pay for my first year. So I always had part-time jobs in the summers. But then
I married young, while we were in school, and I needed to get more work during
the school year. And soon I found myself working in bookstores to help pay the
tuition.

This was at Purdue?
Yes. But then my husband finished his
graduate degree and we moved to Colorado. All the while I was still working in
bookstores and libraries to help pay the tuition bills. And after some time—I
was in graduate school then—I woke up one morning literally staring at the
ceiling and said, “You idiot, don’t you know that you’ve been doing what you love
all these years? Why don’t you just get on with it?” So I dropped out of
graduate school and I got more serious about the book business. Around this
time the marriage ended, and I had two small children.

When was this?
1973. We were still pretty young, so
we didn’t have much savings. But I took my half and began pursuing the book
business. Fast forward a year or so and a little store in the Cherry Creek area
of Denver came up for sale. It was called the Tattered Cover, and it was three
years old. It was a small storefront—only 950 square feet—and carried only
new books, despite its name. So, I did a little business plan on an envelope
with a pencil and figured I could pull it off. The bad news was that the owner
wanted what seemed like a huge amount of money at the time. But the good news
was that he was willing to carry the note, to be the banker. And the other
piece of good news was that he didn’t want much money down. So I figured out
what I could do and I made an offer, which was promptly rejected.

Some time went by
and I decided, through the urging of a friend, to go see what was going on,
because there was no ownership transition of the store that was apparent. It
turned out that someone else had made a better offer earlier, but the deal had
fallen through. I don’t know why the owner didn’t come back to me afterward.
Who knows? But, to make a long story somewhat shorter, I made another offer. I
borrowed some money from my uncle in California and that offer was accepted in
September 1974, and ownership transferred to me.

Over the next several years you
expanded, however.
Yes, in increments.

Was this the plan from the
beginning, or did opportunities arise that allowed you to grow?
I can’t speak for every bookseller
in the world, obviously. But wouldn’t you say it’s true that every bookseller
sort of has this dream of the bookstore in the sky—what it could be, how you
would want to have so much of what you loved and what your customers
appreciated, and then also have the opportunity to pique their interest in
different areas without betting the ranch?

Of course.
So I don’t think I had a goal to
have a huge bookstore by any means. But I certainly wanted to grow it to a size
that would accommodate a fine representation of the wonderful books that are published.
So every time one of our neighbors in the building would move out, we would
take the space if it were available and if it were the right timing for us. We
were fortunate in that way. There was growth in the commercial area, there was
growth in what was possible in the book business in Denver, and we took the
opportunities.

But looking back, I think our biggest decision in
terms of growth in that first store was when we decided to move upstairs in the
original building. Quite a bit of space had become available on the second
floor and it was offered to us at a good price because second floor space—for
retail—is less desirable. So I pondered and pondered and pondered it. Because
the question was: How do you get the customers upstairs? And any time our
customers or colleagues found out that we were considering this, they thought
the sky was falling! They were very concerned and they gave me all kinds of
advice: “Don’t do it, don’t do it; your customers won’t follow you. It will be
the end of the Tattered Cover. It will be dreadful.”

Were you going to move the whole
store upstairs?
Oh, no. We were going to have both
floors. We were going to put in a staircase. And it’s not like there weren’t
stores that had tried this before. Obviously department stores were
multi-level. But it wasn’t quite the same thing. Our colleagues and sales reps
and customers were just beside themselves in their advice to me about not doing
this. And I kept thinking to myself, “Well, I’m sure they’ve got good reasons
for this, and I can see both sides to the story…” but we needed the space, we
were growing, the rent was very compelling, and I simply didn’t want to lose
that opportunity. And I thought, “We could make the staircase wider; we could
put books on the landings to draw people up the stairs; we could put
destination sections up there…” I said, “We can do this so it doesn’t feel like
an interminable journey up these stairs.”

Fast forward—we
did it. Our landlord had a charitable streak from time to time, and he loaned
me the money to put the staircase in. And the customers came upstairs. But our
colleagues were right in that it is much
harder to get people upstairs. Still, it worked. And it worked again. We took
again more space upstairs when it became available. So we grew from about 950
square feet to 6,000 square feet in that location. Then we were out of space.

Then, perhaps 1980
or so, I started looking around for space within the immediate area to move to.
And so I was looking, looking, looking, looking, nothing, nothing, nothing,
nothing. Moving a store is a serious decision, you know?

And no small undertaking.
And no small undertaking, even
though we’d become pretty used to barreling out walls and moving bookcases. In
fact, in my earliest years, after my husband and I were divorced, I lived in a
small place with the kids. I would go to the lumberyard and have my boards
pre-cut and then bring them back in the car. I had space in the alleyway, which
was next to the store, and I’d be banging away, making new bookcases. [Laughter.] I’d forgotten about that.

So, you know, we
were stuck. It didn’t seem like anything was going to work. And then I had a
visit from a developer in town who had his eye on a vacant piece of property
next to a parking garage next to a department store that was across the street
from a shopping center. It was an open field at that point, and he was planning
on putting in ground-floor retail and then a little bit of an expansion of the
parking garage next door above on the roof—a few extra stories of parking. And
so he said, “I’ll cut you a good deal. Would you like to move over here?” It
was only half a block away and it was brand new space—two floors, totaling
about 11,000 square feet. This was double what we currently had. And he was
willing to do a lot for us to get us over there, and I thought, “Okay. Let’s go
for it.”

So we got serious
about that and we were planning to sublet the old store location of 6,000
square feet. But then the bookstore grapevine came through town and we learned
that Pickwick Books was considering bringing a store to Denver. You probably
don’t remember Pickwick Books.

No, I don’t.
Pickwick Books was a new
development arm of the Dayton Hudson Corporation, which owned B. Dalton back
then. And Crown Books—do you remember Crown Books?

I do.
Well, Crown Books was very
successful opening up in the Washington D.C. area. They were one of the first major
discounters and they, were really doing a number on the independent stores, as
well as on the B. Dalton and Walden stores. So my assumption back
then—”assumption,” keep that in mind—was that when the powers that be got
together and saw what was happening with Crown in their locations, they got
nervous and started to think of ways they could counteract this trend. So B. Dalton—at
that time owned by the Dayton Hudson Corporation—decided to do an experiment.
They had purchased a small, regional chain in southern California called
Pickwick. Then they converted those stores to B. Dalton stores and they retired
the Pickwick name. But they still owned it. It’s my understanding that by still
owning that name they decided to use it for their trial run of a new bookstore
model: heavy discounting, using Crown as the model. They were going to place it
in three or four cities around the country to test market it, and one of those
cities was Denver. [Laughter.]

This was now in the 80s?
This would be the early-to-mid 80s,
because we were supposed to move in ’82 but there was construction delay. So we
moved in January ’83 into the new space. And then we learned that Crown was
doing this roll-out across the country and that one of the cities was also
going to be Denver.

Cue ominous music.
Right! [Laughter.] So I took my calculator home and tried to figure
out what they knew about bookselling that I didn’t know. And I couldn’t see how
we could maintain our position. So I thought, “Well, we can’t discount. But we
can give the bargain-conscious customer something else. We can go heavily into
bargain books—remainders.” But we needed more space to do that. So we decided
to keep the old store space and put it primarily into bargain books. That’s
also about the same time that we decided to go more heavily into periodicals and
sidelines. Anyway, it turned out that business thrived.

Tattered Cover is often cited as one of the first independent stores
to develop an author reading series. Were readings a part of Tattered Cover
from the beginning?
It happened early, but it happened in
an unusual sort of way. As I said before, I had worked in bookstores when I was
in school. And when I bought Tattered Cover we were not really seeking author
events because I had seen too often a lovely gathering where nobody came, and I
didn’t want to put the author in that kind of position. Well, one day I got a
call from our sales rep for Little, Brown and she said, “Joyce, I’ve got an
offer to make to you. Ansel [Adams] is going to be on his way to see Georgia
[O’Keeffe] in New Mexico and he’s going to stop in Denver. Would you like to
have him for a signing?” I held my breath and said, “Absolutely. We would be
delighted to have a signing.” Though I was completely terrified. I had heard
that he was very particular about the plates on the books and that he would go
to the printers about it, and so I thought he must be a difficult and demanding
personality. But when he came he couldn’t have been sweeter. Just wonderful.
And, of course, the line was out the door. I was sold at that point. The magic
of that moment—of seeing the author and his people—was just fabulous.

I remember when
Tom Wolfe came for The Right Stuff. We had a wonderful group of folks waiting for him, and events just
became a part of our community experience. Every signing—every one—is
different. To me, there are no two that are exactly the same. You can make all
the predictions you want. There are some elements, of course, that are common
to any signing. But when it comes to a particular reader meeting a particular
writer, a particular connection is made and there’s nothing like it that has
ever existed before. It cements the building blocks of the whole experience of
reading and publishing and writing. It’s just wonderful.

Are there any other authors or
events that you found particularly special?
Once we had acquired the second
floor in the original building, we did all the signings up there. And at one
point we had the opportunity to host Buckminster Fuller—a forward-looking
architect and writer of note. As it turned out, he was on his last tour. He was
quite elderly at the time. And when he walked in the door and I saw how frail
he was, I thought, “He’s never going to make those stairs.” So I said, “We’ll bring the signing table
downstairs.” But he said, “No, no, no, no, no.” He was going to go up those
stairs and sit at that table and greet his admirers. And he did so. It was a
daytime event, and his admirers almost genuflected when they came up to the
signing table. It was that type of experience. And as the line was coming to a
close, his adult grandson, who was traveling with him, said to me, “Do you have
a large pan that you could put some warm water in for granddad to soak his
hand?” It turns out that he’d broken a finger or two but he insisted on coming
to sign. That was really remarkable.

Do you also do nonliterary events here that are community oriented?
When we’re not doing signings here [in
the events space] or when there is a gap for some reason, we will rent this
space out to the community; we also have a minimal rental rate for nonprofits.
And sometimes we’ll just let some organizations use it, such as the Lighthouse
Writers Group. They meet here once in a while. So, yes, it’s a community
meeting space.

Another thing I’d like to talk with
you about—because it has to do both with the local community here in Denver
and the broader literary community—is the First Amendment case that you were
involved in. Can you talk a bit about how this came about?
In 2000 we were approached by a DEA
agent who served us with a subpoena to turn over some records. But the
subpoena—upon sending it to our attorney—turned out not to be an official
subpoena. After my attorney looked at it, he indicated to me that this type of
subpoena was not actionable. So he called the agent, informing him that in
order to obtain access to the records a proper subpoena would need to be
presented.

But the agent
indicated that he didn’t want to take that course of action. So we thought that
was the end of that. But three weeks later, my attorney, Dan Recht, called and
said, “Joyce, I got a call from an individual in the Adams County DA’s office,
saying that a search warrant is in the works on Tattered Cover, in the hopes of
getting the sales records for a particular customer.” And I said, “A search
warrant? That is immediately
actionable.” I knew that much about the law. But he said, “Don’t get excited
yet; I asked for some extra time. We have until the end of the business day
tomorrow to come up with a response. So I want you to think about this
overnight, and I’ll call you tomorrow afternoon.

The decision was whether to allow
it?
The decision was about how we were
going to respond. Because there’s no decision to be made about “allowing” a
search warrant—once issued, the authorities can act on it. So the next day I
was in the office and I got a visit from one of our floor managers. She said,
“Joyce, there are police officers here with a search warrant and they want to
see you.” I said, “That’s impossible.” And she said, “No, it isn’t; they’re
here.”

So you began shredding all your records, right?
No. [Laughter.] I said, “Okay, send them upstairs and we’ll
deal with this.” There were four or five individuals, all dressed in civvies.
They weren’t jack-booted police officers or anything like that. In fact, they
were dressed like booksellers—one had a ponytail; they wore tennis shoes. They
were all completely gentlemanly. But they had a search warrant. So I said, “May
I call my attorney?” They said, “Yes.” And when I called Dan he absolutely hit
the ceiling: “They can’t do that! They gave us until the end of the business
day today! Fax me a copy of the search warrant.”

So while the
warrant was faxing over, I was sitting with the officers and talking about the
First Amendment and the Kramerbooks case [in which independent counsel Kenneth
Starr tried unsuccessfully to obtain Monica Lewinsky’s purchase records from an
independent bookstore in Washington, D.C.]. They had a mission and the mission
was going to be accomplished. They said, “This isn’t about you.” I said, “I know it’s not about me.” They said, “You’re perfectly
legal.” I said, “I know we’re
perfectly legal.” They said, “You can sell anything that’s constitutionally
protected.” I said, “I know we
can sell anything that’s constitutionally protected—that’s what we sell.” This
went on: “But we need this information.” “Well, I see that as a First Amendment
issue.” “It’s not a First Amendment issue.” “Yes, it’s a First Amendment
issue.”

Meanwhile, Dan got
the copy of the search warrant and he asked to talk with the lead officer. So I
put him on the phone and they went at it. While Dan was talking to him, I kept
talking to the other officers. Finally, at the very end, I said, “What are the
books that you’re after, anyway? How do you even know we stock them?” And one
officer looked me right in the eye and he said, “You’ll special-order anything,
won’t you?” [Laughter.] Got
me.

Throughout this
meeting they kept saying, “We just want this one record, we just want this one
record from this one customer.” And I asked, “What if you don’t find what
you’re looking for?” And he said, “We’ll take the next step then.” Which I
translated as: The search warrant goes into effect and they look at more
records and more records.

Somehow, some way,
Dan was able to persuade them to hold off for ten days. So they left the store,
Dan and I conversed, and within a heartbeat Dan filed for a temporary
restraining order in the court, and we got it. This enabled us to file suit
against them—to get a judicial opinion on whether the search warrant could
move forward or not.

Whether it truly was an infringement of First Amendment rights?
Right. That’s what was up for debate.

Was it the individual’s right to privacy being defended, or was it
your right?
It was the individual’s right. I asked
the officer, “Why don’t you just go to the individual and get us out of the
loop?” But the officer replied, “He’s not going to tell us anything.” You see,
we didn’t know anything about the case. We assumed it had something to do with
drugs because the DEA had been involved earlier, but that was all we knew.

So they suspected that this
individual had purchased a particular title, but they needed to verify that
fact with you.
That’s right. They wanted confirmation.
When we learned more, as our case moved through the judicial process, we found
out that it had to do with a meth lab. There’d been suspicion of a meth lab in
a trailer home in a trailer park in Adams County, and so the officers had been
able to get a search warrant for the premises on probable cause that illegal
activity was happening there. As they suspected, they found a small meth lab in
the bedroom of the trailer home. They also found in the trash what they called
a “mailing envelope” from Tattered Cover. The mailing envelope had a mailing
label on it, and there was an invoice number on the label. There was also the
name of the person to whom the contents of the envelope were addressed, who
lived at the trailer home. But there was no indication what had been in the envelope.

Because there was no invoice?
Correct. Inside the trailer home, near
the meth lab, were two books on how to make meth. And so the officers said,
“Aha!” They wanted to put the two pieces of evidence together to tie it to that
specific person. They wanted to know who occupied that bedroom, because there
were four or five people who lived in that trailer.

So Tattered Cover was within its legal rights to sell that book; the
officers simply wanted to identify which individual had bought it so that that
purchase could be used as circumstantial evidence to prove who had been making the meth.
Right. So they went to get a search
warrant for us after we were unwilling to turn the information over with the
unofficial subpoena. But because Tattered Cover is a legitimate business, the
DA’s office in Adams County may have felt there wasn’t any danger of us
destroying evidence—which is normally one of the reasons why a search would be
necessary. Instead, they wanted the officers to do more due diligence
first—dust the books for fingerprints, interview people in the trailer park to
see who lived in that trailer, and so on.

So they went and
did the fingerprinting, which yielded no results. In fact, one of the books
still had its brown wrapper around it. Hadn’t been opened, hadn’t been cracked.
And the other one looked like it hadn’t been cracked—the spine was clean.

But the officers
wanted to take the shortcut. And since they were on hold with the Adams County
DA’s office, they went to Denver for the search warrant. They could do that
because we’re located in the city and county of Denver. So now we’re in the
Denver district court and we find out that this is going to go on for a while.
Dan’s is a small office. He doesn’t have a big corporate office to absorb
costs, and he was charging us little. Meanwhile, we were getting five-dollar
donations from customers to help pay legal fees. And Chris Finan from the
American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression stepped in. And our pal
Neal Sofman in San Francisco held a fund-raiser at A Clean Well-Lighted Place
for Books with Daniel Handler, who writes as Lemony Snicket, along with some
other authors to raise money for us.

So this was becoming a national issue.
It became a national phenomenon. We
were getting calls from national press. I never saw anything like it.
Meanwhile, all we’re trying to do is sell books. [Laughter.]

Yet 90 percent of your time was spent on this issue.
And our customers—every time we’d
been involved in cases like this before there was press, and each time I
thought, “This time the customers are not going to understand and we’re going to
go out of business.” I thought for sure that would be the case with this one. I
mean, a meth lab? We don’t like meth labs. But that was not the point of the
case.

So that judge in
the district court gave half a loaf to each side. In his decision, he ruled
that authorities could not have the thirty days’ worth of material/background
on this customer that they were seeking. But the Tattered Cover would have to
turn over the record of what was mailed to that customer on that one invoice.
So then we had a decision as to whether to appeal our case to the Colorado
Supreme Court or not. And we did.

To skip to the end
of that story, we got a 6-0 decision in our favor. One judge abstained; I
have no reason why.

How long did the entire process last?
Two years. It was decided in 2002. And
once it was over, the authorities finally went out and got the guy. They put
him in prison for a number of years.

Without even needing this evidence.
Right. By the time we were into the
case we had several pro bono attorneys. And many of them were criminal
[defense] attorneys. They looked at the facts and they said, “They don’t need
this. We’ve had less evidence for some of our clients who got put away.” At
about the same time—midway through the case—a couple of local young filmmakers
asked us if they could do a documentary. So they followed us around for the
second year of the case. But when the case was over and they’d finished their
piece and were trying to sell it to PBS, they found out that they needed to get
eight or nine more minutes of film. So they came to us and said, “We would like
to have an aftermath panel with all the parties. It would be you, Dan, the lead
officer, their attorney, and someone from the University of Denver law school
who would moderate the panel. We’ll do it at the Press Club. Would you be
willing to do that?” So we were all set to go when Dan got a phone call from
the public defender who had represented the guy who was accused and convicted
of making the meth. He asked Dan to confirm what was in the package.

Because of course you had to have known what the book was this whole
time.
But the guy who’d been put in prison
hadn’t known anything about this case while it was going on. He had no idea.
They’d arrested him after the case was over. But evidently he’d told his public
defender what had been in the package, and when the police had finally
interviewed him he’d also told them. But they didn’t believe him, evidently.

So the public
defender said to Dan, “Would you confirm the title?” And Dan said, “Well, we
could if we had permission from the individual. But it’s not something we
really want to do. We feel that this is private. He can say what the book was
if he wants to, but in any case we would certainly need written permission.” So
the next thing you know a letter is delivered from the guy in prison, with his
permission to reveal the contents of the package.

After the phone
call, Dan said to me, “Maybe we should do that.” And I said, “No! We spent two
years of our lives on this thing. We’re not going to make more hay out of
this.” Meanwhile, the filmmakers have set up the panel. You can actually see
this film if you ever care to. They play it nearly every September during
Banned Book Week.

So there we are on
the panel. A whole bunch of people are in attendance. It’s a small room at the
Denver Press Club, but it’s filled up. And when we get to the
question-and-answer period, who should be in the audience but the public
defender…. [Raises eyebrows.]
He stands up, identifies himself as the attorney for the convicted individual,
and he says—I’m paraphrasing here—”Mr. Recht, you have received a letter from
my client giving you permission to identify what was in the package, haven’t
you?” Dan says, “Yes.” “And would you do so?” And Dan says, “We would never
identify what was in the package unless we had explicit permission from whoever
owned the package, whoever bought the book.” And the public defender says, “But
you have that permission, don’t you?” And Dan says, “Yes, but again I want you
to know that we would certainly never put this information out there unless we
had permission.” “Well?” the public defender asks. “Okay, then,” Dan finally
says. “The book was on Japanese calligraphy.”

That’s amazing.
It’s true. The guy was a tattoo
artist. [Smiles.]

Let’s talk a bit about the future next. You can’t open a
bookselling-related periodical and not see at least one story about e-readers
and Kindles and digital bookselling. Do you have any intention of selling
digital books?
I think it’s very apropos of the
times. We do sell digital downloads on our Web site. We can sell them for most
of the e-readers except the Kindle, which is proprietary to Amazon. There are
many issues with regard to books being produced in this way, but as far as
independent stores’ being competitive with Amazon it’s a pricing issue. Though
we can sell these digital downloads, we can’t really be competitive because
Amazon is selling below cost. We just don’t have the financial wherewithal to
sustain that.

I’ve always been a
firm believer that information will move in the most user-friendly manner
possible. And when mass-market paperbacks became a big deal in the United
States after World War II, there were a number of people who said that this was
going to be the end of good publishing. That didn’t happen. Times will change,
and we do need to face the challenges that are before us and still maintain our
care and our community service to the people who are so important to us—the
writers and the readers. And I think that ink on paper between boards, well
done, will always be, at least in the foreseeable future, part of our social
construct. Reading a book, as you well know, is more than a cerebral
experience—it’s a physical experience. And while an e-reader has its place in
many people’s lives, there’s nothing like holding a book and seeing the pages
turn in a way that is not electronic. [Laughter.]

When I think of a
book, there are many forms that it takes. When we talk about fine literature
and poetry and use that as an example, the soul of that book is its content and
the message of the author. So that’s first. What holds that message—whether it
is a computer, ink on paper, or an iPad or a Kindle or a Nook or a Sony
Reader—has more significance in some circumstances than others. I would prefer
to read my fiction and a great deal of my nonfiction in ink on paper. If I’m on
an airplane and going on vacation, I might choose something else. But if it’s a
cookbook, I need pictures. I want to be able to get a little of what I’m
cooking on the page. [Laughter.]
So, while it may be mixing metaphors a bit, you’re not going to stand in the
way of the freight train of change. However, I think it’s really important to
be up front laying the track as best you can in the right direction for the
benefit of the readers who we serve.

Finally, what is your favorite
thing about the day-to-day of bookselling?
When I’m walking through the sales
floor and a little kid goes up to the shelf and spots a book and says, “Oh,
wow! You’ve got that book!” To know you’ve played some small role in making
that happen—there’s nothing like it. I’ve been in this business a long time
and I still get chills down my back when things like this occur.

Just this morning we received a letter
from a young girl—a ten-year-old fifth grader—who wrote a poem about books,
and loving to be in this store, and the cushy chairs, and her favorite step
that she likes to sit on. “Books, books, books, books,” she wrote. “Read, read,
read, read.” That’s what she said. [Smiles.] It is a remarkable profession, trade, and way of life.

page_5: 

INSIDE TATTERED COVER BOOK STORE
What are the best-selling sections
in your stores?
Backlist and genre fiction, new
fiction, new nonfiction, and children’s books. The next tier would include
history, religion, and travel.

What for you is the most unique or
defining aspect of Tattered Cover as a bookstore?
The dedication of its booksellers to
providing a special comfortable “place,” physical and mental, where customers
can browse a vast selection of ideas in print. 

Is there anything special you look
for in terms of an author event?
The Tattered Cover offers a wide
variety of ideas presented in the form of author events—over five hundred each
year—including the very literary, thought provoking, humorous, topical,
educational, controversial, and political, to name just a few. All of this
said, first and foremost, the author’s work has to have an audience motivated
to come to hear the author speak. We can provide the venue, the publisher can
provide a few dollars to advertise the event, but in the end it’s the author
who is the draw.

What role does technology play in
your store?
If one considers the modern printing
press a technological wonder, not to mention the various elements of
production, these are the very basis of our existence as a business. However,
technology, as we tend to think of it today, plays a significant role in
database information and searches, communication, business record keeping,
marketing, and, increasingly, the presentation and download of “the book”
itself into handheld and/or computer devices.

What has been the biggest challenge
for Tattered Cover in the last decade?
Maintaining a strong customer base that
will continue to support the booksellers; offering customers a substantial inventory
in a faltering economy and a highly competitive atmosphere.

What is the most important service
that bookstores provide their communities?
The free flow of ideas in print through
a sense of place within the community, offering an opportunity for people and
ideas to come together.

Jeremiah Chamberlin teaches writing at the University of Michigan in
Ann Arbor. He is also the editor of the online journal Fiction Writers
Review.

Tattered Cover Book Store in Denver

For the fifth installment of our ongoing series of interviews, Inside Indie Bookstores, Jeremiah Chamberlin travelled to Denver to speak with Joyce Meskis, owner of Tattered Cover.

Tattered Cover Book Store 1

Image: 

Denver’s Tattered Cover Book Store, located in the LoDo (Lower Downtown) area of the city, occupies two floors over approximately twenty thousand square feet, including a café and a dedicated special-events area that accommodates up to 250 people.

Tattered Cover Book Store 2

Image: 

From the moment you walk in, you feel a sense of ease and peacefulness. There are overstuffed chairs and couches throughout both floors, as well as spacious tables in the café area.

Tattered Cover Book Store 3

Image: 

The guiding aesthetic is a wonderful mix of the old (worn hardwood floors downstairs, exposed rafters and hand-hewn support beams) and the new (forest green carpet upstairs, a selection of organic and local options at the café). The place feels vital. It feels vigorous.

Tattered Cover Book Store 4

Image: 

Owner Joyce Meskis radiates a type of calm that seems unflappable by the challenges of daily life. Yet in conversation she is the first to poke fun at herself and the many obstacles she has faced in her thirty-six years as a bookseller—not just in terms of running a business, but also advocating for First Amendment rights and helping to nurture the social and literary communities of Denver.

Tattered Cover Book Store 5

Image: 

“I can’t speak for every bookseller in the world, obviously,” Meskis says. “But wouldn’t you say it’s true that every bookseller sort of has this dream of the bookstore in the sky—what it could be, how you would want to have so much of what you loved and what your customers appreciated, and then also have the opportunity to pique their interest in different areas without betting the ranch?”

Tattered Cover Book Store 6

Image: 

“When I’m walking through the sales floor,” says Meskis, “and a little kid goes up to the shelf and spots a book and says, “Oh, wow! You’ve got that book!” To know you’ve played some small role in making that happen—there’s nothing like it. I’ve been in this business a long time and I still get chills down my back when things like this occur.”

 

Tattered Cover Book Store 7

Image: 

“Every signing—every one—is different,” says Meskis. “To me, there are no two that are exactly the same. You can make all the predictions you want. There are some elements, of course, that are common to any signing. But when it comes to a particular reader meeting a particular writer, a particular connection is made and there’s nothing like it that has ever existed before. It cements the building blocks of the whole experience of reading and publishing and writing. It’s just wonderful.”

Tattered Cover Book Store 8

Image: 

“The Tattered Cover offers a wide variety of ideas presented in the form of author events—over five hundred each year—including the very literary, thought provoking, humorous, topical, educational, controversial, and political, to name just a few,” Meskis says. “All of this said, first and foremost, the author’s work has to have an audience motivated to come to hear the author speak. We can provide the venue, the publisher can provide a few dollars to advertise the event, but in the end it’s the author who is the draw.”

 

Tattered Cover Book Store 9

Image: 

“Times will change,” says Meskis, “and we do need to face the challenges that are before us and still maintain our care and our community service to the people who are so important to us—the writes and the readers.”

Tags: 
bookstores
reading venues
Inside Indie Bookstores: Boswell Book Company in Milwaukee
Inside Indie Bookstores: Powell’s Books in Portland, Oregon
Inside Indie Bookstores: Women & Children First in Chicago


Inside Indie Bookstores: Women & Children First in Chicago


Inside Indie Bookstores: Powell’s Books in Portland, Oregon

by

Jeremiah Chamberlin

March/April 2010
3.1.10
In Print and Online

Few independent bookstores are more iconic than Powell’s Books. Even readers who’ve never been to Portland, Oregon, know about the store from its ads in places like the New Yorker, or from its prominent online presence, or from its reputation as the largest new- and used-book store in the world. The “City of Books,” as the four-story flagship store on West Burnside is known, occupies an entire city block, and carries more than one million books. The sixty-eight-thousand-square-foot space is divided into nine color-coded rooms, which together house more than 3,500 sections. From the moment you walk in, it feels as if you could find anything there. (And if you can’t, try one of the seven branch stores in five other locations throughout Portland, specializing in everything from technical books to home and garden.)

I was early for my interview with owner Michael Powell, so I decided to get a coffee in the attached café. Like the bookstore itself, the guiding aesthetic is simplicity—no overstuffed chairs, no fireplace, no decorations on the salmon-colored walls other than some taped-up flyers for local bands and a Buddhist meditation group. Not that anyone seems to notice. While I was there, every single person I encountered was reading. At the table nearest me a high school girl in cat-eye glasses and a ski cap read Lucy Knisley’s French Milk (Epigraph Publishing, 2000), with a stack of David Sedaris waiting at her elbow. A well-dressed elderly woman flipped through the Oregonian not too far away. And on the other side, near the windows, a young woman with black hair and piercings through both her cheeks was making a list of recipes from The Garden of Vegan (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2003). Filling the rest of the tables were hipsters in zip-up sweatshirts and Chuck Taylor All Stars, a young father in a shirt and tie with his two children, construction workers wearing Carhartt overalls, and women with trendy bags and knee-high leather boots. All were reading. Here was a microcosm of the store: A diversity of people and interests, sure, but what’s most important in Powell’s is neither image nor decor but the books themselves.

This is not to say that the store doesn’t have a unique vibe. Like Michael Powell himself, there is a straightforwardness to Powell’s that puts a person at ease. When the owner and I met, he was dressed casually in jeans and a pullover sweater. And though he had to attend a black-tie community event later that night, he was generous with his time, walking me through both the history of the business and the store itself—how the portion of the building with terrazzo floors had originally been an American Motors dealership; how when they built the newer sections of the store, more than a decade ago, they’d intentionally left the concrete floors bare because the industrial feel not only complemented the plain, pine bookcases but also added to the laid-back atmosphere; and how proud he is that their foreign-language section alone accommodates more than thirty thousand titles.

Michael Powell’s philosophy on bookselling is simple: He wants to provide people with books. He has no interest in telling people what to read. Nor would he ever judge a person by the type of books she purchases. New or used, dime-store paperback or first-edition hardcover, manga or metaphysics, all are equally at home on his shelves.

This sense of equality permeates every aspect of the Powell’s business model, from the practice of shelving used and new books side by side in each section, to the store’s long-standing advocacy on free-speech issues, to the fact that its five hundred employees are unionized and have a matching 401(k) plan. Likewise, Powell may be the boss, but it’s clear that he also sees himself as a fellow employee. When we left the downtown location and he drove me across town to the former ball-bearing warehouse that is now the site of the online bookselling operations, no one had to “look busy” when the owner arrived. Instead, they chatted with him as we walked through the facility, offering updates on their various ongoing projects, including ideas for how best to recycle used packaging materials. The warehouse, which feels like an airplane hangar but with the sound of jazz floating in the air, processes up to three thousand online orders daily. And 70 percent of those are single-title orders, a fact that amazes Powell, a logical man who never ceases to be surprised or impressed by his customers, even when they pay more than twenty dollars to have a four-
dollar book shipped overnight. It makes him wonder aloud how he can better meet their needs.

This, then, might be the trait that best characterizes Michael Powell: curiosity. He is endlessly curious about the world, about his employees’ ideas, about what his customers want to read, and about innovative ways to do business. It is a trait that has served him well during his last four decades of bookselling. And though he’ll officially hand over the reins of the business to his daughter, Emily, in July, when he turns seventy, one gets the sense that Powell will always be dreaming of how to connect books and people. Because it’s clear that he loves them both.  

How did you become a bookseller?
In the mid-sixties I ran a little student co-op [at the University of Chicago] where students could sell textbooks and other books on consignment. I also rode my bike around to various thrift shops in the general area and went to the Sunday morning flea market called Maxwell Street—which was very famous in its day in Chicago—to buy books and put them on consignment. Then I sold books by catalogue for a couple years to university libraries, mostly out-of-print social science and history, before I opened my first store in 1970, in Chicago.

Early on, I was thinking of opening a store in Santa Fe, New Mexico, because my wife and I had traveled to Santa Fe and saw it for the first time and everybody falls in love with Santa Fe the first time. She was being offered a job as a Montessori teacher there and I was going to open a bookstore when I got a phone call from a mentor in Hyde Park, in Chicago. He wanted to move his store because he’d been attacked by a customer.

He’d found a new location that was closer to campus, and the reason it was currently vacant was that the Weathermen had firebombed its previous occupant out of existence and he didn’t want to go back into it, he was too nervous. And the university—well, not exactly the university, but whoever was in charge of organizing these things—had approached my friend. However, the space was too big for him; he wanted to take only half of it. So he said to me, “You take half and do mostly paperbacks, and I’ll do hardbacks.” And I said, “I could do that, but I don’t have the money.” My wife says I was always good for twenty bucks but never for a hundred. And he said, “There are some professors who would like to talk to you about that; they’re kind of the patron saints of bookstores.” There were three of them: Morris Janowitz, Edward Shils, and the third one was Saul Bellow. Morris Janowitz, who was the lead, came to me and said, “What would you need?” I had no idea. So I said—and this is, remember, 1970—I said, “Probably three thousand dollars.” And he said, “We can do that. We can loan you three thousand dollars.” Then I said, “But, you know, I’ve got a problem. I don’t know how quickly this will get up and running. And there’s all the rent.” So he said, “We can help with rent, too, for a little while.” Rent was, I think, a hundred dollars a month. So, okay, now they’re rehabbing the building and there’s some time before I can occupy it. So my wife and I take a thousand of the three thousand and we travel across the country to Oregon to visit my folks. [Laughter.]

When we were back in Chicago, I took the remaining two thousand dollars and bought some books. A friend and I built some shelves, and we opened. Like I was saying, it was a small, small store. But we did well. The students, of course, liked used paperbacks. They thought that was great. At some point my neighbor moved away and I took his space. Then there was another business in the back…and when they went away I took that space. So, ultimately, it was about four thousand square feet.

And then my dad [who had come to Chicago to work in the bookstore] went back to Portland in 1971. He opened his shop, moved once into a space of about ten thousand square feet, and had begun to introduce new books into the mix, shelving them side by side with used books. In 1979 he said, “You know, now wouldn’t be a bad time if you’re interested in coming back.” I always thought I would come back. I always thought of myself as an Oregonian, always kept my Oregon driver’s license. And I said, “Yeah, I’d like to do that.” There had been a huge snowstorm in Chicago that winter; we’d had an infant—she was born in November—and we had to get out of the neighborhood we were in. It wasn’t suitable for raising a family, and I’d had it with the weather. So coming back to Oregon sounded great to me.

Well, the night before we left Chicago, my dad called. He said, “I’ve got some news: We’ve lost our lease.” Our landlord, which was a brewery, had wanted to take the space back and had given us a year to find a new location. So we spent that year searching, and we found the space that is currently Powell’s Books. In the mid-eighties, we started opening branch stores. I was always curious about new ways to do things with books; I didn’t want just to replicate anything. And one of the questions was if we could do our new-used mix and do it in the suburbs, where everybody’s perception was that it would have to be Borders or Barnes & Noble or something.

By that you mean nice carpeting and polished wood, soft lighting—
The whole nine yards. We weren’t getting women to our downtown location in the proportions that most people have women as shoppers, perhaps because our area was a little bit edgy.

It was a developing neighborhood?
It was an undeveloped neighborhood—mostly warehouses, wholesalers, and auto repair shops. Kind of funky stuff, but not retail. Not restaurants and bars. Now it’s all high-end national and local boutiques, and dozens and dozens of restaurants and bars. It’s quite fashionable, I suppose.

In any case, I wanted to see if we could capture a different audience if we opened the store in a suburb, and that went well. And each year for about six years we opened a store. First, we did a travel bookstore downtown in about 1985. Then the Hawthorne District stores in about 1986. Then the cookbook store…somewhere in there we opened a store in the airport, and a technical bookstore. So I was both interested in segmenting books like technical and travel and cooking, and I was also interested in demographics, like urban centers, suburbs, and airports. It sounds like it was planned, but it wasn’t. It was just opportunity and impulse. The only one of those that we don’t have any longer is the travel store. The Internet took that business away enough to justify not keeping a whole store solely focused on the subject. And the cookbook store sort of morphed into a lifestyle store, with gardening and cooking and interior design. And now we have three stores at the airport.

What did you find with the suburban store that you built to look like Borders or Barnes & Noble?
Well, we were going to build a fairly fancy store in the suburbs—nice white shelving, a tile floor, banners over the aisles, and colors, and so forth and so on. But the aesthetics weren’t right. So the first chance we got to get rid of all that, we did.

You shut the whole store down?
We moved it. And when we moved it, we moved it into a larger space. And at that point we went back to wood shelves. Pine wood, cement floor, more of an industrial look. That has always worked for us well downtown. That was my misreading of the 
suburbs—that I had to sort of pretty it up, and I was wrong. We’ve more recently moved that store into a space double the size—thirty-two thousand square feet. And once again we have a cement floor. In fact, the ceiling has exposed insulation as a sort of architectural touch. It looks very industrial.

Why do you think that works?
People want a calm background for the books. I don’t think they need…I think Borders’s and Barnes & Noble’s message is “Buy the book and get the hell out of here” in some subliminal way. It’s too bright, the shelves are low so everybody’s watching everybody. You feel very exposed. Our shelves are about twelve feet high. You live in these little alleys, and there’s a kind of cozy feel in that that makes it comfortable for customers. And you can sit on the floor, you know, you can spill something on the floor. It’s not a big disaster.

You don’t have to worry about messing up someone’s living room.
No. And the used books look more comfortable in that environment, because they look a little shabbier when they’re too exposed. So, that’s where we are. In 1994 we went on the Internet with the only inventory we had in the database at that point, which was the technical bookstore. I’d only been up for about a month when I got a letter from England from someone saying, “I was looking for this technical book, and I was told in England it would take six weeks to deliver and would cost me the equivalent of a hundred dollars. So I thought, ‘Well, I’ll just check out the Internet and see.’ You had the book for forty-five dollars and you could get it to me in three days.”

When I read this, I thought, “Holy hell! Here’s an opportunity.” So we got all our books into a database. We had what we called “the river” and “the lake”—there were all the new books coming every day that had to get entered, but we also had to back enter everything that was currently on the shelves. So it took a year.

Is that lake dried up now?
The lake is now part of the river. And we built up the Internet business to where it was about a fourth of our sales. So we were an early adopter for selling books online. Amazon came along, of course, and blew right past us. But we sell a lot of books via Amazon, and we sell books via eBay and Alibris and AbeBooks in addition to on our own site. We also carry inventories from England and Germany—our books are drop shipped to the customer. We do what we can.

I imagine that most people think of you as being in direct competition with Amazon. But, in fact, you’re actually doing a lot of partnership with Amazon?
Well, I don’t know. We are in competition at one level, certainly. I’m sure some of our business has turned over to Amazon. But I’m not foolish about it. If there’s an opportunity to sell books, I’m going to sell them. Amazon is my opportunity. And we sell some new books there, but mostly used.

So you ship to Amazon and then they repackage and ship them?
No, we package and ship. We can ship in our boxes with our materials inside. So we can brand that shipment. They’re good with that. And if somebody just orders a new book from us, we’ll usually have a wholesaler fill that order. Ingram or Baker & Taylor drop ship for us in our boxes, so it cuts out shipping to us. That works well. We do the same thing with Gardner Books in England and Lieber in Germany, both wholesalers. And it works. Some of it is hard. It’s not easy—a lot of infrastructure crossed with the Internet.

What are some of its particular challenges?
I think everybody, me included, thought the Internet was going to be this miracle way of making money, because for not very much money you could make all these books available around the whole world. Well, people didn’t count on all the software writers you need to keep your Web site hot and current, or the editorial work that has to go into maintaining a Web site both in terms of the tracking game and also making it sticky for people to visit and to find value there so that they’ll shop with us. Because we don’t discount the books, you know. It’s a small number—twenty, thirty books—otherwise it’s retail. You would think we’d have no business, that people are nuts for ordering books from us.

Because there are cheaper places?
There are cheaper places. And yet, the brand, the interest, whatever…we maintain a good new book sale. I won’t say it’s growing, but it’s steady. There’s a lot of price competition in both the used book world and in the new book world. So it’s been hard to build that business, but we think we can. We have a lot of people who visit the site but don’t stay, and we have to find a way to encourage them to stay. A small percentage of these customers mean a lot to our business. My daughter’s working with some consultants to redesign and redeploy our Web strengths. 

The site certainly has a wonderful array of resources—interviews with authors, blogs…
We Tweet; we do everything. We do everything we possibly can with the resources we have. I always say that the people I have working on our Web site are a rounding error for Amazon. Amazon would have thousands of employees dedicated to what I have twenty dedicated to. On the other hand, I have to say we go toe-to-toe with them. They have things we don’t have, but we have things they don’t have. Sometimes they have them pretty fast after we have them, but we think of ourselves as innovators.

One of these recent innovations is our online buyback. Anyone in the U.S. can go to our Web site, check via a book’s ISBN number to see whether or not we want to buy it, and then find out how much we want to pay for it. We’ll pay the freight; all you have to do is box it, print out our label and packing list, and ship it in. Once it’s received and we’ve checked the condition, we’ll pay you via PayPal, or you can get virtual credit, which you can spend as you will. That has given us a pretty hefty flow of books.

So even after paying shipping costs it’s still worthwhile for you to buy these books?

 

Yeah. In order to maintain our inventory, we can’t rely only on books bought in Portland. We’ve always relied on a certain number of books being bought elsewhere in the country, whether they’re from store inventories or private collections. Well, that’s an expensive way to buy books. You have to fly people there to look at them, then you have to fly people there to box them, and then you have to pay the shipping in. Also, you usually have to take everything, which means you’re handling a lot of books you don’t want. So the online buyback is great because theoretically we want all those books. And you don’t have to go anywhere to get them. And the customer boxes everything up. At the moment, Amazon doesn’t do that. There are some people who do, but they’re not major players. So that’s given us at least a temporary advantage in source of books.

 

I’d like to go back and talk a little bit about the operation of the main store. In addition to the industrial look and feel of the space, another way that Powell’s is different from most bookstores is that you mix new and used books on the shelves. Why did you decide to do this?
Well, we started as a used books company. My dad introduced new books in the late seventies, and his mantra was two of everything and three of nothing. So when a local writer like Jean M. Auel published her first book, we had just two copies. Then we bought a bunch of tables from Dalton’s, and they asked, “What are you going to put on these tables?” And I said, “Stacks of…something.” So that’s when we got into the new arrival business.

But now we have about three hundred thousand volumes in the main store, as well as however many in the other stores. It’s a substantial part of our business. In dollars, roughly 50 percent of our total business is new books, about 40 percent is used books, and then 10 percent is magazines, cards, and sidelines.

On average, bookstores make about 40 percent on each book they sell. Yet you’ve managed to nudge that up to nearly 44 percent. Considering that these percentages are before operational expenses, a small difference like this can mean the difference between staying open and going bankrupt. How did you achieve this?
You know, when you’re done, you’re always plus or minus. Your minus can be a lot, but your plus is hardly ever more than 2 percent after costs. And that’s before you make any capital reinvestment. Because we’re a larger business, we tend to order in volumes that allow us to get the maximum discount. And we do one other thing: We ship all our books to a central warehouse and then we distribute. I don’t know if it’s Borders or Barnes & Noble, but whatever the discount those stores got for shipping to a central warehouse, the publishers had to match that for us.

I’m sure that being your own distributor also makes things more efficient.
Yeah. We do all central receiving. Once the books are received, they’re labeled and then distributed out to each of the stores. So we have our own truck fleet that runs our books around.

With used books, on the other hand, you’ve said that your average is closer to 65 percent. Is that also something you’ve been able to nudge up in similar ways, or is that number static?
We have slowly, over time, pushed that up about five points, either by paying less or controlling inventory better, and by making fewer buying mistakes. In the used-book world the risk is that you’re going to buy something that you already have too many copies of, or that sales have evaporated for, or it’s a book you had once and never sold. Now computers can tell you all that, so while we don’t check every book we buy at the moment we buy it, if there’s any doubt about the book we can scan it and see its history, the current inventory level, sales history, and make a judgment based on that. So I think our rate of having to pull things from the shelves has dropped considerably.

What’s hurting us at the moment is this move away from people buying new hardbacks. You’ve probably heard this elsewhere, but in this downturn many people are avoiding a twenty-five-dollar book and moving, in our case, to used books. This has meant that we can try to keep our dollar volume up by boosting the units we’re selling, because used books are cheaper, but of course the labor involved doesn’t go away.

Or the overhead or the cost of the building.
Right. But the overall dollars have dropped because you’re not selling that twenty-five-dollar book. Fewer dollars are coming in. So it’s been a challenge. And we’ve had to do several things in the course of the last year to accommodate that.

Such as?
Well, we had to reduce the number of people working in the company, which we did through not filling positions when people left.

But no one was let go?
No one was let go, no. At one moment we were within two weeks of seriously considering it, but then the numbers looked like they maybe didn’t require it, so we backed off. You don’t do that casually. You don’t turn people loose in this economic environment. I really didn’t want to do it, and fortunately we didn’t have to. We had twelve months of down business. But [last] September we had our first up month, so that was certainly good news.

What do you think accounted for that?
People are buying more books! I don’t know what to say.

Are you a bellwether for the economic recovery?
Well, I hope so. It’s not like spending money on cars or houses, but if they’re feeling comfortable enough to do that…I mean, listen, they have an alternative. First of all, they can choose not to read. They can go to the library, they can buy fewer books, whatever. But the fact that the customers are back feels great.

Some people have suggested that it’s not the fact that Amazon or big-box stores like Walmart and Target are selling books that accounts for many independent stores’ losing their footing, but rather it’s a lack of readers. Do you feel that’s the case?
No, I’m not a subscriber to that. I understand the theory. The theory is that there are only so many hours in the day, and so if you’re playing computer games or tweeting or searching the Internet or going to a movie or watching TV, you haven’t got time left over for reading. And, yeah, that makes perfectly good sense. Yet we are selling more books. [Last] September we sold more books than we did a year [earlier] by a fairly sensational number. They were cheaper books, but there were more of them.

Long run? I’m not a predictor of the future. I don’t know. Will the Kindle and the Sony Reader, or print on demand, or some other phenomenon we haven’t thought of yet, erode our business? It’s certainly possible. Nothing is forever. And there’s no way to say that somebody’s new vision of the future won’t force us to reshape our vision. But I think as long as we’re alert and pay attention and find ways to adapt, then we’ll be okay.

Let’s talk specifically about electronic books. Do they affect your business?
We sell them. Been doing that for the better part of ten years.

Really?
Yeah. There just weren’t very many books and they weren’t great and we didn’t sell a lot of them, though there have been people trying to do this for a long time. And, you know, it’s a small part of our business. But we’re positioned to make it a bigger part if that happens.

Now, I want to go back a minute. People always say, “Well, there’s this way of doing business and then there’s Powell’s way of doing business.” But I want to point out that I got on the Internet because there was one guy on my staff who came to me and said, “I can put the technical books on the Internet. I need ten thousand dollars to do that.” The money wasn’t for himself, but for the technology. And I said, “Seems good to me.” At the time, Barnes & Noble and Borders were opening stores all around me. My wagons were circled and they attacked from the suburbs, these giant stores. And I thought, “If there’s any way to leap over those stores and reach a broader audience, there’s nothing better than this thing called the Internet.” And I was very enthusiastic. And so for ten thousand dollars—which is a lot of money, I appreciate that—and his time, we got to play. But it’s not like somebody handed me ten million dollars and said, “Here, go invest this in the book business.” We have built every brick, every stone—every element of the system is a result of organic growth.

In addition to building this business from the ground up, your family has always played an important role in the process. Your father came to Chicago to work in the first store, and now your daughter Emily is involved.
Yes. Emily is going to take over in July.

How long has she been moving into this role?
Probably four years now. She was director of used books for a while, and she worked to get our minds back into the used book world. 

What do you mean?
Well, when the economy started to go bad, we told ourselves that we needed to get more used books on the shelves. That meant changing some of the ways of channeling books to the stores and also boosting the volume. For the last year she’s been in charge of the Internet marketing world, with the goal of taking a fairly flat Internet business and seeing it grow. She just finished an executive MBA, and one of the faculty members from her program, along with another fellow he knows, are acting as consultants. So she’s been working with them to redirect the energies of staff, reorganize staff, and redesign the Web site, and to do things that make it easier to use, more intuitive. We’ve always won awards for the content on our site, but I don’t think anybody would ever give us an award for the smoothness, or the use of the page. Now we’re trying to make it a more intuitive process to use, and that always involves a fair amount of rewrite on software, so you can’t do it overnight. But you can do it. So she’s been working on that and doing a great job.

Having grown up in a bookstore, she must have a familiarity with this world that few people possess. To say nothing of her commitment, since it’s a family business.
There’s a great story about Emily. When she was about eight or nine, she and I were doing Christmas cash register work. I would open the book and read the price, and then she would key it in the cash register and make change while I bagged the book. A lady came up who was trying to be nice to Emily and said, “When you grow up, are you going to be a cashier?” And Emily, counting out her change, says, “When I grow up, I’m going to own this place.” [Laughter.] And by God, she is.

That was never in my mind, as a given. In this day and age, the world beckons. I just told her, “You’d be a damn fool not to kick the tires that had been good to us. I don’t ask or expect you to go in this direction, but I think you’d be foolish not to give it a shot.” And out of the blue one day she called from San Francisco and said, “You know, I’m ready to take that shot if you’re ready.”

Was she in college at the time?
No, she was working in San Francisco. She had a boyfriend down there and she was in a variety of things—she was an apprentice to a maker of wedding cakes, then worked as an assistant to the head of a law firm for a couple years. And, you know, she enjoyed San Francisco very much, but I think that gave her the motivation to say, “Well, I think it’s time to try the book business.” She had worked here for a year earlier, right out of college, but she needed to really get out and try something else in the world for a while.

How hands on or off will you be once you retire?
Well, I’ll tell you a story. I had someone like you come to interview me and he said, “So when you retire, what will you do?” And I said, “Well, you know, I’ll probably go out to the warehouse and process books, get them out of boxes. I like doing that.” And he laughed. So I said, “What’s funny about that? You don’t think I can do that?” And he said “No, no. I was out on the floor interviewing one of your employees and I said, ‘What will Michael Powell do when his daughter takes over?’ And he said, ‘He’ll go over to the warehouse and process books.'” So I guess I’m known for my limited talents.

Somehow I’d like to stay involved. You know, you learn a lot, and business is complex, and you can’t know everything and you can’t be everywhere. Just walking around you see things and you say, “I wonder why they’re doing it that way? That doesn’t seem as efficient.” Or, “Do they know that people in the other store are doing it differently?” So I think it’ll be helpful to have someone with an educated eye watching the business from the inside, to see where those opportunities are. For example, there are several things we’re doing by hand that we ought to be doing in a more automated way. At the moment, those are opportunities. You’re always working for productivity efficiencies because your costs go up and you’ve got to keep your costs and revenues in balance. The casual approach we had to the business fifteen years ago just doesn’t work. Certainly with the high investment in technology we have and the high investment in inventory, we better be very grounded in what we’re doing, and alert.

You came into this neighborhood when it was mostly just car repair shops and warehouses, and now it’s become more of a boutique area. Do you think Powell’s had a hand in that transition? I imagine that most people must think of you as an anchor in this community.
Well, I think we’re an anchor for the city. That may sound immodest, but somebody’s got to say it. If you have a relative come into town, or a friend come into town, and they say “What is there to do in Portland?” If you name three things, one of them is going to be Powell’s. Because the city’s proud of it. You don’t even have to be a reader—you just want to show it off. Biggest bookstore in America, maybe the biggest in the world. You know, if you’ve got the biggest ball of string, people think you’re kooky. But if you have the biggest bookstore, it says something positive about the community—that it supports a store that large—and people like that message. And we try to then earn the respect of the community by not just running a good business, but also being involved in the community. I spend a lot of my time on boards and commissions and planning efforts. I chair the streetcar board. We just created what will now be about eight miles of streetcar. We’re the first city in America to put new streetcars back in.

Like old-style trolleys?
No, they’re modern-looking streetcars, and they’re European built. They’re not San Francisco cute; they’re modern, sleek streetcars. And we move four million people each year. I’ve also been involved in dozens and dozens of committees and commissions, some in the arts and some in social services and some in politics. Not partisan politics, but political efforts to do things or to stop things from happening, all aimed at trying to fulfill the vision of a city that is a twenty-four-hour-a-day city, that works, that’s attractive and great to do business in, and great to live in. I think people respect the work that we do in that area. People will stop me and say, “I love your store,” but sometimes they’ll stop me and say, “I love what you do for the community,” and they’re referring to a broader level of involvement. People ask me if it ever gets tiring, being stopped by people. But I think no; when they stop, that’s problematic. That means we’re doing something that’s not working. I get involved in political things, but they’re almost always around censorship or involved with access to books. Oregon has a very strong constitutional defense of books, but we also have the same element of the population that would like to, for a variety of reasons, control that flow. You know: “Don’t put gay books in schools, don’t let anyone under the age of eighteen be exposed to bad books.” But we win those fights.

Still, they usually take a lot of energy and some money, and with the first anti-gay measure in Portland—Proposition 9—businesses were very closely involved. I have gay staff, of course, and friends who are gay, and they challenged me. There was an element of that legislation that involved not letting libraries, specifically school libraries, have gay-related materials. But we just turned the store into a poster board for that issue, and we won it, and we were very proud of that.

So you helped defeat it at the ballot.
Yep. There were two efforts and we won both of those. Not by overwhelming numbers, but we won. If we can define the issue as one of censorship, and they can define the issue as perversity, and you let that go in a challenge, they’ll win. But Oregonians don’t like censorship, and again I say not by overwhelming numbers, but we do win. And so we get involved in those issues and they seem to come along with certain regularity, every four or five years. Otherwise most of the stuff I get involved in is more planning. I don’t get involved in partisan politics as a company. In fact I keep the company very separate from that. Personally I do get involved, but I try to keep it as separate as I possibly can.

As a citizen, not an owner.
Yeah, yeah.

page_5: 

What do you think people are most surprised to learn about independent bookselling?
I think they’re surprised to know how hard it is. I think everybody—or the uneducated person who doesn’t know much about the business—thinks that as a bookseller you sit in a store, read books, and when someone comes in you have a nice conversation and then recommend and sell some things to that person. That you have a stock of books you believe in and know intimately. That you wear patches on the elbows of your sport jacket, and there’s a cat somewhere in the window, and there’s a fire burning in a fireplace, and there’s the smell of coffee and all that. That it’s a very relaxed and low-key kind of thing. The reality is that it’s extremely intense, whether it’s a small store or a huge store. You’re always pushing the rock up the hill, and it’s relentless, and an awful lot of people get ground down by it. That’s why you see stores close with the frequency they have. People give five or ten years of their lives and realize it’s not going anywhere. And that’s hard. It’s hard to be in an industry that takes so many casualties and that much stress.

The good news is you still get to work with books. And you get to work with people who really love books, both as customers and as staff. I’m sure people who love hardware love their hardware, but, you know, I wouldn’t. There’s a high level of gratification. I was trying to calculate how many books I had sold during my life under the Powell’s name. I’d like to think it’s coming close to a hundred million. You know, in chaos theory there’s this idea that a butterfly flapping its wings on one side of the globe can create a storm in Africa. Well, what about a hundred million butterfly wings? What has it done? You don’t know. People hardly ever tell you, “I read a book and it changed my life.” Most books are probably sold for entertainment, some are sold for information, and some are sold for inspiration. Certainly some are sold for all three at the same time. But I say to myself, “Well, at least when you’re reading a book it’s hard to rob a bank.” I like to think that some of those books have had a positive impact on people’s lives.

Jeremiah Chamberlin teaches writing at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He is also the associate editor of the online journal Fiction Writers Review.

INSIDE POWELL’S BOOKS
How many book sales are you processing a day as online orders?
About 2,500. Upward to 3,000. It spikes at Christmas, and it spikes when the school year starts, but otherwise it’s fairly steady.

How many books do you have in your warehouse for online sales?
About 380,000 in [the main] warehouse, and then there’s about 125,000 in another warehouse.

And how many books do you carry in your stores?
About a million in the flagship store, and probably another six hundred thousand scattered around the other stores. And then we support another two million in Europe. So online we support upward of 4.5 million titles.

How do you determine the price you pay for used books that you buy from online customers? Do you use an algorithm, or is there a person who works on each order?
No, it’s an algorithm. We have several million books in our database to match against, so we just take a percent of either the imprint price or the in-store resale price and pay that amount.

Powell’s Books in Portland, Oregon
An Interview With Poet and Independent Bookseller J. W. Marshall
Indie Bookstores Face Uphill Battle
Inside Indie Bookstores: Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi

Inside Indie Bookstores: Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi

by

Jeremiah Chamberlin

January/February 2010
1.1.10
In Print and Online

This is the inaugural installment of
Inside Indie Bookstores, a new series of interviews with the entrepreneurs who
represent the last link in the chain that connects writers with their intended audience.
Once the authors, agents, editors, publishers, and salespeople have finished
their jobs, it’s up to these stalwarts to get books where they belong: into the
hands of readers. News of another landmark bookstore closing its doors has
become all too common, so now is the perfect time to shine a brighter light on
the institutions that mean so much to the literary community. Post a comment
below to share your thoughts about a favorite indie bookstore.

The first thing customers notice when
they enter Square Books—apart from the customary shelves and tables
overflowing with hardcovers and paperbacks—is the signed author photographs.
There are hundreds of them, occupying nearly every vertical surface not already
taken up by bookcases. They cover the walls and trail up the narrow staircase
to the second floor, framing windows and reaching all the way to the
fourteen-foot-high tongue-and-groove ceiling. Most of the photos are
black-and-white publicity shots, the kind publishers send with press kits, but there
are also large-format, professional ones—of Larry Brown, Barry Hannah, Richard
Ford, and others. Many have that spare yet beautiful quality of something
Eudora Welty might have taken. Collectively, they comprise an archeological
record of this place’s luminous history—all the authors have passed through
these doors—as well as a document of the important role that this particular
institution has had in promoting writers and writing.

Richard Howorth,
the store’s owner, would modestly deny having had a hand in any of the number
of literary careers that have sprung from the fertile soil in this part of the
country, but the honest truth is that Square Books has served as a nurturing
place for writers—as a “sanctuary,” to borrow a word from William Faulkner,
another Oxford 
native—for more than thirty years now. He and his wife,
Lisa, opened the first store in 1979. Seven years later they moved into their
current location, formerly the Blaylock Drug Store, after buying the building.
Since then, they’ve opened two other shops: in 1993, Off Square Books, which
specializes in used books, remainders, and rare books and serves as the
venue for store events and the Thacker Mountain Radio program; and, in 2003,
Square Books, Jr., a children’s bookstore. Howorth also helped establish the
Oxford Conference for the Book, which brings together writers, editors, and
other representatives from the publishing world each spring for public
readings, roundtables, and panel discussions on writing and literacy. This
year, as part of the seventeenth annual event, the conference will celebrate
the legacy of Barry Hannah.

I made my first
literary pilgrimage to Oxford nearly a decade ago. At the time, I was running
Canterbury Booksellers, a small independent bookshop in Madison, Wisconsin.
Invariably, whenever authors visited our store, one of the topics we’d end up
discussing was where they were headed next or where they’d just been. Square
Books was always mentioned as a place they one day hoped to go, were looking
forward to going, or couldn’t wait to get back to. Partly this has to do with
its lineage, for few places can claim to have hosted readings for such varied
and important authors as Etheridge Knight, Toni Morrison, Allen Ginsberg, Alice
Walker, Alex Haley, George Plimpton, William Styron, Peter Matthiessen, and
others. And partly it has to do with the Howorths themselves, who, despite the
cliché about Southern hospitality, make all authors feel as if they were the
first to visit the store.

This was certainly
the case for me. Even though I wasn’t reading, and even though I hadn’t been
back to town in almost ten years, I was welcomed with enormous generosity when
I arrived. For two days I was given the grand tour, including a dinner with
local writers at the Howorths’ house, a walk through Faulkner’s home, a trip to
the Ole Miss campus to see the bronze statue of James Meredith under a marble
archway in which the word courage is carved into the stone, as well as an oral history of what took place
in Oxford during the Civil War as we drove through the shady neighborhoods of
town.

No person could
have been a better guide to the literary and historical roots of Oxford.
Howorth grew up across the street from Faulkner’s home (in the house where the
bookseller’s father, a retired doctor, still lives). Faulkner’s
sister-in-law used to chase Richard and his brothers off the property
for pestering her cow and causing mischief. All the Howorth brothers still
reside in town—one a judge, one a retired lawyer, one an architect, and one a
retired admissions director at the University of Mississippi. In addition to
his thirty years as a local bookseller, Richard, the middle brother, also just
finished his second term as mayor of Oxford.

It was with this
same generosity of spirit that Howorth agreed to talk with me at Square Books
one afternoon. We sat upstairs, at a small table in an out-of-the-way corner. I
chose the spot because it seemed secluded—though, coincidentally, we were
between the Faulkner and Southern Literature sections. Howorth commandeered the
espresso machine and made us cappuccinos before we settled in to chat, fixing
us our drinks himself. He is a man quick to laugh, and despite having spent the
past three decades as a bookseller and the last eight years in public office,
seems largely optimistic about the world. Or, rather, has learned to appreciate
life’s quirks, mysteries, and small pleasures.

How did you come to bookselling?
Deliberately. I wanted to open a
bookstore in my hometown, so I sought work in a bookstore in order to learn the
business and see whether it was something that I would enjoy doing, and would
be capable of doing.

The apprentice model.
Yes. Lisa and I both worked in the
Savile Bookshop, in Georgetown, for two years. In the fifties and sixties it
was a Washington institution. It was a great old store. The founder died about
ten years before we arrived. It had been through a series of owners and
managers, and by the time we were working there it was on its last leg. It was
also at the time that Crown Books was first opening in the Washington
suburbs—it was the first sort of chain deep-discounter. The Savile had this
reputation as a great store, but it was obviously slipping. We were on credit
hold all over the place. So it ended up being a great learning experience.

Then you came back here with the
intention of opening Square Books?
Sure. We opened the first store in the
upstairs, over what was, I think, the shoe department of Neilson’s Department
Store. Back then the town square was so much different from what it is today,
and commerce was not so terribly vital. It was certainly viable, but the
businesses didn’t turn over very much because the families that owned the
businesses usually owned the buildings. Old Mr. Denton at his furniture store
didn’t care if he sold a stick of furniture all day; it was just what he did,
run his store. So when I came home I knew I wanted to be on the square, and I
just couldn’t find a place. My aunt owned the building where Neilson’s had a
long-term lease on the ground floor, but there were three offices
upstairs—rented to an insurance agent, a lawyer, and a real estate agent who
were paying forty dollars, thirty dollars, and thirty dollars a month,
respectively, for a total of a hundred dollars. So my initial rent was a hundred
dollars a month.

Did you have a particular vision
for this store from the beginning, or did it change over time?
The initial vision is still very much
what the store is today. I wanted it to serve the community. Because of
Mississippi’s distinct history and character, as well as social disruptions,
the state—and Oxford, in particular, due to the desegregation of the
university in 1962, when there was a riot and two people were killed—was
regarded as a place of hatred and bigotry. And I knew that this community was not that. I knew that there were a lot of other
people here who viewed the world the same way my family did, and my instinct
was that people would support the store not just because they wanted to buy
books or wanted a bookstore here, but because they knew—not to overstate
it—that a bookstore would send a message. That we’re not all illiterate, we’re
not all…it said something about both the economic and cultural health of the
community.

Has that happened?
The university, for instance, has made
a lot of progress—there’s now a statue of James Meredith; there’s now an
institute for racial reconciliation at the university. And most young people
today know what the civil rights movement was, but they don’t know the specific
events and how tense and dramatic and difficult all of that was at that time.

You grew up in the midst of
that.
Correct. I was thirteen when
Goodman and Chaney and Schwerner were murdered [in 1964] and buried in Neshoba
County, Mississippi, and I was eleven when the riots at Ole Miss occurred. I
remember my mother crying when that happened. Her father taught English at the
university for years, and she knew that it was a tragic event.

As someone who’s spent most of
his life in this town, how did you see the place after having been the mayor?
My view of the community is
essentially no different from what it was before I was mayor. Except, I would
say, I really appreciate all the people who work
for the city. A lot of good public servants.

When you talk with writers about
places they hope to visit someday, they always name Oxford. Partly that’s
because this is Faulkner country—his house is here, and his grave is here, and
so on—but how did this place become such a literary destination in the last
several decades?
You know, it’s a lot of things. Beginning with Faulkner. But there were
people preceding Faulkner connected to the university, mostly. Stark
Young
was a novelist and a New York Times drama critic and an editor at the New Republic who helped Faulkner a little bit. Phil Stone was
a lawyer here, educated at Yale, who introduced Faulkner to Swinburne and Joyce
and a lot of the reading that was so influential to him when he was very young.
And primarily because of the presence of the university, there’s always been
something of a literary environment. But I think because Faulkner’s major work
dealt with this specific geography and culture so intimately, and because of the mythology he created, that
makes for a very particular kind of literary tourism. Hemingway didn’t quite do
that with Oak Park. It wasn’t a little native postage stamp of soil. And in
Mississippi in general there were also Richard Wright, Tennessee Williams,
Eudora Welty—these great writers of the twentieth century.

More recently,
Willie Morris moved to Oxford in 1980, within a year after we opened the store.
He was from Yazoo City, Mississippi. He was the editor of the [University of]
Texas student newspaper, and from there got a job with the Texas Observer, where he became editor at a very young age. He
was hired by Harper’s Magazine to
be an editor, and a few years later, in 1967, became its youngest editor in
chief. And while at Harper’s,
he really changed the magazine and was on the ground floor of New Journalism.
He published David Halberstam and Larry L. King; he published Norman Mailer’s
“Armies of the Night” [originally titled “Steps of the Pentagon”], the longest
magazine piece ever to have been published; and he published Walker Percy.

He also wrote a
book called North Toward Home,
which was his autobiography, published in 1967, that kind of dealt with this
whole ambivalence of the South and being from here and loving so much about
it—stuff about growing up in Yazoo City, and his friends, and his baseball
team, and his dog, and his aunt Minnie who lived next door—but also the
racism. The murders and the civil rights movement. And he had to get out of the
South ’cause he loved it too much and hated so much of everything that was
going on.

That sense of conflictedness.
Right, right. The book expressed all
that and was a touchstone for a lot of people my age. Then he got fired from or
quit Harper’s, depending on
the story. He got in a fight with the publisher and submitted his resignation,
believing that he wouldn’t accept it. But he did. [Laughter.] So he continued to write, but none of his
subsequent books were quite as big as North Toward Home. And Willie was a big drinker and he had kind of
run out of gas in the black hole, which is what he called Manhattan. But Dean
Faulkner Wells, William Faulkner’s niece, and her husband, Larry, raised money
to give Willie a visiting spot here at the university. So he came here that
spring as a writer-in-residence. And he immediately befriended us and the
bookstore. He said, “Richard, I’m going to bring all these writers, all my
friends. I’m going to bring them down here and they’re going to do book
signings at your store and we’re going to have a great time.”

The summer I came
back to open the store was also about the same time that Bill Ferris, who was
the first full-time director at the newly established Center for the Study of
Southern Culture at the university, came here. Bill was originally from
Vicksburg; he’d been to Davidson [College in North Carolina] and got a PhD in
folklore under Henry Glassy at Penn, taught at Yale. Bill was a tremendous guy
and very charismatic and bright and enthusiastic and full of ideas. Bill had a
tremendous influence on the university and the community and our store. On the
South as a whole. What he did was, despite this whole business of the South’s
being known for racism and bigotry and poverty and illiteracy and teen
pregnancy and all the things we’re still sort of known for [laughter], he took Creole cooking and quilt making and basketry and storytelling
and literature and the blues—all these aspects of Southern culture—and made
it fascinating to the public. So Bill had a tremendous influence on the
community and the bookstore. He also knew a lot of writers. The first book
signing we did was with Ellen Douglas, the second month we were open, October
1979. She had a new novel coming out called The Rock Cried Out. The second person to do a book signing at the
store was a black poet who was originally from Corinth, who had taught himself
to write while doing time at the Indiana State Prison: Etheridge Knight. [Laughter.] Bill knew Etheridge and he got Etheridge to come
here. Bill also knew Alice Walker, got her to come here. Knew Alex Haley, got
him to come here. And Willie got George Plimpton and William Styron and Peter
Matthiessen. All these people were coming and doing events in the bookstore.
So, really, from the time that we opened, we had this incredible series of
events. Then the store kind of became known. And in those days the whole author
tour business was nothing like what it soon thereafter became. In the seventies
and early eighties, publishers would send an author to San Francisco and Denver
and Washington and Atlanta. Maybe. But primarily they were there to do
interviews with the press and go on radio and television. Publicity tours, not
a book-signing tour. They didn’t go to bookstores. We weren’t by any means the
first store to do this, but there weren’t many who were doing this at the same
time as we were. The Tattered Cover [Denver] and Elliott Bay [Seattle] and the
Hungry Mind [Saint Paul]. I think that’s kind of how the circuit business got
started.

Then Barry Hannah
moved here in 1983 to teach creative writing. And his personality and writing
style particularly contrasted with Willie’s. Because Willie, he was kind of a
journalist. And even though he could be critical of the south, part of his
method in being critical was to get to a point where he could also be a
cheerleader for the south. And Barry I think kind of looked down his nose at
that sort of writing. You know, Barry was the Miles Davis of modern American
letters at that point. There would’ve been kind of a rivalry with any writer,
any other writer in town, I suppose. Plus, both of them had to struggle with
Faulkner’s ghost—there was that whole thing. But it was an immensely fertile
period in the community’s literary history.

So that convergence of events
helped create the foundation you would build the store upon.
Right, right. And then, you know,
Larry Brown emerged from the soil. His first book came out in 1988. John
Grisham: His first book was published in 1989.

Had John been living here the
whole time too?
No, he’d been living in north
Mississippi, by South Haven. He was in the state legislature. But when he was
in law school at Ole Miss, he heard William Styron speak. Willie had invited
Styron down for the first time, and that was when he got the bug. That’s when
John said, “Wow, I’m gonna do something with this.”

And now he endows a great
fellowship for emerging southern writers here at Ole Miss.
Correct. And he did that because he
wanted to try to build on what Willie did with all the people he brought in.

Speaking of nurturing young writers,
I once heard that when Larry
Brown was working as a firefighter he came into the store and asked you whom he
should read.
Nah.

Is that not correct?
No. [Laughter.]

Was he already writing on his own?
Firemen work twenty-four hours and
then they’re off for forty-eight hours. And then they’re back on for
twenty-four and they’re off for forty-eight. So all firemen have other jobs.
They’re usually painters or carpenters or builders or something. Larry worked
at a grocery store. He was also a plasterer; he was a Sheetrock guy; he was a
painter; he was a carpenter. He did all of this stuff. And he’d always been a
pretty big reader. Larry’s mother, especially, was a really big reader of
romance novels. So Larry had this idea that he could supplement his income by
writing a book that would make money. And he would go to the Lafayette County
Public Library and check out books on how to be a writer, how to get your book
published. He went through all of those. And I think he read that you start by
getting published in magazines, so then he began to read magazines—fiction
especially. He would read Harper’s and Esquire. Larry was
a complete omnivore of music and film and literature.

He took it all in.
Took it all in and he had an
incredible memory. You would talk about a movie; he knew the producer, the
director, the actor, the actresses, the location; music, the song, the group,
who was on bass, the drums. On and on and on. And at some point, yes, early on,
he came into the store. When I first opened the store, I was the only person
who worked there. So I was talking to everyone who came in. And we started
talking and, you know, I didn’t give him a reading list and say, “Read these
ten books and that’ll make you a writer.” Larry was already reading Raymond
Carver and Harry Crews. Cormac McCarthy very early, long before Cormac broke
out. Flannery O’Connor. So we talked about those authors, but Larry completely
found his own way. He was completely self-taught. And I did later on help him
in a specific way when he was kind of stuck. But he would’ve gotten out of the
jam that he thought he was in at the time.

What was that?
Well, he had had one or two stories
published and then he kind of couldn’t get anything else published. He kept
sending off these short stories and they kept coming back. Then he called me
one day—and, you know, I hadn’t read anything he’d written, hadn’t asked to; I
don’t go there with writers unless they ask me. It was a Sunday. He said, “I
don’t know what else to do. I’m sorry I’m calling you, I don’t mean to bother
you, but I think I must be doing something wrong. Everything’s coming back.” I
said, “Larry, I’d be happy to read them. Bring me a few of your stories. I’m no
editor or agent or anything, but I’d be willing to read them.”

So he came over
with a manila folder. It was raining outside. We sat down at the dining room
table and I opened this folder. He was sitting right across from me, and I just
started reading. The first story was “Facing the Music.” You know, I read maybe
four pages and I said, “Larry, this is an incredible story. You’re not doing
anything wrong.” And then I finished reading it and chills went down my spine.
Because I knew that it was a great story. It still is a great story. And I told
him, “This is going to be published. I don’t know when, I don’t know where,
just don’t despair.” Actually I was looking the other day at a note he’d sent
me. He thanked me for helping to make it better, that specific story. But I
don’t remember what that was. I may have said, “You might move this sentence
from here to here,” or something like that.

But mostly you were telling him
to keep the faith.
Exactly. Also, I suggested he
contact Frederick Barthelme and Rie Fortenberry at the Mississippi Review, who’d published his first serious publication, a
story called “The Rich.” I said, “What about this story? Where have you sent it? Have you sent it to the
Mississippi Review?” And he said, “No,
‘cause they’ve already published me.”

That’s a good thing! [Laughter.]
So he sent it to them and they
published it and he dedicated that story to me. And then later on I helped him
meet Shannon Ravenel, who published his first book.

It seems like so many of the greatest writers of American letters have
come out of the south: Tennessee Williams, Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Flannery
O’Connor. And, more recently, Tom Franklin, Larry Brown, Barry Hannah. All these
people whose work I deeply admire. They share something…an intimacy with place
perhaps?
It often gets explained in phrases
like that, but I think that for the moderns…well, Faulkner was a genius. But I
think he also realized early on what he could do and in contrast to the many
things that he could not do.

What do you mean by that?
Well, he was a failure as a
student. But I think with someone like Eudora Welty, who was an intelligent and
independent woman of that time, there were limited opportunities for things
that she could do. But writing, writing was one of them. And photography was
one. So I think it’s tied to economics in some way, but I also think that all
of the rich and conflicted history of the South has a lot to do with it, all
the various tensions. Because literature is built on conflict. There’s also the
whole war thing, the Civil War. Being the loser in that war makes us akin to
other literature-producing places—Ireland, Russia.

Do you see any collective
project happening as a trend in writing right now, in the same way that, say,
the modernists were trying to make sense of a new world?
No, but I think there are always
different schools in the same way that Updike focused on the suburban married
life, and I think other writers operate in certain other niches.

How about southern writers
specifically? How are they trying to make sense of what the south looks like
right now?
I think Southerners are mostly
concerned with just telling a good story.

The tale?
Yeah.

Since we’re talking about
contemporary southern writers, let’s discuss the Conference of the Book. How
did that start?
The Faulkner conference is held
every summer. I think it started in 1974. It’s always drawn a crowd—people
come from California, Japan, Canada, wherever. And over the years, people would
come in the store and say, “I heard about that Faulkner conference and I’d love
to come back here and go to that, but I don’t think I want to do Faulkner for a
whole week.” These are people who aren’t necessarily Faulkner fans or scholars,
but who want to come for the experience.

A literary pilgrimage.
Right. And at the same time, I was
going to conferences like ABA [American Booksellers Association] and BEA
[BookExpo America] and SIBA [Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance], where
you would hear not just writers but also publishers and agents and editors
talking about the process of publishing a book—all these great stories which
typically were not available to the public. And I thought, “What if we had a
conference in Oxford where people could get the local experience, but also a
more general thing about books?”

So I talked to Ann
Abadie, who was a founding director of the Faulkner conference. I told Ann,
who’s been a good friend for a long time, “I’ve got this idea. Instead of just
having the Faulkner conference, why don’t we do another kind of literary
conference? We can just talk about books and what’s going on with The Book and how it’s doing today. We’ll invite editors and
agents and people who have these conversations, but make it for the public.”
And Ann said, “Yeah, maybe soon.” Then, after about three or four years, she
said, “Let’s do this book conference thing.” And so we did.

Is it focused specifically on
Southern writers?
No. I was trying for it not to be just a Southern thing.

That would be too insular?
Yeah, and frankly I get tired of
all this stuff about the South all the time. And I thought that the university
and the community had the opportunity to create a one of a kind conference.

Where would you like to see this
conference five years from now? Ten years from now?
In an ideal world it would have a
larger budget to bring people in. For instance, Nicholson Baker wrote that
article in the New Yorker about the
Kindle. You know, that’s a timely thing. He could come and do a lecture,
perhaps even be on a panel with other people from the industry, people like
[Amazon founder] Jeff Bezos.

So you want it to explore all
the different intersections, not just publishing.
Right. Everything that’s going on
that affects books. We want to put this thing called The Book on the operating
table and cut into it and see what’s going on.

With developments like the Kindle
and Japanese cell-phone novels and Twitter stories, how does a bookstore stay
relevant in the twenty-first century?
I
think there are a couple of things. There are the technological developments,
which are interesting and positive in that they offer opportunities for reading
and the dissemination of literature and ideas in a way that might be greater than
the way we’ve historically done before. As Nicholson Baker pointed out in that New
Yorker article, digital
transference of text is much cheaper than disseminating literature through
books. So you have that, which in many ways, properly conceived, is a positive
development.

But the question
we need to ask is, How does the technology threaten this thing that we love so
much, and has been so critical to the development of civilization for so long?
And how do we, in terms of that threat, deal with and understand it? There’s
also the cultural threat of younger people who are growing up not reading
books. The way I see it, though, I think that digital technology will go on, on
its own path, no matter what. But in terms of books, I maintain that a book is
like a sailboat or a bicycle, in that it’s a perfect invention. I don’t care
what series number of Kindle you’re on, it is never going to be better than
this. [Holds up a book.] I
don’t see how it could be. I could be wrong. Who knows? But this thing is
pretty wonderful—and irreplaceable.

I think they can
coexist is what I’m saying. And by the same token, I think bookstores offer an experience to book consumers that is
unique. To be able to go into a place physically, to experience a sensation
that is the precise opposite of all that is digital, and to talk to people
about books in a business that has as one of its objectives a curatorial
function and the presentation of literature as another—that is, I believe,
irreplaceable. Of course, the question we all recognize is how the development
of technology, in reducing the industry that creates the physical book, will
change bookselling. Because there won’t be as many of these [books], and
therefore the cost will go up.

page_5: 

So what is the future for
independent bookstores? If their role is curatorial, will they become more like
art galleries? Should they have public funding? Or will bookstores become
nonprofit entities?
I don’t know. I hope not, though. It’s
a very difficult business. But in many ways, I like the fact that it’s a
difficult business. Otherwise, people who want to make money—by selling
crap—would be trying to get into the book business. [Laughter.]

This store specializes in
literature, especially southern literature, as well as books about this region
and this place. Do you think that specialization is part of the reason for your
success?
I don’t really think of it in terms
of specializing. I think of it in terms of giving our customers what they want.
If Nietzsche had been born here, our philosophy section would probably look a
little different. [Laughter.]

So what are bookstores that are
succeeding doing right?
Well, I think a lot of it has to do
with adaptation. The business’s ability to adapt in all kinds of ways to its
own market, to be innovative, to not ignore the technological developments and,
in some cases, take advantage of them. Thacker Mountain Radio was kind of an
innovation.

How did that come to be?
Ever since the bookstore opened,
there’ve always been people coming in wanting to have their art exhibit in the
bookstore, or to stage a play, or do a music performance.

So that really meets your vision
of a community place.
Yeah, except that I learned fairly
early on that you have to make it relate to selling books. You can’t just be an
all-purpose community center; you’ve got to make it conform to the mission of
selling books and promoting writers and literature. Because I did have art
exhibits and it was just sort of a pain. So I kind of got away from that. What
happened, then, was two graduate students who had been trying to develop a
little kind of a music radio show that wasn’t really working at one of the
local bars, came and wanted to use Off Square Books as a venue. I told them
that I’d done enough of this kind of messing around to know that I wasn’t going
to do something like that unless it could promote writers. I said, “Maybe if we
did a radio show that incorporated both music and writers it could be
something.” And that’s how that got started.

It’s been good for
our book business, mainly because writers really want to be on the show. And a
lot of publishers want their writers to be on the show because it’s broadcast
on Mississippi Public Broadcasting, so it reaches a large audience. Which is
always appealing, as you know, to publicists.

Do they just read? Do they do
interviews?
Depends on what the book is and how they
want to present it. They can read; they can talk about it. We’ve had a lot of
writers come up there and just tell stories. It’s performed, recorded, and
broadcast live on local commercial radio. Then we edit stuff for time, do all
the production work on the disc, and send it down to Jackson where they
rebroadcast the show.

It’s often really
great. And a lot of times we have musicians who’ve written books come on the
show, or we have writers who are musicians who like to play on the show.
There’s almost no writer who, given the choice early in their career, wouldn’t
have rather been a rock musician. [Laughter.]

Now that you’ve finished your
two terms as mayor, you’re returning to the bookstore full time again. What are
you most looking forward to? What did you most miss?
I just missed being here. I missed
being around the books, going down to the receiving room and seeing what’s come
in each day, talking to the customers, knowing which books are coming out,
being able to snag an advance reading copy of something that I know I’m gonna
be interested in. The whole shooting match. So what I’m doing now is really
kind of returning to my roots. I’m just going to be on the floor. I’m not going
to resume buying; I’m not going to be doing all the business stuff; I’m not
going to go running around to every store trying to control staff schedules and
training. I just want to—

Be around the customers and the
books.
Yeah. There may come a point when I
want to do something else. I don’t know. But that’s the plan now.

Where would you like to see the
store ten years from now? Is there anything you still want to achieve with it?
No. But returning to that whole
future of books conversation, one of the things that I should’ve added has to
do with what’s happened at Square Books, Jr. We’re selling more children’s
books than ever. The level of enthusiasm and excitement about books from
toddlers to first readers to adolescents and teens…if you go in there and hang
around for a few hours, you would never even think that there might be such a
thing as a digital book.

Jeremiah Chamberlin teaches writing at
the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He is also the associate editor of the
online journal Fiction Writers Review.

INSIDE SQUARE BOOKS
What were your best-selling books in
2009?
John Grisham signs books
for us—lots of them—every year, so his book is usually our number one seller.
Our best-seller list is dominated by local and regional titles—books about
Oxford or Mississippi or about or by Mississippians. Other than Grisham’s The Associate, I think our top 2009 sellers are The Help by Kathryn Stockett, The Devil’s Punchbowl by Greg Iles, and In the Sanctuary of Outcasts by Neil White. All three writers are from
Mississippi, and Neil lives here in Oxford. Two of the books are set in
Mississippi.

What
books did you most enjoy selling in 2009?
Lark and
Termite by Jayne Anne Phillips, A
Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore, The
Missing by Tim Gautreaux, and Waveland
by Frederick Barthelme.

How do you compile your Staff Picks section?
There are no constraints
on staff picks, except the book has to be in print, of course. And, after a
time, the recommendation has to have made at least a sale or two. Doesn’t have
to be paperback, but they always seem to be. Anybody can recommend anything
using any language, although I recently made one staffer change his
recommendation because he’d written in big letters, “It’s great! I’m serious!
Just buy it!” It was the exclamation points that really did it. I told him to
see Strunk and White.

Any
books you’re particularly excited about in 2010?
I’m excited about Jim Harrison’s new book, The Farmer’s Daughter; that
big, wonderful new novel The
Swan Thieves by Elizabeth Kostova, who has agreed to come to our
store; and Brad Watson’s new book of short stories, Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives, which has
one of the best stories I’ve read in years, “Vacuum.”

Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi
An Interview With Poet and Independent Bookseller J. W. Marshall
Indie Bookstores Face Uphill Battle
So Much Depends Upon a New Bookstore: Postcard From Paris

Inside Indie Bookstores: Tattered Cover Book Store in Denver

by

Jeremiah Chamberlin

September/October 2010
9.1.10
In Print and Online

On the morning I visited Denver’s
Tattered Cover Book Store, the place was bustling with activity. Customers
wandered up and down the central staircase, carrying books tucked under their
arms. They stopped to browse the spacious aisles, scanning titles on the
shelves. They lingered in the downstairs café, eating as they flipped through
magazines from the enormous periodical section.

The reason for the
crowds had partly to do with the influx of writers who had traveled to Denver
this weekend for the Association of Writers & Writing Programs Conference,
and partly with the fact that it was opening day of the Major League Baseball
season—the sidewalks were filled with fans headed to nearby Coors Field, home
of the Colorado Rockies, and before the game, many of them stopped at Tattered
Cover. The store’s location, in the LoDo (Lower Downtown) area of Denver, is a
success story of urban revitalization. This neighborhood is the oldest section
of Denver, and like the boom-and-bust economy of this western city, it has had
its fair share of downturns. In 1988, however, the city council created the
Lower Downtown Historic District with the mission to preserve the architectural
and historical assets of the area and to spur economic investment and growth.

Because of her
belief in this project and the need for community-oriented business districts,
Joyce Meskis, owner of Tattered Cover, purchased the warehouse building at 16th
and Wynkoop with a business partner in 1990, and subsequently moved her
administrative offices and the shipping-and-receiving operations for her Cherry
Creek store, which opened in 1974, to this location. A few years later, she
opened a second Tattered Cover store here, as well as a coffee shop and
newsstand. By 1996 the LoDo store had substantially expanded and today occupies
two floors over approximately twenty thousand square feet, including a café and
a dedicated special-events area that accommodates up to 250 people.

The store has since
become as much a destination for the local community as it has for writers.
From the moment you walk in, you feel a sense of ease and peacefulness. There
are overstuffed chairs and couches throughout both floors, as well as spacious
tables in the café area. The guiding aesthetic is a wonderful mix of the old
(worn hardwood floors downstairs, exposed rafters and hand-hewn support beams)
and the new (forest green carpet upstairs, a selection of organic and local
options at the café). The place feels vital. It feels vigorous.

The same could be
said of Meskis. Though soft spoken, she possesses an engaging and charming
personality that immediately put me at ease. She radiates a type of calm that
seems unflappable by the challenges of daily life. Yet in conversation she is
the first to poke fun at herself and the many obstacles she has faced in her
thirty-six years as a bookseller—not just in terms of running a business, but
also advocating for First Amendment rights and helping to nurture the social
and literary communities of Denver. In fact, Tattered Cover hosts more than
five hundred readings a year among its three locations. So it was fitting that
we sat down for our talk beside a fireplace at the back of Tattered Cover’s
expansive event space, surrounded by black-and-white photographs of many of the
authors who’ve read at the store during its nearly four decades of existence.

How did you come to bookselling?
I came to bookselling accidentally. I
was intent on teaching at the university level.

Here in Denver?
No, I didn’t have a place in mind. I
grew up in Chicago on the South Side, and I was very driven in terms of my
direction in life. I was determined I was going to get the zillionth degree,
and I wanted to have a life that was full of the usual things—marriage,
children. I could see myself at an excellent university teaching brilliant
students all day long, walking home with a briefcase in hand, kicking the fall
leaves as I approached my nice but not ostentatious house, hearing strains of
Chopin being played by my children through the open French doors. [Laughter.] It didn’t quite work out that way.

What year was this?
I graduated high school in 1959. Then
I went to college.

Did you go to school in Chicago?
No, I went to Purdue [in Indiana]. I
was a math major, believe it or not. It was always a toss-up, and I eventually
shifted to English. My parents didn’t have much money, but they were able to
pay for my first year. So I always had part-time jobs in the summers. But then
I married young, while we were in school, and I needed to get more work during
the school year. And soon I found myself working in bookstores to help pay the
tuition.

This was at Purdue?
Yes. But then my husband finished his
graduate degree and we moved to Colorado. All the while I was still working in
bookstores and libraries to help pay the tuition bills. And after some time—I
was in graduate school then—I woke up one morning literally staring at the
ceiling and said, “You idiot, don’t you know that you’ve been doing what you love
all these years? Why don’t you just get on with it?” So I dropped out of
graduate school and I got more serious about the book business. Around this
time the marriage ended, and I had two small children.

When was this?
1973. We were still pretty young, so
we didn’t have much savings. But I took my half and began pursuing the book
business. Fast forward a year or so and a little store in the Cherry Creek area
of Denver came up for sale. It was called the Tattered Cover, and it was three
years old. It was a small storefront—only 950 square feet—and carried only
new books, despite its name. So, I did a little business plan on an envelope
with a pencil and figured I could pull it off. The bad news was that the owner
wanted what seemed like a huge amount of money at the time. But the good news
was that he was willing to carry the note, to be the banker. And the other
piece of good news was that he didn’t want much money down. So I figured out
what I could do and I made an offer, which was promptly rejected.

Some time went by
and I decided, through the urging of a friend, to go see what was going on,
because there was no ownership transition of the store that was apparent. It
turned out that someone else had made a better offer earlier, but the deal had
fallen through. I don’t know why the owner didn’t come back to me afterward.
Who knows? But, to make a long story somewhat shorter, I made another offer. I
borrowed some money from my uncle in California and that offer was accepted in
September 1974, and ownership transferred to me.

Over the next several years you
expanded, however.
Yes, in increments.

Was this the plan from the
beginning, or did opportunities arise that allowed you to grow?
I can’t speak for every bookseller
in the world, obviously. But wouldn’t you say it’s true that every bookseller
sort of has this dream of the bookstore in the sky—what it could be, how you
would want to have so much of what you loved and what your customers
appreciated, and then also have the opportunity to pique their interest in
different areas without betting the ranch?

Of course.
So I don’t think I had a goal to
have a huge bookstore by any means. But I certainly wanted to grow it to a size
that would accommodate a fine representation of the wonderful books that are published.
So every time one of our neighbors in the building would move out, we would
take the space if it were available and if it were the right timing for us. We
were fortunate in that way. There was growth in the commercial area, there was
growth in what was possible in the book business in Denver, and we took the
opportunities.

But looking back, I think our biggest decision in
terms of growth in that first store was when we decided to move upstairs in the
original building. Quite a bit of space had become available on the second
floor and it was offered to us at a good price because second floor space—for
retail—is less desirable. So I pondered and pondered and pondered it. Because
the question was: How do you get the customers upstairs? And any time our
customers or colleagues found out that we were considering this, they thought
the sky was falling! They were very concerned and they gave me all kinds of
advice: “Don’t do it, don’t do it; your customers won’t follow you. It will be
the end of the Tattered Cover. It will be dreadful.”

Were you going to move the whole
store upstairs?
Oh, no. We were going to have both
floors. We were going to put in a staircase. And it’s not like there weren’t
stores that had tried this before. Obviously department stores were
multi-level. But it wasn’t quite the same thing. Our colleagues and sales reps
and customers were just beside themselves in their advice to me about not doing
this. And I kept thinking to myself, “Well, I’m sure they’ve got good reasons
for this, and I can see both sides to the story…” but we needed the space, we
were growing, the rent was very compelling, and I simply didn’t want to lose
that opportunity. And I thought, “We could make the staircase wider; we could
put books on the landings to draw people up the stairs; we could put
destination sections up there…” I said, “We can do this so it doesn’t feel like
an interminable journey up these stairs.”

Fast forward—we
did it. Our landlord had a charitable streak from time to time, and he loaned
me the money to put the staircase in. And the customers came upstairs. But our
colleagues were right in that it is much
harder to get people upstairs. Still, it worked. And it worked again. We took
again more space upstairs when it became available. So we grew from about 950
square feet to 6,000 square feet in that location. Then we were out of space.

Then, perhaps 1980
or so, I started looking around for space within the immediate area to move to.
And so I was looking, looking, looking, looking, nothing, nothing, nothing,
nothing. Moving a store is a serious decision, you know?

And no small undertaking.
And no small undertaking, even
though we’d become pretty used to barreling out walls and moving bookcases. In
fact, in my earliest years, after my husband and I were divorced, I lived in a
small place with the kids. I would go to the lumberyard and have my boards
pre-cut and then bring them back in the car. I had space in the alleyway, which
was next to the store, and I’d be banging away, making new bookcases. [Laughter.] I’d forgotten about that.

So, you know, we
were stuck. It didn’t seem like anything was going to work. And then I had a
visit from a developer in town who had his eye on a vacant piece of property
next to a parking garage next to a department store that was across the street
from a shopping center. It was an open field at that point, and he was planning
on putting in ground-floor retail and then a little bit of an expansion of the
parking garage next door above on the roof—a few extra stories of parking. And
so he said, “I’ll cut you a good deal. Would you like to move over here?” It
was only half a block away and it was brand new space—two floors, totaling
about 11,000 square feet. This was double what we currently had. And he was
willing to do a lot for us to get us over there, and I thought, “Okay. Let’s go
for it.”

So we got serious
about that and we were planning to sublet the old store location of 6,000
square feet. But then the bookstore grapevine came through town and we learned
that Pickwick Books was considering bringing a store to Denver. You probably
don’t remember Pickwick Books.

No, I don’t.
Pickwick Books was a new
development arm of the Dayton Hudson Corporation, which owned B. Dalton back
then. And Crown Books—do you remember Crown Books?

I do.
Well, Crown Books was very
successful opening up in the Washington D.C. area. They were one of the first major
discounters and they, were really doing a number on the independent stores, as
well as on the B. Dalton and Walden stores. So my assumption back
then—”assumption,” keep that in mind—was that when the powers that be got
together and saw what was happening with Crown in their locations, they got
nervous and started to think of ways they could counteract this trend. So B. Dalton—at
that time owned by the Dayton Hudson Corporation—decided to do an experiment.
They had purchased a small, regional chain in southern California called
Pickwick. Then they converted those stores to B. Dalton stores and they retired
the Pickwick name. But they still owned it. It’s my understanding that by still
owning that name they decided to use it for their trial run of a new bookstore
model: heavy discounting, using Crown as the model. They were going to place it
in three or four cities around the country to test market it, and one of those
cities was Denver. [Laughter.]

This was now in the 80s?
This would be the early-to-mid 80s,
because we were supposed to move in ’82 but there was construction delay. So we
moved in January ’83 into the new space. And then we learned that Crown was
doing this roll-out across the country and that one of the cities was also
going to be Denver.

Cue ominous music.
Right! [Laughter.] So I took my calculator home and tried to figure
out what they knew about bookselling that I didn’t know. And I couldn’t see how
we could maintain our position. So I thought, “Well, we can’t discount. But we
can give the bargain-conscious customer something else. We can go heavily into
bargain books—remainders.” But we needed more space to do that. So we decided
to keep the old store space and put it primarily into bargain books. That’s
also about the same time that we decided to go more heavily into periodicals and
sidelines. Anyway, it turned out that business thrived.

Tattered Cover is often cited as one of the first independent stores
to develop an author reading series. Were readings a part of Tattered Cover
from the beginning?
It happened early, but it happened in
an unusual sort of way. As I said before, I had worked in bookstores when I was
in school. And when I bought Tattered Cover we were not really seeking author
events because I had seen too often a lovely gathering where nobody came, and I
didn’t want to put the author in that kind of position. Well, one day I got a
call from our sales rep for Little, Brown and she said, “Joyce, I’ve got an
offer to make to you. Ansel [Adams] is going to be on his way to see Georgia
[O’Keeffe] in New Mexico and he’s going to stop in Denver. Would you like to
have him for a signing?” I held my breath and said, “Absolutely. We would be
delighted to have a signing.” Though I was completely terrified. I had heard
that he was very particular about the plates on the books and that he would go
to the printers about it, and so I thought he must be a difficult and demanding
personality. But when he came he couldn’t have been sweeter. Just wonderful.
And, of course, the line was out the door. I was sold at that point. The magic
of that moment—of seeing the author and his people—was just fabulous.

I remember when
Tom Wolfe came for The Right Stuff. We had a wonderful group of folks waiting for him, and events just
became a part of our community experience. Every signing—every one—is
different. To me, there are no two that are exactly the same. You can make all
the predictions you want. There are some elements, of course, that are common
to any signing. But when it comes to a particular reader meeting a particular
writer, a particular connection is made and there’s nothing like it that has
ever existed before. It cements the building blocks of the whole experience of
reading and publishing and writing. It’s just wonderful.

Are there any other authors or
events that you found particularly special?
Once we had acquired the second
floor in the original building, we did all the signings up there. And at one
point we had the opportunity to host Buckminster Fuller—a forward-looking
architect and writer of note. As it turned out, he was on his last tour. He was
quite elderly at the time. And when he walked in the door and I saw how frail
he was, I thought, “He’s never going to make those stairs.” So I said, “We’ll bring the signing table
downstairs.” But he said, “No, no, no, no, no.” He was going to go up those
stairs and sit at that table and greet his admirers. And he did so. It was a
daytime event, and his admirers almost genuflected when they came up to the
signing table. It was that type of experience. And as the line was coming to a
close, his adult grandson, who was traveling with him, said to me, “Do you have
a large pan that you could put some warm water in for granddad to soak his
hand?” It turns out that he’d broken a finger or two but he insisted on coming
to sign. That was really remarkable.

Do you also do nonliterary events here that are community oriented?
When we’re not doing signings here [in
the events space] or when there is a gap for some reason, we will rent this
space out to the community; we also have a minimal rental rate for nonprofits.
And sometimes we’ll just let some organizations use it, such as the Lighthouse
Writers Group. They meet here once in a while. So, yes, it’s a community
meeting space.

Another thing I’d like to talk with
you about—because it has to do both with the local community here in Denver
and the broader literary community—is the First Amendment case that you were
involved in. Can you talk a bit about how this came about?
In 2000 we were approached by a DEA
agent who served us with a subpoena to turn over some records. But the
subpoena—upon sending it to our attorney—turned out not to be an official
subpoena. After my attorney looked at it, he indicated to me that this type of
subpoena was not actionable. So he called the agent, informing him that in
order to obtain access to the records a proper subpoena would need to be
presented.

But the agent
indicated that he didn’t want to take that course of action. So we thought that
was the end of that. But three weeks later, my attorney, Dan Recht, called and
said, “Joyce, I got a call from an individual in the Adams County DA’s office,
saying that a search warrant is in the works on Tattered Cover, in the hopes of
getting the sales records for a particular customer.” And I said, “A search
warrant? That is immediately
actionable.” I knew that much about the law. But he said, “Don’t get excited
yet; I asked for some extra time. We have until the end of the business day
tomorrow to come up with a response. So I want you to think about this
overnight, and I’ll call you tomorrow afternoon.

The decision was whether to allow
it?
The decision was about how we were
going to respond. Because there’s no decision to be made about “allowing” a
search warrant—once issued, the authorities can act on it. So the next day I
was in the office and I got a visit from one of our floor managers. She said,
“Joyce, there are police officers here with a search warrant and they want to
see you.” I said, “That’s impossible.” And she said, “No, it isn’t; they’re
here.”

So you began shredding all your records, right?
No. [Laughter.] I said, “Okay, send them upstairs and we’ll
deal with this.” There were four or five individuals, all dressed in civvies.
They weren’t jack-booted police officers or anything like that. In fact, they
were dressed like booksellers—one had a ponytail; they wore tennis shoes. They
were all completely gentlemanly. But they had a search warrant. So I said, “May
I call my attorney?” They said, “Yes.” And when I called Dan he absolutely hit
the ceiling: “They can’t do that! They gave us until the end of the business
day today! Fax me a copy of the search warrant.”

So while the
warrant was faxing over, I was sitting with the officers and talking about the
First Amendment and the Kramerbooks case [in which independent counsel Kenneth
Starr tried unsuccessfully to obtain Monica Lewinsky’s purchase records from an
independent bookstore in Washington, D.C.]. They had a mission and the mission
was going to be accomplished. They said, “This isn’t about you.” I said, “I know it’s not about me.” They said, “You’re perfectly
legal.” I said, “I know we’re
perfectly legal.” They said, “You can sell anything that’s constitutionally
protected.” I said, “I know we
can sell anything that’s constitutionally protected—that’s what we sell.” This
went on: “But we need this information.” “Well, I see that as a First Amendment
issue.” “It’s not a First Amendment issue.” “Yes, it’s a First Amendment
issue.”

Meanwhile, Dan got
the copy of the search warrant and he asked to talk with the lead officer. So I
put him on the phone and they went at it. While Dan was talking to him, I kept
talking to the other officers. Finally, at the very end, I said, “What are the
books that you’re after, anyway? How do you even know we stock them?” And one
officer looked me right in the eye and he said, “You’ll special-order anything,
won’t you?” [Laughter.] Got
me.

Throughout this
meeting they kept saying, “We just want this one record, we just want this one
record from this one customer.” And I asked, “What if you don’t find what
you’re looking for?” And he said, “We’ll take the next step then.” Which I
translated as: The search warrant goes into effect and they look at more
records and more records.

Somehow, some way,
Dan was able to persuade them to hold off for ten days. So they left the store,
Dan and I conversed, and within a heartbeat Dan filed for a temporary
restraining order in the court, and we got it. This enabled us to file suit
against them—to get a judicial opinion on whether the search warrant could
move forward or not.

Whether it truly was an infringement of First Amendment rights?
Right. That’s what was up for debate.

Was it the individual’s right to privacy being defended, or was it
your right?
It was the individual’s right. I asked
the officer, “Why don’t you just go to the individual and get us out of the
loop?” But the officer replied, “He’s not going to tell us anything.” You see,
we didn’t know anything about the case. We assumed it had something to do with
drugs because the DEA had been involved earlier, but that was all we knew.

So they suspected that this
individual had purchased a particular title, but they needed to verify that
fact with you.
That’s right. They wanted confirmation.
When we learned more, as our case moved through the judicial process, we found
out that it had to do with a meth lab. There’d been suspicion of a meth lab in
a trailer home in a trailer park in Adams County, and so the officers had been
able to get a search warrant for the premises on probable cause that illegal
activity was happening there. As they suspected, they found a small meth lab in
the bedroom of the trailer home. They also found in the trash what they called
a “mailing envelope” from Tattered Cover. The mailing envelope had a mailing
label on it, and there was an invoice number on the label. There was also the
name of the person to whom the contents of the envelope were addressed, who
lived at the trailer home. But there was no indication what had been in the envelope.

Because there was no invoice?
Correct. Inside the trailer home, near
the meth lab, were two books on how to make meth. And so the officers said,
“Aha!” They wanted to put the two pieces of evidence together to tie it to that
specific person. They wanted to know who occupied that bedroom, because there
were four or five people who lived in that trailer.

So Tattered Cover was within its legal rights to sell that book; the
officers simply wanted to identify which individual had bought it so that that
purchase could be used as circumstantial evidence to prove who had been making the meth.
Right. So they went to get a search
warrant for us after we were unwilling to turn the information over with the
unofficial subpoena. But because Tattered Cover is a legitimate business, the
DA’s office in Adams County may have felt there wasn’t any danger of us
destroying evidence—which is normally one of the reasons why a search would be
necessary. Instead, they wanted the officers to do more due diligence
first—dust the books for fingerprints, interview people in the trailer park to
see who lived in that trailer, and so on.

So they went and
did the fingerprinting, which yielded no results. In fact, one of the books
still had its brown wrapper around it. Hadn’t been opened, hadn’t been cracked.
And the other one looked like it hadn’t been cracked—the spine was clean.

But the officers
wanted to take the shortcut. And since they were on hold with the Adams County
DA’s office, they went to Denver for the search warrant. They could do that
because we’re located in the city and county of Denver. So now we’re in the
Denver district court and we find out that this is going to go on for a while.
Dan’s is a small office. He doesn’t have a big corporate office to absorb
costs, and he was charging us little. Meanwhile, we were getting five-dollar
donations from customers to help pay legal fees. And Chris Finan from the
American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression stepped in. And our pal
Neal Sofman in San Francisco held a fund-raiser at A Clean Well-Lighted Place
for Books with Daniel Handler, who writes as Lemony Snicket, along with some
other authors to raise money for us.

So this was becoming a national issue.
It became a national phenomenon. We
were getting calls from national press. I never saw anything like it.
Meanwhile, all we’re trying to do is sell books. [Laughter.]

Yet 90 percent of your time was spent on this issue.
And our customers—every time we’d
been involved in cases like this before there was press, and each time I
thought, “This time the customers are not going to understand and we’re going to
go out of business.” I thought for sure that would be the case with this one. I
mean, a meth lab? We don’t like meth labs. But that was not the point of the
case.

So that judge in
the district court gave half a loaf to each side. In his decision, he ruled
that authorities could not have the thirty days’ worth of material/background
on this customer that they were seeking. But the Tattered Cover would have to
turn over the record of what was mailed to that customer on that one invoice.
So then we had a decision as to whether to appeal our case to the Colorado
Supreme Court or not. And we did.

To skip to the end
of that story, we got a 6-0 decision in our favor. One judge abstained; I
have no reason why.

How long did the entire process last?
Two years. It was decided in 2002. And
once it was over, the authorities finally went out and got the guy. They put
him in prison for a number of years.

Without even needing this evidence.
Right. By the time we were into the
case we had several pro bono attorneys. And many of them were criminal
[defense] attorneys. They looked at the facts and they said, “They don’t need
this. We’ve had less evidence for some of our clients who got put away.” At
about the same time—midway through the case—a couple of local young filmmakers
asked us if they could do a documentary. So they followed us around for the
second year of the case. But when the case was over and they’d finished their
piece and were trying to sell it to PBS, they found out that they needed to get
eight or nine more minutes of film. So they came to us and said, “We would like
to have an aftermath panel with all the parties. It would be you, Dan, the lead
officer, their attorney, and someone from the University of Denver law school
who would moderate the panel. We’ll do it at the Press Club. Would you be
willing to do that?” So we were all set to go when Dan got a phone call from
the public defender who had represented the guy who was accused and convicted
of making the meth. He asked Dan to confirm what was in the package.

Because of course you had to have known what the book was this whole
time.
But the guy who’d been put in prison
hadn’t known anything about this case while it was going on. He had no idea.
They’d arrested him after the case was over. But evidently he’d told his public
defender what had been in the package, and when the police had finally
interviewed him he’d also told them. But they didn’t believe him, evidently.

So the public
defender said to Dan, “Would you confirm the title?” And Dan said, “Well, we
could if we had permission from the individual. But it’s not something we
really want to do. We feel that this is private. He can say what the book was
if he wants to, but in any case we would certainly need written permission.” So
the next thing you know a letter is delivered from the guy in prison, with his
permission to reveal the contents of the package.

After the phone
call, Dan said to me, “Maybe we should do that.” And I said, “No! We spent two
years of our lives on this thing. We’re not going to make more hay out of
this.” Meanwhile, the filmmakers have set up the panel. You can actually see
this film if you ever care to. They play it nearly every September during
Banned Book Week.

So there we are on
the panel. A whole bunch of people are in attendance. It’s a small room at the
Denver Press Club, but it’s filled up. And when we get to the
question-and-answer period, who should be in the audience but the public
defender…. [Raises eyebrows.]
He stands up, identifies himself as the attorney for the convicted individual,
and he says—I’m paraphrasing here—”Mr. Recht, you have received a letter from
my client giving you permission to identify what was in the package, haven’t
you?” Dan says, “Yes.” “And would you do so?” And Dan says, “We would never
identify what was in the package unless we had explicit permission from whoever
owned the package, whoever bought the book.” And the public defender says, “But
you have that permission, don’t you?” And Dan says, “Yes, but again I want you
to know that we would certainly never put this information out there unless we
had permission.” “Well?” the public defender asks. “Okay, then,” Dan finally
says. “The book was on Japanese calligraphy.”

That’s amazing.
It’s true. The guy was a tattoo
artist. [Smiles.]

Let’s talk a bit about the future next. You can’t open a
bookselling-related periodical and not see at least one story about e-readers
and Kindles and digital bookselling. Do you have any intention of selling
digital books?
I think it’s very apropos of the
times. We do sell digital downloads on our Web site. We can sell them for most
of the e-readers except the Kindle, which is proprietary to Amazon. There are
many issues with regard to books being produced in this way, but as far as
independent stores’ being competitive with Amazon it’s a pricing issue. Though
we can sell these digital downloads, we can’t really be competitive because
Amazon is selling below cost. We just don’t have the financial wherewithal to
sustain that.

I’ve always been a
firm believer that information will move in the most user-friendly manner
possible. And when mass-market paperbacks became a big deal in the United
States after World War II, there were a number of people who said that this was
going to be the end of good publishing. That didn’t happen. Times will change,
and we do need to face the challenges that are before us and still maintain our
care and our community service to the people who are so important to us—the
writers and the readers. And I think that ink on paper between boards, well
done, will always be, at least in the foreseeable future, part of our social
construct. Reading a book, as you well know, is more than a cerebral
experience—it’s a physical experience. And while an e-reader has its place in
many people’s lives, there’s nothing like holding a book and seeing the pages
turn in a way that is not electronic. [Laughter.]

When I think of a
book, there are many forms that it takes. When we talk about fine literature
and poetry and use that as an example, the soul of that book is its content and
the message of the author. So that’s first. What holds that message—whether it
is a computer, ink on paper, or an iPad or a Kindle or a Nook or a Sony
Reader—has more significance in some circumstances than others. I would prefer
to read my fiction and a great deal of my nonfiction in ink on paper. If I’m on
an airplane and going on vacation, I might choose something else. But if it’s a
cookbook, I need pictures. I want to be able to get a little of what I’m
cooking on the page. [Laughter.]
So, while it may be mixing metaphors a bit, you’re not going to stand in the
way of the freight train of change. However, I think it’s really important to
be up front laying the track as best you can in the right direction for the
benefit of the readers who we serve.

Finally, what is your favorite
thing about the day-to-day of bookselling?
When I’m walking through the sales
floor and a little kid goes up to the shelf and spots a book and says, “Oh,
wow! You’ve got that book!” To know you’ve played some small role in making
that happen—there’s nothing like it. I’ve been in this business a long time
and I still get chills down my back when things like this occur.

Just this morning we received a letter
from a young girl—a ten-year-old fifth grader—who wrote a poem about books,
and loving to be in this store, and the cushy chairs, and her favorite step
that she likes to sit on. “Books, books, books, books,” she wrote. “Read, read,
read, read.” That’s what she said. [Smiles.] It is a remarkable profession, trade, and way of life.

page_5: 

INSIDE TATTERED COVER BOOK STORE
What are the best-selling sections
in your stores?
Backlist and genre fiction, new
fiction, new nonfiction, and children’s books. The next tier would include
history, religion, and travel.

What for you is the most unique or
defining aspect of Tattered Cover as a bookstore?
The dedication of its booksellers to
providing a special comfortable “place,” physical and mental, where customers
can browse a vast selection of ideas in print. 

Is there anything special you look
for in terms of an author event?
The Tattered Cover offers a wide
variety of ideas presented in the form of author events—over five hundred each
year—including the very literary, thought provoking, humorous, topical,
educational, controversial, and political, to name just a few. All of this
said, first and foremost, the author’s work has to have an audience motivated
to come to hear the author speak. We can provide the venue, the publisher can
provide a few dollars to advertise the event, but in the end it’s the author
who is the draw.

What role does technology play in
your store?
If one considers the modern printing
press a technological wonder, not to mention the various elements of
production, these are the very basis of our existence as a business. However,
technology, as we tend to think of it today, plays a significant role in
database information and searches, communication, business record keeping,
marketing, and, increasingly, the presentation and download of “the book”
itself into handheld and/or computer devices.

What has been the biggest challenge
for Tattered Cover in the last decade?
Maintaining a strong customer base that
will continue to support the booksellers; offering customers a substantial inventory
in a faltering economy and a highly competitive atmosphere.

What is the most important service
that bookstores provide their communities?
The free flow of ideas in print through
a sense of place within the community, offering an opportunity for people and
ideas to come together.

Jeremiah Chamberlin teaches writing at the University of Michigan in
Ann Arbor. He is also the editor of the online journal Fiction Writers
Review.

Tattered Cover Book Store in Denver
Inside Indie Bookstores: Boswell Book Company in Milwaukee
Inside Indie Bookstores: Powell’s Books in Portland, Oregon
Inside Indie Bookstores: Women & Children First in Chicago


Inside Indie Bookstores: Women & Children First in Chicago


by

Jeremiah Chamberlin

May/June 2010
5.1.10
In Print and Online

When I walked into Women & Children
First, the
feminist bookstore that Linda Bubon and her business partner, Ann
Christophersen, founded more than thirty years ago, the overriding
feeling I
experienced was one of warmth. And it wasn’t because Chicago was having a
late-winter snowstorm that afternoon. From the eclectic array of books
stacked
on tables, to the casualness of the blond wood bookcases, to the
handwritten
recommendations from staff below favorite books on the shelves,
everything
feels personalized; an atmosphere of welcome permeates the place.

In the back of
the store, a
painted sign showing an open book with a child peering over the top
hangs from
the ceiling, indicating the children’s section. Not far away, a similar
sign,
this one of a rainbow with an arrow below it, points toward the GLBTQ
section.
Despite these signs—not to mention the name of the store itself—Women
&
Children First carries more than books for women and, well, children.
The
literature section stretches down one wall; there are stacks of
photography
collections; books on writing fill an entire bookcase; and disciplines
as
diverse as cooking and psychology have healthy offerings. Though
conceived as a
feminist bookstore three decades ago, since moving in 1990 to its
current
location in the Andersonville neighborhood (an area originally home to a
large
population of Swedish immigrants in the mid-nineteenth century that has
since
evolved into a multiethnic community, and one with an equally diverse
range of
locally owned businesses such as Middle Eastern cafés, an Algerian crepe
house,
and, of course, a Swedish bakery), Women & Children First has become
as
much a neighborhood shop as a specialty store. And because the area has
become
popular with families and young professionals, the clientele is just as
likely
to be made up of men as women.

Still, books
related to women
and women’s issues—whether health, politics, gender and sexuality,
literature,
criticism, childrearing, or biography—are clearly the store’s focus.
Such
lauded authors as Maya Angelou, Alice Walker, Gloria Steinem, Annie
Leibovitz,
and Hillary Rodham Clinton have all read here. Many now-famous writers
such as
Sandra Cisneros, Ana Castillo, Julia Alvarez, Margot Livesey, and Jane
Hamilton
got their start at this store. Needless to say, Women & Children
First has
a devoted audience for its events, and many who attend are well-known
writers
themselves. So on any given night you’ll be as likely to be sitting next
to
authors such as Elizabeth Berg, Carol Anshaw, Rosellen Brown, Sara
Paretsky,
Audrey Niffenegger, Aleksandar Hemon, or Nami Mun as hearing them speak
from
the podium.

Like co-owner
Bubon, Women
& Children First doesn’t take itself or its mission too seriously,
despite
its long history and literary laurels. Twinkle lights hang in the front
windows
facing Clark Street; there are jewelry displays around the front
counter; and
tacked to the community bulletin board are flyers for both theater
performances
and burlesque shows. When I met Bubon, she was wearing a simple, black,
scoop-neck sweater and a subtle, patterned scarf in shades of red,
orange, and
cream. (She also wore Ugg boots, which she unabashedly raved about for
their
comfort.) Because Christophersen had to be out of town during my visit,
Bubon
took me around the store herself—not that I needed much of a tour.
Women &
Children First is only 3,500 square feet in area, most of which is one
large
open room. Still, the store carries more than twenty thousand books, as
well as
journals, cards, and gifts. And perhaps it is this combination that adds
to its
coziness.

But nothing
captures the
laid-back feel and philosophy of the bookstore better than the wooden
kitchen
table that sits in the back, near the children’s section. Around it are
four
unmatched wooden chairs. Bubon brought us here for the interview, and it
seems
a perfect example of the spirit of openness that pervades this place.
Several
times during our conversation customers wandered over to chat with her
and I
was generously introduced. And more than once Bubon excused herself
politely to
help a nearby child pull down a book he couldn’t reach. But never did
these
interactions feel like interruptions, nor did they ever change the
course of our
conversation. Rather, it felt as though I was simply a part of the ebb
and flow
of a normal day at Women & Children First. Nothing could have made
me feel
more welcome.

When did you meet Christophersen?
We met in graduate school. We were both
getting a
master’s degree in literature, and we became very good friends.

Was that here in Chicago?
Yes, at the University of Illinois. Our
class and
the one just above us had a lot of great writers—James McManus, Maxine
Chernoff, Paul Hoover. It was a very fertile atmosphere. So as we were
finishing the program, Ann and I started talking about opening a
business
together, and the logical choice was a bookstore. There was only one
local
chain at the time, Kroch’s & Brentano’s, and there were probably
sixty or
seventy wonderful independent bookstores in the city and the suburbs of
Chicago.

That many?
Yeah. There were a lot of independent bookstores.
It was a really great environment for booksellers. I mean, we all
thought of
ourselves as competing with one another, but really there were enough
readers
to go around. By the mid-1980s, however, we were feeling crowded—after
five
years we had outgrown that first place. So we moved to a larger store,
two
blocks away, at Halsted and Armitage.

Did you decide from the beginning
that you
wanted to specialize in books for women and children?
Yes. It was what was in our hearts, and
in our
politics, to do. We were part of an academic discussion group made up of
feminist teachers from all the nearby universities that met at the
Newberry
Library. Two of our teachers were part of this group and they had asked
us to
join as grad students. They were discussing Nancy Chodorow, whose book The
Reproduction
of
Mothering had just
come out. Also Rubyfruit Jungle. I was like, “Oh, my goodness!”
because I had never read any lesbian literature, and here was this group
of
academics discussing it. They discussed Marge Piercy and Tillie Olsen.
These
were writers whom, when I went looking for them at places like Kroch’s
&
Brentano’s or Barbara’s Bookstore, I wasn’t finding. Similarly, as an
academic,
I knew how much Virginia Woolf had written. Yet I would look for
Virginia Woolf
and there would only be To the Lighthouse. Maybe Mrs.
Dalloway. Or A Writer’s Diary. But we envisioned a store
where everything that was in print by Virginia Woolf could be there. And
everything by outsider writers like Tillie Olsen or Rita Mae Brown would
be
there.

It’s interesting to hear you
describe these
authors as being outsiders at one time, because when I was growing up
they were
people I was reading from the beginning.
Oh, back then you had to go lookin’,
lookin’,
lookin’, lookin’ to
find these writers. And they certainly weren’t being taught. Alice
Walker had written The Third Life of Grange Copeland, and maybe Meridian
had come out. But all the
stuff that you think of as classic women’s literature—Margaret Atwood,
Toni
Morrison—they were not a part of the canon. They were just fledgling
writers.
It was much different. And, again, there was no gay and lesbian
literature.
None. I mean, it just didn’t exist. We put a little sign on the shelf
that
said, “If you’re looking for lesbian writers, try Virginia Woolf’s Orlando,
May Sarton, Willa
Cather….” You know, writers who historians had discovered had had
relations
with women. [Laughter.]
Nothing public at all. We had a little list. Back
then our vision was about this big. [She holds her hands about eight
inches
apart.]
Now, thirty years later, it’s incredible to look back and see the
diversity of
women writers who are published, and the incredible diversity of gay and
lesbian literature, and transgender literature, that’s being published.

I
still think
women lag behind in winning the major awards, and they lag behind in
getting
critical attention. So there’s still a need for Women & Children
First and
stores like it that push the emphasis toward women writers. But, at that
time,
we had to work to fill up a store that was only a quarter of the size of
this
one. That first store was only 850 square feet, yet it was still a
challenge to
find enough serious women’s literature to stock the shelves. Because we
didn’t
want to do romances. And it’s not that we didn’t have a vision of a
bookstore
that would be filled with works by women and biographies of women and
eventually
a gay and lesbian section and all that. But I had no idea that there
would be
this renaissance in women’s writing. That it really would happen. That
women
would get published, and get published in some big numbers, and that I
would
finally be able to sell books by women who were not just white and
American or
British. I mean, the internationalizing of women’s literature has been
very
exciting, I think.

What precipitated the move to 
this
neighborhood and this bigger store, then?
In those first ten years we had
double-digit
growth every year. Ten percent up, 11 percent up, 15 percent up. I don’t
think
we even made returns until we’d been in business three years. We were
just
selling. I had no ordering budget. “Oh, new stuff by women?” I’d say.
“Great!
We need it.” Business was growing.

Was that because nobody else was
selling this
type of literature?
Yes, and because women’s studies was
developing as
a discipline. Also, I think we were good booksellers. And we had great
programming right from the beginning. Not so much big-name authors, but
interesting stuff.

So like the first store, you outgrew
the second
one.
We outgrew it. Our landlord had also
sold the
building and the new owner was going to triple our rent. So if we needed
any
more motivation to move, that was it. What was tough, however, was that
we’d
been ten years in the DePaul neighborhood, which is very central to
Chicago.
You can get there very easily from the South Side, from the West Side,
off the
highways…yet we couldn’t really afford to stay there, and we couldn’t
find a
new space that would suit us. But then we were recruited to move up here
by the
Edgewater Community Development Organization. Andersonville is a part of
Edgewater, which goes all the way to the lakefront and west to
Ravenswood. They
literally came to us and said, “The people in our community would love
to have
a bookstore in that neighborhood. There’s a lot of spaces that are being
renovated, and we wonder if you’re thinking of opening a second store,
or if we
could encourage you to.”

This happened by coincidence, while
you were
already considering a new location?
Yes! And we said, “Well, you know, we
need more
space. We’ll come up and look.” At the same time, there were two women
who were
opening a women’s arts-and-crafts store, and all their friends said, “It
doesn’t matter where you’re located as long as you’re next to or on the
same
block with Women & Children First.” So we came up to Edgewater to
look, and
they showed us this building, which had been a big grocery store. It was
being
renovated and gutted, so we could get in at the beginning and say, “We
want the
corner and we want this much space.” The arts-and-crafts store opened
next
door. They
stayed open for seven years, and when the partnership broke up, in 1997,
we
took over their space. In terms of our growth, business kicked up 20
percent
the first year we were here. We opened in July 1990, and that first year
people
came in and brought us plates of cookies and said, “Thank you for coming
to our
neighborhood.” It was just great.

But
the move itself is the best story. Remember, this was still a shoestring
operation. We had to rely on the community. So we organized seventy
volunteers.
Four different women rented or had trucks. And those seventy people
moved every
book and bookshelf out of the old space and into this space in one day.
We
organized people in groups of three or four, and we said, “Okay, you
have the
Biography section. You pack up all these books in these boxes, mark them
‘Bio,’
pull out that shelving unit, you go with that unit and those boxes to
the new
space, and there will be somebody here to help set it up.” We had other
women
who went out and bought three trays of sandwiches and fed all the
volunteers.
We started on Friday night, worked all day Saturday, and by two in the
afternoon on Sunday we were open for business. We were only really
officially
closed for one day. And women still tell me, “I remember helping you
move.”
They’ll come in and they’ll say, “That’s my section; I put this section
back together.”

Have readings and events been a part
of this
store from the beginning?
They’ve been a huge part of the store.
Getting to meet
all these wonderful writers whom I’ve read—in person—is also something
that’s
kept me motivated and excited. And, you know, the excitement of
discovering a
new writer is always great.

We have a lot
of local
politicians who shop here too. When Jan Schakowsky decided to support
Barack
Obama in his run for the U.S. Senate, she had a press conference here.
She asked if she could use
our store to make the announcement that she was throwing her support
behind him
in the primary. And I remember her saying to me, “If we can just get
people to
not call him Osama.” I mean, that’s where we were at that time. Nobody
knew who
he was.

So the store has been important for
the
community in many ways.
A political gathering place, and a
literary
gathering place, and a place where we have unpublished teen writers read
sometimes. We’ve developed four different book groups, plus a Buffy
discussion
group. And if you came on a Wednesday morning, you’d see twenty to
thirty
preschoolers here with their moms for story time, which I do. I love it.
I just
love it. It’s absolutely the best thing of the week. I have a background
in
theater and oral interpretation, so it’s just so much fun for me.

Has that grown over the years as the
neighborhood has developed?
Grown, grown, grown. For many years I
would have
nine or ten kids at story time, maybe fifteen. Then, about four or five
years
ago, it was like the neighborhood exploded, and I started getting twenty
to
thirty kids every week. In the summer, I can have fifty in here. That’s
why
everything is on rollers. For story time, the kids sit on the stage and I
sit
here. For regular readings, it’s the opposite—authors read from the
stage and
we have chairs set up down here. We can get a hundred, sometimes even a
hundred
and fifty people in here.

A year and a
half ago, we
started Sappho’s Salon. Once a month, on a Saturday night, we have an
evening
of lesbian entertainment. Sometimes it’s open mike; sometimes it’s
acoustic
music. Kathie, who does our publicity, generally runs it, and her
girlfriend,
Nikki, who is a part-time DJ, brings her DJ equipment. Then we set up
little
tables and candles, and try to make it feel like a salon. We’ve even had
strippers. [Laughter.]
But right from the beginning we conceived of having a
weekly program night. Author
readings weren’t happening much, so we decided we’d have
discussions on hot books that people were reading. We knew a lot of
teachers
from this Newberry Library group who were writing, and who were in the
process
of writing feminist criticism, so we invited them to come and do a
presentation
on an idea.

Then we
conceived of having
a topic for each month. For example, “Women in the Trades.” So every
Tuesday
night in March a woman who was working in a male-dominated trade would
come and
talk about how she got her job, or how women can get into engineering,
or what
kind of discrimination she’s experiencing on the job and what her
recourses
were. I think one of our very biggest programs in those early years was
on the
subject of sadomasochism in the lesbian community. And we had eighty or
ninety
women who would come and sit on our shag rug—we didn’t have chairs and
stuff
like that then—and listen to people who had differing viewpoints
discuss the
issue. It seems almost silly now, but it was a big issue at the time,
and
people were really torn about whether this was an acceptable practice or
not.
Also, whether we should carry books on the subject. There was one
pamphlet
available at the time: What Color Is Your Handkerchief? Because
you would put a
handkerchief of a certain color in your back pocket to indicate what
your
sexual proclivity was.

It’s amazing how subtle the coding
had to be.
It was so discreet.
I remember the first time I saw two
women walk out
of my store holding hands. I was walking to the store a little later
because
somebody else had opened that day, and when I saw them [pause] I
cried. Because it was so
rare in 1980 to see two women feel comfortable enough to just grab each
other’s
hands. And I knew that they felt that way because they’d come out of
this
atmosphere in which it was okay.

At
our thirtieth
anniversary party [last] October, the Chicago Area Women’s History
Conference
recorded people’s memories of Women & Children First. They had a
side room
at the venue where we were having the party, and people took time to go
in and
talk about, you know, the first time they came to the bookstore, or when
they
saw Gloria Steinem here, or how they met their girlfriend here, or that
when
their daughter told them she was gay and they didn’t know what to do
about it
they came here and got a book. People shared all these memories. And
that’s
going to be part of our archive too.

This celebration was
also a
benefit for the Women’s Voices Fund, which you started five years ago.
Can you
talk about its mission?
Several years ago, Ann
and I were
looking at the budget and, frankly, there wasn’t enough money coming in
for the
expenses going out. Meanwhile, we were planning the benefit for our
twenty-fifth anniversary—this party that we hoped would raise some
extra
money—and other people in the not-for-profit world who were advising us
said,
“People will pay for your programs. They will make a donation to keep
your
programming going.” So Ann sat down and calculated what it cost to print
and
mail out a newsletter, to put on these programs, to advertise the
programs, and
then to staff them. What we discovered was that is was about forty
thousand
dollars a year we were spending on programming. And we thought, “If
there’s a
way to remove that expense from the budget and use people’s donations to
fund
that, that would be a smart thing.” So that’s what we did. Now anytime
we have
an advertisement or a printing bill or expenses related to providing
refreshments at programs, that cost comes out of the Women’s Voices
Fund.

So the store’s not a
nonprofit,
but it has a nonprofit arm.
It’s not a 501c3 on its
own. We are
a part of the pool fund of the Crossroads Fund in Chicago. So you can
send
Crossroads a check, have it be tax deductible, and have it earmarked for
the
Women’s Voices Fund.

Few people realize
how expensive
readings and events can be.
Occasionally there are
readings that
are profitable. Occasionally. But very, very often, even with a nice
turnout of
twenty to fifty people, you still may only sell three or four books.
Maybe five
or six. But it’s not paying for the program. And from the beginning we
didn’t
want to look at everything we did in terms of whether it was going to
make
money: “If we have this author
we gotta
sell ten books or we’re not gonna pay for the Tribune ad, or the
freight.” No. Having the fund
means we
pass the hat at the program, and maybe we take in twenty or thirty
dollars. But
sometimes people put in twenties, you know? And we raised thirty
thousand
dollars at this benefit.

But
obviously something
changed in the bookselling industry or you wouldn’t have had to hold
this
fundraising event. You
said earlier that when you first moved into this neighborhood you had
double-digit growth. What happened?
Well, the rest of that story is that a
year and a
half later our sales dropped 11 percent. This was 1993. And the next
year, they
fell another 3 percent. So that was a 14-percent drop in two years, for a
store
that had never seen a loss. Borders and Barnes & Noble started in
the
suburbs, but then they gradually came into the city. In 1993, when this
hit us,
Barnes & Noble and Borders had put in stores three miles to the
south of
us—right next to each other—and three miles to the north of us, in
Evanston.
Then, about seven years ago, Borders put the store in Uptown, which is
just a
mile from us, and they put another store west of us by about two miles.
More recently,
B&N closed the store three miles south of us, and Borders announced
over
two years ago that they were trying to rent all the stores around us.

They overextended themselves.
When everybody else was starting to
downsize,
Borders opened several new stores in Chicago, including this one in
Uptown.
And, you know, we’d almost gotten past the point where the chain stores
were
affecting us, because they’ve had to stop widespread discounting. But
the month
this Borders opened that close to us, our sales dropped 12 percent over
the
year before. And then over the course of that year our sales were down 5
percent. But, you know, it’s been an underperforming store. They put it
in
between two underperforming stores in a neighborhood that was more
economically
depressed than Evanston and Lincoln Park.

Do you think five years from now
they’ll be
gone?
I do. I do.

Can you wait them out?
You know, from what I can observe,
Barnes &
Noble seems to treat their employees pretty well; they seem to put
stores in
locations where there’s actually a need, and to close stores down when
needed
and redistribute employees. It seems to me Barnes & Noble plans very
carefully. Borders, on the other hand, has changed hands several times
since
1990. I just don’t see how they are going to survive. When I go in there
now
all I see is…sidelines. Candy.

I think what’s been
particularly frustrating for independent stores like ours that have
developed a
reading series over the years in Chicago—you know, attracting more and
bigger-name authors, and more interesting authors, and conducting ten to
fifteen programs a month—is when publishers take an author who has a
real base
in our store, and for whom we have a real audience, and they say, “Oh,
but the
Michigan Avenue Borders wants this author, and that’s a better
location.”

Why does that happen?
They
don’t always realize
that our location is not downtown, and that it attracts a different kind
of
clientele. And I’ve seen situations where we’ll have a local author—one
who we
have a close relationship with, and who’s done every launch with
us—whose
publisher will now say to her, “You know, two thirds of your books are
sold in
the chain stores, and so you have to do your launch at the chain store.”
But
those authors try to figure out things to do for us to get us some extra
business.

The author tour itself seems to be
waning. I
don’t blame publishers for their reluctance to send a writer out on the
road—after all, it probably seems hard to justify paying for an
author’s
travel expenses when you see only eight or nine books sold at an event.
But
people always forget the long-term sales that readings generate.
Right. Because I’ve read the book, and
so has one
of my coworkers, and we’ll both put it on our Recommends shelf. We’re
going to
keep selling this book long after the event. And we do find, when we
look at
our year-end figures, that our best-sellers for the year are almost
always
written by people who have had appearances here. Or, if not here,
they’ve done
an off-site event that we’ve been in charge of. Those books turn out to
be our
number one sellers for the year.

So what does the future look like for
you?
I’m a bookseller, but I’m a feminist
bookseller.
Would I be a bookseller if I were going to run a general bookstore? I’m
not
sure. Sometimes I think, “What will I do if the store is no longer
viable?” And
I think that rather than going into publishing or going to work for a
general
bookstore, I would rather try to figure out how to have a feminist
reading
series and run a feminist not-for-profit. Because the real purpose of my
life
is getting women’s voices out, and getting women to tell the truth about
their
lives, and selling literature that reflects the truths of girls’ and
women’s
lives. Sometimes we’re abused; we have to talk about that. Sometimes we
take
the bad road in relationships; we have to talk about that. Sometimes
we’re
discriminated against in the workplace; we have to talk about these
things.
Violence against women in the United States and worldwide has not
stopped. We don’t
have a feminist army to go rescue women in Afghanistan—would that we
did.

The goal of my
life has been
to get the word out, to understand women’s lives. We have to continue to
evolve
and change if we’re to have a full share, and if our daughters are to
have a
full share of the world.

page_5: 

INSIDE WOMEN & CHILDREN FIRST WITH ANN CHRISTOPHERSEN
What were some of your best-selling
books in
2009?
Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout; Her
Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger; Yes Means Yes!
Visions of Female Sexual Power and
a World Without Rape,
edited
by Jaclyn
Friedman and Jessica Valenti; Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa
Lahiri; The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood; The
Sisters
Grimm
Book
1: Fairy-Tale Detectives by Michael Buckley; In
Defense of Food by Michael Pollan; Fun
Home by
Alison Bechdel; Hardball by Sara Paretsky; The Mysterious
Benedict Society by Trenton Lee Stewart; Everywhere
Babies by
Susan Meyers; Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins; Mama Voted For
Obama! by Jeremy Zilber; The Brief Wondrous Life of
Oscar Wao
by Junot Díaz; and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg
Larsson.

What is the best-selling section in
your
store?
Paperback fiction.

What do you look for in terms of an
author
event?
First we consider whether the book fits
with our
specialty—books by and about women—or ones that offer a feminist
perspective
on any subject. It is also important to us that we can provide an
audience for
the author. Finally, though we always want to host women writers with a
national reputation, we are strongly invested in supporting local
writers and
those launching their careers with debut novels, poetry, or nonfiction.

In what ways have your events
changed over the
years?
In the store’s early days, many of our
events
were feminist issue–based, sometimes with an author or book involved but
not necessarily. We were a hub of feminist and lesbian politics and
culture,
and produced feminist plays and women’s music concerts, sponsored
women’s
sports teams, and provided support for almost every women’s/lesbian
project in
our city. Over the past number of years, however, we have focused our
energies
and events on books and other written material, knowing that that was
our
unique role in the women’s movement.

What challenges do
women still
face that you hope your store can help address?
Women writers are still
vastly
under-represented in review vehicles, which means their books are less
visible.
This can be verified by keeping a gender tally of writers reviewed in
the NYTBR or the New
Yorker, for example, during any
given month. Though women
artists working in most mediums have certainly moved forward, they still
struggle for opportunity and recognition. Women in general have also,
obviously, made many advances since the seventies, but we still have a
long way
to go. Women’s right to control our own bodies is constantly being
challenged;
we are still paid less for doing the same job as men; we still have few
good
options for childcare; married women who work—which is the majority of
us—still do more than our fair share of taking care of home and
children;
women are seriously unrepresented in political decision-making. I could
go on,
but these are some of the reasons we still need organizations—and
bookstores—that focus on women.

How does feminism in
the
twenty-first century differ from when you opened this store?
The main difference is
that the
second wave of the feminist movement in the seventies was just hitting
the
streets and was brilliantly, feverishly, and obviously active. New
organizations were being created every day to deal with issues like
incest,
domestic abuse, healthcare, job opportunities, equal pay, the absence of
political power, and many others. The work that began then has become
institutionalized over the years since. It continues to advance, but
people
don’t always notice it now since it’s become deeper, more complex, and,
some
might say, mainstream. Another significant difference is that many of
the
growing pains have been outgrown: Feminism has been able to overcome
many of
the challenges posed by race, class, and national boundaries, becoming
truly
global. 

What role does technology play in
your store?
It has played an important role since
we bought a
computer and began using POS/IM bookstore software in 1985. We had a Web
site
for marketing purposes and then took advantage of the American
Booksellers
Association’s Web solution so we could sell books online; we switched
from
print to e-newsletters several years ago; we use social media, first
MySpace
and now Facebook and Twitter. And we have the technology—and desire—to
sell
e-books.

How do you think the rise of digital
reading
devices will affect your future?
The extent to which e-books affect our
future
depends on how large that segment of the market grows and whether there
are any
real opportunities for stores our size to get a share of online sales.
There’s
little to no local advantage online, and when your competitors are large
enough
to dictate market prices, it is somewhere between extremely difficult
and
utterly impossible to get even market share to scale.

Where would you like to see Women
&
Children First in ten years?
I would like to see us still finding
ways to serve
our community and fulfill our mission of giving voice to women.

How about feminism?
Continuing to make steady
progress toward
a world in which women are free to live an unobstructed, rich, creative
life.

What do you most love
about
bookselling?
Going through my days surrounded
by books
and the people involved in writing, publishing, selling, reading, and
talking
about them. 

Jeremiah Chamberlin teaches writing at the
University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He is also the associate editor of
the
online journal Fiction Writers Review.

Ann Christophersen photo by Kat Fitzgerald.

Women & Children First in Chicago
Inside Indie Bookstores: Powell’s Books in Portland, Oregon
Inside Indie Bookstores: Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi

The Amazon Conflict

by

Kevin Nance

9.30.14
Online Only

They were a team, once. In the mid-1990s, the fledgling e-retailer Amazon and the major New York publishing houses—the Big Six, as they were then known—professed themselves partners in a new era of online bookselling. One senior executive recalls Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos, announcing his enthusiasm for their common cause. “I remember sitting at a conference table with Jeff telling a handful of us about what he wanted to do,” says the executive, who asked to remain anonymous. “We said, ‘That’s great.’” And for years the partnership was mutually beneficial. As Grove/Atlantic’s president and publisher Morgan Entrekin conceded back in July, at a forum at the New York Public Library (NYPL), Amazon provided “a smooth transition to digital” that kept publishers happy: “It was primarily that there was a reliable vendor; we didn’t have piracy problems, and we got paid decently.” Good times, those.

But that age of convivial cooperation seems to be over, replaced by accusations and acrimony. For much of 2014, Amazon and Hachette Book Group—one of the Big Five publishers, as they’ve been known since the 2013 merger of Penguin and Random House—have been locked in a hostile public dispute over e-book pricing that some view as threatening the fragile ecosystem of the book industry, which includes writers, readers, publishers, brick-and-mortar bookstores, and online book retailers. On the simplest and most immediate level, Amazon wants to be allowed to sell e-books more cheaply, which it argues will benefit readers and lead to increased sales and higher royalties paid to writers. Hachette, whose divisions include Little, Brown and Grand Central Publishing, among others, begs to differ. (Although Amazon and Hachette have refused to grant most media interviews about the details of their ongoing negotiation—both declined to comment for this article—they have issued statements summarizing their positions.)

Is the current dispute just about e-books, or does it have more fundamental, perhaps existential implications? “In the publishing business, people tend to think you’re either going gangbusters or you’re on your way to death, but in reality, people are just evolving,” says Edward Nawotka, editor in chief of the trade journal Publishing Perspectives. “It’s like marriage. Husbands and wives will blow up at times, and the smallest, most insignificant thing can start a fight that appears to be the be-all and end-all. But people are just evolving. It’s the small stuff that makes you crazy.” Others, however, tend to view the Amazon-Hachette fight as less of a lovers’ squabble and more of a prelude to a real crisis that could damage American literary culture by crippling traditional publishers’ ability to publish books with great artistic merit or scholarly value but far lower commercial prospects than more popular books. “Publishers don’t make a lot of money,” the megaselling thriller writer James Patterson said at the NYPL forum. “The great fear for me is that if [traditional publishers] get squeezed down any more than they’re getting squeezed now…they’re not going to have money to bring authors along, they’re not going to have money to buy [books like] Infinite Jest.”

In this way of thinking, the dispute is about far more than the price of e-books; it’s about the future of literature itself. Some fear, for example, that Amazon’s drive to increase its already dominant share of the e-book market could spill over into hardcovers, ultimately depriving traditional publishers of a sustainable business model and making it impossible for them to offer advances that many authors depend upon. And if Amazon continues to increase its market share by underselling its competitors (including chain and independent bookstores as well as other e-retailers), many believe that it will eventually become effectively a monopoly, concentrating unprecedented power in the hands of a single corporation—one that treats books as commodities rather than as intellectual capital whose intangible value to the culture transcends economics.

“Perhaps I’m biased, but I think that books are more than commodities like vacuum cleaners,” says Amy Berkower, a leading New York literary agent and a member of the board of Poets & Writers, Inc. “I don’t know the terms of the Hachette-Amazon dispute, but I suspect Amazon is seeking more than lower e-book prices, and I fear they are asking for greater discounts that will seriously affect the already slim profit margins on which publishers operate. Unlike Amazon, publishers can’t depend on other products like vacuum cleaners to pay the bills. If their profit margins are seriously diminished, they won’t be able to afford to pay the kind of advances that finance serious works of fiction and nonfiction. I’m all for self-publishing, lower prices, and higher e-book royalties, but not at the expense of destroying a model that, however faulty it may be, provides the capital for books that require years to research and write.”

Whether such a scenario comes to pass or not, only time will tell. In the short term, Amazon argues that e-books should be cheaper because they cost less than physical books to produce. Furthermore, they say, cheaper e-books will strengthen, not harm, the culture of reading. “For every copy an e-book would sell at $14.99, it would sell 1.74 copies if priced at $9.99,” the company stated in an open letter to readers. “So, for example, if customers would buy 100,000 copies of a particular e-book at $14.99, then customers would buy 174,000 copies of that same e-book at $9.99. Total revenue at $14.99 would be $1,499,000. Total revenue at $9.99 is $1,738,000. The important thing to note here is that at the lower price, total revenue increases 16 percent. This is good for all parties involved: The customer is paying 33 percent less. The author is getting a royalty check 16 percent larger and being read by an audience that’s 74 percent larger…. The total pie is bigger.”

But as book-industry observers point out, this formula is unlikely to apply to many books, such as literary novels, with great cultural importance but far lower commercial expectations than popular or genre fiction. “What Amazon says might be true for some writers, but it’s not necessarily going to be true for all writers,” says Roxana Robinson, president of the Authors Guild—the nation’s leading professional association for writers—and the author of eight books, including the novel Sparta (Sarah Crichton Books, 2013). “That means if their sales don’t increase, they’ll just get a drop in revenues. So for Amazon to say they’re doing this to benefit writers, it doesn’t ring true.” And one publishing executive at a Big Five house, who asked to remain anonymous, calls Amazon’s position on e-book pricing “disingenuous at best, not to mention a fundamental misunderstanding of the marketplace. There are costs associated with e-books. It’s true that the profit margins are better on e-books, but e-books are not published in isolation. E-books are published in tandem with physical books, which are very costly to produce.”

In August, Michael Pietsch, the former Little, Brown editor and publisher who is now Hachette’s CEO (and is also a member of the board of Poets & Writers, Inc.), responded to Amazon’s statement with his own open letter. Hachette’s e-book prices are far below those for print books, he noted, with more than 80 percent of its e-books priced at less than ten dollars, and the prices for e-books are lowered when the paperback version of the original hardcover is published. “We know by experience that there is not one appropriate price for all e-books, and that all e-books do not belong in the same $9.99 box,” he wrote. “Unlike retailers, publishers invest heavily in individual books, often for years, before we see any revenue. We invest in advances against royalties, editing, design, production, marketing, warehousing, shipping, piracy protection, and more. We recoup these costs from sales of all the versions of the book that we publish—hardcover, paperback, large print, audio, and e-book. While e-books do not have the two- to three-dollar costs of manufacturing, warehousing, and shipping that print books have, their selling price carries a share of all our investments in the book.”

For much of 2014, Amazon and Hachette Book Group…have been locked in a hostile public dispute over e-book pricing that some view as threatening the fragile ecosystem of the book industry, which includes writers, readers, publishers, brick-and-mortar bookstores, and online book retailers.

The single most controversial aspect of the current dispute has been Amazon’s tactic of using sanctions against Hachette’s writers as leverage to force concessions from their publisher. For more than six months, Amazon has targeted Hachette authors by removing preorder buttons (which is more significant than it might appear, since publishers factor in preorders to determine their print runs), slowing shipping times, refusing to discount some books and directing readers to competing titles. The move has outraged many traditionally published writers, including members of Authors United, a group led by Douglas Preston that in August purchased a full-page ad in the New York Times calling on Amazon to stop putting writers in the middle of its battle with Hachette. About nine hundred writers signed the statement, including household names such as Stephen King, James Patterson, John Grisham, Scott Turow, Nora Roberts, and Suzanne Collins, along with Sherman Alexie (who went on The Colbert Report to discuss the dispute with Stephen Colbert, a Hachette author), Paul Auster, Madison Smartt Bell, Michael Chabon, Andre Dubus III, Jennifer Egan, Mary Gaitskill, Mary Gordon, Allan Gurganus, Siri Hustvedt, Maxine Hong Kingston, Dennis Lehane, Ann Patchett, Scott Spencer, and Donna Tartt. “As writers—most of us not published by Hachette—we feel strongly that no bookseller should block the sale of books or otherwise prevent or discourage customers from ordering or receiving the books they want,” the group said. “It is not right for Amazon to single out a group of authors, who are not involved in the dispute, for selective retaliation. Moreover, by inconveniencing and misleading its own customers with unfair pricing and delayed delivery, Amazon is contradicting its own written promise to be ‘Earth’s most customer-centric company.’… Without taking sides on the contractual dispute between Hachette and Amazon, we encourage Amazon in the strongest possible terms to stop harming the livelihood of the authors on whom it has built its business. None of us, neither readers nor authors, benefit when books are taken hostage.”

The Authors Guild has also officially not taken sides in the dispute, but most of its leadership—including Robinson and co–vice president Richard Russo—deplores what Robinson calls Amazon’s “punitive and intimidating” tactics. “It’s the dirtiest kind of dirty pool,” says Russo, whose novels include the Pulitzer Prize–winning Empire Falls (Knopf, 2001). “Amazon and Hachette may both be ruthlessly pursuing their own interests, but Hachette isn’t forcing Amazon to abuse authors.”

Amazon’s treatment of Hachette writers has been widely condemned by a wide swath of authors, including Louise Erdrich, author of the National Book Award–winning The Round House (Harper, 2012) and the owner of Birchbark Books & Native Arts, an independent bookstore in Minneapolis. “This a form of blacklisting,” says Erdrich, adding that she’s particularly concerned by the prospect of Amazon becoming a monopoly in all but name. “Allowing one company to get so big that it controls all of the information is dangerous,” she says. “Do we have the freedom to speak and write as we wish? Presently. But if we allow one distribution point, we have a dangerous bottleneck. Amazon is basically holding the books, the information, the writers, the editors, and all who contribute to the book world, hostage.” Entrekin, at the NYPL forum, issued a similarly dire warning. “We’re concentrating the flow of information in our society into the fewest hands ever in the history of the world,” he said. “That’s not a healthy thing, for all the obvious reasons.” 

In its open letter, Amazon responded to criticisms of its sanctions against Hachette writers by pointing the finger back in Hachette’s direction. “We recognize that writers reasonably want to be left out of a dispute between large companies,” the company’s book team said in a letter to readers. “Hachette spent three months stonewalling and only grudgingly began to even acknowledge our concerns when we took action to reduce sales of their titles in our store. Since then Amazon has made three separate offers to Hachette to take authors out of the middle. We first suggested that we (Amazon and Hachette) jointly make author royalties whole during the term of the dispute. Then we suggested that authors receive 100 percent of all sales of their titles until this dispute is resolved. Then we suggested that we would return to normal business operations if Amazon and Hachette’s normal share of revenue went to a literacy charity. But Hachette, and parent company Lagardère, have quickly and repeatedly dismissed these offers even though e-books represent 1 percent of their revenues and they could easily agree to do so. They believe they get leverage from keeping their authors in the middle.”

And as Amazon pointed out in the letter, not all authors are united in their opposition to the retailer or its negotiating tactics. Indeed, more than eighty-five hundred people—largely self-published writers, many of whom have been rejected by the New York legacy houses but found success distributing their work on Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing platform—have signed an online petition calling on Hachette to “stop fighting low prices and fair wages.” Calling the Big Five a “collusive cartel”—a reference to the Department of Justice’s 2012 lawsuit alleging that the largest New York publishers conspired with Apple in a price-fixing scheme—the petitioners attacked Hachette and the other big publishers as greedy, elitist, and high handed, while praising Amazon for its consumer focus and willingness to help writers shut out by the New York establishment and give them a chance to find an audience. “Amazon provides us the freedom to express ourselves in more creative ways, adding to the diversity of literature,” the writers state in the petition. “Hachette believes you’ll read whatever Hachette tells you to, and rejects and dismisses many worthy writers.” With regard to Amazon’s negotiating tactics targeting Hachette writers, the petition was sanguine: “Unfortunately for Amazon, a company that prides itself on customer service, a breakdown in negotiations has meant making decisions that are hard on customers and authors in the short run in order to fight for the rights of those same customers and authors in the long run.”

One early signer of the petition was C. J. Lyons, a former emergency-room pediatrician who now writes best-selling medical thrillers published independently and by the New York houses, and who is a member of the Authors Guild board of directors. “I totally see why [Hachette] authors are upset,” she wrote in an e-mail. “Without these extras [such as preorder buttons] that Amazon used to provide, their publisher has to work harder to market and sell their books and, quite frankly, Hachette has not been able to do that. I’ve seen reports of sales dropping by 50 percent or more.” On the other hand, she wrote, “Is it Amazon’s fault that publishers have given it such a large market share or that publishers themselves have created a business model where they have become dependent on Amazon? Several years ago, the same could be said of Barnes & Noble—in fact, Simon & Schuster authors suffered when they were in negotiations with B&N [in 2013]. That’s business. And if you don’t like the business model your own company has created, change it.”

As for nonfiction books that take years to research and write, “Those authors are clearly passionate about their work, as are their readers (however limited),” Lyons says. “While I applaud that, it would be up to each publisher to decide whether a work and author should be subsidized with a large advance. I don’t think we can lay that onus on any one distributor. Perhaps the answer lies in crowd-sourcing, increased grants and endowments for the arts, as well as self-publishing models where the author recoups more of the profit as well as has the chance to connect with [the] audience and create multimedia income streams.”

For now, the health of the publishing business is “extremely important to the health of literary culture,” Nawotka says. “They’ve published a lot of books that advance our culture that will be difficult to fit into the self-publishing structure, which is largely relegated to genre fiction and self-help books. You’re not going to see a lot of self-published biographies of Abraham Lincoln.”

For more than six months, Amazon has targeted Hachette authors by removing preorder buttons (which is more significant than it might appear, since publishers factor in preorders to determine their print runs), slowing shipping times, refusing to discount some books and directing readers to competing titles. The move has outraged many traditionally published writers.

Because the details of the Amazon-Hachette negotiations are so closely held, it’s impossible to predict how much longer they will continue. One thing that does seem likely is that traditionally published authors are unlikely to back down in their adamant opposition to Amazon’s policies with regard to Hachette writers. In mid-September, Authors United took the unusual step of calling upon Amazon’s board of directors to reconsider sanctions against Hachette authors’ books, which the group says have caused some authors’ sales—including hardcover, paperback and e-books—to drop by as much as ninety percent.

“Several thousand Hachette authors have watched their readership decline, or, in the case of new authors, have seen their books sink out of sight without finding an adequate readership,” the Authors United letter stated. “These men and women are deeply concerned about what this means for their future careers…. Amazon chose to involve twenty-five hundred Hachette authors and their books. It could end these sanctions tomorrow while continuing to negotiate. Amazon is undermining the ability of authors to support their families, pay their mortgages, and provide for their kids’ college educations. We’d like to emphasize that most of us are not Hachette authors, and our concern is founded on principle, rather than self-interest. We find it hard to believe that all members of the Amazon board approve of these actions. We would like to ask you a question: Do you as an Amazon director approve of this policy of sanctioning books?”

Pressing its argument, Authors United made the case for traditional publishers as curators, guarantors of quality and champions of books ill-equipped to compete in a marketplace dominated by bestsellers. “Publishers provide venture capital for ideas,” the letter went on. “They advance money to authors, giving them the time and freedom to write their books. This system is especially important for nonfiction writers, who often must travel for research. Thousands of times every year, publishers take a chance on unknown authors and advance them money solely on the basis of an idea. By assuming the risk, publishers expect—and receive—a financial return. What will Amazon replace this process with? How, in the Amazon model, will a young author get funding to pursue a promising idea? And what about the role of editors, copy editors, designers, and other publishing staff who ensure that what ultimately ends up on the shelf is both worthy and accurate?”

Most recently, top literary agent Andrew Wylie has been successfully recruiting his stable of blue-chip clients, including Milan Kundera, V. S. Naipaul, Philip Roth, and Salman Rushdie, along with the estates of Roberto Bolaño, Joseph Brodsky, William Burroughs, John Cheever, Allen Ginsberg, Norman Mailer, and Arthur Miller, to join Authors United. That group has reportedly drafted a letter calling on the Department of Justice to begin an antitrust investigation of Amazon and its tactics.

It’s unclear whether Amazon was prepared for such vociferous opposition from traditionally published writers, a group it once counted among its most vocal supporters. “Whatever one would say of negotiating better terms from a vendor, this wasn’t the ideal way of handling it,” says Joe Regal, CEO of the start-up e-retailer and literary-curation site Zola Books, which is trying to position itself to challenge Amazon. “Everybody wants better terms—that’s the nature of business—but I don’t think Amazon was prepared for the backlash that’s happening when authors, who are innocent bystanders, are caught in the crossfire.”

Kevin Nance is a contributing editor of Poets & Writers Magazine. Follow him on Twitter, @KevinNance1.

Everybody wants better terms—that’s the nature of business—but I don’t think Amazon was prepared for the backlash that’s happening when authors, who are innocent bystanders, are caught in the crossfire.

Amazon and Hachette Battle Gets Orwellian, Ursula K. Le Guin and Michael Cunningham Talk Genre, and More

by

Staff

8.11.14
Online Only

Every day Poets & Writers Magazine scans the headlines—from publishing reports to academic announcements to literary dispatches—for all the news that creative writers need to know. Here are today’s stories:

In response to the open letter to Amazon signed by more than 900 members of the group Authors United, Amazon created a group of its own called Readers United, and wrote a letter to supporters over the weekend urging them to e-mail Hachette. In the letter, the Amazon Books team offered a number of suggested talking points including, “We have noted your illegal collusion” and “stop using your authors as leverage”; they also used a George Orwell quote out of context in an attempt to bolster their argument against publishers’ perceived reservations about e-books. Hachette CEO Michael Pietsch responded to Amazon supporters with an e-mail saying, “This dispute started because Amazon is seeking a lot more profit and even more market share, at the expense of authors, bricks and mortar bookstores, and ourselves. Both Hachette and Amazon are big businesses and neither should claim a monopoly on enlightenment, but we do believe in a book industry where talent is respected and choice continues to be offered to the reading public.” (New York Times, Digital Book World)

At the Atlantic, novelists and twin brothers Lev and Austin Grossman—whose parents were also writers—discuss family, influence, taste, and the paths that led them both to writing.

“When the characteristics of a genre are controlled, systematized, and insisted upon by publishers, or editors, or critics, they become limitations rather than possibilities.” At Electric Literature, Ursula K. Le Guin talks with Michael Cunningham about the “arbitrary division between ‘literature’ and ‘genre.'”

Flavorwire’s Emily Temple rounds up fifty novels by women writers under fifty that everyone should read.

Meanwhile, the Millions offers up a reading list for the dog days of August.

In bookstore news, a new “nerd mecca” in New Orleans, specializing in science fiction, fantasy, crime, and mystery books, will open at the end of this month. Meanwhile, a new LGBTQ bookshop, Queer Books, is in the works in Philadelphia, in an effort to fill the space that recently defunct Giovanni’s Room left behind. (Publishers Weekly)

The new musical adaptation of Alison Bechdel’s best-selling graphic memoir Fun Home will head to Broadway next spring. (New York Times)

Authors United Heads to DOJ, Banned Books That Kids Should Read, and More

by

Staff

9.26.14
Online Only

Every day Poets & Writers Magazine scans the headlines—from publishing reports to academic announcements to literary dispatches—for all the news that creative writers need to know. Here are today’s stories:

In its latest move against Amazon, the group Authors United—led by best-selling thriller writer Douglas Preston—confirmed on Wednesday that it intends to contact the Department of Justice requesting an antitrust inquiry into Amazon’s tactics against publishers. Amazon has been embroiled in a months-long battle with Hachette Book Group over e-book prices, throughout which the e-retailer has removed pre-order buttons on select titles and delayed deliveries to customers. (Publishers Weekly)

In celebration of the thirty-second annual Banned Books Week, the Huffington Post has asked educators which banned books they teach their students and why. Check out more of the conversation on Twitter under the hashtag #TeachBannedBooks.

Meanwhile, the blog What Do We Do All Day? has rounded up eight banned books that kids should read, including Lois Lowry’s The Giver and Shel Silvertein’s A Light in the Attic.

In the latest installment of By the Book, the New York Times talks to science writer and linguist Steven Pinker—author of The Language Instinct, The Blank Slate, and, most recently, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century—who says he’s never gotten in trouble for reading a book, only for writing them.

NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour gets giddy about detective stories and forthcoming fall books.

Three small presses—Civil Coping Mechanisms, Broken River Books, and Lazy Fascist Press—are teaming up to start an independent bookstore and beer shop in Astoria, Oregon. (Electric Literature)

The Guardian is offering an exclusive sneak preview of Haruki Murakami’s forthcoming book, The Strange Library. The ninety-six-page illustrated novella will be published in December by Knopf.

Bluewater Productions has created a comic book profiling Lean In author and Facebook COO and Sheryl Sandberg. The new project is part of a series called Female Force, which has featured the stories of women such as Mother Teresa, Hillary Clinton, Tina Fey, and more. (GalleyCat)

Wylie Asks Authors to Unite Against Amazon, Gaiman and Palmer Celebrate Indie Bookstores, and More

by

Staff

9.29.14
Online Only

Every day Poets & Writers Magazine scans the headlines—from publishing reports to academic announcements to literary dispatches—for all the news that creative writers need to know. Here are today’s stories:

Literary agent Andrew Wylie, whose client list bears some of the most well known names in literature, is asking his writers to join the group Authors United in its battle against Amazon. Among those who have agreed are heavyweights Philip Roth, Orhan Pamuk, Salman Rushdie, V. S. Naipaul, and Milan Kundera. “It’s very clear to me, and to those I represent, that what Amazon is doing is very detrimental to the publishing industry and the interests of authors,” Wylie told the New York Times. “If Amazon is not stopped, we are facing the end of literary culture in America.” As reported last week, Authors United intends to bring complaints against Amazon and its tactics against Hachette throughout the companies’ ongoing e-book pricing impasse to the Department of Justice, as early as this week. 

Meanwhile, Publishers Weekly reports that Amazon has reached a new deal with Perseus Book Group over e-book prices. The agreement will affect not only all of Perseus’s imprints, but the more than four hundred independent presses that use Constellation, the publisher’s e-book distribution service.

The American Booksellers Association has recruited author Neil Gaiman and his wife, musician Amanda Palmer, to serve as spokespeople for this year’s Indies First campaign, an initiative launched last year by Sherman Alexie that celebrates independent bookstores. As part of the event, which takes place on Saturday, November 29, authors will serve as volunteer sellers at their favorite indie shops across the country. (GalleyCat)

“You know when a novel’s done, but not so much with short stories. In fact, short stories [are] a venerable form, but it’s diabolically hard to master.” Author Paul Theroux, whose latest story collection, Mr. Bones, is released this week, talks to NPR about the short form.

Thomas Pynchon, the legendary and elusive novelist who rarely makes public appearances (and whose photo hasn’t been published in more than fifty years) might soon appear on the big screen. In the first authorized film adaptation of Pynchon’s work—Paul Thomas Anderson’s forthcoming Inherent Vice—the Gravity’s Rainbow and Mason & Dixon author could be making a cameo. (New York Times)

Last night at KGB Bar in New York City, PEN American Center hosted a reading with the five finalists for this year’s PEN/Bingham Prize, given annually for works of debut fiction. The finalists, whose readings can be heard in their entirety on the PEN website, include Anthony Marra, Saïd Sayrafiezadeh, Ian Stansel, Shawn Vestal, and Hanya Yanagihara. The winner will be announced tonight at the 2014 PEN Literary Awards ceremony.

To fight the Monday doldrums with a little literary prowess, a new Buzzfeed quiz asks, How well do you know the first lines of classic books?

Authors Reimagine Live Events During the Coronavirus Pandemic

An Indie Alternative to Amazon?

by

Gila Lyons

January/February 2020
12.11.19
In Print and Online

The past few years have been rocky for Chris Doeblin, owner and cofounder of Book Culture, four beloved independent bookstores in New York City. “Before Amazon we had a viable company. I made a decent living in New York City. We bought an apartment,” he says. “Twenty-five years later I’m on the verge of bankruptcy. Our stores can go out of business any minute.” Doeblin’s story is all too familiar to many bookstore owners, and if America’s online book-buying trends—specifically the retail dominance of Amazon—continue as they are, some industry forecasts suggest that the stress on independent bookstores will only increase. 

Entrepreneur and publisher Andy Hunter has a new idea for how to reclaim some of the ground lost to Amazon and direct it to support independent bookstores. In January, in collaboration with the American Booksellers Association and Ingram, he and a small staff will launch Bookshop (bookshop.org), a site that will offer indie bookstores, authors, and publishers a way to competitively sell their books online. Bookshop will also enable anyone—from “bookstagrammers” and celebrity book club hosts to book-review editors and authors themselves—to link to a point of purchase for a book without linking to Amazon. Hunter, who is cofounder of Literary Hub, Electric Literature, Catapult, and CrimeReads, hopes the site will provide independent bookstores with “a unified e-commerce strategy that is as fast and user-friendly as Amazon” and, with it, a means of continued survival.

Here’s how Bookshop plans to work: Interested parties will sign up as affiliates with the site. Anyone can be an affiliate, including authors, reviewers, publishers, and media sources. There will be no cost to participate. When affiliates link to a title on Bookshop, they will receive 10 percent of any sales that come from clicking through to Bookshop from their site. (Amazon gives 4.5 percent of sales to their partners). Another 10 percent of sales will go into a pool to be distributed equally among participating independent bookstores semiannually. “For example, if Bookshop’s sales are $4 million in six months, and we have two hundred partners,” Hunter says, “each partner will receive $2,000.” If independent bookstores link to Bookshop—the bigger site promises a larger audience than the shop would connect with on its own, as well as other conveniences—they will receive a 25 percent commission of a sale directly. (Most bookstores typically make 40 to 45 percent when they sell a book online themselves.)

Of the rest of the revenue on a sale, Hunter says the publisher gets about 50 percent, Bookshop gets 5 to 10 percent to cover costs, and the rest goes toward processing and shipping the book. Ingram, the country’s largest wholesaler, will fulfill all orders and provide two- or three-day shipping, customer service, and a competitive return policy. Hunter uses his own experience at Literary Hub to speak to the site’s benefits for its partners: “All publications who review books need affiliate revenue for their coverage. Literary Hub’s network has 3.5 million visitors per month,” Hunter says, “and we don’t have affiliate revenue because we won’t link the books we write about to Amazon. So we’re leaving tens of thousands of affiliate dollars on the table.” 

Bookstores with successful online sales platforms, like Powell’s in Portland, Oregon, will likely not participate, and Hunter says Bookshop will do all it can to avoid competing with them. Instead, Bookshop intends to target Amazon customers who are not currently buying from independent bookstores and to direct them there, particularly by working with major media outlets to link to their site rather than to Amazon. “We are actively doing everything we can to drive people to independent bookstores,” Hunter says, noting that every Bookshop receipt will include information about local bookstores based on zip code. When customers log in to Bookshop.org, they can choose to  subscribe to a local bookstore’s newsletter. Hunter posits that if Bookshop captures just 1 percent of the $3.1 billion in annual U.S. book sales going to Amazon, that would represent $31 million, a cut of which would represent a substantial payback to struggling brick-and-mortar stores. 

The owner of the Raven Book Store in Lawrence, Kansas, Danny Caine, says he is excited to have a centralized outlet that is not Amazon to which to link. “Anything we can do to resist Amazon and fight back, we’re going to enthusiastically participate in,” he says. “It seems like a tall order to compete with Amazon without competing with indie bookstores, but if they can do it, I’m all for it.” 

Doeblin of Book Culture is a little more cautious. “It’s a nice gesture, but I’m skeptical of their ability to produce the results they’re talking about based on the limits of the market,” he says. “Amazon has closed tens of thousands of retail stores in America, and before that, Walmart did the same thing. American consumers shop with price in mind more than anything else. Still, we struggle on because just enough people choose to shop indie and shop local.”

Hunter remains steadfast. “I’m trying to create sustainable models for advocating for the culture that I love and feel indebted to, which is the culture around books. We need to make sure the people selling books are safe and strong.” 

 

Gila Lyons writes about mental health and social justice for the New York Times; O, the Oprah Magazine; Cosmopolitan; Salon; Vox; and other publications. Find her on Twitter, @gilalyons, and on her website, gilalyons.com.

Bookshop founder Andy Hunter.

(Credit: Idris Solomon)

Inside Indie Bookstores: The Complete Series
The Future of Barnes & Noble
The Amazon Conflict

A New Hub for Literary Culture

by

Jonathan Vatner

May/June 2015
4.15.15
In Print and Online

As the Internet continues to disgorge an ever-flowing river of reviews, essays, and articles about literature, deciding where to look for intellectually stimulating content can sometimes feel like wading through a massive slush pile. And while a number of trusted arts and culture websites produce a good deal of reliable content, finding an engaging read amid a sea of click bait and 140-character links can often be overwhelming. But the hunt for serious discourse about books became a little easier with the recent launch of Literary Hub (lithub.com), a joint endeavor between independent publisher Grove Atlantic and digital publisher Electric Literature. Founder Morgan Entrekin, president and publisher of Grove Atlantic, says he long desired to create a home on the web for lovers of literature. “It’s this problem of discoverability—it’s a dreadful word—but we’re all struggling with the idea that we can produce this stuff, but how can we bring people to it?” he says. “Now, if you’re interested in literary culture, there’s one place you can go to for your news and information.”

The site curates literature-related content from all corners of the web, while also offering commissioned essays about books and the writing life, as well as excerpts from newly released and forthcoming books. “It’s a site with the best, smartest writing about the best, smartest writing,” explains editor in chief Jonny Diamond.

While other websites round up and produce daily content on literature, Literary Hub distinguishes itself through its broad network of partners. Entrekin has been busy signing those partners—including imprints of all five major trade publishers, independent and university presses, literary magazines, bookstores, literary nonprofits, even college English and creative writing departments—whose job is to submit content and promote the site on social media. When the venture was announced in February, sixty-five such partners had agreed to participate; Entrekin hopes to grow that number to well over a hundred. Partners so far include indie publishers Graywolf Press, McSweeney’s, and Melville House; literary publications AGNI, n+1, the Paris Review, and Poetry magazine; and the nonprofit arts organization PEN American Center.

Entrekin also enlisted help in creating the website. Rather than hiring a traditional web developer to build it, he looked to partner with an existing site that aligned with his mission. Electric Literature, which was established as an online magazine in 2009 and attracted 2.9 million readers last year, seemed the perfect fit. Editorial director Halimah Marcus and founder and chairman Andy Hunter agreed to partner with Entrekin; the website’s staff built Literary Hub and will help keep it running. Grove Atlantic has committed to funding the site for its first three years, and while he isn’t turning away any ads, Entrekin isn’t soliciting them either.

To oversee the content, Hunter hired Diamond, the former editor of the L Magazine and Brooklyn Magazine, as Literary Hub’s editor in chief, and John Freeman, the former editor of Granta, to be the executive editor. Writer and critic Roxane Gay, fiction writer Alexander Chee, and poets Rebecca Wolff and Adam Fitzgerald serve as contributing editors, and rounding out the masthead are about a dozen correspondents from across the country, reporting on the literary scene beyond New York City.

Each day the website’s editorial team aims to push out a significant amount of content, including a book excerpt, contributed by one of Literary Hub’s publishing partners; a critical or personal essay about books and literary culture; an e-mail roundup of interesting reading about the literary world; and quotations and other archival material aimed at drawing clicks on social media. The editors accept pitches from writers, though Diamond says a traditional book review isn’t enough to merit inclusion. “I’m looking for longer essays that discuss multiple titles, critical pieces that engage with ideas, pieces that talk about trends in the literary conversation, pieces that can take stronger positions and become conversation starters,” he says.

Hunter acknowledges that it can take years to build a loyal audience. “The average person only checks out eight websites regularly,” he says. “To become one of those websites is a very tall order. There’s a lot of tricks, with search-engine optimization and shareable headlines, but ultimately what works in the long run is putting out great content and giving people material they love and relate to—and feel at home in.”

Jonathan Vatner is a fiction writer in Brooklyn, New York. He is the staff writer for Hue, the magazine of the Fashion Institute of Technology.

 

Resources for Writers in the Time of Coronavirus

8.11.20
Online Only

As writers, teachers, publishers, booksellers, and librarians in our local, national, and international communities grapple with how to proceed in their creative, financial, professional, and personal lives during this time of uncertainty, we are compiling a list of resources we hope you will find useful. We will be updating this list as we learn of new resources and opportunities. (If you know about an opportunity, initiative, or helpful resource not on this list, please send an e-mail to editor@pw.org.) 

 

Financial Resources

The Academy of American Poets, the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses, and the National Book Foundation have established the Literary Arts Emergency Fund to help writing organizations outlast the coronavirus pandemic. With the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the three nonprofits will administer a total of $3.5 million via one-time grants of $5,000 to $50,000. Applications were accepted through August 7.

The Poets & Writers COVID-19 Relief Fund provides emergency assistance to writers having difficulty meeting their basic needs due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In the initial round of funding, Poets & Writers distributed 107 grants of $1,000 each to writers from twenty-six states. A second round of funding, in which the organization expects to be able to distribute grants of $1,000 to approximately thirty writers, closed on June 28.

The initiative Artists Relief, sponsored by a coalition of arts grantmakers—the Academy of American Poets, Artadia, Creative Capital, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, MAP Fund, National YoungArts Foundation, and United States Artists—will award a total of $10 million, half of which was contributed by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, to artists and writers “facing dire financial emergencies due to the impact of COVID-19.” Applicants who are twenty-one or older, able to receive taxable income in the United States regardless of their citizenship status, and have lived and worked primarily in the United States over the last two years are eligible to apply for $5,000 grants. Artists Relief will also serve as an informational resource, and will collaborate with Americans for the Arts to launch the “COVID-19 Impact Survey for Artists and Creative Workers.”

The Writers Emergency Assistance Fund, sponsored by the American Society of Journalists and Authors (ASJA), helps established freelance writers “who cannot work because they are currently ill or caring for someone who is ill.” Applicants need not be members of the ASJA but must have five published articles from regional or national publications or one book published by a major publishing house.

Authors League Fund offers assistance to professional authors, journalists, and poets who “find themselves in financial need because of medical or health-related problems, temporary loss of income, or other misfortune.” 

Carnegie Fund for Authors awards “grants to published authors who are in need of emergency financial assistance as a result of illness or injury to self, spouse, or dependent child, or who has had some other misfortune that has placed the applicant in pressing and substantial pecuniary need.”

The PEN America Writers’ Emergency Fund distributes grants of $500 to $1,000 to U.S.-based professional writers, including fiction and nonfiction authors, poets, playwrights, screenwriters, translators, and journalists, who demonstrate an acute financial need, especially one resulting from the impact of the COVID-19 outbreak. 

Artist Relief Tree is “set up to collect donations from those of us with the means to help. We intend to support artists, particularly freelance artists, in a small way. Unfortunately we cannot hope to replace artists’ entire fees or lost work, but we wish to provide hope, make a small difference, and show solidarity with colleagues and Friends.” A group of artists—Andrew Crooks, Marco Cammarota, Morgan Brophy, Rachel Stanton, Tehvon Fowler-Chapman, and Thomas Morris—organized the fund. Note: This group is not taking new requests for funds at the moment.

Queer Writers of Color Relief Fund, started by Luther Hughes, founder of Shade Literary Arts, seeks to “help at least 100 queer writers of color who have been financially impacted by the current COVID-19. Priority will be given to queer trans women of color and queer disabled writers of color, but I hope this relief fund will help as many queer writers of color as it can.”

The Creator Fund, from the e-mail marketing company ConvertKit, is offering financial assistance of up to $500 for artists and small business owners—the term “creator” is loosely defined. The mini-grants can be used for groceries, childcare, rent, mortgage or medical expenses. The Fund, which will disburse $185,300 in total, is now closed to new applications after receiving more than sixteen thousand applications.

The Dramatist Guild Foundation’s Emergency Grants are available to “individual playwrights, composers, lyricists, and book writers in dire need of funds due to severe hardship or unexpected illness.” The grants, which typically range between $500 and $3,000, are intended to support expenses related to healthcare, childcare, housing, disability, natural disaster relief, and other unforeseen circumstances. Applicants will be notified in two to four weeks.

Substack, an e-mail newsletter platform, will administer a total of $100,000 to individuals “writing, or thinking about writing, on Substack” through its Independent Writer Grant Program. Individuals who are experiencing economic hardship due to the coronavirus pandemic can apply for grants from $500 to $5,000, in addition to mentorship from the Substack team. Applications are open through April 7. (It is free to join Substack and start an e-mail newsletter; if you decide to charge your audience a subscription fee, Substack takes 10 percent.) 

The Freelancers Relief Fund, organized by the Freelancers Union, will offer “financial assistance of up to $1,000 per freelance household to cover lost income and essential expenses not covered by government relief programs” including food supplies, utility payments, and cash assistance to cover lost income. Freelancers who reside in the United States, derive most of their income from freelance work, and have experienced “a sudden decrease of at least 50 percent of income as a direct result of the COVID-19 pandemic” are eligible. Applications have been temporarily closed due to the overwhelming response the fund received from its community.

We Need Diverse Books (WNDB) will administer emergency grants of $500 through the WNDB Emergency Fund for Diverse Creatives in Children’s Publishing to “diverse authors, illustrators, and publishing professionals who are experiencing dire financial need.” Traditionally published writers and illustrators who have lost income due to canceled festival, school, or library visits, are eligible, as are furloughed publishing professionals—editors, agents, publicists, designers, and sales positions—who work in the field of children’s literature. Only U.S. residents are eligible. Applicants should receive a response in two to three weeks.

The Maurice Sendak Foundation has dedicated $100,000 to the new Maurice Sendak Emergency Relief Fund, which will be administered by the New York Foundation for the Arts. The fund will offer grants of up to $2,500 to children’s picture book artists and writers who “have experienced financial hardship from loss of income as a direct result of the [COVID-19] crisis.”  Children’s picture book artists and/or writers who have published at least one picture book in the last five years and are residents of the United States or U.S. territories are eligible. Applications will open on April 23 and close after six hundred applications are received; grantees will be notified by May 15.

As part of its response to the COVID-19 crisis, the Economic Hardship Reporting Project (EHRP) offers emergency hardship grants of $500 to $1,500 to professional journalists based in the United States. EHRP will prioritize the unemployed, single parents, members of one-income families with young children, and people with acute medical needs over the age of fifty-five. Applications are reviewed on an ongoing basis. EHRP also accepts pitches from independent journalists for stories on “the intersection of the coronavirus and financial suffering in America, with an emphasis on writers and photographers who are themselves experiencing significant economic hardship caused by the pandemic.” EHRP typically pays reporters roughly a dollar a word or $300 to $500 a day for photojournalists.

The Foundation for Contemporary Arts (FCA) has established a temporary Emergency Grants COVID-19 Fund to “meet the needs of experimental artists who have been impacted by the economic fallout from postponed or canceled performances and exhibitions.” Individual artists who make “work of a contemporary, experimental nature,” live in the United States or U.S. territories, and have a U.S. Tax ID number are eligible to apply for grants of $1,500. FCA supports artists working in poetry, dance, music/sound, performance art/theater, and the visual arts. Applications are open through May 31.

 

Location-Specific Financial Resources

The California Relief Fund for Artists and Cultural Practitioners program, created by the California Arts Council in response to the economic crisis and impending financial needs of individual artists resulting from the coronavirus pandemic, will award a total of $920,000 via unrestricted $1,000 rapid-relief grants to more than 900 individual artists and cultural practitioners in the state of California. “Grants will be distributed to reflect the cultural and geographic diversity of the state of California—including those who are of historically underserved communities who are especially vulnerable financially due to this economic crisis.” Applicants must be current, full-time residents of the state of California, artists or cultural practitioners; and must not be eligible for or currently receiving traditional California state unemployment insurance (UI) benefits. The application deadline is August 18 at 3 PM PDT.

Literary Arts in Portland, Oregon, has created the Booth Emergency Fund for Writers “to provide meaningful financial relief to Oregon’s writers, including cartoonists, spoken word poets, and playwrights.” Awards of $1,000 each will be given to 100 writers at the end of the application period, which runs through May 13. (If additional funds are secured for this purpose, Literary Arts may open up a second round of applications later in June.) Since COVID-19 is disproportionately impacting communities of color, Literary Arts is prioritizing funding “for writers identifying as Black, Indigenous, and/or People of Color.” Funds are intended to be used for (but are not limited to) recouping financial losses due to canceled events, offsetting loss of income for teachers, and support for artists working full- or part-time in the service industry “or other professions who have lost income.” 

The Boston Artist Relief Fund “will award grants of $500 and $1,000 to individual artists who live in Boston whose creative practices and incomes are being adversely impacted by Coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19).”

The Oregon Science Fiction Convention’s Clayton Memorial Medical Fund helps professional science fiction, fantasy, horror, and mystery writers living in the Pacific Northwest states of Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Alaska deal with the financial burden of medical expenses.

NC Artists Relief Fund, sponsored by Artspace, PineCone, United Arts Council, and VAE Raleigh, supports “creative individuals who have been financially impacted by gig cancellations due to the outbreak of COVID-19.” All donated funds “will go directly to artists and arts presenters in North Carolina. Musicians, visual artists, actors, DJ’s, dancers, teaching artists, filmmakers, comedians, and other creative individuals and arts presenters are experiencing widespread cancellations due to this global pandemic.”

The Safety Net Fund is offering financial support to artists who typically make their living offline, at in-person events and performances. To qualify, you must reside in the Bay Area (or near it, as some San Joaquin and Santa Cruz county zip codes are eligible), provide proof of an artistic endeavor in the last six months, cannot be eligible for unemployment insurance from the state, and must have earned less than $1,000 of income in the last thirty days.

The San Francisco Arts & Artists Relief Fund, cosponsored by the Center for Cultural Innovation, San Francisco Arts Commission, and Grants for the Arts, offers funds to “mitigate COVID-19 related financial losses that artists and small to mid-sized arts and culture organizations have suffered.” Individuals based in San Francisco who are eligible for, or currently on employment, are eligible for grants of up to $2,000. Organizations that conduct a majority of their work in San Francisco and operate on a budget of less than $2 million are eligible for grants of up to $25,000.

The Personal Emergency Relief Fund, sponsored by Springboard for the Arts, helps artists in Minnesota “recover from personal emergencies by helping pay an unanticipated, emergency expense.” Artists can request up to $500 for lost income “due to the cancellation of a specific, scheduled gig or opportunity (i.e. commissions, performances, contracts) due to coronavirus/COVID-19 precautionary measures.” 

Max Kansas City’s Emergency Grants offers grants of up to $1,000 to New York State residents who are professionals in the creative arts. “Individuals who have made their living through their art form either professionally or personally and demonstrate a financial need for medical aid, legal aid, or housing” are eligible.

The NYC Low-Income Artist/Freelancer Relief Fund, organized by Shawn Escarciga and Nadia Tykulsker, offers grants of up to $150 to “low-income, BIPOC, trans/GNC/NB/Queer artists and freelancers whose livelihoods are being affected by this pandemic in NYC.”

The New Orleans Business Alliance’s Relief Fund offers grants of $500 to $1,000 to “meet the needs of gig economy workers who have been directly impacted via loss of income.” Writers who live in New Orleans, earn more than 60 percent of their income via gig-work, and are below a certain income level are eligible.

Artist Trust’s COVID-19 Artist Trust Relief Fund offers grants of $500 to $5,000 to “artists whose livelihoods have been impacted by COVID-19” and are residents of Washington State. The grants are intended to help artists who are coping with lost wages and earnings, lost income from canceled events and performances, medical expenses, rent and mortgage payments, food, utilities, and other living expenses.

The Indy Arts & Culture COVID-19 Emergency Relief Fund, sponsored by a coalition of community funders and the Arts Council of Indianapolis, offers $500 grants to “individuals working in the arts sector and impacted by the current public health crisis,” especially those working at small to mid-sized nonprofit arts and cultural organizations. Applicants must live in Marion or one of the seven surrounding counties in Indiana.

The Cultural Relief Fund offers grants of up to $2,000 to individuals in the Seattle area for “emergencies related to the COVID-19 virus and to support the creative responses cultural workers offer in times of crisis.” The first round of funding was available April 1 through May 15. Applications are reviewed weekly; applicants will be notified within ten business days. 

The Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council Emergency Fund for Artists offers grants of up to $500 to artists dealing with financial losses due to canceled events, canceled classes, or school closures. Artists who live in Pittsburgh (in Allegheny, Beaver, Butler, Washington, Lawrence, Indiana, Greene, Fayette, Washington, and Westmoreland counties) are eligible. Applications are reviewed on a rolling basis.

The Canadian Writers’ Emergency Relief Fund, financed by the Writers’ Trust of Canada, the Writers’ Union of Canada (TWUC), and the Royal Bank of Canada, will distribute $150,000 to writers in Canada that have “seen contracted or projected income evaporate due to the current public health crisis.” Poets, fiction writers, nonfiction writers, and young adult writers with a track record of publication (or self-published writers who are members of TWUC) who will lose more than $1,500 between March and May 2020 are eligible to apply for grants of $1,500. The application deadline was April 9.

The Atlanta Artist Lost Gig Fund, administered by the arts nonprofit C4 Atlanta, offers grants of up to $500 to artists in the Atlanta area who “have unmet essential needs due to lost revenue from canceled upcoming events and gigs.” Artists who make their living from their practice are eligible.

The Culture Connects Coalition Artist Relief Fund, cosponsored by the City of Santa Fe Arts and Culture Department and the Lannan Foundation, will administer grants of $500 to artists who live in Santa Fe County and have suffered financial losses due to canceled events, including  readings, panels, and teaching opportunities. Priority will be given to requests from Black/Indigenous/People of Color, transgender and nonbinary artists, and/or artists with disabilities. The current round of applications is open until May 17; the next round of applications will open on June 1.

 

Resources for Working Remotely

Zoom: “How do I host a video meeting?”

Vimeo: “How to plan a virtual event: Vimeo’s live production experts tell all”

Creative Capital: “Thinking About Livestreaming as an Artist? Read This First.” Artists Yara Travieso and Brighid Greene describe how to approach livestreaming and survey platforms available to writers: Instagram, HowIRound, Vimeo, Twitch, YouTube, Facebook, and Zoom.

The Chronicle of Higher Education offers advice for teaching during the coronavirus, including Moving Online Now: How to Keep Teaching During Coronavirus, a collection of articles, advice, and opinion pieces on online learning; “The Quandary: How Do I Support a Student Who’s Sick With Covid-19?”; “Eight Ways to Be More Inclusive in Your Zoom Teaching”; and more.

The National Endowment for the Arts has put together a list of ways to create an inclusive experience for virtual and digital events. “Resources to Help Ensure Accessibility of Your Virtual Events for People with Disabilities” includes information about captioning, sign language interpretation, virtual platform accessibility features, and more. 

 

Resources for Booksellers

The American Booksellers Association’s Coronavirus Resources for Booksellers includes immediate steps to take during the outbreak, ABA initiatives during the outbreak, and opportunities for financial assistance.

Book Industry Charitable Foundation (Binc) offers assistance “for the medical expenses of booksellers and to help booksellers in specific cases where store closure and/or loss of scheduled pay leads to the inability to pay essential household bills for an individual or family.”

The #SaveIndieBookstores campaign fund—organized by James Patterson, Reese’s Book Club, the ABA, and Binc—will administer financial assistance to independent bookstores, “the hearts and souls of main streets in cities and towns all across the United States.” Applications will be open from April 10 to April 27.

 

Resources for Librarians

The Help a Library Worker Out (HALO) Fund, organized by the nonprofit EveryLibrary Institute, will administer grants of up to $250 to library workers, librarians, and library staff who are “experiencing personal or household financial difficulties during this time of crisis.” Individuals who reside in the United States or U.S. territories and have lost work or experienced a significant wage reduction—or are part of a household in which a member has lost their job or seen their income reduced—are eligible. HALO grants can be used toward personal expenses such as food, rent or mortgage payments, cell phone and internet expenses, medicine, or household needs. Grants are made on a rolling basis.

The American Library Association’s (ALA) Pandemic Preparedness page includes news on how librarians are dealing with the pandemic, professional development and training resources, and lists of federal, state, and local resources. The ALA also hosts free webinars on topics such as considering copyright during a crisis, navigating the impact of COVID-19 on library technical services, using a library’s virtual presence to reach users with disabilities, and more.

 

Resources for Readers and Writers

The New York Public Library is offering expanded access to its online research databases. Research librarians and curators are also available for online consultations.

Audible has assembled a free collection of audiobooks, including literary classics and books for young readers. 

Many university presses and other not-for-profit publishers are collaborating with Project MUSE to offer free access to books and journals. 

Independent publisher Archipelago Books is unlocking access to thirty e-books through April 2.

As usual, the Academy of American Poets and the Poetry Foundation, among other organizations, offer free-to-access poetry archives.

The editors at Brightly, a subsidiary of Penguin Random House, have assembled “Reading Through It Together,” a set of educational resources and reading exercises for children and teens.

In partnership with Simon & Schuster, the Folger Shakespeare Library is sharing resources from its video and audio recordings archive—including footage of the Folger Theatre’s 2008 production of MacBeth—through July 1. 

The Sequential Artists Workshop (SAW) in Gainesville, Florida, is making five of its most popular online courses in comics and graphic storytelling available for free.

Calamari Press has made digital copies of all its book titles, as well as back issues of Sleepingfish literary magazine, available for free.

Writer Suleika Jaouad has organized a daily creativity project, the Isolation Journals, through which she sends daily journaling prompts via e-mail from some of her favorite writers, artists, and musicians, including Elizabeth Gilbert, Erin Khar, Esmé Weijun Wang, Georgia Clark, Hallie Goodman, Ilya Kaminsky, Jen Pastiloff, Jon Batiste, Jordan Kisner, Kiese Laymon, Lily Brooks-Dalton, Mari Andrew, Melissa Febos, Nora McInerney, Rachel Cargle, Ruthie Lindsey, and more. 

The Authors Guild posted their webinar “Coronavirus Relief Programs for Authors and Freelancers,” featuring Mary Rasenberger and Umair Kazi, the Authors Guild’s executive director and director of policy and advocacy, respectively, and Marcum LLP partner Robert Pesce. The trio covers “how authors and freelancers can benefit from the government relief programs for economic assistance during the coronavirus crisis.” They discuss qualification criteria for unemployment, loan terms, and other information about the process.  

As usual, Poets & Writers offers weekly writing inspiration through The Time Is Now, which features writing prompts in poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, and Writers Recommend, through which authors share the rituals, art, books, music, movies, and habits that get them writing. 

 

Other Resources

NYC Covid Care, a volunteer network of more than 2,500 mental health professionals, life coaches, spiritual care providers, organizers, and crisis line operators based in New York City, offers free support to those in crisis. All essential workers and their families based in the New York City Metro Area are eligible to participate. Applicants will be contacted by a volunteer professional via phone or video-conference for a confidential consultation.

COVID-19 Freelance Artists Resources is “an aggregated list of FREE resources, opportunities, and financial relief options available to artists of all disciplines.”

Creative Capital’s List of Arts Resources During the COVID-19 Outbreak

Kickstarter’s COVID-19 Coronavirus Artist Resources

New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) Emergency Grants Page

BOMB magazine’s COVID-19 Artist Resources and Closing the Distance: New Spaces for Community, an “ongoing list of online tools, workshops, and livestreams to keep you company and engaged in the time of COVID-19.”

National Endowment for the Arts COVID-19 Resources for Artists and Arts Organizations

Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts has compiled a national directory of organizations that offer legal services to artists, some of which are provided pro bono. Membership and processing fees vary by organization.

The Community of Literary Magazines and Presses COVID-19 Resources for Indie Publishers lists emergency grants and resources available to independent publishers and other literary stakeholders.

Just Shelter, a project started by Evicted author Matthew Desmond and Tessa Lowinske Desmond, offers a state-by-state directory of more than six hundred organizations that work to “preserve affordable housing, prevent eviction, and reduce family homelessness.” 

The Authors Guild posted its webinar “Coronavirus Relief Programs for Authors and Freelancers,” featuring Mary Rasenberger and Umair Kazi, the Authors Guild’s executive director and director of policy and advocacy, respectively, and Marcum LLP partner Robert Pesce. The trio covers “how authors and freelancers can benefit from the government relief programs for economic assistance during the coronavirus crisis.” They discuss qualification criteria for unemployment, loan terms, and other information about the process. 

The Whiting Foundation offers notes from financial guru and artist Amy Smith’s April webinars “Unemployment Compensation for Freelancers and Self-Employed Individuals,” “Applying for PPP and EIDL Relief as an Organization,” and “Applying for PPP and EIDL Relief as an Individual.”

 

Cancellations and Postponements: Retreats and Contests Affected by the Crisis

Inside Indie Bookstores: The Complete Series

by

Jeremiah Chamberlin

4.28.17
Online Only

Inside Indie Bookstores, a series of interviews with the entrepreneurs who represent the last link in the chain that connects writers with their intended audience, ran in all six issues of 2010, celebrating the passion, ingenuity, determination, creativity, and resourcefulness of the entrepeneurs who run the institutions that mean so much to the literary community. Below we revisit the unique personalities, the expert perspectives, and that intoxicating new- and used-book atmosphere of Inside Indie Bookstores.

 

Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi
by Jeremiah Chamberlin
1.01.10
In the inaugural installment of Inside Indie Bookstores, a new series of interviews with independent booksellers across the country, contributor Jeremiah Chamberlin talks with Richard Howorth about his initial vision for Square Books, how a bookstore can stay relevant in the twenty-first century, and the future of independent bookselling.

Powell’s Books in Portland, Oregon
by Jeremiah Chamberlin
3.01.10
In the second installment of our series Inside Indie Bookstores, Jeremiah Chamberlin travels to Portland, Oregon, to talk with Michael Powell, owner of Powell’s Books. The “City of Books,” as the four-story flagship store on West Burnside is known, occupies an entire city block, and carries more than one million books. The sixty-eight-thousand-square-foot space is divided into nine color-coded rooms, which together house more than 3,500 sections. From the moment you walk in, it feels as if you could find anything there.

Women & Children First in Chicago

by Jeremiah Chamberlin
5.01.10
In the third installment of our series Inside Indie Bookstores, Jeremiah Chamberlin travels to Chicago to talk with Linda Bubon and Ann Christophersen, co-owners of Women & Children First, which was conceived as a feminist bookstore three decades ago and has grown into a neighborhood shop popular with families and young professionals. Still, books related to women and women’s issues—whether health, politics, gender and sexuality, literature, criticism, childrearing, or biography—are clearly the store’s focus. 

Boswell Book Company in Milwaukee
by Jeremiah Chamberlin
7.01.10
In the fourth installment of our series Inside Indie Bookstores, Jeremiah Chamberlin travels to Milwaukee to talk with Daniel Goldin, owner of Boswell Book Company, which is named after James Boswell, the eighteenth-century British biographer, and is located on Downer Avenue in a diverse area of the city—close to both the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee and Lake Michigan. 

Tattered Cover Book Store in Denver
by Jeremiah Chamberlin
9.01.10
In the fifth installment of our series Inside Indie Bookstores, contributor Jeremiah Chamberlin travels to Denver to speak with Joyce Meskis, owner of Tattered Cover Book Store, which as become as much a destination for the local community as it has for writers. From the moment you walk in, you feel a sense of ease and peacefulness. The guiding aesthetic is a wonderful mix of the old (worn hardwood floors downstairs, exposed rafters and hand-hewn support beams) and the new (forest green carpet upstairs, a selection of organic and local options at the café). The place feels vital, vigorous.

McNally Jackson Books in New York City
by Jeremiah Chamberlin
11.01.10
In the sixth installment of our series Inside Indie Bookstores, contributor Jeremiah Chamberlin travels to New York City to speak with Sarah McNally, owner of McNally Jackson Books, located in a vibrant area of lower Manhattan—though technically in NoLita (North of Little Italy), it’s also on the eastern fringe of SoHo (South of Houston)—that is filled with boutiques, hip coffee shops, and trendy restaurants.

How to Make a Life, Maybe Even a Living

Inside Indie Bookstores: The Complete Series

by

Jeremiah Chamberlin

4.28.17
Online Only

Inside Indie Bookstores, a series of interviews with the entrepreneurs who represent the last link in the chain that connects writers with their intended audience, ran in all six issues of 2010, celebrating the passion, ingenuity, determination, creativity, and resourcefulness of the entrepeneurs who run the institutions that mean so much to the literary community. Below we revisit the unique personalities, the expert perspectives, and that intoxicating new- and used-book atmosphere of Inside Indie Bookstores.

 

Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi
by Jeremiah Chamberlin
1.01.10
In the inaugural installment of Inside Indie Bookstores, a new series of interviews with independent booksellers across the country, contributor Jeremiah Chamberlin talks with Richard Howorth about his initial vision for Square Books, how a bookstore can stay relevant in the twenty-first century, and the future of independent bookselling.

Powell’s Books in Portland, Oregon
by Jeremiah Chamberlin
3.01.10
In the second installment of our series Inside Indie Bookstores, Jeremiah Chamberlin travels to Portland, Oregon, to talk with Michael Powell, owner of Powell’s Books. The “City of Books,” as the four-story flagship store on West Burnside is known, occupies an entire city block, and carries more than one million books. The sixty-eight-thousand-square-foot space is divided into nine color-coded rooms, which together house more than 3,500 sections. From the moment you walk in, it feels as if you could find anything there.

Women & Children First in Chicago

by Jeremiah Chamberlin
5.01.10
In the third installment of our series Inside Indie Bookstores, Jeremiah Chamberlin travels to Chicago to talk with Linda Bubon and Ann Christophersen, co-owners of Women & Children First, which was conceived as a feminist bookstore three decades ago and has grown into a neighborhood shop popular with families and young professionals. Still, books related to women and women’s issues—whether health, politics, gender and sexuality, literature, criticism, childrearing, or biography—are clearly the store’s focus. 

Boswell Book Company in Milwaukee
by Jeremiah Chamberlin
7.01.10
In the fourth installment of our series Inside Indie Bookstores, Jeremiah Chamberlin travels to Milwaukee to talk with Daniel Goldin, owner of Boswell Book Company, which is named after James Boswell, the eighteenth-century British biographer, and is located on Downer Avenue in a diverse area of the city—close to both the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee and Lake Michigan. 

Tattered Cover Book Store in Denver
by Jeremiah Chamberlin
9.01.10
In the fifth installment of our series Inside Indie Bookstores, contributor Jeremiah Chamberlin travels to Denver to speak with Joyce Meskis, owner of Tattered Cover Book Store, which as become as much a destination for the local community as it has for writers. From the moment you walk in, you feel a sense of ease and peacefulness. The guiding aesthetic is a wonderful mix of the old (worn hardwood floors downstairs, exposed rafters and hand-hewn support beams) and the new (forest green carpet upstairs, a selection of organic and local options at the café). The place feels vital, vigorous.

McNally Jackson Books in New York City
by Jeremiah Chamberlin
11.01.10
In the sixth installment of our series Inside Indie Bookstores, contributor Jeremiah Chamberlin travels to New York City to speak with Sarah McNally, owner of McNally Jackson Books, located in a vibrant area of lower Manhattan—though technically in NoLita (North of Little Italy), it’s also on the eastern fringe of SoHo (South of Houston)—that is filled with boutiques, hip coffee shops, and trendy restaurants.

How to Make a Life, Maybe Even a Living

Authors Reimagine Live Events During the Coronavirus Pandemic

by

Michael Bourne

3.23.20
Online Only

Six years ago, when Emily St. John Mandel published Station Eleven (Knopf, 2014), her best-selling novel about a pandemic flu that decimated the world’s population, she couldn’t have known that her next novel, The Glass Hotel (Knopf, 2020), would arrive at the height of a pandemic flu outbreak that, if not as lethal as the fictional “Georgia flu” of her earlier book, is nevertheless upending the world economy—and, not incidentally, her twenty-five-city book tour.

“Yeah, irony, right?” Mandel says with a rueful chuckle. “I maintain that this is nowhere near as bad as the Georgia flu. We’re not going to end our days in traveling Shakespearean theater companies crossing a post-apocalyptic wasteland.”

Perhaps not, but the coronavirus pandemic has radically disrupted the book business, setting off waves of bookstore closures and book festival cancellations, making it nearly impossible for authors like Mandel to tour in support of their books. For now these closures and cancellations are only affecting books published this spring, but if the national lockdowns continue, it could send lasting shockwaves through the always fragile publishing ecosystem. 

Already, though, authors and booksellers are teaming up to shift canceled live events online using digital tools like Zoom and Facebook Live. Mandel herself will be participating in a live digital Q&A Tuesday, March 24, with author Isaac Fitzgerald, hosted by Brooklyn’s Greenlight Books, where Mandel was originally scheduled to launch her book in person. The same night, a new organization, A Mighty Blaze, run by writers Jenna Blum and Caroline Leavitt, will be featuring Facebook Live events for Laura Zigman’s new novel Separation Anxiety (Ecco, 2020) and Andrea Bartz’s novel The Herd (Ballantine, 2020), along with a slate of debut authors.

It remains to be seen how effective these digital book events will be, especially for smaller presses that rely on in-person events at bookstores and festivals to introduce their authors to readers, says Mary Gannon, executive director of the Community of Literary Magazine and Presses. “I think everybody is trying to pivot and reinvent as quickly as possible just to experiment with how these events might work,” she says. “So it’s hard to tell at this point if digital events can make up for canceled live ones, but there’s kind of nothing else to do.”

No matter how successful these digital events are, virus-related lockdown orders and restrictions on in-person gatherings will hurt authors and the book industry more generally, Gannon says. When fears of infection slashed attendance at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) Conference earlier in March, she says, many of the small presses in her organization saw sales for the month drop by as much as 20 or 30 percent, just from the loss of in-person sales from that one event.

“I think there’s going to be serious negative impact on both small and large publishers, but the smaller publishers are the ones that are more at risk because they have fewer resources,” she says. “It’s especially important right now for us to support literary magazines and small presses in any way we can. They’re essential to ensuring the health and diversity of the literary arts.”

Indeed, Paul Bogaards, deputy publisher at Knopf and Pantheon Books, offers a slightly more sanguine view of the disruption to live author events. At Knopf and Pantheon, imprints of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, which is a part of Penguin Random House, Bogaards says, all book tours have been canceled or postponed through the end of April, which impacts about a dozen titles at just those two imprints. “I can’t speak for the industry, but given the CDC protocols in place, no one is touring,” he says. “Physical gatherings are kaput. Boots-on-the-ground book tours are dead for the moment.”

But, he says, critics haven’t stopped reviewing books, authors continue to sit for interviews, and publishers are able to maintain their social media campaigns. “Touring is just one spoke in the wheel of book promotion and publicity,” he says, “and, in point of fact, publishers are doing less of it than they once did.”

Bogaards is encouraged by upticks in sales of commercial fiction and topical nonfiction, along with titles that touch directly on contagious diseases like Stephen King’s The Stand (Doubleday, 1978), Albert Camus’s The Plague (Gallimard, 1947), and Mandel’s Station Eleven. Publishers are hoping the enforced down-time will spark renewed interest in their classic titles. To that end, Knopf and Pantheon are launching social media initiatives designed to prompt readers toward its backlist catalog. “I mean, if you are under a government-ordered lockdown, what better way to travel than through the pages of a book?” he says.

In the meantime, authors at small and large publishers are exploring digital alternatives to live events. Blum and Leavitt, the organizers behind A Mighty Blaze, were among the first to see the need for a hub for writers whose book tours were stranded by the pandemic. The idea for the site came about after Leavitt, author of twelve books, including With or Without You, due out in August from Algonquin, learned that the Texas Library Association Conference, where she had been invited to appear, had to cancel and move its offerings online.

“I had spent a lot of time memorizing what I thought was a funny speech, with hand movements and everything,” she says. “I made a video of it and I sent it to Algonquin just for a lark, and they liked it so much they said, ‘Ooh, we can send that out.’ So I started the ‘Nothing is Cancelled Book Tour,’ where I told authors to make little videos and I’d post them as if they were in a bookstore. All I asked is that they shout out another writer and shout out an indie bookstore.”

The site took off, and Leavitt quickly joined forces with Blum, author of The Lost Family (HarperCollins, 2018). Calling themselves “two women writers in yoga pants trying to help other writers whose book tours have been canceled,” the pair has already attracted more than fifty industry partners, including Poets & Writers and two hundred author participants.

“It’s grown exponentially every day,” says Blum. “I would say it’s been growing faster than COVID. We’ve been having so many writers join us, and so many industry people from publishers to publicists to agents to indie bookstores to literary conferences and festivals—everybody wants to help.”

Still, digital events aren’t for everyone. Poet Tess Taylor is publishing two collections this spring, Last West: Roadsongs for Dorothea Lange, commissioned by New York’s Museum of Modern Art, and Rift Zone, due from Red Hen Press in April. Taylor was able to attend a reading for Last West at MoMA in February, but most of the subsequent events for that book, along with twenty-five more events planned for Rift Zone, have all been canceled.

The two books contained a decade’s worth of poems, Taylor says, and she spent a year organizing the events to support them. “It feels like building a sandcastle,” she says. “You know, you build it up and up and up and then a wave comes and it knocks it down. I don’t know if I’m sad or angry. I’m all those things, and then sometimes I’m just humbled because what’s going on is so much bigger than just us or me.”

Living as she does in California, which is currently under a shelter-in-place order, Taylor says she will be throwing herself a digitally streamed “imaginary book party” with fellow poet Judy Halebsky, inviting friends “to have a glass of wine and watch us give our reading” online, and plans to regularly post poems by poets she admires. But she admits to feeling ambivalent about moving her live events online.

“I’m using social media because I want to be in a community right now at this moment when we can’t go out in the world, but I love people,” she says. “I love human beings. I really miss them. I love bookstores and want to support them. I love the feeling of live poetry, having it read, being in a room where someone is sharing their words and their breath with you—in the most wonderful way, not in a toxic way. Poetry is a beautiful way of sharing breath, and I miss that.”

 

 

Michael Bourne is a contributing editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.

From top: Emily St. John Mandel, author of Glass Hotel; Caroline Leavitt, cofounder of A Mighty Blaze and author of With or Without You; and Tess Taylor, author of Rift Zone.

(Credit: Mandel: Michel Leroy; Leavitt: Jeff Tamarkin; Taylor: Taylor Schreiner)

Resources for Writers in the Time of Coronavirus

Amid Pandemic, Barnes & Noble Pauses to Improve Its Stores

by

Michael Bourne

3.30.20
Online Only

Can a pandemic that shutters nearly two-thirds of a nationwide bookstore chain’s locations have a silver lining? If that bookstore chain is Barnes & Noble, quite possibly it could.

The chain, which was bought out last year by New York–based hedge fund Elliot Management, was in the process of overhauling its stores before the coronavirus hit this spring, says CEO James Daunt. Now, with roughly 400 of the chain’s 627 stores temporarily closed to help slow the spread of the pandemic, that work can continue in relative peace.

“Our stores are pretty terrible, we know that,” Daunt says. “We don’t shy away from that fact and certainly I don’t shy away from articulating that fact. To make them better bookstores, we really have to do a lot of work and some of that is physical work, moving the interiors around and changing the layout and the presentation of the stores, making them more open, easier to navigate, and frankly just better looking bookstores. And that, ironically, is a lot easier to do when you don’t have any customers in the way.”

Not that Daunt looks upon the wave of temporary closures at Barnes & Noble as good news. He has had to lay off all employees with less than six months seniority and furlough many others, actions he calls “traumatic” but necessary to trim costs while the stores are closed to the public.

“It’s desperately difficult. None of us have any idea how long this will go on for. If President Trump is correct and we’re back in business by Easter, then really, we don’t have a particular problem. It’s a nasty shock, but it’s not a problem, and very few people, if any, will ultimately lose their jobs. If it extends further, then evidently they will,” he says. (Trump has since extended social-distancing guidelines through April 30.) “If you have no money coming in, then your liabilities become a significant issue and we have to cut costs to ensure the survival of the business, and that will include unfortunately our staff as well as all the other discretionary expenditures that we have available to cut back on.”

But Daunt, who also runs the bookstore chain Waterstones as well as his own smaller independent chain, Daunt Books, in the U.K., has retained a core team of experienced booksellers at many shuttered Barnes & Noble locations and plans to use the time provided by the enforced closures to spruce up the stores and improve the selection of books on the shelves.

“The backlist at Barnes & Noble has really deteriorated over the last decade and the cumulative impact is that we have pretty shockingly poorly stocked stores,” he says. “Before this crisis, we had already embarked on a process of using the holiday sales to empty them out to a degree just to give us space, and what we were intending to do with that liberation of space is then pile back in the backlist that was missing and start to re-curate the stores.”

This work has been seen by book-industry observers as desperately overdue for Barnes & Noble, which had to close 150 stores in the decade leading up to the buyout last summer in the face of competition from Amazon and newly resurgent independent bookstores. The enormous selection of books at its larger stores, which helped spur the chain’s growth in the 1980s and 1990s, had become a liability in an era when customers can buy books from a warehouse by clicking a few buttons on their smartphones.

Daunt, who oversaw a similar overhaul at Waterstones over the past decade, strenuously denies the make-over at Barnes & Noble will entail abandoning a large number of under-performing locations. 

“If I could get a dollar for every time I was told I would close a hundred stores I would be a very rich man, but in fact I have a huge motivation to keep as many bookstores open as possible,” he says. “I believe in the profession, I believe in the vocation, I believe in the purpose and worth of bookstores within communities. That said, there is a clear case for closing a reasonably large number of stores because they’re just too big or too old, too this, too that, but we’d only do that if we could relocate. What we’ve done at Waterstones is actually close a very substantial number of stores but open up a larger number of stores. We haven’t deserted any locations. We’ve just moved.”

Over time, Daunt hopes the chain can find new locations that will better reflect the market for books in a given area. “So often it’s driven by the property—what’s the right size of store for a particular location, and certainly there are a number of Barnes & Noble stores which are either in the wrong place and they should be down the freeway or across the mall or in a slightly better location, or they’re just too big,” he says. “We’ve got a 25,000-square-foot store when a 20,000-square-foot store would be a much better size to have.”

While the widespread closures will eat into Barnes & Noble’s revenues in the short run, Daunt says the chain’s deep-pocketed ownership group will help it weather the crisis. It helps, he says, that business was unusually brisk at many of the chain’s locations before the shutdowns and that sales via the company’s website are currently running three or four times higher than normal.

“Our financing is not as bleak as perhaps our financial situation might have led one to think,” he says. “We just have to be pragmatic and sensible and we need an owner who’s prepared to let us continue to invest.”

Michael Bourne is a contributing editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.

James Daunt was named Barnes & Noble’s CEO in August 2019.

A Matter of Survival for Independent Bookstores
The Future of Barnes & Noble
Authors Reimagine Live Events During the Coronavirus Pandemic

A Matter of Survival for Independent Bookstores

by

Michael Bourne

3.30.20
Online Only

The waves of lockdowns and shelter-in-place orders imposed across the country to slow the spread of coronavirus infections are a potential shot to the heart of independent bookstores, which have thrived in recent years by turning their shops into community hubs featuring cafés, classes, and readings. But even as scores of indie bookstores have shut their doors to the public and laid off staff, many stores continue to serve their customers via online orders and curbside pickup programs, and for now at least readers seem to be responding by buying huge numbers of books.

At Flyleaf Books in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, owner Jamie Fiocco closed her store on March 16 and switched to online sales, along with an elaborate system of curbside delivery. After North Carolina’s Governor Roy Cooper announced a statewide stay-at-home order on March 27, however, Fiocco ended the curbside delivery program, choosing to handle all phone and online orders by mail.

For the moment, the system seems to be working. Sales at the store are in line with what they were a year ago, though the expense of having offered curbside pickup as well as below-cost shipping to her customers is eating into Fiocco’s profits. She isn’t sure how long she can hold out, despite having laid off seven of her fourteen employees.

“What I’m trying to do right now is make enough money to keep my [remaining] staff paid,” she says. “At some point, I would not be surprised if we are asked to shut down by local or state government but we will keep going until then. We’ll try to keep a trickle of revenue in, but we’re really counting on government assistance to see us through to the end of this.”

Flyleaf Books is far from alone in struggling to outlast the coronavirus outbreak. The legendary Strand Book Store, located in New York City, the epicenter of the pandemic, had to shutter all of its operations, including its website, on March 15, forcing it to temporarily lay off much of its staff. Powell’s Books in Portland also shut down its five stores, but on March 27, CEO Emily Powell announced the store had one hundred staffers working full-time to keep up with online orders. At the Tattered Cover Book Store in Denver, the physical stores are closed, but a skeleton crew is still working to fulfill online orders. 

In San Francisco, Green Apple Books closed its three stores to the public on March 17 and furloughed all but nine of its forty employees, who have stayed on to handle online orders, according to co-owner Kevin Ryan. Sales from the website are ten times higher than normal, but, Ryan says, “all that web-order fulfillment is really low margin, and at first we were doing free freight which cost us three dollars for every book right off the top. Some books we even lost money on, so it’s not a great solution.”

The fallout from the virus isn’t confined to indie bookstores. As of March 27, Barnes & Noble, the nation’s largest remaining bookstore chain, had closed roughly 400 of its 627 locations, though its website has seen a huge boost in orders. James Daunt, the chain’s newly installed CEO, says he has laid off all employees with less than six months seniority and furloughed many of the rest, though he has retained a few core employees at each location to help refurbish the stores while they’re closed. (Read “Amid Pandemic, Barnes & Noble Pauses to Improve Its Stores.”)

Whether individual bookstores can survive the extended closings depends not only on how long the social distancing orders are in effect in their area, but also on how strong their balance sheets were before the outbreak, how receptive their landlords will be to delayed or reduced rental payments, and how much they’re able to rely on their websites to sell books during the closures, booksellers say. Booksellers are also counting on relief in the form of disaster grants and low-interest loans from the massive $2.2 trillion stimulus package passed by Congress, which includes $375 billion in aid for small businesses, along with $260 billion for unemployment insurance for laid off and furloughed workers.

In the meantime, a new digital bookstore, Bookshop.org, offers a way for readers to buy books online while supporting their local indie bookstore. Each time an affiliated bookstore directs a shopper to buy books from the site, the store gets a 25 percent commission on the sale. In addition, the site is putting 10 percent of all it sales revenue into a pool that will distributed twice annually to its 550 affiliated bookstores. As of March 30, that pool had grown to just under $180,000.

In the past two weeks, sales at Bookshop.org, which only opened for business in January, have jumped by more than 1,000 percent, says CEO Andy Hunter. “I think people are rallying around their local bookstores,” he says. “They understand that indies are not only important parts of their communities but really important to literary culture and the culture around books in general.”

Still, if the shutdowns last more than a few weeks, some bookstores will surely face a reckoning, says Fiocco, the ABA president. “I haven’t heard of any permanent closings yet,” she says. “There are sure to be some. I will say this, that it is as dire a situation as it could be. 

“I think there will be a lot of closings for stores that don’t have the operating capital to continue,” she adds. 

Fiocco hopes her own store can open for business as usual by June 1, though she knows the shutdown could last much longer. If the store does reopen in June, she is guardedly optimistic that she can survive.

“It depends on a lot of communications with publishers, with our landlord, and whatever governmental assistance we get,” she says. “I feel like the will is there, but I think a lot of bookstores don’t have that good will or landlords that understand the value of bookstores or have the ability to ride this out. I believe that we will be here. I don’t see the path yet, but I feel like the players are all working together to make that happen.”

In San Francisco, Kevin Ryan, Green Apple Book’s co-owner, says he’s heartened by the federal stimulus bill, which he hopes will allow the store to delay paying rent for a few months and help his staff weather the shutdown. “If all the money comes through like it sounds like it might and we’re able to rehire them in mid April, I don’t think they’ll miss a paycheck, he says. 

Like Fiocco, Ryan believes Green Apple will eventually reopen, but he remains uncertain how robust business will be in the wake of the economic damage the pandemic is sure to leave behind. 

“We’re a pretty healthy business,” he says. “If we’re closed, it means everybody’s closed, and I just don’t see that happening. One way or another we’re going to open. The bigger question mark is what it’s going to look like on the other side, with the massive unemployment and all that, if people are going to come back and buy books. That’s a real question mark.”

 

Michael Bourne is a contributing editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.

Authors Reimagine Live Events During the Coronavirus Pandemic
Amid Pandemic, Barnes & Noble Pauses to Improve Its Stores
An Indie Alternative to Amazon?
Resources for Writers in the Time of Coronavirus
Inside Indie Bookstores: The Complete Series

Inside Indie Bookstores: The Complete Series

by

Jeremiah Chamberlin

4.28.17
Online Only

Inside Indie Bookstores, a series of interviews with the entrepreneurs who represent the last link in the chain that connects writers with their intended audience, ran in all six issues of 2010, celebrating the passion, ingenuity, determination, creativity, and resourcefulness of the entrepeneurs who run the institutions that mean so much to the literary community. Below we revisit the unique personalities, the expert perspectives, and that intoxicating new- and used-book atmosphere of Inside Indie Bookstores.

 

Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi
by Jeremiah Chamberlin
1.01.10
In the inaugural installment of Inside Indie Bookstores, a new series of interviews with independent booksellers across the country, contributor Jeremiah Chamberlin talks with Richard Howorth about his initial vision for Square Books, how a bookstore can stay relevant in the twenty-first century, and the future of independent bookselling.

Powell’s Books in Portland, Oregon
by Jeremiah Chamberlin
3.01.10
In the second installment of our series Inside Indie Bookstores, Jeremiah Chamberlin travels to Portland, Oregon, to talk with Michael Powell, owner of Powell’s Books. The “City of Books,” as the four-story flagship store on West Burnside is known, occupies an entire city block, and carries more than one million books. The sixty-eight-thousand-square-foot space is divided into nine color-coded rooms, which together house more than 3,500 sections. From the moment you walk in, it feels as if you could find anything there.

Women & Children First in Chicago

by Jeremiah Chamberlin
5.01.10
In the third installment of our series Inside Indie Bookstores, Jeremiah Chamberlin travels to Chicago to talk with Linda Bubon and Ann Christophersen, co-owners of Women & Children First, which was conceived as a feminist bookstore three decades ago and has grown into a neighborhood shop popular with families and young professionals. Still, books related to women and women’s issues—whether health, politics, gender and sexuality, literature, criticism, childrearing, or biography—are clearly the store’s focus. 

Boswell Book Company in Milwaukee
by Jeremiah Chamberlin
7.01.10
In the fourth installment of our series Inside Indie Bookstores, Jeremiah Chamberlin travels to Milwaukee to talk with Daniel Goldin, owner of Boswell Book Company, which is named after James Boswell, the eighteenth-century British biographer, and is located on Downer Avenue in a diverse area of the city—close to both the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee and Lake Michigan. 

Tattered Cover Book Store in Denver
by Jeremiah Chamberlin
9.01.10
In the fifth installment of our series Inside Indie Bookstores, contributor Jeremiah Chamberlin travels to Denver to speak with Joyce Meskis, owner of Tattered Cover Book Store, which as become as much a destination for the local community as it has for writers. From the moment you walk in, you feel a sense of ease and peacefulness. The guiding aesthetic is a wonderful mix of the old (worn hardwood floors downstairs, exposed rafters and hand-hewn support beams) and the new (forest green carpet upstairs, a selection of organic and local options at the café). The place feels vital, vigorous.

McNally Jackson Books in New York City
by Jeremiah Chamberlin
11.01.10
In the sixth installment of our series Inside Indie Bookstores, contributor Jeremiah Chamberlin travels to New York City to speak with Sarah McNally, owner of McNally Jackson Books, located in a vibrant area of lower Manhattan—though technically in NoLita (North of Little Italy), it’s also on the eastern fringe of SoHo (South of Houston)—that is filled with boutiques, hip coffee shops, and trendy restaurants.

How to Make a Life, Maybe Even a Living

The Spirit and the Strength: A Profile of Toni Morrison

by

Kevin Nance

November/December 2008
11.1.08
In Print and Online

Toni Morrison sucks her teeth. The gesture, identified by linguists as rooted in Africa, produces something like the sound that horseback riders use to get their mounts moving, but Morrison’s version is sharper, wetter, and more expressive—of comic disapproval or, more often, an ingrained skepticism. The 1993 Nobel laureate is skeptical about so very many things: prizes and fame, critics, the teaching of creative writing, politics (of the electoral, racial, sexual, literary, and academic varieties), and virtually anything else anyone tries to sell her. Morrison isn’t buying it, generally speaking—at least not until she’s squeezed and weighed and probed it to her own exacting standards. And sometimes not even then.

Photograph by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders.
 

From the beginning of her career, Morrison has bequeathed this teeth-sucking, and the fiercely independent, questioning mind-set it conveys, to many of her most memorable characters, most of them female. In her first novel, The Bluest Eye (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970), a sassy young girl named Frieda sucks her teeth; so does the maverick title character of Morrison’s second novel, Sula (Knopf, 1973). So, too, do figures in several of her other books, including Jazz (Knopf, 1992), whose opening sentence (“Sth, I know that woman”) includes a transcription of the sound—the sound of intelligence irreverently asserting itself, like it or not.

The sucking of the teeth continues, literally and figuratively, in Morrison’s life and on the page. In an interview at the New York City offices of Random House—where for many years she worked as an editor—she fixes her interviewer, and by extension the world, with a gimlet eye. At seventy-seven, her cascade of silver dreadlocks set off against a cranberry blouse, she laughs often, easily, and sometimes wickedly, but it never quite balances the intensity of her assessing gaze. She’s always on guard, always suspicious of conventions, structures, and received wisdom from all sources.

That includes her own initial research for A Mercy, her new novel, set in late-seventeenth-century Virginia, published this month by Knopf. As part of her study of indentured servitude in that period, Morrison examined the manifests of ships that ferried a motley group of people from the British Isles to the New World, finding that 70 to 80 percent of them listed their occupation as servant.

Hah!

“I was trying to get beyond the Puritan, Plymouth Rock stuff, because I didn’t believe that, not for one minute,” says Morrison, sounding a bit like a detective in a crime novel. “I mean, I believe that, but I didn’t think it was the whole story. Why are you leaving a servant job to go to this unknown place on the other side of the ocean? What were they running from?” Her eyes light up with discovery. “Some of them were adventurers, but most of them were felons. Most of them were prostitutes. Most of them were children. Most of them were just people they didn’t want in Great Britain, and they gave them a choice: prison or transportation.”

In a few cases, even the poorest passengers from other backgrounds—stuffed belowdecks next to the animals, without light or air, enduring conditions not far removed from those of African slaves making their own middle passage—journeyed across the Atlantic for different reasons. In A Mercy, one of these, a sturdy and practical young woman named Rebekka, travels to meet her new husband, an enlightened Protestant named Jacob. Settled on his farm, Rebekka finds herself mistress of a strange trio of young slaves: Lina, a Native American, and Sorrow and Florens, both black. (On the periphery are two white male indentured servants whose terms of service are perennially extended.) Relations among the four women, always complex, grow deeper and even more interdependent when Jacob, known to the slaves as Sir, dies, leaving Rebekka infected with pox. To save her life, Florens is dispatched on a dangerous mission through inhospitable territory to find a free black man, a blacksmith who once worked at the farm and is believed to possess healing powers—and with whom she happens to be in abject, obsessive love.

Florens’s first-person account, which forms the novel’s narrative spine, alternates in contrapuntal fashion with the third-person stories of the other characters. Within this elegant structure—the book is also, at 167 pages, conspicuously compact—Morrison returns to the great theme of her Pulitzer Prize–winning Beloved: slavery and its tar pit of historical, political, and emotional implications.

But where Beloved, which was published by Knopf in 1987, combined the slow-building epic sweep of Greek tragedy with the mounting horror of a ghost story, A Mercy has the intimacy and speed of a chamber piece while still being impressively dense, like a small valise packed with enough outfits for a month in the country. It parses sometimes surprisingly fine distinctions between master and slave, male and female, black and white (and brown). It features a new entry in Morrison’s ever-growing inventory of the forces aligning themselves against freedom: a certain type of romantic love, which Florens is finally forced to confront as a kind of spiritual quicksand that threatens to swallow her sense of self. Above all, A Mercy brims with the omnipresence of the author’s questing, sifting brain, which the reader can feel inspecting each strand of the story, subjecting it to the closest scrutiny before weaving it into the whole. The result is both a compelling yarn and a meditation on the varieties and degrees of enslavement and liberation; it is as precise, taut, and tough-minded as Morrison herself.

“To me, this is her finest book since Beloved, and I’m very impressed and moved by it,” says Robert Gottlieb, her longtime editor at Knopf. “My personal favorites among her books are Sula, Song of Solomon, Beloved, and this. It’s very intense.”

A Mercy may be a doubling back to Beloved, but it’s also, like that earlier book, closer to the bone than many readers will realize. Morrison’s grandfather was born a slave in Alabama, and her father, a ship welder named George Wofford, whose family had migrated from the South in the early twentieth century, distrusted whites. Raising his own family, with his wife, Ella Ramah Willis, in the small town of Lorain, Ohio, he had reason to. In the early years of the Great Depression, when Chloe Anthony Wofford (who later adopted her nickname, Toni) was about two years old, “people set our house on fire to evict us,” she told Ed Bradley of 60 Minutes in 1998.

The family held fast in Lorain, however, and Chloe, the second of four children, thrived in a household full of music, storytelling, folklore, and fairy tales. She graduated from high school with honors in 1949 and then studied English at Howard University—where she was the first in her family to receive a college degree—after which she attended graduate school at Cornell, where she earned a master’s degree (writing her thesis on the theme of suicide in the works of William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf). After a short stint at Texas Southern University, where she taught English, she started teaching at Howard, where she met and married another member of the faculty, the architect Harold Morrison, with whom she had two sons, Harold Ford and Slade Kevin.

The marriage was not a happy one, and she sought solace in a writers group, for which she wrote a short story about a young black girl who yearned for blue eyes. In 1964 she divorced, left Howard, and became an editor for Random House, working from Syracuse. In 1967 she transferred to Random House’s New York City office, where she became a senior editor known for discovering young black women writers including Toni Cade Bambara and Gayl Jones. Three years later The Bluest Eye, based on her short story, was published.

In 1973 Knopf published Sula, the first of her books to deal with one of her most enduring themes—friendships among black women—and the first edited by Gottlieb. “I said to her, ‘Sula is perfect. It’s like a sonnet. But you don’t have to do that again,’” he recalls. “She knew exactly what I meant, and of course she was thinking the same way. It wasn’t that what I said was a magic elixir or anything, but my saying it helped free her to do what she knew she had to do, which was expand and take chances. And the result, in the short term, was Song of Solomon.”

That book—the story of Milkman Dead (so named because of his unusually long period of breast-feeding), who goes in quest of an inheritance of gold—was Morrison’s breakthrough. Widely hailed as the best novel about African Americans since Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, Song of Solomon won the National Book Critics Circle Award with its lyrical prose, folkloric source material, and the flashes of magic realism—influenced by the work of Gabriel García Márquez—that would become one of her signatures.

“Gabriel García opened the world for me,” Morrison recalls. “When I read One Hundred Years of Solitude, it was a wide-open door. I could put reality and mythology together in a way that was so assumptive and real. I was sneaking up on it in Sula”—in which the title character’s arrival in town is heralded by a plague of robins—“but it was like some road was beckoning, and I wouldn’t take it. It was a risk. Then, after Márquez, it was open to me, and I was totally in control of it.”

Years later, in Mexico, Márquez recited the plot of Song of Solomon back to her, “like I hadn’t heard it before,” Morrison recalls with a smile. “He said, ‘This happened, this happened, and then this happened.’ It was in Spanish, so it had to be translated, and it took about twelve minutes. But it was amazing, because he understood the structure, how everything related to everything else.” (Another person who liked to recite passages of the book to her, in a series of late-night phone conversations, was Marlon Brando. “I’m like, ‘Who does he think he is—I don’t have this kind of time!’ But he would say, ‘Remember this part?’ And [he had] that voice, so I couldn’t hang up.”)

In the early eighties Knopf published Morrison’s fourth novel, Tar Baby, and she left her job at Random House. She resumed her academic career, teaching first at the State University of New York, Albany, then at Princeton. In 1993, a year before her mother died—her father had passed away back in 1975—she became the first black woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. “She had a class scheduled that afternoon,” recalls her Princeton colleague, poet Paul Muldoon. “The world’s press had beaten a six-lane highway to her door, but she absolutely refused to meet with them till she’d finished that class. I think that says a lot about her.”

Morrison, who reads her reviews, approaches the publication of A Mercy with a mixture of confidence and a certain resignation. Although Beloved was widely acclaimed—and in 2006 was named “the single best work of American fiction published in the last twenty-five years” by 125 leading writers, critics, and scholars polled by the New York Times—it also has its detractors.

“They didn’t ask me,” Charles Johnson, author of the National Book Award–winning novel Middle Passage (Atheneum, 1990), says of the Times poll. “I think Ms. Morrison is somebody who can write a very elegant, poetic prose line. But I’m a writer who values such things as plot, structure, and character development, which I didn’t quite feel were present in Beloved.”

Johnson was also among those troubled by the literary brouhaha surrounding Beloved in 1988, when forty-eight black writers, including Maya Angelou, Alice Walker, John Edgar Wideman, and Ernest J. Gaines, signed an open letter in the Times noting that Morrison “has yet to receive the keystone honors of the National Book Award or the Pulitzer Prize.”

“Lo and behold,” Johnson says ruefully, “she gets the Pulitzer.”

Poet Nikky Finney, one of the signers of the Times letter, resents the implication of foul play. “Toni Morrison changed the landscape of American literature with The Bluest Eye, and has been changing it with every other book she’s published,” says Finney, an African American woman and writer-in-residence at Smith College. “There’s no one writing today about the history of this country like Morrison does, yet she too often gets relegated to questions about race. Her narratives arc the whole American experience, and yet they get slotted into questions about black people. That’s a really narrow view. She’s writing more honest narratives about the interplay of the human heart and the human mind than anybody else today.”

Still, Morrison’s relationship with critics seems to have shifted since Beloved. Especially post-Nobel, certain former champions—notably Michiko Kakutani—have soured on Morrison, whose recent novels they seem to regard as having become too explicitly political and, in some cases, too openly feminist. In the Times Kakutani dismissed Paradise (Knopf, 1999), about a community of women murdered by the men of an all-black settlement, as “a heavy-handed, schematic piece of writing,” then criticized Love (Knopf, 2003) as “didactic” and “haphazard.”

Morrison sucks her teeth. “It read like a book report to me—an eleventh-grade book report,” she says of Kakutani’s Paradise slam. “I would not have expected that of a Princeton freshman. The level of execution—not what she thought about it, ‘heavy-handed’ or whatever, but how it was written. I was surprised that she was so careless.”

Responding to the “political” rap, her gaze sharpens. “All of that art-for-art’s-sake stuff is BS,” she declares. “What are these people talking about? Are you really telling me that Shakespeare and Aeschylus weren’t writing about kings? All good art is political! There is none that isn’t. And the ones that try hard not to be political are political by saying, ‘We love the status quo.’ We’ve just dirtied the word ‘politics,’ made it sound like it’s unpatriotic or something.” Morrison laughs derisively. “That all started in the period of state art, when you had the communists and fascists running around doing this poster stuff, and the reaction was ‘No, no, no; there’s only aesthetics.’ My point is that it has to be both: beautiful and political at the same time. I’m not interested in art that is not in the world. And it’s not just the narrative, it’s not just the story; it’s the language and the structure and what’s going on behind it. Anybody can make up a story.”

Of course, her novels were implicitly political from the first. The Bluest Eye was a lyrical yet harrowing portrait of internalized racism and its result, black family dysfunction, while Sula posited black sisterhood as a key survival mechanism, even as the author herself was—and remains—somewhat at odds with the women’s movement. “It was for white women, as far as I was concerned, and I was annoyed at that time and much later because affirmative action has helped more white women than anybody,” she says. “They don’t have to apologize for getting into those medical schools. They don’t have to say, ‘We were not taking something away from white guys.’ If it’s labeled black, then all of a sudden there’s a problem. But no group of white women defended affirmative action, even though they were the largest beneficiaries of it. And then they started saying that sisterhood was powerful, as if it were this brand-new idea!”

Morrison laughs. “Sisterhood was so critical among black women because there wasn’t anybody else. And our dependency on one another—in my life, my mother’s life—it was a real thing. We saved one another’s lives for generations. When I was writing Sula, I was talking about a relationship that fell apart, because I wanted the reader to miss it.”

And if the later novels are more willing to frame their characters and situations within the larger context of Morrison’s deepening sense of American history—and at times to underline those meanings—her editor sees it as only natural. “The times have changed, and we’re older, and we know more, I hope,” Gottlieb says. “Like any intelligent person, Toni has evolved. At first, I’m sure, the issue was, ‘Can I write a novel?’ That was the main impulse, and The Bluest Eye proved that she could. But as you grow more sure of yourself, you become freer to look outside yourself, and her political consciousness developed. She became a great figure, too, which gives you both more freedom and more responsibility. That [Nobel] prize liberates people to say what they want to say more openly.”

Increasingly, Morrison has been doing just that. Her book of critical essays, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Harvard University Press, 1992), was a biting critique of white American writers’ handling of black characters and themes. The same year, she edited Race-ing Justice, En-gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality (Pantheon Books). Today, she’s a member of the editorial board of the Nation, a leading liberal journal, and a public endorser of Barack Obama who worries about the presidential election. “The one thing that Republicans really, really hate is voters—they really do not like people to vote,” she says, again sucking her teeth. “And anything they can do to stop that…or steal it, they will.”

Novelist Reynolds Price, one of Morrison’s oldest and closest friends, isn’t surprised by her flowering as a cultural commentator. “I think the Nobel Prize gave Toni a podium from which to make a number of comments upon politics, sociology, whatever,” says Price, who developed a bond with Morrison when they served together on panels for the National Endowment for the Arts in the 1970s. “But any such podium is likely to attract attention from the world, and there are a number of people who wish Toni would just shut up. That has aroused a certain amount of ire and rejection. As a person who’s gotten my own share of bad reviews, I know how she feels. As Truman Capote said, ‘Once I’ve published a book, all I want to hear is praise.’”

In any case, Morrison’s friends say, becoming famous hasn’t changed her. “When I first knew her, she was not the very iconic figure that she now is, but I’m always delighted to see that she’s survived the Nobel,” says Price, who cherishes the memory of a dinner at Russell Banks’s home in the late 1980s, during which he and Morrison surprised Banks and another guest, their Princeton colleague Joyce Carol Oates, with their madcap sense of humor. “At one point I was playing with Toni’s pigtails and she said she’d cut one off and send it to me—I don’t think Joyce quite understood us,” Price recalls with a laugh. “Since then, I’ve always felt that within five minutes of our winding up at the same table or in the same room, my friendship with Toni is essentially where we left it the last time. She’s certainly not high-hat, or anything else that she once deplored in others.”

Perhaps that’s because everyday life has its ways of reminding Morrison that being a Nobel laureate gets you only so far. “It doesn’t help you write better, and then you have to get the prize out of your head,” she says. “You have to wait till it’s gone—the gaze of the prize; otherwise you’re just doing somebody else’s business. And people do say nice things, but not really. I go to the airport and these two black girls are there at the security desk pushing the luggage through, and they say, ‘Oh! Toni Morrison! We love you, honey, we love you! My mother loves you! Your books, my God! Take off your shoes.’”

Which sends her now into uproarious laughter.

Morrison’s humor may come in handy again soon. As her relationship with the critical establishment has deteriorated in recent years, she also increasingly faces pressure from fellow writers and scholars who take issue with what they see as Morrison’s failure to engage fully with contemporary African American life. Prominent among these is Johnson, whose recent essay in the American Scholar, “The End of the Black American Narrative,” invites fiction writers to consider leaving slavery and its long aftermath—what Johnson calls the “group victimization” story—behind. African Americans are now so successful and so diverse, he argues, that the slavery era has lost its potency as a lens through which to view the black experience.

Johnson’s essay doesn’t take specific aim at Morrison. But in a phone interview from Seattle, where he is an English professor at the University of Washington, it’s clear that he sees her novelistic material as in need of refreshment—a thesis arguably supported by the choice of subject for her new novel.

“I think writers should be free to go wherever their imaginations take them, but I do think clearly that slavery-era stories and segregation-era stories are stories about the past,” says Johnson, an African American who admittedly has written a number of such stories himself. “If there’s something fresh there, I say chase it down to the last page. But we do need a new narrative about black Americans living in America today.”

As for A Mercy, which Johnson hasn’t read, “I don’t want to say she’s beating a dead horse,” he says. “But she probably feels more comfortable writing about that period, as opposed to maybe something more contemporary.”

Provided with a copy of Johnson’s essay, Morrison doesn’t disagree with some of its points. She’s impressed, she says, by the potential of Edwidge Danticat and writers from many parts of the African diaspora; she’s also interested in younger “post-black” writers who, she notes with a kind of wonder, are singularly uninterested in the past. But as Morrison points out, her fiction never concerned itself with black identity politics per se, and this was deliberate.

“I know I’m of the generation that’s supposed to be hanging on desperately to the good old days of dogs and hoses and how we all survived, but I was never interested in that,” she says with a laugh. “What’s true is that that generation relied on white guilt as a stepping-off point to gain respect or resources or what have you. But where blackness becomes a product, I’m out. You can sell it, withhold it, mock it, imitate it. It makes money. And that’s too bad. Because when you start selling it, oh please! That’s over, or should be over. For me, I’m writing about African Americans in the same way that James Joyce wrote about Irish people. They don’t look like race books to me. This is just what I’m interested in, and when I lose interest in it, I’ll write about something else. I don’t feel as though I have to put race in, or wave it like a flag. The young black writers certainly don’t feel that obligation, and I don’t see why they should.”

On the other hand, she says in a steely voice, “Slavery can never be exhausted as a narrative. Nor can the Holocaust; nor can the potato famine; nor can war. To say slavery is over is to be ridiculous. There is nothing in those catastrophic events of human life that is exhaustible at all.”

Finney agrees. “When I’m reading her, I’m always lifting my eyes above the text toward something going on in contemporary life, even if she’s writing about 1863. What’s happening with Barack Obama is a wonderful thing, and it will bring new narratives to the pens of black and white writers. But think of his wife, who’s being made to seem ‘uppity’ and unfeminine—where does that come from? Does it fall from the heavens? The fact is that we have not fully looked at what slavery did to black people and white people. And now we’re supposed to cut off our feet—our feet being the foundational moment when this country came to be—and walk on ahead? We’re still hurting, and the only way to stop is to look forward and backward. If we don’t, we will never get the answers we need. We will make up some answer that will fit the moment, and it will be a pebble in our shoe, for the rest of our lives and our children’s lives. From what Morrison is laying down, we can learn something about who we are and how we got here.”

The Johnson/Morrison dialogue has already begun to pick up steam within academic circles. Marc C. Conner, who has edited books about Johnson and Morrison and is involved with scholarly societies devoted to their bodies of work, says the clash of these literary titans has been a hot topic at a number of recent literature conferences—so much so that it threatens to generate more heat than light. At a conference in May, he says, a Morrison supporter rose to her feet and declared, “You can’t compare these two; she’s better than he is.” Replied Conner: “That’s not cultural analysis. That’s keeping score.”

“It’s a good thing not to let this devolve into something simplified, because Johnson’s essay is extraordinarily important, especially in the year of Obama, and it does seem to go against Morrison’s fictional material,” Conner, who is white, says in an interview from Washington and Lee University, where he is an English professor and director of the African-American Studies program. “I think Johnson is exactly right that the simplest form of the narrative of victimization is no longer accurate for contemporary African American culture. And it’s a little troubling that her work is always looking backward, rather than at the present. That being said, I think she deserves the Nobel Prize and the Pulitzer Prize, and I agree that Beloved is one of the greatest novels of the century.”

How much attention Morrison pays to all this is unclear. She’s an extraordinarily busy woman, with a book tour on the way and a multitude of interview requests to satisfy (or not). Now a professor emerita at Princeton, she plans to teach one more semester next spring in the interdisciplinary “atelier” concept she developed there in the nineties, in which students work with professional artists in various media—who over the years have included novelist A. S. Byatt, theater and opera director Peter Sellars, cellist Yo-Yo Ma, and composer Richard Danielpour (with whom Morrison later collaborated on Margaret Garner, an opera based on the same source material as Beloved).

At first, when Morrison was considering retirement at age sixty-five, the atelier was her response to burnout. “In the creative writing department, I was not challenged, I think,” she says, choosing her words carefully. “Once in a while I had a really good student, but you never know whom you’re going to get; they just pass the students out randomly to avoid clubbishness. And so I was bored. It was okay to be half-engaged, and I don’t like to work that way; it’s just not worth my time to sort of come in and write things in the margin. So I thought, if I was going to stay here, what would make me interested? Creative writing wasn’t getting it—there was no juice in it for me.”

Another factor in Morrison’s thinking at the time was that she has always been skeptical of the value of creative writing programs in general. “I thought they were a good way for writers to say what they know to people who were interested, and to get paid, and to have some protection and some dignity that was separate from the publishing industry,” she says. “For students, I thought it wasn’t going to help at all. I thought it was going to make them think that that could be taught. And it can’t. My feeling was, you can take something and make it a little bit better by editing it—or you can throw it in the trash, or whatever—but you cannot teach vision. Talent you can hone, but the essential thing, the compulsion to create—where you know that if you don’t do it, something dies in you—that’s there or it’s not. And I thought that part was going to be watered down in the sort of creative writing industry.”

In recent years, however, Morrison has changed her mind—“not altogether, but partly, because I see interesting writers coming out of those programs,” she says. Even so, she adds, “Sometimes they’re a little too academic, and I hear in their prose a question to some critic somewhere: ‘Is this okay?’”

For Morrison, the solution was the atelier, which at first was regarded by some at the university as of questionable value—“just some junk that kids do at camp,” she says. There were also questions about the usefulness of the collaborations to creative writing students, which Morrison found maddening. “I don’t think writers write in isolation,” she says. “All this business about going home to your little desk—it’s nonsense. I don’t know any writer in history who did not know painters, listen to music. I think the myth of the isolated, starving, horrified, lonely guy or girl—a room of one’s own—I mean, please. You’re surrounded by people who are thoughtful, who are doing other things that you can learn from. There are historians in your group. There are musicians. And they add to what you know.”

For Conner, who was a graduate student at Princeton, the atelier was more evidence of Morrison’s innovation. “So many writers ensconced in their comfortable Ivy League chair will just teach their semester and vanish,” he says. “Here she was, injecting new conceptions of the arts at Princeton, as she herself was entering her seventh decade.”

That’s the Morrison whom Price knows too. “Toni has worked unusually hard, and kept at it,” he says. “She’s gone through a lot, and one of the miracles of her life and career is how she’s sort of sucked her teeth and gone on—not only with her increasingly brilliant writing but with her life.”

For now, Morrison finds herself pleased with life and work. She has a special affection for Florens from A Mercy, who learns the hard way that even love is no substitute for independent thinking. “She turns into something fairly feral, a tough-minded person who’s willing to stand up for herself,” she says in a tone that suggests she could be speaking just as easily of someone else. “Too bad about the guy, but at least she’s meaner. And she might survive this.”

At this prospect, Toni Morrison smiles a dazzling smile.

 

Kevin Nance is a contributing editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.

Conservation Stories

The Pop-Up Literary Agency

by

Jessica Kashiwabara

July/August 2021
6.16.21
In Print and Online

Before teaching under-graduate courses in children’s and young adult literature in the English department at the University of Arizona, Stephanie Pearmain was a reader for the Andrea Brown Literary Agency. “I have an MFA in creative writing,” says Pearmain, “but my real, crash-course education in writing, editing, and the world of publishing came from the work I did as a reader for a literary agent.”

With this experience in mind, Pearmain helped develop a semester-long course at the university in 2016, English 389: Introduction to Publishing in the Children’s Literature Market. Her hope was to give students a better idea of the many facets of the publishing industry with a hands-on approach, preparing them with practical skills and tools so they could see how a degree in English might open doors for their future careers. Initially the course began with students running an online literary magazine, but in the fall of 2020, Pearmain launched an even more ambitious class project, a pop-up literary agency for children’s picture books called 389 Literary. “With 389 Literary, I set out to create a win-win-win situation,” she says. “Students would get to work with real manuscripts and professionals in the field; writers would get feedback on query letters and picture book manuscripts, plus the possibility of an above-the-slush-pile read from top agents and editors—and agents and editors might even get a new client.”

Pearmain figured if she could get at least one agent to agree to the project, it would be a success. To her delight six literary agents—including reps from two top juvenile literary agencies, Jennifer March Soloway of Andrea Brown Literary Agency and Miranda Paul of Erin Murphy Literary Agency—and one editor, Cheryl Klein, editorial director of Lee & Low Books, agreed to participate.

In the fall of 2020, 389 Literary was open for submissions, welcoming authors with children’s picture-book manuscripts. By the end of the month, the pop-up agency received around three hundred manuscripts from around the world. True to their word, 389 Literary offered feedback to each of the authors, an enormous feat accomplished by the hardworking students of the course, led by honor students Hannah Miller and Wendy Waltrip, who assisted Pearmain in setting up the website and social media accounts for the agency, among other tasks. “I didn’t realize how exhausting it could be to read through so many manuscripts,” says Waltrip. “I definitely have a huge amount of respect for literary agents now.” 

Because of the enthusiastic response to the project, reviewing manuscripts took longer than expected, so Pearmain decided to extend the course with a seven-week spring session. To prepare for the process of evaluating the manuscripts, Pearmain set up what she calls Collaboration Modules, which offered lessons on dealing with group dynamics and differing opinions, useful not only for the purposes of the project, but perhaps also for future workplaces. “My goal is always to open up the world of publishing so students can see the many hands and departments that participate in getting a book into the world,” she says. Pearmain also teaches students about the Diversity Baseline Survey (DBS) created in 2015 by Lee & Low Books, an independent publisher focused on multicultural children’s books. The goal of the DBS is to report concrete statistics about the diversity of the publishing workforce, focusing on gender, race, sexual orientation, and ability, in order to track progress. Pearmain hopes to impress on the students that although there is much work to be done in terms of increasing diversity in the industry, her students can be a part of that change. 

For their mock acquisition meetings, students presented over Zoom and pitched the manuscripts they thought met the mark, having considered whether the work matched the manuscript wish list of a participating agent or editor, sounded fresh, had a good plot and narrative arc, and would be considered an “Own Voices” book, a term denoting a work by an author from a marginalized or underrepresented group writing about their own perspective. Recognizing that decision-making is subjective was also part of the process, as agents passed on some of the favorite manuscripts of the class and made offers for representation to authors whose manuscripts didn’t connect with the students. “The submission process definitely taught me that every person who reads a manuscript will have a different experience with it,” says Waltrip. 

Overall the project was well received by everyone involved, especially the students. “This experience has given me so much professional confidence,” says Miller. “I’ve had the opportunity to network with industry professionals, strengthen my feedback skills, and read a ton of amazing stories.”

For Pearmain the best outcome of 389 Literary has been the growth of her students. “I hope to demystify the world of publishing a little,” she says. “I want to give students tools that will serve them as writers, future publishing professionals, and future business professionals.” As for her classes, Pearmain has some plans, including getting even younger students involved. “My bigger goal is to find ways to reach more BIPOC students and create paths to publishing,” she says. “I would love to partner with an agency or publishing house to help make that happen. Honestly I believe that will take outreach aimed at high school students. Maybe that will be my next project.”  

 

Jessica Kashiwabara is the digital director of Poets & Writers, Inc.

Students at the University of Arizona attending the Introduction to Publishing in the Childrens Literature Market class via Zoom.

Publishing, Empowering Teen Writers

by

Tara Jayakar

July/August 2017
6.14.17
In Print and Online

For Chicago teenagers with a passion for writing, there is no shortage of resources. Young Chicago Authors; 826CHI, a branch of the youth writing organization started by writer Dave Eggers; StoryStudio Chicago; and Writopia Lab, among other programs, have been offering writing workshops, open mics, summer camps, and poetry slams for kids throughout the city for decades. But a new organization has a more specific goal in mind for Chicago teens: to offer them hands-on experience in editing and publishing their peers. Launched last year by poet and educator Jennifer Steele, [Y]volve Publishing (YP) is an extension of Revolving Door Arts Foundation, which Steele founded in 2014 to empower and publish young and emerging writers and to get them actively involved in the publishing industry. Steele runs the organization almost exclusively on her own, with some help from a volunteer board that includes writers Fred Sasaki and Kenyatta Rogers. While Steele has other projects in the works for the organization, including workshops for young and new mothers, an anthology about postpartum depression, and a reading series, her primary focus is currently YP and its inaugural project, the Teen Chapbook Series, which features poetry chapbooks written and edited by teens. 

The chapbook series began last summer, when Steele asked four teenagers on the slam poetry team she coaches to each write five poems and then expand that work into a chapbook-length collection. The four young poets—Nyvia Taylor, Semira Truth Garrett, Kai Wright, and Jalen Kobayashi—worked with one another, along with Steele, to edit their poems. “Each book has been a personal journey for these writers, as they explore personal ideas and also think about how to expand the craft of their writing,” says Steele. “Semira, for instance, was really interested in learning how to write short poems. Jalen has learned about truth versus fact when writing a poem. And Nyvia has been writing brave poems that are confronting difficult, personal subjects.” 

The chapbooks, each featuring artwork the poets chose themselves, were published in May. Steele also invited four established poets, including CM Burroughs and Jacob Saenz, to write introductions to the chapbooks. For the young poets, seeing their words in print has had a powerful impact. “When you have a hard copy of something, it’s forever,” says Kobayashi in a video on the press’s website. “As poets, we share our work on social media, but that can only get you so far. Once you actually have that physical copy of all your words on the page, nobody can take that from you.” Wright agrees: “I’m just a little Chicago kid from the West Side, but to be able to put my work out there in a permanent way—these are just my words that are here and nobody can take my story, or my truth, or my life away from me as a result of that.” 

The Teen Chapbook Series will be published annually, and next year’s series will be expanded to include fiction and nonfiction. (Submissions will open this month, and the chapbooks will be released in Spring 2018.) Steele is also in the process of developing a teen editorial board, which will oversee the production of each book in the series from start to finish. “We’re hoping to have a full-fledged publishing program that includes graphic design, marketing, and promotion teams by 2018,” Steele says. Students will create a call for submissions, read and select manuscripts, and then be paired with a more established editor or writer to edit the selected manuscripts. They will also work on every stage of production, from layout and design to promotion. Steele plans for the press to release three to five chapbooks through the series each year and to put out other books as well. This summer she is working with a group of teens to curate, edit, design, and publish a book of poetry and fashion photography centering around the Gwendolyn Brooks centennial, which is being celebrated this year in Chicago. The anthology will be published in October. 

By teaching teens how to publish books, Steele believes she will help equip them with both entrepreneurial and collaborative experience that will be applicable within and beyond the creative industry. By taking on the role of an editor, publisher, or marketing executive, Steele says, the young people involved with the YP will acquire marketable skills before they even graduate high school. She also hopes to reach more teens by bringing YP books into classrooms. Starting in the 2017–2018 school year, she plans to provide the chapbooks to teachers in Chicago schools and help them develop lesson plans based on each book’s content or theme. “We often hear from teachers that they wish they had more books written by teens to share with their students, so we’re hoping this could fill that need,” she says. “As far as I know, there aren’t many collections of poetry being taught in the classroom, let alone collections by teens.” 

Steele’s commitment to empowering teens is partially motivated by her own experiences as a young person. “I didn’t know I could be an editor,” she says. “I thought if I got my English degree, I was just going to be a high school English teacher. But if someone had told me that I could be editing a magazine, I probably would have made different choices. We’re trying to create these experiences for kids at this age so they can make more informed choices about what they’re interested in doing. That’s the underlying point of all of this: creating, through the literary arts, skills that can be transferable to any career path they’re interested in.”

Tara Jayakar is the founder and editor of Raptor Editing. She lives in New York City.

[Y]volve Publishing’s poets (from left) Semira Truth Garrett, Jalen Kobayashi, Kai Wright, and Nyvia Taylor.

(Credit: Kikomo.p Imagery)

Amanda Gorman Named National Youth Poet Laureate

by

Maggie Millner

4.27.17
Online Only

Last night in New York City, at a historic ceremony at Gracie Mansion, nineteen-year-old Amanda Gorman of Los Angeles was named the first national youth poet laureate. The unprecedented title, to be awarded annually, honors a teen poet who demonstrates not only extraordinary literary talent but also a proven record of community engagement and youth leadership.

For Gorman, poetry and civic outreach aren’t separate interests. The Harvard University freshman knows firsthand that creative writing can build confidence and a sense of community among young people whose voices are often underrepresented in mainstream dialogue. In 2016 she founded One Pen One Page, a nonprofit organization that provides an “online platform and creative writing programs for student storytellers to change the world.” She continues to serve as the organization’s executive director.

Gorman’s own writing often addresses the intersections of race, feminism, and adolescence, as well as the changing landscape of her native Los Angeles. For both her poetry and her advocacy, Gorman has been recognized by Forbes, the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards, the YoungArts Foundation, and the OZY Genius Awards. She has also performed on The Today Show, ABC Family, and Nickelodeon News, and helped introduce Hillary Clinton at the 2017 Global Leadership Awards.

“For me, being able to stand on a stage as a spoken word poet, as someone who overcame a speech impediment, as the descendent of slaves who would have been prosecuted for reading and writing, I think it really symbolizes how, by pursuing a passion and never giving up, you can go as far as your wildest dreams,” said Gorman at the ceremony on Wednesday evening. “This represents such a significant moment because never in my opinion have the arts been more important than now.”

Amanda Gorman, national youth poet laureate.
 

The event represented the culmination of years of work by arts organizations across the country. In 2009 literary arts nonprofit Urban Word NYC, in partnership with the New York City Campaign Finance Board and Mayor’s Office, began bestowing the annual title of New York City youth poet laureate on one visionary poet between the ages of fourteen and nineteen. Michael Cirelli, executive director of Urban Word NYC, says the program was founded on a belief that “young poets deserve to be in spaces of power, privilege, and governance, and to have their voices front and center of the sociopolitical dialogue happening in our city.”

Since the inception of New York’s youth poet laureate program, arts and literacy organizations in over thirty-five cities have followed suit, launching their own youth laureateship positions. As it spread nationally, the program garnered support from the Academy of American Poets, the Poetry Society of America, and PEN Center USA, among other major poetry organizations. Finally, in 2016, the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities partnered with Urban Word to bring the program to the national level.

Last July a jury of prominent poets, including U.S. poet laureate Juan Felipe Herrera, Brooklyn poet laureate Tina Chang, and Academy of American Poets executive director Jen Benka, narrowed the pool of local laureates down to five national finalists. Poets were evaluated on the caliber and subject matter of their poems, as well as their commitment to serving their communities through volunteer and advocacy work, and each finalist was selected to represent a geographic region of the country (Northeast, Southeast, South, Midwest, and West). Along with Gorman, Hajjar Baban of Detroit, Nkosi Nkululeko of New York City, Lagnajita Mukhopadhyay of Nashville, and Andrew White of Houston were named the first annual regional laureates and finalists for the inaugural national youth poet laureateship.

Each finalist received a book deal with independent press Penmanship Books, which published Gorman’s first poetry collection, The One for Whom Food Is Not Enough, in 2015. Over the past year, the finalists have also had the opportunity to perform for large audiences at renowned venues, including the Poetry Foundation, the Kennedy Center, and the White House. As the national youth poet laureate, Gorman will continue to give readings and participate in events across the country throughout her yearlong term.

“The role of poetry, especially in marginalized communities, is to provide a voice to those who are traditionally silenced,” says Cirelli, “and the best way to effect social change is to provide platforms for youth to tell their stories. We hope to leverage our work to allow these diverse stories to be told in spaces that have historically omitted youth voices, and to energize and engage the issues that they are most passionate about.”

The ceremony at Gracie Mansion featured performances by three of the finalists, as well as a roster of current and former New York City youth poets laureate. The performers were introduced by a group of acclaimed poets, including American Book Prize winner Kimiko Hahn and four-time National Poetry Slam champion Patricia Smith. Nkululeko recited a poem about his hair, a metaphor through which he discussed his relationship with his mother and collective African American history. Baban, who was named runner-up for the national title, recited a sestina on language, family, and her Muslim name. Finally, Gorman delivered a poem about how her speech impediment led her to discover writing.

“I am so grateful to be part of this cohort of young creatives who are taking up their pens to have a voice for what is right and what is just,” Gorman said in her acceptance speech. “I don’t just want to write—I want to do right as well.”

 

Maggie Millner is Poets & Writers Magazine’s Diana and Simon Raab Editorial Fellow.  
 

Q&A: Yang Inspires Young Readers

by

Dana Isokawa

March/April 2017
2.15.17
In Print and Online

In 2008 the Library of Congress, the Children’s Book Council, and the nonprofit organization Every Child a Reader established the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature position to celebrate and promote books for children and young adult readers. The current ambassador, graphic novelist and recent MacArthur “Genius” Grant recipient Gene Luen Yang, started his term in January 2016. Yang has devoted much of his work to his Reading Without Walls Challenge, which encourages kids to read books with unfamiliar characters, topics, and formats. Yang is the perfect advocate for such an undertaking: His popular graphic novels American Born Chinese and Boxers & Saints have pushed against cultural stereotypes and blurred the lines between the comic-book and book-publishing industries. More than halfway through his two-year term, Yang spoke about his work as the ambassador.

What inspired you to come up with the Reading Without Walls Challenge?
We want kids to read outside their comfort zones, and we want them to do it in three ways. One: We want them to read about characters who don’t look like them or live like them. Two: We want them to read about topics they don’t know anything about. And three: We want them to read books in different formats. So if they normally read only graphic novels for fun, we want them to try a chapter book, and if they read only chapter books for fun, we want them to try a graphic novel.

What are you planning next?
Right now we’re trying to promote the Reading Without Walls program. We’ve put together a bunch of downloadable materials: recommended reading lists, posters, and certificates of completion. We’re hoping librarians, booksellers, and teachers will download, print, and use these materials to promote the initiative with their classes. And we’re trying to do a wider national push for the summer.

What else is involved in the national ambassador position?
It’s pretty flexible. I have a few speaking engagements—I was at the National Book Festival in Washington, D.C., in the fall, which was a ton of fun. I’m going to go again this year, and I’ve done a few school visits, some of them in person, some of them over Skype. We’ve tried some online stuff. I have a video podcast called the Reading Without Walls podcast—it’s just me having conversations about children’s books with people I really like. I had one that came out with Lois Lowry, who wrote The Giver; another one with Patrick Ness, who wrote A Monster Calls. I also do a monthly column at Book Riot about making comics, and we’re probably going to start another podcast this year.

Why do you think it’s important for kids to read books with characters who don’t look or live like them?
There are studies that show that fiction in particular builds empathy—that when you read about characters who don’t look or live like you, you begin to understand them a little bit better. You understand what makes you similar and how vast the differences are, and it helps you to be a little bit more compassionate toward people who are different from you. Right now it seems like—not just in America, but around the world—we need a little more empathy. And I include myself in that too. I worry about how technology affects us. Just recently with the presidential election, there was all of [this research] about how Facebook basically shows you stuff you like to read. And then even beyond that, you can literally read about yourself all day. You could just fill your whole day with pure narcissism because of digital media. And I think fiction is the exact opposite of that. Well-written fiction pulls you out of your own mind space and helps you see into the thoughts and lives of somebody else.

Can you think of a book where you were reading without walls as a kid?
As an Asian American kid growing up in America in the eighties, almost every book that I read was outside of my own walls, because they were about kids that were part of the majority culture. I do think that maybe gender-wise there were books that pushed me outside of my walls. Like almost every kid in the eighties, I loved Beverly Cleary and I loved the Ramona books. I think as a character Ramona really broke stereotypes and cultural norms about the way little girls should act, because she was creative and rambunctious and kind of loud. And there was a lot of overlap in the way she saw the world and the way I saw the world as a little kid. So I think that that pushed me out. And there were also books that mirrored my life. I started collecting comics in the fifth grade and got really obsessed with superheroes. I wonder if part of that obsession comes from the fact that these superheroes negotiated two different identities—Superman wasn’t just Superman, he was also Clark Kent. In some ways that mirrored my own reality since I had a Chinese name at home and an American name at school; I lived under two different sets of expectations. And Superman is actually an immigrant too—he deals with the cultures of both Krypton and America.

Have your experiences as a graphic novelist informed the challenge, especially the part about reading in different formats?
Yes, absolutely. I think in America, up until pretty recently, the comic-book market and the book market were really two separate entities. They had their own stores, distribution systems, norms, and readerships. It’s only in the last ten or fifteen years that they’ve started working together. I really think I’ve been a beneficiary of that merging, and it’s exciting to see. It’s exciting to see how publishers and authors who are prominent in one area are starting to embrace the work from the authors in the other area. More and more we’re seeing publishers who typically only publish prose books start to add graphic novels to their list. On the other side, we’re starting to see comic-book publishers recruit writers who are primarily known for their prose, like Ta-Nehisi Coates over at Marvel.

Do you think that’s because people’s opinions or the form itself is changing? Can you diagnose why that shift is happening?
I think there are three prominent comic cultures in the world. There’s the American one; there’s an Asian one that’s centered primarily around Japan, and there’s a European one centered around France and French-speaking Belgium. And in those other two cultures, comics have been prominent for a long time. If you go to Japan, there will be people of every age and gender reading graphic novels and manga on the subways. In France, it’s the same way: They televise the comic awards shows. In both of those cultures, it’s always been a big deal. It’s only in America that comics have been in this backwater. And that really goes back to the 1950s when the child psychologist Fredric Wertham wrote a book called Seduction of the Innocent, in which he argued that comic books cause juvenile delinquency. The United States Congress took it very seriously and had a series of congressional hearings where they called comic-book authors, publishers, and artists to Washington, D.C., to testify to see if comics actually caused juvenile delinquency. These hearings lasted for a few weeks, but didn’t end conclusively—there was no congressional decision that came out of it. But they damaged the reputation of comics in the eyes of the American public, and that lasted for decades. That didn’t happen in Japan or France. I feel what happened in Japan and France was a much more natural development of the medium, whereas in America it was stunted. It wasn’t until the last couple of decades that people have forgotten about what happened in the fifties. People have finally started to realize that comics don’t cause juvenile delinquency.

What draws you to working with and writing for young people?
I think it’s kind of my natural storytelling voice. When I first started writing comics, I was a self-publisher. I was working at a tiny scale. I would Xerox comics and I’d try to sell them at shows. I’d sell probably a dozen or two—tiny scale. And when you’re working at that level, you don’t think about demographics. I wasn’t actually categorized as a young-adult author until I signed with First Second, my primary publisher. They come out of the book world, not the comic-book world. In the book world age demographics are huge; that’s how booksellers decide where to shelve their books and how to sell them. So I was categorized there. It’s not something I had in my head when I first started, but I think it sits well—probably because I was a high-school teacher for a long time. I taught high-school computer science for seventeen years, so I was just surrounded by teenage voices, and a lot of that just bleeds into you. When you spend so much time in the hallways of a school, the voices of those hallways just kind of get into you.

Dana Isokawa is the associate editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.

Academy Establishes Web Resource for Teen Poets

6.18.09
Online Only

Yesterday, the Academy of American Poets launched a new online poetry resource targeted at teenage readers and writers of poetry. The initiative was conceived after the organization conducted a survey of visitors to its Web site and found that 75 percent of users developed an interest in poetry before the age of eighteen.

The new home page features writing resources and a collection of poems for teens, as well as links to the organization’s discussion forum and a comprehensive index of Web sites and reference materials for poets. A “Leave Your Mark” feature prompts teen users to share indispensable lines of poetry, upcoming events, and to create virtual poetry notebooks of their own design featuring poems, writer profiles, and interviews culled from the Academy’s site.

Young writers are also prompted to sign up for the “Street Team” newsletter, which will notify them of poetry projects and contests in which they could participate. Planned programs include the Free Verse Photo Project, in which a line of poetry is written using a temporary medium and photographed before it disappears, the National Poetry Writing Month challenge and pledge drive, and Poem In Your Pocket Day.

The home page initiative was funded by close to five hundred Academy members, the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, which supports advancement of artistic inquiry and scholarship, and the graduating class of 2008 from Holmdel High School in New Jersey.

Inside Publishing: The Literary Agent Assistant

by

Michael Bourne

January/February 2020
12.11.19
In Print and Online

Say you’ve written a young adult novel and you think Emily van Beek is the right literary agent to represent your work. You’ve read her bio on the website for her agency, Folio Literary Management in New York City, and studied her recent book deals on Publishers Marketplace. You have assiduously followed her guidelines for unsolicited submissions, but what you may not realize as you press Send on your query letter is that van Beek will likely never see it unless her assistant, Elissa Alves, thinks the book is right for her boss.

Such is the quiet power of literary agent assistants, not just at Folio, but at most literary agencies, where these unheralded individuals handle the unglamorous but essential tasks of answering office telephones, tracking royalty payments, proofreading contracts—and, in many cases, vetting their boss’s unsolicited submissions.

For assistants like Alves, who is a recent graduate of Drew University in New Jersey, this last task can require a form of readerly ventriloquism as she sets aside her own literary sensibilities to find submissions that will fit well on van Beek’s list. 

“I really have to distance my own taste from it because of course we don’t have the exact same taste, and I have to pretend as if I’m reading it with Emily’s taste,” Alves says. “So I know she loves a great sense of voice. I know she loves a sense of humor. She’s particularly looking for humorous middle-grade books right now, so that’s what I’m looking for, or anything that has a really great hook, perfect for a series for middle grade.”

While there is no one profile for literary agent assistants, most are in their twenties (Alves is twenty-six) and working in one of their first full-time jobs after college. Some attend a summer training program such as the Columbia Publishing Course at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, while others come to the job through a series of unpaid internships. On average, according to the job search site Glassdoor, they earn about $34,000 a year, which is very much an entry-level wage in New York City, one of the most expensive cities on the planet. And most assistants aspire to become literary agents themselves one day, which is one important reason writers ignore the assistant at their peril.

“We are—I wouldn’t say the backbone of the agency, but we’re definitely some important bone, maybe like a femur,” says Renée Jarvis, an assistant at the MacKenzie Wolf agency in New York City. “We’re super important, and we deal with a lot.”

What precisely an assistant has to deal with varies from agency to agency and from assistant to assistant, though in nearly all cases the job is principally administrative. At Folio, Alves splits her day in two, working from home in the mornings as an assistant to van Beek, then commuting to Folio’s Manhattan offices in the afternoon to assist the agency’s contracts director and office manager. At the start of her workday, Alves logs on to Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter to update the social media feeds for Folio Jr., the children’s and young adult literature division of the agency. Once that’s finished, she opens her boss’s submission inbox to read the ten to twenty queries van Beek receives on a typical day.

With forty-two active clients, van Beek has a relatively full client list, Alves says, so of the roughly four hundred queries van Beek receives a month, she typically requests full manuscripts from only two or three writers, and even fewer will receive offers of representation. In fact, in the year Alves has been an assistant at Folio, she says she has seen van Beek take on six new clients, but none have come through unsolicited submissions.

Jarvis, on the other hand, who started at MacKenzie Wolf in early 2018, only recently began reading queries for one of the agency’s two partners, Gillian MacKenzie. At present Jarvis estimates that her job is about 85 percent administrative, with the remaining fraction devoted to assisting agents in making submissions to book editors.

Still, Jarvis sees her many back-office tasks as invaluable hands-on training for becoming an agent. It is essential, she says, for her to have a full grasp of the nitty-gritty details of the publishing business so that once she’s actively seeking clients of her own, she can rely on more than a simple gut reaction to a piece of writing when she’s deciding whether to take on a project.

“As I begin working with the queries and submissions, I will have more to report on,” she says. “It won’t just be about the content. I’ll have more to back up or to critique based on what I know about how the auction and the submissions and the pitches may have to go.”

This on-the-job training is in many ways the raison d’être of the agent assistant position. Literary agents work exclusively on commission, typically netting 15 percent of an author’s domestic book earnings, but a busy agent must perform a host of administrative tasks ranging from picking up the phone to routing royalty payments that are key to keeping clients happy but take time and energy away from the income-generating work of honing client manuscripts and pitching them to editors. Assistants take on much of this more mundane work in exchange for a paid apprenticeship in the agenting world. Ideally, over time, as assistants become acculturated to the business, their editorial responsibilities grow until they are ready to take on writers themselves.

Aemilia Phillips, who has been working as an assistant at the Stuart Krichevsky Literary Agency in New York City for three years, is far enough along in her career that she has begun co-agenting clients with the agents she assists, Mackenzie Brady Watson and David Patterson. Phillips, who helps screen queries for the agency, says there’s no formal process for deciding which new writers will work with Watson or Patterson and which will stay with Phillips. “It’s not really a competitive thing,” she says. “If I read something and say, ‘I love this. I would love to be involved in it,’ most of the time they’re going to give the go-ahead, and it will be a very collaborative process.”

With each of the five writers she is co-agenting, Phillips has worked with the writers to shape and refine their books, and Watson and Patterson have stepped in to help her connect with editors once the manuscripts are ready for submission. “They will be co-agents on the project,” she says, “and their expertise is essential in terms of submitting and having the personal relationships with the editors.”

The apprenticeship model, which is prevalent at publishing houses as well, is not without its problems, notes Patterson, Phillips’s boss at the Krichevsky agency. Assistants typically arrive with a prestigious college degree and months of unpaid internships only to spend years more answering phones and filing contracts at minimal pay. This is excellent training for an agenting career, but it can drive away applicants from less privileged backgrounds who may find it hard to stick it out for the years it can take to rise out of the assistant ranks and build a sustainable client list.

All of this contributes to the well-documented lack of diversity in the publishing industry, Patterson says. And while there are signs the industry is diversifying, especially in the assistant ranks, it remains to be seen how lasting those gains will be, given how long it can take for an assistant fresh out of college to earn enough to set down roots in New York City. “I do think there has been some progress, but the progress is far, far from complete,” Patterson says. “The question is not, Is the apprentice-level staff that’s been hired more inclusive than it used to be? The question is, Are those people still going to be working in book publishing in ten or twenty years?”

Patterson has seen firsthand how having a more racially diverse staff can influence the books he takes on. Patterson, whose mother is Puerto Rican, says he has been pleasantly surprised by how much Phillips, whose father is from Mexico, has helped him broaden his client list.

“I’ve wanted for quite some time to represent more Latinx writers,” he says, “and it’s been a slight challenge for me partly because I don’t think anyone sees my name online and thinks, ‘Oh, that’s someone who’s going to be eager to welcome me’ if they’re coming from that background. But it’s a real and sincere interest of mine, and because she and I share that and we read almost everything together, when Latino or Latina writers arrive, we can support each other.”

Jarvis, who is Antiguan American and from a working-class neighborhood in Staten Island, New York, says she herself has witnessed the industry’s blind spots on issues of race and class. Jarvis vividly recalls an episode when she was applying for one of her early internships and wrote a scathing reader’s report on a novel the agency represented, which she thought was deeply racist. The book was ultimately published unchanged, and Jarvis later found a review online that brought up all the points she had raised.

“That fortified my desire to become an agent because it was seen by so many eyes,” Jarvis says. “It was read by the agent, possibly the publishing board, by the editor over and over again, and not one of the things—and there were a lot of things—that I had pointed out, nobody noticed they were racist.”

Today, with two years of practical experience under her belt, Jarvis is excited about the prospect of diving into the slush pile looking for authors and stories that reflect the people and places she grew up around. “Being from New York City, I’ve always been surrounded by people from a vast variety of backgrounds and histories and walks of life, so those are the stories that I’m interested in,” she says. “Whether it’s down the line when I’m working as an agent or even as I’m reading queries and submissions and helping out at the agency, I might be able to vouch for these people and for their experiences where there may be a lack of understanding.”

Not all assistants are as sure as Jarvis that they’re cut out for agenting, however. Being a literary agent is mainly a sales job, ideal for extroverts who like to schmooze and aren’t afraid to cold-call an editor to pitch a book. In her year at Folio Literary, Elissa Alves says she has found herself drawn more to her administrative work than to the client-facing side of agenting. “You want your agent to be an advocate for you, someone who is fierce and willing to negotiate, and I’m a little shier than that,” she says. “I enjoy the spreadsheets. I enjoy looking at the royalty statements. Paperwork is something I’ve always loved doing, which is crazy, I know, but still I enjoy it.”

Assistants who are keen to make the shift into full-time agenting can be a resource for aspiring writers. Many agencies now list their assistants on their websites, and many junior agents who have recently left the assistant ranks will name-check the agents who mentored them. This can be valuable information because assistants and junior agents tend to share literary tastes with their mentors and lean on them for help in reaching out to editors. If a highly esteemed agent is too busy with current clients to take on many new writers, a former assistant may have more time to work with a new writer and be able to tap the more senior agent’s contacts at publishing houses.

“I don’t think many literary agents’ assistants get into this business unless they’re looking to build a career,” says Phillips, “so writers shouldn’t be afraid to work with young literary agent assistants, even if they only have a client or two to their name, because we’re young and we want to make our way in the industry, and we have the time and space to work really hard and prioritize the writers we’re working with to create the best books.” 
 

Michael Bourne is a contributing editor of Poets & Writers Magazine. 

Literary agent assistants Elissa Alves, Renée Jarvis, and Aemilia Phillips.

Four Lunches and a Breakfast: What I Learned About the Book Business While Breaking Bread With Five Hungry Agents

by

Kevin Larimer

July/August 2019
6.12.19
In Print and Online

If you want to learn about the business of books, it helps to be hungry. Not only hungry to learn, as the expression goes, but also just plain hungry, literally—it helps to have an appetite. Or an expense account. Ideally both. Because no matter how much the world of publishing has changed over the past hundred years—and, boy, has it changed since the days of Blanche Knopf, Horace Liveright, and Bennett Cerf—some things remain the same. It is still a business of relationships; it still relies on the professional connections among authors and agents and editors and the mighty web of alliances that help bring a work of literature out of the mind of the writer and onto readers’ screens and shelves. And those relationships are often sparked, deepened, and sustained during that still-sacred rite: the publishing lunch.

In the two decades I’ve worked at this magazine, I’ve had the pleasure of eating lunch with a small crowd of publishing professionals—mostly book editors and publicists, the majority of whom want to tell me more about a new book they have coming out, or an exciting debut author I may not have heard about and who would be perfect for a little extra coverage. I’ve always considered it one of the perks of my job to receive such invitations, because without exception they have come from kind, passionate, smart people—in short, ideal lunch companions. But until recently relatively few have been agents. There was a lovely meal in Chicago with agents Jeff Kleinman and Renée Zuckerbrot. And last fall, quite out of the blue, the legendary agent Al Zuckerman, founder of Writers House and agent to Ken Follett, Michael Lewis, Olivia Goldsmith, Nora Roberts, and Stephen Hawking, invited me to lunch at the Belgian Beer Café, which is now closed but had clearly offered Zuckerman, whose office is a short stroll away, in Manhattan’s Flatiron District, years of sustenance. Those lunches notwithstanding, I have not had as many opportunities as I’d like to sit down with agents and talk about the important work they do. 

“According to the hallowed tradition of book publishing, it was necessary to have lunch with all these people, and many more, as often as possible,” wrote Michael Korda, the former editor in chief of Simon & Schuster, in his book Another Life: A Memoir of Other People (Random House, 1999), a treasury of anecdotes about the publishing industry in the mid-twentieth century. He goes on to paint a picture of publishing that has changed little, except perhaps the size of editors’ expense accounts:

For editors, in fact, having lunch is regarded as a positive, income-generating, aggressive act, and a certain suspicion is extended toward those few who can be found eating a sandwich at their desk more than once or twice a week. Publishers have been known to roam through the editorial department at lunchtime to catch editors who are ‘not doing their job’ in the act of unwrapping a tuna sandwich from the nearest deli. A large expense account is very often perceived as proof of ambition and hard work…. Nobody has ever done a poll to see whether the agents—the putative beneficiaries of this largesse—really want to be taken out to lunch every day of the workweek. It is simply one of the basic assumptions of book publishing that he or she who lunches with the most agents gets the most books. 

To be honest, most afternoons I can be found in my office, staring over a sad desk lunch and trying to clear a heavy plate of work, not food. Meanwhile I suspect New York publishing’s best and brightest are rushing off to lunch reservations at fancy restaurants all over Manhattan, laying the groundwork for book deals and discussing plans for book launches and, yes, gossiping about titles the average reader won’t discover for many months or, more likely, years. To writers this world can seem opaque, removed from the solitary task of writing. So I figured it was time to get out of the office. It was time to learn more about how agents find writers and turn them into authors, to collect some honest advice for those who are looking for, or working with, an agent. And what better place to do that than in the agent’s native habitat: loud Manhattan restaurants.

The plan was simple: In five days invite five agents to lunch. (What did Robert Burns write about the best-laid plans of mice and men?) I asked each of them to pick a restaurant, ideally one they frequented with book editors and/or clients, and in exchange for a few hours of their valuable time, I’d pick up the check. Not surprising, all five chose restaurants in Manhattan—still the undisputed center of commercial book publishing—but thankfully not all were located in Midtown, that area between 34th and 59th Streets, where the concrete canyons can start to feel stifling to even the most urbane of urbanites. 

I had previously met only two of the five agents I chose for this project. I was introduced to Anjali Singh of Pande Literary at a writers conference a couple years ago, and Emily Forland of Brandt & Hochman appeared in a cover feature, “The Game Changers,” in the July/August 2011 issue of this magazine. But for the most part, I didn’t know these agents, at least not well. I’d never met Julia Kardon of HSG Agency, Kent Wolf of the Friedrich Agency, or Marya Spence of Janklow & Nesbit Associates. I’d simply heard their names in casual conversation with editors and other agents, in the way one hears names when one talks about who is publishing what, when, and with whom.

All five of the agents represent authors whose recent publishing stories I suspected would illuminate certain aspects of the business—some positive, others maybe less so. I had no specific agenda for the conversations beyond eating some decent food and learning as much as I could about agents as people, their incentives for doing what they do, and how they see their role in the grand, flawed, beautiful experiment that is twenty-first-century book publishing. 

 

MONDAY 8:45 AM
Kirsh Bakery & Kitchen
551 Amsterdam Avenue, near West 87th Street

Two eggs, scrambled; potatoes; toast; side of lox
French toast with marscapone cream and mixed berry jam
Three caffe lattes

Best-laid plans indeed. The first interview I am able to set up takes place not over lunch, as I had planned, but rather over breakfast because Anjali Singh’s schedule proves more crowded than a Times Square subway platform, which I thankfully avoid on my way to Kirsh Bakery & Kitchen on the Upper West Side. A few days earlier Anjali returned from the Belize Writers’ Conference, where she spent a week meeting with about a dozen writers from all over the United States who had traveled to the tropical locale to talk with agents about their writing projects. She came home to a full house: She has two children, ages ten and seven; her husband is a professor of Chinese history at Lehman College in the Bronx. Tomorrow she’ll travel to Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania, where she is scheduled to give a Q&A and talk with students in the undergraduate writing program at Susquehanna University. Such is the busy schedule of a literary agent. So, yes, breakfast it is.

Anjali spends the first ten minutes of our time together recounting in remarkable detail the writers she met in Belize, all of them women—a retired fire chief from California; a police detective from Omaha; a speech pathologist from Reno, Nevada—and the way she speaks about these writers, with excitement and genuine interest in not only their writing, but also their personal and professional lives, provides a caffeine-fueled preview of what’s to come in our conversation. While most people would rhapsodize about the Caribbean shoreline or the daily yoga sessions that I will later learn were part of the conference schedule, Anjali’s takeaways are the lives of writers whose paths she feels fortunate to have crossed. “It was a beautiful beach and everything, but the best part was the writers I met,” she says. “It was amazing. It was so good for my soul.”

Anjali’s career in publishing started in 1996 when she took a job as a literary scout with Mary Anne Thompson Associates, having graduated from Brown University with a degree in English and American literature. I’ve always been curious about literary scouts, or book scouts as they are sometimes called, and wanted to know more about what these “spies of the literary world,” as Anjali jokingly calls them, actually do. “So you’re basically a consultant,” she offers helpfully. “You get paid a monthly retainer by your clients, and your clients are foreign publishers. But you only work for one per country because otherwise it would be a conflict of interest. When I first started, of course, there was no Publishers Marketplace or Deal of the Day or any of that. It was all on the ground. Mary Anne would talk to her editor friends…and then, officially, I would talk to agents. I covered certain agencies, and I would call them and find out what was going on and what books had sold to whom for how much. We would do a report every Friday, like a deal memo, and it would say, ‘XXXXX publisher, you should pay attention to this.’ So the idea is to help them get ahead of their competitors, or to be on par with their competitors, to get books early. It’s to be their eyes and ears in the New York publishing world.”

Anjali tells me that Mary Anne Thompson had exclusive contracts with foreign publishers such as Macmillan in the U.K., Droemer Knaur in Germany, and Kadokawa Shoten in Japan. Nowadays, with so much information available online, the scout’s job is to filter that information and tell the clients what to pay attention to and what to disregard, “because you can’t possibly pay attention to everything,” she says. 

In some ways it was the ideal first job in publishing, working for five years in a small office, learning about the business alongside colleagues who would also go on to successful agenting careers, including PJ Mark, now an agent at Janklow & Nesbit; Cecile Barendsma, who has her own agency in Brooklyn; and Susan Hobson, director of international rights at McCormick Literary. “What it allowed me was an incredible database of information about publishing,” Anjali says. 

But this information couldn’t have prepared her for the vagaries of the next dozen or so years, during which she moved from one house to the next—not uncommon for editors coming up in the business. First she was an editor at Vintage, the paperback imprint of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, and she very quickly made a name for herself by discovering Persepolis, the best-selling graphic memoir by Marjane Satrapi, on a shelf at a friend’s apartment in France, where the book was originally published. Anjali brought it to the United States, and it was published to great acclaim by Pantheon, another Knopf Doubleday imprint known for publishing graphic classics such as Art Spiegelman’s Maus and Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth. 

Anjali worked at Vintage for four years, buying paperback rights to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s debut novel, Purple Hibiscus, and working on her second, Half of a Yellow Sun, before leaving to go to Houghton Mifflin (later Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), hired as senior editor by vice president and publisher Janet Silver. Silver was later let go, about a year before Anjali herself was laid off, during the financial crisis of 2008, just after Anjali’s first child was born. Two years later, Jonathan Karp hired Anjali as senior editor at Simon & Schuster, but she remained there for only two years before she was laid off during a restructuring in which Free Press, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, was folded into the company’s flagship imprint.

Her next stop was Other Press, an independent publisher of literary fiction and nonfiction founded by Judith Gurewich and Michael Moskowitz, where Anjali was editorial director. Although her stay at Other Press was relatively short—only sixteen months—it was a refreshing change after her years in the corporate environments of Vintage, Houghton Mifflin, and Simon & Schuster. At Other Press, she says, “I just got to feel a sense of stability again, and a sense of self-worth, I guess. I got to be much more connected to what made me care about books and publishing.” 

Shortly thereafter her husband got tenure—and the time and financial stability, not to mention health insurance, that comes with it—so she made the switch to agenting. She’s been at Pande Literary for three and a half years. 

Which is where Arif Anwar and his debut novel, The Storm, enter the conversation. Before Anjali became an agent, Arif had queried Ayesha Pande, head of the eponymous agency, with the manuscript of a novel that told a half century of Bangladeshi history through the braided stories of characters who live through a storm similar to the 1970 Bhola cyclone, in which a half million people in East Pakistan and India’s West Bengal died overnight. Ayesha had offered representation, but Arif went with another agent who had offered her services first. 

Two years later, Anjali was now an agent and Arif was looking for a little more hands-on attention, so he asked again whether Ayesha was interested in representing him. Ayesha and Anjali both read his manuscript, compared notes, and decided that they would take him on, with Anjali assigned to do the editorial work necessary to prepare the novel for submission. 

“One of the things that I found really moving was that he depicts a fishing community in Bangladesh,” Anjali says about Arif, who was born in Chittagong, a port city on the southeastern coast of Bangladesh, and now lives in Toronto. “There have been other books, but not that much South Asian literature focuses on the underclass—those people who aren’t visible. He just immediately brought me into this world in a very visceral way. It’s really ambitious, and I admire that ambition. He’s also writing outside of his experiences, writing from the perspective of a British nurse in the 1940s, and a Japanese fighter pilot. I admire the scope of that vision.”

Anjali worked with Arif for roughly six months, cutting two whole narrative threads from the manuscript and weaving together the remaining five. Finally it was ready to be submitted to editors. Because Arif lives in Toronto, Anjali says, it made sense to have a separate Canadian publisher. After an auction involving three excited editors—notable, given the relatively small Canadian market—the book went to Iris Tupholme at HarperCollins Canada. 

Reactions to submissions in the United States were less encouraging. “We got a lot of passes, which was devastating,” Anjali says. “A lot of passes, including from someone who really liked the book but after talking about it with her publisher was like, ‘We can’t do this because we have another book with a Bangladeshi character.’ The author wasn’t Bangladeshi, but it was about a Bangladeshi woman.”

Anecdotes like this one, that throw into relief the cold reality of publishing as a subjective business that is not always all about the writing, have clearly made Anjali more determined than ever to use her role as an agent to fight for greater access on behalf of her authors. “A hunger to see more stories, to tell different stories in different places in the world,” she says about her own agenda. “A hunger for representation across class, which I think literary fiction doesn’t always do that well. All of that I’m bringing to the table.”

Eventually Rakesh Satyal of Atria Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, offered a deal in the United States, and Arif was off to the races. About four months ahead of publication—HarperCollins Canada scheduled it for March 2018, Atria set a May 2018 publication date—Anjali joined Arif on a conference call with the publicity team at Atria to brainstorm ideas for articles and essays Arif might write and try to place in newspapers, magazines, or websites to boost awareness of the book. Arif was also asked to supply Atria with names for a “big-mouth list” that might include organizations working with or interested in Bangladesh, as well as writers he admires. 

“Big mouths” is an industry term for anyone—writers, editors, bloggers, and people with a large following on social media—in a position to spread the word about a book. These people are often on a list that the publicity department uses for a targeted mailing of finished copies of a book, sometimes accompanied by a personal note from the author or editor. 

When I ask Anjali whether Arif was doing enough in the lead-up to publication, I don’t even have to finish my question. “Oh my God—the whole time Arif was like, ‘This is what I want to be doing. Tell me what I can do. I’ll do anything you want me to do.’” The book received starred reviews from Library Journal and Booklist as well as a rave from Publishers Weekly calling it an excellent debut: “This first novel will touch and astound readers.” 

Still, momentum can be difficult to sustain, and while the novel received some terrific blurbs from authors such as best-selling author Shilpi Somaya Gowda and novelist Rumaan Alam, and a positive review in the New York Times Book Review, albeit two months after the publication date, it just didn’t quite reach the heights that Anjali and, certainly, Arif were hoping for. Everyone, of course, is hoping for a best-seller. “Some really nice things happened, like the reviews, which made us hope it was poised for more, but for whatever reason…we just never got a sense of momentum,” Anjali writes to me after our breakfast. “I think it was both a success in the fact that we found editors who championed this book and published it beautifully; Arif is now an ‘author’ with some lovely reviews under his belt, one who has begun to make meaningful connections with readers at book clubs and the various festivals he was invited to; and he now has a paperback to sell the hell out of. I think as the agent, along with Ayesha, and as someone who loved this book and who thinks if more people knew it existed it would have a stronger readership, it’s hard not to feel some small sense of disappointment that the book wasn’t a best-seller, even though I do know how hard that is to achieve. Our hope is that Arif’s career will continue to grow, and as it does, more readers will discover and fall in love with this book.”

I ask Anjali if she has any advice for writers looking for an agent, and she doesn’t hesitate. “The best thing you can do is be really intentional about who you approach,” she says. “It’s doing all that work to write a really good query letter. It’s also doing all that work to think about what books your book sits alongside. And who you aspire to be as a writer.” This will be a recurring theme as I talk to the agents—this idea of intentionality, of doing the work of figuring out who you are as a person, as a writer, and how you want to direct that out into the world before you approach agents. “There’s a reason why you spent all of these years writing this book. If you can explain to me why you cared so much, it’s going to help me understand why I should care. And I think that is a kind of self-knowledge. I feel like by the time you write that query letter, you have to excavate that and articulate it.”

(Singh: Chuck Wooldridge)

TUESDAY 12:30 PM
Russ & Daughters Cafe
127 Orchard Street

Whitefish Croquettes: smoked whitefish, potato, tartar sauce
Pickled Herring Trio: canapés of pickled herring on pumpernickel
Lower Sunny Side: eggs, sunny-side up; Gaspé nova smoked salmon, potato latkes
Challah bread pudding: dried apricots, caramel sauce; Halvah ice cream: halvah, sesame, salted caramel
Cream soda: vanilla bean–infused demerara sugar; Concord grape soda: jasmine, timut pepper, lemon

Making my way up Delancey Street, a few blocks from the sublet apartment where I laid my head during my first month in New York City—fresh out of an MFA program, little money, no prospects—I’m having difficulty matching the glass-encased condominium complex and the fancy Regal multiplex with my memory of the boarded-up storefronts and dirty brick facades of the Lower East Side in the late 1990s. But I don’t have a lot of time for nostalgia because I’m on my way to Russ & Daughters Cafe to meet Emily Forland, and she gave me explicit instructions to not be late. My punctuality has long been a point of pride, but I understand her urgency; the restaurant, which opened in 2014, on the hundredth anniversary of the original Russ & Daughters appetizing store, located two blocks away, on Houston Street, doesn’t take reservations. And it’s always busy. But Emily has called in a favor. She is the agent not of Joel Russ of Russ & Daughters (he died in 1961), nor his daughters (the last of them, Anne Russ Federman, died last year at the age of ninety-seven), but rather his grandson Mark Russ Federman, who wrote a memoir, Russ & Daughters: Reflections and Recipes From the House That Herring Built (Schocken, 2013), and whose daughter and nephew opened the restaurant to which I am headed posthaste.

I find Emily waiting a bit nervously in the small crowd outside (I’m not late), and we duck inside and are quickly ushered to our booth.

Originally from San Antonio, Texas, Emily moved to New York City to attend the MFA program in poetry at Sarah Lawrence College. Through a family friend (one of her father’s friends was married to Judith Rossner, author of Looking for Mr. Goodbar), she lucked out on an invitation to have dinner with Rossner’s literary agent, the much-beloved Wendy Weil. Nothing momentous happened at the dinner, but a couple of weeks later, she ran into Wendy on the subway. “She was coming from her weekly tennis game, and she looked like Annie Hall, and instead of being timid and hiding behind my New Yorker, which might have been what I normally did, I just went over and said hi. And we rode together.” In other words, it was one of those incredibly fortuitous moments when your life is forever altered by happenstance and a simple decision—like screwing up your courage and saying hi to a famous literary agent who you happened to see in the crowd.

Emily was offered a summer internship at the Wendy Weil Agency—the same summer, coincidently, that Wendy was interviewed for a profile that appeared in the September/October 1997 issue of this magazine—and continued on at the agency as an assistant and, eventually, as a full agent, up until when Wendy died suddenly, in September 2012. Emily then moved to Brandt & Hochman and represents authors such as Jane Alison, Flynn Berry, Katharine Dion, Carrie Fountain, Kirk Lynn, Elizabeth McKenzie, and Dominic Smith. 

As the waiter brings us our whitefish croquettes, however, the author we are talking about is Nathan Hill, whose debut novel, The Nix, was the talk of the town—and, more important, bookstores—in 2016, when it was published by Knopf and landed on all the big year-end lists (the New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, the Washington Post, Slate). At last count the number of languages the novel has been published in was twenty-eight, but Emily tells me that this morning the agency’s foreign-rights director got a call from Beirut about an Arabic edition, so it might be twenty-nine by now.

The publication of The Nix is a lesson in perseverance and patience that pays off in a big way, the biggest way imaginable for most writers. It’s not just that the author took his time writing the book (ten years, from 2004 to 2014), and that he was patient through the publishing process (which took another two years), but also that he was patient in his professional relationship with Emily—after all, The Nix wasn’t even the first book of his that she had tried to sell. 

Nathan first queried Emily (it was a “very straightforward” letter, she recalls) when she was still at the Wendy Weil Agency, in December 2010. Nathan had read Susanna Daniel’s novel Stiltsville, which was set in Florida, where he lived at the time, and decided to send her agent, Emily, a collection of stories he had written partly while an MFA student at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst six years earlier. “I wrote to him after reading the first few pages of the first piece,” Emily says. “The writing was so strong, and I told him I had to keep reading, but I already knew.”

Ask any agent and you’ll likely hear the same thing: Stories are hard to sell. So it’s a testament to Nathan’s talent that Emily fell so deeply for his writing that she was willing to send the collection of stories (“very interconnected, about a couple inching toward each other,” she says) out on submission in 2011. “It came close, but it didn’t land,” Emily says about response to the collection. “There were people who really admired it but couldn’t get it through, or thought, ‘Ugh, stories.’ Also, stories come in waves of editors being receptive to them.”

Rather than let this derail him, Nathan told Emily about a novel he’d been working on for the past six years, about a mother and her son, partially set in 1968, and secrets about the mother’s past. Intrigued, Emily took him out to lunch the next time he was in New York. The two dined at the Morgan Library, across from the Wendy Weil Agency. (Fun fact: At the end of The Nix, there is a scene set in the dining room of the Morgan that was drawn from this visit.) For two years afterward, the two kept in touch.

It’s worth slowing down for this part and considering: two years. After getting encouragement from Emily, he didn’t rush through a draft of his novel; he wasn’t despondent after the rejection of his stories or panicking that his window of opportunity was closing. He took the time to write the best book he could write. In the meantime Emily had moved to Brandt & Hochman, but eventually Nathan wrote to her again: “Okay, remember my novel?” Emily recalls him writing. “It’s now also about cell-phone distraction and Occupy Wall Street and multiplayer online games and the housing crisis. Are you still in?” After Emily assured him she was, another update would arrive every six to eight months.

“Nathan was canny because he waited,” Emily says. “When he finally delivered The Nix, he waited quite a while for me to read it.” Why is this important? Because the manuscript he delivered, in the summer of 2014, was 275,000 words. (Some math: the typical double-spaced manuscript page contains 250 words, which means this draft was roughly 1,100 pages, or more than two packages of standard printer paper.)

About six months of revising and editing between agent and author followed. “Every draft he gave me, he had worked very hard to get to and had specific questions but was also very open to feedback…just open and creative in the way he addressed comments and revision,” Emily says. “I think he really enjoyed being in this book, so I don’t think he was hurrying.” 

Finally, after cutting 35,000 words and moving some sections around and pushing the manuscript as far as they could, Emily sent it out to editors, in advance of a blizzard, at the end of January 2015. She submitted it to twelve editors, and additional editors requested it after there was a “very noisy response from foreign publishers.” I ask Emily what this means. How could foreign publishers know about it? “I guess the scouts got it,” she says, meaning one of the editors she sent it to must have forwarded it to one of those “spies of the literary world,” as Anjali Singh had joked. This can be a good thing—it was a very good thing in this case; fire spreads—but it doesn’t always work out that way. “If you have a quiet literary novel that is going to find its way but might take a lot of submitting, it’s likely that it’s going to be old news by the time it’s gone out. You don’t want anything to be shopworn.” In other words the scouts can note a lack of enthusiasm, too.

But in this case the fire spread, and Emily was fielding requests to see the manuscript, including one from Tim O’Connell at Knopf, who was not one of the original editors to whom Emily submitted it but who nevertheless made a preemptive bid (or preempt, the purpose of which is to end a bidding war immediately by offering a significant advance). It worked. “Knopf was great,” Emily tells me. “They were really behind it, their offer was strong, and we got to keep foreign rights.” (Marianne Merola, the foreign-rights director at Brandt & Hochman quickly sold rights in fourteen countries, so that detail about the foreign rights turned out to be a very good business decision.)

Nathan and Tim did another round of edits, cutting an additional thirty thousand words or so. This work did not come as a surprise to Nathan; before accepting the offer from Knopf, he had spoken with Tim, who wanted to make sure he conveyed exactly what was expected of the process. Nathan was all in. “It was very much about making sure the novel was as compulsive as it could be,” Emily says about the final round of editing. Meanwhile the gears were starting to turn on the marketing and publicity side of the business as well. Early on, Nathan returned to New York and met with Emily and representatives from the publicity department at Knopf. Emily says she expected maybe four people at that meeting. The conference room was full.

The purpose of such a meeting is to brainstorm ideas and explore possible ways of getting the word out about the book in advance of publication, but it’s also an opportunity for the folks in publicity to meet the author and see for themselves what he’s like—his style, his personality, his communication skills—as arguably the most important spokesperson for the book. Despite not knowing the crowd of professionals in the room, he made an impression, especially with Knopf’s vice president and editorial director. “I just remember Robin Desser whispering in my ear as we were leaving, ‘He’s a rock star,’” Emily says.

Before it was published on August 30, 2016, The Nix landed a coveted spot on the Editors’ Buzz panel at BookExpo, held that year in Chicago. (BookExpo America, or BEA, is the country’s largest book trade fair, and it’s where editors, publishers, agents, and authors from around the world promote their forthcoming books to a captive audience of booksellers.) It was also reviewed in all the usual places, and Nathan was profiled in the New York Times four days before the book was published. A month later, Warner Bros. optioned the novel for a television series adaptation, with JJ Abrams set to direct. Meryl Streep was initially attached to the project but no longer; as of this writing it’s still being cast. 

Hope for the best; expect the worst. If Emily had a pregame speech—something she told her authors before she sends their work out on submission—that would be it. “In general I think that stance is helpful for going through the world and especially going through the world as a writer,” she says. And sometimes, as Nathan Hill’s story illustrates, you work hard then hope for the best, and that’s pretty close to what you get.

 

THURSDAY 12:30 PM
Gaonnuri
1250 Broadway, 39th floor, corner of West 32nd Street

Black Cod Gui: white kimchi, chive, doenjang, gochujang, served with white rice, banchan, and seaweed soup
Marinated Galbi: marinated prime beef short rib, served with white rice, banchan, and seaweed soup

Walking into Gaonnuri, the posh Korean restaurant on the thirty-ninth floor of a skyscraper just south of the Empire State Building, I’m reminded of the first time I had the very New York experience of riding an elevator to what I assumed would be a hallway leading to the apartment where a cocktail party was in full swing, but when the elevator doors opened, I was staring at the inside of the apartment, and all the guests turned their heads and stared. For an introvert this is the stuff of nightmares. But the panoramic view of the Manhattan skyline that greets me this afternoon when I step off the elevator is something else entirely, and as I’m shown to a table by the windows, I do not resist the urge to snap a photo with my phone. Fortunately, Julia Kardon, an agent at Hannigan Salky Getzler (HSG) Agency, hasn’t yet arrived to witness my touristy act.

When Julia does arrive she tells me why lunches with editors are so important for agents. “You just learn things about them that you can’t learn from their Publishers Marketplace write-up. You find out that Emily Graff at Simon & Schuster has a twin sister. So then you might think about how you would pitch a book about siblings to her. Molly Turpin [at Random House] is a beautiful artist, so in addition to the kind of history, nonfiction, that she focuses on, if you have a project that has to do with art history, you would definitely want to send that to her.”

Born and raised in New York City, Julia studied comparative literature as well as Slavic languages and literature at the University of Chicago, then moved to Prague to teach English for a year. Back in New York, after a brief internship at the Wylie Agency, she started her career at Sterling Lord Literistic, where she was an assistant to Philippa (Flip) Brophy, who showed Julia the ropes, including the art of the phone pitch. “She was on the phone constantly. Her handset smelled like her perfume,” Julia recalls. “I learned from her, and that made me want to pitch that way.” In addition to e-mailing a pitch letter to editors, she adds, “I, unlike some of my millennial peers, always call editors to pitch a project.”

Julia worked at Sterling Lord for just under three years before moving to Mary Evans, a boutique agency (a fancy term for a small, specialized agency), where she worked on foreign rights while building a list of clients for herself before moving to HSG. Among the first clients she signed was John Freeman Gill, whom Julia reached out to after reading an op-ed he had written in the New York Times titled “The Folly of Saving What You Kill,” about preserving the city’s old buildings. His bio stated that he was working on a novel about architectural salvage. Intrigued, she invited him to lunch. “He knew that I was young, but the way you position yourself when you’re young is that you’re very hungry but you’ve also worked on great things, like ‘I’m working with Michael Chabon to some degree. I worked on James McBride’s National Book Award–winning novel,’ things like that. Obviously I didn’t agent it, but I know what the publishing process looks like. I know how it’s done and how it should be done.” In other words, there was some salesmanship involved, but the two connected, and she ended up selling his novel, The Gargoyle Hunters, at auction to Knopf. 

I ask Julia how an auction works, specifically a round-robin-style auction like Gill’s, in which there were four bidders. “You send the auction rules to everyone, and basically you tell them what rights they’re bidding on. If you have a lot of attention, you’d want to make that North American rights only,” she says, and I remember Emily Forland’s smart decision to retain foreign rights for her big sale. Julia continues: “In the first round everyone makes their first bids, and then you call the lowest bidder and tell them what the highest bidder’s number was, and they have to become the new high bidder or they have to drop out. And then you call the next-lowest bidder and tell them what the new high bid is. And they have to beat that or they drop out. And it goes around like that. It can be pretty exasperating because sometimes the lowest bidder will improve the highest bid by $2,500 or $5,000. So you can go from $100,000 to $200,000 over the course of two days, and it’s like, ‘I’m going to lose my mind if I have to keep doing this.’” 

To avoid a prolonged auction, agents sometimes dictate a minimum increment by which a bid can be raised. “You can also at any point in the auction call for best bids,” she adds. “Theoretically that is just getting everyone’s best, final bid, and you don’t go back to negotiate.” But agents can and often do go back to negotiate certain aspects of the agreement, such as the payout of the advance—traditionally a third at signing, a third when the publisher accepts the final manuscript, and a third on publication, but that can be adjusted to quarters, with the final 25 percent due on paperback publication. The agent’s standard cut is 15 percent of the author’s gross domestic earnings, including the advance (and 20 percent for foreign rights deals).

Writers often think of agents sitting in well-appointed offices and waiting for a query or proposal to strike their fancy. But the path to a literary agent is not a one-way street. Agents are actively looking for potential clients too. This is how Julia found John Freeman Gill, and it’s also how she found Brit Bennett when she was in her final year of the MFA program at the University of Michigan. On December 17, 2014, Jezebel published an essay by Brit titled “I Don’t Know What to Do With Good White People” that went viral. “As soon as that essay published, I knew that it was going to be big,” Julia says. “I think it was already at several hundred thousand page views by the time I read it. And I looked in the white pages to see if I could find her phone number and—I don’t remember doing this, but—I apparently left a voice mail on her mother’s answering machine in California. Brit says she was in a class, and her mom called her cell phone…so she ran out of the class to make sure everything was okay. ‘An agent just left a voice mail for you; I think it’s really important!’ I don’t remember doing that, but it’s not unlike me…. I knew that I wouldn’t be the only agent to reach out to her. I think nine ultimately did. And I wanted to make an impression by getting in early and showing her that I was really passionate, because at that point I hadn’t even had one of my client’s books published yet. Brit’s book was my first book to publish. It was not the first book I sold, but it was my first one to publish. So I didn’t have a lot that I felt like I could trade off of other than the power of my conviction and the passion that I had for her.”

When the two of them eventually talked, Julia asked Brit if she was working on an essay collection. When she learned Brit was actually writing a novel, The Mothers, about a seventeen-year-old whose pregnancy leads to a decision that shapes her life and the lives of those around her forever, Julia asked for the first chapter. “I read that chapter and I was like, ‘Holy shit. This is amazing.’ I felt like that immediate electricity coming off the page, sizzling in my hands, and I’m like, ‘Okay, where’s the rest?’” Four weeks later, when Brit sent the full manuscript, as she had requested, Julia cleared her schedule and read it the same day it arrived. She was so blown away by it that she called Brit that evening to tell her she loved it and thought she could sell it. “She was so funny because Brit is very reserved and very cool and collected as a person,” Julia says. “She just was like, ‘Oh, thank you so much for reading so quickly. Can we schedule a call to talk about this tomorrow? Right now is not good for me.’”

Julia figured Brit was fielding offers from other agents. “I just had to assume that almost everybody who had two eyes and a beating heart and a brain would be able to recognize very fast that this was an incredible talent.” She scheduled a call with Brit for the following morning and, at the appointed hour, made the case for why she should be Brit’s agent. It didn’t go very well. “I just felt really unsatisfied with the conversation. I hadn’t asked her enough questions,” Julia admits. “And I remember talking to Mary Evans’s assistant about whether or not I should call her back, because [Brit] isn’t here in New York, so I can’t take her to lunch and show her how cool I am and find out more about her.” After much deliberation Julia did call her back that same morning, and the two ended up talking for two more hours. Even after that Julia wasn’t confident. “I do remember that it was this agonizing stretch of time. I felt completely convinced that she wouldn’t sign with me but that I had done everything I could. So I could at least take some small comfort in that I was going after the right people.”

But Brit did choose Julia, and when Julia sent The Mothers out to editors, right before the 2015 London Book Fair, Sarah McGrath, vice president and editor in chief of Riverhead Books, put in a significant preempt that was too good to pass up. The novel was published in October 2016, quickly became a New York Times best-seller, and was named a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Award, the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, and the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award.

Julia and Brit’s relationship is a great success story, but it’s also a good reminder of the effort that agents often put into finding their authors. It also shows that the balance of power is not always weighted so heavily in the agent’s favor. While it may seem like agents hold all the cards, it’s important to remember that agents hope writers will choose them, too.

(Kardon: Tony Gale)

Emily Forland

(Credit: Mark Abrams)

FRIDAY 1:30 PM
Maysville
17 West 26th Street

Avocado egg salad sandwich: mixed greens, crispy shallots
Cobb salad: romaine, grape tomatoes, avocado, hard-boiled eggs, blue cheese
Cajun spiced nuts: garlic, rosemary
Diet Coke, ginger ale

My first full-time job in New York, after months of freelance proofreading and temp jobs, was at W. H. Freeman, an imprint of Macmillan. On my first day, when I walked through Madison Square Park to the black skyscraper that held my modest cubicle thirty-seven stories above Madison Avenue, across from the iconic Flatiron Building, my heart did a little somersault. I had made it. It didn’t last long—I left that job after eight months or so—but it was still a great moment. I’m in a hurry as I walk through Madison Square Park this afternoon, but every time I’m in the neighborhood I can’t help but look up at that black building to find the window—not mine, I never had one—through which my former boss, Erika Goldman (now the publisher of Bellevue Literary Press), saw the city’s skyline. After a quick look I pick up the pace, fast-walking a couple of blocks west to the restaurant at which I’m meeting Kent Wolf, an agent at the Friedrich Agency. When he suggested Maysville for lunch, I had to look it up to see whether we needed a reservation. It took me thirty seconds to discover that we would be eating lunch two days before the Southern-inspired eatery and bar that boasts 150 different American whiskeys is scheduled to close, for good. Two questions: Does this mean the place will be empty or crowded, and does the drink menu suggest I’ll get a taste of those inebriating publishing lunches I’d read about?

The first question is answered the moment I step inside: It’s neither packed nor deserted, which is not a great sign for a Manhattan restaurant on a Friday afternoon, hence, I assume, the closing. The answer to my second question takes longer, but in the end: No, those days appear to be over. It’s a couple cans of cold soda for me and Kent, who is from Illinois—he attended Illinois Wesleyan University in Bloomington—and has a delightfully sly sense of humor. At one point in the conversation he directs my attention to a gentleman wearing an impressive mullet (business in the front, party in the back), a hairstyle we both recognize from our days in the Midwest.

Before moving to the Friedrich Agency, Kent was an agent at Lippincott Massie McQuilkin. He got his start in publishing on the editorial side, at the independent press Dalkey Archive, before working as a literary scout at McInerney International, then moving to Harcourt, for which he was the subsidiary rights manager until 2008, when he lost his job as a result of Harcourt’s merger with Houghton Mifflin. 

“This is a very relationship-based business,” Kent tells me after we get settled and I ask him if agents are a particularly competitive bunch. “Whether it’s me or somebody at ICM or somebody at, God forbid, the Wylie Agency, we’re all good at our jobs; we all have the same relationships, but sometimes authors look for different kinds of experience, and some prefer being at a boutique agency like the Friedrich Agency because we’re very hands-on, and you don’t have to go through layers of nameless assistants—you know, like binky urban assistant at icm dot com—to get to me, Lucy Carson, Heather Carr, or Molly Friedrich,” he says, referring to the sole members of the Friedrich Agency team. “But some authors prefer someone in accounts payable who processes their checks, or the allure of a foreign-rights team, or an agency that has their own book-to-film division, and those are things we can’t provide as an agency. But if you look at our track record, it speaks for itself.” 

This is true, and among the agency’s impressive roster of clients, one in particular jumps off the page: Carmen Maria Machado, who is represented by the guy sitting across from me.

Just as Julia Kardon reached out to Brit Bennett after reading an essay she had published online, Kent got in touch with Carmen in 2015 after reading a piece she’d written for the Rumpus. Throughout our conversation Kent drops a number of references to literary magazines—Ploughshares, Guernica—that he scours, looking for new talent. I ask him if he can list more of his favorite journals. “If I tell you, then other agents will start reading them,” he says, which makes me think my earlier question about competition among agents was on point. Saturdays and Sundays, he says, one can find him in the reading room of the Center for Fiction, just around the corner from where he lives in Brooklyn, reading stories and manuscripts. He found another of his clients, Ingrid Rojas Contreras, after reading a story of hers in Guernica. Her debut novel, Fruit of the Drunken Tree, was published by Doubleday in July 2018. 

Doubleday, of course, is a part of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, which is itself a part of Penguin Random House, the multinational conglomerate formed in 2013 from the merger of Random House, owned by German media conglomerate Bertelsmann, and Penguin Group, owned by British publishing company Pearson.

Carmen’s story collection, Her Body and Other Parties, did not find a home at Penguin Random House, or any of the other publishers comprising the Big Five that currently dominate the commercial publishing market. As a matter of fact, close to thirty publishers, including some small indies, declined before Kent found an editor and a press willing to take a risk on the debut story collection. “Graywolf was our last port of call,” Kent says. “It’s difficult to say what would have happened if Graywolf had turned down the book. Maybe another small press out there would have taken it. The independent presses are the ones that can take risks because they don’t have shareholders to answer to.… The big trade publishers are just notoriously risk-averse, and they’re getting increasingly so.” 

The initial response from publishers to Carmen’s debut reminds me of what happened with the first book by Nathan Hill that Emily Forland was unable to sell. “It’s cliché now, but you hear it all the time,” Kent says. “It’s this exact sentence: Stories are hard. And they say it in this soft, apologetic way—gentle. ‘Send us the novel when it’s ready.’ I was in a meeting with a scout, and I was talking about Carmen’s collection, pitching it for foreign sales. And the scout, that was the first thing she said: ‘Mmm, stories are hard.’ She was like twenty-two. What do you know? Your boss says that, so now you’re parroting it. I told her she was never allowed to say that to me again,” he says, grinning.

In the end, Ethan Nosowsky at Graywolf Press bought Carmen’s story collection, and it was published in October 2017. The book that was passed on by the New York publishing establishment went on to be named a finalist for the National Book Award, the Kirkus Prize, the Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, the Dylan Thomas Prize, and the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction. It won the Bard Fiction Prize, the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, the Brooklyn Public Library Literature Prize, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Award. Last year the New York Times listed Her Body and Other Parties as one of “15 remarkable books by women that are shaping the way we read and write fiction in the 21st century.”

“There was a lot of revisionist history going on in New York” once it was clear what all those editors had passed on, Kent says, then adds: “You can write that my eyes rolled so hard my irises disappeared.” 

When I ask him to elaborate, he gives me a kind of side-glance, grins, and says, “This is a risk-averse industry, unless they can see an audience for something. That’s why they’re always insisting on comps.” Comps, by the way, is short for “comparable titles,” which are standard ingredients in any query letter or proposal. Agents and editors want to know the titles of some recently published books that have proved successful (but not too successful) and that share some characteristics with what you’ve written. “A book doesn’t exist in a vacuum,” Kent says, repeating what a couple of the other agents said earlier in the week. “So if [editors] can point to this particular recent success, or something that recently won an award or was turned into a movie or whatnot, if they can see that there is an audience for something, then they can more comfortably get behind that.”

On the other hand, writers often hear publishers and editors talking about how they’re looking for the next new thing: something exciting, something they haven’t read before. There is an inherent contradiction at play here, and it triggers one of Kent’s biggest complaints about the industry. “Here is one thing I hate about this business: publishers massively overpaying for debut fiction. It’s the worst. Two or three million dollars for a debut novel and everything else on that publisher’s list gets eclipsed by that book; they put all of their efforts behind it,” he says. “They circle their wagons around one, two, three books a year, and everything else is getting lost. This is not a sustainable model. It’s bad for publishers, it’s bad for authors, it’s bad for readers.”

Carmen’s second book, a memoir, In the Dream House, will be released by Graywolf in November, and despite the early rejections of her debut, it is difficult to see how her career would have been launched any better at one of the bigger publishers. “With Graywolf, it’s a smaller list, and the attention they pay to each book is noticeable,” Kent says. “What’s nice for an author being published by a press like Graywolf is that they’re more part of the process. And I think authors are given more agency, or at least they are able to be part of decisions in a way that a [larger publisher] couldn’t offer because of the layers of bureaucracy.”

 

MONDAY 1:00 PM
Taylor Street Baristas
28 East 40th Street, between Madison and Park Avenues

Granny’s chopped salad: romaine, cucumber, avocado, tomato, feta, smoked salmon
Smoked tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwich
Nishi Sencha tea, filter coffee

I was warned that Taylor Street Baristas would be loud, and as I make my way through Grand Central Terminal and walk two blocks south on Park Avenue to the specialty coffee shop and café, I take Emily Forland’s advice to hope for the best and expect the worst. Unfortunately, my fears are realized when I walk in the door. I believe clamorous is the word. So many people talking so close to one another (the Midwesterner in me will never get used to tables positioned this close) that I worry I won’t be able to hear my lunch companion, Marya Spence, an agent at Janklow & Nesbit. As I wait for her at a corner table in the second-floor dining room, music is added to the din. I would be annoyed if not for the playlist (sweet sounds of the 1970s, “Running on Empty” by Jackson Browne, followed by Steely Dan’s “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number,” offer an appropriate soundtrack for this rainy day), and soon enough my ears adjust and Marya arrives. 

Having studied literature at Harvard, followed by an MFA in fiction at New York University, during which she had paid internships at the New Yorker and Vanity Fair—she also wrote reviews for Publishers Weekly and taught undergrads—Marya seemingly could have had her choice of careers in the editorial or academic arena. Toward the end of her time at NYU, she began to look into teaching, a profession that was familiar to her. (She grew up on college campuses; her father is a prize-winning professor and administrator who taught at schools across the country). But while Marya was applying for adjunct teaching jobs, the writer David Lipsky (Although of Course You End Up Being Yourself: A Road Trip With David Foster Wallace) suggested she look into agenting. “I really had no idea what agenting was at that time,” she says, but Lipsky knew someone at Janklow & Nesbit, an agent who specialized in young adult fiction and is no longer with the firm, so she sent her résumé, which floated down the hallway to another agent, PJ Mark, who brought her in for an interview. “I came in, wrote an editorial response on a manuscript, and we were off to the races,” Marya says. She started as PJ’s assistant while doing what many assistants do: try to build their own list of clients. “I was working on some projects of my own…doing that thing young people have to do in publishing, which is working double triple time. I was my boss’s assistant during work hours, and then I would stay late editing some manuscripts that I hadn’t formally signed yet. But that’s how you get your foot in the door.” 

One of the books that landed on her desk in those early days, in January 2015, to be precise, was Goodbye, Vitamin, a novel by Rachel Khong, then senior editor at Lucky Peach, the irreverent food magazine that would shutter two years later. The novel, about a thirty-year-old woman who returns home to Southern California for Christmas and ends up staying to care for her ailing parents, made an immediate impression.

“I read Goodbye, Vitamin overnight, and I cried on the subway and I cried at my neighborhood bar, where I would sit in the corner and they would pour me tea—it was very romantic, my life then,” Marya recalls. “And I walked into PJ’s office and said, ‘Look, I haven’t asked to sign anyone yet, particularly one that came to both of us, but [she pauses] this is my book. It has to be.’ And PJ was drowning, as I am now, and was like, ‘Please, you have more than my blessing.’”

So Marya sent Rachel an editorial letter—she calls them love letters—in which she put all of her thoughts and visions and desires for the book, comparing her work to Renata Adler (Speedboat) and Jenny Offill (Dept. of Speculation), and explaining some of the editorial work she thought the manuscript needed, including tightening the pacing in some places and building up some of the characters. “I will admit I’m a sucker for romance or a crush story, so I wanted that to be built out a little bit more too,” she says. 

Rachel happily agreed, and for the next ten months or so, the agent and author worked together on the manuscript. Meanwhile, Marya made her first sale: Jaroslav Kalfar’s Spaceman of Bohemia to Ben George at Little, Brown, in a six-figure preempt—not a bad way to start an agenting career. When Goodbye, Vitamin was ready for submission, it too received an “overwhelming response,” attracting more than a dozen interested editors. Before the auction, Marya scheduled what she describes as “a week of back-to-back, on-the-dot forty-five-minute phone calls” between Rachel, who lives in San Francisco, and her suitors. 

I ask Marya what exactly happens during these kinds of phone calls—or typically, if the author is in New York, in-person meetings—before an auction begins, and whether the conversations are primarily for the editor’s benefit or the author’s. “First and foremost it’s for the writer,” she says. “Editors’ responses to a manuscript can range from ‘I’m interested but with some qualifications,’ in which case a talk is really important for them to just speak directly and get a sense for each other’s styles and personalities, to ‘I’m just freaking out, I’m losing sleep over this book, and I just want to tell this person how much I’m dying to work with them,’ which is also good for a writer to hear.”

In Rachel’s case the responses were similarly varied, so it was important for her to get a sense of where each editor stood before the auction began. As a result of one of the phone calls, an excited editor made a preemptive offer. “With all of the interest, we didn’t take it,” Marya says. “It was a really nice preempt from an amazing editor and house, but I wanted Rachel to know where some of these other houses and editors were coming from.” Instead Sarah Bowlin, a senior editor at Henry Holt, won the auction and the rights to publish Goodbye, Vitamin. 

Fantastic news, but then what? I’ve always been curious about the moments, days, and weeks following such a momentous decision. Here’s a debut novelist whose life has just been changed by a series of e-mails and phone calls on the other side of the country. What’s the next step? 

“The next step is getting on an e-mail chain together, and there’s lots of exclamation points,” Marya says. “I think it’s really important to celebrate. This is a moment where everything has gone right. Cherish that.” This is solid advice. But an agent doesn’t just raise a glass, then hand over the keys and wish the writer well. There are a number of things that require her attention: The finer points of the contract need to be settled—the formats and markets in which the book will be published, subsidiary rights, payment schedule, due dates, options, and so on—and the publisher’s contracts department likely needs a little nudging. And then there’s getting everyone together—the author, the editor, the publicity and marketing team—so they can draw up a game plan for publication. 

Still, on some level there is a handoff that happens naturally after the author and editor have been introduced. “I like to be looped in on everything, but I also want writers to have direct relationships with their editors,” Marya says. “As much as I would love to be a part of every step of the editorial process, I just can’t be, so they need to get comfortable as soon as possible. I think of it sometimes like a relay race. Up until that point, for months or maybe years I’ve been working with my writer on a super-familiar basis; now the ball is more in the editor’s court, and they might step into that role of editorial and creative collaboration.”

But then sometimes, as was the case with Rachel, the unexpected happens: Sarah Bowlin left Holt. As a matter of fact, she left editing altogether: She moved to Los Angeles and is now an agent at Aevitas Creative Management. “So then the book was reassigned to Barbara Jones, who is wonderful,” Marya says. “I could think of no better editor to take up the mantle than her. She had said that she was the first person to raise her hand to take it on because she read it and cried during submission.” 

Marya calls the departure of an editor mid-process “very disruptive,” but in this case it didn’t spell disaster. The publisher was already fully behind the book, and it had already been edited, but there were still many things to be done before publication, including finalizing the cover. Marya stayed on top of the situation. “I think authors need to hear, ‘Don’t worry, I’m on top of them. I’ll make sure that these balls don’t get dropped.’”

Agents, of course, are good at juggling, and after Goodbye, Vitamin was published in July 2017, it was named a best book of the year by nearly a dozen major publications, including O, the Oprah Magazine; Vogue; Esquire; Entertainment Weekly; and BuzzFeed. It went on to win a 2017 California Book Award and was a finalist for the Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction.

I ask Marya if she has any advice for authors in the middle of the publishing process, who may be juggling a bit of anxiety themselves. “Recognize that there will always be surprises along the way,” she says, “and know that we’re on your team.”

 

Kent Wolf

(Credit: Laura S. Wilson)

Talk to an agent long enough, over a good meal, and inevitably subjects will come up that are, shall we say, sensitive. As many of these agents reminded me, this is a business of relationships—one even said it’s a business of feelings—so there are stories, or bits and pieces of hard-earned wisdom, that they may not be comfortable having attributed to them. Rather than restrict our conversations, I offered to save such morsels for “dessert,” served cold, names removed. Here then is a collection of unattributed quotes gleaned from our conversations. Some verbal tics and tones have been edited to preserve anonymity and to avoid giving any agent indigestion.

I never predict what someone’s advance is going to be. I tell people that I work on commission, and therefore I don’t take on projects that I think are not going to sell well. But I will never say, “Oh I think this should be around $150,000.” I would just never guess that, because it’s a losing game. You either give them this false hope that you can’t deliver on or you look like you undervalued them, which is also not a good look. 

I’ve never been on the phone and said to a client, “No way in hell are you taking this.” We talk it through. I try to give them as much agency in the process as I can, and complete transparency. I’ve never not conveyed an offer to an author. But there are some agents who will keep information from their clients.

The kind of agent who makes a decision that they’re going to represent the most moneymaking clients regardless of what their ideology is—I’m not there. Maybe I will lose money in the long run because of it, but I don’t think that I could be a passionate advocate for a writer whose political opinions I abhor or felt were actively damaging the fabric of society. I mean, it’s not like Steve Bannon approached me and asked me to represent him, but I can at least say that I’m not interested in those kinds of books.

If I share a rejection note from an editor with you, and then you write the editor directly about it, that’s not a good idea. I don’t work with that author anymore.

The numbers are always so made up. The profit-and-loss statements that editors use for debuts are truly nonsense numbers; they’re actually insane.

I like to say I work in the margins of a very commercial space so I take on those things that I feel need to be seen but that I also think I can get into a big trade place and make an advance, which is hard—I’m an agent and I get to choose what I give my time to, but unfortunately it’s also about the money on some level because I have to also make a living. And some of these decisions are also economic.

If your agent gives you honest feedback on the first draft of your novel, that should be considered private correspondence. It is bad form—as well as being really unconstructive—to post it on social media or vent about it on your blog.

There’s a funny story about FSG. I don’t know if it’s apocryphal, but the story goes that an agent and author asked for a marketing plan for a book, and it was just a photo of the spine with the colophon.

Make sure you’re writing for the right reasons. If you’re writing a novel because you’re trying to work through your own personal issues, that’s not why you should be writing a novel. 

I’ve definitely talked to people where we disagree about a book, and I very, very rarely say, “I can see your side of things here.” No, my side is right. I knew that book was going to be a big deal, and if it hadn’t been I would have left the industry, because I would not have been able to work with people too stupid to understand what they had in front of them. 

 

Kevin Larimer is the editor in chief of Poets & Writers, Inc. Follow him on Twitter, @KevinLarimer.

The Business of Relationships: How Authors, Agents, Editors, Booksellers, and Publicists Work Together to Reach Readers

by

Kevin Larimer

July/August 2018
6.13.18
In Print and Online

It is often said that book publishing is a business of relationships. Behind every successful title there is a small crowd of people who, over the course of many months and even years, worked together—via e-mail and in person, on the phone and over lunch—to turn an idea into a vision, edits into finished pages, a manuscript into a book. A work of art conceived and created in solitude is carried forth by a team, passing through many hands before it reaches the marketplace. I asked five debut authors to describe their first steps toward establishing the initial relationship, the one that starts the whole process rolling: finding an agent. I then asked those five agents to explain how the relationships with their clients grew and how they introduced their clients to the ideal editors who would shepherd their books into print. Next, I contacted those editors and invited them to walk us through the acquisition and editorial process that turns the raw material into finished products. And finally I spoke with five indie booksellers who convey the enthusiasm, the passion, and the purpose of author, agent, and editor in their efforts to place the books in the hands of their intended readers. Along the way I was introduced to marketing directors, publicity managers, events directors, sales reps, and other agents, editors, and authors who aided in forging connections that proved crucial in the process. The result is a series of illustrations offering a glimpse at how the book business operates on the strength of personal and professional bonds among dedicated people working toward the twin goals of creative expression and smart business.

 

Jordy Rosenberg author of the novel Confessions of the Fox, published in June by One World, an imprint of Random House

According to my e-mail records, it was seventeen days from when I first e-mailed Susan Golomb to our initial phone call. However, this does not take into account the seventeen years that I spent writing and throwing away manuscripts. During that time I had been fortunate to discuss my different projects with several agents with varying specializations: noir/mystery, creative nonfiction, popular fiction. These conversations ultimately became a part of Confessions, which interweaves all these genres—speculative fiction, thriller, metafiction, autotheory—into a single novel. With such a formal composite, I needed and wanted to work with an agent who specialized in high-concept literary fiction. I knew Susan had worked on this kind of thing with a number of her other clients, so I had hoped Confessions would attract her attention, and to my great fortune it did. But I could not have predicted the storm of activity that would ensue once she took me on. Susan was tireless with her edits. It was a little sublime and terrifying, actually, and I don’t know how she did it. We went through three full rounds of line edits—as well as larger structural edits—in the space of three weeks. This mania was surely responsible for the fact that Susan was struck with pneumonia midway through the process. Which still didn’t stop her: She was calling me from the hospital about edits. I believe she was still on antibiotics, in fact, when she made the connection between me and Chris Jackson and Victory Matsui at One World. I’m very much in her debt for the clarity of her vision, not only about the book’s bones, but also for intuiting that the horizon of the book’s potential lay with Chris and Victory and the deep working relationship we would go on to establish.

 

 

 

 

Susan Golomb of Writers House

When Michael Szczerban interviewed me in your pages in 2014, I made reference to my “shaggy dogs.” Jordy’s novel was one such animal. It came bounding into my slush pile with a mention of my client Rachel Kushner as a referral, wagging its tail with charming yet acerbic wit and playful language that included the actual lexicon of the demimonde, which put me in mind immediately of A Clockwork Orange, but with a bursting heart. There were probably fifty words for sexual intercourse, each more delicious and descriptive than the next, and a thriller frame with extremely topical, political subtext dripping with atmosphere. Like all shaggy dogs, however, its ambition exceeded its reach, so we set to work, and in a hurry, to have it on submission for the Frankfurt Book Fair. I worked with Jordy to trim the plot and imbue it with more suspense, to deepen the characters and raise the stakes of their desires. And I felt the title, while quite apt and intriguing, could be off-putting. So we came up with an interim one—and the final was by way of brainstorming with Writers House colleagues at a party and back and forth with Jordy and the One World team. While racing to meet the Frankfurt deadline, I came down with pneumonia, and Jordy plied me with bone broth, which came by messenger from Brodo and endeared him to me even more than his spectacular talent and, yes, I’ll say it, dogged willingness to make the manuscript as brilliant as it could be.

 

 

 

 

 

Victory Matsui editor at One World

When Susan Golomb sent the novel to me and Chris Jackson on submission, I had just joined One World a month earlier. I was searching for fiction that fulfilled the One World mission—books that “challenged the status quo and subverted dominant modes of thinking.” I was especially looking for a novel that celebrated the political resistance and joyful weirdness of queer and trans communities. Can you imagine how I felt when I first read Confessions? Jordy had merged a radical sensibility with the pleasures of great storytelling to write an epic queer love story through the histories of capitalism, imperialism, and imprisonment. Chris and I quickly set up a call with Susan and Jordy, and we immediately fell in love with his electric mind, his sense of humor, and his ambition to make this book both intellectually engaging and richly entertaining. We set down the phone and agreed we had to publish this book. So we offered a preempt—an offer that takes the book off the table before other editors have the chance to offer—and were overjoyed when Jordy and Susan accepted. Of course that was just the beginning: Our work together would take us from nights of e-mailing back and forth about character backstory to long phone calls about narrative structure to a tearful meeting at Le Pain Quotidien about footnotes—ultimately resulting in one of the most fulfilling editor-author relationships of my life.

 

 

 

 

Alex Schaffner at Brookline Booksmith in Brookline, Massachusetts

First an advance reader’s copy (ARC) arrived addressed to our backlist buyer, Shuchi Saraswat, who keeps an eye out for booksellers’ interests as ARCs come in. She and my co–events director, Lydia McOscar, heard more about the book directly when they visited Penguin Random House’s New York offices. The publisher’s contagious enthusiasm spurred me to dig in. LGBT literature is one of my key interests, and I wrote a thesis on eighteenth-century literature, so this was a natural path from publisher excitement to store to just the right bookseller. Fans of Sarah Waters and Jeanette Winterson will love it, and with hand-selling and shelf-talkers [printed cards or other signs attached to a store shelf to call buyers’ attention to a particular title], I expect the book to be a success at the store.

 

 

 

 
 
 

 

“Rosenberg’s masterful debut is, at once, a work of speculative historical fiction, a soaring love story, a puzzling mystery, an electrifying tale of adventure and suspense, and an unabashed celebration of sex and sexuality.” 
—Christine Mykityshyn, publicity manager, Penguin Random House

 

 

Nafissa Thompson-Spires author of the story collection Heads of the Colored People, published in April by 37 INK, an imprint of Atria Publishing Group

In 2015 I started querying agents with a novel I’d written as my MFA thesis at the University of Illinois. No one was sure about its genre—YA or adult literary fiction. After a lot of partial requests and a dozen full requests, lots of rejections, and lots of agents ignoring me—I queried about a hundred—an agent asked me to revise and resubmit. I grew bored with trying to write to his suggestions; to distract myself I wrote several short stories. One of them, “Heads of the Colored People,” gave me the idea for a full manuscript. In early 2016 I ran into an old colleague, Jensen Beach, who recommended that I submit my completed collection to some contests and mentioned that he could refer me to his agent, Anna Stein. Two weeks later the collection won a small-press contest that came with publication, but I wasn’t sure if that was the best route. I contacted Anna and the three or four other agents I’d submitted to, strategically this time. Anna responded enthusiastically that I should talk to her instead of giving the book to the small press. We clicked on the phone, and the rest is a blessed history.

arrow_right_2.png

 

 

 

 

Anna Stein of ICM Partners

Nafissa’s collection came to me thanks to my client Jensen Beach, who had recommended us to each other. I remember my assistant at the time, Mary Marge Locker, started reading before I did and said, “You’d better take this home with you.” At the time I was living in a one-bedroom apartment with my husband and two young daughters, so I headed off to a café to read. I was immediately immersed and engaged. The collection was just so surprising, so refreshingly unexpected. There was a kind of cool intellectual perspective that made the stories feel like they were operating at different registers simultaneously. I didn’t have to think twice; we started working together the very next week.

arrow_left.png

 

 

 

 

 

Dawn Davis vice president and publisher of 37 INK

The submission came in via Anna Stein of ICM, a literary agent who has represented two of my favorite contemporary novels, A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara and Where’d You Go, Bernadette? by Maria Semple. I jumped right in and was struck by how fresh the stories were but also by Nafissa’s mordant use of humor to talk about race and isolation. It was dark at times, which I was used to; novels about black life are often dark. But the irony and wry wit was strikingly original—and at times bold. I ate it up. When Nafissa and I spoke on the phone, I expressed my enthusiasm for what I loved about Heads of the Colored People—the title story and “Wash Clean the Bones” broke my heart, while “Belles Lettres” had me laughing with glee—and I was candid about what I thought was missing. She was respectful, curious, and open.

arrow_right_2.png

 

 

 

 

Rick Simonson at Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle

Dawn Davis and I have kept in touch for more than twenty years—for however long wherever she’s worked—including wide-ranging talks on books and publishing, above and beyond any particular title. But there have been particular books over which we make a special connection. Maybe most memorable was The Known World by Edward P. Jones. She sent early manuscripts of that book out to a few of us, and so, too, with Heads of the Colored People, which she told me about some time ago. Then I’ll get a galley with a note: “Finally, this.” It is, without fail, extraordinary when she makes these connections. She has that eye. Also playing a part, in her own way, is our Simon & Schuster sales rep, Christine Foye, who is attuned to editors’ books, Dawn’s among them. Heads of the Colored People is very much of the present time, and it is finding readers here at Elliott Bay from the get-go.

arrow_left.png

 

 

 

 

 

“Her stories are exquisitely rendered, satirical, and captivating in turn, engaging in the ongoing conversations about race and identity politics, as well as the vulnerability of the black body.”
—Stephanie Mendoza, senior publicist, Simon & Schuster

 

 

Rachel Z. Arndt author of the essay collection Beyond Measure, published in April by Sarabande Books

I was lucky to have met some great agents when I was in grad school at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the University of Iowa’s nonfiction writing program. The most substantive conversations with these agents took place during my third year, when I had an idea of the book I wanted to make. I honed my pitch as I met with more and more people and as I learned to describe my essay collection in terms of what I was working toward, not necessarily what I had then. One of those people was Samantha Shea. I gave her some essays when I was still in school, and after I graduated, I sent her my thesis—which would eventually become a good chunk of my book. The summer after graduating, Samantha took me on, immediately offering invaluable guidance and feedback.

arrow_right_2.png

 

 

 

 

Samantha Shea of Georges Borchardt, Inc.

Rachel and I first met when I visited the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in early 2016. She reached out a few months later to say that she had a complete essay collection and an offer from Sarabande. I quickly read the work she sent me and was so impressed with the thoughtfulness of her writing—its searching quality, its currents of existential frustration, fear, and longing. We began working together right away—first negotiating the deal with Sarabande and, later, placing other work of hers, including some of the essays in the collection, with journals and magazines like Woolly, the Believer, Literary Hub, and Longreads.

arrow_left.png

 

 

 

 

 

Sarah Gorham president and editor in chief of Sarabande Books

I first came to know Rachel Z. Arndt on a scouting trip to the University of Iowa. I was taken by the elegance and clarity of her writing, not to mention the originality of her project. Rachel recognized how measurement—in pounds, “likes,” temperature, train schedules, and so on—is running our lives, not necessarily the other way around. We wrote up a contract. I suggested she give us three new essays. Then, after a preliminary line edit, I passed the manuscript on to our marketing director at the time, Ariel Lewiton, for another look. We mailed off a detailed editorial letter, encouraging Rachel to flesh out her scenes a little and add more reflection to the essays. Turns out she’s an excellent reviser. One or two more passes later, we had a ready-for-prime-time collection.

arrow_right_2.png

 

 

 

 

Jan Weissmiller at Prairie Lights in Iowa City

The buyers at Prairie Lights were made aware of this new book last season when the extraordinary John Mesjak of Consortium Book Sales & Distribution alerted us to its forthcoming publication. His job, selling us Rachel’s essay collection, was certainly made easier by her relationship to the University of Iowa and, therefore, to Prairie Lights. Her book was acclaimed in catalogue copy by poet Robyn Schiff and essayist John D’Agata, both on faculty at the university, as well as Vivian Gornick—one of the preeminent memoirists of our time. With that in mind we knew we would be able to feature and sell this book, and we assumed that Rachel would come to read at Prairie Lights. All that has since come to pass. The book is front and center in our New Nonfiction section, and we are glad to recommend it—particularly at this moment, when it resonates so strongly with women of Rachel’s generation. Sarabande has been publishing exceptional work since its inception in 1994. Its cofounder Sarah Gorham has discovered just the right book for Prairie Lights. Independent bookstores rely on publishers like Sarabande and sales teams like that of Consortium to publish and publicize the kinds of books that discerning readers find in our stores. We are grateful and fortunate to have this timely collection gracing our shelves.

arrow_left.png

 

 

 

 

 

“With poignantly obsessive and imaginative detail, Arndt carries us from sleep study labs to judo competitions, from Nine Inch Nails concerts to the repetitive drone of first dates, and from wacky Airbnb reviews to the oppressive limitations of kitchen design. Never to be confused for a mathematical word problem, Arndt’s writing is witty and deftly humorous as she probes the patterns and structures that permeate our every action.” 
—Joanna Englert, director of marketing and publicity, Sarabande Books

 

Aja Gabel author of the novel The Ensemble, published in May by Riverhead Books

I was a baby writer when my first agent signed me on the promise of a short story. We worked well together for a bit, placing stories, but parted ways when I was close to finishing the novel. I think she and I always had different working styles, but it took a big project, and some maturing on my part, to realize that. I decided then to look for an agent who made me excited about my work instead of nervous about it, who believed exactly what I believed about myself, without convincing. So I dug up a nice e-mail Andrea Morrison at Writers House had sent me and wrote her back. I remember it was a sunny day in March when she called, and I was sitting on the floor of my living room, unemployed, feeling like if I didn’t sell this novel I would suffocate. And immediately I knew. Andrea just got what I was trying to do. She was young and hungry and smart. She was like me. 

arrow_right_2.png

 

 

 

 

 

Andrea Morrison at Writers House

I didn’t know Laura Perciasepe at Riverhead before I submitted Aja’s novel to her. But I did of course do some online sleuthing to get a sense of her taste and the titles she’d worked on previously. It seemed like she would really connect with Aja’s prose. And when we did submit the novel, Laura read the manuscript immediately and was so incredibly passionate in all the right ways. Aja and Laura meshed editorially and on a personal level from the start. 

arrow_left.png

 

 

 

 

 

Laura Perciasepe editor at Riverhead Books

When Andrea Morrison called and pitched me The Ensemble, it sounded like a story I hadn’t read before, which always intrigues me. When I opened the manuscript that night to start reading, I couldn’t stop. I was fully immersed in these characters and in their creative, competitive world—which Aja writes about in such an authentic way, pulled from her own experience. I came into the office the next day, all riled up, pushing the book into everyone’s hands, and we ended up preempting the novel. It had to be mine!

arrow_right_2.png

 

 

 

 

Annie B. Jones of the Bookshelf in Thomasville, Georgia

In a problem my younger self would have only dreamed of having, I am bombarded with books, and it often takes a persistent sales rep to convince me that a new title is worth trying. The Ensemble had a few things working in its favor: an intriguing premise, in-depth character development, well-conducted research, even a striking cover, all “sold” to me by a team of agents, editors, and reps whom I trust and who know what I like to read. This novel by Aja Gabel quickly moved to the top of my pile. The Ensemble is poetic and memorable, one of the best books I’ve read all year, and I can’t wait to put it on my store’s shelves and into readers’ hands.

arrow_left.png

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Aja Gabel masterfully conveys the all-consuming flame of youthful ambition, the tension between raw talent and hard work, and the intense love shared between members of a family brought together not by blood, but by choice.” 
—Elizabeth Hohenadel, senior publicity manager, Riverhead Books

 

 

page_5: 

Ruth Joffre author of the story collection Night Beast, published in May by Black Cat, an imprint of Grove Atlantic

When I began researching agents, I focused my attention on those who represented story collections and/or queer writers I admired. In the process of putting together a list, I spoke to a friend of mine—Rebekah Frumkin, author of The Comedown—who suggested querying Ross Harris, who had just sold her novel. He was interested in books with queer characters, so it seemed like a perfect fit. I queried him and I think eight other agents right after Thanksgiving—a difficult time, I soon learned, as most of the agents who requested the full manuscript were about to go on vacation. In the end the timing worked out in my favor, because it served as a kind of litmus test gauging who was going to be the most dedicated advocate of my work. I signed with Ross in January, and he sold my book in April.

arrow_right_2.png

 

 

 

 

Ross Harris of Stuart Krichevsky Literary Agency

I offered Ruth Joffre representation based on the sheer strength of her collection and on several fruitful conversations we’d had regarding her works-in-progress. It also didn’t hurt that she came highly recommended by a cherished client. But it was Ruth’s confidence on the page that made me fall for her; she wasn’t afraid to go there and get weird. Ruth knew her comp titles, she knew her space, she knew the boundaries she wanted to push, and she knew where she fit—which is sometimes a tricky thing to own and celebrate if you’re writing about queer people and the underrepresented. I loved Night Beast a great deal, but I loved Ruth even more. It signified the promise of many exciting things to come.

arrow_left.png

 

 

 

 

 

Nicole Nyhan former assistant editor at Black Cat, now managing editor of Conjunctions

The acquisition of Night Beast was serendipitous, if not a worldly miracle. Just as I began writing Ross Harris to follow up on a client he’d mentioned, the phone rang; it was Ross, pitching Night Beast. I’d been searching for provocative, imaginative new fiction—work with a strong ethical impetus and composed with poetic precision—and suddenly there was Ruth Joffre, a fierce, uncompromising author of tremendous talent, offering deeply empathic stories about women who felt so familiar but somehow, in 2017, I had still yet to encounter on the page. The book would be a challenge to publish, I knew—publishers usually lose money on debut collections—but this was clearly an initial step in a long, important writing career. Thanks to the generous good faith of everyone at Grove, we were able to take on the book.

arrow_right_2.png

 

 

 

 

Lauren Banka of Elliott Bay in Seattle

As a young bookseller I’m still building my relationships with publishers and with our local reps, who are our main points of contact with the publishers. I do this mainly by reaching out about books I’ve already discovered, usually advance review copies that the publishers sent to the store. I also benefit from the rich bookselling community at Elliott Bay—for Night Beast in particular, Karen Maeda Allman and Rick Simonson spoke with our Grove rep, Cindy Heidemann, and brought the book to my attention because I’ve been actively promoting experimental and diverse science fiction at the store. As a buyer I balance my trust for my colleagues and reps with my sense of our customers. Night Beast is exciting because there’s real enthusiasm on the publisher side, and I know that our customers are so hungry for more queer, literary SF collections.

arrow_left.png

 

 

 

 

 

“With exquisite prose and transfixing imagery, Joffre explores worlds both strange and familiar, homing in on the darker side of humanity. Powerful, unsettling, and wildly imaginative, Night Beast is a mind-bending, genre-hopping debut, a provocative and uncommonly raw examination of relationships and sexuality, trauma and redemption, the meaning of family, and coming-of-age—and growing old—as an outsider.” 
—John Mark Boling, senior publicity manager, Grove Atlantic  

 

 

Kevin Larimer is the editor in chief of Poets & Writers, Inc. 

 

We Mean Business: Twelve Agents Who Want to Read Your Work

by

Kevin Larimer

July/August 2017
6.14.17
In Print and Online

To say there are a lot of literary agents out there is an understatement—almost like saying there are a lot of writers looking for an agent (but not quite). The Association of Authors’ Representatives (AAR), a nonprofit membership organization founded in 1991, currently lists more than four hundred agents as members, all of whom meet certain experience requirements and abide by an established code of ethics. Another, more general, online database claims to offer details for nearly a thousand agents of varying levels of expertise and areas of emphasis. The carefully curated and focused database of literary agents at pw.org lists more than a hundred, including contact information, submission guidelines, and client lists.

No, the challenge for writers is not a dearth of agents, but rather picking the right one out of the crowd. (Of course, the same could be said about the challenge for agents.) To help narrow the field, I contacted some hungry agents who I know are eager to receive an e-mail from an as-yet-unknown writer and asked each of them for some basic information about what kind of work they want to read and how to reach them, as well as some not-so-basic information that will help you get to know them a little better. Remember, publishing is a business of relationships. You don’t want to simply fire off an e-mail to any agent you happen to come across. Read carefully. In the following profiles, a dozen agents are dropping some subtle (and not so subtle) hints for you. Have you written a piece of narrative nonfiction that gets to the heart of what it means to live in a specific geographical region? Duvall Osteen might be a great fit. Do you have a novel set in North Carolina? Adam Eaglin could be your man. Are you from Detroit and love music? You may need to look no further than Carrie Howland. Are you a writer of smart horror fiction and just can’t get enough of the work of Joe Hill and Nathan Ballingrud? You should take the time to get to know Renée Zuckerbrot.

These twelve agents all have distinct personalities, aesthetics, work habits, backgrounds, proclivities, and peeves—and so do you. So take your time, do the research, read books by their clients, and listen to what these professionals are saying. One of them might be speaking directly to you.

 

Danielle Svetcov, Levine Greenberg Rostan Literary Agency

Who she represents: Bridget Quinn (Broad Strokes), Bonnie Tsui (Why We Swim), Nicole Perlroth (This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends), Stephanie Wilbur Ash (The Annie Year), Meg Elison (The Book of the Unnamed Midwife), James Nestor (Deep), Shalane Flanagan and Elyse Kopecky (Run Fast Eat Slow), Eben Weiss (The Ultimate Bicycle Owner’s Manual)

What she wants to read: Biographies and histories in which I can smell the breath and walk in the footsteps of the characters profiled; memoirs and reported narratives braced by vivid scenes and a sense of urgency; humor that can revive a marriage when read before bed; fiction that reads easy but isn’t.

When you should contact her: If your manuscript is the only piece of writing you’ve got to share (you’re not a working journalist, say, or a published author), then your manuscript (if it’s fiction) should be complete before you query. If you are a professional writer with clips galore to share, I still recommend you query when you’ve got a finished manuscript (if fiction), because it leaves no mystery (but it’s up to you). If you’re submitting nonfiction—all writers—then you should have a full proposal to share when you query. Coda: An agent should not be the first person (besides you) to read your manuscript or proposal.

Where she can be reached: e-mail dsvetcov@lgrliterary.com

Why you should want her as your agent: To quote my clients: “relentless,” “wolfish,” “and she always calls you back.”

How she wants to be contacted: Send query letter with attached proposal or sample of fiction (say, twenty-five pages).

 

Renée Zuckerbrot, Massie & McQuilkin Literary Agents

Who she represents: Dan Chaon (Ill Will), Shannon Leone Fowler (Traveling With Ghosts), Kelly Link (Get in Trouble), Deborah Lutz (The Bronte Cabinet: Three Lives in Nine Objects), Andrew Malan Milward (I Was a Revolutionary), Keith Lee Morris (Travelers Rest), Shawn Vestal (Godforsaken Idaho), M. O. Walsh (My Sunshine Away), Daniel Wallace (Extraordinary Adventures)

What she wants to read: I tend to be seduced by voice, so voice-driven fiction and nonfiction are high on my wish list. I love getting lost in a world that is strikingly different from mine. I have a deep appreciation for storytelling that allows me to see the world anew, or introduces me to a culture or worldview outside my own. I read to be entertained and educated. Writers who approach current events and historical topics with original, provocative ideas will always find readers. I’m also looking for smart horror writers along the lines of Joe Hill and my client Nathan Ballingrud (North American Lake Monsters). There will always be room on my list for popular science—Eric Sanderson’s Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City is a good example—and pop-culture books like my client Theron Humphrey’s Maddie on Things.

When you should contact her: Please query me when you have a complete manuscript or proposal with a sample chapter. I am also willing to look at a complete short story collection and partial novel, or a complete novel and a partial story collection. For memoirs, I will consider a proposal with a sample chapter or the complete manuscript.

Where she can be reached: e-mail renee@mmqlit.com

Why you should want her as your agent: I am a careful reader who reads on both a micro and macro level. My first job was in editorial—I’m a former Doubleday editor—so it’s all about the writing. I work with my clients on getting their work in the best shape possible before submitting it. That said, my job is not to edit a manuscript so that it conforms to my idea of perfection; rather, it is to edit a work so that editors reading it will be able to envision the book as the writer intends. I need to leave enough room for editors to work with my clients to shape their manuscripts to their shared vision and the publisher’s vision. I’m proud of the fact that the manuscripts I sell never require major editorial overhauls. Also, I value fostering long-term relationships with my writers. Last but not least, I’m enthusiastic about collaborating with my writers and their publishers during the publication of their work. I love helping to generate buzz for my clients by talking up their work to anyone who will listen.

How she wants to be contacted: Please include a description of your work, your writing credentials, a brief bio in the body of an e-mail, along with the first three chapters/stories from your manuscript as a Word document. For nonfiction, you can also send a proposal and sample chapter.

 

Duvall Osteen, Aragi Inc.

Who she represents: Bethany Ball (What to Do About the Solomons), Elizabeth Poliner (As Close to Us as Breathing), Marjorie Liu (Monstress), Lauren Holmes (Barbara the Slut and Other People), Brooke Barker (Sad Animal Facts), Brad Watson (Miss Jane), Bryce Andrews (Badluck Way: A Year on the Ragged Edge of the West), Wil S. Hylton (Vanished: The Sixty-Year Search for the Missing Men of World War II), Pablo Medina (The Island Kingdom)

What she wants to read: Fiction and narrative nonfiction with a big voice and/or a strong sense of place.

When you should contact her: For fiction I request completed novels or story collections. For narrative nonfiction I’m happy to read a proposal, which should include an overview and at least two finished chapters.

Where she can be reached: e-mail queries@aragi.net; attn: Duvall Osteen

Why you should want her as your agent: We’re a small, selective agency. We keep it that way for a reason. Our authors are never going to be handed off; they can always reach us, no matter how big or small the question, no matter what stage of their career. Every single author at Aragi is of equal importance.

How she wants to be contacted: Please send your query via e-mail, which should include a synopsis of the book and your bio.

 

Jeff Kleinman, Folio Literary Management

Who he represents: Garth Stein (The Art of Racing in the Rain), Elizabeth Letts (The Eighty-Dollar Champion), Eowyn Ivey (The Snow Child), Jacquelyn Mitchard (Two If by Sea), Charles J.  Shields (Mockingbird), Karen Dionne (The Marsh King’s Daughter), Benjamin Ludwig (Ginny Moon), Val Emmich (The Reminders), Kathy McKeon (Jackie’s Girl)

What he wants to read: I focus on book-club/literary fiction and narrative nonfiction—especially those projects that I feel can make a difference either to me personally or to the world. I love unique voices, magnificently strong characters, unusual premises, and books that offer some new perspective on something I thought I already knew something about or never even dreamed existed. I’m always interested in learning and love when someone can teach me something organically so it doesn’t feel like I’m even learning. I’m particularly looking for voice-driven fiction as well as very well-written thrillers and psychological suspense novels; or novels with a great, quirky, fun voice. I love narrative nonfiction and memoir and have sold projects in a wide variety of subjects, including art, history, animals, military, and many other genres.

When you should contact him: Fiction writers, when you’ve finished your entire novel, had it read by several readers, edited and reedited it, and feel like it’s now absolutely as strong as you can possibly make it, write me a letter and tell me about it. Nonfiction writers, when you’ve written a book proposal, paying particular attention to the sample chapter(s)/excerpts and marketing materials, write me a letter.

Where he can be reached: E-mail jeff@foliolit.com, but please consult the Folio website (foliolit.com) before you fire off an e-mail. No phone calls or hard copies, please.

Why you should want him as your agent: I’m very hands-on and love the editing-collaborating process—brainstorming plots, rejiggering motivations, tweaking backstory. It’s really satisfying and invigorating to be part of the creative process. I also love being part of the publication process, too—coming up with marketing ideas, discussing PR strategies, revising flap copy, reading/editing short promotional materials, and so forth. I do best working with authors who see their agent as a partner in the book publishing process: I’m not a guy who rubber-stamps a manuscript and just forwards it to the editor; and I don’t just disappear once the book has been sold. As one author told me recently, “I was just saying that what you do for me is not normal. I don’t know of a single other agent who works so hard to make sure his clients look good—and I know a lot of agents!”

How he wants to be contacted: For fiction, a query letter plus the first page of your manuscript; for nonfiction, a query letter plus a proposal overview and/or first page of a sample excerpt.

 

Eleanor Jackson, Dunow, Carlson & Lerner

Who she represents: David Wroblewski (The Story of Edgar Sawtelle), Susie Steiner (Missing, Presumed), T. Geronimo Johnson (Welcome to Braggsville), Aline Ohanesian (Orhan’s Inheritance), Susan Straight (Between Heaven and Here), Michael Lemonick (The Perpetual Now)

What she wants to read: I believe a good book should wake you up by taking you out of your life and immersing you in someone else’s. So I want to read books with deeply imagined worlds, by writers who are not afraid to take risks with their work.

When you should contact her: Fiction writers, I want you to contact me when you have a full draft of your novel. I sell a lot of nonfiction on proposal, so I’m happy to look at those projects a bit earlier. If I’m considering nonfiction on proposal, I’d like to see one or two sample chapters. In general, I think the best moment for writers to contact an agent is when they have done everything they possibly can on their own.

Where she can be reached: Dunow, Carlson & Lerner Literary Agency; 27 West 20th Street, Suite 1107; New York, NY 10011; e-mail eleanor@dclagency.com

Why you should want her as your agent: I consider my clients my friends. They all have my cell-phone number and are free to use it. My list is intentionally small, so I can give every project the attention it deserves. I also like to think long-term, about how to build a career as well as sell individual books.

How she wants to be contacted: Please send me a one- to two-page query letter with a summary of your work and an author bio. If you have a proposal, please attach it to your query. If you are working on a novel, please attach the first ten to twenty pages to give me a sense of your writing.

 

Allison Hunter, Janklow & Nesbit Associates

Who she represents: Katie Heaney (Never Have I Ever), Arianna Rebolini (Public Relations), Swan Huntley (We Could Be Beautiful), Anna Pitoniak (The Futures), Anne Helen Petersen (Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud), Christina Kelly (Good Karma), Victoria James (Drink Pink), Kelsey Miller (Big Girl), Jen Chaney (As If!), Emilie Wapnick (How to Be Everything), Dvora Meyers (The End of the Perfect 10), Eliot Nelson (The Beltway Bible), Megan Mulry (A Royal Pain)

What she wants to read: Literary and commercial fiction, especially upmarket and women’s fiction, as well as select memoir, narrative nonfiction, cultural studies, and pop culture. I’m especially looking for funny female writers, great love stories, campus novels, beach reads, family epics, and nonfiction projects that speak to the current cultural climate.

When you should contact her: Fiction writers, please wait until you have a complete, polished manuscript. Nonfiction writers, you should have a fully fleshed out idea and ideally a full book proposal.

Where she can be reached: e-mail ahunter@janklow.com

Why you should want her as your agent: I like to think that I offer my authors the best of both worlds—the resources of a large, world-class agency but with a great deal of personal attention. I am a fast and voracious reader and feel that it is my duty to read widely in the genres I’m representing, to fully understand the market. I pride myself on my close working and personal relationships with editors at every publishing house, as well as my connections with the greater literary community in New York City.

How she wants to be contacted: Please send me a query and approximately ten to fifteen pages of your manuscript or proposal.

 

Carrie Howland, Empire Literary

Who she represents: Kaitlyn Greenidge (We Love You, Charlie Freeman), Carmiel Banasky (The Suicide of Claire Bishop), Melissa Gorzelanczyk (Arrows), Sarah Prager (Queer, There, and Everywhere), Jason Tougaw (The One You Get)

What she wants to read: I’m actively seeking adult-fiction writers, both literary and upmarket. My background is in poetry and literary fiction, so beautiful language is one of the first things I look for in any project. Equally important are a strong voice and great story, which I’m looking for across genres. I would love to see a literary thriller, whether adult or young adult, come across my desk. For children’s books, I love voice-driven, contemporary fiction that isn’t afraid to tackle tough issues. I adore a middle-grade adventure story but am also taken by one that might deal with the loss of a sibling, for example, or a serious issue at school or with a friend. For nonfiction, I’m a music fanatic, and as such I’m always looking for great books on movements, culture, musicians themselves, or simply how we as a society respond to, and are affected by, the music around us. I’m a Detroit-area native, so I’d also love submissions for books that deal with the city itself, or cities like it, the politics surrounding them, and stories of people who live there. In addition to poetry, I have a strong background in public policy, so I’m incredibly interested in books that deal with politics, education, or other societal issues. Finally, I love all things pop culture, so I will never say no to a proposal about anything from “why we’re a Bachelor-obsessed nation” to “why we can’t ever seem to get enough of Gilmore Girls.”

When you should contact her: For fiction, a project should truly be finished before I see it. I recommend you have a not only complete but also well-edited manuscript before sending to me, or any agent. For nonfiction, a proposal is perfect.

Where she can be reached: e-mail carrie@empireliterary.com

Why you should want her as your agent: After nearly twelve years as an agent, representing award-winning authors, I’ve developed a hands-on approach to launching the careers of debut novelists. I’m a very editorial agent and love collaborating with my clients. Whether that’s idea development, manuscript feedback, assisting with publicity, social media, or marketing, I really do consider myself a full-service partner for my authors. I absolutely love what I do; I live and breathe for my clients and work tirelessly to promote their work and careers. Beyond that, while I’ve been a New Yorker for over a decade, I’m a Midwestern girl at heart, so you’ll find not only an advocate, but a friend in me as your agent. This can be a tough business, and I like to remind my clients why we all chose this profession in the first place: because we’re passionate about the written word.

How she wants to be contacted: Please send your query letter and first twenty pages (for fiction) or proposal (for nonfiction) as a Word document to carrie@empireliterary.com.

 

Ross Harris, Stuart Krichevsky Literary Agency

Who he represents: Isaac Oliver (Intimacy Idiot), Charlyne Yi (Oh the Moon: Stories From the Tortured Mind of Charlyne Yi), Rachel Lindsay, Manoush Zomorodi (Bored and Brilliant: How Spacing Out Can Unlock Your Most Productive and Creative Self), A. Brad Schwartz (Broadcast Hysteria: Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds and the Art of Fake News), Rebekah Frumkin (The Comedown), Ruth Joffre (Night Beast and Other Stories)

What he wants to read: My taste tends to lean toward the literary, but as long as the plot surprises and entertains, I’ll be won over. I love to find new, unpredictable stories—I think every agent will tell you that—but I particularly enjoy the feeling, the unease, the excitement that creeps in when I honestly don’t know what’ll happen next. When I finish a book (or proposal), the lasting feeling of wonderment is what I’m after.

When you should contact him: You should write to me (and, yes, please do!) when you feel comfortable sharing your work. I tell writers that the right time to share your work with an agent is when you feel confident that it’ll speak for itself—without you having to be in the room. If you’re going to want to be over my shoulder saying, “Well, this part will be fixed…” or “I intend to make this part a little clearer…,” you aren’t ready to share the work, which is completely fine. Many writers make the mistake of looking for an agent too soon. An agent’s primary job is to sell your work, so if you don’t have anything yet to sell…wait until you do. You get one first impression. Make it count.

Where he can be reached: My inbox is always open to new and prospective clients: rh@skagency.com.

Why you should want him as your agent: I’m fun, I mean business, I care deeply about seeing each and every client succeed in her or his own way. When I work with any writer, regardless of genre or style, it’s a very personalized relationship.

How he wants to be contacted: A partial manuscript, a proposal, or full manuscript. The work doesn’t have to be 100 percent polished, but remember that I’m going to be considering its salability, not potential salability. Just make sure you’re ready (and feel confident) to send. If you’re excited to share your work with me, I’ll be excited to read it.

 

Caroline Eisenmann, Frances Goldin Literary Agency

Who she represents: Meghan Flaherty (Tango Lessons), Brandon Hobson (Where the Dead Sit Talking)

What she wants to read: In almost any genre, I’m attracted to great prose and a strong sense of emotional intelligence on the page. For upmarket and literary fiction, I tend to be particularly drawn to relationship-driven novels, stories about obsession, and work that grapples with intimacy and its discontents. With nonfiction, I’m very interested in deeply reported narratives and stories that take the reader into the heart of a subculture as well as idea books with a surprising or unusual central argument.

When you should contact her: I’d like to see your work when you feel you’ve taken it as far as you can by yourself. With a novel, this will almost always mean an edited full manuscript; in nonfiction, I’d generally want to read at least the fundamental elements of a proposal (outline, sample pages, etc.).

Where she can be reached: It’s best to get in touch by e-mail at ce@goldinlit.com

Why you should want her as your agent: I do a lot of editorial work with my clients, generally from the ground level of a project. That can mean brainstorming about the concept behind nonfiction or coming up with plot solutions in fiction, but my goal is always to help authors reach the best possible version of their book before submission. I’m also a clear communicator who’s constantly thinking about what my clients want and need, and I will do everything possible to make those goals happen. I worked in marketing and digital publishing before coming to agenting, which gives me extra insight into how to position my clients in an evolving landscape.

How she wants to be contacted: Please send a query. If the work is fiction or completed nonfiction, include the first ten pages in the body of the e-mail.

 

Adam Eaglin, Cheney Associates, LLC

Who he represents: Lawrence Osborne (Hunters in the Dark), Jennine Capó Crucet (Make Your Home Among Strangers), Ron Rash (The Risen), Lisa Servon (The Unbanking of America: How the Middle Class Survives), David Treuer (Prudence), Devin Leonard (Neither Snow nor Rain: A History of the United States Postal Service), Leah Vincent (Cut Me Loose: Sin and Salvation After My Ultra-Orthodox Girlhood), Diksha Basu (The Windfall)

What he wants to read: Debut literary and upmarket fiction; narrative nonfiction and memoir; journalists and academics writing new takes on culture, politics, and current events. Regardless of genre, I’m always interested in diverse voices and underrepresented perspectives, and as a native North Carolinian I am partial to great fiction set in the South.

When you should contact him: For fiction, it’s usually best to be in touch when you have a finished manuscript to share. For nonfiction, a draft of a proposal.

Where he can be reached: e-mail adam@cheneyliterary.com

Why you should want him as your agent: I try to keep a small, selective list and only take on projects I really believe in, which enables me to be a hands-on and passionate advocate for each of my writers. This includes in-depth editorial work, working strategically to find the best publishing deals, and shepherding an author through all aspects of the publication process, including publicity and marketing. My goal is always to help each of my author’s books make as big an impact as possible and to build careers over time.

How he wants to be contacted: A query by e-mail with a full manuscript (for fiction) or a proposal (nonfiction).

 

Amelia Atlas, ICM Partners

Who she represents: Caite Dolan-Leach (Dead Letters), Mark O’Connell (To Be a Machine), Matt Gallagher (Youngblood), Joy Williams (Ninety-Nine Stories of God)

What she wants to read: I’m looking for books—whether fiction or nonfiction—that feel engaged with the larger world. That can mean having a big new idea, taking me to a place or a part of history that I haven’t seen, or simply having a kind of inquisitive spirit. I’m looking for writing that comes from a place of urgency.

When you should contact her: Ideally I’d like to hear from writers who have a finished manuscript or proposal ready for review. At the very least it should feel like you’ve really pushed the project as far as you can without outside eyes and feedback.

Where she can be reached: e-mail aatlas@icmpartners.com

Why you should want her as your agent: The projects I look for are the kind of things I know I’m going to want to be in the trenches fighting for in the years to come (publishing is a slow business), and I think that shows in how I work with my clients—whether it’s reading multiple drafts, batting ideas around, or shepherding them through the publishing process. I like to be pretty hands-on, especially in the early, developmental stages: It’s exciting to watch something become the book we know it should be.

How she wants to be contacted: A query letter plus the first ten pages pasted into the body of an e-mail.

 

Julie Barer, The Book Group

Who she represents: Joshua Ferris (To Rise Again at a Decent Hour), Bret Anthony Johnston (Remember Me Like This), Lily King (Euphoria), Celeste Ng (Everything I Never Told You), Cristina Henriquez (The Book of Unknown Americans), Helen Simonson (Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand), Mia Alvar (In the Country), Madeline Miller (The Song of Achilles), Alice Sebold (Lucky), Kathleen Kent (The Heretic’s Daughter), Nicole Dennis-Benn (Here Comes the Sun), Megan Mayhew Bergman (Almost Famous Women), Paula McLain (The Paris Wife), Kevin Wilson (The Family Fang), Charles Yu (How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe)

What she wants to read: My list is predominantly fiction, and I am particularly interested in representing diverse voices and perspectives from around the world. I’m always looking to learn something new from the fiction I read and to be taken somewhere I’ve never been before. I’m drawn to original voices, or retellings of stories we’ve heard before in new and innovative ways. I need to feel emotionally connected to the characters, and as obvious as it sounds, I need a real plot. More than anything, though, I just want to fall in love. I want to miss my subway stop because I can’t stop reading. I want to completely disappear into the world of the novel. I want to turn the last page and immediately feel the need to tell everyone I know about it.  

When you should contact her: In general I think it’s best, when writing fiction, if you have a complete and polished manuscript. That means you’ve taken the time to self-edit and even stepped away from the project for some time so you know that you’ve really put everything into it that you can. If it’s nonfiction, then a proposal with forty to fifty pages of material is usually enough. 

Where she can be reached: The Book Group, c/o Julie Barer; 20 West 20th Street, Suite 601; New York, NY 10011; thebookgroup.com; e-mail submissions@thebookgroup.com

Why you should want her as your agent: At the Book Group we believe in a very hands-on approach at every stage of the publication process. I love to edit, and I bring a strong editorial eye and passionate commitment to each project, making sure I’ve done all I can do to help authors realize their vision and address any issues before we submit to publishers. I’m extremely selective in taking on new projects, which ensures that I’m able to give my clients the time and attention they need. I’m also committed to helping my clients establish and navigate their careers across many years and many books, so I like to be involved in everything from helping write jacket copy to developing a social media presence, pitching magazine ideas, and submitting short stories to brainstorming for the book’s marketing campaign and beyond. We are right there with you every step of the way, and in addition to the U.S. market, we’re thinking about international sales, film, television and audio, and also what your next project should be. This long-term, big-picture perspective and involvement is one of the most interesting parts of my job. 

How she wants to be contacted: Please submit a query letter along with ten sample pages with “Julie Barer” in the subject line to submissions@thebookgroup.com. Please do not include any attachments.

Kevin Larimer is the editor in chief of Poets & Writers, Inc. 

Agents & Editors: The Complete Series

by

Jofie Ferrari-Adler, Michael Szczerban, and M. Allen Cunningham

2.10.21
In Print and Online

Launched in 2008, this series of in-depth interviews with book editors, publishers, and agents offers a unique look at the past, present, and future of the book industry and what writers can do to thrive in today’s publishing world.  

 

Agents

 

The Book Group
by Michael Szczerban
6.14.16
Four veteran agents—Julie Barer, Faye Bender, Brettne Bloom, and Elisabeth Weed—talk about the business of books, the secret to a good pitch, and what authors should do in the lead-up to publication.

Claudia Ballard, Seth Fishman, Melissa Flashman, and Alia Hanna Habib
by Michael Szczerban
6.17.15
Four young literary agents meet for an evening of food, drink, and conversation about how they find new authors, what they need to see in a query letter, and the common mistakes writers should avoid.

Jennifer Joel
by Michael Szczerban
2.10.15
Jennifer Joel, whose clients include Chris Cleave, Joe McGinniss Jr., Evan Osnos, and Shonda Rhimes, talks about the difference between selling fiction and nonfiction, what inspires her to go the extra mile for her authors, and what writers should really want out of publishing.

PJ Mark
by Michael Szczerban
6.18.14
PJ Mark, whose clients include Samantha Hunt, Wayne Koestenbaum, Dinaw Mengestu, Maggie Nelson, Ed Park, and Josh Weil, talks about what writers can do to improve their chances of success, why fiction is harder to sell than nonfiction, and the importance of trusting your heart.

Susan Golomb
by Michael Szczerban
5.1.14
Susan Golomb, whose clients include Jonathan Franzen, Rachel Kushner, and William T. Vollmann, talks about the ebb and flow of submission season, the art of the preemptive offer, and the gems she finds in her slush pile.

David Gernert
by Michael Szczerban
1.1.14
Literary agent David Gernert discusses the bookstore as a key to our culture, what it’s like to work with John Grisham, and how big changes in the industry are affecting authors’ incomes.

Eric Simonoff
by Michael Szczerban
7.1.13
A heavy-hitting agent who for twenty-two years has represented some of the biggest literary writers in the country, Eric Simonoff discusses recent changes in the publishing industry, the pitfalls of self-publishing, and what he’s learned about staying creative.

Georges Borchardt
by Jofie Ferrari-Adler
9.1.09
Georges Borchardt has been an agent for more than fifty years. He’s seen authors, editors, and other agents come and go, but two things have never changed: his belief that good writing is a gift and his ability to get it published.

Maria Massie, Jim Rutman, Anna Stein, and Peter Steinberg
by Jofie Ferrari-Adler
5.1.09
Four agents discuss how the economy is affecting their jobs, where they’re finding new writers, and what totally freaks them out about MFA students.

Julie Barer, Jeff Kleinman, Daniel Lazar, and Renee Zuckerbrot
by Jofie Ferrari-Adler
1.1.09
Four young literary agents meet for an evening of food, wine, and conversation about the writing they’re looking for, how they’re finding it, what they love, what they hate, and ten things writers should never ever do.

Molly Friedrich
by Jofie Ferrari-Adler
9.1.08
Known as a heavy-hitting agent willing to go to bat for her clients, Molly Friedrich discusses how an author should choose an agent, what she looks for in a manuscript, and what separates great agents from merely good ones.

Nat Sobel
by Jofie Ferrari-Adler
5.1.08
Agent Nat Sobel, one of the most forward-thinking and outspoken agents in the business, voices his opinions on what authors should do for themselves, the dangers of MFA programs, and what he finds in literary magazines.

Lynn Nesbit
by Jofie Ferrari-Adler
1.1.08
With more than forty years of experience in the business, agent Lynn Nesbit discusses how she signed some of her biggest clients, how a writer can get an agent’s attention, and what’s wrong with the publishing industry.

 

Editors

 

Sarah McGrath
by M. Allen Cunningham
2.10.21
The editor in chief of Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House, talks about her start in publishing, acquiring books, editing as a creative process, and more.

Ben George
by M. Allen Cunningham
8.14.19
Ben George, a senior editor at Little, Brown who works with some of the biggest names in literary fiction and nonfiction, talks about the author-editor relationship, the plight of the midlist writer, and the art of revision. 

Rob Spillman
by Michael Szczerban
10.12.16
Editor Rob Spillman talks Tin House—the magazine, the books, the summer workshop—and the pleasures, perils, and surprises of independent publishing.

Michael Wiegers
by Michael Szczerban
10.14.15
Michael Wiegers, the editor in chief of Copper Canyon Press, talks about how he decides which books to publish (from the two thousand manuscripts the press receives each year) and what it’s like to edit the likes of Pablo Neruda, W. S. Merwin, and C. D. Wright.

Dawn Davis
by Michael Szczerban
8.19.15
Dawn Davis—vice president and publisher of 37 INK, an imprint of Simon & Schuster’s Atria Publishing Group—talks about editing Edward P. Jones, the lack of diversity in publishing, and what some of the most successful authors have in common.

Jeff Shotts
by Michael Szczerban
10.15.14
Graywolf Press executive editor Jeff Shotts discusses the power of patience in publishing, editing as an act of empathy, and why it’s an exciting time to be a poet.

Amy Einhorn
by Michael Szczerban
2.12.14
The publisher of her eponymous imprint at Penguin Random House, Amy Einhorn discusses her early days as an assistant at FSG, the importance of titles, and how she pushes her authors to make their books the best they can be.

Jordan Pavlin
by Michael Szczerban
9.1.13
A vice president and executive editor at Knopf, Jordan Pavlin discusses her terror of launch meetings, the particular genius of Sonny Mehta, and her job as a writer’s ideal reader.

Jonathan Karp
by Jofie Ferrari-Adler
11.1.09
As the editor in chief of Twelve, Jonathan Karp is always looking for good writing. Considering that half of all the books he’s published there have become best-sellers, that should make a lot of writers very, very excited.

Jonathan Galassi
by Jofie Ferrari-Adler
7.1.09
Some publishers may have lost sight of what’s important, but the head of FSG shows his allegiance as he discusses the fallacy of the blockbuster mentality, what writers should look for in agents, and his close bond with authors.

Lee Boudreaux, Eric Chinski, Alexis Gargagliano, and Richard Nash
by Jofie Ferrari-Adler
3.1.09
Four young editors, from big houses and small, take some time off to discuss what makes a good manuscript, what they’ve come to expect from their authors, and how much of their work needs to be done at night and on weekends.

Chuck Adams
by Jofie Ferrari-Adler
11.1.08
A veteran editor who has worked at publishing houses both large and small, Chuck Adams of Algonquin Books talks about what beginning writers tend to forget, the secret to selling two million copies, and the problem with MFA writing.

Janet Silver
by Jofie Ferrari-Adler
7.1.08
Having settled into her new role at Nan Talese’s imprint following her ouster from Houghton Mifflin, editor Janet Silver discusses what she looks for in a new writer and what every author should know about agents.

Pat Strachan
by Jofie Ferrari-Adler
3.1.08
With nearly four decades of editing experience, publishing veteran Pat Strachan reveals the qualities she looks for in fiction, her approach to editing, and how writers can help themselves navigate the industry.

Agent Advice: The Complete Series

by

Staff

12.15.21
In Print and Online

The industry’s best and brightest agents respond directly to readers’ questions in this regular column dating back to 2010. To submit a question for the next featured agent, e-mail editor@pw.org.

Monica Odom of Odom Media Management
12.15.2021
The agent answers questions about attracting agents using self-published books and whether to use a summary or a writing sample to pitch a memoir.
 

Larissa Melo Pienkowski of Jill Grinberg Literary Management
10.13.21
The agent who represents writers TJ Alexander and K. Tempest Bradford, among others, answers questions about being ghosted by agents and how to query for nonfiction books.

Jade Wong-Baxter of Frances Goldin Literary Agency
8.18.21
The agent representing Chris Belcher, Kate Broad, Delia Cai, Duy Doan, and others offers advice about working with a coauthor, changing a memoir to fiction, why agents don’t consider previously published work, and how to become an agent.

Amy Elizabeth Bishop of Dystel, Goderich & Bourret
 6.16.21
The literary agent answers questions about how to seek representation as a self-published author, break into the agenting business, and more. 

 Iwalani Kim of Sanford J. Greenberger Associates
 4.14.21
The literary agent answers questions about submitting story collections, getting an agent’s attention, and querying two agents at the same agency.
 

Jody Kahn of Brandt and Hochman
4.10.19
A literary agent answers questions from writers about genre, age, costs, and client lists.

Find a Literary Agent

The Literary Agents database contains details about more than 170 agents who are looking for new clients. Search the listings to find contact information, submission guidelines, client lists, tips from the agents, and more. 

find an agent

Priya Doraswamy of Lotus Lane Literary
10.10.18
An agent answers questions on obtaining the copyright of a self-published novel and seeking a U.S. publisher from abroad.
 

Regina Brooks of Serendipity Literary Agency
8.15.18
An agent answers questions on referrals, pitching a self-published book, and what to do if you’re dropped by an agency.
 

Annie Hwang of Folio Literary Management
12.13.17
A literary agent answers readers’ questions—from how seriously agents consider a writer’s previous sales to how to responsibly seek new representation.

Kirby Kim of Janklow & Nesbit Associates
4.12.17
A seasoned literary agent offers valuable counsel on when to query, how to keep revising, and whether horror fiction is a genre worth pursuing.

Anna Ghosh of Ghosh Literary
12.14.16
Anna Ghosh answers readers’ questions—from why poetry agents are seemingly nonexistent to whether or not it is possible to be “too young to write.”

Betsy Amster of Betsy Amster Literary Enterprises
10.14.15
The agent of authors such as María Amparo Escandón and Joy Nicholson offers advice on query letters, editing, and what not to do when submitting a manuscript.

Agents & Editors Recommend

A dependable source of professional and creative advice, Agents & Editors Recommend features anecdotes, insights, tips, recommended reading and viewing for writers, and more from leading agents and editors.

Explore the series

Danielle Svetcov of Levine Greenberg Rostan
4.15.15
Should you pay to have a manuscript edited beforehand? Are there benefits to querying via snail mail versus e-mail? Danielle Svetcov of Levine Greenberg Rostan answers readers’ questions about what (and what not) to do when trying to find an agent.

Meredith Kaffel Simonoff of DeFiore and Company
8.20.14
An agent representing authors such as CJ Hauser and Cecily Wong answers questions about writing in multiple genres, agents’ fees, and publishing work in online journals.

Amy Rennert of the Amy Rennert Agency
3.01.14
The agent of authors such as Diana Nyad and Herman Wouk answers questions about self-publishing, age restrictions, and working with an agent remotely.

Chris Parris-Lamb of the Gernert Company
10.06.13
Chris Parris-Lamb of the Gernert Company offers advice on submitting query letters and manuscripts, and when to embrace or eschew self-promotion.

Lucy Carson of the Friedrich Agency
9.01.13
Lucy Carson of the Friedrich Agency discusses e-book publishing, when to send a sample to an agent, and more.

Matt McGowan of Frances Goldin Literary Agency
5.01.13
Literary agent Matt McGowan, who represents Eula Biss, John D’Agata, Brian Evenson, and many others, answers writers’ most commonly asked questions.

Rebecca Gradinger of Fletcher & Company
10.17.12
Literary agent Rebecca Gradinger explains why writers need agents and offers tips about best practices for finding one.

Douglas Stewart of Sterling Lord Literistic
4.12.12
The agent of Jami Attenberg, David Mitchell, Carolyn Parkhurst, Matthew Quick, and others offers guidance about publishing credits, MFA programs, and unagented submissions.

Jenni Ferrari-Adler of Brick House Literary Agents
3.01.11
Does your book need to be finished before you seek representation? Do agents really read synopses? Agent Jenni Ferrari-Adler, whose clients include Lauren Shockey and Emma Straub, answers these questions and more.

Terra Chalberg of the Susan Golomb Literary Agency
10.15.10
When is the best time in your career to look for representation, and when should you call off an author-agent relationship? Terra Chalberg, whose clients include Lori Ostlund and Glenn Taylor, tackles these questions and more.

Jennifer Carlson of Dunow, Carlson & Lerner
8.11.10
The agent of authors such as Kevin Brockmeier and Marisa de los Santos offers her thoughts on self-publishing and what she looks for in the first five pages of a writing sample.

PJ Mark of Janklow & Nesbit Associates
5.01.10
The agent of authors such as Samantha Hunt, Dinaw Mengestu, and Josh Weil offers advice on shaping a query letter and when to follow up after pitching your book.

Katherine Fausset of Curtis Brown, Ltd.
3.01.10
Agent Katherine Fausset answers questions from readers about the agent’s role in submitting work to literary magazines and how writers can choose agents based on their client lists.
 

Agents & Editors: The Complete Series

We Mean Business: Twelve Agents Who Want to Read Your Work

Agent Advice: The Complete Series

by

Staff

12.15.21
In Print and Online

The industry’s best and brightest agents respond directly to readers’ questions in this regular column dating back to 2010. To submit a question for the next featured agent, e-mail editor@pw.org.

Monica Odom of Odom Media Management
12.15.2021
The agent answers questions about attracting agents using self-published books and whether to use a summary or a writing sample to pitch a memoir.
 

Larissa Melo Pienkowski of Jill Grinberg Literary Management
10.13.21
The agent who represents writers TJ Alexander and K. Tempest Bradford, among others, answers questions about being ghosted by agents and how to query for nonfiction books.

Jade Wong-Baxter of Frances Goldin Literary Agency
8.18.21
The agent representing Chris Belcher, Kate Broad, Delia Cai, Duy Doan, and others offers advice about working with a coauthor, changing a memoir to fiction, why agents don’t consider previously published work, and how to become an agent.

Amy Elizabeth Bishop of Dystel, Goderich & Bourret
 6.16.21
The literary agent answers questions about how to seek representation as a self-published author, break into the agenting business, and more. 

 Iwalani Kim of Sanford J. Greenberger Associates
 4.14.21
The literary agent answers questions about submitting story collections, getting an agent’s attention, and querying two agents at the same agency.
 

Jody Kahn of Brandt and Hochman
4.10.19
A literary agent answers questions from writers about genre, age, costs, and client lists.

Find a Literary Agent

The Literary Agents database contains details about more than 170 agents who are looking for new clients. Search the listings to find contact information, submission guidelines, client lists, tips from the agents, and more. 

find an agent

Priya Doraswamy of Lotus Lane Literary
10.10.18
An agent answers questions on obtaining the copyright of a self-published novel and seeking a U.S. publisher from abroad.
 

Regina Brooks of Serendipity Literary Agency
8.15.18
An agent answers questions on referrals, pitching a self-published book, and what to do if you’re dropped by an agency.
 

Annie Hwang of Folio Literary Management
12.13.17
A literary agent answers readers’ questions—from how seriously agents consider a writer’s previous sales to how to responsibly seek new representation.

Kirby Kim of Janklow & Nesbit Associates
4.12.17
A seasoned literary agent offers valuable counsel on when to query, how to keep revising, and whether horror fiction is a genre worth pursuing.

Anna Ghosh of Ghosh Literary
12.14.16
Anna Ghosh answers readers’ questions—from why poetry agents are seemingly nonexistent to whether or not it is possible to be “too young to write.”

Betsy Amster of Betsy Amster Literary Enterprises
10.14.15
The agent of authors such as María Amparo Escandón and Joy Nicholson offers advice on query letters, editing, and what not to do when submitting a manuscript.

Agents & Editors Recommend

A dependable source of professional and creative advice, Agents & Editors Recommend features anecdotes, insights, tips, recommended reading and viewing for writers, and more from leading agents and editors.

Explore the series

Danielle Svetcov of Levine Greenberg Rostan
4.15.15
Should you pay to have a manuscript edited beforehand? Are there benefits to querying via snail mail versus e-mail? Danielle Svetcov of Levine Greenberg Rostan answers readers’ questions about what (and what not) to do when trying to find an agent.

Meredith Kaffel Simonoff of DeFiore and Company
8.20.14
An agent representing authors such as CJ Hauser and Cecily Wong answers questions about writing in multiple genres, agents’ fees, and publishing work in online journals.

Amy Rennert of the Amy Rennert Agency
3.01.14
The agent of authors such as Diana Nyad and Herman Wouk answers questions about self-publishing, age restrictions, and working with an agent remotely.

Chris Parris-Lamb of the Gernert Company
10.06.13
Chris Parris-Lamb of the Gernert Company offers advice on submitting query letters and manuscripts, and when to embrace or eschew self-promotion.

Lucy Carson of the Friedrich Agency
9.01.13
Lucy Carson of the Friedrich Agency discusses e-book publishing, when to send a sample to an agent, and more.

Matt McGowan of Frances Goldin Literary Agency
5.01.13
Literary agent Matt McGowan, who represents Eula Biss, John D’Agata, Brian Evenson, and many others, answers writers’ most commonly asked questions.

Rebecca Gradinger of Fletcher & Company
10.17.12
Literary agent Rebecca Gradinger explains why writers need agents and offers tips about best practices for finding one.

Douglas Stewart of Sterling Lord Literistic
4.12.12
The agent of Jami Attenberg, David Mitchell, Carolyn Parkhurst, Matthew Quick, and others offers guidance about publishing credits, MFA programs, and unagented submissions.

Jenni Ferrari-Adler of Brick House Literary Agents
3.01.11
Does your book need to be finished before you seek representation? Do agents really read synopses? Agent Jenni Ferrari-Adler, whose clients include Lauren Shockey and Emma Straub, answers these questions and more.

Terra Chalberg of the Susan Golomb Literary Agency
10.15.10
When is the best time in your career to look for representation, and when should you call off an author-agent relationship? Terra Chalberg, whose clients include Lori Ostlund and Glenn Taylor, tackles these questions and more.

Jennifer Carlson of Dunow, Carlson & Lerner
8.11.10
The agent of authors such as Kevin Brockmeier and Marisa de los Santos offers her thoughts on self-publishing and what she looks for in the first five pages of a writing sample.

PJ Mark of Janklow & Nesbit Associates
5.01.10
The agent of authors such as Samantha Hunt, Dinaw Mengestu, and Josh Weil offers advice on shaping a query letter and when to follow up after pitching your book.

Katherine Fausset of Curtis Brown, Ltd.
3.01.10
Agent Katherine Fausset answers questions from readers about the agent’s role in submitting work to literary magazines and how writers can choose agents based on their client lists.
 

Agents & Editors: The Complete Series

Seventy-Eight Agents to Follow on Twitter

by

Staff

July/August 2017
6.14.17
In Print and Online

We did the work for you and found the most active and insightful agents to add to your Twitter feed. The seventy-eight listed below share with their followers upcoming pub dates, news, reading recommendations, and more. For more agents, visit our Literary Agents Database.

Noah Ballard                             @NoahBallard

Monika Woods                      @booksijustread

Ginger Clark                            @Ginger_Clark

Julie Barer                                        @juliebarer

Amelia Atlas                                 @ameliaatlas

Adam Eaglin                                        @aeaglin

Caroline Eisenmann           @CarolineMEisen 

Ross Harris                                    @rossharris1

Carrie Howland                 @ECarrieHowland 

Allison Hunter                      @AllisonSHunter 

Jeff Kleinman                             @FolioLiterary

Duvall Osteen                           @AragiAuthors

Renée Zuckerbrot                             @RZAgent

Danielle Svetcov                                @dsvetcov

Ayesha Pande                             @agent_ayesha

Alia Hanna Habib                         @AliaHanna

Alice Tasman                              @AliceTasman

Andrew Lownie                      @andrewlownie

Betsy Lerner                                @BetsyLerner

Brettne Bloom                                     @Brettne

Carly Watters                              @carlywatters

Carol Mann                       @carolmannagency

Chris Parris-Lamb                    @thegernertco 

Claudia Ballard                                         @wme

Curtis Russell                               @CurtisPSLA

Daniel Lazar                         @DanLazarAgent

David Haviland                       @davidhaviland

Deborah Schneider              @deborschneider

Brian DeFiore                                     @DeFiore

Dorian Karchmar              @DorianKarchmar

Elisabeth Weed                        @elisabethweed

Elyse Cheney                              @ElyseCheney

Emily Forland                           @EmilyForland

Emma Sweeney               @EmmaSweeneyESA

Emma Patterson                              @EmPat222

Farley Chase                                   @farleychase

Ryan Fischer-Harbage            @fischerharbage

Christy Fletcher                     @FletcherChristy

Gary Morris                               @garymmorris

Katie Grimm                                     @grimmlit

Jenni Ferrari-Adler               @JenFerrariAdler

Jessica Papin                                         @jkpapin

Joanne Wyckoff                      @JoanneWyckoff

Joy Harris                             @JoyHarrisAgency

Kate Garrick                                   @kategarrick

Katherine Fausset                                   @Kfauss

Kimberly Witherspoon                      @kwspoon

Laura Biagi                                     @LauraJBiagi

Laurie Abkemeier                @LaurieAbkemeier

Laura Dail                                                @LCDail

Liza Dawson                        @LizaDawsonAssoc

Lucy Carson                                 @LucyACarson

Mary Evans                                 @MaryEvansInc

Melissa Flashman                         @melflashman

Meredith Kaffel                                     @mere215

Miriam Altshuler                   @MiriamAltshuler

Peter Steinberg                         @PeterSteinberg1

Rayhané Sanders                      @rayhanesanders

Rena Rossner                                  @renarossner

Sarah Burnes                                  @sarahburnes

Samantha Shea                                       @sb_shea

Seth Fishman                              @sethasfishman

Stuart Krichevsky                                @skagency

Sarah Levitt                                    @slevittslevitt

Sarah Yake                                               @slyyake

Soumeya Bendimerad Roberts     @soumeya_b

Rachel Sussman                       @SussmanRachel

Sarah Bowlin                                        @svbowlin

Michelle Tessler                            @tessleragency

Bill Clegg                                 @TheCleggAgency

Tina Wexler                                    @Tina_Wexler

Uwe Stender                             @UweStenderPhD

Vicky Bijur                                                  @VBLA

Joseph Veltre                                                @veltre

Rachel Vogel                                  @Vogelrachelm

William Clark                                @wmclarkassoc

Zoë Pagnamenta                        @zoepagnamenta

 

 

We Mean Business: Twelve Agents Who Want to Read Your Work
Agents & Editors: The Complete Series
Agent Advice: The Complete Series

A Thing Meant to Be: The Work of a Book Editor

by

Rebecca Saletan

4.11.18
Online Only

The following essay was adapted from remarks given at Poets & Writers’ annual dinner, In Celebration of Writers, on March 28, 2018, in New York City.

In my senior year of college, having discovered that I generally liked working on other people’s prose a great deal more than my own, I confided to a professor that I was thinking of trying to become an editor. “Pretty thankless job,” she said. The truth is, despite its moments of frustration and overwhelm and failure, I have never found the job thankless.

More than anything, there is this: the sublime moment—and it never stops being sublime—when you get to attend, as beautiful, meaningful, and original work emerges in the world. When I gave birth to my daughters, one of my sisters-in-law said, “It is one of the rare experiences for which ‘miracle’ is not an overstatement.” It’s not an overstatement for the birth of art, either. What’s most miraculous is the “let there be” of it—the way a new and unique something yet again emerges from the wordless deep.

The sense is that the book is trying to communicate what it wants to become, how it wants to incarnate itself. Masha Gessen recently spoke of this process in an interview: “I know what my objectives are and I know what the topic is, and then I’m just reporting. I walk around for a bit, literally, bike and walk, and then suddenly, I get an idea of what it should be, what the structure is. I can’t tell you how I came up with this.” Peter Matthiessen thanked John Irving for his comments on the sprawling early draft of what would become his monumental Shadow Country back in “the book’s cretaceous days, when the whole was still inchoate, crude, and formless.” And when Matthiessen died, just before we at Riverhead had the precious honor of publishing his final book, Irving mourned the loss of “a friend I dared to show what I was up to, when I was still unsure of what it was.”

At its best—and it is often this good—editing means getting to be such a friend, and entering into that strange and almost primal process of divining the shape the work is trying to assume. It was Matthiessen himself who gave me my first experience of being taken seriously as an editor, back when I was an assistant to the formidable Jason Epstein, and Peter was working on a collection of stories. One day he asked if I would look at one he’d been laboring over. Something was hampering it, but he didn’t know what. I read it and instantly saw—or rather, felt—what was off: The story was constructed on a hinge, and the hinge was stuck, much as an actual hinge might be.

It’s as if writer and editor have their eyes not on each other but on the shape of the emergent work, and this angle of approach is wonderfully liberating, breaking down barriers and kindling an immediate intimacy that may be my favorite thing about my job. This past fall, I was invited to give a talk at a conference on Ivan Doig, the great memoirist and novelist of the West. I puzzled over what to say. Writers and editors don’t talk about what a work means, I realized, we talk about how it’s made. Ivan and I began with Bucking the Sun, a novel that opens with a couple found drowned in a truck at the bottom of the Missouri River. Revisiting our correspondence of twenty years ago in the online archive, I was struck by how unceremoniously we got down to business: The mystery of who these characters were was a thread that needed to be pulled more firmly through the entire book.

When I think about the writers and books I have worked with, it’s the dialogue about shape that I most remember. A draft of a story in which a kind of sonic boom goes off at the beginning demands an answering boom at the end. Or: Rather than trying to launch six complicated characters at the outset, how about introducing them one by one, like a juggler putting balls into the air? Perhaps not surprisingly, all my career I have been drawn to writing and writers who are structurally inventive and do not fit into easy categories: fiction/nonfiction, narrative/essay, poets and writers. I love that the very name of this organization allows for the reading that they are one and the same.

What took me much longer to recognize—and is I think less recognized generally—is that the boundary between the “creative” enterprise and the “business” of publishing is worth challenging too. If we keep our focus on the work itself, keep taking our inspiration from it rather than imposing a grid of conventional approaches and expectations on it—the publishing process becomes an extension of the creative moment that gave rise to the book itself. My mentors in this have been my colleagues. The art director, looking to create a jacket that will become the outward expression of a book’s inmost explosive self, runs around for weeks exploding her hands until she finds a photographer willing to let her throw colored dust all over his studio and photograph it. The production editor nerds out on finding the mot that does justice to a magnificent sentence. The publicity director dreams up a campaign that involves pet treats or murals. The shape of a powerful pitch for a book comes to an editor while commuting on her bike. The publisher keeps the whole enterprise aloft, sometimes tugging us back into orbit but also challenging us to boldly go where we haven’t before. When we are doing it right, the work we are trying to put into the world focuses and fuels us, and we recapitulate its Big Bang in a series of detonations all the way through the process.

When work like this goes out into the world—when it goes out into the world like this—I think it is not audacious to say that it becomes, as the phrase goes, an instance of the change we wish to see in the world. This is not only because of the impact it may have, as its fullest and most coherent self, shown in the brightest possible light, presented like nothing we have seen before but a thing necessary, meant to be. It is also because, in putting it into the world this way, we, with our writers, become a community functioning as we would have the world function.

 

Rebecca Saletan is vice president and editorial director of Riverhead Books, a Penguin Random House imprint. Over her thirty-five-year career in publishing, Saletan has worked with a wide range of authors including internationally best-selling novelist and essayist Mohsin Hamid; National Book Award-winning journalist and social critic Masha Gessen; and National Book Award-winning writer and environmentalist Peter Matthiessen. She received the 2018 Editor’s Award from Poets & Writers, Inc.

Rebecca Saletan (front left, seated) at Poets & Writers’ annual dinner with authors (clockwise from upper left) Garnette Cadogan, Mandy Aftel, Danzy Senna, Pitchaya Sudbanthad, Francisco Cantú, Casey Gerald, Yelena Akhtiorskaya, Lesley Nneka Arimah, Claire Vaye Watkins, and Anna Badkhen.

(Credit: Margarita Corporan)

Agents & Editors: A Q&A With Editor Janet Silver

by

Jofie Ferrari-Adler

July/August 2008
7.1.08
In Print and Online

Considering that it took Janet Silver only a few weeks to land a plum new job as
editor-at-large for Nan A. Talese’s imprint at Doubleday, perhaps it isn’t
worth going into the whole convoluted chain of events that resulted in her
ouster, back in January, from her position as vice president and publisher of
Houghton Mifflin, the venerable Boston-based house she’d headed since 2001. No
doubt it would be cleaner to avoid the subject altogether and talk instead
about her background (she was raised in South Orange, New Jersey, and educated
at Brown and the University of Chicago); the staggering list of authors she has
edited, including Jonathan Safran Foer, Jhumpa Lahiri, Tim O’Brien, Cynthia
Ozick, Philip Roth, Robert Stone, Natasha Trethewey, and John Edgar Wideman; or
her charming house in the woods in Concord, Massachusetts, where our
conversation took place.

After
all, maybe Silver was sacked after twenty-four years at Houghton for reasons
having nothing to do with the ambitions of a thirty-nine-year-old Irish
businessman named Barry O’Callaghan. But that seems unlikely. The facts are as
follows: O’Callaghan is one of the richest men in Ireland. Although his
background is in law, investment banking, and venture capitalism, in December
2006 his Dublin-based educational software company, Riverdeep, pulled off an
audacious, highly leveraged reverse takeover of Houghton Mifflin. After the
merger, he moved the new company’s official headquarters to the Cayman Islands
(always a promising sign). Then, seven months ago, O’Callaghan acquired another
piece of low-hanging publishing fruit, Harcourt, taking the next step in an
apparent attempt to build a publishing empire. In the fallout surrounding that
merger, Silver was one of several well-regarded veteran editors to be shown the
door.

Admittedly, it’s hard to summon up much outrage about
the conglomeration of American book publishers these days. Huge corporations
have been buying and selling them with abandon for the past five decades.
O’Callaghan is just the latest member of an elite fraternity whose top dog has
to be Rupert Murdoch (his News Corporation owns the numerous HarperCollins
imprints). Still, just as one can’t help feeling a chill to realize that
revenues generated by books like Brave New World, To Kill a Mockingbird, and A People’s History of the United States are paying the lighting bills over at Fox News,
O’Callaghan’s recent actions, and their consequences, are poignant reminders
that the media moguls who hold sway over today’s publishing houses tend to look—and,
more to the point, behave—less like Alfred Knopf or Bennett Cerf and more like
Gordon Gekko from Oliver Stone’s Wall Street. The problem is not so much that men like O’Callaghan
continue to buy publishing houses, but rather that they rarely care enough
about the work publishers do to hang on to them when it stops suiting their
bottom line. Which is about the time when people like Janet Silver and her
colleagues start losing their jobs—and their authors lose their most
passionate advocates.

If any of this keeps Silver up at night, she didn’t
let on during our conversation, in which she spoke candidly about what she looks for in
first novels and dispensed some useful advice for writers about agents. We
talked in her living room while her dog, Roxy, and her cat, Phoebe, lounged on
the floor beside the fireplace.

Tell me a
little about your background.
I grew up in
South Orange, New Jersey, which today has become a little like Brooklyn in that
a lot of people from publishing seem to live there and commute. When I was
growing up it was not like that at all. I went to college at Brown and graduate
school at the University of Chicago. It was when I was a graduate student at
Chicago that I began to realize I was more temperamentally inclined toward
editorial work than scholarship.

You were
studying English?
Yes. I was
actually on a track for a doctorate. But while I was in school I needed to
support myself. I got a job as the managing editor of this quarterly, Critical
Inquiry, which was one of the journals
published by the University of Chicago Press. This was in the mid-seventies,
late seventies. It was kind of wild. The journal did criticism in the arts, in
all of the arts, but primarily in literature. This was in the heyday of the
great deconstruction rage, so we were publishing the first translations of
essays by Derrida, for instance, and Lacan, and some essays by Jacques Barzun.
It was very, very intellectual. It was very abstract. But we were also
publishing the early essays by people like Skip Gates. I got to work with some
amazing writers, and we really did edit the pieces, because when you work for a
journal things have to be a particular length and they have to make a
particular point. A lot of the academic writers we worked with really welcomed
some input.

The
other nice thing about working for a journal—unlike working on a dissertation,
which is endless—is that there was an end product four times a year. It was
this thing that other people read. It was a way to be engaged in a cultural
conversation that seemed important—at the time, anyway. I loved the
interaction with the writers. I loved the opportunity to learn about the
production of a journal. We were a very small office. We did all of the
editing, all the copyediting, all the proofreading. It was this little
mini-education in a certain kind of publishing.

How did you
get from there to Houghton?
I was there for
five years, doing my course work and working full time. But before I finished,
my husband and I got married. He had finished his doctorate in philosophy and
was teaching and on the job market. This was a time when there were pretty much
no jobs unless you were willing to go from North Dakota to South Texas to
wherever. That wasn’t what he wanted to do. So, like many people with
doctorates in that era, he went to law school. As much as we both loved
Chicago, we also wanted to come back east. So we came back and he went to
Harvard Law School and I needed to work. The only skill I had was editing. I
started doing freelance work, some of it for the Museum of Fine Arts—I also
have a background in art history—and some of it for Houghton Mifflin. It just
sort of evolved and I began to work there full time.

What
was your position when you started at Houghton Mifflin?
Manuscript
editor. Some publishers used freelance copyeditors—this was 1984—but Houghton
always had an in-house group of people, whom they called manuscript editors,
who did copyediting and a lot of developmental work. It was a chance to get in
the door and begin to learn trade publishing from the ground up. I never did
the standard editorial assistant thing where you go up through the ranks that
way. When I was a manuscript editor, one of the earlier books I worked on was
[Margaret Atwood’s] The Handmaid’s Tale. Nan Talese was at
Houghton Mifflin at the time—so it feels like a nice symmetry that it’s come
full circle now.

Was there
somebody who taught you how to edit?
I pretty much
learned by doing it. To some degree I feel as though the opportunity to edit
articles first was a great way to start. It’s much smaller. It’s more
contained. You learn to focus on every line, every paragraph, and get that fine
detail down. I never thought of myself as a detail person, but when you start
working that way, you kind of become one. You are forced to slow down and not
only think about the larger argument and whether it’s flowing naturally, but
also to concentrate on a more micro level. To some degree, the authors teach
you. You make your mistakes, and boy, do they let you know it. But the other
thing is that, having spent a lot of time reading, you just naturally know if a
narrative is flowing well or if you’re stumbling over things and things don’t
seem entirely clear. When I was in graduate school, my concentration was in
fiction, so I naturally gravitated toward editing fiction more than other kinds
of narratives.

Were
there older people at Houghton who helped you make the transition to being an
acquisitions editor?
I was there so long I
kind of think of it in terms of eras. There was the Austin Olney-Nan
Talese era, which is what I came into when I joined. And that was kind of old
school. The nice thing was that there were editors who had too many books to
edit and really wanted additional help. So I was able to pick up some work that
I might not have had the chance to do otherwise. The next era was the Joe
Kanon-John Sterling era. That was when I really began to take on books of
my own, with John’s encouragement, probably four or five years into the job. I
was very fortunate because I did get the support of people who encouraged me to
go out on my own and acquire, and that doesn’t happen for everybody.

I never
thought of myself as particularly ambitious for myself, but more for my writers.
At a certain point I found that I became so invested in the books I was editing
that it felt like a loss to turn them over to other people. The longer I’d been
at the company and had a chance to see the way books were published, the more
opinionated I became about what to publish, especially what kinds of books to
publish. Houghton went through a lot of changes—grew and contracted, grew and
contracted—but the one thing that I always felt about the list was that it had
a certain kind of profile as being fairly conservative, especially in fiction—a
little sleepy. Some of Nan’s authors helped to change that profile: writers
like Margaret Atwood, Ian McEwan, Valerie Martin. The authors she was
publishing at Houghton are still the people she’s publishing today, which is
much to her credit. But it was a moment when the publishing world and the
readership were changing and evolving, and it seemed like there was room on the
Houghton list for different kinds of voices.

Like what?
More books by women.
More books by ethnic writers. One of the first novels I acquired was by a young
woman named Connie Porter, a young black woman who had graduated from the
[Louisiana State University] graduate writing program. She had written a first
novel called All-Bright Court, which was about a community of African
Americans who had migrated up from the South after World War II when there
seemed to be a lot of opportunity. The book was about this aspiring community
of black workers who came to find that the promises they were given really
didn’t come through. And that book is still in print. The wonderful thing about
it was that here was a young writer talking about a certain kind of community
and experience that wasn’t very well represented in the market.

Another
example is a collection of stories by a young woman named Carolyn Ferrell
called Don’t Erase Me. Carolyn comes from a mixed background.
Her mother is white and her father is black. The stories she wrote were very literary
and ambitious and challenging in a particular way. Edward P. Jones is a writer
whom I might compare her to. That book won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. I
just felt there was a need to hear from those kinds of voices—and that
Houghton should be supporting writers like that.

Where
does that interest come from for you?
I don’t know. Maybe it’s
just the idea that in every era there are the voices you haven’t heard from
before. In the 1940s and 1950s it was Jewish American writers. The thing that
makes reading interesting is hearing from different voices and different
perspectives, especially in fiction. And the book that probably typifies that—the
most symbolically important of the books I acquired with that mission—was
Jhumpa Lahiri’s short story collection Interpreter of Maladies.

How
did she come to your attention?
It
was a combination of things. She had just graduated from the Boston University
writing program. She had a couple of small publications, and she did have an
agent—who’s no longer an agent, Cindy Klein—who was with Borchardt. I think
Cindy sent me four or five stories. I pretty much knew right away that she was
a writer I really wanted to publish. But I also knew about her through Peter Ho
Davies, who called to tell me I was going to be seeing this collection and this
was somebody I should really pay attention to. And she was also one of the
writers who was on Katrina Kenison’s radar for the Best American Short Stories,
of which I was the in-house editor for many years starting in the eighties. I
met with Jhumpa and talked with her about her writing and her ideas for the
stories and the collection. We were very much on the same wavelength in terms
of my editorial suggestions. And one of the great benefits Houghton could offer
at the time was the opportunity to publish in paperback original.

Let’s
talk about that.
Mariner had just
started, and the fact was that it was really hard to sell short story
collections in hardcover. A lot of publishers were shying away from them unless
they came with a novel that you could publish first and then have the stories
trail along afterward. I think the opportunity to publish in paperback original
really made a lot of sense at the time, although when Mariner started it sort
of defied conventional wisdom. A number of publishers had tried that format,
and the books being published in that format got a reputation for having a
particular persona. You know—edgy, downtown.

Like
the books published by Gary Fisketjon’s Vintage
Contemporaries.
Exactly. But in its
first year Mariner published a novel by Penelope Fitzgerald, who was in her seventies
at the time, called The Blue Flower, which became a phenomenon. I think the fact
that it was published in paperback original made a huge difference because it
enabled people to take a chance. That’s the beauty of it. A lot of publishers
had published Fitzgerald’s work in hardcover in the States with very little
success. But here was a way to say to readers and bookstores, “You’re going to
read these fabulous reviews, and it’s twelve dollars, so take a chance.” And
the publicity department waged a really aggressive campaign with reviewers,
which I think was important. Because that was the other thing about publishing
in paperback original—they were seen as second-class citizens and not
necessarily to be taken as seriously by reviewers. We made a point of saying,
“No, this is really just a way to reach readers by making the price point more
accessible.”

This was also the moment
at which booksellers were switching over to computerized inventory so that
ordering was happening based on the sales of the writer’s previous book. Well,
if you can increase sales simply by lowering the price—if you can double or
triple or quadruple the sales you would anticipate in hardcover—then you can
establish a base from which a writer can grow.

And now when
we’re talking to writers and agents, making the argument for paperback
original, one of the books we always point to is Interpreter of Maladies.
Right.

But there
wasn’t any resistance at the time?
It was a short
story collection by an unknown writer.

And nobody
knew it would win the Pulitzer Prize.
Right, but it
really began to sell well before it won the prize. You have to remember that
when I bought the book she hadn’t published in the New Yorker yet. They bought two stories shortly after I
acquired it, and she won the New Yorker‘s first fiction prize at the end of that year. When the book came out
it got great reviews—that always helps—and it won the PEN/Hemingway Award. So
by the time she won the Pulitzer there were already something like forty-five
thousand copies in print. Then there were a lot of copies in print. Of course
it’s hugely gratifying to find an author like her. I wasn’t by any means the
only one to discover her, but I was first.

So
the decision about paperback original just made a lot of sense. It made sense
to her. Her agent was probably hearing
from every publisher, “Well, short story collections are really hard.” And we
were saying, “No, we know how to do it, and the first printing will not be twenty-five-hundred copies. It’s going to be at
least fifteen or it doesn’t make any sense.” So that argument made a lot of
sense to her and to her agent. But it was a two-book contract. We had the novel
under contract too.

But even
after all the successes, authors and agents still resist paperback original. Do
you think it will ever take over like it has in Europe?
Well, Europe is
certainly way ahead of us. I like to think that Mariner set a precedent that
other publishers followed so that the whole idea of paperback original became much
more appealing. I guess the problem now is that the economics are even more
challenging. The big economic problem with paperback original is that it costs
just as much to publish and promote the book, but the revenues are half—for
everybody. So you have to make sure it’s the right book, that you’re not
flooding the market. I think it’s important for publicity departments to
continue to wage that campaign with reviewers. But I don’t think it matters as
much for reviewers anymore. I think there was something about the uniqueness of
the Mariner list when it started—with writers like Penelope Fitzgerald and
James Carroll, who had just won the National Book Award—that gave it a certain
kind of profile. So while the world at large may not have known what a Mariner
book was, booksellers and reviewers did. Now that it’s more common, it doesn’t
have any particular cachet or imply a particular kind of publishing.
Unfortunately, that means it’s just like every other book. So it’s complicated.
I don’t know where it’s going. I think Morgan [Entrekin] did something very
interesting with Man Gone Down, by
upping the production values, with the French flaps and the rough front, to
make the book itself a kind of object. Today the trick is to distinguish these
books. Once the distinction disappears, it’s going to become harder for
everybody.

When you
became publisher of the company in 2001, you became Philip Roth’s editor.
Philip started
at Houghton with Goodbye, Columbus in
1959, and after being with many other publishers over a long career he came
back to Houghton with Sabbath’s Theater, when Joe Kanon was the publisher. Roth always worked with the
publisher. After Joe left, his editor became Wendy Strothman. When Wendy left,
I became his editor. That was when we had just published The Human
Stain. He was definitely at a high point.
And what a privilege to be able to work with him. It was fun because my parents
grew up in Newark and I grew up with Philip Roth in many ways. He was of my
parents’ generation, grew up in the same town, went to the same high schools,
and also sort of made that same migration out of Newark and into the suburbs,
to the South Orange and Maplewood area. So it was a world that I had not only
been reading about in Roth’s novels for all these years, but also kind of knew
intimately.

I imagine it
must have been incredibly intimidating to suddenly be Roth’s editor.
Well, nobody
“edits” Philip Roth. It was a real privilege, I would say, but also a
responsibility. The biggest responsibility was to make sure that he was
published as well as possible—and to be published without a hitch. Philip Roth
is extremely knowledgeable about publishing, and very deliberate, and very
attentive to detail. My job was to make sure all those details fell into place.

The first time
you get a Roth novel in manuscript it’s very, very exciting. The thing comes to
you. It’s complete. And you’re one of the first people to have a chance to read
it. So there are no preconceived ideas about the book, no reviews to sway you
one way or another. The first book I read in manuscript was The Plot Against
America. And when I read that manuscript, I
just knew it was going to be his best-selling book. I just knew it.

Because of
the hook?
Because of the
hook and because I think he just hit a nerve. He hit a nerve and an anxiety in
the American psyche at the right moment. He is so attuned to the American
psyche. And the fact is that he didn’t, as he said, write the book to make any
particular political statement about current politics. He really did want to
write about that era. But what he discovered in that alternative history was a
way to touch a nerve that’s very raw in our generation.

He
is a very private person, and he didn’t really talk much about some of his
previous books, but we were able to convince him to do some publicity for that
book, and to his credit, I think he actually enjoyed doing it. So Katie Couric
interviewed him and he was on Terry Gross, who had interviewed him before. That
was an opportunity for us. His willingness to talk about those books—he did a
little bit for The Human Stain—really
made all the difference. People want to hear from him, and his generosity in
doing that was tremendous. Somebody said to him, “How come you decided to give
interviews about Plot?” He said,
“Well, my publisher asked me to do interviews and I said okay.” It’s much more
complicated than that, but I think he was able to talk about the book on his
own terms, and what more could any reader want than to hear him talk about a
book on his own terms?

When
we published American Pastoral, we had
Roth come to sales conference. I’m not sure it was that book, but I think so.
And this was amazing for the reps. I mean, to have Philip Roth at the sales
conference? Edna O’Brien had come in the day before, and if you’ve ever
encountered Edna O’Brien, she’s very dramatic and theatrical and just has this
regal quality to her, and she swept in and gave a marvelous speech and left.
The next day Roth came in. Everyone was so nervous about meeting him. But he strolled into the room, and rather
than standing up and giving a speech, he sat down at the table—this open
square, the way a sales conference goes—and he talked a little about the book
and then asked if people had questions for him. Nobody was going to ask him a
personal question about something he didn’t want to talk about—he knew he
could trust us that way. The [Barnes & Noble] rep raised his hand and said,
“I just want to thank you for putting New Jersey on the map.” And we all
laughed and from there he answered every single question he got about the book,
about his writing career…. Someone asked him if he had other people read his
manuscripts, and he said there were six people in American who he really
trusted to read his work—he doesn’t read reviews, that’s not important to him—and
the opinions of those six people were the only opinions that mattered to him. I
just thought he was so thoughtful and gracious and generous in the way he
answered and responded to every single question. I think it made such a difference.

Do you have
any insight into this amazing productivity—both in quantity and in quality—late
in life? It’s kind of unusual.
I think that a
lot has come together in his writing. There’s a particular fury that’s always
been a part of his work, but at this time in his life he’s been able to focus
it on a large canvas. When he accepted the National Book Foundation’s
distinguished medal, he talked about having the great American writers as his
models. By that he meant he didn’t necessarily think of himself as a Jewish
writer—that he’s not necessarily Saul Bellow or Bernard Malamud or the other
writers he’s usually grouped with. This is speculation, but at this point in
his life maybe he sees his own writing in an even larger way—more in the
context of the history of American writing—and that’s partly where some of
these more recent novels come from.

You also work
with Cynthia Ozick. Tell me about your experience with her.
She’s a delight
in every way. Cynthia was at Knopf for many years. She got a new agent, Melanie
Jackson, and I think that she was ready for a change—some writers just need a
boost. She’s a writer who I’d been reading for years and who I adore and who I
think both in fiction and nonfiction—especially as an essayist—is without
peer. She writes a better essay than any American writer. She is a public
intellectual, in a way. I don’t always agree with her. But she’s so deeply
engaged in this cultural conversation—like it or not, in terms of her opinions—and
she cares so deeply about American culture and what’s happened to it and where
it’s going, and she’s so eloquent, that you must read her.

But
she’s also a great fiction writer in the tradition of Henry James and my
favorite nineteenth-century Victorians. When I found out that she was looking
to move—I had already brought over Anita Desai, who is also represented by
Melanie Jackson—I immediately expressed my interest. Melanie sent me the
novel, Heir to the Glimmering World,
which was untitled at the time. Actually, it was called The Bear Boy because one of the characters is based on the real
life model for Christopher Robin in the Winnie-the-Pooh books. I started reading this novel and I was just
blown away. I said to myself, “It’s her Middlemarch.” And, in fact, the main character is named Dorothea,
and there’s this whole family drama that takes place in the Bronx. It’s George
Eliot in the Bronx! When I had my first conversation with Cynthia, I said to
her, “It’s your Middlemarch,” and
she knew that I understood where she was coming from. We had the best meeting.
It was a love-fest all around.

I
just felt that she was so important that she had to be published at the top of
the list. She just had to be. Sometimes when you love a writer, and an agent
brings you a book, it’s just not the right book to move. You really want to be
able to make a difference. Boy did I
think this was the book where we could publish it in a different way and make a
difference. All of her books had a similar look, a kind of “Cynthia Ozick
look,” and instead of doing that we gave it this bright cover with foil
fireflies on the front and a title that was unlike any Cynthia Ozick title
you’ve ever heard before. We got her to meet booksellers, which she had never
done. She had never had a chance to go out and meet booksellers. Lots of people
had seen her on panels and in that context, but they had not been able to sit
down at dinner with her and just talk. She is just the most delightful dinner
companion you can imagine. She truly is so generous and so deeply interested in
what people have to say.

You also edit Tim O’Brien. Was he
always a Houghton author?
Tim is one of a number of authors
who left Houghton and came back. I can’t take credit for all of them by any
means, but a lot of them stayed under my direction. Roth came back, obviously.
Bob Stone came back. Tim O’Brien came back. He had been brought to Houghton by
Sam Lawrence, the legendary Sam Lawrence. After Sam died, John Sterling became
his editor. About the time that Houghton published In the Lake of the Woods, John went off to start up Broadway Books. Tim went
with John. As sad as it was, I love to see that. I love to see an author be
really loyal to an editor. But he just never felt the same about the house. And
at a certain point he came back and talked to our CEO, Nader Darehshori at the
time, and said he wanted to come back to Houghton Mifflin. I met with him and
Wendy Strothman, who was the publisher at the time. We had this great lunch,
and he said to me, “I want to come back and I want you to be my editor.” How
gratifying is that? That’s pretty great.

We
just have a truly wonderful relationship. I think writing this last novel, July,
July, was very hard for him. He’s gone
through so many changes in his life—he moved to Texas and got married and has
two children. But all this time, and especially when we were working on this
last novel, which evolved from a collection of short stories into a novel,
we’ve just had such a wonderful back and forth, and I’ve also been able to get
a sense of his own ambition and his own frustration with being boxed in as a
writer who’s expected to produce a certain work, always about Vietnam. The
Things They Carried will always be the book
he’s known for. It just will. But, much to his credit, he really wanted to do
more than that, and always has. He has always sort of tested that, and I admire
that tremendously. His writing is so complex and so edgy, in a way, that I
think people could relate to it in war stories but it’s more unexpected when it
comes to other kinds of stories. That’s been a real tension in his work for a
long time. But he’s working on a new book now, I’m happy to say.

I’m curious
about your transition from editor in chief to publisher. First of all, what is
the job of the editor in chief in your mind?
I can only talk about
myself—I think it’s different at different houses—but in my mind it’s really
to guide the editorial group and to encourage editors to grow in their own
ways. I became editor in chief at a time when the editorial ranks were really
depleted. There had been a lot of change at Houghton, after having stability
for literally generations. We were bought by this French water processing
company, Vivendi, which had aspirations to take over the world. They bought us
and sold us very quickly, so there was a lot of turmoil.

When
Wendy Strothman became publisher, her background had been at a university press
and then at Beacon Press. She had a strong affinity for books on social change
and felt that Houghton could be doing more of that, which we did, with some
success, but not with the kind of breadth that I felt the list really needed.
But she was able to help me focus the list in a way to return it to its real
strengths—rather than trying to be all publishers to all people and trying to
compete with much larger houses with much bigger resources in all of the same
categories. My feeling, and I had her support, was to really focus the list on
areas that would sell over time, and to focus on narrative nonfiction in areas
like science and history and biography that Houghton had a strong background
in. Actually, Houghton was less known for science—we had been known for
natural history—but I felt that you had to grow organically, and the natural
way to grow out from natural history was to publish more science. So I wanted
to hire a science editor. I wanted to find a history editor. My role was to
find specialists who could really speak to authors in their own language.
That’s one way of being convincing when you have more limited resources: to
find the most brilliant editors, with a deep knowledge of a subject area and
experience editing those kinds of books, and to say to an agent and an author,
“Let’s get these two together. Let’s have a conversation.”

Eamon
Dolan is a great example. There’s someone who now, at a young age, has become a
very legendary editor. Eamon was known for a certain kind of narrative book.
But Houghton published sports books, and what did Eamon bring us? He brought us
the best of sports. He brought Buzz Bissinger and Three Nights in August. I remember when he brought that book to the acquisitions
committee, which includes sales, marketing, and all of that. The sales people
sort of shook their heads. “Oh, it’s regional.” This was before Friday
Night Lights became a movie and a TV show
and popular in that way. Eamon said he didn’t think it was regional. I didn’t
think so either. So sometimes you defy the internal wisdom. Eamon also found
Eric Schlosser and Fast Food Nation.
Again, there were some in-house doubters who said, “It’s a magazine article. Is
this a book that’s going to sell over time? Isn’t it all about the current
moment?” But Eamon was convinced, and he convinced others, and he was right. So
that’s what you do as a publisher. You find the best talent and you let them
shine.

Talk
me through how you decide how much to pay for a first novel.
It’s partly enthusiasm
in the house. It’s the uniqueness of the voice. It’s passion. But unfortunately
it’s also “Who does this remind you of who has sold really well?” It’s all of
those things, and there’s no one way to decide. When Jonathan Safran Foer’s
novel came to us, Eric Chinski was the editor at the time. He got that
manuscript around to people so quickly, and so many readers in-house instantly
knew that this was something very special. That was an investment unlike any we
had made in a first novel before. I can tell you—I was the editor in chief at
the time and Wendy Strothman was the publisher—that she was nervous about it.
But she also saw what was going on in-house. She saw how many different readers
were responding to it, and not just in editorial, but in sub-rights, in
publicity, in marketing, in sales. And not everybody agreed. There were
definitely naysayers, which is the best way to go about it. You want people to
love it or hate it—mediocrity is the thing that you should pass up. But the
people who adored it were so passionate that she was willing to take a very big
flyer, and it was certainly worth it. It was a great bet in the end. It was
also something that allowed us to push a little bit on the kinds of fiction
that Houghton did, not to have a reputation for doing only one kind of thing in
fiction.

One of the nice things
about the era in which we were publishing writers like Jonathan, and building
writers like Richard Dawkins, is that it was very much a group effort. As a
publisher, you want to encourage your editors to work really closely with
marketing and publicity, and to bring the author in as well. One of the things
that we’ve all learned in publishing is that the authors know their audiences
very well. We want to have them participate as part of the conversation.

That seems to
have become increasingly important over the last decades. How did that evolve,
from your perspective?
It’s happened in
different ways. First, it happened with the book tour. Today the book tour has
become less and less productive for some authors—so now we have the book tour plus media. But I think publishers also have found that
there are special interest groups for particular books that their authors are
aware of, and that that kind of micro-marketing—whether it’s regional
marketing or a medical group or something else—can be really effective. I’m
thinking about Jacki Lyden’s memoir, Daughter of the Queen of Sheba, which was a great success for us. This was a very
compelling memoir about her mother’s manic-depression. Since it was published,
Jacki has really been on the circuit. She talks to support groups,
psychological associations, groups that work with families who have
manic-depression in their families. She was aware of some of that in advance,
so we were able to think of different ways to approach the promotion of the
same book.

More
and more, publishers are looking for nonfiction ways of talking about fiction.
You have to find new ways to interest people. You have to get them to pick up
the book. If one of the ways to do that is to find an extra-literary element to
talk about, and if the author can do some of that talking and not just the
publisher, it makes a big difference.

You’ve never
worked in New York. Was that a conscious decision?
No. I made my
home here, and I was very lucky because I started building a list at a moment
when it was still not difficult to do that—there was still enough publishing
in Boston that it wasn’t an outpost. Little, Brown was still here in addition
to Beacon and all the university presses. There was a real publishing community
that doesn’t exist as much anymore.

Still, I
would imagine there are advantages to being in Boston now.
Well, that’s
what we all say. Everybody has always said that the great advantage of being in
Boston is that you’re not so much in the center of the hype. It’s a little bit
easier to have some perspective. And to some extent it’s true. If you’re not
always talking to the same people in the same small publishing community, I
think you don’t get quite as caught up in the machinery. Houghton really had to
think about distinguishing itself from the rest of the publishing community in
order to attract the best authors. So, one way you do that is to say that it
has this long, distinguished tradition with a vision that’s outside the New
York publishing community. But I think the main advantage is that it’s a very
sane life. It’s a wonderful place to live. And there’s a kind of intellectual
energy because of all the universities, a kind of cultural energy around you
that’s really fabulous.

Which is a
nice segue to talking about poetry.
My great love.

Yeah?
Yes, it is.

Were you
always editing poetry?
I started
editing poetry pretty early on at Houghton. We used to have a fellowship, a
poetry contest, and as soon as I came on I knew I wanted to be one of the
judges for that. Peter Davison was the poetry editor at the time. Houghton had
this long history of publishing poetry, but one way of bringing on new writers
in addition to Galway Kinnell and Donald Hall and the Houghton stable of
writers was to find new talent through this annual contest. I became involved
in judging it, and one of the early winners—maybe even the first year I was at
Houghton—was Andrew Hudgins for a collection called After the Lost War, which is about the Civil War. I just loved having a
chance to be engaged with those writers, so I copyedited that book. I
copyedited Tom Lux and Rodney Jones and some of the other writers who were there
at the time.

Peter
was a great supporter of poetry and a poet himself, which maintained a certain
profile for the list. But from where I sat we were really just publishing one
poet at a time rather than having an actual poetry program. So at the point when
I could make a difference, when I became the editorial director and then the
editor in chief and the publisher, I wanted to expand the list, to bring on
some different kinds of poets, and also to try to engage the rest of the house
more. It’s so hard for a trade house to publish poetry if it’s just one book at
a time. But if you can go to a reviewer with a whole campaign for the house’s
poets, three or four on a list, and you can advertise them together, you can
get more attention and spread the costs over several books. I think they just
needing some nurturing and attention and a sense that marketing and publicity
were behind them.

What other
things did you do?
I hired Michael
Collier, who is the head of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. First I brought
Michael to Houghton as a poet, and then the busier I got and the more I had
need for somebody else to manage the program as it evolved and developed, I
felt that Michael would be just the right person for that. Poetry is such a
small world and there are so many egos involved that you need someone to manage
it who is just so open-minded and generous. As the head of Bread Loaf, he’s
used to dealing with a wide array of writers and personalities. He also has
impeccable taste. Another nice thing about having Michael come on is that he
was able to really edit the manuscripts—I didn’t have time to do that anymore—and
to keep the poets in the loop about other book that were coming out and to
foster a sense of community among the Houghton poets.

One
of the other ways in which I worked with Michael was to take on the publication
of the winners of the Bakeless Prize, which is awarded by Bread Loaf annually.
Houghton would publish the winners in paperback original in Mariner. One of the
earliest winners was Spencer Reece for his collection The Clerk’s Tale—the judge was Louise Glück—and this was just a
fabulous collection. This is another example of a way in which you can talk
about poetry in the same way you can talk about fiction, with a nonfiction
hook. The Clerk’s Tale was an
obvious allusion to Chaucer, but Spencer himself had a wonderful story. He was
a clerk at Brooks Brothers in Florida. That’s what he did for a living. After
he won the prize, Michael was able to send the poems to Alice Quinn, and she
loved them and published the entire title poem on the back page of the New
Yorker. I think that was unprecedented. So
here was a way to launch a poet with a prize-winning collection and to talk
about his work in ways that could attract popular attention. It was always
about quality, but it was also about good publishing—finding ways to grow the
poetry list and bring attention to it.

As
you’ve read first novels and story collections over the years, have you noticed
any common mistakes that beginning authors tend to make? I’d like to get a
sense of how you evaluate first fiction.
The one thing that every
aspiring novelist and story writer should know is that it’s really about personal
taste. So much depends on taste. People always talk about the pros and cons of
creative writing programs. It’s a little clichéd now to say that there’s an
identifiable “writing program style,” but there kind of is. It can be
solipsistic, it can be dialogue based. I do think that some of the work coming
out of those programs is being published too early. I find that the best
writers, the most ambitious writers, are the greatest readers, and not just of
contemporary fiction, but of classic fiction.

There are a couple of
things I see in first fiction that always tell me something is not for me. The
first is usually in fiction by young women. There will be a young female
protagonist with a vaguely artistic temperament who goes to New York to do
something. At some point, usually about page ten, she looks in the mirror and
describes herself. And you see this device in many wonderful novels—this is
the way the author’s going to let the reader know what the narrator or main
character looks like—but now you just see it too much. So I usually get to
that on page ten and say, “Not interested.”

The
other is that you’re only allowed one dream per novel. Because it’s too easy.
It’s sort of like looking in the mirror—you get to know something about the
main character’s fears and inhibitions or whatever because it all came out in a
dream. If there’s more than one dream, I think, “Oh, wow, that’s just too
easy.”

What
about the opposite? What are you always looking for in a new writer?
I tend to like
character-driven fiction by writers who are sort of pushing their own ambition
and their own vision. Someone like Peter Ho Davies, who has this marvelous
background. He can write about his Welsh heritage or his Malaysian heritage—and
sometimes the two meet—but there’s always a strong sense of history. In his
story collection The Ugliest House in the World, there’s a central
story called “A Union,” which is about the Welsh mining strikes. But it was
also about a marriage. And I just loved the way these characters were set in
time—which is not to say that I like historical fiction, because I don’t
especially—but I really do like to know that the author has a sense of
history, so there’s a context and a richness, a textural kind of context.
Peter’s stories take you all over the world, but they also are very grounded in
his sensibility.

I
also like when a writer can write all different kinds of characters. Back in
the nineties we published a story collection called The Coast of Good
Intentions by Michael Byers. He was a Seattle-based
writer who now lives in Michigan. And he could write from the perspective of an
eighteen-year-old immigrant living in Seattle as easily as a twelve-year-old
girl or a forty-five-year-old man or an elderly woman. That flexibility, the
ability to inhabit a character so fully, to make them totally believable on the
page, is something I really look for.

Tell me about
a particularly memorable editing experience.
Peter Ho Davies
comes to mind. The greatest thing for an editor is when you read a manuscript,
you give some comments, and then the author goes off and does something
completely different from what you expected, but it’s brilliant and wonderful.
With some of Peter’s stories, especially that one I was just describing, I gave
him some comments, and the story came back about three times as long. So there
was this kind of ebullient response from him—a kind of magnanimous sense of possibility. You could see him sort of stretching toward a novel
in that experience.

How many
times do you read a manuscript you’re editing?
Quite a few.
When I first read a manuscript, I feel like I have to read it all the way
through without putting my pencil down, and then you make notes and go back
through and make more specific comments. Then you get a revision and you have
to do the same thing all over again. So I probably read every manuscript two or
three times. Sometimes, if you’ve been through enough drafts of a book, you get
confused. You forget if something was in this draft or a previous draft, you
lose track of what’s been dropped. When I was editing Jonathan’s second book, Extremely
Loud and Incredibly Close, there was this
line in the beginning where Oskar was talking about his grandmother—they
needed to get somewhere—and she says, in this perfect Jewish grandmother kind
of way, something about how she believes in God but she does not believe in taxis.
In a subsequent version of the manuscript that line got dropped, and it stuck
in my mind, and when I realized it wasn’t there, I thought, “I loved that line.
Put it back in!” So he did, just for me, I think.

I find that the best writers, the most ambitious writers, are the greatest readers, and not just of contemporary fiction, but of classic fiction.
page_5: 

The last
person I interviewed was lamenting that editors aren’t allowed to go to sales
conference anymore to communicate their enthusiasm in person. As a publisher,
what do you think of that?
Well, there are
economic factors, and I know that every house does things differently. But I
think it’s so important that every editor, no matter how much access you have
physically to the sales reps or to anybody else, thinks like a publisher. By
that I mean that every single book needs support, whether it’s getting the
right blurbs or getting in touch with a particular rep and saying, “Take a look
at this one.”

One
of the things that I did throughout my career was to make a point of visiting
every territory, getting out of the house and going around with the reps to
meet with booksellers, to the degree that they were able to give me some time.
Not so much to sell, more to just make personal contact and talk about
publishing in general, to talk about the obstacles, to say, “Well, if you loved
this, you’re going to love that.” I had a wonderful experience at Tattered
Cover one time. It was in the morning, before the store opened, and it was just
me and Margaret Maupin and the staff. I brought a bunch of books, and I said,
“Here are the stories behind these
books.” Here’s why an editor acquired something, how it came about. Getting to
tell those behind-the-books stories, and having that personal contact, not only
with the buyer but with the clerks on the floor, the people who talk to each
other all day, was just something I enjoyed. I learned so much from talking to booksellers. It was a complete
education. Every editor should spend time talking to booksellers.

Yet that
doesn’t happen much.
No, and it’s too
bad. I think people get stuck in their
offices. I really do. I think it’s so great to get out of the office.

Why don’t
publishers make them get out of the office?
People have time
constraints. Booksellers have time constraints. I also think that so much is
just too managed, that publishers may be a little bit too cautious about
sending people out. I don’t know. That’s my sense of it, that, “Oh, who knows
what’s going to happen in that exchange.” And the sales force has to be on
board for it too. The sales rep doesn’t want the editor walking in and stepping
all over his territory, literally. It’s a delicate thing to do, but I think it
really helps everybody if it can happen, if there’s more of that contact.

Speaking of
bookselling, I’m sure you’ve spent a lot of time thinking about returns. Could
the system ever change, without destroying booksellers and their ability to
take a chance on something?
I think it’s
changing itself. Both the wholesalers and the retailers are taking fewer books
up front. They just are. That’s a reality of the business: It’s becoming more
of a wait-and-see business and fewer risks are being taken. That’s just
something that publishers are going to have to figure out how to manage. It’s
managing inventory. It’s making sure that you can ride a wave when it starts to
build—when a book is taking off—but before it crests. There needs to be
really good communication between the booksellers and the reps. Part of the
problem is that people are overstretched. There are just not enough people in
marketing and publicity to go around, and the reps have so many books in their
bags. What I hate to see is for the small books not to get a chance, because
every publisher has had the experience of the book they least expected—maybe somebody did, but not the whole house—just selling and
selling and making the year. Those little surprises are so important, and you
want to make room for them. You want to allow them to happen. Maybe they take
more work than they used to. A lot of it is just luck and…you know, Oprah.

The
computerized systems that bookstores use to track sales is also something
you’ve seen evolve.
Yes, exactly.
This whole conversation is really about that. It’s about how few risks
booksellers can take, are willing to take, and how much they’re ordering up
front. But I’m probably naively optimistic about this. People go into
bookselling because they love books, and they still love finding new things.
They love making discoveries. And the sales reps can be really wonderful in
helping to do that. I think it’s fabulous that they have the reps’ picks at BEA—again,
as long as it’s not entirely orchestrated. I don’t like to see everything sort
of programmed in advance, where what the reps get to say is only what has been
agreed upon in-house because these are the books that must sell. I think every rep should have the opportunity to
say, “Here’s this little one that I’m hunchy about.”

Of the
changes that you’ve seen in the last thirty years, what would you say is the
single most significant?
It’s hard to
say. It’s really the confluence of so many different things. I mean, it’s the
rise of the chains and Internet selling…. It’s got to be the computer in every
way that you can imagine. The way it now manages inventory and selling. But I
also think there are some things that have been consistently wonderful, that
some things have not changed.

Like what?
Editors still
have the opportunity to be creative, to test their own talent, to try to find
new things and not always to do the same thing. That’s been true all along. The
other thing that hasn’t changed is that in every era you can imagine, in my
thirty years, someone has always been saying that publishing is in crisis. When
I was cleaning out my files, I came across this article by Fran Kiernan, who
was an editor at Ticknor and Fields—an imprint that was relaunched and folded
in my time at Houghton Mifflin. The article was called “The Great Publishing
Crash of 1989.” I looked at that and said to myself, “This industry loves a crisis. What would we do without a crisis? We must
have one to thrive.”

Maybe
it’s worse now than it ever was, but everybody thinks their own time is worse
than it ever was. I really believe that. Publishing is in trouble as much as
every industry is in trouble. The economy may be worse than it was in 1989, but
I’m not so certain. And for all of the change, there will always be blockbusters,
there will always be bodice-rippers, there will always be literary fiction.
There just will.

If
you could snap your fingers and change one thing about the publishing industry,
what would it be?
I would say the emphasis
on high advances. There’s so much risk—huge risk—that comes with huge
advances, and so much distortion of the value of a particular work based on how
much is paid. I think that if there were more opportunity for editors to take
some risks at a lower level, that there would be more opportunity to continue
to publish smaller books because you wouldn’t see disappointment based on how
high the advance was. I think that drives so many other things. When a book
doesn’t do as well as expected, it sometimes makes the relationship between the
author and the editor complicated. Of course everybody wants a million dollars,
but I don’t necessarily think that’s always the best thing.

How did we get to the current situation? Was it the crazy
paperback auctions in the old days?
Beats me. I really don’t know. I don’t think that agents are
evil, but I do think that that’s certainly been a very big factor—having
agents with reputations for selling books for a lot of money. You know,
whenever you get a Brockman project, for example, it’s going to be expensive.

Tell
writers one thing about agents that they don’t know but should.
That they can ask a lot
of questions; that they should ask a lot of questions. I think that writers, especially
first-time writers, sometimes feel as though, “Well, whatever the agent says.
Of course the agent knows best.” But in the same way that I think authors
should be having conversations and asking a lot of questions of editors, they
should ask potential agents, “Okay, whom do you represent? Which houses do you
work with? Which editors do you like? How do you go about deciding where you’re
going to send something?” I’m just astonished again and again when I talk to
writers at writing programs that they don’t know they can ask those questions.

So
you think it’s healthy for aspiring writers to take an active interest in
understanding the publishing industry?
I do. Well, it can be.
What you want, all around, is for expectations to match, and I guess it can be
kind of depressing for an aspiring writer to find out too much about the
industry, because it’s a tough business. But I think being more educated is
always better than being less educated. It shouldn’t mean that an author thinks
they know better than their editor or agent, but just to know something about
the way things work. I think it’s important.

How
are you feeling about what you’ve just been through at Houghton?
I’m very much looking
forward to starting my new job. It’s a huge change, of course,
because I was at the same place for all those years. But that’s so unusual in
this industry. I was very fortunate to be able to build a personal list and to
create an editorial group that could publish so many exciting books, and that
is a wonderful legacy to leave behind. Now I can turn some of that energy back
toward my own list, which I had not been able to do for quite a while. When
you’re a publisher, you just can’t. I acquired fewer and fewer books the bigger
and bigger my job got. I’m not expecting to start acquiring like crazy, but I
am excited to be able to focus my energies on individual writers and how best
to support them over time. Just to publish any one book particularly well is an
exciting challenge. Having known Nan all these years makes it very comfortable.
I think her reputation for excellence and quality and sticking with writers
over the long term makes it a really nice fit. I was very deliberate in making
a decision to go to a place where I felt that my authors would be comfortable
and I wouldn’t need to do any convincing. It just made perfect sense—for my
writers, for the agents. And it’s a lot less stressful not to have to worry
about all of the finances and the hiring and the firing, and especially not to
be at a place that’s in turmoil.

Are
there any books—not books you’ve published—that you find yourself going back
to and reading again and again?
Middlemarch. Moby-Dick.

Really?
How many times have you read Moby-Dick?
Oh, many times—four,
five, maybe six times. I spent a lot of time on it when I was in graduate
school. And, yes, I do read the whaling chapters. I love nineteenth-century
fiction, and that’s what I go back to.
But recently I’ve been rereading a lot of Faulkner and Salinger.
It’s interesting how your perspective changes on a lot of this reading when
you’re not studying it like you were in school. Reading Salinger as an adult,
especially as an adult with children, is a very different experience. What I
found was that there was a certain way in which he got those voices, in Catcher
in the Rye for example, he got that voice
so perfectly. I heard my own son’s voice. At the beginning of the book, when
Holden is talking about his older brother, the first thing he says about his
brother, if I’m remembering right, is something about how his brother has this
incredibly cool car. The first thing he says about his brother is about his
car! I thought, “Yeah, that’s what my kid would say too, and in just that tone
of voice.” There was something completely timeless about that. So no matter how
dated some of the other stuff gets, especially the sort of pop psychology that
Salinger fell victim to, he got those voices really right.

What keeps driving you?
I’ve always felt that I needed to have a goal
and a mission, and at Houghton it was helping to change the shape of the list—diversify
the fiction, support poetry—and then as a publisher to bring in editors who
could really find the best stuff and be creative about publishing it. I still
feel really ambitious for particular writers. I would love to have the opportunity
to publish the fourth, fifth, sixth book of a writer like Peter Ho Davies, for
instance, or Michael Byers, or Monique Truong, and to continue to work with
writers like Cynthia Ozick and Anita Desai. I think it’s important to publish
them well.

I also think—this will sound incredibly snobby—that this culture is
sort of deeply debased. I don’t think of myself as the one and only guardian of
intelligent conversation in this country, but you do want to keep it going on
some level. Which is not to say that everything I do is high-minded, not by any
means, but there’s got to be a place for it. There just does. So it would be
great if I can contribute to that.

Jofie Ferrari-Adler is an editor at Grove/Atlantic.

Agents & Editors: A Q&A With Agent Lynn Nesbit

by

Jofie Ferrari-Adler

January/February 2008
1.1.08
In Print and Online

On a recent afternoon, I walked up Park Avenue from my
office in downtown Manhattan to interview the literary agent Lynn
Nesbit. The agency she founded almost twenty years ago, Janklow &
Nesbit Associates, occupies an entire floor of a large office building
on the corner of Fifty-seventh Street. In the elevator, I couldn’t help
but think of the celebrated authors who must have taken the same ride
to visit Nesbit, and my mind wandered to some of their memorable
opening lines: “We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the
desert when the drugs began to take hold” (Hunter S. Thompson). “That’s
good thinking there, Cool Breeze” (Tom Wolfe). “It is easy to see the
beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends” (Joan Didion).

For
Nesbit, the beginnings of things were no less evocative. Raised in the
small town of Dundee, Illinois, and educated at Northwestern, the
Sorbonne, and in the Radcliffe Publishing Program, she came to New York
in the fall of 1960 and took the first job she was offered. The
position, as an editorial apprentice at Ladies’ Home Journal,
was unsatisfying. She badgered Sterling Lord—even then a legendary book
agent—for a job as his assistant, but he had nothing permanent to
offer. So, in her spare time, she read manuscripts for him in French.
Eventually a position opened up, and Nesbit leapt at the opportunity,
despite a salary cut of ten dollars a week.

She
worked her way up to being an agent in Lord’s office; her early clients
included Donald Barthelme, Michael Crichton, Frederick Exley, Hunter S.
Thompson, and Tom Wolfe. In 1965, she left Sterling Lord to start the
agency that would become International Creative Management; in 1989 she
joined forces with Mort Janklow to found another new agency, Janklow
& Nesbit Associates, which remains one of the most successful in
New York. Over the years she has guided the careers of luminaries such
as John Cheever, Joan Didion, William H. Gass, Shirley Hazzard, and
Gore Vidal; younger writers such as Ann Beattie, Stephen L. Carter,
Jeffrey Eugenides, Jayne Anne Phillips, Richard Price, and Scott
Spencer; commercial superstars such as Robin Cook, Richard Preston, and
Anne Rice; and nonfiction heavyweights such as Robert Caro, Jimmy
Carter, Jonathan Kozol, and Gay Talese.

In
this, the first in a new series of interviews with veteran book
editors, publishers, and agents, Nesbit talks about her life, her
career, and her authors, reflecting on the past, present, and future of
the book industry and what writers can do to thrive in today’s
publishing world.

Why don’t you start by telling me a little about your background. Where did you grow up?
I grew up in Illinois, in a town thirty-five miles northwest of Chicago called Dundee.

And you went to Northwestern?
I
went to Northwestern because I wanted to be a drama major. But then I
quickly learned, once I was involved in it, that I didn’t want to do
it. It was such a serious professional school. So I switched my major
from theater to oral interpretation of literature. You’d do chamber
theater, for example. You’d take Don Quixote and present it
as a chamber theater piece. I was in a production and I played all of
the women roles. Of course they were all variations on Dulcinea or his
fantasy. It was an extremely good way to learn about the construction
of a narrative. Because when you’re breaking it apart, often you will
characterize or have an actor play the narrator’s role, so you learn a
lot about voice.

What brought you to New York?
I always wanted to come to New York. When I was a child I used to listen to Grand Central Station—”Crossroads
of a million private lives”—and think, “What could be more exciting
than New York?” I was wandering through the English department my
senior year at Northwestern and saw something about the Radcliffe
Publishing Program. I thought, “Hmmm, I want to come to New York, I
love to read books, this sounds like it’s for me.”

How did you get started in the industry?
At
the Radcliffe program, they told you to take the first job you were
offered because there were no jobs in publishing. They’ve been saying
that for forty, fifty years. Sterling Lord was the agent who came to
speak to the students, and I thought—I don’t know why, I’ve thought
about this over the years—but I thought, “Agent, that’s what I want to
do.” But Sterling said he had nothing to offer. So I took the first job
I got, which was as an editorial apprentice at Ladies’ Home Journal.
And I hated it. It just wasn’t for me. So I kept hounding Sterling. And
I read French quite well then. He was representing a couple of people
who wrote in French, Tereska Torres and Juan Goytisolo. So I would read
the books and write readers reports on them. And I hounded him. After
three months at Ladies’ Home Journal he offered me a job, for
which I took a ten-dollars-a-week salary cut. I became his
receptionist, his typist, his file clerk, and I had to weigh the
packages and stamp all the letters.

Was Sterling Lord your primary mentor in the industry?
Sterling
wasn’t very interested in fiction, which helped me. He was immediately
turning some things over to me. After I’d been working as his assistant
for a month or two, he went to the Staten Island Writers Conference and
came back and just threw these stories down on my desk. He said to read
them and write to any of the writers I liked. One of the stories was
“The Big Broadcast of 1938” by Donald Barthelme. And I read it and
thought, “This is extraordinary.” So I wrote, Dear Mr. Barthelme, I’m
an agent and I just read this story and I think it’s extraordinary and
blah blah blah and I’d love to represent you. And he wrote back and
said, “Fine.” Now I don’t think that happens today. There would be
thirty agents crawling all over that story today—there are more agents
than writers. And there are more writers than readers. I’m convinced of that.

Was Donald Barthelme your first big client?
Donald was very important because I sold the first story of his that I represented to the New Yorker.
And he went on and became such an important force in the short story.
But my first really big client—big in every way—was Tom Wolfe.

How did you meet him?
I pestered Byron Dobell at Esquire.
I told him I wanted to meet Tom Wolfe. This was probably 1963. He’d
published “Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby,” the piece,
in Esquire, and every other agent was after him too. I still
ask him, to this day, why he signed with me. He says it’s because I’m
the only one who suggested he do a book, which is hard for me to
imagine, but that’s what he says. He was older than I was, and already
a big deal, and I was just this kid.

The
other big writer that I got young was Michael Crichton. I left Sterling
Lord in, I think, 1965, to start a literary department for Marvin
Josephson. It was called Marvin Josephson Associates. The head of his
television department was a man named Ralph Mann, and he had a friend
who had been a television agent at the William Morris office, whose
daughter was Michael’s first wife. This man was determined to find
Michael the biggest agent there was. Of course he knew everyone. So
Michael was interviewing all these people and he interviewed me, too.
He was in medical school then and he had published one of his paperback
John Lange thrillers, and he only had one other contract. So he came
back for a second meeting and said—and this I remember very well—he
said, “Let’s grow up in the business together.” So that was great.

Who was Marvin Josephson?
He
was a very mild-mannered, shy, rather diffident television agent. He
went around and bought these other agencies. He bought CMA, Monica
McCall, Ashley-Famous. And this became ICM, this big corporate
behemoth. He was never really an agent; he was a deal-maker, a buying
agency.

And when you went there, you were the head of the agency right away?
I
started the literary department for them at age twenty-five. They
didn’t have one. I went there and I was this kid. I was really young. I
got there because I was dating an agent who worked for Marvin who said,
“You should hire Lynn Nesbit.” That’s how I got there.

Tell me about some of the big personalities from those days in the book world.
Well, there were a lot of them. Bob Gottlieb was a genius.

From your perspective as an agent, what is his genius?
In
the first place, he, like Michael Korda, who is my client actually,
could read an eight-hundred-page manuscript in a night and come back to
you the next day and give you a perfect analysis. Also, Bob never let a
manuscript lay around. You would never hear from him, “Oh, I have seven
manuscripts on my desk, I can’t get to yours until a month from now.”
Bob also has such an incredibly big personality. And I always said that
Bob has a big ego, but he can lend it to his writers, so they can share
it. Bob Caro is one of my clients, and it’s written into his contract
that he has to have Bob as his editor.

A
lot of people lament how the publishing industry has changed over the
years. Your career seems to very much bridge all that—from the small
independent shops to the corporatization of it all.
I
say to Bob Gottlieb, who’s still a very close personal friend, “You
couldn’t stand to be in publishing today.” And he says, “I know.” It is
very corporatized. We all began to think about that in those days. What
was going to happen? These big conglomerates, synergy, all that. People
began to worry about it.

The first novel is the easiest to sell. But if it doesn’t do well, you’re up a creek. You have to reposition the author…because the publisher doesn’t want to take another bath.

Tell me about some more of the big characters.
We
just don’t have them anymore. Morgan [Entrekin] is as close as we have.
And Sonny [Mehta]. There were so many: Henry Robbins, Ted Solotaroff,
Joe Fox, Sam Lawrence, David Segal. Even Dick Synder is a lot more
colorful than Jack Romanos, who is now gone. I mean, they had passion,
they cared about literature. Even Dick, who’s not an intellectual. He
cared. He was a madman. I mean, we need a little bit more…. Who is a
madman now in publishing? Peter Olson, but of a very strange type. I
mean, Morgan’s eccentric, Sonny’s eccentric. Morgan’s less eccentric
than he used to be. He’s getting very conventional now with the wife
and the child. It was just different then.

So you miss the personalities
Yes.
I miss the fun. I tell Tina [Bennett] and Eric [Simonoff], “You missed
the good days.” When I worked for Sterling Lord, I had a loft, a sort
of duplex loft apartment on Barrow Street. And Michael Sissons, who’s
now the head of Fraser & Dunlop, and Peter Matson, who’s also an
agent, used to give these parties at my house. They would make these
drinks of half brandy and half champagne, and people got so drunk. One
night Rosalyn Drexler, the lady wrestler and the novelist, picked up
Walter Minton and just threw him against the wall. I’ll never forget
that. There was just more of a sense of fun.

So why was that lost?
It’s the corporate thing. People are too scared. It doesn’t attract eccentrics anymore.

Where are the eccentrics going?
The movie business. [Laughs.]

When did you start to represent Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne?
My
daughter is thirty-seven and John told this story—it’s still difficult
for me to talk about John—he told this story himself. He said,
“Remember what I said to you when we were talking about you
representing me?” I said, “No, I have no memory.” He said, “Don’t you
remember when I said, ‘What if you were to have a child?’ Nobody would dare
ask that question of a woman today! You would be stigmatized!” So I’ve
represented him since before my first child, and she’s thirty-seven.

At that point were you already representing Joan?
No. I didn’t represent Joan until the book After Henry,
when I came here. It’s been a long time now, about eighteen years. They
were very good friends of mine. I knew Joan very well. She was
represented by Lois Wallace. Well, first Helen Strauss at the William
Morris Agency, and then she was inherited by Lois, and then she came to
me. It’s been a long time now, but not back into the dark ages like it
was with John.

Were you surprised by the phenomenal commercial success of The Year of Magical Thinking?
Yes. So was the publisher. The first printing was supposedly thirty-five thousand copies, then the Times
magazine piece came out and they upped it to fifty thousand, then if
you look at later editions and the number of printings.… It obviously
touched a chord in so many people—young, old, people who hadn’t even
had anyone die. I think the honesty of her voice, the way she directly
addressed the reader, without any sentimentality, was so moving.

How did you meet Hunter S. Thompson?
I
don’t know how Hunter came to me. I can’t remember the sequence. I
don’t know who would have suggested it. Hunter was such a
larger-than-life character. I always said that he was the one writer
who always tried to say, “Oh, that didn’t really happen”—talking about
his escapades—but unlike most writers, they probably did
happen. With most writers it’s the opposite. He liked to go to these
very chic restaurants in New York. I can remember taking him to the
Carlyle and he’d be snorting cocaine right off his watch. He’d order
six bottles of beer, two margaritas, and some salad. But the funny
thing is, often he wouldn’t even touch the stuff. Lunch would go on for
hour after hour and he really wouldn’t be drinking all that much during
that time.

I read somewhere that you represented Fred Exley—and you sold A Fan’s Notes?
That
was when I was a kid too. That was very early. I don’t remember the
date, but that was when I was still at Sterling Lord, I think.

Do you remember how you met him? Were you close?
Oh,
yes. I had an incredible correspondence with him. Fred was a terrible
alcoholic and a tortured soul. Even more with Fred than with Hunter,
there was a very, very tender part of him. Very sweet. Fred showed it
more than Hunter did. I think that they couldn’t deal with their
vulnerability, therefore they drank. Or in Hunter’s case, he drank and
did drugs and everything else. They just couldn’t cope with it. A Fan’s Notes
got tons of rejections and finally I sold it to David Segal, who was
great. David was an eccentric. We need more people like him. He started
his career at New American Library, which was a rather commercial
imprint. But David had such a passion for literature and good writing.
For instance, he picked up Cynthia Ozick when no one else did. And
Fred. And Bill Gass.

You represent so many of the original New Journalists. What was it like to be at the center of a movement like that?
When I first represented Tom Wolfe, I was younger than Tom. I was a
kid. And when I went to sell Tom’s first book, his editor, Clay Felker,
was the most important magazine editor in New York. I sent Tom’s book
out for auction. Viking, with whom Clay had an arrangement as sort of
editor at large, brought Tom in for a meeting with Tom Guinzburg. But
on the auction day, Viking didn’t bid. So I thought that was curious.
But they didn’t, and the book went to FSG.

A
few days later I went to this big literary party at Rust Hills’s. I
will never forget walking in. It was jammed with every writer and
editor in New York. Clay was then dating Gloria Steinem, and Clay
walked right over to me—this is like two days after the Tom thing—and
he said, “You fucking cunt.” I thought, “Oh my God!” I saw Tim Seldes coming up, so I said, “Tim, do you know Clay Felker?” And I walked away.

So
what happened—the reason Clay was so furious—was that he thought he
could deliver Tom Wolfe to Tom Guinzburg without anyone else looking at
it. So of course he got mad at me instead of Tom. He was furious! Tom
Guinzburg was furious too.

Now I’m going to skip forward many, many years. It’s the publication party for Barbara Goldsmith’s book Little Gloria…Happy at Last.
It’s a dinner at Phyllis Wagner’s house. There are fourteen people
invited. When she tells me the names, one of them is Clay Felker. And I
said, “You know, he and I haven’t spoken in years.” And she said, “I
think he thinks it’s time to make up.” So I go to the party and he
comes over to me for the first time and says, “I’m really sorry about
that. It wasn’t your fault. It was that fucking Tom Guinzburg!”

But Clay’s hatred of me got me a lot of good clients. Because around New York magazine he would scream that I was the toughest, bitchiest agent in town.

And it helps to have a little edge to your reputation?
Of course it does.

Why did you eventually decide to leave ICM and
start Janklow & Nesbit? Was the decision affected at all by how the
publishers were doing that—combining forces and becoming conglomerates?
No.
My decision to leave ICM was more because I wanted to become an equity
partner. I didn’t want to just work for a big organization as a
salaried employee. That’s pretty much what drove it. And I’d probably
been there long enough, and it was getting very big. I like the way we
can focus more here. I have much more time to focus on the clients here
because we have such a strong back office. It frees me to do more
representation, not to worry about things.

Looking back, what would you say were some of the crucial turning points in your career?
Going to Marvin Josephson was a big turning point—getting to start a literary division. And then I got Charlie Portis and True Grit.
That was a big deal. I had him from the beginning too. Tom [Wolfe] was
a big thing. He was a big deal before I signed him. Michael [Crichton]
wasn’t. Victor Navasky was my first client. He was very helpful in
introducing me to people in New York. We used to have this thing at the
Algonquin, the round table—Victor tried to resuscitate the Algonquin
round table. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt and I used to go, Kurt Vonnegut,
Bud Trillin, Marvin Kitman, Knox Burger. People would come and go. We’d
have it like once a week. This was in 1961, when Victor was starting Monocle and signing a lot of good people on.

Donald
Barthelme was a big turning point. Donald was the one who introduced me
to William Gass. That’s another book that was turned down everywhere
and David Segal signed it, Omensetter’s Luck. That was a huge literary event. David was crucial.

I
never thought, “Oh, here’s an obstacle.” I didn’t think about building
a career. It just sort of evolved. James Mills became a client. He
wrote Panic in Needle Park. That was a big book. That was
when I was at ICM. And Joan and John wrote the screenplay. That might
be how I met John, by representing Jim Mills.

When did you meet Jimmy Carter?
I
met him when I was at ICM with Marvin Josephson. He was just leaving
the White House and Marvin and I went to the oval office to meet with
him. I said to him, “You know, I’m one of the few Protestants in New
York publishing.” And I think he liked that. So he signed with us and
Marvin and I divided the selling of the presidential memoir. After
that, he began to write more and I completely took him over, and then
he came with me here.

How do you see your principal roles and responsibilities as an agent? Have they changed over time?
You
are part of a writer’s support system—a very important part. The role
of the agent is more important today than it was when I was starting
out. Because the publishing world is so corporate, and editors move
around so much, you are increasingly the only fixed point for the
writer. That’s one way it’s changed. Another thing that I notice here,
with younger agents like Tina and Eric, is that they do a lot of
editing, and we didn’t do that when we were young. I think it’s partly
because of the editors. There is such pressure on editors to come in
with something that’s almost ready to go that the agents are assuming
part of what the editors used to do.

When did you start to recognize that as a phenomenon?
Probably just in the last eighteen years, or ten years.

Did you ever edit?
Not to the extent that they do.

What is your editorial process like? Will you give notes?
Oh,
yes. For example, Andy Greer is a young new client of mine. I’ve read
the draft of his new novel, which is coming out next spring, five
times. That doesn’t often happen, but with Andy it did. It was
fascinating because I kept seeing how he kept enhancing and changing
it.

What kind of specific thoughts would you give?
Just sort of general thoughts. Is this character really working here, or what about this scene.

But what you see with younger agents is more getting in there with a pencil and editing?
Especially on proposals.

What are the implications of that?
I
think the implications are that editors need to see something very
polished because everyone is so nervous. Books are an endangered
species, especially fiction. I do think that younger agents work more
on the nonfiction proposals, with extensive notes, before they go out.
But with fiction, everyone is so nervous about it.

What do you mean exactly by “nervous”?
Nervous
that fiction is very difficult to sell. An editor wants to see
something that’s more near completion, that the idea or the thrust
behind a novel is more fully realized. Twenty-five years ago an editor
would say, “Oh, this has promise,” and sign it up. Today, editors want
to say no rather than yes. Unless they see it as a big book.

And this is because of corporate pressures? Profit pressures?
Profit
pressures. You must know that fiction is very hard to sell. Today it’s
almost that fiction needs to seem like it’s going to be an event. It
almost has to open like a movie, on the commercial side, or else the
editor has to be convinced its going to get such praise, such positive
literary acclaim, that even if it doesn’t sell a lot you’re launching a
real voice.

Everybody talks
about how the model for a writer’s career has changed. You just talked
about a book opening like a movie. There’s this blockbuster mentality,
especially for debut novels, with astronomical advances and very high
sales expectations. How do you feel about that in relation to writers
and their careers over the long haul?
Well, if
it works, it’s fine.… If they spend a lot and the book works, then
everyone’s happy and your career is launched. If they spend a lot and
the book doesn’t work, then it’s a problem. Because as you know,
everyone can see the numbers today. There is no fudging. And that’s
because of the chains. There are two or three big outlets. It used to
be that we couldn’t sell as many copies per book. We could argue that
this is very good, this new chain system, because you can sell more
copies.

Tell me how you feel about these changes, the blockbuster mentality.
I
think it’s kind of unhealthy. Because a movie is a movie, but when
you’re building a writer’s career…. As I said, if it works, it’s great.
If it doesn’t, I think it’s a huge black spot on that writer’s career.
Everybody knows what’s gone on. In the old days, we could fudge it a
bit better. But today everybody knows if a book’s been a success or a
failure. There’s no fudging. The problem is not the first book. It’s
the second. At least nobody asks me that question anymore, “How hard is it to sell a first novel?” The first novel is the easiest
to sell. But if it doesn’t do well, you’re up a creek. You have to
reposition the author, probably move them to a new house, because the
publisher doesn’t want to take another bath. So you sell it to a new
house and say X overpaid and maybe they didn’t do as good of a job as
they should have, and the author probably understands that he probably
has to take less money.

If you were a first-time writer and you were offered a big advance, would you be wary of it?
I
think I would probably take it. There are very few who could resist it.
Sometimes an author—and it’s happened here at the agency—they’ll take a
somewhat smaller advance because they prefer the editor or the house or
whatever. But it’s never that much less. It’s not a hundred thousand
dollars less. Maybe it’s twenty thousand dollars less. But you never
know what will happen. The Elizabeth Kostova book worked. I mean, I
don’t think that’s literature. It’s sort of what we call, you’ve heard
this term, faux literature. But it sold. Can we think of a book that was a real bomb?

It can be devastating to an author’s career.
Well, not devastating, but not hopeful. Let’s put it that way.

In terms of the book industry itself, what would you say are the most troubling or frustrating changes today?
What
worries me is that there aren’t as many younger people who want to
become editors as there used to be. Because at a certain point they get
frustrated. There’s not enough money to make the job palatable, and
they don’t have enough freedom. So they feel that they have this
corporate bureaucracy imposed on them and yet they’re not making a
decent enough salary. What I see is this flow of young editors becoming
agents. There are hundreds of agents. I can’t believe how many there
are. When I was starting out, there were agents, but not at the number
there are now. Because today they can operate out of their apartments
with a telephone. Or they think they can. I can’t imagine that because
in an agency you do need a big support staff of people who handle the
foreign rights, the first serial, the permissions. We have two lawyers
on staff who go over the contracts. So I can’t imagine operating that
way.

What other changes are you seeing?
I
said this earlier as sort of a joke, but I’m beginning to think there
are more writers than readers. I get these e-mails pouring in from
people who want to write their life stories. It’s because of the
memoir. Everybody thinks they have a story. I also feel there are fewer
and fewer civilians—I mean people outside of our business—who I meet
who have time to read. They all say, “I’d love to read, but I’m just
too busy.” What worries me is that people are on blogs, Web sites—there
is a lot of that going on—but they aren’t reading books. That
phenomenon, to me, is not a product of the industry, it’s a product of
how our culture is changing. People’s attention spans are getting
shorter and shorter. And everybody has their specialty. I don’t ever
look at blogs or Web sites because I would never get anything done. I’m
tempted to because I hear about these great things.

What
does that mean for the future of books and reading? A lot of people
seem to think an iPod-like device will come along for books.…
Great.
That would be terrific. I have no problem with that. The more forms in
which people can read intellectual content, the better. I don’t care if
they read it in a real book or on an iPod. If they’re more likely to
read it on some device, great. I have no fear about that. I have no
idea why people do. It’s the content that matters, the intellectual
content. As long as we can keep it copyrighted. I also look forward to
books on demand. Jason Epstein has been working on this machine for
years, and he tells me that other people have been trying to do it too.
The modes of distribution are so antiquated.

Epstein
also seems to think that publishers are getting too big and will
eventually collapse from their own bigness and fracture into smaller
shops.
Like what’s happened in
Hollywood. I think it will happen. I think it’s happening now, with all
these imprints. There are so many imprints. And once they get the
distribution figured out…. If these machines really do become
effective, and there are more efficient ways of distributing books,
then I think there will be more and more independent producers. And
independent producers use a distribution outlet. So the publishers will
be more like distributors. I think it could happen. I don’t know
because this business is so primitive—the publishing business—so
unsophisticated. It takes so many years to make a change here that I
don’t think it’s ten years away.

I’m always thinking about this issue of
distribution—and returns, which is this convention that came about in
the Depression that allows bookstores to return unsold books for full
credit. It’s very complex, very fraught, and it’s a huge problem. But
nobody really talks about changing it because it would scare
booksellers.
I think the only way to
solve the problem is these machines, books on demand. Then we won’t
have to have returns. We’d have a storefront with a display of books,
and you’d go in and print out the book you want.

But what would that mean for booksellers, and for the aesthetics of being a book lover?
I’m
right next to Borders. To go in there is such a nightmare. I love to go
in and browse up near my country house in Millerton, New York. We have
quite a good bookstore, an old-fashioned one. But even with these
machines, they’ll still probably display books. There will probably be
some stores where people can go in and browse. I think it’s going to
hurt the chains more than anyone. Or maybe it won’t. Maybe Barnes &
Noble will get this machine. If there were print on demand, maybe some
independent stores would come back. I mean, people want to go in and
physically pick up a book, and it’s hard at a big chain store. It’s so
big and the sales clerks don’t want to help you.

What effect has the decline of independent booksellers and independent publishers had on books in this country?
I’m
not sure which is the chicken and which is the egg. Of course Barnes
& Noble and Borders—the chains—helped kill the independent
bookseller. But on the other hand, there are so many stores available
to people—in shopping malls, in places that probably didn’t have a
decent independent bookstore. So, in a sense, we can say the chains
have helped the book business. They certainly have been able sell a lot
more copies. The blockbuster books sell commensurately much more than
they did thirty years ago.

I
don’t think that many people have a real sense of what agents do all
day. Obviously all days are different, but walk me through a typical
day.
You spend most days divided between things.
You’re reading the final draft, talking to the editor and to the
writer. I’m having dinner tonight with Jayne Anne Phillips, who just
delivered the final draft of her new novel. I read about five drafts of
this one, too. And I was talking to her editor, Ann Close, yesterday.
Questions like, “When are we going to publish this?” The question of
course this year is the election, which is not always the case. Ann is
sort of pushing for fall of ’08, and everyone is sort of nervous about
it, but on the other hand, is the election really going to affect a
novel? Maybe it’s a good time to publish them, Jayne Anne’s included.
You have all these questions. Then you have the question of the cover.
We often have to go through many sketches before we get a cover. We
also have to send the books out for first serial, which is right at the
time when we get the manuscript in. And then we start thinking about
foreign rights, and we try to submit a manuscript to the U.K., because
the U.K. edition should come out simultaneously. So we hope that the
U.S. pub date isn’t so close that we can’t have our best shot at
getting a U.K. deal. And then in some cases there’s a question of movie
rights. In most cases with literary fiction you want to wait until
there’s some buzz.

So you spend your day deeply involved…
Yes. Deeply involved in all the minutiae—it’s important minutiae—of the print runs, the jackets, the timing
of the pub date, first serial, foreign rights. And then, if you’ve
represented an author for a number of years, you have their backlist.
Someone wants to make a movie out of Ann Beattie’s “The Burning House.”
So you’re dealing with that.

Say
you have a novel from a new writer. How do you typically go about
selling it? Do you pick up the phone and call one person, or five
people, or ten people?
If it’s of
literary quality but I don’t think it’s going to be a megabuck sale, I
probably submit it to the key editors who I think would respond to it
at maybe a half-dozen houses.

How do you make those decisions—about which editors you send it to?
It’s
part of my job to know editors, to know what they respond to and what
they like. I just intuitively know that from working over the years.

Are you ever consciously trying to match dispositions or personalities between a new author and an editor?
That wouldn’t be my primary concern, but I think of that as a secondary problem. Will this person really mesh with so-and-so?

What’s your style when you have several publishers interested in a project?
I
would want the author to meet the editors, and probably the publicists,
and maybe the marketing people. Then we would make a decision together,
or the author may have strong feelings about who he or she wants to be
with. I think you have to get a feel for it.

Do you know how many new clients you take on in, say, a year?
I
really don’t, because sometimes I’ll take on an odd project. I took on
Sherry Lansing’s book. I mean that’s a one-off. Or perhaps she’ll do
another book. That can happen. Right now I have two new authors I’m
ready to go out with pretty soon. I don’t know how many I take on.

How are new clients finding their way to you at this point?
They
come in recommended. A client of mine will recommend them to me. A lot
of my writers teach, like Deborah Eisenberg, Ann Beattie, Roxana
Robinson, André Aciman—a lot of them. So they’ll recommend someone and
often I’ll give them to some younger agent here. I mean, Vikram
[Chandra] came to me through Barthelme and I gave him to Eric. And
Edward P. Jones came to me and I gave him to Eric.

Tell me about some of that, about some of the mentoring you’re done over the years.
I hired Binky [Urban] and Esther [Newberg] and trained them.

But what does that amount to?
They weren’t agents. They were working in other jobs. Esther had been in politics, Binky had been working at New York
magazine. I hired them when I was at ICM, and they would tell you I
trained them. I hired Suzanne Glück and trained her. John Sterling
worked for me at one time at ICM as an agent.

What do you look for in an agent?
Enthusiasm,
energy, commitment, and taste. Eric and Tina are probably the two
stars. Do you know Tina? She was with my daughter in graduate school at
Yale. Tina was a few years older. Priscilla called me and said “Mom,
you’ve got to hire this woman.” Mort and I looked at her resumé and
said, “This is amazing.” And Eric should be an editor! He was at Norton.

Now
put yourself in an author’s shoes, an author who finds herself in a
situation where she’s lucky enough to have her choice between a few
different agents who want her. What are the factors you would use to
make the decision?
I think a lot of
it is chemistry between the two people. I would also want to know a lot
about how the office works, how much of a support system there is. I
don’t want to just sing our own praises, but I think our agency offers
that more than any other agency because we are completely book
oriented. There is not another book agency in New York that has two
lawyers and a paralegal devoted to our authors and their contracts. We
have four people in foreign rights. I would want to know, “How does
this agency work?”

What other factors?
I
would obviously want to know the agent’s reaction to my work. I think
it’s important to feel out the level of commitment they have. Unlike
twenty or thirty years ago, the agents now—at least here—are not going
to take you on unless they’re going to go gung ho. Because they know
how tough the market is. They’re not going to speculate.

What about in the industry at large?
I
don’t know. I can’t speak to that. But I have a feeling that some of
these more independent agents who are just starting out will take more
people because they need it more.

page_5: 

What can a writer starting out today do to put himself in a position to find an agent?
They can send stories to the Paris Review, Conjunctions…there
are so many places. If you’re writing short fiction, once you have two
or three short stories in those magazines, and you’re working on a
novel, then agents begin to wake up and say, “We’d like to see this.”
So they have an entrée right there from the quarterly world. And I
think everyone is desperate to find a good novel. We are more desperate than ever.

Do you feel a sense of competition with other agents and agencies?
Well,
yes. I think all agents feel some sense of competition. As publishers
do. If we didn’t, I think we’d be very lazy and lax in our jobs. I
think everyone feels they have to be on their mark today. You can’t
ever get complacent. You can’t ever say, “Well, I’ve got enough clients
and they’re all wonderful and they love me.” They could march off the
next day. One doesn’t know. It’s like a marriage. Friendships break up.
It’s personalities. And they’re professional and personal. The thing
about our business is it interweaves the professional and the personal
life. That’s the way in which it is incredibly different than other
businesses.

What is the single biggest problem with the book world today?
Distribution.
Especially for smaller books. Because the bookstores won’t take a
chance. And if a writer has a not-so-rosy track record, then they won’t
order more and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Then, if the book
happens to get good reviews, you’re caught out of print and have to
reprint and maybe the books don’t get to the stores fast enough. And
distribution is a problem on the other end, too, with books that are
overprinted, books that may get on the best-seller list. It may look
good to the outside world, but the returns may negate the rosy picture.

One
of your agents here, Eric Simonoff, has sold a novel by James Frey to
HarperCollins. Tell me about that decision, the decision to represent
him. Is that something you sign off on?
I
don’t know anything about it. I haven’t read the book. Eric can do
anything he wants. He’s codirector of the agency. Tina and Eric are
very important forces in this agency. I don’t mind it anyway. Get over
it; it’s fiction.

But tell me how you feel about him, about Frey?
I
have no feeling. I haven’t read the novel. But Eric says it’s
brilliant. And he wasn’t going to take him on until he read the novel.
I didn’t want to meet with him early on. It’s very interesting because
Nan [Talese] backed him so much and Gay was so opposed to him. But Gay
is a consummate journalist, and this memoir thing is another thing.
Memoir involves such an unreliable narrator. And of course James Frey
got into problems because he kept defending himself. But do I think
everything in A Fan’s Notes happened? No.

Nor A Moveable Feast. Actually one of your clients, Nancy Milford, wrote a piece about this in the Washington Post during the Frey thing, which I thought nailed it. But tell me how you feel about this move toward nonfiction and memoir.
I
think it’s unfortunate. I think it’s mirrored in every part of our
culture. Look at the reality programming on television—people want to
know the truth, they want to identify. This memoir craze has eaten away
at fiction. A lot of people will read memoirs but they won’t read a
novel.

What do you read for pleasure?
I mix it up. I try to read books that are current that I don’t represent. For example, I read Eat, Pray, Love. I read Larry Wright’s book [The Looming Tower].
When I travel, I read books about where I’m going, or maybe a piece of
fiction. I read Joseph Roth’s Berlin diaries when I went to Berlin. But
I have to read so many manuscripts that I have to squeeze them in.

Who
are some of your favorite editors to work with today? Who is doing
interesting things, who is effective in how they’re publishing, who are
you admiring?
I like a lot of
people. They all bring different things to the table. I like Jonathan
Galassi [at Farrar, Straus and Giroux] as long as Jeff Seroy’s there.
Jeff Seroy is an incredibly important part of the way they publish. Now
Jeff is much more than just head of publicity, he’s vice president.
Jonathan is an old-fashioned editor, which is great, but when you run
into problems you need somebody like Jeff, who’s dogged, who will take
them up. I do a lot of business with FSG. And I do have a lot of
authors with Knopf. I work with various editors there. I represent Gita
Mehta, Sonny’s wife, and I know the Mehtas very well. Alice Mayhew is
who I do Carter with, and I’ve know her for years. She’s an eccentric.
But she doesn’t do fiction. I think Paul Slovak is a very committed
publisher and editor. I think Molly Stern’s kind of great. I moved
Susan Choi to her. Molly’s very energetic, she can really dig into the
publishing process as well as be an editor, too. Frances Coady is a
consummate editor. And Jonathan Galassi is a wonderful editor, there’s
no two ways about that. But in this current era we have to talk about
people who also involve themselves in the publishing process, which is
what Jeff does. Sarah Crichton has been a very good addition for them.

Can you pinpoint any mistakes you’ve made in your career?
Sure. I turned down Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.
And I read it in many drafts, which perhaps colored my opinion of it. I
mistakenly read it as a true crime book, and there wasn’t really a
payoff for that. I didn’t understand or respond enough to the
atmospheric quality of the book, and the fact that it was a roman noir in its way. So we all make mistakes.

Do
you have anything to share with younger editors and agents starting out
today, maybe to help them avoid mistakes in their own careers?
I
feel sorry for editors who want passionately to take on a project that
the house makes them turn down, and it goes on to be a big best-seller.

That happens all the time.
I know. So that’s a mistake. Not a mistake, but it’s a problem.

What about younger agents?
I
think they can take on too many clients. I think that can be a problem.
You have to be selective. If you’re not selective, you have too many
people who perhaps you don’t care enough about, and you don’t give them
good enough service, and their books don’t sell, so they blame you.

But you do have to rely on your gut.
You do. And if you really feel passionate, okay. But you can’t just sort of throw a fishing line out.

How do you know when a book has you. Is it a visceral feeling?
Yes.
It’s about the voice. You think, “Oh my God. This is an arresting
voice.” To me, voice matters almost more than narrative. Because it
shows an originality. Many people can write good narrative—actually not
many people; it’s hard to write good narrative. But to have a style?
Voice is what makes Joan Didion a great writer. Andy Greer and André
Aciman have it. Have you read him?

No.
Oh, you should. Call Me by Your Name is a brilliant novel. And Out of Egypt
is now considered a classic. It’s wonderful. It’s just so much fun to
read. Tina Brown e-mailed me this week and said, “I’m so glad you told
me to read André Aciman’s book, it’s brilliant.” But it had a hard time
breaking through because of the subject. It’s not a gay novel. He gave
this to me—he’s under contract to FSG for a very long novel, it’s about
New York life, it’s very layered—but he brought this novel Call Me by Your Name
to me two summers ago. He said, “Look, I wrote this novel in a month,
two months. Read it and tell me if you think I should publish it.” I
took it home that night. It was a hot summer night, I remember. And I
wasn’t going out. I read the thing straight through. Oh my god. I
called him up the next day and said, “André, of course you have to
publish this. Are you joking?” He said, “Well, let me see what Susan
says.” He hadn’t told Susan, his wife, about it. He comes back and
tells me that Susan said yes. So then I gave it to Jonathan [Galassi]
and he said, “Of course we’re going to publish it.” It’s unlike
anything you’ve read.

People have such romantic notions about the publishing world. To you, what are the things that ultimately make it special?
It’s
given me a fantastic life. I have met so many interesting people. I
have gone to so many interesting places. It just continually opens
doors for me. I just came back from George Weidenfeld’s eighty-eighth
birthday party in Berlin with Springer-Verlag. Angela Merkel gave one
of the toasts. It’s a wonderful life because you’re dealing in ideas,
with literature, with interesting people.

Is there anything you’d still like to accomplish?
I’d love to find and represent a couple of new extraordinary young writers. It’s exciting; it’s fun.

Anything else?
I just want the business to keep going. I want it to flourish. I just
hope people continue to read books and see them as a source of pleasure
and not as some daunting task.

Is there a memoir in your future?
Definitely
not. I don’t think I would have the patience to sit down and write a
book. I admire people who can. And I promised my mother I would never
write a memoir. I’m joking, but I did promise my mother that.

Any final thoughts?
What
makes me happy is seeing these agents I’ve trained doing so well. It’s
been great with Tina and Eric—seeing their careers flourish. I
certainly know with Tina and Eric that they care deeply about the
business, they’re 100 percent committed to the writers, and that
they’re thoughtful, intelligent people. So that makes me happy.

Jofie Ferrari-Adler is an editor at Grove/Atlantic.

Agents & Editors: A Q&A With Editor Pat Strachan

by

Jofie Ferrari-Adler

March/April 2008
3.1.08
In Print and Online

In an industry known for its larger-than-life personalities, Pat Strachan, a senior editor at Little, Brown, is something of a revelation. Born and raised in the suburbs of St. Louis, and educated at Duke University and the Radcliffe Publishing Program, Strachan moved to New York City in 1971 and spent the first seventeen years of her career at Farrar, Straus and Giroux (FSG), starting as an assistant and rising to vice president and associate publisher by editing top-shelf writers such as Joseph Brodsky, Lydia Davis, John McPhee, and Marilynne Robinson. Over almost four decades in the business, she has edited some of our most celebrated poets—Donald Hall, Galway Kinnell, Philip Larkin, Czeslaw Milosz, and Grace Paley, to name a few—and an equally impressive roster of prose writers, including Ian Frazier, Jamaica Kincaid, Rick Moody, Edna O’Brien, Jim Shepard, Tom Wolfe, and Daniel Woodrell. In 1982, she was awarded the PEN/Roger Klein Award for Editing. Yet despite these accomplishments, she remains a gentle and unassuming presence—an echo of Max Perkins in the era of Judith Regan.

When Strachan leads me into her office, the first thing I notice is that her large, L-shaped desk is neat and uncluttered. She explains that many of her manuscripts are at home, where she does her reading and editing. The office is decorated with dozens of framed photographs, drawings, and other mementos from a life in books: here a black-and-white photo, taken in the 1970s, of Derek Walcott at the Trinidad Theatre Workshop; there a shot of Padgett Powell and his beloved pit bull, Spode. On the wall to my right is a poem by Seamus Heaney titled “A Paean for Pat,” which he presented to her when she resigned from FSG in 1988 to become a fiction editor at the New Yorker. In 1992, after four years at the magazine, Strachan returned to book publishing, holding senior-level positions at Harcourt and Houghton Mifflin before moving to Little, Brown in 2002.

Shortly before this interview went to press, the literary world was shocked by news that Tom Wolfe, whose books Strachan edited at FSG, had left his publisher of forty-two years and given his next book to Little, Brown for an amount of money that anonymous sources have placed at between six million and seven million dollars. Sara Nelson, the editor in chief of Publishers Weekly, speculated in her weekly column that “by choosing Pat Strachan, wherever she is, Wolfe is declaring that sometimes it’s the editor, even more than the house, that counts.” I dropped Strachan a line to ask if she thought that was the case. True to form, she ducked the opportunity to take any personal credit, replying, “I can barely believe my great good fortune in being able to work with Tom Wolfe again. His new novel will be both an enormous amount of fun and an important reckoning with our times, as readers know to expect of Tom.”

In this interview, Strachan talks about her years at the New Yorker, the art of editing literary fiction, and what authors should consider when trying to land a publisher.


Maybe you can start by telling me a little bit about your background.
I was born in Kirkwood, Missouri, which is a suburb of St. Louis. Marianne Moore lived there when she was young, with her brother and mother. They lived with their uncle at the parsonage at the First Presbyterian Church. I only learned that later, when Mr. Giroux went to her funeral and brought back the program. Basically it was a postwar suburb. I went to public schools all the way through and then Duke University. At Duke, I found a flyer advertising the Radcliffe Publishing Procedures course. It was run by a woman named Mrs. Diggory Venn, which I think was a pseudonym. So fate took me to that course, and that’s where I met my husband, who was also taking the course. There were seven men out of seventy-seven students, and he was one of them. We met and married a year later, when I was twenty-four. That’s the nutshell story.


Did you know you wanted to go into publishing when you were growing up?
Oh, no. Books came into the house via an aunt. My father died when I was small—five—and this aunt from afar sent us books all the time for some reason. She would send us the Caldecott and Newbery award winners. So I read Thurber, for instance. My mother was a reader but she was more a periodical reader—the New Yorker was always in the house. But she preferred to read to learn something. A third grade teacher, Mrs. Hunter, somehow spotted me as a reader and encouraged me to read as much as possible and kept feeding me books. You know, this was third grade, so it was Little House in the Big Woods. She was extremely influential. In fact, I went back to St. Louis last April to see Kathryn Davis at Washington U. Kathryn asked me what I wanted to do most when I was back, and I said I’d like to see my third grade teacher. So we found her and went to see her. She turned one hundred in July. And she’s still reading and she’s still bright as anything. So, that, I think, indicates how much I felt I owed her.

The second teacher was a high school English teacher, Miss Andrews, who was a fanatic about literature and especially Moby-Dick. There was a harpoon over her desk. She was very passionate, and she encouraged me to work with the literary magazine as an editor—really as an editor more than as a writer. I was a timid writer, and we didn’t really do creative writing in high school. A few people did obviously or there wouldn’t have been a magazine. She pushed me. She pushed me to become involved. And the goal for women in those days when you went to college was to become an elementary school teacher if you were a reader, or if you were an action person to become a nurse. And Duke had a nursing school and an elementary education division. So you majored in English if you wanted to teach elementary school. I knew fairly quickly that I didn’t want to do that.

One day I went to a lecture by what we used to call a woman lawyer with my roommate. I walked out knowing I didn’t want to become a lawyer, but that’s when I saw the flyer for the publishing course. It was a eureka moment. So I went to Boston. It was a six-week course, and after it was over, my husband—my future husband—got a job at Anchor Books with Anne Freedgood, a wonderful, wonderful editor. So he moved to New York and I stayed in Boston and worked in the Radcliffe publicity department for a year. And then it was another fateful moment when my boss at Radcliffe—she knew I wasn’t very suitable for that job—told me Mr. Giroux at Farrar, Straus and Giroux had an opening. She reviewed books for the Boston Globe and knew what was happening in publishing. So I basically just flew down there fast.


Had you been to New York before?
To visit Bill but not to live. So I flew down, got that job, and moved to New York. That was 1971. And it was very lucky.


Did you like New York right away?
No.


It was a pretty scary time to be here, wasn’t it?
It was extremely dangerous. We lived in a group house on the Upper West Side on a block that is now quite nice, West Eighty-fifth Street, but was then deemed the most dangerous block in New York City. And yet we got used to it. We got used to it fairly quickly, and then Bill and I got our own apartment. And, of course, the wonderful thing about those days was that you could get an apartment for practically nothing. We made nothing and the apartment cost practically nothing, so living was a lot easier. Union Square, where I worked, was very rough. No one would walk across it except Roger Straus—in his ascot. He had no fear whatsoever. And now, of course, it’s beautiful. It looks like an English garden now.

Tell me about your first impressions of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
I felt as if I were in heaven, really. Mr. Giroux (whom I call Bob to his face but still call Mr. Giroux in public, as I first addressed him) was very supportive and kind and kept giving me more things to do. Mr. Straus was a character—very brilliant, very outspoken, very self-confident, and very personable. He walked around the office twice a day and said hello in one way or another to everybody.

Michael di Capua, who was mainly doing children’s books, was a huge support. He always pushed me to try to do more, to try to acquire—to do this—and gave me a great deal of help and confidence. So I was very well taken care of. I remained an editorial assistant for five years, which is sort of unusual, but I just didn’t see why I would leave. At that point I was taking care of some of Mr. Giroux’s authors, some of the poets, and then when Tom Stewart left, I was promoted. Tom Stewart was taking care of—I say taking care of rather than acquiring—Tom Wolfe and John McPhee at the time, and I inherited them. So really, am I not the luckiest person in the world? Now the trick was to start acquiring.

What were some of the first books you acquired?
A book about the Cajuns. I liked Cajun music and decided that there should be a book on the Cajuns and their story should be told. I found a writer at an alternative paper in New Orleans—his name was William Faulkner Rushton—and he said yes, he would do the book. We had a gumbo party at my apartment when it was published. The book was in print for about twenty-five years, so it was a good book.

Basically you had ideas and Roger [Straus] would throw you things, like, “Here’s a great book on papier-mâché, baby.” And you would edit a book on papier-mâché. I edited a book by Aldous Huxley’s widow, Laura Huxley, which was a self-help book about getting closer to your true feelings.

[Laughter.] Those were the days.
But that’s how you prove yourself as a worker. You will do anything and you will get these books into shape. It was fun, really. Then Larry Heinemann’s book Close Quarters landed on my desk—the first Vietnam War novel I had read. Ellen Levine sent it to me, probably as a single submission. I just adored it and was able to buy it for a very low price. This was maybe 1977. The book was basically about a grunt’s tour of duty—very vivid language—and his next novel, Paco’s Story, which I also edited, won the National Book Award. I believe that was the first serious book I acquired. The second also came from Ellen Levine, whom I owe a great debt, which was Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping.


That was the second book you acquired?
Yes, the second serious one. It was possibly a single submission as well, for a modest price, and there was no question that it was a great book. I read it, and Mr. Giroux read it, and we signed it up. But, you see, things were a lot easier in those days. There wasn’t the same competition. You had time to read it, consider it, and you could buy it if you liked it.


At the time, did you have any sense of what Housekeeping would become?
I thought it would last. It’s not just the writing, but the feeling. It’s a rendition of loss without heaviness, and of course loss has a great deal to do with all of our lives. It was just too gorgeous and affecting not to last.


Was there any real editing to be done?
Let’s put it this way: Marilynne and I sat at my dining room table and did some back-and-forthing. And I would say in 99 percent of the instances of questioning, Marilynne’s opinion stood. The book is really almost the same as it was when it came in to me. I have notes and papers and some record of our back-and-forthing that wasn’t done at the dining room table, which is really wonderful. She’s so articulate in explaining why she had done what she had done, why she had used that word rather than another word. She’s just brilliant.


Was the title always Housekeeping?
It was always Housekeeping and the title was questioned. The questioning was put to rest because that was the title Marilynne had always had while she was writing the book. So Housekeeping stayed. And the jacket process was basically, “Marilynne, what would you like to have on your jacket?” She said, “I’d like the bridge across the lake,” which was roughly Sandpoint. So we commissioned someone to paint the lake and the bridge. It was an oil painting. Someone asked me recently, “Where is that painting?” Well, I don’t know.

It’s probably in the art director’s apartment.
You know, maybe not. Maybe it was tossed. Who knows? In any case, that was the second book. And then there was a cluster around then, late seventies, early eighties. Jamaica Kincaid. I read one little story called “Girl” in the New Yorker, found out who the agent was, made an offer, and signed up the book. Edna O’Brien was also around that time. Of course she wasn’t a first novelist, but she’d switched publishers one too many times and was sort of at sea. We put together her collected stories and got Philip Roth to write the introduction and got a front page TBR [Times Book Review review]. And then there were Ian Frazier and Lydia Davis and Padgett Powell. So you had this base of authors and they would write other books, obviously, and it was a wonderful base to have.

Tell me about working with John McPhee.
John had been published at Farrar, Straus for several years before I got there. I can’t tell you who first acquired him. I think it was Hal Vursell. And then Henry Robbins and then Tom Stewart. I took him over with the book about general practitioners. John is a perfectionist, and he had very strong opinions about things, but always in a very nice way. He didn’t want his picture on his book jackets, though I think we finally broke him down on that. He didn’t want any pictures in the books—he was doing it with words and didn’t want to compromise that. He was very particular about his jackets. If we sold reprint rights, for instance Coming Into the Country, he said, “I just want to make sure that the paperback publisher doesn’t put an Eskimo with a ruff on the cover.” I said, “Just talk to them about it. Just say, ‘There’s one thing I really don’t want: an Eskimo with a ruff.’ ” And then the cover came. You guessed it. I can’t remember if it got changed or not.

I got very sick in 1994 and had to go through the whole treatment and surgery and everything. And John called me—at that point I was unemployed, Harcourt had let go of almost everybody in New York—and asked if I would edit, together with David Remnick, the second John McPhee Reader. He was basically giving me a job when I was in a bad spell, both professionally and with my health. So he’s a really good guy.

And now his daughters are writing. He had four daughters, and his wife had four daughters, so there were eight girls. And when my daughter was born I remember he said, “Congratulations—you have fourteen years before she’s fourteen.” So he’s also really funny.


Coming Into the Country was his first best-seller. That was very exciting. That’s probably the peak of excitement on a certain scale—when a company has published twelve books and the thirteenth becomes a best-seller. And then all the books thereafter sell better.

When did you meet Tom Wolfe?
He was working with Tom Stewart, who left the house, and I stepped in starting with The Right Stuff, which was so great. He had done a serialization of The Right Stuff in Rolling Stone but then revised it completely. Tom is a reviser. So the deadline is coming up and the book is expected and he’s revising up to the last minute. My job with Tom, mainly, was to make sure that nothing had slipped up in the revision process, that there weren’t any inadvertent repetitions or timeline problems. The wonderful thing is that he revised in different colors. He must have used some kind of soft colored pencils because the lines were thick—it wasn’t this stingy little pencil line—and there would be several layers on the manuscript of green, blue, red. It was beautiful to see. The copyeditors loved it too. It was a terrible inconvenience, of course, but nobody seemed to mind because he was, and is to this day, I’m sure, extremely courteous with everybody and so apologetic that these further changes had come forth. He was a pleasure to work with. After The Right Stuff there was From Bauhaus to Our House and then Bonfire of the Vanities.

That must have been a big book for you. Or was The Right Stuff the bigger book?
Well, The Bonfire ended up selling more copies. They were both big books. I guess The Right Stuff must have been a best-seller as well. I forgot about that. I remember when Bonfire was out and I was sitting at my desk typing something and young Roger, the sales director, came in and kissed me on the forehead. I said, “What’s that all about?” He said, “You’re number one.” And I didn’t know what he was talking about. Bonfire had hit number one on the best-seller list, but I didn’t viscerally relate to that.

Why?
Because it had been a long time since the editing and I was already on to something else. Of course it was wonderful for Tom and wonderful for everyone involved, but my work was pretty much done. I had nothing to do with it becoming number one.

That’s interesting because today editors are so involved in the promotion and the talking and the chatter, getting everyone fired up. Has that been a change in the space of your career?
That is a bit of a change. I mean, I always did a lot of hobnobbing on my authors’ behalf and that never let up. We were not quiet and genteel at FSG. We were very fervent and committed. But my basic job had been done, in that particular case, and now it was up to someone else to make it a best-seller. And Tom didn’t need my help. He didn’t need quotes. He was already a well-known writer. But we hobnobbed in different ways. It was less within the house than it was outside the house. It was like each editor was his or her own brand. The decision on what to publish was pretty much up to you, and therefore you had to justify your decision. And the responsibility was all on your head for every book you signed up. Certainly fiscal responsibility reigned at a small, private house where, you know, the bank was at our door a lot. So those profit-and-loss statements—whatever they called them then, before you signed up a book—were important. You saw what the last book did and sort of tailored your advance to that. We were very careful with money.

Roger was notoriously stingy.
[Laughs] He was careful with money. John McPhee actually called him McStraus, and he called him that to his face, and we all laughed. But John never had an agent. John just took the deal every time and eventually we had the best-seller with Coming Into the Country.

How did you actually learn to edit? Was there a mentor?
The mentor, initially, was Mr. Giroux. I would Xerox his manuscripts after he edited them. He took the month of August off every year and would edit three or four books during that time. But the closest teacher was a woman named Carmen Gomezplata, who was our chief copyeditor. We were the children, and we and Carmen were in and out of each other’s offices all the time. We would ask her questions and as we grew into our roles we continued to ask her questions. She really taught us to see those copyedited manuscripts in great detail. In those days, you went over them and then sent them to the author. You really learned. That was a valuable experience. That’s the technicalities of editing. The editing itself—I mean, not the punctuation and if you put the possessive here or there, but the instinctive editing—is hard to explain. That has to do with your own ear and your own sense of the language. Every editor is different, and the editing is generally subjective and instinctive, which is why everything is pretty much put in a question form. That’s what I call the slow reading, rather than editing—slow, slow, slow reading. You have to have a very long attention span as you know and just not get up for a long time to keep the continuity. And if you are a sedentary person anyway, which I am, it’s a marvelous, marvelous job.

Did you know that you liked it right away?
I did. It’s because the writers were so wonderful. One after the other would come into the office—most of them did, anyway—and they were so interesting and so fun to be with. It’s not as if the editing of their books was the penance part, but the association was such a joy, and I knew I wanted to be among that group of people who were writing and publishing books.

You were also editing a fair number of poets. How did you come to meet Seamus Heaney?
I met him through his books. Seamus had been distributed by Oxford University Press—his Faber and Faber editions—and Faber had for a while wanted Farrar, Straus to publish him. I started publishing him with Field Work, which was maybe 1978. And that was really, really a wonderful opportunity. He’s so kind, and so funny. This is what I find about a lot of poets: Before the kind, the funny. Why are poets so funny? Joseph Brodsky: hilarious. Derek Walcott: hilarious. Mark Strand—they’re all funny. Even Gjertrud Schnackenberg is funny. Grace Schulman’s funny. They don’t have as much at stake as far as becoming financial successes. There is a limited readership, even with someone like Seamus. They are jealous about prizes and jockey in that sort of way, but basically they’re pretty satisfied with what they’ve chosen to do in life. It’s a choice that was almost made for them. It’s who they are.

I have to confess that the idea of editing poetry is mysterious to me. What does it amount to?
It shouldn’t be mysterious. Because once again it’s just slow reading. If there’s a dangler in there, the poet doesn’t want that dangler. “No, I didn’t mean for that to refer to that.” I think it’s basically just catching mistakes. If there’s something you really, really think should be clear—it’s meant to be clear but it’s not, it’s coming forth as obscure—then you ask. And if they say no, it was supposed to be at a slant, that’s fine. But you just ask. Editing poetry to me was asking the dumb question again and again and again, and having absolutely no pride about that. So that the poet knows that everything there is what she wanted to say. It’s asking a lot of dumb questions. And there is work to be done with poetry, work that’s very concrete, just like any other piece of writing. And you would find that too if you sat down with a manuscript of poems. All the mystery would go away.

You also edit the novelist Daniel Woodrell.
Daniel is new to me. I can credit my husband, Bill, for Daniel. Bill was editor in chief at Holt when Dan was published there by Marian Wood. He really liked his work and met him and liked him very much. After his seventh or eighth book, Daniel decided that he wanted to try a new publisher, which is very common and often legitimate. Just to see if another sales force might do better. It had nothing to do with the editor at all. So a partial of Winter’s Bone was submitted to Little, Brown. And the partial was so strong that we bought the partial and an unwritten novel. And with fiction, that’s very unusual. Obviously he’d written books in the past, but we hadn’t worked with him in the past. It turned out to be wonderful. We’ve been able to at least double, if not triple, his sales. We were able to do the same thing for Rosemary Mahoney with her travel memoir Down the Nile.

Tell me about that. What do you do for a writer who’s maybe midcareer, whose career may have stalled a little bit in terms of sales?
It’s tough. Getting new sorts of support for the writer that he or she hadn’t had before is sometimes helpful. For Winter’s Bone, Edna O’Brien gave a comment. I know her, but she’d never read Dan before and would not have praised the book if she didn’t really love it. So to have a blurb from Edna O’Brien, that sort of points to something about the language in the book, whereas people may have been thinking, “Oh, does he just write country noir? Or are these crime novels? Or are they mysteries?” I’m also very proud to have gotten Tom McGuane, who I don’t know and who doesn’t know Dan, to read it and write a comment about it. That in turn helps the reviewers to think about the writer again. And we got a ton of reviews, and big ones, and really nice ones, for this book. And reviews do sell books at a certain level. So it’s a very gradual sort of chipping away process and nothing is really guaranteed. You can’t make someone give a blurb. I’ve always regretted that—that you can’t write the blurb yourself and sign it.

You also had a very close relationship with Laurie Colwin, the late novelist and food writer.
Our children started it, the first day at City & Country School, on Thirteenth Street. Our children were barely two years old. She needed time to write and I needed for my child to have some action other than the babysitter. We sort of circled each other. I knew she was a writer, she knew I was an editor. And we were very standoffish at first. This is all about the children. This is not about business. And then it was clear we were just made for each other. As mothers. As friends. She did teach me a lot, as a friend, about what the writer’s life is like, how challenging it is, even for such a popular writer. How Spartan it can be. Of course she countered that by making things nice, and often it was through food. Food was very important. Halloween was very big in her and Juris’s part of Chelsea, and so the Halloween meal would be served at their apartment. You never had a drink before dinner at Laurie’s. You just sat down and had dinner and got right to it. And then you talked and talked and talked. She was a very dear friend. A lot of my writers were friends. Laurie wasn’t my author, so that was a different situation. I was constantly amazed that she was interested in anything I had to say. Because she was so interesting, and I’m just an editor, a boring person who works at a company.

Take me back to the early part of your career and talk about the atmosphere of the industry in those days.
Well, I must say that there were a lot of parties. There were those George Plimpton parties. It was to celebrate writers. That was the purpose of the parties. Publishers would give parties at their houses and invite total strangers. George Plimpton was one of those people and Roger Straus was one of those people, too. Roger actually had a standard poodle named Schwartz who was sent downstairs at eleven o’clock to sort of herd people out. Eleven o’clock was the time you were supposed to leave if it was a dinner party. The parties may not have been very useful, but you met people. You met friends of your writers who might want to publish with you. You met people who might want to support your writers. That sort of networking was very easy to do because of publication parties. If a party was at the National Arts Club, every editor at the house was invited, as well as all the publicity people. It wasn’t very focused, frankly. Everybody came: the young people, the older people, everybody. It wasn’t just for the press.

This was all over the industry?
I think it was fairly industry-wide that publication parties were expected. I’m not saying it’s a huge loss that we don’t have as many publishing parties as we used to, but the kids had a lot of fun—the younger people, I shouldn’t say kids—because you got a lot of free food and you met a lot of people you wouldn’t have met otherwise. It was a benefit, it was definitely a benefit. And people did have fun outside the office. Michael di Capua was just a workaholic in the office. You couldn’t get him to look up or stop yelling about something that went wrong. But outside the office, we would costume up and maybe go to Studio 54. And you didn’t talk about work outside the office. You may have talked about books, but you didn’t talk about the office. It was a different time. This was the ’70s and ’80s.

In those days, who were you were looking up to in the industry? The way that someone my age would look up to Galassi or whoever.
Cork Smith—Corlies Smith—everyone called him Cork. He was an editor at Viking for many years. He was just an addictive reader. I remember him saying to me once, “I know it’s bad, but sometimes I finish the manuscript when I know I’m not going to buy it.” Because he just couldn’t stop reading! He always wanted to know the end of the story. He was very laconic and he looked like…what did Cork look like? He was extremely handsome. As Elisabeth Sifton always said, “Well, just stand in line, because there are a lot of people in line and he’s been married to Sheila for many, many years.” He looked like Marlon Brando, only tall and thin. That’s pretty good looking. And everybody really admired him.

Alan Williams was another one. Alan was at Viking as well. He had a piece recently, I think in the Yale Review or somewhere, about his career—he died a few years ago—saying, “All right, here’s what my liberal arts education did for me. I learned how to talk about anything for five minutes and to talk about nothing for more than five.” And that’s the definition of a trade book editor. You’re constantly becoming an expert in every area. You can do fiction and nonfiction, which we all do, and there’s this continuing education aspect to it. Bob Gottlieb was always highly admired for being interested in everything—interested in the way the ad looked, interested in every aspect of the process. He had very catholic, broad taste—he could publish a thriller or anything else. Peter Mayer at Penguin was also extremely well-respected and liked.

What was it about Peter that you admired?
His commitment. That publishing was his life, is still his life. And that’s really the only way you can do it. You know, you don’t go home and switch on the TV every night. You’re always thinking about how you might push this book, how you might help the book, how this world event might help. There’s an article in the paper about Polish workers in London, and I think, “How can I attach that to Rose Tremain’s book?” And of course you can’t. But it becomes habitual that you are always thinking about the publishing process and the books that you’re working on. It’s that way-of-life mentality of some publishers. Roger Straus. Bob Gottlieb. Cork Smith, who was more an editor than a publisher. Alan. Peter Mayer. There must be others I’m leaving out, certainly Roger Straus and Bob Giroux. You know, as Edmund Wilson always said, “Literature is life,” and in some ways if you’re in publishing, publishing is life. And it gives back. You’re constantly learning.

Do you have any great Roger Straus stories that you can tell?
He was extremely personable. He loved people. He was a liberal at heart in the way that he trusted people. He trusted other people’s opinions, not just his own. And I think in a way, like Alfred Knopf, who probably wasn’t as friendly, he depended on advice, and that was a way to build a great house. Whether it was the CIA people he had out there in Italy finding Alberto Moravia, or later it was Susan Sontag and Joseph Brodsky advising, he trusted other people. Not that he couldn’t judge for himself. But why not get the people who write for a living and read for a living, the total-immersion people, to tell you who’s best of these twenty Italian writers? And he was self-confident enough to do that, to take advice, and Knopf did the same thing. That’s how Roger built up his European list. And he trusted his editors. Now, of course, if you didn’t get the good reviews, he would stop trusting you. So that’s why your standards became very high—because you didn’t want to disappoint him. And a bad review was not acceptable. He wouldn’t say anything, but you knew he was disappointed, and that was a great motivation to sign up the best things you could find and not take it lightly.

Do you have any sort of guiding philosophy that shapes your editing?
Not a guiding philosophy, but I do think it’s extremely dangerous to mess with a novel structurally, because it’s close to poetry in that it’s almost pure consciousness. The way it comes forth from the writer is the way it should probably be, even though maybe the beginning is unclear or not enough action happens in this part or whatever. With a literary book—I hate to say literary, but a piece of serious fiction that isn’t genre fiction—I try to stay away from structural suggestions because they can be very damaging. One big change can make the whole house of cards fall apart. So with literary fiction I really try to stick to line editing. I also think the less done the better, and I consider myself a fairly heavy editor. But I do as little as I can do, because a work of serious literature is a very fragile construction.

I have a few little bugaboos. I learned one of them at the New Yorker. It’s called the “stopper.” A stopper is usually a graphic or upsetting image that causes the reader to stop and read in a daze over the next pages. The reader has a visceral reaction. And you don’t want to do that and follow it up with important stuff. You don’t want to do that too fast, you don’t want to do it too soon—especially in a story. It’s more than prudery. There are certain rules about how a reader is actually reacting, that I have in my own mind at least. But the stopper was a New Yorker term, and I thought it was really very wise.

Who was editing the New Yorker when you were there?
It was Bob Gottlieb, lots of fun, and the deputy was Chip McGrath, marvelous, and Roger Angell was the head of the fiction department, which he probably still is. Alice Quinn was there doing poetry and some fiction. Linda Asher and Dan Menaker, lots of fun, plus assistants and about three people who did nothing but read.

Why did they call you? This was after Bonfire?
Yes. It was right after Bonfire, which was my first best-seller after Coming Into the Country and my last best-seller. I knew John McPhee very well, and they were looking for a fiction editor and John, I know, recommended me to Roger. And I knew Chip fairly well. They may have thought I might have been unhappy because I was passed over for the editor in chief job at Farrar, Straus, which was offered to Jonathan Galassi, who’s done such a beautiful job ever since. Because of the length of time I had been there, they may have thought my nose was out of joint, which it really wasn’t. But the opportunity presented itself and it was lovely. The magazine was more limited in some ways, but it’s more expansive in that you had an audience for each story of possibly eight-hundred-thousand readers. Now I think it’s up to nine-hundred-and-something thousand. The idea of distributing a piece of fiction that you love to so many people is alluring. For selfish reasons, it’s nice because the piece of writing you’re working on is very short. There’s no interior design to be fooled with. There’s no jacket. There are no reviews, no subrights. Being a fiction editor at a magazine is a very distinct task, as opposed to books. Surely there are people who can’t image the sluggishness of our process—“How can you have the patience to work with books?”—but that was what I was used to. So that’s why I left after four years, very tearfully, because I loved the people and I loved the magazine but I knew I wanted to be back with books.

How did it work at the New Yorker in terms of deciding what got published?
The way it worked then, which was 1988 to 1992, was that when you found a story that you liked you would write a little report on your manual typewriter—maybe we had electric by then—fold it over, and pass it on to the next reader. All the editors read all the stories, and the report would circulate with the story. The next editor would read the story, open up the piece of paper, and add his or her paragraph. It would go all the way to the top that way, to Chip McGrath and eventually Bob Gottlieb, and Bob would make the final decision. We rarely talked about the story until the process was over, which must have come from years of experience, from knowing that talking about fiction can often lead you into an emotional tug-of-war, that the responses to fiction are very often psychological, and the discussions could become very heated and the opinions just wildly divergent, even within the fiction department at the New Yorker. So it was best not to talk about the stories until it was over. Then you could say, “What did you think about that?” when the stakes weren’t quite so high and there was either a yes or no already. I thought it was a very elegant way to do things, and they may not have even been aware of it.

What was it like to work for Bob Gottlieb?
I wish I had seen more of him. He was very busy because he ran the whole magazine. He was absolutely ebullient and excited about just about everything and very outspoken when you eventually got to speak to him. But I felt that I was working more for Chip and Roger and those people because Bob had the responsibility of the whole magazine. He did say, when we moved offices—we moved from 28 West Forty-fourth Street to offices overlooking Bryant Park—I remember him saying, “We are going to have individual radiators and individual air conditioners, just as we did in the old office, because I don’t want to do climate control issues.” He was so wise. I don’t want to do climate control issues. That’s usually what the discussion is in every office—whether it’s too cold or too hot.

Getting back to books, I wonder if you would walk us through your day a bit to give us a sense of how an editor spends her time.
We don’t read or edit in the office. If someone asks you to read something really quickly for them, you might stop and read, but you want the leisurely hours to read. We have meetings: editorial meetings, acquisitions meetings, marketing meetings, focus meetings, meetings about the jackets, meetings about the titles. There are lots of meetings and often there’s preparation for those meetings—we don’t just walk in cold. An agent or two may inquire about one thing or another: distribution of the book internationally, some question about the catalogue. Usually there are several agent inquiries a day. They’re trying to keep on top of what’s happening with their clients’ books.

I correspond with writers, obviously. I do miss the phone contact, but e-mail has become so much more efficient. If they’re not home—and they’re often not home—the e-mail is still there. So that’s a lot of the day. We always look at Publishers Lunch for too long. Rejection letters. Rejections are things that you try to compartmentalize and not think about too much. It’s probably the least pleasant part of the job. It takes a lot of tact to do it without hurting anybody’s feelings. Doing it so that the author could possibly see the letter and feel encouraged rather than discouraged is time-consuming. It’s anonymous, unsung work. Everybody in the company knows what you signed up, but they don’t know what you didn’t sign up. There are also lunches. Lunches are the best. That’s with the writers or the agents. Lunches are always interesting to me, and I feel really privileged that I get lunch. You get your bearings back when you inhale a little oxygen and actually talk to people. I don’t think lunch is a universal love, but it’s certainly one of mine, and it’s very useful.

Tell me about your most memorable lunch.
Maybe it was my first lunch with Tom Wolfe. Of course, I took the subway. I was headed to the Four Seasons. And the subway got stuck. Tom, the most courtly of men, was waiting at the Four Seasons for forty-five minutes, close to an hour, and he didn’t leave. And when I finally arrived it was memorable for its tension released by his gallantry. Another was with Joseph Brodsky, when he learned at lunch that I didn’t know much about classical music. He was really horrified. After lunch, he took me to a record store and bought me a basic set: Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater, Purcell’s Funeral Music for Queen Mary, Brahams’s Third Symphony. A few basics to get me started. And I’ve been listening ever since. My daughter is addicted, has to go to sleep by it. So I guess that was a life-changing lunch in terms of my cultivation level. The horror on his face! I loved a lunch with Jamaica Kincaid. I think it was my introductory lunch with Jamaica. We were at the Gotham on Twelfth Street, and we both ordered rosé, and the waiter brought red, and she looked up and said in her beautiful Antiguan accent, “You must think we look stupid!” That was all she said. And the red was exchanged for rosé.

Book editors serve all kinds of different masters: the authors, your bosses, the agents. I wonder how you think about those allegiances and responsibilities.
An editor always wants to make their writers happy. That is a priority. There’s had to be some adjustment and adaptation to the systems as they work now. For instance, the attitude toward the book jacket is more sophisticated than it once was. Today we wouldn’t necessarily get someone to paint an oil of a certain scene for a jacket. It’s become more sophisticated. So the editor’s role, in part, is to translate for the writer the logic behind certain decisions on the house’s part. There’s more gentle persuasion that needs to take place for jackets, titles. But that’s about it. The rest is between the editor and the writer.

How many new books do you try to buy in a year?
As many as I love, really, and it varies from year to year. I might buy four one year and eleven the next. Sometimes they come in clumps. The books you like come all at once. And that can be awkward sometimes. You’ve just signed one up, why should you be signing up another one? Well, it may be six months before another one comes along. So the acquisitions rhythm can be jerky.

Take us behind the scenes at an editorial meeting. I think a lot of writers would be very interested to know what happens.
There are two levels of meetings. First there’s an editorial meeting, where the editors and the editorial assistants basically air their views on significant manuscripts that have crossed their desk in the last week. Often it’s to find out if your colleagues might have a particular interest in, say, Rufus Wainwright, because you know of this Rufus Wainwright book that’s going around. And if there’s significant interest then you might chase it more readily than you would otherwise. So that’s sort of determining subject interest, topic interest. Even now and then with fiction writers, you’ll get a manuscript and want to know if other people have read the writer and what their opinion was. It’s sort of just airing things so there’s a forum for all the material that’s coming in every week. Every now and then, someone will mention a significant turnaway—a reluctant or significant rejection—that sort of thing. “I passed on this even though it’s going elsewhere…” It’s like our live newsletter—what’s been happening at your desk. And it’s not so much a decision-making meeting. Every now and then our editor-in-chief, Geoff [Shandler], will say, “I wouldn’t pursue it. I don’t think it’s right for us.” But not too often. Everybody likes to talk. We talk a lot. It’s a little bit of togetherness, and then we retreat back to our lonely desks.

The acquisition meeting is a decision-making meeting, and we prepare fairly rigorously for it. We write our opinion of the book. We do a description of the book. We give some background on both sales and critical reception for the author’s previous books. We make a profit and loss projection—always an estimate, but something to go by. Every acquisition meeting varies from one company to the next as far as I can tell, but generally a decision is made in the meeting whether or not we’re going to make an offer for the book, and about how high we would be allowed to go to buy the book. So it can go either way. It can be yes or no. And you have to be very manly about it. If I’m unable to sign up a book I want, that’s when I have to be my most manly. And everybody has the same experience. It’s not always a book the company can do, or feel it can do well. But the main thing, your main desire, if you love a book that isn’t signed up by your house, is that it be signed up at some other house. And there are very, very few titles that do get lost. So while it’s a disappointment, it’s not tragic, generally, if your book is turned away. If that’s the worst sort of trauma we have to suffer, it’s not so bad.

So are these decisions made, on some level, by consensus?
On some level. Different voices speak up. Editors. Publicity people. Salespeople. And everybody’s just sort of gently giving their opinion. Then our publisher has to make the final judgment. But it’s often the result of what’s gone on before.

Do you feel a sense of competition with editors at other houses?
That’s a good question. I can’t say that I do. If I admire an editor, and I can’t do a book and they can, I have to honestly say I’m happy for the book, because the writer landed with a good editor. So I don’t really feel competitive. There are some moments when I feel envious, but I don’t feel active competition.

Say you get a debut novel or a debut collection of stories. What is it about something that gets your attention, compared to all the other ones that don’t?
Well, take this collection of stories by Peter Orner, Esther Stories. It was sent by Rob Preskill, an agent in San Francisco who I’d never done any business with and didn’t even know was in business. The stories came out of the blue. I started reading them, and I just found them enormously emotionally affecting. They’re very spare, and the writing is fantastic but not fancy. I just found them very serious—I mean, sometimes they’re funny—but the intent behind them is very serious. They’re basically about families. I was able to find another reader, Eric Chinski, who also loved them, went completely berserk over them, and I was able to buy them at Houghton Mifflin. We put them into an original paperback and lots of wonderful things happened for this book. I published his second book last year. Esther Stories was a very pure acquisition. I’d say that’s about as pure as you can get. Never heard of the agent, no stories published in major magazines.

If you’re talking about a more obvious way of having a book of stories come to your attention, there’s Uwem Akpan. This is a Nigerian writer who is also a Jesuit priest and who got his MFA from the University of Michigan in 2006. He’s written a collection of stories called Say You’re One of Them. It’s about children in various African countries who are in crisis because of conflicts they can’t control. I read the one story, “An Ex-Mas Feast,” in the New Yorker. I read many New Yorker stories, but this one really bowled me over, in, again, a visceral way. And I couldn’t stop reading once I started. So we took action fast. Michael Pietsch, our publisher, felt the same way about the story. I wrote to Uwem. We waited. We waited until the second story came out. Then he got an agent. We waited at auction. We bought the book. It was as if it was fated—it was going to happen. But a lot of publishers wanted a story that was so powerful, and a collection that also had the New Yorker imprimatur.

On the other hand, what is the most common problem with first books?
They can be too controlled. I find a lot of first novels too careful and too polite. I mean, let’s face it, Housekeeping is a wild book. I don’t think Marilynne had ever published anything before, even short pieces. She was doing what came from her mind and her experience. Larry Heinemann’s book is another example, a graphic war novel, but just gorgeous. Sometimes others can be a little tight and a little fearful of being messy.

Do you think MFA programs contribute to that problem?
I don’t think so. I think they’re trying to counter it in some way. I think they try to coach the students to…Look, any time you do something for the first time, you’re more fearful than you are the second time. So the feelings often don’t come forth right away.

But in your opinion are MFAs a good thing for a writer to do or a bad thing?
I think it doesn’t hurt if you have the time. If only to meet other writers and to meet writers with more experience. To learn to talk about writing and the different ways people approach it. I think it’s a good thing. I don’t think it damages writers. I don’t think you can teach anyone how to write, but it can certainly teach people what to expect from themselves, and give them a communal feeling—that this isn’t easy—and give them some endurance power. I don’t think there is a plethora of the programs. I’ve been to several and I always find the writers so alive.

page_5: 

I read somewhere that you can tell if you’re interested in a novel within the first two pages. Is that true?
Some part of my brain really responds to an interesting sentence. Over two pages, if there isn’t an interesting sentence or thought or description, or if there isn’t something vivid, it doesn’t mean that I’m going to stop reading, because that would be wrong—there are certainly worthwhile books that don’t impress you with the language in the first two pages—but I pretty much know if I’m interested or not, even though I’ll read to the end in many cases anyway. Some books are more dependent on story than other books, and it can really depend on the outcome. You read the entire book because the outcome might be smashing—the cumulative power of what comes before. But certainly, stylistically, I know pretty quickly whether or not it’s a book I’m going to love. I would say two pages is an exaggeration. Probably ten pages.

How important is it to you that your books sell well?
It’s important to me because I want people to read them. Because when they do, and I get reactions, it makes me feel good, as if I did something valuable. And it’s most important to me for the writer, because the writer wants readers. It’s usually not about the money at all. They want as many readers as they can get. It’s hard to project what’s going to sell and what isn’t, so I just assume that what I buy is going to sell sufficiently to not create a debt at the house. That’s my job. That’s my professional job—not to lose money—and I try very hard not to lose money. And having a great big book to offset some of the books that sell less well would be wonderful. I think I have some lurking in the future.

Agents have assumed a new primacy for writers in the last several decades. How do you feel about that?
I’m very glad to have the agents’ help. The agents know much more about publishing than the writers do, obviously. Some of them have worked at publishing houses and can explain the logic behind the publisher’s decisions. They know what to ask for and what not to ask for. I think agents have become more important to writers because there is not as much continuity in publishing now. So if a writer is jumping houses, if the houses are making the writer jump, then you need one stable person in your life to put everything together. So I suppose that’s the single biggest reason that that shift in loyalty to agents took place. The agent’s job is also a lot more complicated now because of the multiple submissions and auctions and the complexity of selling a book that is desired by many publishers. I don’t want to keep harking back to the days of single submissions, but it was pretty relaxing. If you sent a manuscript to Bob Giroux, he would be really irritated if you sent it to anyone else while he was reading it. Wasn’t his time worth more than that? It was a simplified process.

Are there any younger agents who you’re finding yourself doing business with or liking or admiring lately?
Julie Barer, who has her own agency, is wonderful—very supportive of her authors and enthusiastic about her projects. More for nonfiction, Brettne Bloom at Kneerim & Williams has great energy and intelligence, as does Julie. There are lots of fine young agents, but for fiction and nonfiction, those are two good suggestions.

From your perspective, what do the best agents do for their authors?
They write a very good letter introducing the writer and the book under consideration. If previous books have been published, they include full reviews with the submission. They try to match an editor to a writer—temperamentally, aesthetically—as much as they try to match a writer to a house. Then, once the process begins, they know what to push for and what not to, how to choose their battles. And that’s a very delicate dance. Because often the writer would like a little more pushing than should or could be done, and the agent has to have a good sense of that.

How involved or not involved do you want authors to be in the marketing and promotion of their work? Is it healthy for an author to be involved?
I think that, in the end, the older writers learn that it’s better to be writing their next books. Of course, everybody needs a break, but it can be distressing to become involved. I remember when I left Houghton Mifflin, one of my poets, Glyn Maxwell, said, “Well, Pat, it’s just publishing.” And I thought, “What a poetic thing to say.” Publishing is my entire life and yet he says, “It’s just publishing.” So, in other words: “I’m a writer. I’ll publish my poetry somewhere. We’ll still be friends.” I thought it was very healthy to see it that way—there is writing and then there is publishing. And they’re two quite different processes. I think involvement in the publishing process can be frustrating, and if a writer can resist, I would resist, frankly.

Put yourself in the shoes of an unpublished writer. Are there any intangible things she can do to put herself on the radar of an agent or a publisher, besides the obvious things like publishing in magazines?
Get to know other writers. Not so much to learn how to write, but to meet people and learn something about the professional way to do things, so you won’t be sending out e-mails from the blue. Knowing writers will convince other writers to read your work, and possibly give a comment on your work, which might be helpful in selling it. My advice would be to not be alone.

What are the important things for an author to look for in an editor and a publishing house?
I would look at the list and look at the catalogues online, which you can do now. I suppose there’s some way to look at which editors do which books by looking at the acknowledgments. I think it’s important to determine that the minds might get along, to learn the kinds of books the editor edits and the publisher publishes—every publisher has a wide variety, but in the field where you’re writing—to see that you’d be in the sort of company you’d like to be in. And if you can’t get that, then accept an offer anyway. Michael di Capua used to say, “Small children won’t die from this,” when the jacket came out the wrong color or something. It is important—the publication of the book and how it’s done—but the book is still there, and there are only so many different ways you can publish it. So I wouldn’t—as a young writer—get too hung up on who the publisher is.

Obviously the industry has changed a lot over the years, from small shops like FSG to very large corporate companies. Having experienced both, what do you think about what’s happened to the industry?
I don’t feel discouraged. I feel that any good manuscript I read is going to be published, and that’s almost true. I don’t feel that there are good books languishing any more than there used to be. And if that’s the case, I’m fine with it. If it wasn’t the case, I would be less fine with the changes. And the changes are that the business is now considered a conventional business. Or, rather, that conventional rules are applied to what started as a cottage-industry business. It’s very difficult to twist publishing into a conventional business. And yet you have to try. Because how else are you going to learn what works? And how are you going to report to your superiors? You have to accept that there are going to be different ways of doing things now—less off-the-cuff, less impulsive. Yet that off-the-cuff impulsiveness is there every time you read a manuscript. And you’re still making those same sorts of impassioned decisions that you ever were. So maybe the final decision about whether to publish or not to publish is more complicated and complex, and maybe there are more obstacles in the editor’s way. But if you don’t publish it, somebody else will. So it’s not a tragedy. It’s not tragic in the larger sense that we’re now conglomerated rather than small. I really don’t think so. I think big versus small is sometimes difficult for the younger people who are learning, because with small you pretty much go to every meeting—production meetings and advertising meetings—and you pretty much learn the whole business. You know why the book is priced this way and why it’s that format instead of this format because everybody goes to all the meetings. That’s a wonderful apprenticeship to have. In a larger company, it can get a little more Balkanized by virtue of necessity. So I think it takes a little while longer for young people to learn every aspect of the business.

What’s the biggest problem or challenge in the publishing industry today?
This is fairly broad, but I would say bringing readers to books. Let me try to personalize that a little. My husband is from a small town in northern Minnesota, and we used to go out there frequently. I once brought John McPhee’s Encounters with the Archdruid, which is a book about conservation. My in-laws mainly read the newspaper, and nature guides, and cookbooks—very little serious literature. But when we came back the next year, the book was in tatters. It had been passed all around the town. There were five thousand people in the town, and it didn’t have a book store. The people got their books from the Book-of-the-Month Club. So they were all reading Portnoy’s Complaint, but they didn’t know about John McPhee. And that, to me, was a very touching experience. It showed that if they had known about the book, it would have been a best-seller. There were so many people who were interested in these issues. There are so many people who would love so many books if they could be led to them in some way. I don’t have a solution. But I think there’s so little exposure to the choice, and the choice has to be more apparent.

Recently, at a dinner party, there was a sort of roundtable question of “What did you read over August vacation?” And the people who weren’t in the book world really felt they had discovered a writer who was extremely well known—not necessarily on the best-seller list, but well known. They thought they were introducing this book to all of us, when anyone in publishing would know the writer and, you know, know the book itself, know where it was on BookScan, know where it was in the Barnes & Noble display area. But people who are outside the business have other things to do. They’re not keeping track of what books are coming out. I don’t have a solution. Maybe Jason Epstein, who’s very smart, has a solution. The shrinkage of the book review media is unfortunate. That was certainly a way to bring news of books to people. I hope that isn’t dropping out of the national conversation.

Are you discouraged about the state of books in this country?
No, I’m not. In some ways, it’s thinking selfishly, because you would like your writers and your books to be read by as many people as possible. And, of course, it’s dreaming. But I certainly don’t think books are going to go away. The object itself it too essential. The idea of having your privacy is too wonderful. A book signals to other people to stay away. I’m in my private zone right now. I think that’s why so many women who are over-stressed read.

How do you feel about the decline of independent booksellers and publishers? What effect has it had?
I think the decline of independent bookstores has had some effect—I can’t measure it, I don’t know the facts—but some effect on the mid-list book. You might not get that surprise success that comes from bookstore recommendations as often. But other systems have taken over, like Book Sense, where they get the word out on a larger level, and maybe that sort of evens things out. We’ve lost bookstores, but they’re louder than they used to be. There are all sorts of areas in publishing where—it’s very easy, as a person who’s been in it for a long time, to be critical—but there are a lot of areas that are improving and much more professional than they used to be. I don’t find the reduction of independent bookstores to be a disaster by any means. It’s fun to get a Discover selection at Barnes & Noble and know they can be very effective too. And they have lots of ways of doing that.

The independent publisher situation? That’s just a big one. I try not to look at the big picture too much because there’s so much to look at in the small picture: your desk, what’s on it; your author, what their concerns are. The work doesn’t feel any different, big or small. The work seems to me to be pretty close to what it was when I started in publishing. Certainly there is more presentation or performance today in one way or another—more written and oral presentation—but aside from that, the work is just the way it always was. I think, as an editor, you’re a little under the radar of whether you’re large or small, and I think as you go up the ladder it probably makes a much bigger difference.

What do you think about the future of books? Do you think this digital revolution or print-on-demand revolution will happen?
I’m not very well educated in this area. I don’t think that the hard-copy book is ever going to disappear. It’s just not. Maybe it’s unthinkable to me, and that’s why I don’t think it. But there’s something about the aesthetic value of the book, the thingness of it. People like things. They like beautiful objects.

But they like their iPods, too. There’s all this talk about an iPod for books that’s going to come along for this generation of people who aren’t buying newspapers anymore, who don’t buy CDs or records because they download everything. You don’t think it will happen?
I don’t. I think there are a lot of uses for digital publishing, in almost a marketing way. “Here’s a sample chapter.” But when it comes down to reading the entire book, I really think people are going to stick with the object. Reference books are a different matter. You’re just trying to look something up and you’re not spending hours and hours with that little screen.

You mentioned your husband, Bill, who’s also an accomplished editor. What’s it like to be married to another editor?
It’s absolutely marvelous, like a marriage made in heaven. Because we do the same thing. Who’s the woman…? Diana Athill. She wrote a book about being an editor called Stet. She said that she partly became an editor because she was an idle person. She was attracted to idleness. And of course you do have to stay in one spot. And my husband and I don’t mind, we don’t find it boring, one reading in one room and one reading in the next and meeting at the end of the night. That’s the way we’ve always done it. I think for those couples who want to go to the movies or something it would be very boring. But for us it’s wonderful. We can also talk about the business without boring our friends. And he’s much more well educated than I am about the actual business of publishing. He was a math major before he was an English major, so he knows a lot about that. And he’ll explain the digital things to me over and over, which I’ll tell you I do not quite understand. We’ve never competed for a book, which is interesting. But he’s more oriented toward topical nonfiction books and mine are a little softer. And we’ve always been discreet about what’s going on at the other person’s company, and that’s just the way it is, so it’s not a problem.

What is the most rewarding part of your job?
Good reviews that make the writer happy. Because that’s the end of the process if best-sellerdom isn’t a prospect. That’s the most rewarding thing. But my daughter’s in medical school, and she said, “You know, when I tell my friends what you do, they say, ‘She reads for a living?’” It’s like a dream to them. And it is a dream. It’s a dream to read for a living. Of course, we do all of our reading in our free time, but still, that’s what we’d be doing anyway. I mean, there are some picnics missed on Sundays, and there are some sacrifices made, so you’d better really love to read, love to not move around too much. And if that’s the case, you’re all right.

What’s the most disappointing aspect of your job?
I think worse than poor sales is no reviews. I don’t normally have that situation. But I’ve seen it. I’ve seen just two reviews. And that’s very, very disappointing. And, again, it’s mainly in empathizing with the writer. That he or she would spend several years on a book that was maybe too complicated for the review community to figure out what to do with—a brilliant book, but a book that wasn’t a natural for review. And it can happen.

Looking back on your career, are there any crucial turning points?
It’s just all such good fortune. I had such good fortune. It feels like it was handed to me. Starting at Farrar, Straus was very good fortune and definitely defined my future career. Because I was taught by people who knew it was an important profession, I had an apprenticeship that sort of guided me. And you never really give up that first impression. So I think the turning point was the starting point in some ways. I think the critical reception of the first novels I did established trust in my mentors, so I had some freedom. The success of the first novels was important. Unfortunately, I have never had a turning point that involved sales. Tom Wolfe was at the house anyway. Tom was a bestselling author—that didn’t have anything to do with me. And, frankly, I haven’t had that turning point, which would have made me a little bit more helpful to the houses I’ve worked for—something I acquired that really sold in huge numbers right away. So my career isn’t based on sales. Although Marilynne and Jamaica and Ian Frazier have gone on to great success without me. And Padgett Powell’s Edisto is still in print.

Do you have any regrets or disappointments?
Disappointments, I think—there is Alice Munro. I had found her Lives of Girls and Women at a street vendor, wrapped in plastic, and I liked the title and bought the book for fifty cents. This was probably the late ’70s. Then I found out she had just recently acquired an agent here, Ginger Barber—Virginia Barber, a marvelous woman. Ginger said, “Well, there’s a manuscript.” It was called “The Rose and Flo Stories,” though the title ultimately became The Beggar Maid. The Rose and Flo stories really, really affected me, and not just because my grandmother’s Canadian and I spent some time in Canada as a child. I gave them to Mr. Giroux. He agreed. Alice came into the office, a fairly young woman at that point, and we talked and I made an offer. I think Mr. Giroux had a few suggestions; I may have had a few. I think we offered sixty-five hundred dollars for the stories, which was a very nice advance at that time. And then, suddenly, Norton bids seventy-five hundred dollars. And Roger said, “Sorry, baby, sixty-five’s as far as we can go.” And that was fine, that was a lot of money for a book of stories. Then it gets a little fuzzy because the editor left Norton and the book was moved to Knopf, and Ann Close has been her editor ever since. I love Ann, I’m very happy for her, but that was something I found on the street! And I really felt I had discovered something in an unlikely and virtuous way.

Any memorable mistakes?
The mistake I remember most for some reason was reading In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin and, not really being a reader of travel literature, just being wowed by it, knocked out by it. It was on submission from Liz Calder at Jonathan Cape. But Roger said, “What do you think, baby? Do you think it will sell?” And I said, “I certainly don’t.” That was a mistake.

Why didn’t you think it would sell?
Remote place. Fancy stylistically. But I would have liked to have worked with him before he died. That book got brilliant reviews and sold very well, but it’s not like it sold a ton of copies. It didn’t make anybody’s career.

What do you still want to accomplish?
It just seems like a continuum to me. It really seems like it will never end because good stuff keeps coming up. I don’t remember if I already mentioned this vision I had of my old age when I was younger. This vision of [editor] Anne Freedgood, in her worn-out chair in the country. You’d be asked to dinner and see her through the window and there she was with the manuscripts, reading all day until it was time to slap the fish on the frying pan. And I thought, “Never, never, never.” Well, now I find that a very happy prospect—that it will still be my work in one capacity or another. To go along and find stuff. It’s very exciting to find stuff. Although it’s sort of dangerous to always want to find. It should be just as important to want to revive. To want to help writers that you admire find their readers is probably more virtuous than to discover, which gives you a lot of credit. I think reviewers like to discover, editors like to discover. Everybody likes to discover. But there’s a lot that’s already been discovered that could use a little boost.

Jofie Ferrari-Adler is an editor at Grove/Atlantic.

Agents & Editors: A Q&A With Agent Lynn Nesbit

Agents & Editors: A Q&A With Agent Nat Sobel

by

Jofie Ferrari-Adler

May/June 2008
5.1.08
In Print and Online

For
the life of me, I can’t remember when I met Nat Sobel for the first time. I
know it must have been around September 2001, when I developed a crush on one
of his assistants. (We married two years ago, and she left the job back in
2004.) Despite my hazy memory of that time—chalk it up to a disorienting mix
of national trauma and new love—my first impression of Sobel couldn’t be
clearer: an old-school bookman, a throwback to the glory days of publishing, a
guy who you half expected to have a copy of the Racing Form tucked inside his
blazer. I’ve since found that impression to be accurate, but only to a point.
When you spend any amount of time with Sobel, talking about books and
publishing, which now have been his lifeblood for almost fifty years, you are
confronted with an obvious contradiction: He is also one of the most
forward-thinking agents in the industry.

Sobel grew up in New York City and has been
immersed in the book business since his days at City College, when he clerked
in a stationery shop and paperback bookstore. After college he went to France
and spent a year reading all the world literature he hadn’t gotten around to in
school. The reading served him well: In 1960, after he’d done a brief stint at
Dell Publishing, Barney Rosset offered him a job as the assistant sales manager
at Grove Press. Over the next ten years, Sobel rose to become Grove’s vice
president and marketing director and played a central role in the company’s
well-chronicled success during that period. In 1970, he struck out on his own,
founding an eponymous agency that began as a consulting firm for independent
publishers and became a full-service literary agency when his wife, Judith
Weber, joined it in 1977.

Today Sobel Weber Associates is one of the top boutique
agencies in New York City. The firm’s clients include heavyweights James
Ellroy, Richard Russo, and the late F. X. Toole; rising stars Julianna Baggott,
Courtney Eldridge, Tom Franklin, and Aaron Gwyn; genre writers Tim Dorsey,
Harry Harrison, Elmer Kelton, Joseph Wambaugh, and the late Robert Jordan; and
a raft of best-selling nonfiction and cookbook authors.

This interview took place in the couple’s elegant Gramercy Park townhouse—it was once the home of the artist George Bellows—which doubles as the agency’s offices. During
most of our conversation, one of Sobel’s cats sprawled in my lap. Afterward,
Sobel led me up several flights of stairs, lined with framed drawings by his
friend and client Ralph Steadman, to show me his loft office at the top of the
house. It is an airy space that overlooks the living room and is adorned with
three huge paintings by Steadman, family photographs, bookcases full of
literary magazines, and a lucky photo of Gandhi that, Sobel notes with
satisfaction, “I’ve had in every office I ever worked in.”

My
sense is that you grew up in New York City. Is that right?
That’s right. I
was working on my own from the time I was eighteen years old. I went to City College
and had to support myself. I had a dream of going to Europe to write after I
graduated from college, and I did go to France and lived for a year on my
savings. But I didn’t write. I read. I spent a whole year reading.

What were you
reading?
I had been a lit
major, and I went with a suitcase full of the books I had wanted to read but
hadn’t had time to get to. I found an English-language bookshop in Paris that
was happy to buy all of the books I read and give me other books in exchange.
That was how I was able to extend my library into a year’s worth of reading. I
read about sixteen hours a day, seven days a week. That’s when I really learned
about world literature—from that year in Paris—but I didn’t get much writing
done. Toward the end of the year, the guys from the bookstore where I’d worked
in college wrote and offered me an opportunity to come back and run most of the
store in the evening and become a kind of partner. I went back and worked there
until a job opened at Dell Publishing, where I worked for about a year as a
salesman. Then Barney Rosset offered me a job as the assistant sales manager of
Grove Press. I was all of twenty-four years old. Eventually I became the sales
manager and the marketing director, all in my twenties. But keep in mind that
at Grove at that time, Barney was only in his thirties. So you get an idea of
the age range. We were a pretty young bunch of guys—this included Richard
Seaver, Fred Jordan, a very talented group of guys—who didn’t think anything
of working long hours, because we enjoyed it. Even at the time, I knew I’d
never get a job like that again.

Tell me how
you met Barney.
It’s a funny
story. Barney came to the Dell sales conference. It was my first sales conference;
I was sharing a room with another guy. I had been playing poker through most of
my college years as a source of additional income. I heard there was a
hospitality suite and there would be poker playing. So I wound up in the
hospitality suite and there were five tables of salesmen all playing poker, and
Barney, thinking that Dell was going to distribute Grove Press books, was one
of them. Late in the evening there was only one table left—all of the winners.
I was at that table, and so was Barney. I had the best hand in five-card draw
I’d ever had. I can remember it all these many years later. It was the biggest
pot of the night. There was a lot of money in that pot. And Barney turned out
to have the best hand of all.

I
stuck around, I’d been drinking, and as a result I passed out on the bed of the
hospitality suite. The sales conference began promptly at eight o’clock the
next morning. Barney was downstairs on the dais with Helen Meyer and the editor
in chief of Dell. But I was asleep in the hospitality suite. When I finally
woke up, with a very bad hangover, and went back to my room, showered, and went
down to have some coffee and head into the sales conference, it was about ten
o’clock in the morning. The hotel we were in was quite remote, and when I
walked in, everybody wondered who the hell I was. They didn’t know me. I hadn’t
been at Dell all that long. I could hear the people on the dais saying, “Who is
he?” I thought I’d be fired. But I wasn’t.

About
two months later I got a phone call, and this guy on the other end of the line
said, “Are you the guy who came two hours late to the Dell sales conference?” I
said, “Yes, who’s this?” Thinking it’s a joke. He said, “My name’s Barney
Rosset, and I like your style, kid. How’d you like to come to work at Grove
Press as the assistant sales manager?” I had the chutzpah to say, “How much are
you paying?” He mentioned a price that was fifty dollars a week more than I was
getting, and I was delighted to go. At that point I didn’t like Dell anyway,
and I knew enough about the Grove Press list to know that I wanted to go there.
And I had a great time. Barney was a great pal, and I gave him a lot of
arguments for many years, and then one night in a bar ten years later he fired
me. But he said, “I’m going to keep you on the payroll for a year till you get
yourself together.” I decided then and there that I would never go to work for
another publisher.

When you got
to Grove, was Barney already fighting his censorship battles all over the country?
Yes. Lady
Chatterley’s Lover had been published. Tropic
of Cancer was being published and there
were some battles. The big battles came about a year after I got there, which
was when the paperback of Tropic of Cancer came out and was available in a lot of smaller towns. There were a
large number of lawsuits against the company that nearly put us out of business.

Were you
involved in that in any direct way?
No. I was on the
sales side of things. Among my duties was to go to the jobbers [distributors]
once a week to pick up some money that was due so we could pay the payroll.
That’s how tight things were. But we did a lot of wonderful books and Barney,
because he was interested in the editorial side more than the marketing side,
gave me a lot of freedom. I hadn’t worked in any big publishing house in a
capacity in which I could make decisions, so I did a lot of things quite
innovatively.

Like what?
I wanted to see
all the orders that came in to the house, which caused a delay in the printing
out of orders, but I wanted to have a hands-on approach to seeing the orders as
they came in and get a feel for what was moving. A few years into the job, we
had to fire everybody in the sales department and I had to travel the country.
I didn’t realize until later what a wonderful experience that was going to be
for me. I had to travel to the West coast for three weeks twice a year. I had
to travel to the South, the Southeast, the Northeast. I even had to train a
couple of the editors to go out and sell our list. We were really just scraping
by. Then, when we started to do a little better financially, with one best-seller
after another, I was able to get on the phone and call a lot of these
booksellers who I now knew personally and get them to get behind a particular
book on the list that I thought had the most potential. We never had a large
sales force, even when we were successful. But we did a lot of phone work and a
lot of postcards and we got the independent booksellers behind us, and that
worked very well. There were also times when we would take a gamble. We didn’t
do P&Ls [Profit and Loss projections] for acquisitions. We didn’t have a
budget. A lot of it was instinctive publishing.

I
can remember a particularly episode with a book that turned out to be one of
the most successful Grove ever published, a book called Games People Play. I thought it was a terrible title for a book on
transactional analysis. We had three colored discs on the cover with lines
going from one to the other, and I said to Barney, “With a title like that, and
a jacket like that, people are going to think it’s a game book.” He totally
ignored me. Just when the book was being published, I went to the West coast
for one of my three-week trips. When I got back, I called Barney and said,
“Look, I want us to do a big ad in the Times for Games People Play.” Barney said, “Why? We only printed thirty-five
hundred copies. I think we’ve gone back for twenty-five hundred more, and you
want a big ad in the Times? We
published his first book and it didn’t do all that well.” I said, “Well, I have
to tell you, Barney, I think God is telling me something.” He laughed and said,
“What is God telling you, Nat?” I said, “Well, I went to the West coast and in
L.A., in a restaurant, I saw a woman reading a copy of Games People
Play. Then I took the shuttle flight from
L.A. to San Francisco and there was someone on the plane reading Games
People Play. I said to myself, ‘If I see a
third person reading this book, with the print order that we had, I’m going to
come back….'” Of course I did see a third person in San Francisco reading Games
People Play, which is why I came back and
told him God was telling me we had to do a big ad. The American Psychiatric
Association convention, at which we always exhibited our books, was coming up,
and we decided to do an open letter to the shrinks who were attending the APA
about Games People Play. Fred
Jordan, who wrote a lot of our ad copy, did almost a full-page letter in the
daily Times. We brought up
hundreds of copies to sell to the shrinks at our little stand. We sold a lot
of copies. And we were selling it to the
right audience: young psychiatrists. Then the media got on to us and the book
became a huge success, the biggest that Grove had ever had. I think we sold
something like 600,000 copies in hardcover. Nobody wanted to buy the paperback
rights because they thought for a hardcover of its kind we had pretty much
covered the whole audience. So Grove had to publish the paperback itself, which
then sold about two million copies. Grove was the kind of place where I could
say to Barney, “God is telling me something.” There was a wonderful level of
collegiality in the company. Sometimes we would gang up on Barney because if
one of us couldn’t persuade him about something, then eventually all of us
could.

Why were you
eventually fired?
The company was
getting involved in the film business. I didn’t like most of the films we were
buying up and distributing. It was also taking a lot of our resources, tying up
Dick’s attention as well as Fred Jordan’s attention, and the book publishing
side was beginning to suffer. The list was not as large, it wasn’t as focused,
and I was the big naysayer about it. I was calling Barney on it. I kept telling
him we had to get out of the film business. I became a strong voice of
opposition. Whereas he took my criticism on other matters for a long time, and
in very good form, I might add, on this point he was adamant.

When
he began to discover that I wasn’t the only one who felt this way, especially
when he asked Dick Seaver to fire me—Dick and Fred were senior to me—and
neither one of them wanted to fire me, he was convinced that I had gotten
everybody on my side on this matter. When he fired me, he said, “I have to
restore control of the company. This is mine. Not yours.” Only two years later,
Barney came to me with a project for which I sold the paperback rights for so
much money that my commission was greater than my last year’s salary working
for him.

So obviously
there were no hard feelings.
Not at all. In
fact, Barney celebrated his eighty-fifth birthday at my home in East Hampton,
which made me very pleased. My best publishing experiences were the years
working for him. I realize now what a great experience it was.

When you get
down to it, what made him such a special publisher?
He was a rebel.
He was attracted to that which turned off other people. He loved a good battle.
He had wonderful taste, and he also had a wonderful outlook on publishing that
doesn’t exist at all anymore.

Tell me what
you mean by that.
I’ll tell you
about a moment in my life with Barney that had a major influence on the things
that attract me as an agent, especially these last few years. At some point I
noticed that on the upcoming list was a book of poetry, a fairly substantially
sized book of poetry by a Mexican poet I had never heard of, and it was going
to be in a bilingual edition, Spanish and English. I went to Barney and said,
“You know, Barney, I don’t think I can sell this book. I’ve never heard of this
guy.” Barney said to me, “I didn’t buy it because I thought you could sell it.
I bought it because I liked it and because I thought it was important.” And the
book was the first publication in English of the poetry of Octavio Paz. It’s
sold hundreds of thousands of copies, it’s still in the Grove Press backlist,
and it was a book he wanted to publish because he loved it. You couldn’t help
loving a guy who had that philosophy.

When you
left, why did you decide to become an agent rather than an editor?
I knew how to
sell books. And because Grove Press had a hardcover list, a trade paperback
list, its own mass market paperback list, and a magazine, I thought I would
make my services available as a consultant. Which is what I did in my first
year or two. Grove was a distributor for a couple of smaller publishers—Peter
Workman’s first list was being distributed by Grove, for example—so I thought
I would approach small publishers and offer my services as a marketing
consultant. Because of the variety on the Grove Press list, and because I had
traveled the country, I think I was able to help some small publishers. One of
those publishers had a book that they wanted to get published instantly. I knew
some of the editors at Dell from my own days there, and I knew Dell did a
number of instant books, and I sold this book to Dell and got my first
commission. About six months later, this small publisher had another book. It
was by an NFL football player who had quit the game and talked about how he had
been supported financially while he was playing football in college by the
university, and some of the illegal things that were going on in football. I
sold the paperback rights for fifty thousand dollars and took a 10 percent
commission. I thought, “Wait a second. Maybe I should be doing this for small
presses instead of offering my consulting thing.”

So
I started to move from consulting work to handling the subsidiary rights—paperback
rights and foreign rights—for small presses. Nobody had ever done that. I kind
of backed into agenting by working for small presses. Eventually, some of those
presses went out of business and the writers found me because I was the one who
had generated the most money for them. At about that point, Judith [Weber]
joined me. She came out of an editorial background and wanted to work more with
authors. Eventually we phased out of the subrights business, partially because
the mass-market publishers started to develop their own hardcover lists, so
they weren’t so anxious to buy reprint rights from other presses. But I was
still doing a little consulting work. I wanted to do other things. As an
example, I started the bookstore in East Hampton.

BookHampton?
Right. I started
it with two guys. One of them was the editor in chief of a company called Stein
& Day, which is no longer around. His partner lived in East Hampton. He
asked me about the idea of starting a bookstore, and I had bookstore
experience, so I found the location and we got BookHampton off the ground,
partially because I didn’t know whether I was going to make it as an agent.
After two years, the store started to take off.

Were you
working full time at BookHampton?
No. I worked
four days a week at the agency. In the first months of BookHampton, I would go
to the jobbers and pick the books to take out to the bookstore. I would work
Friday, Saturday, and Sunday in the bookstore. So I was working seven days a week.
I was getting pressure on both sides. I couldn’t put in any more time at the
store, and my two partners were pretty much beginning to know how to run the
business without me. We had a financial settlement and I was able to work full
time at my agency.

What were
some of the first books and authors you represented?
I still
represent one of the first authors I represented, a guy by the name of Dr.
Raymond Moody, and in fact I’m working on a new book of his. So he must be one
of the oldest clients I have. He wrote a book called Life After Life, the first book dealing with the near-death
experience. The publisher of that book was a small library press in Georgia.
The publisher came to me in New York because he was trying to sell the
paperback rights to this little book that was very odd for him. He gave me the
galleys and I read it and thought it was an amazing book. The author was a
thirty-two-year-old doctor who had just discovered these cases in several
hospitals in Atlanta. The book was a huge success. We sold it in something like
twenty-five countries, and it was the first big financial success the agency
had. When Raymond wrote his second book, he went to the same small publisher.
The publisher called me up and said, “Nat, this is not the kind of book I
publish. I published that first book because nobody else wanted to do it. But I
think you ought to be his agent.” So he turned the manuscript and Raymond over
to me. There are a lot of other stories like that, people I came to know, like
best-selling Catholic priest Father Andrew Greeley. He’d been published by a
small press that I was doing the rights for, and I wound up becoming his agent.
But I had no idea that trying to build a list of authors, to make it as an
authors’ agent, was going to be such a long and difficult path.

When you were
starting out as an agent, were there any established agents that you looked up
to or went to for advice?
None. I didn’t
join the agents’ organization either.

You just sort
of figured it out?
I made a lot of
mistakes. I took on a lot of things I shouldn’t have taken on, but when you’re
getting started, if anybody comes to you, you think, “I’m going to do it. I can
sell it.” It’s only been in the last twenty years, or maybe the last ten years,
that I became aware, as did Judith, that we wanted the agency to reflect our
tastes, rather than just take on things that were saleable. Our list is our
taste. Which means that there are a lot of areas of publishing that we will not
go into because we aren’t interested in them. So we’ve never done any romances,
for instance.

How
is being a writer different today than it was when you started out as an agent?
I think it’s
easier for the writer. Today writers are a lot more aware that they need an
agent than they were then. The so-called slush pile at publishing houses is
almost nonexistent today—a lot of writers languished in those slush piles for
years. I think writers were often tempted by ads run in the writers magazines
by agents who charged exorbitant fees to have their manuscripts “evaluated,”
and much of that has disappeared. By and large, writers get responses from
agents much quicker today because of e-mail. I think the process has fewer
mines in the ground for writers to avoid. But on the other hand, it’s much more
difficult to get published if you’re a fiction writer. It’s a bit of a
tradeoff.

Why
do you think it’s more difficult to get published as a fiction writer?
I think you have to really look at the market today. If you look at the
Deals page of Publishers Weekly, nine out of the ten deals
described are nonfiction books. There certainly is a very strong feeling in the
publishing world that fiction is chancier—absolutely chancier—than
nonfiction. Today, you have to have all sorts of other reasons to publish a
first novel—other than that it happens to be very good.

What
do you mean by that?
We keep hearing this phrase, “What’s the platform?” What’s the fucking
platform? The first time I heard the word platform was
at a writers conference. I was on the dais with another agent and she was
talking about “the platform.” I thought, “What the fuck is a platform? What is
she talking about?” Well, what it is is this: What does the author bring to the
table? Talent is not enough. The number of slots open to fiction on a publisher’s
list is being reduced all the time.

But
that wasn’t always the case. What do you see as the reason for that shift?
I think
there are a lot of reasons. It’s not just the conglomeratization of publishing
and the slow disappearance of the independent booksellers. But maybe it’s
easier for the sales rep to go and sell a nonfiction book that he hasn’t read,
or she hasn’t read, than it is for the rep to go in and sell a first novel that
he or she hasn’t read. As the sales forces of the major publishing houses have
become decimated, there really is very little time for any of these reps to
read the first fiction on their list. So it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Almost more to the point, I think, is how agenting has changed in the last ten
years.

I
read something where you were talking about how many agents there are now, as
opposed to the old days when there weren’t as many, and the importance to a
writer of picking a good one.
Yes. And how
do you know if you’ve got a good one?

Exactly.
I
try to impress my client list on new writers. There may be a writer on that
client list whose work you’ve read, whose work you really like. It should give
you some sort of comfort to think, “Well, if he was so-and-so’s agent then he
can’t be all that shabby.” The client list is a wonderful tool for the would-be
writer to explore. Now that so many agents are putting their client lists on
their Web sites, I think that’s a great way for writers to use that tool. Of
course you don’t really know how good an agent is until you work with them.
It’s like trying to determine if somebody is going to be a good sex partner
without getting into bed with them. At some point, you’ve got to get into bed.
But I think you would know fairly early on what sort of agent you have. It has
to do with the level of chemistry between you—how they respond to your work,
what they want you to do with it, and how they perform.

Do
you think editors do less editing than they used to?
I
think so. But I also think publishers do a lot less selling than they used to.
They do a lot less promotion than they used to. And this really gets to the
core of what I think about where agenting is going. There are a lot of editors
who are basically acquirers, and there are some who are really hands-on
editors. The editors in that second category are a much smaller number, and
those are the people who I generally go to first with my manuscripts. But I
think the whole question of editing also has to do with how much time the
editor can really give to a novel. That’s another reason why I think fiction is
not as sought after by publishers as it used to be. You need a lot more editing
for a novel than you do for a work of nonfiction—although a lot of nonfiction
should be edited as well. But from the standpoint of how much time an editor
has to devote to the books on his or her list, fiction is on the time-consuming
end of it. So we see less time spent.

I think what is evolving today for agents is that they
need to be the first line editors for their authors. Judith and I really love
the editing process. We have spent years editing nearly every novel we’ve ever
agented. We did that long before we began to discover how little editing was
going on in the publishing houses. But today agents need to be far more
proactive in almost every other area of the publishing process. We have to be
the marketing directors for many of our books. We have to involve ourselves in
looking at the jacket design, the jacket copy, the catalogue copy. We have to
be very proactive in how we help direct the writer to help sell his or her
book. Those are things you never thought about in agenting
when I first came into it. You made the deal, you negotiated the contract, and
that was it—the publisher took over.

Today the writer very much needs to be
proactive. When I have writers who have the kind of personality that they enjoy
going out and selling their books, and I’ve gotten them a big enough advance,
they are smart enough, with my guidance, to put some of that advance aside and
spend their own money to get the book off the ground. I think that being able
to suggest things to writers, things they can do themselves to help sell the
book, is getting to be as important a factor as helping them to edit the work.
It’s been amazing to me how much money a publisher will spend to acquire a
book, and how little they will spend to make the book a success. The role of
the agent today is a totally involving one—you have to be involved in the
whole process. Which starts with helping the writer, as we do, through two or
three drafts of the work to bring it up to the level where it is as good as we
think it can be. That’s not to preclude the possibility of some additional
insights from a really savvy editor.

You’re
talking about a fairly major shift from the responsibilities of the publisher,
in terms of the editing and the promotion, to the agent and the author. Tell me
why that happened.
I think that
nature abhors a vacuum. It’s as simple as that. The vacuum that has been
created in the publishing houses by the reduction in their promotion and
publicity budgets, by the reductions in the size of the sales force, by the
dependence on a few key accounts buying most of the print order, has led to the
reduction in staffs of the publicity and promotion departments, and reductions in
staff throughout the publishing house. The result is that things aren’t getting
done the way they used to be. It’s not because the people in those houses
aren’t willing to do it, they’re just either overworked or underfunded. So
perfectly wonderful books get printed and disappear. And if you don’t do
something, if something isn’t done by somebody…I think the writer has his or
her own future in her hands in terms of what she is willing to do in order to
make the book succeed.

But when you
look at the landscape of the publishing industry, why did that vacuum come to
be?
I think it has
to do with the bottom line. If they can save money by reducing their sales
force, they’re going to do that.

And that came
about due to the decline of independent booksellers, right? You needed less
salespeople.
Yes. You could
hire people in an office warehouse someplace to get on the phone and call some
of the smaller booksellers. You didn’t have to have book reps. Recently, it
didn’t get a lot of attention, but Random House fired some of its most
experienced sales reps. These were people who were better paid and had been
with the company for a long time. The guy who they reported to finally had to
quit himself because he couldn’t face having to fire some of the best reps they
had, who were going to be replaced by new, young, and cheaper people. But
somebody forgot along the line that these reps had built up a rapport with
booksellers. They could get a bookseller to take a chance on a book that they
were enthusiastic about. [See Editor’s Note.]

Another
problem is how the level of enthusiasm has been watered down by the way the
publishing houses are now structured. You used to have a situation where you’d
have an enthusiastic agent selling a manuscript to an enthusiastic editor, and
then that enthusiastic editor would go to the sales conference and communicate
her enthusiasm to the sales reps, and then the sales reps would read the book
and communicate their enthusiasm to the booksellers. But now the editors don’t
go to the sales conferences. The sales force doesn’t have that direct contact
with the person who bought the book. And the sales force itself keeps getting
modified so that the enthusiasms don’t percolate down to the booksellers who
are going to take a chance on that first novel. The system is such that
enthusiasm itself has been kind of cut off, at the most strategic place, which
is the editor’s ability to communicate her or his enthusiasm to the reps and to
the rest of the people in the house. There are some editors who are very savvy
and very enthusiastic about their books. I love dealing with those people. They
don’t let a book die. They are going to get out and get everybody’s attention.
But even they can’t go to the sales conference, can’t deal with the reps, can’t
communicate that enthusiasm to the people who have to go out and sell the
books.

Tell me about
some of those editors who are especially good at that.
I’m not going to
name any names. I’ll tell you why. Because I’ll wake up tomorrow and think,
“Why didn’t I tell him about A, B, and C? Why did I only tell him about D, E,
and F?” The editors who I really respect a great deal, they know I respect
them.

What
kinds of things are you encouraging your authors to do on their own behalf?
It depends
on how much money they get for their books. When I sold Tim Dorsey’s first
novel—Tim is an offbeat crime writer who’s written ten novels about a very
amiable serial killer, very wacky novels—we wound up selling it at auction. He
was the night editor for the Tampa Tribune. The money he got—it was a two-book
deal—was more than several years of his salary at the paper. I said, “Tim, I
don’t want you to leave the Tampa Tribune until after your first novel is
published.” He said, “Does that mean you think I won’t ever sell my third or
fourth books?” I said, “No, it’s because I have an idea. I want you to write to
the book review editor of every newspaper in Florida, on Tampa Tribune letterhead, and ask
them if they would review your book, as a colleague, so to speak.” I said,
“Don’t expect the publisher to spend much money promoting your book. I want you
to think about things you can do to help sell your book.”

And he did that. He sent out letters
on Tampa Tribune letterhead. It worked very well. He came to the
[BookExpo America conference] on his own and brought cartons of T-shirts to
give out with his first novel. Then he spent many months traveling to bookstores
in Florida and Georgia and Louisiana and Alabama. And the fact that he’s up to
book ten should speak for itself. He has a very proactive Web site where he
sells T-shirts and baseball caps and he has an interactive Web site for his
serial killer, Serge. Tim is about to make his thousandth bookstore stop. He’s
made the books succeed and he’s made his publisher a believer in him. He’s a great
student of what the proactive author should be. And the booksellers love Tim.

You also
represent James Ellroy. How did you meet him?
Years ago, my
lawyer was, and still is, the lawyer for Otto Penzler and the Mysterious
Bookshop. He thought Otto and I should get together. I’ve been Otto’s agent for
many years. Anyway, I liked Otto a lot, and we couldn’t figure out how a
bookseller and an agent could do anything together. I got the idea, or maybe it
was Otto, to form the Mysterious Literary Agency. This was really at the point
when I was just beginning to represent authors, and the idea was that Otto had
this wonderful bookshop where crime writers came in all the time, and he would
send writers to me who asked how to get an agent. So we started the Mysterious
Literary Agency. We did a whole thing where our letterhead had no address and
no phone number. If you wanted to find us, you had to solve the mystery. New
York magazine did a little thing about the
Mysterious Literary Agency. James saw that. James had had two paperback
originals published and his agent had given up on him. He walked into the
Mysterious Bookshop and said, “I am the demon dog of American crime
fiction.” Otto said, “I’ve never
heard of you.” James said he had this manuscript, which Otto sent to me as the
first manuscript of the Mysterious Literary Agency. It was Ellroy’s third
novel, which I edited, as did Otto. About that time, Otto got financing to
start Mysterious Press. He told me he wanted to buy Ellroy’s novel for his
first list. So the Mysterious Literary Agency went out of business. Of course
neither Otto nor I knew that James’s previous agent had had seventeen
rejections on this novel. But we had done a lot of work on the book.

Tell me about
that. I remember seeing some documentary where you talked about the editing
work you did with Ellroy.
There are a lot
of Ellroy stories. I wrote Ellroy a rather lengthy editorial report about that
first novel I represented. I got back what looked like a very lengthy kidnap
letter. It was written in red pencil on yellow legal paper, and some of the
words on it were like an inch high: I AM NOT GOING TO DO THIS. I thought, “Oh,
I’ve got a loony here. Somebody who calls himself the demon dog? Maybe he is a
demon.” But it was a very smart letter. He was very smart about what he would
do, why he wouldn’t do certain things. And he did do a lot of work on the book.
I’ve edited him ever since. Nearly all of the editing is done here. He’s been
wonderful to work with.

But isn’t
there a story about you removing a lot of words from one of his books?
That’s another
story about how Ellroy’s style developed. It was for a book called L.A.
Confidential. It was a bigger book, in
length, than he had ever done before. Otto was still at Mysterious Press when
Warner Books bought it, but the editor in chief of Warner had heard that L.A.
Confidential was finished. I called her and
told her I had the manuscript. She asked me how long it was. I said it was
about 850 pages. She said, “No, we can’t publish that.” I said, “What do you
mean you can’t publish it?” She said, “We publish all of Ellroy’s books in mass
market, and a manuscript of that size”—maybe it was even longer—”you’ll have
to cut 25 percent of the book.”

L.A.
Confidential follows three cops, and you
couldn’t take out one of the cops. James came to my house to talk about what we
could do about it. I had the manuscript on the desk in front of me, and as a
joke I said to James, “Well, maybe we could cut out a few small words.” I meant
it entirely as a joke. But I started going through a manuscript page and cut
out about a dozen words on the page. James said, “Give me that.” I gave him the
page. And he just kept cutting. He was cutting and cutting and cutting. When he
was done with the page, it looked like a redacted piece from the CIA. I said,
“James, how would they be able to read this?” He said, “Let me read you the
page.” It was terrific. He said, “I know what I have to do.” He took the whole
manuscript back and cut hundreds of pages from the book and developed the
style. That editor never knew what we had to do, but she forced him into
creating this special Ellroy style, which his reputation as a stylist is really
based on. It came from her, sight unseen, saying “Cut 25 percent of the book.”
He wound up cutting enough without cutting a single scene from that book.

How
do you explain Ellroy’s success with The Black Dahlia after six novels that
were basically commercial failures?
It was a much bigger book, a much more emotionally involving book for
James, and it dealt with a crime he’d been thinking about for a long time. So
the manuscript itself was a big leap forward for him. But that doesn’t explain
how it succeeded after six novels didn’t. James made a huge bet on himself. At
the time he wrote The Black Dahlia, James was working as a
caddie in Westchester. He was writing at night. He had no family and no other
interests except writing. Otto [Penzler] was continuing to publish him and had
bought The Black Dahlia for more money than he’d spent on
James’s previous three novels because he thought it was a terrific book.

Word got out about this book, and we got an offer from
Warner Brothers, who optioned the book for fifty thousand dollars. That was
more money than James had gotten for all of his other books combined. When I
called James to tell him, he said, “When the money comes in, call me.” When I
did call him, he said, “I don’t want the money. I want you to call Otto Penzler
and ask him what the advertising and promotion budget is for The Black
Dahlia.”
Otto told me they were going to probably spend fifteen thousand dollars because
none of the books had succeeded up till then. I told James. He said, “Ask him
to double it. Tell him that if they’ll double the budget to thirty thousand,
you’ll be giving him my check for forty-five thousand dollars and we’ll have an
entire budget of seventy-five thousand dollars to launch my book.” And when I
did that, Otto agreed to increase the budget to thirty thousand dollars. He was
just floored by the fact that James was going to kick in forty-five thousand
dollars of his own money—all of what he was getting, after my commission, from
the movie sale. James wanted the money to be spent on the front cover of Publishers
Weekly,
a full-page ad in the Times Book Review, and the rest of it to be spent on
sending him around the country for three months. Three months. And he went. Because
James has nearly a photographic memory, he remembered every single person he
met, and he single-handedly made his book successful. That was more than twenty
years ago.

Where did he
get the idea? That’s so farsighted for somebody in his situation.
He didn’t get
the idea from me. He was smart enough to say, “This is my chance. This is my
book to get out and do it.” He made it happen. Whatever success James has is
entirely of his own making. He’s a very thoughtful guy. He never went to
college. But he’s intelligent, he loves people, and he loves to go out and
promote. Not every writer can do that. Not every writer’s as good at it as he
is. Tim Dorsey’s as good as that. Others I’ve represented are. When you’ve got
a talented writer and they have that charisma, it’s my job to advise them about
how to use those tools to make their book successful. So in effect, I am still
the sales manager that I was when I was at Grove Press.

Tell me about how you find clients.
My great
love, and where we’ve found most of our fiction writers, has been the literary
journals. I don’t know how many other agents read the journals. I know it’s a
lot more than it used to be, but I certainly read them more extensively than
anybody else.

How
many do you subscribe to?
I don’t know
the exact count, but it’s somewhere over a hundred. My heroes in publishing are
the selfless people who work at these journals, who either are not paid, or
volunteer, and who spend their lives putting together these journals with
relatively small circulations, but enjoy it. Over the years I’ve developed a
number of friends among them. I admire them. I admire what they do. And they
are responsible for many of the writers I represent, including Richard Russo,
who I found in a literary journal out of Bowling Green, Ohio, which had a
circulation of something like three hundred copies.

Walk me
through what happened after you got in touch with Richard Russo.
He called me. He
said he’d just finished a novel and asked if I could give him one good reason
why he should send it to me. At that point in my career, I probably had a list
of unknown writers, none of whom he would have recognized. This was the
mid-eighties. I said, “If you send it to me Federal Express”—we didn’t have
electronic mail then—”I’ll read it quickly and tell you what edits I think it
needs.” And Mr. Russo said to me, “How do you know it’ll need any edits?” I
said, “I’ve never read a first novel that I didn’t think could be improved.” So
he sent it to me, and I gave him my edits.

Were they
extensive?
No. I’ve
actually given him many more notes as I’ve gone along with him from book to
book than I gave him on the first novel. I think I was a little intimidated by
the way he responded on the telephone, saying, “How do you know it needs any
edits?” But he responded very well.

And what
happened from there?
I sent out the
novel and had it turned down by twelve major houses before I finally sent it to
Gary Fisketjon, who was then doing Vintage Contemporaries, his list of original
paperback fiction that was getting a lot of attention. While he couldn’t give
me very much money, he said he would make it the lead title on their fall list.
He did a great job with the book. What I sometimes quote as a “high four-figure
advance” turned out to be the beginning of a success story for Rick.

When you look
back at the way he built a career—the sort of slow build, book after book after
book—do you think that’s still possible today?
In Rick’s case,
he’s earned out every book he’s published, and rather quickly, which has always
led to him getting more money for the next book. But I think it’s much harder
today. I think Rick himself would say that he was lucky he got to the right
editor at the right time in that editor’s career. In fact, the more I think
about it, the more I realize that with almost every successful book I’ve had,
it’s been the right editor at the right time at the right house. That’s the key
to all of the successful books I’ve ever had—the right editor.

And there’s
an element of luck?
Sometimes it’s
luck. I think that if I were to look back on my career, I would say I’ve been
very lucky. I’m going to be the last guy to dismiss the idea of luck.

People in the
business talk about how eight out of ten readers, or whatever the number
actually is, are women. I think it’s very difficult for young male writers to
get published, especially today. I wonder what you think about that and how
you’ve dealt with that in your career.
I certainly
think it’s very difficult for male writers who are not writing thrillers. They
have a much tougher road. We’ve read a number of pretty good novels by male
writers that we know just won’t go. Male coming-of-age novels are impossible to
sell. We’ve already talked about how it’s getting more and more difficult to
sell fiction. Let me give you a better picture of it by looking back on last
year. Five of us in the agency read submissions—everyone downstairs and Judith
and myself. Five of us. We have an editorial meeting on Thursdays. I never talk
to Judith about what I’ve read except at this meeting so it’s all fresh for all
of us. We generally read partial manuscripts, or complete manuscripts. Everyone
averages about two of those per week. So, in an average year, that’s more than
five hundred manuscripts. Last year, from those five hundred books, we took on
three new writers. And we were only able to sell one of them. Remember that
much of what we get is from writers I’ve written to after reading their stories
in the literary journals—we get very little over the transom. So look at those
odds.

They’re very
tough.
Damn right.
We’ve spent a lot of time editing through second and third drafts and finally
abandoning books because we don’t think we can get the writer up to the level
we want. We have to give up on them. Occasionally those books will get
published too. But the odds are really difficult, and for the male writers it’s
even harder.

Is there
anything they can do to make their odds better?
I’m always
looking for the unusual. I think it may require writing something of a
historical nature, with a historical setting. They have to be able to get an
idea of what’s on the best-seller list today and see that, outside the thriller
genre, there aren’t too many male fiction writers who are succeeding. And I
don’t think that’s going to change for a while.

But isn’t
that troubling?
Sure it’s
troubling. I think it’s troubling for all literary fiction writers today. But
particularly for the male writers, who are only gradually becoming aware of how
limiting that audience is. But I think you can find good male writers who can
write from the woman’s point of view, too. I remember a first novel I sold
years ago. The writer himself was in his early thirties, but the novel was a
first-person novel from the point of view of a sixty-two-year-old woman. It was
entirely in first person, and it was a terrific story. It began his career. So
if a male writer can write from the female point of view, or has a story that
will interest a woman’s audience, I think he has a better chance than somebody
who’s writing the kind of Hemingway-esque stuff we read in school.

You talked a
little about the decline of independent booksellers. Tell me a little more
about how you think that’s affected the publishing industry.
It’s
particularly with first fiction. I think Book Sense has done a lot to try to
pick up the slack there. But for first fiction, which is really the future
generations of writers, it has become a real problem for publishers because
they don’t have the large list of independent booksellers that they can appeal
to. I forget what the percentage of sales is today from the independents, but
it goes down every year. I think that’s affecting first fiction, particularly
short story collections. I love the short story. I love the form. But who’s
going to take on a short story collection today? Damn few. I think that’s
influencing the market—the market is feeding on itself.

With all the short stories and novels you read, what
is it about something that grabs your attention?
I can’t say
what it is that captures my attention. I just know it. I think since I’ve been
reading all my life, I know on the first page, the first paragraph, if I’m in
the hands of somebody really capable. I wrote an essay that I put on my Web
site about reading the stories in the journals. I pointed out the first
paragraphs of a number of writers whose novels I subsequently took on. And it
was always right at the beginning that I was grabbed.

I
remember reading a first novel and turning to Judith and giving her the first
page and saying, “I’ll bet you can’t stop reading.” She read it and asked,
“Where’s the rest of it?” I said, “Aha!” So can I describe what it is? It is
entirely a visceral reaction, and it is also very personal and subjective and
not easily categorized. It could be, for me, a western (I represent Elmer
Kelton, who is recognized as the greatest living American writer of the
western); it could be a crime novel; it could be a literary novel. It doesn’t
matter what the category is—but it gets me. I think that’s what keeps us all
going. It’s the discovery. One of the best things about my job is that when I
finish reading the manuscript of a first novel that I really like, whatever the
time of day is, I can get on the phone and call the author, even if it’s eleven
o’clock at night, and know that they’ll be very happy to get my call. And how
often have you read a wonderful book where you’d love to call up the author and
talk about it? That’s what I do for a living.

How do you
feel about the decline of independent publishing and independent publishers?
I like to hope
that Morgan Entrekin is not alone in this field. There are some interesting
small presses coming along. I’m really impressed by what they’ve been doing.
It’s interesting how many submissions they’re getting from agents these days—agents
who were not able to sell that really good novel to a major house because the
author didn’t have a platform but had a terrific book. I think we’ll see more
of that. Because, again, as nature abhors a vacuum, I think there’s a need in
this country for good writing. And while it may not be commercial, there will
be an audience to read it.

Do you have
any thoughts about the future of books. Have you played with this Kindle thing
that Amazon has made, or the Sony Reader?
No. Listen, I
was probably the last guy to get a computer at his desk. I am a Luddite. I’d
rather read the finished book. I love the feel of a printed book, and I suspect
many people of my age group in publishing feel the same. When you open a carton
of new books that have just come from the printer, take a breath of that air
and the new fresh print. It’s intoxicating. The smell, when the box is opened,
is intoxicating.

Do you think
book reviews are as important as they used to be?
I don’t think
so. I don’t think anybody will tell you they are. A front-page New York Times Book Review can either sell a book or not sell a book. Sometimes
it’s because you finish reading the review and you can’t tell whether or not
the reviewer liked the book. There was a time when book sales fell off
dramatically when the New York Times
was on strike and there was no Times Book Review. I don’t think that happens anymore, unfortunately.
You can see the newspapers are cutting back on their book sections. They’re not
making any money. The publishers aren’t spending the money they used to on
advertising in the book review section. Look at today’s Times Book
Review—the number of ads is very small.
Once a book review section doesn’t make money, and starts losing money, it’s
going to be cut back. So between the number of reviews now available, and the
effectiveness of the reviews, and where they’re placed in the paper, I think
we’re seeing the real value disappear.

Tell
me what you think about MFA programs.
A number of
the writers I represent are graduates of MFA programs. But in much of the
material I’ve seen from MFA
writers, they’re writing about the standard stories of family trauma, divorce,
the death of a parent. They’re very capably written. But we’ve seen too much of
that.

You
wrote a piece in maybe the early ’90s about the sameness of what you were
reading.
Yes, and I
think if you talk to the editors of a lot of the journals, they’ll tell you
that they’re used to the same thing—that they see an awful lot of capable
stuff that is not very engaging. I was asked this question once at a
university. I was talking to seniors, and some of the writers were considering
going into MFA
programs. They asked me about the MFA programs. I said I thought it was great for
discipline: You have to write. I mean, you should want to write, but if you
find that difficult and need the discipline of going to class, then you should
go do it. If you want to go ahead with a career in the university, if you want
to teach creative writing, you’re going to need an MFA. I think the programs do some good
for people who either need the degree in order to continue in the university
setting or need the discipline. But I think the originality factor is something
that’s suffering as a result. We’re getting too much of the same old, same old.
But I’m working right now with a writer who’s going for his MFA, and he’s
writing a novel in first person that is very unusual, and I’m encouraging him
to keep working on it. It’s difficult to give you a blank statement about MFAs. There are
good things and there are some quite negative things.

page_5: 

What do you think the students in them could do to
avoid that sameness?
They have to
get out and live.

What
do writers who are starting out today need to look for in an editor?
First of
all, I think writers today are thrilled if they’ve got an editor who wants to
buy their first novel. They’re already thrilled with that editor. But I think
they want to be convinced that the editor is really enthusiastic and will help
to get the whole house behind the book—beyond anything that was spent to buy
the book.

Are
you saying an author should be more concerned about having a great advocate
than having a great editor?
Well, since a lot of the editing is being done before the manuscript is
delivered, I think the most important thing is having an advocate. In fact, I
think the best thing an editor can do for a book is to be the great in-house
advocate. That counts far more than the editing process, especially if you’re a
writer who feels you’ve gotten enough editing from your agent. And I think more
and more agents are editing books.

And
that’s a good thing?
Absolutely.
I think you have to. The editors themselves know which agents edit their books.
When an editor calls me and says, “I like this book and want to buy it, but I
have some problems with the ending. How willing is the writer to do some more
work?” I have to be in a position where I can say to the editor, “Listen, I’ve
worked with this writer through three drafts of this book. I know he or she is
willing to do the work and is capable of doing the work.” I have to be able to
tell that to the editor. I think, too often, the editor discovers that the
writer didn’t get edited by the agent and that the writer doesn’t want editing.
Strange as that may seem, it happens.

All agents
have different philosophies about what kind of deal they want in terms of
advance money. Some agents are just concerned with the money. Others look at
other factors. What has your experience taught you about this issue?
My
particular philosophy about this has to be influenced by the years I worked
inside a publishing house. I have a tendency to see things from the publisher’s
side of it as well as the author’s. While I want to get the best money I can
for a writer, especially when we’re talking about novelists who are going from
Book A to Book B, I don’t want to price the author out of the market. I have a
pretty good idea, based on sales, what I think the publisher can afford, or
should be able to afford, to pay for the author’s next work. I’ve done my own
mathematics; the number is not taken out of a hat. It’s one that I know the
editor can go back to his boss, or her boss, and get, as a not crazy amount of
money. So having a little bit of knowledge about the mathematics has been very
helpful in being able to determine a fair price for an author’s next work.
Sometimes I’ve had a difference of opinion with a writer who thinks he should
be getting a lot more money for his next book. In that case, if I’m not on the
same page with the writer, then the writer is perfectly able to go on their
own, find another agent, and see if they can get the money. But I’d rather see
an author brought along from book to book, with a track record that develops
and enhances his or her value to the publisher, and at the same time gets them
more money. But it’s commensurate with how the previous work has sold. I don’t
believe in putting a gun to the publisher’s head. In the long run, I think the
best deal is where both sides feel they’ve gotten a good deal.

What
do you love most about your job? Is it that phone call at eleven o’clock at
night, or is it something else?
There are
lots of things I like about the job. The discovery of new talent, of course.
The success of a book that you’ve worked on and helped nurture. I mean, I spent
a lot of time working with James Ellroy on The Black Dahlia, more than on his
previous books, and I felt I’d made a real contribution to the success of that
book. I like a lot of the people I deal with in publishing. I came into publishing
about the same time as Sonny Mehta did, and Peter Mayer, both of whom I
consider old friends. So I have a sense of community. I love hanging out with
these guys. We have a history together. We’ve all seen publishing change, but
we’re still in the business. We love what we do. There is a kind of a family
feeling to the business, among, let’s say, forty or fifty agents and forty or
fifty editors. So you feel a sense of community.

I love to see a first novel get on the best-seller list. I
always want to read those books, especially if it’s a first novel. I mean, look
at how [Nancy Horan’s] Loving Frank, for instance, succeeded as a best-seller last
year. I wanted to read that book. I wanted to see what it was. But I do know
there was great in-house enthusiasm for the book. And I know what a splendid
job Algonquin did with [Sara Gruen’s] Water for Elephants. And what a great job
Morgan did with [Charles Frazier’s] Cold Mountain. I mean, they don’t
happen very often. But every one of those successes keeps us all in the game.

What are the
disappointing aspects of working as an agent?
The novel that
you worked on for months, through two or three drafts, and then you can’t sell.
Terrible. You can’t help but take it personally. The writer who leaves you
after several books, either because the books didn’t go anywhere or because he
feels he’s ready to move up to a big-time agent. But I think a lot of these
things happen to people like Peter Mayer and Sonny Mehta, too. So it’s part of
the game.

What do
editors do that drives you crazy?
When they don’t
answer my mail.

Why is that?
Well, we could
get into a whole discussion about common courtesy, and how it seems to have disappeared.

But especially
in this business, right?
More among
younger editors, who aren’t aware that if you’ve asked for a book, and there’s
a closing—and I never send a manuscript to an editor unless they’ve asked for
it—then they have to call and let you know. Sometimes you wait all day to hear
from them, or you have to chase them again. That pisses me off. I don’t get too
many form rejection letters anymore. I usually respond by sending my own form
rejection letter to the editor. I tell the editor, “Our agency no longer accepts
form rejection letters and we have decided to remove you from our submission
list.”

What makes
you love an editor?
A quick
response. An intelligent response that shows me they’ve read the book. Maybe
they pinpoint a problem in the book. If I have a difference of opinion with a
writer about some aspect of their novel, I may say, “Well, why don’t we try
three editors and see what their responses are.” I’m hoping to hear from the
editors that they have the same problem with the manuscript. If I get that kind
of response, I can go back to the writer and make him make the change before I
go elsewhere with the book. But I don’t get that kind of response very often.
The editors I like are the ones who instinctively know that there’s a good book
here but it needs this, that, or the other thing—and they are willing to tell
me. A lot of editors aren’t willing to tell you what the real problem is with a
book. The stock phrase will be “I couldn’t summon up enough enthusiasm” or “I
didn’t feel passionately,” none of which tells you anything. But the editors
who tell you specifically what it is that they didn’t like about the book are
valuable. And you don’t get too much of that. You talk about editing in the
publishing world? Getting intelligent responses to our manuscripts is almost as
important for us as getting an offer is, these days. You don’t get too much of
that.

Tell me about
some high points and low points in your career.
For low points,
I told you about the writer whose work you really love, or you really like them
a great deal, and for one reason or another they leave you. That’s always a low
point. Maybe they feel their careers aren’t going anywhere. The publisher isn’t
offering as much money for their new book as they did for their last book, and
they think that some of that is your responsibility. As one writer who I liked
a great deal once wrote to me, “I can’t fire me, Nat. You’re the only one I can fire.” And he fired me. That was the whole letter!
His career didn’t go anywhere, but that was one of the nicer rejection letters.

The
real high points are the writer who you’ve worked with for several years, and
their career’s gone nowhere, and you’ve been working on their new book and it’s
really terrific—it’s different from anything else they’ve written—and you’ve
gone out with that book and sold it in the face of the fact that any check of
BookScan will reveal that they sold hardly anything of their last book. But you
found an enthusiastic editor who’s willing to take the book on despite that and
really run with it. That’s a great moment, and that’s happened to me a few
times. I say that to writers who have had poor results with their first few
books and feel that publishing doors have closed to them. Because the sales
track is clearly one of the things an editor looks at. Sometimes they can’t see
how incredible a new book is—they can only look at the author’s track record
at another house. So when you can overcome that, as an agent, and convince an
editor that they have something special, you’ve really made a breakthrough,
especially in this market.

Do you worry
about the future of books and reading?
I don’t think
you can be in this business without worrying about that subject. But, you know,
when I got started in publishing, I can remember an old salesman telling me,
“You should have been here in the forties and the fifties, Nat. That was the
great period! Now it’s all gone to hell.” I think every generation probably
feels like, Geez, you should’ve been here twenty years ago, kid. Where were
you twenty years ago when it was really great?
I think there’s always going to be that element—that it’s not as good as it
used to be. But it is tougher today.

What do you
still want to accomplish?
I just love
doing what I’m doing, and I hope I’ll be able to do it for many more years to
come.

Jofie Ferrari-Adler is an editor at Grove/Atlantic.

 

[Editor’s Note: Following the publication of Jofie Ferrari-Adler’s extended interview with Nat Sobel, we received a letter from Stuart Applebaum, executive vice president of communications for Random House, who takes issue with Sobel’s views of the firing of the publisher’s sales reps. We reprint his letter below in its entirety.]

While Mr. Sobel is well entitled to express his opinions about book publishers, his observations about the Random House, Inc., sales force demand clarification, in particular, two points in his quote.

First, the Random House Sales reorganization he cites took place some eighteen months ago—not so “recently,” as he misleadingly pegs it.

Second, his suggestion that the Random House field reps who left were “replaced by new, young, and cheaper people” is simply untrue. In virtually every instance the accounts affected at the time of the change were and continue being sold by longstanding, highly knowledgeable Random House veteran sales representatives with great rapport and effectiveness with their customers.

As a point of reference, about one-quarter of our field reps have more than twenty years of service. All but nine of them have at least five years of field-sales service. And speaking of tenure, at our national Sales Conference in March 2008 we celebrated three RH Sales Group members with thirty-five years of service; six celebrating thirty years; three with twenty-five years; and five commemorating twenty years.

Stuart Applebaum
Executive Vice President, Communications
Random House, Inc.


The author responds:

In his essay “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell warns us about words that are “used in a consciously dishonest way.” I was reminded of that warning when I read Stuart Applebaum’s letter about the Random House sales force’s “reorganization” (Orwell again: “Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them”).

Mr. Applebaum’s first complaint is almost too minor to be taken seriously, but, for the record, this interview was conducted on January 6, 2008, and the cuts to the Random House sales force were reported in Publishers Lunch on November 10, 2006, which places the actual time-span at less than fourteen months. Readers can decide for themselves if fourteen months can be reasonably considered “recent” for an agent with Sobel’s decades of experience in the business.

Mr. Applebaum’s second complaint is not minor at all. It could have been pulled straight out of “Politics and the English Language,” and therefore it is troubling. Just after Mr. Applebaum assures us that Sobel’s comment is “simply untrue,” he qualifies that phrase and everything that follows it by inserting the word “virtually.” Again, readers of this magazine know enough about language to look at the letter and decide for themselves what the word’s presence tells them.

Obviously Mr. Applebaum is just doing his job, and I have a hard time faulting anyone for that. It should also be noted that it is impossible to prove or disprove Sobel’s supposition without having access to information that is personal and proprietary, namely the salaries of the sales reps who were fired and the salaries of any reps who may have been hired to do the same work in the interim. But I am disheartened by Mr. Applebaum’s attempt to distract readers from the larger truth of Sobel’s observations—that reps are overburdened, and that publishing veterans are routinely replaced by cheaper help in order to save money, both of which hurts writers as well as readers—by issuing a statement that, when you really look at it, says virtually nothing.

Jofie Ferrari-Adler

Agents & Editors: A Q&A With Agent Lynn Nesbit
Agents & Editors: A Q&A With Editor Pat Strachan

Agents & Editors: A Q&A With Editor Pat Strachan

by

Jofie Ferrari-Adler

March/April 2008
3.1.08
In Print and Online

In an industry known for its larger-than-life personalities, Pat Strachan, a senior editor at Little, Brown, is something of a revelation. Born and raised in the suburbs of St. Louis, and educated at Duke University and the Radcliffe Publishing Program, Strachan moved to New York City in 1971 and spent the first seventeen years of her career at Farrar, Straus and Giroux (FSG), starting as an assistant and rising to vice president and associate publisher by editing top-shelf writers such as Joseph Brodsky, Lydia Davis, John McPhee, and Marilynne Robinson. Over almost four decades in the business, she has edited some of our most celebrated poets—Donald Hall, Galway Kinnell, Philip Larkin, Czeslaw Milosz, and Grace Paley, to name a few—and an equally impressive roster of prose writers, including Ian Frazier, Jamaica Kincaid, Rick Moody, Edna O’Brien, Jim Shepard, Tom Wolfe, and Daniel Woodrell. In 1982, she was awarded the PEN/Roger Klein Award for Editing. Yet despite these accomplishments, she remains a gentle and unassuming presence—an echo of Max Perkins in the era of Judith Regan.

When Strachan leads me into her office, the first thing I notice is that her large, L-shaped desk is neat and uncluttered. She explains that many of her manuscripts are at home, where she does her reading and editing. The office is decorated with dozens of framed photographs, drawings, and other mementos from a life in books: here a black-and-white photo, taken in the 1970s, of Derek Walcott at the Trinidad Theatre Workshop; there a shot of Padgett Powell and his beloved pit bull, Spode. On the wall to my right is a poem by Seamus Heaney titled “A Paean for Pat,” which he presented to her when she resigned from FSG in 1988 to become a fiction editor at the New Yorker. In 1992, after four years at the magazine, Strachan returned to book publishing, holding senior-level positions at Harcourt and Houghton Mifflin before moving to Little, Brown in 2002.

Shortly before this interview went to press, the literary world was shocked by news that Tom Wolfe, whose books Strachan edited at FSG, had left his publisher of forty-two years and given his next book to Little, Brown for an amount of money that anonymous sources have placed at between six million and seven million dollars. Sara Nelson, the editor in chief of Publishers Weekly, speculated in her weekly column that “by choosing Pat Strachan, wherever she is, Wolfe is declaring that sometimes it’s the editor, even more than the house, that counts.” I dropped Strachan a line to ask if she thought that was the case. True to form, she ducked the opportunity to take any personal credit, replying, “I can barely believe my great good fortune in being able to work with Tom Wolfe again. His new novel will be both an enormous amount of fun and an important reckoning with our times, as readers know to expect of Tom.”

In this interview, Strachan talks about her years at the New Yorker, the art of editing literary fiction, and what authors should consider when trying to land a publisher.


Maybe you can start by telling me a little bit about your background.
I was born in Kirkwood, Missouri, which is a suburb of St. Louis. Marianne Moore lived there when she was young, with her brother and mother. They lived with their uncle at the parsonage at the First Presbyterian Church. I only learned that later, when Mr. Giroux went to her funeral and brought back the program. Basically it was a postwar suburb. I went to public schools all the way through and then Duke University. At Duke, I found a flyer advertising the Radcliffe Publishing Procedures course. It was run by a woman named Mrs. Diggory Venn, which I think was a pseudonym. So fate took me to that course, and that’s where I met my husband, who was also taking the course. There were seven men out of seventy-seven students, and he was one of them. We met and married a year later, when I was twenty-four. That’s the nutshell story.


Did you know you wanted to go into publishing when you were growing up?
Oh, no. Books came into the house via an aunt. My father died when I was small—five—and this aunt from afar sent us books all the time for some reason. She would send us the Caldecott and Newbery award winners. So I read Thurber, for instance. My mother was a reader but she was more a periodical reader—the New Yorker was always in the house. But she preferred to read to learn something. A third grade teacher, Mrs. Hunter, somehow spotted me as a reader and encouraged me to read as much as possible and kept feeding me books. You know, this was third grade, so it was Little House in the Big Woods. She was extremely influential. In fact, I went back to St. Louis last April to see Kathryn Davis at Washington U. Kathryn asked me what I wanted to do most when I was back, and I said I’d like to see my third grade teacher. So we found her and went to see her. She turned one hundred in July. And she’s still reading and she’s still bright as anything. So, that, I think, indicates how much I felt I owed her.

The second teacher was a high school English teacher, Miss Andrews, who was a fanatic about literature and especially Moby-Dick. There was a harpoon over her desk. She was very passionate, and she encouraged me to work with the literary magazine as an editor—really as an editor more than as a writer. I was a timid writer, and we didn’t really do creative writing in high school. A few people did obviously or there wouldn’t have been a magazine. She pushed me. She pushed me to become involved. And the goal for women in those days when you went to college was to become an elementary school teacher if you were a reader, or if you were an action person to become a nurse. And Duke had a nursing school and an elementary education division. So you majored in English if you wanted to teach elementary school. I knew fairly quickly that I didn’t want to do that.

One day I went to a lecture by what we used to call a woman lawyer with my roommate. I walked out knowing I didn’t want to become a lawyer, but that’s when I saw the flyer for the publishing course. It was a eureka moment. So I went to Boston. It was a six-week course, and after it was over, my husband—my future husband—got a job at Anchor Books with Anne Freedgood, a wonderful, wonderful editor. So he moved to New York and I stayed in Boston and worked in the Radcliffe publicity department for a year. And then it was another fateful moment when my boss at Radcliffe—she knew I wasn’t very suitable for that job—told me Mr. Giroux at Farrar, Straus and Giroux had an opening. She reviewed books for the Boston Globe and knew what was happening in publishing. So I basically just flew down there fast.


Had you been to New York before?
To visit Bill but not to live. So I flew down, got that job, and moved to New York. That was 1971. And it was very lucky.


Did you like New York right away?
No.


It was a pretty scary time to be here, wasn’t it?
It was extremely dangerous. We lived in a group house on the Upper West Side on a block that is now quite nice, West Eighty-fifth Street, but was then deemed the most dangerous block in New York City. And yet we got used to it. We got used to it fairly quickly, and then Bill and I got our own apartment. And, of course, the wonderful thing about those days was that you could get an apartment for practically nothing. We made nothing and the apartment cost practically nothing, so living was a lot easier. Union Square, where I worked, was very rough. No one would walk across it except Roger Straus—in his ascot. He had no fear whatsoever. And now, of course, it’s beautiful. It looks like an English garden now.

Tell me about your first impressions of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
I felt as if I were in heaven, really. Mr. Giroux (whom I call Bob to his face but still call Mr. Giroux in public, as I first addressed him) was very supportive and kind and kept giving me more things to do. Mr. Straus was a character—very brilliant, very outspoken, very self-confident, and very personable. He walked around the office twice a day and said hello in one way or another to everybody.

Michael di Capua, who was mainly doing children’s books, was a huge support. He always pushed me to try to do more, to try to acquire—to do this—and gave me a great deal of help and confidence. So I was very well taken care of. I remained an editorial assistant for five years, which is sort of unusual, but I just didn’t see why I would leave. At that point I was taking care of some of Mr. Giroux’s authors, some of the poets, and then when Tom Stewart left, I was promoted. Tom Stewart was taking care of—I say taking care of rather than acquiring—Tom Wolfe and John McPhee at the time, and I inherited them. So really, am I not the luckiest person in the world? Now the trick was to start acquiring.

What were some of the first books you acquired?
A book about the Cajuns. I liked Cajun music and decided that there should be a book on the Cajuns and their story should be told. I found a writer at an alternative paper in New Orleans—his name was William Faulkner Rushton—and he said yes, he would do the book. We had a gumbo party at my apartment when it was published. The book was in print for about twenty-five years, so it was a good book.

Basically you had ideas and Roger [Straus] would throw you things, like, “Here’s a great book on papier-mâché, baby.” And you would edit a book on papier-mâché. I edited a book by Aldous Huxley’s widow, Laura Huxley, which was a self-help book about getting closer to your true feelings.

[Laughter.] Those were the days.
But that’s how you prove yourself as a worker. You will do anything and you will get these books into shape. It was fun, really. Then Larry Heinemann’s book Close Quarters landed on my desk—the first Vietnam War novel I had read. Ellen Levine sent it to me, probably as a single submission. I just adored it and was able to buy it for a very low price. This was maybe 1977. The book was basically about a grunt’s tour of duty—very vivid language—and his next novel, Paco’s Story, which I also edited, won the National Book Award. I believe that was the first serious book I acquired. The second also came from Ellen Levine, whom I owe a great debt, which was Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping.


That was the second book you acquired?
Yes, the second serious one. It was possibly a single submission as well, for a modest price, and there was no question that it was a great book. I read it, and Mr. Giroux read it, and we signed it up. But, you see, things were a lot easier in those days. There wasn’t the same competition. You had time to read it, consider it, and you could buy it if you liked it.


At the time, did you have any sense of what Housekeeping would become?
I thought it would last. It’s not just the writing, but the feeling. It’s a rendition of loss without heaviness, and of course loss has a great deal to do with all of our lives. It was just too gorgeous and affecting not to last.


Was there any real editing to be done?
Let’s put it this way: Marilynne and I sat at my dining room table and did some back-and-forthing. And I would say in 99 percent of the instances of questioning, Marilynne’s opinion stood. The book is really almost the same as it was when it came in to me. I have notes and papers and some record of our back-and-forthing that wasn’t done at the dining room table, which is really wonderful. She’s so articulate in explaining why she had done what she had done, why she had used that word rather than another word. She’s just brilliant.


Was the title always Housekeeping?
It was always Housekeeping and the title was questioned. The questioning was put to rest because that was the title Marilynne had always had while she was writing the book. So Housekeeping stayed. And the jacket process was basically, “Marilynne, what would you like to have on your jacket?” She said, “I’d like the bridge across the lake,” which was roughly Sandpoint. So we commissioned someone to paint the lake and the bridge. It was an oil painting. Someone asked me recently, “Where is that painting?” Well, I don’t know.

It’s probably in the art director’s apartment.
You know, maybe not. Maybe it was tossed. Who knows? In any case, that was the second book. And then there was a cluster around then, late seventies, early eighties. Jamaica Kincaid. I read one little story called “Girl” in the New Yorker, found out who the agent was, made an offer, and signed up the book. Edna O’Brien was also around that time. Of course she wasn’t a first novelist, but she’d switched publishers one too many times and was sort of at sea. We put together her collected stories and got Philip Roth to write the introduction and got a front page TBR [Times Book Review review]. And then there were Ian Frazier and Lydia Davis and Padgett Powell. So you had this base of authors and they would write other books, obviously, and it was a wonderful base to have.

Tell me about working with John McPhee.
John had been published at Farrar, Straus for several years before I got there. I can’t tell you who first acquired him. I think it was Hal Vursell. And then Henry Robbins and then Tom Stewart. I took him over with the book about general practitioners. John is a perfectionist, and he had very strong opinions about things, but always in a very nice way. He didn’t want his picture on his book jackets, though I think we finally broke him down on that. He didn’t want any pictures in the books—he was doing it with words and didn’t want to compromise that. He was very particular about his jackets. If we sold reprint rights, for instance Coming Into the Country, he said, “I just want to make sure that the paperback publisher doesn’t put an Eskimo with a ruff on the cover.” I said, “Just talk to them about it. Just say, ‘There’s one thing I really don’t want: an Eskimo with a ruff.’ ” And then the cover came. You guessed it. I can’t remember if it got changed or not.

I got very sick in 1994 and had to go through the whole treatment and surgery and everything. And John called me—at that point I was unemployed, Harcourt had let go of almost everybody in New York—and asked if I would edit, together with David Remnick, the second John McPhee Reader. He was basically giving me a job when I was in a bad spell, both professionally and with my health. So he’s a really good guy.

And now his daughters are writing. He had four daughters, and his wife had four daughters, so there were eight girls. And when my daughter was born I remember he said, “Congratulations—you have fourteen years before she’s fourteen.” So he’s also really funny.


Coming Into the Country was his first best-seller. That was very exciting. That’s probably the peak of excitement on a certain scale—when a company has published twelve books and the thirteenth becomes a best-seller. And then all the books thereafter sell better.

When did you meet Tom Wolfe?
He was working with Tom Stewart, who left the house, and I stepped in starting with The Right Stuff, which was so great. He had done a serialization of The Right Stuff in Rolling Stone but then revised it completely. Tom is a reviser. So the deadline is coming up and the book is expected and he’s revising up to the last minute. My job with Tom, mainly, was to make sure that nothing had slipped up in the revision process, that there weren’t any inadvertent repetitions or timeline problems. The wonderful thing is that he revised in different colors. He must have used some kind of soft colored pencils because the lines were thick—it wasn’t this stingy little pencil line—and there would be several layers on the manuscript of green, blue, red. It was beautiful to see. The copyeditors loved it too. It was a terrible inconvenience, of course, but nobody seemed to mind because he was, and is to this day, I’m sure, extremely courteous with everybody and so apologetic that these further changes had come forth. He was a pleasure to work with. After The Right Stuff there was From Bauhaus to Our House and then Bonfire of the Vanities.

That must have been a big book for you. Or was The Right Stuff the bigger book?
Well, The Bonfire ended up selling more copies. They were both big books. I guess The Right Stuff must have been a best-seller as well. I forgot about that. I remember when Bonfire was out and I was sitting at my desk typing something and young Roger, the sales director, came in and kissed me on the forehead. I said, “What’s that all about?” He said, “You’re number one.” And I didn’t know what he was talking about. Bonfire had hit number one on the best-seller list, but I didn’t viscerally relate to that.

Why?
Because it had been a long time since the editing and I was already on to something else. Of course it was wonderful for Tom and wonderful for everyone involved, but my work was pretty much done. I had nothing to do with it becoming number one.

That’s interesting because today editors are so involved in the promotion and the talking and the chatter, getting everyone fired up. Has that been a change in the space of your career?
That is a bit of a change. I mean, I always did a lot of hobnobbing on my authors’ behalf and that never let up. We were not quiet and genteel at FSG. We were very fervent and committed. But my basic job had been done, in that particular case, and now it was up to someone else to make it a best-seller. And Tom didn’t need my help. He didn’t need quotes. He was already a well-known writer. But we hobnobbed in different ways. It was less within the house than it was outside the house. It was like each editor was his or her own brand. The decision on what to publish was pretty much up to you, and therefore you had to justify your decision. And the responsibility was all on your head for every book you signed up. Certainly fiscal responsibility reigned at a small, private house where, you know, the bank was at our door a lot. So those profit-and-loss statements—whatever they called them then, before you signed up a book—were important. You saw what the last book did and sort of tailored your advance to that. We were very careful with money.

Roger was notoriously stingy.
[Laughs] He was careful with money. John McPhee actually called him McStraus, and he called him that to his face, and we all laughed. But John never had an agent. John just took the deal every time and eventually we had the best-seller with Coming Into the Country.

How did you actually learn to edit? Was there a mentor?
The mentor, initially, was Mr. Giroux. I would Xerox his manuscripts after he edited them. He took the month of August off every year and would edit three or four books during that time. But the closest teacher was a woman named Carmen Gomezplata, who was our chief copyeditor. We were the children, and we and Carmen were in and out of each other’s offices all the time. We would ask her questions and as we grew into our roles we continued to ask her questions. She really taught us to see those copyedited manuscripts in great detail. In those days, you went over them and then sent them to the author. You really learned. That was a valuable experience. That’s the technicalities of editing. The editing itself—I mean, not the punctuation and if you put the possessive here or there, but the instinctive editing—is hard to explain. That has to do with your own ear and your own sense of the language. Every editor is different, and the editing is generally subjective and instinctive, which is why everything is pretty much put in a question form. That’s what I call the slow reading, rather than editing—slow, slow, slow reading. You have to have a very long attention span as you know and just not get up for a long time to keep the continuity. And if you are a sedentary person anyway, which I am, it’s a marvelous, marvelous job.

Did you know that you liked it right away?
I did. It’s because the writers were so wonderful. One after the other would come into the office—most of them did, anyway—and they were so interesting and so fun to be with. It’s not as if the editing of their books was the penance part, but the association was such a joy, and I knew I wanted to be among that group of people who were writing and publishing books.

You were also editing a fair number of poets. How did you come to meet Seamus Heaney?
I met him through his books. Seamus had been distributed by Oxford University Press—his Faber and Faber editions—and Faber had for a while wanted Farrar, Straus to publish him. I started publishing him with Field Work, which was maybe 1978. And that was really, really a wonderful opportunity. He’s so kind, and so funny. This is what I find about a lot of poets: Before the kind, the funny. Why are poets so funny? Joseph Brodsky: hilarious. Derek Walcott: hilarious. Mark Strand—they’re all funny. Even Gjertrud Schnackenberg is funny. Grace Schulman’s funny. They don’t have as much at stake as far as becoming financial successes. There is a limited readership, even with someone like Seamus. They are jealous about prizes and jockey in that sort of way, but basically they’re pretty satisfied with what they’ve chosen to do in life. It’s a choice that was almost made for them. It’s who they are.

I have to confess that the idea of editing poetry is mysterious to me. What does it amount to?
It shouldn’t be mysterious. Because once again it’s just slow reading. If there’s a dangler in there, the poet doesn’t want that dangler. “No, I didn’t mean for that to refer to that.” I think it’s basically just catching mistakes. If there’s something you really, really think should be clear—it’s meant to be clear but it’s not, it’s coming forth as obscure—then you ask. And if they say no, it was supposed to be at a slant, that’s fine. But you just ask. Editing poetry to me was asking the dumb question again and again and again, and having absolutely no pride about that. So that the poet knows that everything there is what she wanted to say. It’s asking a lot of dumb questions. And there is work to be done with poetry, work that’s very concrete, just like any other piece of writing. And you would find that too if you sat down with a manuscript of poems. All the mystery would go away.

You also edit the novelist Daniel Woodrell.
Daniel is new to me. I can credit my husband, Bill, for Daniel. Bill was editor in chief at Holt when Dan was published there by Marian Wood. He really liked his work and met him and liked him very much. After his seventh or eighth book, Daniel decided that he wanted to try a new publisher, which is very common and often legitimate. Just to see if another sales force might do better. It had nothing to do with the editor at all. So a partial of Winter’s Bone was submitted to Little, Brown. And the partial was so strong that we bought the partial and an unwritten novel. And with fiction, that’s very unusual. Obviously he’d written books in the past, but we hadn’t worked with him in the past. It turned out to be wonderful. We’ve been able to at least double, if not triple, his sales. We were able to do the same thing for Rosemary Mahoney with her travel memoir Down the Nile.

Tell me about that. What do you do for a writer who’s maybe midcareer, whose career may have stalled a little bit in terms of sales?
It’s tough. Getting new sorts of support for the writer that he or she hadn’t had before is sometimes helpful. For Winter’s Bone, Edna O’Brien gave a comment. I know her, but she’d never read Dan before and would not have praised the book if she didn’t really love it. So to have a blurb from Edna O’Brien, that sort of points to something about the language in the book, whereas people may have been thinking, “Oh, does he just write country noir? Or are these crime novels? Or are they mysteries?” I’m also very proud to have gotten Tom McGuane, who I don’t know and who doesn’t know Dan, to read it and write a comment about it. That in turn helps the reviewers to think about the writer again. And we got a ton of reviews, and big ones, and really nice ones, for this book. And reviews do sell books at a certain level. So it’s a very gradual sort of chipping away process and nothing is really guaranteed. You can’t make someone give a blurb. I’ve always regretted that—that you can’t write the blurb yourself and sign it.

You also had a very close relationship with Laurie Colwin, the late novelist and food writer.
Our children started it, the first day at City & Country School, on Thirteenth Street. Our children were barely two years old. She needed time to write and I needed for my child to have some action other than the babysitter. We sort of circled each other. I knew she was a writer, she knew I was an editor. And we were very standoffish at first. This is all about the children. This is not about business. And then it was clear we were just made for each other. As mothers. As friends. She did teach me a lot, as a friend, about what the writer’s life is like, how challenging it is, even for such a popular writer. How Spartan it can be. Of course she countered that by making things nice, and often it was through food. Food was very important. Halloween was very big in her and Juris’s part of Chelsea, and so the Halloween meal would be served at their apartment. You never had a drink before dinner at Laurie’s. You just sat down and had dinner and got right to it. And then you talked and talked and talked. She was a very dear friend. A lot of my writers were friends. Laurie wasn’t my author, so that was a different situation. I was constantly amazed that she was interested in anything I had to say. Because she was so interesting, and I’m just an editor, a boring person who works at a company.

Take me back to the early part of your career and talk about the atmosphere of the industry in those days.
Well, I must say that there were a lot of parties. There were those George Plimpton parties. It was to celebrate writers. That was the purpose of the parties. Publishers would give parties at their houses and invite total strangers. George Plimpton was one of those people and Roger Straus was one of those people, too. Roger actually had a standard poodle named Schwartz who was sent downstairs at eleven o’clock to sort of herd people out. Eleven o’clock was the time you were supposed to leave if it was a dinner party. The parties may not have been very useful, but you met people. You met friends of your writers who might want to publish with you. You met people who might want to support your writers. That sort of networking was very easy to do because of publication parties. If a party was at the National Arts Club, every editor at the house was invited, as well as all the publicity people. It wasn’t very focused, frankly. Everybody came: the young people, the older people, everybody. It wasn’t just for the press.

This was all over the industry?
I think it was fairly industry-wide that publication parties were expected. I’m not saying it’s a huge loss that we don’t have as many publishing parties as we used to, but the kids had a lot of fun—the younger people, I shouldn’t say kids—because you got a lot of free food and you met a lot of people you wouldn’t have met otherwise. It was a benefit, it was definitely a benefit. And people did have fun outside the office. Michael di Capua was just a workaholic in the office. You couldn’t get him to look up or stop yelling about something that went wrong. But outside the office, we would costume up and maybe go to Studio 54. And you didn’t talk about work outside the office. You may have talked about books, but you didn’t talk about the office. It was a different time. This was the ’70s and ’80s.

In those days, who were you were looking up to in the industry? The way that someone my age would look up to Galassi or whoever.
Cork Smith—Corlies Smith—everyone called him Cork. He was an editor at Viking for many years. He was just an addictive reader. I remember him saying to me once, “I know it’s bad, but sometimes I finish the manuscript when I know I’m not going to buy it.” Because he just couldn’t stop reading! He always wanted to know the end of the story. He was very laconic and he looked like…what did Cork look like? He was extremely handsome. As Elisabeth Sifton always said, “Well, just stand in line, because there are a lot of people in line and he’s been married to Sheila for many, many years.” He looked like Marlon Brando, only tall and thin. That’s pretty good looking. And everybody really admired him.

Alan Williams was another one. Alan was at Viking as well. He had a piece recently, I think in the Yale Review or somewhere, about his career—he died a few years ago—saying, “All right, here’s what my liberal arts education did for me. I learned how to talk about anything for five minutes and to talk about nothing for more than five.” And that’s the definition of a trade book editor. You’re constantly becoming an expert in every area. You can do fiction and nonfiction, which we all do, and there’s this continuing education aspect to it. Bob Gottlieb was always highly admired for being interested in everything—interested in the way the ad looked, interested in every aspect of the process. He had very catholic, broad taste—he could publish a thriller or anything else. Peter Mayer at Penguin was also extremely well-respected and liked.

What was it about Peter that you admired?
His commitment. That publishing was his life, is still his life. And that’s really the only way you can do it. You know, you don’t go home and switch on the TV every night. You’re always thinking about how you might push this book, how you might help the book, how this world event might help. There’s an article in the paper about Polish workers in London, and I think, “How can I attach that to Rose Tremain’s book?” And of course you can’t. But it becomes habitual that you are always thinking about the publishing process and the books that you’re working on. It’s that way-of-life mentality of some publishers. Roger Straus. Bob Gottlieb. Cork Smith, who was more an editor than a publisher. Alan. Peter Mayer. There must be others I’m leaving out, certainly Roger Straus and Bob Giroux. You know, as Edmund Wilson always said, “Literature is life,” and in some ways if you’re in publishing, publishing is life. And it gives back. You’re constantly learning.

Do you have any great Roger Straus stories that you can tell?
He was extremely personable. He loved people. He was a liberal at heart in the way that he trusted people. He trusted other people’s opinions, not just his own. And I think in a way, like Alfred Knopf, who probably wasn’t as friendly, he depended on advice, and that was a way to build a great house. Whether it was the CIA people he had out there in Italy finding Alberto Moravia, or later it was Susan Sontag and Joseph Brodsky advising, he trusted other people. Not that he couldn’t judge for himself. But why not get the people who write for a living and read for a living, the total-immersion people, to tell you who’s best of these twenty Italian writers? And he was self-confident enough to do that, to take advice, and Knopf did the same thing. That’s how Roger built up his European list. And he trusted his editors. Now, of course, if you didn’t get the good reviews, he would stop trusting you. So that’s why your standards became very high—because you didn’t want to disappoint him. And a bad review was not acceptable. He wouldn’t say anything, but you knew he was disappointed, and that was a great motivation to sign up the best things you could find and not take it lightly.

Do you have any sort of guiding philosophy that shapes your editing?
Not a guiding philosophy, but I do think it’s extremely dangerous to mess with a novel structurally, because it’s close to poetry in that it’s almost pure consciousness. The way it comes forth from the writer is the way it should probably be, even though maybe the beginning is unclear or not enough action happens in this part or whatever. With a literary book—I hate to say literary, but a piece of serious fiction that isn’t genre fiction—I try to stay away from structural suggestions because they can be very damaging. One big change can make the whole house of cards fall apart. So with literary fiction I really try to stick to line editing. I also think the less done the better, and I consider myself a fairly heavy editor. But I do as little as I can do, because a work of serious literature is a very fragile construction.

I have a few little bugaboos. I learned one of them at the New Yorker. It’s called the “stopper.” A stopper is usually a graphic or upsetting image that causes the reader to stop and read in a daze over the next pages. The reader has a visceral reaction. And you don’t want to do that and follow it up with important stuff. You don’t want to do that too fast, you don’t want to do it too soon—especially in a story. It’s more than prudery. There are certain rules about how a reader is actually reacting, that I have in my own mind at least. But the stopper was a New Yorker term, and I thought it was really very wise.

Who was editing the New Yorker when you were there?
It was Bob Gottlieb, lots of fun, and the deputy was Chip McGrath, marvelous, and Roger Angell was the head of the fiction department, which he probably still is. Alice Quinn was there doing poetry and some fiction. Linda Asher and Dan Menaker, lots of fun, plus assistants and about three people who did nothing but read.

Why did they call you? This was after Bonfire?
Yes. It was right after Bonfire, which was my first best-seller after Coming Into the Country and my last best-seller. I knew John McPhee very well, and they were looking for a fiction editor and John, I know, recommended me to Roger. And I knew Chip fairly well. They may have thought I might have been unhappy because I was passed over for the editor in chief job at Farrar, Straus, which was offered to Jonathan Galassi, who’s done such a beautiful job ever since. Because of the length of time I had been there, they may have thought my nose was out of joint, which it really wasn’t. But the opportunity presented itself and it was lovely. The magazine was more limited in some ways, but it’s more expansive in that you had an audience for each story of possibly eight-hundred-thousand readers. Now I think it’s up to nine-hundred-and-something thousand. The idea of distributing a piece of fiction that you love to so many people is alluring. For selfish reasons, it’s nice because the piece of writing you’re working on is very short. There’s no interior design to be fooled with. There’s no jacket. There are no reviews, no subrights. Being a fiction editor at a magazine is a very distinct task, as opposed to books. Surely there are people who can’t image the sluggishness of our process—“How can you have the patience to work with books?”—but that was what I was used to. So that’s why I left after four years, very tearfully, because I loved the people and I loved the magazine but I knew I wanted to be back with books.

How did it work at the New Yorker in terms of deciding what got published?
The way it worked then, which was 1988 to 1992, was that when you found a story that you liked you would write a little report on your manual typewriter—maybe we had electric by then—fold it over, and pass it on to the next reader. All the editors read all the stories, and the report would circulate with the story. The next editor would read the story, open up the piece of paper, and add his or her paragraph. It would go all the way to the top that way, to Chip McGrath and eventually Bob Gottlieb, and Bob would make the final decision. We rarely talked about the story until the process was over, which must have come from years of experience, from knowing that talking about fiction can often lead you into an emotional tug-of-war, that the responses to fiction are very often psychological, and the discussions could become very heated and the opinions just wildly divergent, even within the fiction department at the New Yorker. So it was best not to talk about the stories until it was over. Then you could say, “What did you think about that?” when the stakes weren’t quite so high and there was either a yes or no already. I thought it was a very elegant way to do things, and they may not have even been aware of it.

What was it like to work for Bob Gottlieb?
I wish I had seen more of him. He was very busy because he ran the whole magazine. He was absolutely ebullient and excited about just about everything and very outspoken when you eventually got to speak to him. But I felt that I was working more for Chip and Roger and those people because Bob had the responsibility of the whole magazine. He did say, when we moved offices—we moved from 28 West Forty-fourth Street to offices overlooking Bryant Park—I remember him saying, “We are going to have individual radiators and individual air conditioners, just as we did in the old office, because I don’t want to do climate control issues.” He was so wise. I don’t want to do climate control issues. That’s usually what the discussion is in every office—whether it’s too cold or too hot.

Getting back to books, I wonder if you would walk us through your day a bit to give us a sense of how an editor spends her time.
We don’t read or edit in the office. If someone asks you to read something really quickly for them, you might stop and read, but you want the leisurely hours to read. We have meetings: editorial meetings, acquisitions meetings, marketing meetings, focus meetings, meetings about the jackets, meetings about the titles. There are lots of meetings and often there’s preparation for those meetings—we don’t just walk in cold. An agent or two may inquire about one thing or another: distribution of the book internationally, some question about the catalogue. Usually there are several agent inquiries a day. They’re trying to keep on top of what’s happening with their clients’ books.

I correspond with writers, obviously. I do miss the phone contact, but e-mail has become so much more efficient. If they’re not home—and they’re often not home—the e-mail is still there. So that’s a lot of the day. We always look at Publishers Lunch for too long. Rejection letters. Rejections are things that you try to compartmentalize and not think about too much. It’s probably the least pleasant part of the job. It takes a lot of tact to do it without hurting anybody’s feelings. Doing it so that the author could possibly see the letter and feel encouraged rather than discouraged is time-consuming. It’s anonymous, unsung work. Everybody in the company knows what you signed up, but they don’t know what you didn’t sign up. There are also lunches. Lunches are the best. That’s with the writers or the agents. Lunches are always interesting to me, and I feel really privileged that I get lunch. You get your bearings back when you inhale a little oxygen and actually talk to people. I don’t think lunch is a universal love, but it’s certainly one of mine, and it’s very useful.

Tell me about your most memorable lunch.
Maybe it was my first lunch with Tom Wolfe. Of course, I took the subway. I was headed to the Four Seasons. And the subway got stuck. Tom, the most courtly of men, was waiting at the Four Seasons for forty-five minutes, close to an hour, and he didn’t leave. And when I finally arrived it was memorable for its tension released by his gallantry. Another was with Joseph Brodsky, when he learned at lunch that I didn’t know much about classical music. He was really horrified. After lunch, he took me to a record store and bought me a basic set: Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater, Purcell’s Funeral Music for Queen Mary, Brahams’s Third Symphony. A few basics to get me started. And I’ve been listening ever since. My daughter is addicted, has to go to sleep by it. So I guess that was a life-changing lunch in terms of my cultivation level. The horror on his face! I loved a lunch with Jamaica Kincaid. I think it was my introductory lunch with Jamaica. We were at the Gotham on Twelfth Street, and we both ordered rosé, and the waiter brought red, and she looked up and said in her beautiful Antiguan accent, “You must think we look stupid!” That was all she said. And the red was exchanged for rosé.

Book editors serve all kinds of different masters: the authors, your bosses, the agents. I wonder how you think about those allegiances and responsibilities.
An editor always wants to make their writers happy. That is a priority. There’s had to be some adjustment and adaptation to the systems as they work now. For instance, the attitude toward the book jacket is more sophisticated than it once was. Today we wouldn’t necessarily get someone to paint an oil of a certain scene for a jacket. It’s become more sophisticated. So the editor’s role, in part, is to translate for the writer the logic behind certain decisions on the house’s part. There’s more gentle persuasion that needs to take place for jackets, titles. But that’s about it. The rest is between the editor and the writer.

How many new books do you try to buy in a year?
As many as I love, really, and it varies from year to year. I might buy four one year and eleven the next. Sometimes they come in clumps. The books you like come all at once. And that can be awkward sometimes. You’ve just signed one up, why should you be signing up another one? Well, it may be six months before another one comes along. So the acquisitions rhythm can be jerky.

Take us behind the scenes at an editorial meeting. I think a lot of writers would be very interested to know what happens.
There are two levels of meetings. First there’s an editorial meeting, where the editors and the editorial assistants basically air their views on significant manuscripts that have crossed their desk in the last week. Often it’s to find out if your colleagues might have a particular interest in, say, Rufus Wainwright, because you know of this Rufus Wainwright book that’s going around. And if there’s significant interest then you might chase it more readily than you would otherwise. So that’s sort of determining subject interest, topic interest. Even now and then with fiction writers, you’ll get a manuscript and want to know if other people have read the writer and what their opinion was. It’s sort of just airing things so there’s a forum for all the material that’s coming in every week. Every now and then, someone will mention a significant turnaway—a reluctant or significant rejection—that sort of thing. “I passed on this even though it’s going elsewhere…” It’s like our live newsletter—what’s been happening at your desk. And it’s not so much a decision-making meeting. Every now and then our editor-in-chief, Geoff [Shandler], will say, “I wouldn’t pursue it. I don’t think it’s right for us.” But not too often. Everybody likes to talk. We talk a lot. It’s a little bit of togetherness, and then we retreat back to our lonely desks.

The acquisition meeting is a decision-making meeting, and we prepare fairly rigorously for it. We write our opinion of the book. We do a description of the book. We give some background on both sales and critical reception for the author’s previous books. We make a profit and loss projection—always an estimate, but something to go by. Every acquisition meeting varies from one company to the next as far as I can tell, but generally a decision is made in the meeting whether or not we’re going to make an offer for the book, and about how high we would be allowed to go to buy the book. So it can go either way. It can be yes or no. And you have to be very manly about it. If I’m unable to sign up a book I want, that’s when I have to be my most manly. And everybody has the same experience. It’s not always a book the company can do, or feel it can do well. But the main thing, your main desire, if you love a book that isn’t signed up by your house, is that it be signed up at some other house. And there are very, very few titles that do get lost. So while it’s a disappointment, it’s not tragic, generally, if your book is turned away. If that’s the worst sort of trauma we have to suffer, it’s not so bad.

So are these decisions made, on some level, by consensus?
On some level. Different voices speak up. Editors. Publicity people. Salespeople. And everybody’s just sort of gently giving their opinion. Then our publisher has to make the final judgment. But it’s often the result of what’s gone on before.

Do you feel a sense of competition with editors at other houses?
That’s a good question. I can’t say that I do. If I admire an editor, and I can’t do a book and they can, I have to honestly say I’m happy for the book, because the writer landed with a good editor. So I don’t really feel competitive. There are some moments when I feel envious, but I don’t feel active competition.

Say you get a debut novel or a debut collection of stories. What is it about something that gets your attention, compared to all the other ones that don’t?
Well, take this collection of stories by Peter Orner, Esther Stories. It was sent by Rob Preskill, an agent in San Francisco who I’d never done any business with and didn’t even know was in business. The stories came out of the blue. I started reading them, and I just found them enormously emotionally affecting. They’re very spare, and the writing is fantastic but not fancy. I just found them very serious—I mean, sometimes they’re funny—but the intent behind them is very serious. They’re basically about families. I was able to find another reader, Eric Chinski, who also loved them, went completely berserk over them, and I was able to buy them at Houghton Mifflin. We put them into an original paperback and lots of wonderful things happened for this book. I published his second book last year. Esther Stories was a very pure acquisition. I’d say that’s about as pure as you can get. Never heard of the agent, no stories published in major magazines.

If you’re talking about a more obvious way of having a book of stories come to your attention, there’s Uwem Akpan. This is a Nigerian writer who is also a Jesuit priest and who got his MFA from the University of Michigan in 2006. He’s written a collection of stories called Say You’re One of Them. It’s about children in various African countries who are in crisis because of conflicts they can’t control. I read the one story, “An Ex-Mas Feast,” in the New Yorker. I read many New Yorker stories, but this one really bowled me over, in, again, a visceral way. And I couldn’t stop reading once I started. So we took action fast. Michael Pietsch, our publisher, felt the same way about the story. I wrote to Uwem. We waited. We waited until the second story came out. Then he got an agent. We waited at auction. We bought the book. It was as if it was fated—it was going to happen. But a lot of publishers wanted a story that was so powerful, and a collection that also had the New Yorker imprimatur.

On the other hand, what is the most common problem with first books?
They can be too controlled. I find a lot of first novels too careful and too polite. I mean, let’s face it, Housekeeping is a wild book. I don’t think Marilynne had ever published anything before, even short pieces. She was doing what came from her mind and her experience. Larry Heinemann’s book is another example, a graphic war novel, but just gorgeous. Sometimes others can be a little tight and a little fearful of being messy.

Do you think MFA programs contribute to that problem?
I don’t think so. I think they’re trying to counter it in some way. I think they try to coach the students to…Look, any time you do something for the first time, you’re more fearful than you are the second time. So the feelings often don’t come forth right away.

But in your opinion are MFAs a good thing for a writer to do or a bad thing?
I think it doesn’t hurt if you have the time. If only to meet other writers and to meet writers with more experience. To learn to talk about writing and the different ways people approach it. I think it’s a good thing. I don’t think it damages writers. I don’t think you can teach anyone how to write, but it can certainly teach people what to expect from themselves, and give them a communal feeling—that this isn’t easy—and give them some endurance power. I don’t think there is a plethora of the programs. I’ve been to several and I always find the writers so alive.

page_5: 

I read somewhere that you can tell if you’re interested in a novel within the first two pages. Is that true?
Some part of my brain really responds to an interesting sentence. Over two pages, if there isn’t an interesting sentence or thought or description, or if there isn’t something vivid, it doesn’t mean that I’m going to stop reading, because that would be wrong—there are certainly worthwhile books that don’t impress you with the language in the first two pages—but I pretty much know if I’m interested or not, even though I’ll read to the end in many cases anyway. Some books are more dependent on story than other books, and it can really depend on the outcome. You read the entire book because the outcome might be smashing—the cumulative power of what comes before. But certainly, stylistically, I know pretty quickly whether or not it’s a book I’m going to love. I would say two pages is an exaggeration. Probably ten pages.

How important is it to you that your books sell well?
It’s important to me because I want people to read them. Because when they do, and I get reactions, it makes me feel good, as if I did something valuable. And it’s most important to me for the writer, because the writer wants readers. It’s usually not about the money at all. They want as many readers as they can get. It’s hard to project what’s going to sell and what isn’t, so I just assume that what I buy is going to sell sufficiently to not create a debt at the house. That’s my job. That’s my professional job—not to lose money—and I try very hard not to lose money. And having a great big book to offset some of the books that sell less well would be wonderful. I think I have some lurking in the future.

Agents have assumed a new primacy for writers in the last several decades. How do you feel about that?
I’m very glad to have the agents’ help. The agents know much more about publishing than the writers do, obviously. Some of them have worked at publishing houses and can explain the logic behind the publisher’s decisions. They know what to ask for and what not to ask for. I think agents have become more important to writers because there is not as much continuity in publishing now. So if a writer is jumping houses, if the houses are making the writer jump, then you need one stable person in your life to put everything together. So I suppose that’s the single biggest reason that that shift in loyalty to agents took place. The agent’s job is also a lot more complicated now because of the multiple submissions and auctions and the complexity of selling a book that is desired by many publishers. I don’t want to keep harking back to the days of single submissions, but it was pretty relaxing. If you sent a manuscript to Bob Giroux, he would be really irritated if you sent it to anyone else while he was reading it. Wasn’t his time worth more than that? It was a simplified process.

Are there any younger agents who you’re finding yourself doing business with or liking or admiring lately?
Julie Barer, who has her own agency, is wonderful—very supportive of her authors and enthusiastic about her projects. More for nonfiction, Brettne Bloom at Kneerim & Williams has great energy and intelligence, as does Julie. There are lots of fine young agents, but for fiction and nonfiction, those are two good suggestions.

From your perspective, what do the best agents do for their authors?
They write a very good letter introducing the writer and the book under consideration. If previous books have been published, they include full reviews with the submission. They try to match an editor to a writer—temperamentally, aesthetically—as much as they try to match a writer to a house. Then, once the process begins, they know what to push for and what not to, how to choose their battles. And that’s a very delicate dance. Because often the writer would like a little more pushing than should or could be done, and the agent has to have a good sense of that.

How involved or not involved do you want authors to be in the marketing and promotion of their work? Is it healthy for an author to be involved?
I think that, in the end, the older writers learn that it’s better to be writing their next books. Of course, everybody needs a break, but it can be distressing to become involved. I remember when I left Houghton Mifflin, one of my poets, Glyn Maxwell, said, “Well, Pat, it’s just publishing.” And I thought, “What a poetic thing to say.” Publishing is my entire life and yet he says, “It’s just publishing.” So, in other words: “I’m a writer. I’ll publish my poetry somewhere. We’ll still be friends.” I thought it was very healthy to see it that way—there is writing and then there is publishing. And they’re two quite different processes. I think involvement in the publishing process can be frustrating, and if a writer can resist, I would resist, frankly.

Put yourself in the shoes of an unpublished writer. Are there any intangible things she can do to put herself on the radar of an agent or a publisher, besides the obvious things like publishing in magazines?
Get to know other writers. Not so much to learn how to write, but to meet people and learn something about the professional way to do things, so you won’t be sending out e-mails from the blue. Knowing writers will convince other writers to read your work, and possibly give a comment on your work, which might be helpful in selling it. My advice would be to not be alone.

What are the important things for an author to look for in an editor and a publishing house?
I would look at the list and look at the catalogues online, which you can do now. I suppose there’s some way to look at which editors do which books by looking at the acknowledgments. I think it’s important to determine that the minds might get along, to learn the kinds of books the editor edits and the publisher publishes—every publisher has a wide variety, but in the field where you’re writing—to see that you’d be in the sort of company you’d like to be in. And if you can’t get that, then accept an offer anyway. Michael di Capua used to say, “Small children won’t die from this,” when the jacket came out the wrong color or something. It is important—the publication of the book and how it’s done—but the book is still there, and there are only so many different ways you can publish it. So I wouldn’t—as a young writer—get too hung up on who the publisher is.

Obviously the industry has changed a lot over the years, from small shops like FSG to very large corporate companies. Having experienced both, what do you think about what’s happened to the industry?
I don’t feel discouraged. I feel that any good manuscript I read is going to be published, and that’s almost true. I don’t feel that there are good books languishing any more than there used to be. And if that’s the case, I’m fine with it. If it wasn’t the case, I would be less fine with the changes. And the changes are that the business is now considered a conventional business. Or, rather, that conventional rules are applied to what started as a cottage-industry business. It’s very difficult to twist publishing into a conventional business. And yet you have to try. Because how else are you going to learn what works? And how are you going to report to your superiors? You have to accept that there are going to be different ways of doing things now—less off-the-cuff, less impulsive. Yet that off-the-cuff impulsiveness is there every time you read a manuscript. And you’re still making those same sorts of impassioned decisions that you ever were. So maybe the final decision about whether to publish or not to publish is more complicated and complex, and maybe there are more obstacles in the editor’s way. But if you don’t publish it, somebody else will. So it’s not a tragedy. It’s not tragic in the larger sense that we’re now conglomerated rather than small. I really don’t think so. I think big versus small is sometimes difficult for the younger people who are learning, because with small you pretty much go to every meeting—production meetings and advertising meetings—and you pretty much learn the whole business. You know why the book is priced this way and why it’s that format instead of this format because everybody goes to all the meetings. That’s a wonderful apprenticeship to have. In a larger company, it can get a little more Balkanized by virtue of necessity. So I think it takes a little while longer for young people to learn every aspect of the business.

What’s the biggest problem or challenge in the publishing industry today?
This is fairly broad, but I would say bringing readers to books. Let me try to personalize that a little. My husband is from a small town in northern Minnesota, and we used to go out there frequently. I once brought John McPhee’s Encounters with the Archdruid, which is a book about conservation. My in-laws mainly read the newspaper, and nature guides, and cookbooks—very little serious literature. But when we came back the next year, the book was in tatters. It had been passed all around the town. There were five thousand people in the town, and it didn’t have a book store. The people got their books from the Book-of-the-Month Club. So they were all reading Portnoy’s Complaint, but they didn’t know about John McPhee. And that, to me, was a very touching experience. It showed that if they had known about the book, it would have been a best-seller. There were so many people who were interested in these issues. There are so many people who would love so many books if they could be led to them in some way. I don’t have a solution. But I think there’s so little exposure to the choice, and the choice has to be more apparent.

Recently, at a dinner party, there was a sort of roundtable question of “What did you read over August vacation?” And the people who weren’t in the book world really felt they had discovered a writer who was extremely well known—not necessarily on the best-seller list, but well known. They thought they were introducing this book to all of us, when anyone in publishing would know the writer and, you know, know the book itself, know where it was on BookScan, know where it was in the Barnes & Noble display area. But people who are outside the business have other things to do. They’re not keeping track of what books are coming out. I don’t have a solution. Maybe Jason Epstein, who’s very smart, has a solution. The shrinkage of the book review media is unfortunate. That was certainly a way to bring news of books to people. I hope that isn’t dropping out of the national conversation.

Are you discouraged about the state of books in this country?
No, I’m not. In some ways, it’s thinking selfishly, because you would like your writers and your books to be read by as many people as possible. And, of course, it’s dreaming. But I certainly don’t think books are going to go away. The object itself it too essential. The idea of having your privacy is too wonderful. A book signals to other people to stay away. I’m in my private zone right now. I think that’s why so many women who are over-stressed read.

How do you feel about the decline of independent booksellers and publishers? What effect has it had?
I think the decline of independent bookstores has had some effect—I can’t measure it, I don’t know the facts—but some effect on the mid-list book. You might not get that surprise success that comes from bookstore recommendations as often. But other systems have taken over, like Book Sense, where they get the word out on a larger level, and maybe that sort of evens things out. We’ve lost bookstores, but they’re louder than they used to be. There are all sorts of areas in publishing where—it’s very easy, as a person who’s been in it for a long time, to be critical—but there are a lot of areas that are improving and much more professional than they used to be. I don’t find the reduction of independent bookstores to be a disaster by any means. It’s fun to get a Discover selection at Barnes & Noble and know they can be very effective too. And they have lots of ways of doing that.

The independent publisher situation? That’s just a big one. I try not to look at the big picture too much because there’s so much to look at in the small picture: your desk, what’s on it; your author, what their concerns are. The work doesn’t feel any different, big or small. The work seems to me to be pretty close to what it was when I started in publishing. Certainly there is more presentation or performance today in one way or another—more written and oral presentation—but aside from that, the work is just the way it always was. I think, as an editor, you’re a little under the radar of whether you’re large or small, and I think as you go up the ladder it probably makes a much bigger difference.

What do you think about the future of books? Do you think this digital revolution or print-on-demand revolution will happen?
I’m not very well educated in this area. I don’t think that the hard-copy book is ever going to disappear. It’s just not. Maybe it’s unthinkable to me, and that’s why I don’t think it. But there’s something about the aesthetic value of the book, the thingness of it. People like things. They like beautiful objects.

But they like their iPods, too. There’s all this talk about an iPod for books that’s going to come along for this generation of people who aren’t buying newspapers anymore, who don’t buy CDs or records because they download everything. You don’t think it will happen?
I don’t. I think there are a lot of uses for digital publishing, in almost a marketing way. “Here’s a sample chapter.” But when it comes down to reading the entire book, I really think people are going to stick with the object. Reference books are a different matter. You’re just trying to look something up and you’re not spending hours and hours with that little screen.

You mentioned your husband, Bill, who’s also an accomplished editor. What’s it like to be married to another editor?
It’s absolutely marvelous, like a marriage made in heaven. Because we do the same thing. Who’s the woman…? Diana Athill. She wrote a book about being an editor called Stet. She said that she partly became an editor because she was an idle person. She was attracted to idleness. And of course you do have to stay in one spot. And my husband and I don’t mind, we don’t find it boring, one reading in one room and one reading in the next and meeting at the end of the night. That’s the way we’ve always done it. I think for those couples who want to go to the movies or something it would be very boring. But for us it’s wonderful. We can also talk about the business without boring our friends. And he’s much more well educated than I am about the actual business of publishing. He was a math major before he was an English major, so he knows a lot about that. And he’ll explain the digital things to me over and over, which I’ll tell you I do not quite understand. We’ve never competed for a book, which is interesting. But he’s more oriented toward topical nonfiction books and mine are a little softer. And we’ve always been discreet about what’s going on at the other person’s company, and that’s just the way it is, so it’s not a problem.

What is the most rewarding part of your job?
Good reviews that make the writer happy. Because that’s the end of the process if best-sellerdom isn’t a prospect. That’s the most rewarding thing. But my daughter’s in medical school, and she said, “You know, when I tell my friends what you do, they say, ‘She reads for a living?’” It’s like a dream to them. And it is a dream. It’s a dream to read for a living. Of course, we do all of our reading in our free time, but still, that’s what we’d be doing anyway. I mean, there are some picnics missed on Sundays, and there are some sacrifices made, so you’d better really love to read, love to not move around too much. And if that’s the case, you’re all right.

What’s the most disappointing aspect of your job?
I think worse than poor sales is no reviews. I don’t normally have that situation. But I’ve seen it. I’ve seen just two reviews. And that’s very, very disappointing. And, again, it’s mainly in empathizing with the writer. That he or she would spend several years on a book that was maybe too complicated for the review community to figure out what to do with—a brilliant book, but a book that wasn’t a natural for review. And it can happen.

Looking back on your career, are there any crucial turning points?
It’s just all such good fortune. I had such good fortune. It feels like it was handed to me. Starting at Farrar, Straus was very good fortune and definitely defined my future career. Because I was taught by people who knew it was an important profession, I had an apprenticeship that sort of guided me. And you never really give up that first impression. So I think the turning point was the starting point in some ways. I think the critical reception of the first novels I did established trust in my mentors, so I had some freedom. The success of the first novels was important. Unfortunately, I have never had a turning point that involved sales. Tom Wolfe was at the house anyway. Tom was a bestselling author—that didn’t have anything to do with me. And, frankly, I haven’t had that turning point, which would have made me a little bit more helpful to the houses I’ve worked for—something I acquired that really sold in huge numbers right away. So my career isn’t based on sales. Although Marilynne and Jamaica and Ian Frazier have gone on to great success without me. And Padgett Powell’s Edisto is still in print.

Do you have any regrets or disappointments?
Disappointments, I think—there is Alice Munro. I had found her Lives of Girls and Women at a street vendor, wrapped in plastic, and I liked the title and bought the book for fifty cents. This was probably the late ’70s. Then I found out she had just recently acquired an agent here, Ginger Barber—Virginia Barber, a marvelous woman. Ginger said, “Well, there’s a manuscript.” It was called “The Rose and Flo Stories,” though the title ultimately became The Beggar Maid. The Rose and Flo stories really, really affected me, and not just because my grandmother’s Canadian and I spent some time in Canada as a child. I gave them to Mr. Giroux. He agreed. Alice came into the office, a fairly young woman at that point, and we talked and I made an offer. I think Mr. Giroux had a few suggestions; I may have had a few. I think we offered sixty-five hundred dollars for the stories, which was a very nice advance at that time. And then, suddenly, Norton bids seventy-five hundred dollars. And Roger said, “Sorry, baby, sixty-five’s as far as we can go.” And that was fine, that was a lot of money for a book of stories. Then it gets a little fuzzy because the editor left Norton and the book was moved to Knopf, and Ann Close has been her editor ever since. I love Ann, I’m very happy for her, but that was something I found on the street! And I really felt I had discovered something in an unlikely and virtuous way.

Any memorable mistakes?
The mistake I remember most for some reason was reading In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin and, not really being a reader of travel literature, just being wowed by it, knocked out by it. It was on submission from Liz Calder at Jonathan Cape. But Roger said, “What do you think, baby? Do you think it will sell?” And I said, “I certainly don’t.” That was a mistake.

Why didn’t you think it would sell?
Remote place. Fancy stylistically. But I would have liked to have worked with him before he died. That book got brilliant reviews and sold very well, but it’s not like it sold a ton of copies. It didn’t make anybody’s career.

What do you still want to accomplish?
It just seems like a continuum to me. It really seems like it will never end because good stuff keeps coming up. I don’t remember if I already mentioned this vision I had of my old age when I was younger. This vision of [editor] Anne Freedgood, in her worn-out chair in the country. You’d be asked to dinner and see her through the window and there she was with the manuscripts, reading all day until it was time to slap the fish on the frying pan. And I thought, “Never, never, never.” Well, now I find that a very happy prospect—that it will still be my work in one capacity or another. To go along and find stuff. It’s very exciting to find stuff. Although it’s sort of dangerous to always want to find. It should be just as important to want to revive. To want to help writers that you admire find their readers is probably more virtuous than to discover, which gives you a lot of credit. I think reviewers like to discover, editors like to discover. Everybody likes to discover. But there’s a lot that’s already been discovered that could use a little boost.

Jofie Ferrari-Adler is an editor at Grove/Atlantic.

Agents & Editors: A Q&A With Agent Lynn Nesbit

Agents & Editors: A Q&A With Editor Pat Strachan

by

Jofie Ferrari-Adler

March/April 2008
3.1.08
In Print and Online

In an industry known for its larger-than-life personalities, Pat Strachan, a senior editor at Little, Brown, is something of a revelation. Born and raised in the suburbs of St. Louis, and educated at Duke University and the Radcliffe Publishing Program, Strachan moved to New York City in 1971 and spent the first seventeen years of her career at Farrar, Straus and Giroux (FSG), starting as an assistant and rising to vice president and associate publisher by editing top-shelf writers such as Joseph Brodsky, Lydia Davis, John McPhee, and Marilynne Robinson. Over almost four decades in the business, she has edited some of our most celebrated poets—Donald Hall, Galway Kinnell, Philip Larkin, Czeslaw Milosz, and Grace Paley, to name a few—and an equally impressive roster of prose writers, including Ian Frazier, Jamaica Kincaid, Rick Moody, Edna O’Brien, Jim Shepard, Tom Wolfe, and Daniel Woodrell. In 1982, she was awarded the PEN/Roger Klein Award for Editing. Yet despite these accomplishments, she remains a gentle and unassuming presence—an echo of Max Perkins in the era of Judith Regan.

When Strachan leads me into her office, the first thing I notice is that her large, L-shaped desk is neat and uncluttered. She explains that many of her manuscripts are at home, where she does her reading and editing. The office is decorated with dozens of framed photographs, drawings, and other mementos from a life in books: here a black-and-white photo, taken in the 1970s, of Derek Walcott at the Trinidad Theatre Workshop; there a shot of Padgett Powell and his beloved pit bull, Spode. On the wall to my right is a poem by Seamus Heaney titled “A Paean for Pat,” which he presented to her when she resigned from FSG in 1988 to become a fiction editor at the New Yorker. In 1992, after four years at the magazine, Strachan returned to book publishing, holding senior-level positions at Harcourt and Houghton Mifflin before moving to Little, Brown in 2002.

Shortly before this interview went to press, the literary world was shocked by news that Tom Wolfe, whose books Strachan edited at FSG, had left his publisher of forty-two years and given his next book to Little, Brown for an amount of money that anonymous sources have placed at between six million and seven million dollars. Sara Nelson, the editor in chief of Publishers Weekly, speculated in her weekly column that “by choosing Pat Strachan, wherever she is, Wolfe is declaring that sometimes it’s the editor, even more than the house, that counts.” I dropped Strachan a line to ask if she thought that was the case. True to form, she ducked the opportunity to take any personal credit, replying, “I can barely believe my great good fortune in being able to work with Tom Wolfe again. His new novel will be both an enormous amount of fun and an important reckoning with our times, as readers know to expect of Tom.”

In this interview, Strachan talks about her years at the New Yorker, the art of editing literary fiction, and what authors should consider when trying to land a publisher.


Maybe you can start by telling me a little bit about your background.
I was born in Kirkwood, Missouri, which is a suburb of St. Louis. Marianne Moore lived there when she was young, with her brother and mother. They lived with their uncle at the parsonage at the First Presbyterian Church. I only learned that later, when Mr. Giroux went to her funeral and brought back the program. Basically it was a postwar suburb. I went to public schools all the way through and then Duke University. At Duke, I found a flyer advertising the Radcliffe Publishing Procedures course. It was run by a woman named Mrs. Diggory Venn, which I think was a pseudonym. So fate took me to that course, and that’s where I met my husband, who was also taking the course. There were seven men out of seventy-seven students, and he was one of them. We met and married a year later, when I was twenty-four. That’s the nutshell story.


Did you know you wanted to go into publishing when you were growing up?
Oh, no. Books came into the house via an aunt. My father died when I was small—five—and this aunt from afar sent us books all the time for some reason. She would send us the Caldecott and Newbery award winners. So I read Thurber, for instance. My mother was a reader but she was more a periodical reader—the New Yorker was always in the house. But she preferred to read to learn something. A third grade teacher, Mrs. Hunter, somehow spotted me as a reader and encouraged me to read as much as possible and kept feeding me books. You know, this was third grade, so it was Little House in the Big Woods. She was extremely influential. In fact, I went back to St. Louis last April to see Kathryn Davis at Washington U. Kathryn asked me what I wanted to do most when I was back, and I said I’d like to see my third grade teacher. So we found her and went to see her. She turned one hundred in July. And she’s still reading and she’s still bright as anything. So, that, I think, indicates how much I felt I owed her.

The second teacher was a high school English teacher, Miss Andrews, who was a fanatic about literature and especially Moby-Dick. There was a harpoon over her desk. She was very passionate, and she encouraged me to work with the literary magazine as an editor—really as an editor more than as a writer. I was a timid writer, and we didn’t really do creative writing in high school. A few people did obviously or there wouldn’t have been a magazine. She pushed me. She pushed me to become involved. And the goal for women in those days when you went to college was to become an elementary school teacher if you were a reader, or if you were an action person to become a nurse. And Duke had a nursing school and an elementary education division. So you majored in English if you wanted to teach elementary school. I knew fairly quickly that I didn’t want to do that.

One day I went to a lecture by what we used to call a woman lawyer with my roommate. I walked out knowing I didn’t want to become a lawyer, but that’s when I saw the flyer for the publishing course. It was a eureka moment. So I went to Boston. It was a six-week course, and after it was over, my husband—my future husband—got a job at Anchor Books with Anne Freedgood, a wonderful, wonderful editor. So he moved to New York and I stayed in Boston and worked in the Radcliffe publicity department for a year. And then it was another fateful moment when my boss at Radcliffe—she knew I wasn’t very suitable for that job—told me Mr. Giroux at Farrar, Straus and Giroux had an opening. She reviewed books for the Boston Globe and knew what was happening in publishing. So I basically just flew down there fast.


Had you been to New York before?
To visit Bill but not to live. So I flew down, got that job, and moved to New York. That was 1971. And it was very lucky.


Did you like New York right away?
No.


It was a pretty scary time to be here, wasn’t it?
It was extremely dangerous. We lived in a group house on the Upper West Side on a block that is now quite nice, West Eighty-fifth Street, but was then deemed the most dangerous block in New York City. And yet we got used to it. We got used to it fairly quickly, and then Bill and I got our own apartment. And, of course, the wonderful thing about those days was that you could get an apartment for practically nothing. We made nothing and the apartment cost practically nothing, so living was a lot easier. Union Square, where I worked, was very rough. No one would walk across it except Roger Straus—in his ascot. He had no fear whatsoever. And now, of course, it’s beautiful. It looks like an English garden now.

Tell me about your first impressions of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
I felt as if I were in heaven, really. Mr. Giroux (whom I call Bob to his face but still call Mr. Giroux in public, as I first addressed him) was very supportive and kind and kept giving me more things to do. Mr. Straus was a character—very brilliant, very outspoken, very self-confident, and very personable. He walked around the office twice a day and said hello in one way or another to everybody.

Michael di Capua, who was mainly doing children’s books, was a huge support. He always pushed me to try to do more, to try to acquire—to do this—and gave me a great deal of help and confidence. So I was very well taken care of. I remained an editorial assistant for five years, which is sort of unusual, but I just didn’t see why I would leave. At that point I was taking care of some of Mr. Giroux’s authors, some of the poets, and then when Tom Stewart left, I was promoted. Tom Stewart was taking care of—I say taking care of rather than acquiring—Tom Wolfe and John McPhee at the time, and I inherited them. So really, am I not the luckiest person in the world? Now the trick was to start acquiring.

What were some of the first books you acquired?
A book about the Cajuns. I liked Cajun music and decided that there should be a book on the Cajuns and their story should be told. I found a writer at an alternative paper in New Orleans—his name was William Faulkner Rushton—and he said yes, he would do the book. We had a gumbo party at my apartment when it was published. The book was in print for about twenty-five years, so it was a good book.

Basically you had ideas and Roger [Straus] would throw you things, like, “Here’s a great book on papier-mâché, baby.” And you would edit a book on papier-mâché. I edited a book by Aldous Huxley’s widow, Laura Huxley, which was a self-help book about getting closer to your true feelings.

[Laughter.] Those were the days.
But that’s how you prove yourself as a worker. You will do anything and you will get these books into shape. It was fun, really. Then Larry Heinemann’s book Close Quarters landed on my desk—the first Vietnam War novel I had read. Ellen Levine sent it to me, probably as a single submission. I just adored it and was able to buy it for a very low price. This was maybe 1977. The book was basically about a grunt’s tour of duty—very vivid language—and his next novel, Paco’s Story, which I also edited, won the National Book Award. I believe that was the first serious book I acquired. The second also came from Ellen Levine, whom I owe a great debt, which was Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping.


That was the second book you acquired?
Yes, the second serious one. It was possibly a single submission as well, for a modest price, and there was no question that it was a great book. I read it, and Mr. Giroux read it, and we signed it up. But, you see, things were a lot easier in those days. There wasn’t the same competition. You had time to read it, consider it, and you could buy it if you liked it.


At the time, did you have any sense of what Housekeeping would become?
I thought it would last. It’s not just the writing, but the feeling. It’s a rendition of loss without heaviness, and of course loss has a great deal to do with all of our lives. It was just too gorgeous and affecting not to last.


Was there any real editing to be done?
Let’s put it this way: Marilynne and I sat at my dining room table and did some back-and-forthing. And I would say in 99 percent of the instances of questioning, Marilynne’s opinion stood. The book is really almost the same as it was when it came in to me. I have notes and papers and some record of our back-and-forthing that wasn’t done at the dining room table, which is really wonderful. She’s so articulate in explaining why she had done what she had done, why she had used that word rather than another word. She’s just brilliant.


Was the title always Housekeeping?
It was always Housekeeping and the title was questioned. The questioning was put to rest because that was the title Marilynne had always had while she was writing the book. So Housekeeping stayed. And the jacket process was basically, “Marilynne, what would you like to have on your jacket?” She said, “I’d like the bridge across the lake,” which was roughly Sandpoint. So we commissioned someone to paint the lake and the bridge. It was an oil painting. Someone asked me recently, “Where is that painting?” Well, I don’t know.

It’s probably in the art director’s apartment.
You know, maybe not. Maybe it was tossed. Who knows? In any case, that was the second book. And then there was a cluster around then, late seventies, early eighties. Jamaica Kincaid. I read one little story called “Girl” in the New Yorker, found out who the agent was, made an offer, and signed up the book. Edna O’Brien was also around that time. Of course she wasn’t a first novelist, but she’d switched publishers one too many times and was sort of at sea. We put together her collected stories and got Philip Roth to write the introduction and got a front page TBR [Times Book Review review]. And then there were Ian Frazier and Lydia Davis and Padgett Powell. So you had this base of authors and they would write other books, obviously, and it was a wonderful base to have.

Tell me about working with John McPhee.
John had been published at Farrar, Straus for several years before I got there. I can’t tell you who first acquired him. I think it was Hal Vursell. And then Henry Robbins and then Tom Stewart. I took him over with the book about general practitioners. John is a perfectionist, and he had very strong opinions about things, but always in a very nice way. He didn’t want his picture on his book jackets, though I think we finally broke him down on that. He didn’t want any pictures in the books—he was doing it with words and didn’t want to compromise that. He was very particular about his jackets. If we sold reprint rights, for instance Coming Into the Country, he said, “I just want to make sure that the paperback publisher doesn’t put an Eskimo with a ruff on the cover.” I said, “Just talk to them about it. Just say, ‘There’s one thing I really don’t want: an Eskimo with a ruff.’ ” And then the cover came. You guessed it. I can’t remember if it got changed or not.

I got very sick in 1994 and had to go through the whole treatment and surgery and everything. And John called me—at that point I was unemployed, Harcourt had let go of almost everybody in New York—and asked if I would edit, together with David Remnick, the second John McPhee Reader. He was basically giving me a job when I was in a bad spell, both professionally and with my health. So he’s a really good guy.

And now his daughters are writing. He had four daughters, and his wife had four daughters, so there were eight girls. And when my daughter was born I remember he said, “Congratulations—you have fourteen years before she’s fourteen.” So he’s also really funny.


Coming Into the Country was his first best-seller. That was very exciting. That’s probably the peak of excitement on a certain scale—when a company has published twelve books and the thirteenth becomes a best-seller. And then all the books thereafter sell better.

When did you meet Tom Wolfe?
He was working with Tom Stewart, who left the house, and I stepped in starting with The Right Stuff, which was so great. He had done a serialization of The Right Stuff in Rolling Stone but then revised it completely. Tom is a reviser. So the deadline is coming up and the book is expected and he’s revising up to the last minute. My job with Tom, mainly, was to make sure that nothing had slipped up in the revision process, that there weren’t any inadvertent repetitions or timeline problems. The wonderful thing is that he revised in different colors. He must have used some kind of soft colored pencils because the lines were thick—it wasn’t this stingy little pencil line—and there would be several layers on the manuscript of green, blue, red. It was beautiful to see. The copyeditors loved it too. It was a terrible inconvenience, of course, but nobody seemed to mind because he was, and is to this day, I’m sure, extremely courteous with everybody and so apologetic that these further changes had come forth. He was a pleasure to work with. After The Right Stuff there was From Bauhaus to Our House and then Bonfire of the Vanities.

That must have been a big book for you. Or was The Right Stuff the bigger book?
Well, The Bonfire ended up selling more copies. They were both big books. I guess The Right Stuff must have been a best-seller as well. I forgot about that. I remember when Bonfire was out and I was sitting at my desk typing something and young Roger, the sales director, came in and kissed me on the forehead. I said, “What’s that all about?” He said, “You’re number one.” And I didn’t know what he was talking about. Bonfire had hit number one on the best-seller list, but I didn’t viscerally relate to that.

Why?
Because it had been a long time since the editing and I was already on to something else. Of course it was wonderful for Tom and wonderful for everyone involved, but my work was pretty much done. I had nothing to do with it becoming number one.

That’s interesting because today editors are so involved in the promotion and the talking and the chatter, getting everyone fired up. Has that been a change in the space of your career?
That is a bit of a change. I mean, I always did a lot of hobnobbing on my authors’ behalf and that never let up. We were not quiet and genteel at FSG. We were very fervent and committed. But my basic job had been done, in that particular case, and now it was up to someone else to make it a best-seller. And Tom didn’t need my help. He didn’t need quotes. He was already a well-known writer. But we hobnobbed in different ways. It was less within the house than it was outside the house. It was like each editor was his or her own brand. The decision on what to publish was pretty much up to you, and therefore you had to justify your decision. And the responsibility was all on your head for every book you signed up. Certainly fiscal responsibility reigned at a small, private house where, you know, the bank was at our door a lot. So those profit-and-loss statements—whatever they called them then, before you signed up a book—were important. You saw what the last book did and sort of tailored your advance to that. We were very careful with money.

Roger was notoriously stingy.
[Laughs] He was careful with money. John McPhee actually called him McStraus, and he called him that to his face, and we all laughed. But John never had an agent. John just took the deal every time and eventually we had the best-seller with Coming Into the Country.

How did you actually learn to edit? Was there a mentor?
The mentor, initially, was Mr. Giroux. I would Xerox his manuscripts after he edited them. He took the month of August off every year and would edit three or four books during that time. But the closest teacher was a woman named Carmen Gomezplata, who was our chief copyeditor. We were the children, and we and Carmen were in and out of each other’s offices all the time. We would ask her questions and as we grew into our roles we continued to ask her questions. She really taught us to see those copyedited manuscripts in great detail. In those days, you went over them and then sent them to the author. You really learned. That was a valuable experience. That’s the technicalities of editing. The editing itself—I mean, not the punctuation and if you put the possessive here or there, but the instinctive editing—is hard to explain. That has to do with your own ear and your own sense of the language. Every editor is different, and the editing is generally subjective and instinctive, which is why everything is pretty much put in a question form. That’s what I call the slow reading, rather than editing—slow, slow, slow reading. You have to have a very long attention span as you know and just not get up for a long time to keep the continuity. And if you are a sedentary person anyway, which I am, it’s a marvelous, marvelous job.

Did you know that you liked it right away?
I did. It’s because the writers were so wonderful. One after the other would come into the office—most of them did, anyway—and they were so interesting and so fun to be with. It’s not as if the editing of their books was the penance part, but the association was such a joy, and I knew I wanted to be among that group of people who were writing and publishing books.

You were also editing a fair number of poets. How did you come to meet Seamus Heaney?
I met him through his books. Seamus had been distributed by Oxford University Press—his Faber and Faber editions—and Faber had for a while wanted Farrar, Straus to publish him. I started publishing him with Field Work, which was maybe 1978. And that was really, really a wonderful opportunity. He’s so kind, and so funny. This is what I find about a lot of poets: Before the kind, the funny. Why are poets so funny? Joseph Brodsky: hilarious. Derek Walcott: hilarious. Mark Strand—they’re all funny. Even Gjertrud Schnackenberg is funny. Grace Schulman’s funny. They don’t have as much at stake as far as becoming financial successes. There is a limited readership, even with someone like Seamus. They are jealous about prizes and jockey in that sort of way, but basically they’re pretty satisfied with what they’ve chosen to do in life. It’s a choice that was almost made for them. It’s who they are.

I have to confess that the idea of editing poetry is mysterious to me. What does it amount to?
It shouldn’t be mysterious. Because once again it’s just slow reading. If there’s a dangler in there, the poet doesn’t want that dangler. “No, I didn’t mean for that to refer to that.” I think it’s basically just catching mistakes. If there’s something you really, really think should be clear—it’s meant to be clear but it’s not, it’s coming forth as obscure—then you ask. And if they say no, it was supposed to be at a slant, that’s fine. But you just ask. Editing poetry to me was asking the dumb question again and again and again, and having absolutely no pride about that. So that the poet knows that everything there is what she wanted to say. It’s asking a lot of dumb questions. And there is work to be done with poetry, work that’s very concrete, just like any other piece of writing. And you would find that too if you sat down with a manuscript of poems. All the mystery would go away.

You also edit the novelist Daniel Woodrell.
Daniel is new to me. I can credit my husband, Bill, for Daniel. Bill was editor in chief at Holt when Dan was published there by Marian Wood. He really liked his work and met him and liked him very much. After his seventh or eighth book, Daniel decided that he wanted to try a new publisher, which is very common and often legitimate. Just to see if another sales force might do better. It had nothing to do with the editor at all. So a partial of Winter’s Bone was submitted to Little, Brown. And the partial was so strong that we bought the partial and an unwritten novel. And with fiction, that’s very unusual. Obviously he’d written books in the past, but we hadn’t worked with him in the past. It turned out to be wonderful. We’ve been able to at least double, if not triple, his sales. We were able to do the same thing for Rosemary Mahoney with her travel memoir Down the Nile.

Tell me about that. What do you do for a writer who’s maybe midcareer, whose career may have stalled a little bit in terms of sales?
It’s tough. Getting new sorts of support for the writer that he or she hadn’t had before is sometimes helpful. For Winter’s Bone, Edna O’Brien gave a comment. I know her, but she’d never read Dan before and would not have praised the book if she didn’t really love it. So to have a blurb from Edna O’Brien, that sort of points to something about the language in the book, whereas people may have been thinking, “Oh, does he just write country noir? Or are these crime novels? Or are they mysteries?” I’m also very proud to have gotten Tom McGuane, who I don’t know and who doesn’t know Dan, to read it and write a comment about it. That in turn helps the reviewers to think about the writer again. And we got a ton of reviews, and big ones, and really nice ones, for this book. And reviews do sell books at a certain level. So it’s a very gradual sort of chipping away process and nothing is really guaranteed. You can’t make someone give a blurb. I’ve always regretted that—that you can’t write the blurb yourself and sign it.

You also had a very close relationship with Laurie Colwin, the late novelist and food writer.
Our children started it, the first day at City & Country School, on Thirteenth Street. Our children were barely two years old. She needed time to write and I needed for my child to have some action other than the babysitter. We sort of circled each other. I knew she was a writer, she knew I was an editor. And we were very standoffish at first. This is all about the children. This is not about business. And then it was clear we were just made for each other. As mothers. As friends. She did teach me a lot, as a friend, about what the writer’s life is like, how challenging it is, even for such a popular writer. How Spartan it can be. Of course she countered that by making things nice, and often it was through food. Food was very important. Halloween was very big in her and Juris’s part of Chelsea, and so the Halloween meal would be served at their apartment. You never had a drink before dinner at Laurie’s. You just sat down and had dinner and got right to it. And then you talked and talked and talked. She was a very dear friend. A lot of my writers were friends. Laurie wasn’t my author, so that was a different situation. I was constantly amazed that she was interested in anything I had to say. Because she was so interesting, and I’m just an editor, a boring person who works at a company.

Take me back to the early part of your career and talk about the atmosphere of the industry in those days.
Well, I must say that there were a lot of parties. There were those George Plimpton parties. It was to celebrate writers. That was the purpose of the parties. Publishers would give parties at their houses and invite total strangers. George Plimpton was one of those people and Roger Straus was one of those people, too. Roger actually had a standard poodle named Schwartz who was sent downstairs at eleven o’clock to sort of herd people out. Eleven o’clock was the time you were supposed to leave if it was a dinner party. The parties may not have been very useful, but you met people. You met friends of your writers who might want to publish with you. You met people who might want to support your writers. That sort of networking was very easy to do because of publication parties. If a party was at the National Arts Club, every editor at the house was invited, as well as all the publicity people. It wasn’t very focused, frankly. Everybody came: the young people, the older people, everybody. It wasn’t just for the press.

This was all over the industry?
I think it was fairly industry-wide that publication parties were expected. I’m not saying it’s a huge loss that we don’t have as many publishing parties as we used to, but the kids had a lot of fun—the younger people, I shouldn’t say kids—because you got a lot of free food and you met a lot of people you wouldn’t have met otherwise. It was a benefit, it was definitely a benefit. And people did have fun outside the office. Michael di Capua was just a workaholic in the office. You couldn’t get him to look up or stop yelling about something that went wrong. But outside the office, we would costume up and maybe go to Studio 54. And you didn’t talk about work outside the office. You may have talked about books, but you didn’t talk about the office. It was a different time. This was the ’70s and ’80s.

In those days, who were you were looking up to in the industry? The way that someone my age would look up to Galassi or whoever.
Cork Smith—Corlies Smith—everyone called him Cork. He was an editor at Viking for many years. He was just an addictive reader. I remember him saying to me once, “I know it’s bad, but sometimes I finish the manuscript when I know I’m not going to buy it.” Because he just couldn’t stop reading! He always wanted to know the end of the story. He was very laconic and he looked like…what did Cork look like? He was extremely handsome. As Elisabeth Sifton always said, “Well, just stand in line, because there are a lot of people in line and he’s been married to Sheila for many, many years.” He looked like Marlon Brando, only tall and thin. That’s pretty good looking. And everybody really admired him.

Alan Williams was another one. Alan was at Viking as well. He had a piece recently, I think in the Yale Review or somewhere, about his career—he died a few years ago—saying, “All right, here’s what my liberal arts education did for me. I learned how to talk about anything for five minutes and to talk about nothing for more than five.” And that’s the definition of a trade book editor. You’re constantly becoming an expert in every area. You can do fiction and nonfiction, which we all do, and there’s this continuing education aspect to it. Bob Gottlieb was always highly admired for being interested in everything—interested in the way the ad looked, interested in every aspect of the process. He had very catholic, broad taste—he could publish a thriller or anything else. Peter Mayer at Penguin was also extremely well-respected and liked.

What was it about Peter that you admired?
His commitment. That publishing was his life, is still his life. And that’s really the only way you can do it. You know, you don’t go home and switch on the TV every night. You’re always thinking about how you might push this book, how you might help the book, how this world event might help. There’s an article in the paper about Polish workers in London, and I think, “How can I attach that to Rose Tremain’s book?” And of course you can’t. But it becomes habitual that you are always thinking about the publishing process and the books that you’re working on. It’s that way-of-life mentality of some publishers. Roger Straus. Bob Gottlieb. Cork Smith, who was more an editor than a publisher. Alan. Peter Mayer. There must be others I’m leaving out, certainly Roger Straus and Bob Giroux. You know, as Edmund Wilson always said, “Literature is life,” and in some ways if you’re in publishing, publishing is life. And it gives back. You’re constantly learning.

Do you have any great Roger Straus stories that you can tell?
He was extremely personable. He loved people. He was a liberal at heart in the way that he trusted people. He trusted other people’s opinions, not just his own. And I think in a way, like Alfred Knopf, who probably wasn’t as friendly, he depended on advice, and that was a way to build a great house. Whether it was the CIA people he had out there in Italy finding Alberto Moravia, or later it was Susan Sontag and Joseph Brodsky advising, he trusted other people. Not that he couldn’t judge for himself. But why not get the people who write for a living and read for a living, the total-immersion people, to tell you who’s best of these twenty Italian writers? And he was self-confident enough to do that, to take advice, and Knopf did the same thing. That’s how Roger built up his European list. And he trusted his editors. Now, of course, if you didn’t get the good reviews, he would stop trusting you. So that’s why your standards became very high—because you didn’t want to disappoint him. And a bad review was not acceptable. He wouldn’t say anything, but you knew he was disappointed, and that was a great motivation to sign up the best things you could find and not take it lightly.

Do you have any sort of guiding philosophy that shapes your editing?
Not a guiding philosophy, but I do think it’s extremely dangerous to mess with a novel structurally, because it’s close to poetry in that it’s almost pure consciousness. The way it comes forth from the writer is the way it should probably be, even though maybe the beginning is unclear or not enough action happens in this part or whatever. With a literary book—I hate to say literary, but a piece of serious fiction that isn’t genre fiction—I try to stay away from structural suggestions because they can be very damaging. One big change can make the whole house of cards fall apart. So with literary fiction I really try to stick to line editing. I also think the less done the better, and I consider myself a fairly heavy editor. But I do as little as I can do, because a work of serious literature is a very fragile construction.

I have a few little bugaboos. I learned one of them at the New Yorker. It’s called the “stopper.” A stopper is usually a graphic or upsetting image that causes the reader to stop and read in a daze over the next pages. The reader has a visceral reaction. And you don’t want to do that and follow it up with important stuff. You don’t want to do that too fast, you don’t want to do it too soon—especially in a story. It’s more than prudery. There are certain rules about how a reader is actually reacting, that I have in my own mind at least. But the stopper was a New Yorker term, and I thought it was really very wise.

Who was editing the New Yorker when you were there?
It was Bob Gottlieb, lots of fun, and the deputy was Chip McGrath, marvelous, and Roger Angell was the head of the fiction department, which he probably still is. Alice Quinn was there doing poetry and some fiction. Linda Asher and Dan Menaker, lots of fun, plus assistants and about three people who did nothing but read.

Why did they call you? This was after Bonfire?
Yes. It was right after Bonfire, which was my first best-seller after Coming Into the Country and my last best-seller. I knew John McPhee very well, and they were looking for a fiction editor and John, I know, recommended me to Roger. And I knew Chip fairly well. They may have thought I might have been unhappy because I was passed over for the editor in chief job at Farrar, Straus, which was offered to Jonathan Galassi, who’s done such a beautiful job ever since. Because of the length of time I had been there, they may have thought my nose was out of joint, which it really wasn’t. But the opportunity presented itself and it was lovely. The magazine was more limited in some ways, but it’s more expansive in that you had an audience for each story of possibly eight-hundred-thousand readers. Now I think it’s up to nine-hundred-and-something thousand. The idea of distributing a piece of fiction that you love to so many people is alluring. For selfish reasons, it’s nice because the piece of writing you’re working on is very short. There’s no interior design to be fooled with. There’s no jacket. There are no reviews, no subrights. Being a fiction editor at a magazine is a very distinct task, as opposed to books. Surely there are people who can’t image the sluggishness of our process—“How can you have the patience to work with books?”—but that was what I was used to. So that’s why I left after four years, very tearfully, because I loved the people and I loved the magazine but I knew I wanted to be back with books.

How did it work at the New Yorker in terms of deciding what got published?
The way it worked then, which was 1988 to 1992, was that when you found a story that you liked you would write a little report on your manual typewriter—maybe we had electric by then—fold it over, and pass it on to the next reader. All the editors read all the stories, and the report would circulate with the story. The next editor would read the story, open up the piece of paper, and add his or her paragraph. It would go all the way to the top that way, to Chip McGrath and eventually Bob Gottlieb, and Bob would make the final decision. We rarely talked about the story until the process was over, which must have come from years of experience, from knowing that talking about fiction can often lead you into an emotional tug-of-war, that the responses to fiction are very often psychological, and the discussions could become very heated and the opinions just wildly divergent, even within the fiction department at the New Yorker. So it was best not to talk about the stories until it was over. Then you could say, “What did you think about that?” when the stakes weren’t quite so high and there was either a yes or no already. I thought it was a very elegant way to do things, and they may not have even been aware of it.

What was it like to work for Bob Gottlieb?
I wish I had seen more of him. He was very busy because he ran the whole magazine. He was absolutely ebullient and excited about just about everything and very outspoken when you eventually got to speak to him. But I felt that I was working more for Chip and Roger and those people because Bob had the responsibility of the whole magazine. He did say, when we moved offices—we moved from 28 West Forty-fourth Street to offices overlooking Bryant Park—I remember him saying, “We are going to have individual radiators and individual air conditioners, just as we did in the old office, because I don’t want to do climate control issues.” He was so wise. I don’t want to do climate control issues. That’s usually what the discussion is in every office—whether it’s too cold or too hot.

Getting back to books, I wonder if you would walk us through your day a bit to give us a sense of how an editor spends her time.
We don’t read or edit in the office. If someone asks you to read something really quickly for them, you might stop and read, but you want the leisurely hours to read. We have meetings: editorial meetings, acquisitions meetings, marketing meetings, focus meetings, meetings about the jackets, meetings about the titles. There are lots of meetings and often there’s preparation for those meetings—we don’t just walk in cold. An agent or two may inquire about one thing or another: distribution of the book internationally, some question about the catalogue. Usually there are several agent inquiries a day. They’re trying to keep on top of what’s happening with their clients’ books.

I correspond with writers, obviously. I do miss the phone contact, but e-mail has become so much more efficient. If they’re not home—and they’re often not home—the e-mail is still there. So that’s a lot of the day. We always look at Publishers Lunch for too long. Rejection letters. Rejections are things that you try to compartmentalize and not think about too much. It’s probably the least pleasant part of the job. It takes a lot of tact to do it without hurting anybody’s feelings. Doing it so that the author could possibly see the letter and feel encouraged rather than discouraged is time-consuming. It’s anonymous, unsung work. Everybody in the company knows what you signed up, but they don’t know what you didn’t sign up. There are also lunches. Lunches are the best. That’s with the writers or the agents. Lunches are always interesting to me, and I feel really privileged that I get lunch. You get your bearings back when you inhale a little oxygen and actually talk to people. I don’t think lunch is a universal love, but it’s certainly one of mine, and it’s very useful.

Tell me about your most memorable lunch.
Maybe it was my first lunch with Tom Wolfe. Of course, I took the subway. I was headed to the Four Seasons. And the subway got stuck. Tom, the most courtly of men, was waiting at the Four Seasons for forty-five minutes, close to an hour, and he didn’t leave. And when I finally arrived it was memorable for its tension released by his gallantry. Another was with Joseph Brodsky, when he learned at lunch that I didn’t know much about classical music. He was really horrified. After lunch, he took me to a record store and bought me a basic set: Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater, Purcell’s Funeral Music for Queen Mary, Brahams’s Third Symphony. A few basics to get me started. And I’ve been listening ever since. My daughter is addicted, has to go to sleep by it. So I guess that was a life-changing lunch in terms of my cultivation level. The horror on his face! I loved a lunch with Jamaica Kincaid. I think it was my introductory lunch with Jamaica. We were at the Gotham on Twelfth Street, and we both ordered rosé, and the waiter brought red, and she looked up and said in her beautiful Antiguan accent, “You must think we look stupid!” That was all she said. And the red was exchanged for rosé.

Book editors serve all kinds of different masters: the authors, your bosses, the agents. I wonder how you think about those allegiances and responsibilities.
An editor always wants to make their writers happy. That is a priority. There’s had to be some adjustment and adaptation to the systems as they work now. For instance, the attitude toward the book jacket is more sophisticated than it once was. Today we wouldn’t necessarily get someone to paint an oil of a certain scene for a jacket. It’s become more sophisticated. So the editor’s role, in part, is to translate for the writer the logic behind certain decisions on the house’s part. There’s more gentle persuasion that needs to take place for jackets, titles. But that’s about it. The rest is between the editor and the writer.

How many new books do you try to buy in a year?
As many as I love, really, and it varies from year to year. I might buy four one year and eleven the next. Sometimes they come in clumps. The books you like come all at once. And that can be awkward sometimes. You’ve just signed one up, why should you be signing up another one? Well, it may be six months before another one comes along. So the acquisitions rhythm can be jerky.

Take us behind the scenes at an editorial meeting. I think a lot of writers would be very interested to know what happens.
There are two levels of meetings. First there’s an editorial meeting, where the editors and the editorial assistants basically air their views on significant manuscripts that have crossed their desk in the last week. Often it’s to find out if your colleagues might have a particular interest in, say, Rufus Wainwright, because you know of this Rufus Wainwright book that’s going around. And if there’s significant interest then you might chase it more readily than you would otherwise. So that’s sort of determining subject interest, topic interest. Even now and then with fiction writers, you’ll get a manuscript and want to know if other people have read the writer and what their opinion was. It’s sort of just airing things so there’s a forum for all the material that’s coming in every week. Every now and then, someone will mention a significant turnaway—a reluctant or significant rejection—that sort of thing. “I passed on this even though it’s going elsewhere…” It’s like our live newsletter—what’s been happening at your desk. And it’s not so much a decision-making meeting. Every now and then our editor-in-chief, Geoff [Shandler], will say, “I wouldn’t pursue it. I don’t think it’s right for us.” But not too often. Everybody likes to talk. We talk a lot. It’s a little bit of togetherness, and then we retreat back to our lonely desks.

The acquisition meeting is a decision-making meeting, and we prepare fairly rigorously for it. We write our opinion of the book. We do a description of the book. We give some background on both sales and critical reception for the author’s previous books. We make a profit and loss projection—always an estimate, but something to go by. Every acquisition meeting varies from one company to the next as far as I can tell, but generally a decision is made in the meeting whether or not we’re going to make an offer for the book, and about how high we would be allowed to go to buy the book. So it can go either way. It can be yes or no. And you have to be very manly about it. If I’m unable to sign up a book I want, that’s when I have to be my most manly. And everybody has the same experience. It’s not always a book the company can do, or feel it can do well. But the main thing, your main desire, if you love a book that isn’t signed up by your house, is that it be signed up at some other house. And there are very, very few titles that do get lost. So while it’s a disappointment, it’s not tragic, generally, if your book is turned away. If that’s the worst sort of trauma we have to suffer, it’s not so bad.

So are these decisions made, on some level, by consensus?
On some level. Different voices speak up. Editors. Publicity people. Salespeople. And everybody’s just sort of gently giving their opinion. Then our publisher has to make the final judgment. But it’s often the result of what’s gone on before.

Do you feel a sense of competition with editors at other houses?
That’s a good question. I can’t say that I do. If I admire an editor, and I can’t do a book and they can, I have to honestly say I’m happy for the book, because the writer landed with a good editor. So I don’t really feel competitive. There are some moments when I feel envious, but I don’t feel active competition.

Say you get a debut novel or a debut collection of stories. What is it about something that gets your attention, compared to all the other ones that don’t?
Well, take this collection of stories by Peter Orner, Esther Stories. It was sent by Rob Preskill, an agent in San Francisco who I’d never done any business with and didn’t even know was in business. The stories came out of the blue. I started reading them, and I just found them enormously emotionally affecting. They’re very spare, and the writing is fantastic but not fancy. I just found them very serious—I mean, sometimes they’re funny—but the intent behind them is very serious. They’re basically about families. I was able to find another reader, Eric Chinski, who also loved them, went completely berserk over them, and I was able to buy them at Houghton Mifflin. We put them into an original paperback and lots of wonderful things happened for this book. I published his second book last year. Esther Stories was a very pure acquisition. I’d say that’s about as pure as you can get. Never heard of the agent, no stories published in major magazines.

If you’re talking about a more obvious way of having a book of stories come to your attention, there’s Uwem Akpan. This is a Nigerian writer who is also a Jesuit priest and who got his MFA from the University of Michigan in 2006. He’s written a collection of stories called Say You’re One of Them. It’s about children in various African countries who are in crisis because of conflicts they can’t control. I read the one story, “An Ex-Mas Feast,” in the New Yorker. I read many New Yorker stories, but this one really bowled me over, in, again, a visceral way. And I couldn’t stop reading once I started. So we took action fast. Michael Pietsch, our publisher, felt the same way about the story. I wrote to Uwem. We waited. We waited until the second story came out. Then he got an agent. We waited at auction. We bought the book. It was as if it was fated—it was going to happen. But a lot of publishers wanted a story that was so powerful, and a collection that also had the New Yorker imprimatur.

On the other hand, what is the most common problem with first books?
They can be too controlled. I find a lot of first novels too careful and too polite. I mean, let’s face it, Housekeeping is a wild book. I don’t think Marilynne had ever published anything before, even short pieces. She was doing what came from her mind and her experience. Larry Heinemann’s book is another example, a graphic war novel, but just gorgeous. Sometimes others can be a little tight and a little fearful of being messy.

Do you think MFA programs contribute to that problem?
I don’t think so. I think they’re trying to counter it in some way. I think they try to coach the students to…Look, any time you do something for the first time, you’re more fearful than you are the second time. So the feelings often don’t come forth right away.

But in your opinion are MFAs a good thing for a writer to do or a bad thing?
I think it doesn’t hurt if you have the time. If only to meet other writers and to meet writers with more experience. To learn to talk about writing and the different ways people approach it. I think it’s a good thing. I don’t think it damages writers. I don’t think you can teach anyone how to write, but it can certainly teach people what to expect from themselves, and give them a communal feeling—that this isn’t easy—and give them some endurance power. I don’t think there is a plethora of the programs. I’ve been to several and I always find the writers so alive.

page_5: 

I read somewhere that you can tell if you’re interested in a novel within the first two pages. Is that true?
Some part of my brain really responds to an interesting sentence. Over two pages, if there isn’t an interesting sentence or thought or description, or if there isn’t something vivid, it doesn’t mean that I’m going to stop reading, because that would be wrong—there are certainly worthwhile books that don’t impress you with the language in the first two pages—but I pretty much know if I’m interested or not, even though I’ll read to the end in many cases anyway. Some books are more dependent on story than other books, and it can really depend on the outcome. You read the entire book because the outcome might be smashing—the cumulative power of what comes before. But certainly, stylistically, I know pretty quickly whether or not it’s a book I’m going to love. I would say two pages is an exaggeration. Probably ten pages.

How important is it to you that your books sell well?
It’s important to me because I want people to read them. Because when they do, and I get reactions, it makes me feel good, as if I did something valuable. And it’s most important to me for the writer, because the writer wants readers. It’s usually not about the money at all. They want as many readers as they can get. It’s hard to project what’s going to sell and what isn’t, so I just assume that what I buy is going to sell sufficiently to not create a debt at the house. That’s my job. That’s my professional job—not to lose money—and I try very hard not to lose money. And having a great big book to offset some of the books that sell less well would be wonderful. I think I have some lurking in the future.

Agents have assumed a new primacy for writers in the last several decades. How do you feel about that?
I’m very glad to have the agents’ help. The agents know much more about publishing than the writers do, obviously. Some of them have worked at publishing houses and can explain the logic behind the publisher’s decisions. They know what to ask for and what not to ask for. I think agents have become more important to writers because there is not as much continuity in publishing now. So if a writer is jumping houses, if the houses are making the writer jump, then you need one stable person in your life to put everything together. So I suppose that’s the single biggest reason that that shift in loyalty to agents took place. The agent’s job is also a lot more complicated now because of the multiple submissions and auctions and the complexity of selling a book that is desired by many publishers. I don’t want to keep harking back to the days of single submissions, but it was pretty relaxing. If you sent a manuscript to Bob Giroux, he would be really irritated if you sent it to anyone else while he was reading it. Wasn’t his time worth more than that? It was a simplified process.

Are there any younger agents who you’re finding yourself doing business with or liking or admiring lately?
Julie Barer, who has her own agency, is wonderful—very supportive of her authors and enthusiastic about her projects. More for nonfiction, Brettne Bloom at Kneerim & Williams has great energy and intelligence, as does Julie. There are lots of fine young agents, but for fiction and nonfiction, those are two good suggestions.

From your perspective, what do the best agents do for their authors?
They write a very good letter introducing the writer and the book under consideration. If previous books have been published, they include full reviews with the submission. They try to match an editor to a writer—temperamentally, aesthetically—as much as they try to match a writer to a house. Then, once the process begins, they know what to push for and what not to, how to choose their battles. And that’s a very delicate dance. Because often the writer would like a little more pushing than should or could be done, and the agent has to have a good sense of that.

How involved or not involved do you want authors to be in the marketing and promotion of their work? Is it healthy for an author to be involved?
I think that, in the end, the older writers learn that it’s better to be writing their next books. Of course, everybody needs a break, but it can be distressing to become involved. I remember when I left Houghton Mifflin, one of my poets, Glyn Maxwell, said, “Well, Pat, it’s just publishing.” And I thought, “What a poetic thing to say.” Publishing is my entire life and yet he says, “It’s just publishing.” So, in other words: “I’m a writer. I’ll publish my poetry somewhere. We’ll still be friends.” I thought it was very healthy to see it that way—there is writing and then there is publishing. And they’re two quite different processes. I think involvement in the publishing process can be frustrating, and if a writer can resist, I would resist, frankly.

Put yourself in the shoes of an unpublished writer. Are there any intangible things she can do to put herself on the radar of an agent or a publisher, besides the obvious things like publishing in magazines?
Get to know other writers. Not so much to learn how to write, but to meet people and learn something about the professional way to do things, so you won’t be sending out e-mails from the blue. Knowing writers will convince other writers to read your work, and possibly give a comment on your work, which might be helpful in selling it. My advice would be to not be alone.

What are the important things for an author to look for in an editor and a publishing house?
I would look at the list and look at the catalogues online, which you can do now. I suppose there’s some way to look at which editors do which books by looking at the acknowledgments. I think it’s important to determine that the minds might get along, to learn the kinds of books the editor edits and the publisher publishes—every publisher has a wide variety, but in the field where you’re writing—to see that you’d be in the sort of company you’d like to be in. And if you can’t get that, then accept an offer anyway. Michael di Capua used to say, “Small children won’t die from this,” when the jacket came out the wrong color or something. It is important—the publication of the book and how it’s done—but the book is still there, and there are only so many different ways you can publish it. So I wouldn’t—as a young writer—get too hung up on who the publisher is.

Obviously the industry has changed a lot over the years, from small shops like FSG to very large corporate companies. Having experienced both, what do you think about what’s happened to the industry?
I don’t feel discouraged. I feel that any good manuscript I read is going to be published, and that’s almost true. I don’t feel that there are good books languishing any more than there used to be. And if that’s the case, I’m fine with it. If it wasn’t the case, I would be less fine with the changes. And the changes are that the business is now considered a conventional business. Or, rather, that conventional rules are applied to what started as a cottage-industry business. It’s very difficult to twist publishing into a conventional business. And yet you have to try. Because how else are you going to learn what works? And how are you going to report to your superiors? You have to accept that there are going to be different ways of doing things now—less off-the-cuff, less impulsive. Yet that off-the-cuff impulsiveness is there every time you read a manuscript. And you’re still making those same sorts of impassioned decisions that you ever were. So maybe the final decision about whether to publish or not to publish is more complicated and complex, and maybe there are more obstacles in the editor’s way. But if you don’t publish it, somebody else will. So it’s not a tragedy. It’s not tragic in the larger sense that we’re now conglomerated rather than small. I really don’t think so. I think big versus small is sometimes difficult for the younger people who are learning, because with small you pretty much go to every meeting—production meetings and advertising meetings—and you pretty much learn the whole business. You know why the book is priced this way and why it’s that format instead of this format because everybody goes to all the meetings. That’s a wonderful apprenticeship to have. In a larger company, it can get a little more Balkanized by virtue of necessity. So I think it takes a little while longer for young people to learn every aspect of the business.

What’s the biggest problem or challenge in the publishing industry today?
This is fairly broad, but I would say bringing readers to books. Let me try to personalize that a little. My husband is from a small town in northern Minnesota, and we used to go out there frequently. I once brought John McPhee’s Encounters with the Archdruid, which is a book about conservation. My in-laws mainly read the newspaper, and nature guides, and cookbooks—very little serious literature. But when we came back the next year, the book was in tatters. It had been passed all around the town. There were five thousand people in the town, and it didn’t have a book store. The people got their books from the Book-of-the-Month Club. So they were all reading Portnoy’s Complaint, but they didn’t know about John McPhee. And that, to me, was a very touching experience. It showed that if they had known about the book, it would have been a best-seller. There were so many people who were interested in these issues. There are so many people who would love so many books if they could be led to them in some way. I don’t have a solution. But I think there’s so little exposure to the choice, and the choice has to be more apparent.

Recently, at a dinner party, there was a sort of roundtable question of “What did you read over August vacation?” And the people who weren’t in the book world really felt they had discovered a writer who was extremely well known—not necessarily on the best-seller list, but well known. They thought they were introducing this book to all of us, when anyone in publishing would know the writer and, you know, know the book itself, know where it was on BookScan, know where it was in the Barnes & Noble display area. But people who are outside the business have other things to do. They’re not keeping track of what books are coming out. I don’t have a solution. Maybe Jason Epstein, who’s very smart, has a solution. The shrinkage of the book review media is unfortunate. That was certainly a way to bring news of books to people. I hope that isn’t dropping out of the national conversation.

Are you discouraged about the state of books in this country?
No, I’m not. In some ways, it’s thinking selfishly, because you would like your writers and your books to be read by as many people as possible. And, of course, it’s dreaming. But I certainly don’t think books are going to go away. The object itself it too essential. The idea of having your privacy is too wonderful. A book signals to other people to stay away. I’m in my private zone right now. I think that’s why so many women who are over-stressed read.

How do you feel about the decline of independent booksellers and publishers? What effect has it had?
I think the decline of independent bookstores has had some effect—I can’t measure it, I don’t know the facts—but some effect on the mid-list book. You might not get that surprise success that comes from bookstore recommendations as often. But other systems have taken over, like Book Sense, where they get the word out on a larger level, and maybe that sort of evens things out. We’ve lost bookstores, but they’re louder than they used to be. There are all sorts of areas in publishing where—it’s very easy, as a person who’s been in it for a long time, to be critical—but there are a lot of areas that are improving and much more professional than they used to be. I don’t find the reduction of independent bookstores to be a disaster by any means. It’s fun to get a Discover selection at Barnes & Noble and know they can be very effective too. And they have lots of ways of doing that.

The independent publisher situation? That’s just a big one. I try not to look at the big picture too much because there’s so much to look at in the small picture: your desk, what’s on it; your author, what their concerns are. The work doesn’t feel any different, big or small. The work seems to me to be pretty close to what it was when I started in publishing. Certainly there is more presentation or performance today in one way or another—more written and oral presentation—but aside from that, the work is just the way it always was. I think, as an editor, you’re a little under the radar of whether you’re large or small, and I think as you go up the ladder it probably makes a much bigger difference.

What do you think about the future of books? Do you think this digital revolution or print-on-demand revolution will happen?
I’m not very well educated in this area. I don’t think that the hard-copy book is ever going to disappear. It’s just not. Maybe it’s unthinkable to me, and that’s why I don’t think it. But there’s something about the aesthetic value of the book, the thingness of it. People like things. They like beautiful objects.

But they like their iPods, too. There’s all this talk about an iPod for books that’s going to come along for this generation of people who aren’t buying newspapers anymore, who don’t buy CDs or records because they download everything. You don’t think it will happen?
I don’t. I think there are a lot of uses for digital publishing, in almost a marketing way. “Here’s a sample chapter.” But when it comes down to reading the entire book, I really think people are going to stick with the object. Reference books are a different matter. You’re just trying to look something up and you’re not spending hours and hours with that little screen.

You mentioned your husband, Bill, who’s also an accomplished editor. What’s it like to be married to another editor?
It’s absolutely marvelous, like a marriage made in heaven. Because we do the same thing. Who’s the woman…? Diana Athill. She wrote a book about being an editor called Stet. She said that she partly became an editor because she was an idle person. She was attracted to idleness. And of course you do have to stay in one spot. And my husband and I don’t mind, we don’t find it boring, one reading in one room and one reading in the next and meeting at the end of the night. That’s the way we’ve always done it. I think for those couples who want to go to the movies or something it would be very boring. But for us it’s wonderful. We can also talk about the business without boring our friends. And he’s much more well educated than I am about the actual business of publishing. He was a math major before he was an English major, so he knows a lot about that. And he’ll explain the digital things to me over and over, which I’ll tell you I do not quite understand. We’ve never competed for a book, which is interesting. But he’s more oriented toward topical nonfiction books and mine are a little softer. And we’ve always been discreet about what’s going on at the other person’s company, and that’s just the way it is, so it’s not a problem.

What is the most rewarding part of your job?
Good reviews that make the writer happy. Because that’s the end of the process if best-sellerdom isn’t a prospect. That’s the most rewarding thing. But my daughter’s in medical school, and she said, “You know, when I tell my friends what you do, they say, ‘She reads for a living?’” It’s like a dream to them. And it is a dream. It’s a dream to read for a living. Of course, we do all of our reading in our free time, but still, that’s what we’d be doing anyway. I mean, there are some picnics missed on Sundays, and there are some sacrifices made, so you’d better really love to read, love to not move around too much. And if that’s the case, you’re all right.

What’s the most disappointing aspect of your job?
I think worse than poor sales is no reviews. I don’t normally have that situation. But I’ve seen it. I’ve seen just two reviews. And that’s very, very disappointing. And, again, it’s mainly in empathizing with the writer. That he or she would spend several years on a book that was maybe too complicated for the review community to figure out what to do with—a brilliant book, but a book that wasn’t a natural for review. And it can happen.

Looking back on your career, are there any crucial turning points?
It’s just all such good fortune. I had such good fortune. It feels like it was handed to me. Starting at Farrar, Straus was very good fortune and definitely defined my future career. Because I was taught by people who knew it was an important profession, I had an apprenticeship that sort of guided me. And you never really give up that first impression. So I think the turning point was the starting point in some ways. I think the critical reception of the first novels I did established trust in my mentors, so I had some freedom. The success of the first novels was important. Unfortunately, I have never had a turning point that involved sales. Tom Wolfe was at the house anyway. Tom was a bestselling author—that didn’t have anything to do with me. And, frankly, I haven’t had that turning point, which would have made me a little bit more helpful to the houses I’ve worked for—something I acquired that really sold in huge numbers right away. So my career isn’t based on sales. Although Marilynne and Jamaica and Ian Frazier have gone on to great success without me. And Padgett Powell’s Edisto is still in print.

Do you have any regrets or disappointments?
Disappointments, I think—there is Alice Munro. I had found her Lives of Girls and Women at a street vendor, wrapped in plastic, and I liked the title and bought the book for fifty cents. This was probably the late ’70s. Then I found out she had just recently acquired an agent here, Ginger Barber—Virginia Barber, a marvelous woman. Ginger said, “Well, there’s a manuscript.” It was called “The Rose and Flo Stories,” though the title ultimately became The Beggar Maid. The Rose and Flo stories really, really affected me, and not just because my grandmother’s Canadian and I spent some time in Canada as a child. I gave them to Mr. Giroux. He agreed. Alice came into the office, a fairly young woman at that point, and we talked and I made an offer. I think Mr. Giroux had a few suggestions; I may have had a few. I think we offered sixty-five hundred dollars for the stories, which was a very nice advance at that time. And then, suddenly, Norton bids seventy-five hundred dollars. And Roger said, “Sorry, baby, sixty-five’s as far as we can go.” And that was fine, that was a lot of money for a book of stories. Then it gets a little fuzzy because the editor left Norton and the book was moved to Knopf, and Ann Close has been her editor ever since. I love Ann, I’m very happy for her, but that was something I found on the street! And I really felt I had discovered something in an unlikely and virtuous way.

Any memorable mistakes?
The mistake I remember most for some reason was reading In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin and, not really being a reader of travel literature, just being wowed by it, knocked out by it. It was on submission from Liz Calder at Jonathan Cape. But Roger said, “What do you think, baby? Do you think it will sell?” And I said, “I certainly don’t.” That was a mistake.

Why didn’t you think it would sell?
Remote place. Fancy stylistically. But I would have liked to have worked with him before he died. That book got brilliant reviews and sold very well, but it’s not like it sold a ton of copies. It didn’t make anybody’s career.

What do you still want to accomplish?
It just seems like a continuum to me. It really seems like it will never end because good stuff keeps coming up. I don’t remember if I already mentioned this vision I had of my old age when I was younger. This vision of [editor] Anne Freedgood, in her worn-out chair in the country. You’d be asked to dinner and see her through the window and there she was with the manuscripts, reading all day until it was time to slap the fish on the frying pan. And I thought, “Never, never, never.” Well, now I find that a very happy prospect—that it will still be my work in one capacity or another. To go along and find stuff. It’s very exciting to find stuff. Although it’s sort of dangerous to always want to find. It should be just as important to want to revive. To want to help writers that you admire find their readers is probably more virtuous than to discover, which gives you a lot of credit. I think reviewers like to discover, editors like to discover. Everybody likes to discover. But there’s a lot that’s already been discovered that could use a little boost.

Jofie Ferrari-Adler is an editor at Grove/Atlantic.

Agents & Editors: A Q&A With Agent Lynn Nesbit

Agents & Editors: A Q&A With Editor Jonathan Karp

by

Jofie Ferrari-Adler

November/December 2009
11.1.09
In Print and Online

For many writers, the world of
publishing is fraught with so much uncertainty and anxiety that it can be
helpful to take a deep breath and remember that, at the end of the day, we are
all working in the service of the same simple and enduring thing: dreams. The
writer sits in a room with a piece of paper and tries to spin one that is, in
John Gardner’s phrase, vivid and continuous. The agent sorts through the many
dreams that are submitted to her in search of the most captivating. The editor
does the same thing and then, if he’s any good, tries everything he can think
of to bring that dream to the widest possible audience. 

Today there is probably no better
expediter of literary dreams than Jonathan Karp, the publisher and editor in
chief of Twelve, an imprint of the Hachette Book Group. In 2005, frustrated by
his lack of freedom at Random House, where he spent sixteen years editing
acclaimed best-sellers such as Laura Hillenbrand’s Seabiscuit, Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief, and Matthew Pearl’s The Dante Club, Karp quit and founded Twelve with the objective
of publishing no more than one book per month. He acquires and edits each book
himself (for the most part) and then works with his publicity director, Cary
Goldstein, to craft a monthlong promotional campaign that is unique to the
book. While this publishing strategy, which values intense focus over the
toss-the-books-against-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks approach of many
publishers, is not unique to Twelve, one thing has become clear: The model
works. In a business where the conventional wisdom dictates that nine out of
ten books will never make money, it’s difficult to fathom how fifteen of the
first thirty books published by Twelve have been New York Times best-sellers. (They include Christopher Hitchens’s
God Is Not Great, Eric
Weiner’s The Geography of Bliss,
Dave Cullen’s Columbine, and
Christopher Buckley’s Boomsday,
Supreme Courtship, and Losing
Mum and Pup.) This fall Karp
added his latest: True Compass,
the memoirs of the late U.S. senator Ted Kennedy.

Although Karp’s hit rate is
impressive, it is by no means his most noteworthy accomplishment. The thing
that makes Twelve truly remarkable is the way it has managed to unite the
dreams of any publisher’s disparate constituencies: writers (who want nothing
so much as a publisher’s attention and effort), literary agents (who encounter
fewer and fewer editors who are experienced, credible, and essentially
autonomous), booksellers (who complain, rightly, that too many books are
published with too little care), the media (which can only cover so much and is
happy to be steered toward the few books that are important), and readers (who
are, by and large, blissfully unaware of the mad sausage making that goes on
behind the scenes but know a good thing when they taste it). To those who
wonder what the publishing industry of the future will look like: It may be
right in front of you.

Why don’t you start by telling me a
little bit about your background.
I grew up in suburban New Jersey and I
was always interested in writing. I was the editor of my junior high school
newspaper, my high school newspaper, and my college newspaper. I was even the
editor of the newspaper at my summer camp. We published an exposé on leeches in
the lake. So I was pretty directed. 

Do you remember certain books that
captivated you?
Absolutely. In around eighth grade, I
read Goodbye, Columbus, and
that spoke to me immediately. We had that second refrigerator in our basement
just like they did in the Patimkin household. Roth was from Newark. So was my
dad. So I really identified with that world and read Portnoy’s Complaint shortly thereafter. I still remember that amazing
love scene with the liver. I went through a phase where I was reading all of
those Jewish American writers. The Assistant by Bernard Malamud was a particular favorite.
Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift. Then
I discovered John Irving. The Cider House Rules and The World According to Garp really spoke to me. The Hotel New Hampshire.

Why were those books speaking to
you?
Garp probably just because it sounded like my last
name. My high school column was called “The World According to Karp.” I think
Irving said that his first three novels were ironic, and he realized after the
third one that in any novel he would write in the future, he would admire his
characters. I certainly admired Jenny Fields in Garp, and I admired Garp. I thought they were
unconventional, romantic people. I remember being terribly sad, just like T. S.
Garp, by the time I finished that book, and feeling as if I had lived a
lifetime with those characters. When I read The Cider House Rules, it was a different feeling. I felt total
identification with Homer Wells—wanting to be of use, just the way he did—and
Irving’s research into the lives of doctors performing abortions made me see
that issue in a whole new way. I just thought the novels had dimensionality,
and I was living in them in a way that seemed incredibly vivid and
powerful—more powerful than the life I was living at the time.

My mom actually turned me on to a book
that had a lot to do with where I wound up working. It was a book written in
the 1970s by Sara Davidson called Loose Change, and it was about the experiences of three women
coming of age at Berkeley in the 1960s. It was all true—it was a memoir—and I
learned a lot about women from that book because it was about their personal
lives: the men in their lives, the career choices they made, and the
compromises they made. I was probably seventeen or eighteen years old at the
time I read it, and it really influenced me. 

When I was applying for jobs, I saw Loose
Change on the shelf of Kate
Medina, with whom I was interviewing. I wanted to work for her because she had
edited that book. It was probably a very strange reason for a
twenty-five-year-old guy to take a job, but it’s true. That was one of the
reasons.

I also remember hearing you talk
about The Best and the Brightest having a big impact on you as a young guy.
Oh, yes. That was when I was working
as a reporter for the Miami Herald. I was twenty-three or twenty-four, and I read The Best and the
Brightest and The Power Broker right around the same time. It was quite simply
the best journalism I had ever read. I was in awe of both reporters and, being
a reporter myself at the time, I knew the incredible amount of work those books
must have taken in order to not just get the facts right but to put them into a
larger context and to reconstruct the lives of the characters and to convey
their points of view. I knew how hard that was. I was genuinely in awe of it.
And it was also a wake-up call because I realized that I was never going to
achieve that level of insight by writing for a daily newspaper. It just isn’t
possible. You can’t go that deep. You can’t take those liberties.

So I quit. I quit and I moved back to
New York City to work in publishing because I thought that being closer to that
level of insight would make me a better reader and make me more knowledgeable
about the world.

Did you enjoy being a journalist?
I did. I loved writing for newspapers.
But the problem with newspaper journalism, for me, was the uncertainty of it. I
really didn’t like getting up in the morning and not knowing what calamity was
going to befall me that day. I wanted to learn one thing and learn it well, and
I didn’t feel like I could go deep as a newspaper reporter. I was at the Washington
Post as a summer intern for two
summers, and I had an opportunity to stay there as a reporter. The metro editor
said, “You give me ten years and I can make you David Broder.” But at the
time—I think I was twenty-two—ten years seemed like a very long time. I
thought, “I don’t want to give you ten years. I’m not even sure I want to be
David Broder.” [Laughter.]

I’ve always wondered what would have
happened if I had stayed there for ten years. One of the interns who was there
with me was John Harris, who has now started the Politico and done really well. I wound up editing one of
his books. Another intern who was there with me was Jeffrey Goldberg, who’s
written an outstanding book on Israel called Prisoners. So I worked with some really good interns and
probably could have had that kind of a career path. But I really didn’t like
that daily confrontation with uncertainty. When I started at Random House, I
remember this incredible feeling of relief that I was going to get to sit on my
ass all day—that I wasn’t going to have to run off and cover some fire or some
murder or some scandal.

But I love journalism and I love
journalists. I respect the work they do. I think it’s incredibly important, and
I think the sensibility I have as an editor is basically that of a journalist.
It’s probably one of the reasons why I’ve done so much nonfiction. I love
fiction just as much, but when it’s ingrained in you the way it was for me—the
who, what, when, where, why, how—it becomes kind of a discipline and a way of
thinking. 

How did you make your way to Random
House?
I answered a classified ad in the New
York Times. I interviewed at
Harper & Row, Doubleday, and Random House. I could type over a hundred
words per minute, so they were all very interested in me, but I went with
Random House because I was so impressed with Kate Medina. She’s a great editor
and she was a great boss. She really taught me how to be an editor. I was her
assistant for about three years. I did all the things that assistants do, but
the most important thing was that I took dictation or, more precisely, I typed
memos that she had dictated. They were her editorial memos, and they were
extensive and brilliant. I saw the way she deconstructed a novel, or any
manuscript, and saw it holistically: structurally, thematically, etcetera. She
saw the big picture and the details at the same time. She was able to steer
writers, in a positive way, toward a better, more vivid work. It was largely
about improving the definition of the novels. And having typed dozens of those
memos over the years, I began to learn the discipline of being an editor. How
to see whether characters rang true. Whether the storytelling was paced well.
How certain language either did or didn’t have an impact.

There’s something about hearing a
person’s voice in your head. I would put on these headphones and hear her
administering her editorial medicine, and it definitely shaped me. But there
are a multitude of reasons why Kate Medina is a great editor. I would overhear
all of her phone conversations, and I vividly remember being struck by the fact
that she never raised her voice and was always pleasant to everybody. I was
kind of an angry twenty-five-year-old guy at that point, and I remember going
into her office and saying, “Kate, you never yell.” She said, “Well, I’ve
always found that there’s a nice way to deal with everything.” That really
changed me. I saw her professionalism, her very positive and constructive way
of dealing with people. I also saw her vision. I typed a letter that she wrote
to Tom Brokaw suggesting that he write a book. It was not the first
letter—she’d been writing to him for years before I got there. I think about
ten years after I typed that letter, The Greatest Generation came out. That was a case of an editor pursuing a
writer she was interested in literally for years. It all starts with somebody
like Kate Medina, frequently. I think the world of her.

Tell me about the atmosphere of
Random House at the time.
Obviously you’re overly nostalgic
about any place you grow up, so I apologize if this is a little sepia-toned,
but Random House really was an extraordinary editorial environment. I was very
fortunate. I still remember the people who were on the hallway when I got
there: Kate, Jason Epstein, Joe Fox, Bob Loomis, Sam Vaughan, Peter Osnos, Joni
Evans, Susan Kamil, Becky Saletan, David Rosenthal. And then shortly
thereafter, Harry Evans, Ann Godoff, Dan Menaker, and so many others. Julie Grau
was there as an associate editor. These were really some of the best editors in
the business. Just between Bob Loomis, Joe Fox, Jason Epstein, and Sam
Vaughn—that’s over 150 years of editorial experience right there. And they all
talked to me. They were so generous with their time and their wisdom.

I was fortunate enough to be the young
assistant who got to attend the editorial meeting and take the minutes. Only
one assistant was allowed in, and somehow I got the gig. So I would listen to
them talking about projects. I remember one week, one of them jokingly said,
“So what’s our view on Catholics?” Another one said, “We’re in favor of them!”
[Laughter.] It was a collegial
place, even though I’m sure there was a lot of stuff going on above my radar.
But they were seeing all of the best projects—this was when Random House was
owned by the Newhouses—and I remember somebody saying, “They’re like the
Medicis. They just want to have the best.”

Anyway, I was watching all of this. I
rarely spoke up in meetings because I was so junior, but eventually some
projects started to come my way. I had written to the best reporter I had
worked with when I was a reporter at the Providence Journal, a guy named Wayne Miller. I encouraged him to
send me any book ideas he had, and he sent me a proposal for a narrative
nonfiction book about one of the great pediatric surgeons of our time. I showed
the proposal to Becky Saletan, Joni Evans, and Kate. They all said nice things
about it, and Joni let me offer twenty-five thousand dollars to buy world
rights. This was at a time when people seemed to like medical stories. The
Book-of-the-Month Club bought it. We actually did respectably with it. I think
they let me do it because it was a good proposal and they wanted to give me a break.
That was the first book I got to edit on my own.

And then I got a lot of really good
opportunities along the way. Peter Osnos asked me to help him edit Tip
O’Neill’s second book, so Peter and I drove up to Massachusetts in Peter’s
convertible and spent a weekend with Tip, listening to his stories. It was just
wonderful. Harry Evans asked me to help edit Colin Powell’s autobiography,
which was a great experience. I remember working on the captions for that book.
There were some pictures of Powell with famous people, including the Pope. I
had titled that section “Friends,” and General Powell faxed me back, “Pope
ain’t my friend.” [Laughter.] 

When you look back and think about
those early years, what were some of the first acquisitions that you feel were
really important to you?
I was following my passions. We had
this magazine called At Random,
which I was writing for. I got to write about Richard Ben Cramer’s What It
Takes. I read that book in
manuscript and it blew me away. It was by far the most interesting book I had
ever read about politicians. So I got to meet Richard and his literary agent
Flip Brophy. One of the most interesting characters in the book was Gary Hart,
and I had been a Hart supporter. I thought he was ahead of his time and somebody
who was trying to do something important about energy and defense issues. I
said to Flip, “I would really like to do a book with Gary Hart about why
political reform doesn’t happen. Every four years we have politicians running
on a reform agenda, but we never get the reform they seek. Why is that?” So I
wrote a letter to Hart and we did a deal. That book did fine. It wasn’t a
best-seller. It just sold respectably. But it was the first book I was able to
do with a major political figure. A few years later, when Flip was representing
another United States Senator, John McCain, she thought of me, and we
preemptively acquired that book, thanks largely to Ann Godoff’s celerity in
dealing with it. Since then I’ve done four other books with John McCain and
several other books with Flip Brophy. I think that was a case of naturally
following my curiosity.

What other books?
My favorite story, and probably the
best opportunity I had as an editor, was with Mario Puzo. This is all true.
You’re not going to believe it, but I swear that it’s true. I was answering the
phones, filling in for the receptionist at lunch, and the publisher at the
time, Joni Evans, came back from lunch, walked out of the elevator, saw me
standing right in front of her, and said, “I need a guy to read this novel I’m
working on.” And I was a guy. So she gave me the manuscript. It was a thriller
set in Washington called The Fourth K—Puzo’s only Washington novel. It was about a son in a great political
family who is very unpopular as president. He’s the second president in his
family and, to strengthen his popularity, he allows an act of terrorism to
occur in the United States, thereby seizing dictatorial power. This was in
1990. 

I loved The Fourth K. I still remember sitting at home on my couch all
weekend reading it. I wrote a ten-page memo about it—what was good about it,
what I thought needed to be improved, etcetera. Joni showed it to Puzo and we
all agreed that the manuscript still needed work. This was during a time when
publishers sometimes traveled to be with their authors. I still can’t get over
this, but Joni, Julie Grau, and I flew to Las Vegas, where we edited Mario Puzo
in person because Mario felt that he did his best work in Vegas. He liked to
gamble. So Mario’s walking around Vegas in his sweatpants. During the day we
worked around the table and edited, and then at night he took us gambling. I
had never gambled in my life, and he decided that he wanted to introduce me to
the game of baccarat. He gave me a hundred dollars and said, “Have some fun.” I
proceeded to lose the hundred dollars. I felt horrible about this. You know,
I’ve come to work with him and I’ve lost his money. But he gave me another
hundred dollars and something remarkable happened: I began to win. I think I
won about five hands in a row. I paid back the two hundred dollars, which was
good, but what was really good was that Mario had been gambling along with me
while I won my five hands, and he’d made about seven thousand dollars on it. So
he felt very good about it.

Anyway, we finished up the editing and
the book came out and did fine. But then Joni and Julie Grau left the company.
There were no other people at Random House who Mario knew well, and a lot of
more senior editors wanted to work with him. But Mario told the CEO, Alberto
Vitale, that he wanted to work with me, not because of my editorial work but
because he thought I was good luck. He’d made seven thousand dollars gambling
with me. And that is how I became Mario Puzo’s editor.

We worked together on The Last Don, and it was a huge best-seller. It was his
comeback novel. Then we reissued The Fortunate Pilgrim, and I wound up editing his last novel, Omerta. Working with Mario was just a magical
experience. He was the kindest, sweetest man. It was always so striking to me
how gentle he was, because he would write these violent scenes full of revenge
and bitter irony. But in person he was one of the nicest people I’ve ever met. 

Did you become close personally
with him?
I felt that way, yes. I was actually
there when he died. I was at his home when he died and got to tell him that I
loved his new book. I said goodbye to him and held his hand. It was amazing to
me. He was really very good to me, and very generous to work with me.

Did he take editing?
Yes. He was a great storyteller. He’d
grown up going to the public library and reading about King Arthur and the
Knights of the Round Table, and he always saw these mafia novels as myths. It
was never a real thing to him. People didn’t appreciate Mario’s sense of humor
in those novels as much as they should have. Even The Godfather is a very funny novel. Mario cared about his
characters. He cared about the story being satisfying to the very end. I
remember him telling me that his great disappointment with most novels was that
they petered out at the end. Mario cared deeply about his endings. The Last
Don had a great surprise ending.

The only editing he would not take was
when I begged him to bring back Johnny Fontane, the Sinatra-esque singer from The
Godfather. I was sure that there
was more life in that guy, and he just wouldn’t do it. But he said, and this is
a quote, “When I croak, you can do whatever you want.” [Laughter.] So after he died we decided to do a Godfather sequel, and I got Johnny Fontane in that way. And
I know that Mario would have been just fine with it, because he really wanted
his books to be read. He cared about that, and he was glad that we were keeping
his work out there. He actually asked us to.

Tell me about Ann Godoff.
I think Ann Godoff is one of the great
publishers of the last two decades. I learned so much from her and was so
inspired by her. To this day, rarely does much time go by without me thinking
of something I learned from her. I think that what distinguishes her from a lot
of other publishers is her conviction about the work. There is nothing cynical
about the way she publishes. She really taught me to look for the authentic
voices and the people who are saying something relevant and fresh.

Give me an example of something you
saw Ann do that taught you something about how to publish.
The first thing that comes to mind is
the way Ann published Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, which was a midlist book that was not acquired
for a lot of money. I remember Ann’s presentation of it. People don’t realize
how important it is that an editor be able to articulate what is compelling and
different about a book, and Ann did that time and time again. I remember when
she published White Teeth. She
said to a room full of people, “We will remember this as the year we published
Zadie Smith.” It was just the perfect way to get your attention. 

What do you remember her saying
about Midnight?
What I remember about Midnight are the advance reader editions, which came a
full year in advance of the book and which you were immediately compelled to
pick up because the cover image was so arresting. Ann had a great eye for
covers. The look of the Random House books of that period was distinctive and
striking. And it wasn’t too long before people around the house were saying,
“Have you read Midnight?” So
by the time we published it there was already a great deal of enthusiasm behind
it. Harry Evans was the publisher at the time, and he did some very brash and
ballsy things, too. They flew a whole group of reporters to Savannah to meet
the people in the book. That got a lot of attention. The New York Times Book
Review was very late to the party
on Midnight. They didn’t
review it until it was already on the best-seller list. So it was publicity
like that trip that launched the book. 

Everybody knows that books like that
are rare, and you can’t ever expect it to happen, but it was one of many
midlist books that Random House launched at that time: The Hot Zone, The Alienist, Makes Me Wanna Holler, and later, when Ann was publisher, Seabiscuit and The Orchid Thief. These were all “make books” and really spoke to
a tradition of publishing that Random House had always done, going back to
people like Jane Jacobs and David Halberstam. Ann understood how to get people
excited about books that weren’t obvious. She often used to say in meetings,
“We do it the hard way, and that’s why it’s fun.” I just found that inspiring.
There was nothing calculated about the way books were published by Ann Godoff.
She was doing it for the right reasons, I thought. 

What was your working relationship
like? How were you learning the things you were learning from her?
It’s important to remember that she
was not just publisher but also editor in chief. Usually every Monday morning I
would bounce into the office having read ten proposals, and I would go into her
office at eight-thirty—she was there every morning—and I would say, “I liked
this, and I liked this, and I liked this.” And she would say, “Well, that one
sounds interesting, that one I don’t see the reader for, that one…I don’t know
if that writer’s really up to it.” So she really was a true editor in chief.
She guided me and helped me winnow the projects. By the end of our relationship
at Random House, we had a wonderful sort of shorthand. I remember walking into
her office and saying, “There’s this guy I read about in the New Yorker named Kenneth Pollack. He’s a Clinton guy who
supports intervention in Iraq. I think that’s interesting. I think we should do
a book with him. What do you think?” And she said, “Oh yeah, I read that
article. We should do that.” I made an offer that day and we signed him up and
it became one of the most influential books on the war in Iraq. That was just a
simple conversation between an editor and a publisher with a trusting
relationship and a shared sensibility. Every young editor should be so
fortunate to have somebody that good guiding him. She really did help me see
which books I ought to devote myself to. I mean, let’s face it. Every editor
has to acquire some clunkers in order to publish the ones that last. I think I
was perhaps spared more of the clunkers because of Ann’s discerning eye. She’s
a real editor.

It seems like you had a fairly
blessed rise. But tell me what was hard for you in those early years.
It wasn’t hard. I’m not going to make
something up. It was fun. I think this is one of the great soft jobs in
America. What is hard about reading books and telling people what you think of
them? It’s not hard. If anything it’s too easy.

But you were an ambitious guy.
Didn’t that create any sorts of tensions?
Okay, you know what was frustrating?
The seven associate publishers telling me what to do. [Laughter.] By the end, I didn’t want any more people
telling me what to do, and that’s why I started Twelve. So that was
frustrating. But with that said, the associate publishers themselves were all
very smart and helpful. It wasn’t that their ideas were wrong. It was just that
I didn’t want anybody telling me what to do.

There were also things I probably
should have gotten the answers to faster. It took me a while to recognize all
of the Kabuki. I spent a tremendous amount of time trying to win friends and
influence people within the house, and in the end, while I think it’s always
good to be collegial, the book probably speaks for itself. I probably didn’t
need to spend so much time trying to curry favor. But maybe you don’t realize
that when you’re a young editor. You think you’re somehow negligent in your
efforts if you don’t make everybody read every page. I think that perhaps it
was a necessary rite of passage. But knowing what I know now, I realize that if
you have a good book, people are smart enough to discover it. And if they don’t
discover it, maybe you need to do more editing. And furthermore, even if they
do discover it, its success is probably still up to things out of your control
anyway.

Were you close with Bob Loomis?
I wouldn’t want to say that I was
close to any of the great editors who were there because that implies that I
was significant to them, and I think I was a piker to most of them at the time.
But I would go into Bob Loomis’s office, and Sam Vaughan’s office, and Joe
Fox’s office. I remember talking to Joe Fox about John Irving, and asking him
if it would be possible to bring Irving back to Random House, and being elated
when Joe gave me an early copy of Son of the Circus. I remember talking to Joe about his experiences
editing Irving. That was an incredible opportunity. Joe gave me one of my first
books to edit. He had acquired The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock and Roll and The Rolling Stone Record Guide, and, as a young guy, I was the perfect person to do all the scut work
on those books. So he handed me the contract and said, “Congratulations! You’re
an editor.” I’ll never forget that.

Jason Epstein said things to me that I
think about to this day. I talked to Jason a lot about Jane Jacobs, whose Death
and Life of Great American Cities
had influenced me a lot. Jason had also edited Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall
of the Great Powers, and I
remember him talking to me about the decline of manufacturing in America. He
had very astute ideas about that. This was in the early 1990s, and he felt that
the diminishment of manufacturing was a sign of America’s decline.

That’s very poignant right now.
Yes, and he’s been talking about it
for twenty years. I remember having conversations with Bob Loomis and Sam
Vaughan about a writer with whom I was obsessed at the time, Herman Wouk. Sam
had been the editor in chief of Doubleday, so he’d worked with Wouk, and he
told me some really good stories about working with him and about how Wouk was
so influenced by the nineteenth-century novel. After that comment, I began to
see fiction in that continuum and realized that a lot of things that I liked
about fiction really derived from the storytelling techniques of Victorian
novelists.

Bob Loomis’s modesty as an editor made
a big impression on me. He’s so soft-spoken and so devoted to his writers. My
favorite book that Bob edited was probably A Civil Action. We had many talks about Jonathan Harr and how he
had edited that book. I believe I was in the editorial meeting when that book
was acquired, although maybe that’s my memory playing tricks on me. But it was
a tough story—it was about children dying as a result of environmental abuses
by New England companies. And Harr took years and years to write it. I think he
put seven years of his life into that book and didn’t turn it in until he was
ready. The same thing happened with another book that Bob edited around the
same time, Sam Tanenhaus’s book on Whittaker Chambers, which I also read cover
to cover and greatly admired. Both were case studies in writers taking as long
as they needed to get it right. Bob never pushed a writer to turn in a
manuscript. He was willing to wait ten years for Neil Sheehan, or however long
it was, and he waited for Sam Tanenhaus and he waited for Jonathan Harr. The
results were best-selling books that will be in print forever. Of the many
lessons I learned from editors at Random House, that was one of the greatest. I
still remember Jason Epstein joking, “Nobody remembers what day War and
Peace was published.” But I saw
that changing in the industry as publishers came under increasing pressure to
meet their fiscal year targets by rushing books out. I think that’s
antithetical to good publishing. The really important books are often worth
waiting for, no matter how long you have to wait. I saw that again and again at
Random House.

Wasn’t A Civil Action published twice because it didn’t work the
first time?
Yes, it was published twice within a
year. That was another example of really ballsy publishing by Harry Evans.
Harry just refused to take no for an answer from the public. He wasn’t happy
with the original cover, so they redesigned it and brought out the book again.
And they eventually got out about a hundred thousand copies. They had a quote
from John Grisham, which helped, and then Vintage brought out the paperback and
it exploded. I don’t think all that would have happened if Random House hadn’t
published it so well in hardcover. 

Tell me about some of the literary
agents who were important to you in the early part of your career.
Flip Brophy gave me a couple of breaks
that I’ll always be grateful for. Binky Urban sat next to me at a Random House
lunch that Harry had set up, and we developed a very good relationship. She’s
submitted many writers to me with whom I’ve worked very happily, starting with
the novelist Paul Watkins. Then we worked together on Jon Meacham, Sally Bedell
Smith, Christopher Buckley, and many others. Binky sent me the first half of Thank
You for Smoking, which was my
first best-seller and is still one of my favorite novels. The idea of writing
about the inner life of a tobacco lobbyist was inspired. Harry Evans was a
friend of Chris Buckley’s—I was a young editor at the time—and basically it
was all set up for me. All I had to do was answer the phone, read the pages,
and laugh, and we were going to do the book. Chris and I have worked together
ever since. We’ve done eight books in fifteen years, and that’s thanks to Binky
Urban. She was instrumental in helping me get started.

Kathy Robbins is another one. I
inherited Ron Rosenbaum and began working with Kathy on Explaining Hitler. Kathy is a tremendously attentive and inventive
literary agent. She always has good publishing ideas in addition to good
editorial ideas. I was so struck by her commitment to every draft of that book.
She read everything along with me. We would talk about it and then talk to Ron.
Again, I think he spent ten years of his life thinking about Hitler. And it’s
one of the best books I’ve ever edited. Working with both of them on that was a
foundational experience. 

I looked in my database recently and
I’ve gotten submissions from over five hundred literary agents. So there are a
lot. Neil Olsen was great to work with on the Mario Puzo books. Always calm,
always constructive. I must mention Peter Ginsberg. Peter submitted a first
novel to me in 1993. I read it overnight and loved it. It was set in the
financial world and it was basically a satirical novel about the absurdities of
the information economy. It was a book called Bombardiers, and the writer’s name was Po Bronson. Harry
Evans let me preempt it for fifty thousand dollars, and we published Bombardiers very successfully. Harry did this thing where we
actually sold futures in the book—we sold stock in the book—and had a party
down on Wall Street. That got on CNN. The book was an international
best-seller. Then Po wrote another novel, then a Silicon Valley book, and then
he began to shift into nonfiction. Peter Ginsberg was with Po from the start.
He was on top of everything. He was an incredibly tough negotiator. He got a
better deal for Po each time—each time he made us up the ante. Each time I
thought, “This is too much money. We’re never going to make it back.” And each
time we made it back. I remember once, I was in the middle of a negotiation
with Peter, and I said, “I can’t deal with this now. I have to go to the
dentist.” He wrote back and said, “I bet you’re looking forward to the
dentist.” And he was right. [Laughter.] But, you know, he was involved in all of the marketing of Po in a
really constructive way. He’s a great literary agent.

Similarly, there’s Suzanne Gluck. Not
only is she as savvy as they come, but, in terms of pure entertainment value
per pound, I’d have to put her very high up there. We worked together on
another first novel—probably the most successful first novel I’ve ever
edited—The Dante Club by
Matthew Pearl. That was one I read over the weekend. I came in on Monday and
said to Ann Godoff, “This is great,” and we preempted it before anyone else
could. It was a huge international success. I haven’t looked lately but I think
it’s sold well over half a million copies. And Suzanne was involved in every
aspect the whole way through. I remember we had an author photo of Matthew and
she called me and said, “Jon, we can’t use this author photo. It’s a thriller,
and this looks like his Bar Mitzvah picture.” [Laughter.]

Tell me about the acquisition of Seabiscuit.
Tina Bennett and I were at lunch at
the Four Seasons—not the fancy Four Seasons, the Four Seasons Hotel—and she
said, “Have you ever heard of Seabiscuit?” I said, “No.” She said, “Well,
Seabiscuit was a horse.” I said, “I’m not interested.” She said, “Well, there
was actually more written about Seabiscuit in the 1930s than Hitler, Mussolini,
and FDR combined.” I said, “Really?” and she said, “Yeah.” I said, “All right,
send me the proposal.”

[Laughter.] You know, if Tina hadn’t pitched it to me that
way, I never would have wanted to read it. She’s a brilliant agent. And the
proposal came in and it was great. We won the auction.

For a pretty modest amount of
money, right? Five figures?
Five figures and we were the
underbidder. Laura Hillenbrand wanted to be with Random House because Random
House was the best publisher of that kind of nonfiction at the time, thanks to
Ann Godoff. The proposal was really very strong. I remember showing it to a
bunch of people. Bob Loomis read it, and, obviously, Ann read it. The thing
that’s interesting is that I often hear people say, “Well, Seabiscuit worked, so we should publish x, y,
or z. Anything can work if Seabiscuit worked.” But actually, what I think people might
be overlooking is that structurally, Seabiscuit was a great story. It was almost a perfect story
in the way the horse kept overcoming expectations and hurdles. You couldn’t
tell from the proposal that Laura would have been able to write it as deeply
and richly and beautifully as she did. The proposal was only about twenty
pages, and there wasn’t very much characterization there because she hadn’t
begun to do that yet, so all we really knew at the time was that it was a
really good story. We figured that it might just be a short book—we didn’t
know how much was going to be there. It was only when the manuscript came in
that we realized what an extraordinary book we had.

When you look back on that book, is
there anything that happened on the way to publication that you think of as the
turning point?
People read it. It’s as simple as
that.

When you say “people,” who do you
mean?
First of all, I read it. I have the
editorial memo I sent her after I read the full manuscript. I said, “This is
the best manuscript that an author has ever delivered to me.” After we were
done editing, I began to give it to people at Random House, and their reactions
were similarly off the charts. At sales conference, the sales rep from Maine
raised his hand and said, “We’re going to sell a million copies of this book.”
And it wasn’t because it was such a commercial subject—everybody knew that
horse racing was not a big category. It was about a feeling that the book gave
people.

What I learned from editing that book
was just how important it is for a book to actually leave you with a feeling. I
had been a very analytical guy up to that point, in terms of my editing. For
nonfiction, I had always assumed that if it made sense and was well written and
had an important point to it, people would respect it and like it. But that
isn’t what it’s about, ultimately. People have to be moved by it. And there was
something going on between the lines in that book, from beginning to end. I
could give you lots of reasons why I think it’s moving. It’s a terrific
transformation story: The horse is transformed by these three men, and the
three men are transformed by the horse. It’s about winning. It’s about
overcoming adversity. And the writer’s reasons for writing the book were pure
and personal. It was infused with a kind of passion that you very rarely
encounter in nonfiction—and that passion was augmented by a degree of focus
and precision that you rarely find. So the book worked on every level. It
worked on a prose level, it worked on a story level, and it worked on an
emotional level. 

I’ve heard you talk about the three
main reasons why people read, and how the best reading experiences combine all
three. I think readers would find that interesting.
If I’m remembering it right there are
three Es. People read for
entertainment, education, or the expressiveness of the language. The best books
combine all three, and Seabiscuit combined all three. It was an expressive book that was wondrously
entertaining and educational in terms of bringing to life a period in American
history. It was published as a work of history even though it was about a horse
winning races. 

So you feel pretty strongly that it
was nothing that happened along the way except for people reading it?
That book was on the best-seller list
before there was any media or any advertising. It was an immediate best-seller.
I mean, Talk magazine had done
an excerpt, but when has an excerpt ever sold a book? I really believe that it
was because we printed about five thousand galleys, people read it and loved
it, and book-sellers were hand-selling it. It was publishing at a time when
there wasn’t a lot of competition. We were very good at publishing in that
window—I think it was March. So that’s why I think that book worked. It was
just a great book to read. And it was different.

What do you mean by “different”?
There wasn’t anything else like it. I
was so amused that right after Seabiscuit, people began publishing all of these books about horse racing. They
completely missed the point. The book didn’t succeed because people were dying
to read about horses. It succeeded because it was a beautifully written story
that was emotionally satisfying and interesting from beginning to end. And
let’s give Random House some credit for publishing that book so well. Random
House is a great publishing company. The sales force was wholeheartedly behind
it. I remember that before sales conference, somebody had suggested that we
change the title to “Dark Horse.” At sales conference the reps kept coming up
to me and saying, “Jon, please don’t change the title to ‘Dark Horse.'” Before
we presented the book, I said to Ann, “They really don’t want to call this book
‘Dark Horse.'” And she said, “You know something? I don’t either.” And she started
the presentation by saying, “I have some news. We are calling the book Seabiscuit.” The room broke out in applause. Everybody had
already read it. Even before the book had been presented, it was known as
something that people were going to love. It’s just one of those things. It’s
alchemy, and you can’t reproduce it.

On the flip side, tell me about a
novel from that era that still breaks your heart because it didn’t achieve what
you’d hoped it would commercially.
There are a number of them. I’m told
by many people that fiction breaks your heart, so I should just accept it. But
when I look at my bookshelf at home, I just wish more readers had been able to
discover some of those books. There was a novel called Cheat and Charmer by Elizabeth Frank. She’s a professor at Bard and
she’d spent twenty-five years writing the book. It was a contemporary variation
on Anna Karenina set in the
McCarthy era. We got some great reviews, but we just didn’t push it hard
enough. I still regret that.

There was a novel called The Baker by a writer named Paul Hond, which was my attempt
to publish a next-generation Malamud. It involved Jews and African Americans in
a burnt-out city, post-riots, and it was about people seeking redemption and
love. It was a retelling of The Tenants and had a little bit of The Assistant in it as well.

A novel called All the Money in the World by Robert Anthony Siegel. It was about the son of a greedy lawyer who
winds up in prison. It eerily foretells the Bernie Madoff story. There are a
lot of them.

What do those experiences teach you
as an editor?
They taught me that you’re going to
fail more often than you succeed. They taught me that you have to pick your
shots. It’s one of the reasons why we’ve been very careful about the fiction
we’re publishing at Twelve. I really want to be able to tell people, “This is
rare. This is special. This is significant.” I think it’s much harder to get
people to read fiction. We’re only publishing one novel in 2010. It’s called Rich
Boy and it’s by a creative
writing teacher at the University of Michigan named Sharon Pomerantz. She’s won
four Hopwood Prizes. Again, she’s been working on this book for ten years, and
it’s one of these novels where characters reveal things that, in your own life,
people never say out loud. I was completely caught up in it. It’s got great
verisimilitude and feeling, and I just love the way secrets are revealed. I
think it was Ian McEwan who said that the key to successful fiction is the way
in which you reveal the information. In Rich Boy the information is revealed quite artfully.

But I think literary fiction is the
toughest to publish. The other thing I will say, which I don’t think people
talk about enough—not to complain—is just how hard it is to be a guy
publishing fiction. Because there is a gender gap. I think more than 70 percent
of fiction is bought by women. It ties you up in knots, in a way, because you
want to publish the books that you can identify with and relate to. I’d like to
believe that I can identify with and relate to the things that women care
about, but I can never be sure. [Laughter.] And, at times, I’m trepidatious, because I think, “Well, if this is a
man writing about a woman, then we’ve got two strikes against us.” If it’s a
woman writing about a man, which is actually the case with Rich Boy, I’m all set to go. I read it and thought, “She’s
writing about a lot of guys I know. I know that it’s real because I feel like I
know these people. And the fact that a woman can do it makes me think that
other women will agree and appreciate it.” But I do think it’s tricky because
obviously there are so many more women in publishing, and so many more really
good fiction editors who are women, that you’re almost immediately at a
disadvantage if you’re a guy who wants to publish fiction. It all comes back, I
think, to my very first experience editing fiction, with Joni Evans coming
through the elevator and basically picking me because I was the only guy she
could find. I think about that a lot.

I also think there are a lot of
complexities to fiction. The kinds of novels that many discerning editors want
to publish are not easy to sell. They’re not sure things. I mean, a lot of my
favorite recent novels—The Corrections, Middlesex, The
Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, The Emperor’s Children—are
not books that are immediate or natural best-sellers. So you really have to get
very lucky, and you can’t count on review attention to the extent that you used
to. Even if you get the review attention, you can’t expect the same kind of
consensus that I think you get with nonfiction reviews, because, for some
reason, it just seems easier to be objective about nonfiction.

Ideally I’d like to publish big social
realism that is relevant to the moment but has enduring value. I wish that I
could find a Garp or a
contemporary analogy to something like The Jungle, a book that influenced the political debate and
had lasting cultural influence. I think that Christopher Buckley, in his own
way, is doing that with books like Thank You for Smoking and Boomsday. I wish I could find more writers in that vein. But I also think
there’s only so much the culture can absorb. I started out by telling you how
much of an influence Philip Roth was on me. I loved the Zuckerman trilogy. I
loved American Pastoral. But
here is a confession: I can’t keep up with Philip Roth. This is a guy who was a
seminal influence on me, and I can’t keep up with everything he’s written. I’ve
got three Roth novels on my shelf that I just haven’t gotten to. So I can’t help
thinking that if I’m having trouble keeping up with all the really good fiction
out there, a lot of other readers are, too.

I have a prediction. I predict that
the new Lorrie Moore novel is going to be huge. And here’s why: pent-up demand.
This is a woman who has held her tongue, and I am dying to buy that Lorrie
Moore book. I will buy that book the first week it comes out. I will pay the
full retail price in cold American cash. And I predict big best-sellerdom. I
don’t know Lorrie Moore and I’m not involved with the book. It’s just an
opinion.

You’ve also edited a lot of
celebrities. Any good stories?
I don’t know if you would rank him as
a celebrity, but when I was growing up, one of my heroes was Rupert Holmes, who
is best known as the creator and singer of “The Piña Colada Song.” But he’s
also won practically every award known to man: the Academy Award, the Grammy,
the Emmy, Tonys. He wrote the book, music, lyrics, and orchestration for The
Mystery of Edwin Drood.

My very first day at Random House—I
was twenty-five years old—I wrote a letter to Rupert Holmes that said, “I will
publish anything you want to do.” Several years later, he called me up and said
he’d like to write a book. So we met, and Ann Godoff and Harry Evans let me
sign up Rupert Holmes without a single word on paper. He had come up with an
idea for a novel about a serial killer, I think. I didn’t know what it was. I
didn’t care. I just wanted to publish Rupert Holmes.

Seven years went by before he turned
it in. But when he finally did, it was wonderful. It’s really, to this day, one
of my favorite novels of all time. It’s called Where the Truth Lies, and it posits a theory that the real reason why
a comedy team like Martin and Lewis broke up is because there was a dead girl
at a casino in Vegas where they were playing. And it goes off from there. It’s
just this elaborately devious, rococo tour through 1970s celebrity culture,
with an utterly suspenseful mystery plot that keeps you wondering who the
killer is until the very end. And it got great reviews. It became an Atom
Egoyan movie. And I wish more people would read it. It did respectably, but I
think people would love this book. 

Rupert has said so many funny things
over the course of his career. Whenever he describes a person he doesn’t think
much of, he says, “She has unexplored shallows.” He describes life as “a rat
race heading for a mousetrap.” He’s my favorite celebrity, and I’m still
working with him.

On a new book?
On a new novel. Which I expect him to
deliver some time in the next seven years.

You left Random House briefly to go
work for the film producer Scott Rudin. Why did you leave, and what happened
there?
I worked in the movie business for
seven weeks. I left because I was bored. I’d been at Random House for twelve
years, and I wanted a new challenge. I was under the impression that movies had
more cultural influence than books, and since I saw myself as basically
somebody who was editing storytellers, it didn’t seem to matter what medium I
was editing the stories in. I had worked in journalism, which was a kind of
storytelling. I’d worked in publishing. I just thought, “I’d like to learn how
stories are told cinematically.”

Scott Rudin was the best producer in
New York. I’d liked a lot of his movies. So when I heard there was an opening,
I went after the job and he said, “Just come here and do what you did at Random
House.” When I got there I was very surprised to discover that, actually, in
terms of writing, books are more culturally central. Maybe that shouldn’t have
come as such a surprise to me, but I learned pretty quickly that film is a
director’s medium and that, as an editor working with writers, I wouldn’t be
able to do what I did at Random House. I wouldn’t be able to sign up people as
easily and develop their work and really have it wind up on the page and
ultimately with the public. Once I realized that, I decided to get out of there
and go right back to Random House, where I still had my authors.

But I knew I would be back at Random
House. At my going-away party I said, “I’ll be back.” I didn’t expect to be
back in seven weeks. [Laughter.]
I thought I would be back in five years, or ten years, after doing movies. But
I fully intended to come back. I was embarrassed that it didn’t work out, and I
was also a little bit surprised by the result of my leaving and coming back. I
was worried that people would take me less seriously as an editor because I’d
done this frivolous Hollywood sojourn, but, in fact, I got even better
submissions once I got back. I think maybe it reminded people I was alive.
Maybe they respected the fact that I’d taken a chance. But the bottom line is
that it actually turned out to be a great thing for my time at Random House.
And I never looked back after that. I never thought seriously about movies or
Hollywood again.

The other thing about it is that I
thought—because there’s such public fascination with movies and Hollywood,
because more people see movies than buy books, because it’s easier to absorb a
two-hour story visually than it is to read something for ten or fifteen
hours—I thought I could have more impact. I also thought that writers would
gravitate to film and that I’d be able to learn more because so many people are
attracted to it. What I was surprised to learn was that it’s not a curiosity
driven art form, for the most part—documentaries are the exception—and
because the storytelling has to appeal to a mass audience, you can’t
necessarily go as deep or explore your curiosity as much as you’d like to. And
again, maybe that sounds naïve. But I was surprised by it.

The other thing I realized is that the
creative decisions on the business end were being made with a very young
demographic in mind—largely teenage boys or men in their twenties. I was in my
early thirties at that point, so I was already edging out of that demographic,
and I realized that the need to serve a demographic that you didn’t necessarily
identify with might be one of the reasons why Hollywood can seem like such an
irrational, capricious place. Because people are fundamentally insecure about
serving an audience that they are not a part of. When I thought about why I
loved Random House so much, it was because I was publishing books for people
who shared my sensibility. And I think that’s what will always remain great
about publishing as an endeavor. Although certain books can achieve great mass
influence, most books are published by people for people with whom they
identify. That’s a big thing. That’s what gives you the confidence and the
passion to do what you do. And I have to say, the publishers who are not
publishing from that interior place, I’m not sure what motivates them.

Was working for Rudin a traumatic
experience?
No. Well, negotiating my exit was
traumatic because I had a contract and he didn’t want me to leave, and then he
didn’t want me to leave until a specific date. And I wanted to get back to
Random House. There was one very long week where I was sitting in an empty
office watching MTV. I remember thinking, “This is very strange.” But in Scott
Rudin’s defense, I let him down, and I quit on him. But it just wasn’t the
right place for me.

Did you have help negotiating your
exit?
Yes, I had a lawyer. It was very
expensive. I remember that bill, too. That bill was traumatic. [Laughter.] 

Eventually
you left Random House for good. Why?
I’d been there for sixteen years.
That’s like going to the same college four times, and I was ready to graduate.
I had this idea for Twelve—I wanted to edit the books and publish the
books—and that just wasn’t going to be possible within that corporate
structure. And with the benefit of distance, I think it was the right reason to
leave. I’m also incredibly grateful for the sixteen years I had there. I carry
the editorial values of Random House with me every day, and I’m close to many
of my former colleagues. I think that Random House is the great American
publishing company. Well, the great German-American publishing company. [Laughter.]

How did you come up with the idea
for Twelve?
There were a number of ideas behind
it. Let’s start with the real impetus, which is that I want to publish the best
books. And I really believe that writers want to be read. Maybe this is not
that profound, but I think that sometimes we lose sight of the fact that, all
things being equal, an author is going to want to be with the person who he or
she thinks can sell the most books. So the goal was to attract the best talent.

I can give you several moments along
the way to the idea becoming clear. When I was at Random House, an agent named
Larry Weissman sent us a nonfiction proposal that we all loved. It was the book
that eventually became The Billionaire’s Vinegar, which is a great historical story involving wine.
We thought that it was a classic
Random House book. We put on the full-court press—I was the editor in chief at
the time—and brought the author and Larry in for a meeting. There were eight
of us in the room. We enthused. We said all the right things. We showed up at
the auction and made an offer, and it was the same as Crown’s. And they chose
Crown. I was mystified. I
called up Larry and said, “Why did you choose Crown?” He said, “They promised
to make us the lead title.” And I thought, “You know something? That was the
right decision.” And then I thought, “What if every book I published were the
lead title?” And then I thought, “How many lead titles can you have?” And then
I thought, “Well, the fact of the matter is, if you’re thinking about how much
the media can absorb, being able to say, ‘This is the one book you should read
this month’ has some credibility to it.”

A second moment was when I was at
Random House and two books I’d worked on for several years were both scheduled
for release in the same month. They were books I really liked—one was called The
Lady and the Panda and the other
was called The Genius Factory.
I believed in both of them equally and wanted to proselytize for both of them
equally. I was suddenly tied up in knots—I was flummoxed—because I didn’t
know which book to talk about, and I didn’t control the schedule. That was
another example.

So I was thinking, “Okay, I want
everything to be the lead title. I want to have at least a month to put it
across. And I want to have the best talent. What’s the best way to do that?”
It’s to make a promise to the author and to make the promise so explicit that
it’s on the spine of the book: Twelve. That’s it. One a month. You get your
launch and, although we can’t guarantee that the book’s going to be a
best-seller, we can at least guarantee that you will have our full attention,
focus, and commitment for a sustained period. We will talk about your book
until people will not listen to us anymore.

One of the things you said in the
run-up to Twelve’s launch was that you wanted to bring authors and agents more
into the process of publishing the books. What are you trying to do differently
in that regard?
Let’s start by taking a step back. I assume that a lot of writers are
reading this, and I sincerely believe that literary agents are essential to the
process and that authors should gladly pay the 15 percent. Here’s why: Every
direct interaction that an author has with his publisher is so fraught with the
power dynamic—and with the fact that the author’s economic livelihood is
involved—that I just don’t think an author can always process all the
information that’s coming from the publisher. So I think it’s really important
and helpful to triangulate with an agent. That’s something I’ve learned over
years of working really closely with authors and agents on everything from the
title of the book to the editorial shape of the book to the cover of the book
to the marketing and advertising of the book. I just can’t imagine doing it in
any other way.

When I said that I wanted to involve them more I think I just meant that,
before we set a marketing plan, I say, “What would you like us to do?” For all
I know, publishers are doing that already. But I really do ask them very early
in the process, before any budget numbers are set, and I try my very best to
make them true partners in the endeavor. But it’s even things that are as
simple as giving them as many galleys as they need—I’m not sure that
publishers even do that all the time. 

Your Web site has twelve bullet
points about the imprint, one of which is that you will publish books that
matter. That’s a very subjective phrase. What does it mean to you?
It means books that are relevant to the
national conversation. Books that advance our understanding in some way,
whether it’s our understanding of events or the human condition. Books that
have redeeming cultural value.

Books that are not “ooks,” as Bob
Giroux used to say.
Yeah. But at the same time, I don’t want to be holier-than-thou about it.
Look, I believe in escapism. I just think that even when you’re escaping, there
can be a point to it. It doesn’t have to be revelatory—it just has to have, I
hope, some larger truth or purpose to it. Purpose is a great word. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that [Rick Warren’s]
The Purpose Driven Life sold all
those copies. I think that people gravitate to purpose. I think we seek it, and
I want each book to serve a purpose. I can’t understand why you would do it any
other way. I really can’t. Even if the purpose is to make a lot of money,
that’s still a purpose. [Laughter.]

What else
are you trying to do differently?
I would say
acquisitions. In fact, I don’t think that’s given enough emphasis when people
talk about publishing. When I first started out in the business, Jacob
Weisberg, a writer I greatly respect, wrote a very influential piece about how
editors don’t edit anymore—all they do is the deal. I think that implicit in
that assessment is an underestimation of just how important the deal is—how
important the decision to publish the book is. I think that a majority of the projects
that are acquired by major houses never have a chance of breaking through. They
are flawed in their conception. What I learned from Ann Godoff was to be a
discerning acquisitions specialist. The most important decision that anyone
makes in a publishing house is the decision to buy the book in the first place,
and I’m amazed by how often that decision is made with very little sustained
consideration.

How do you make those acquisition
decisions? What are you looking at and thinking about and turning over in your
mind?
Well, first of all, “Is it different?
Is it distinctive? Is it singular?” I would’ve loved to have called this
imprint Singular Books, but it sounded too much like a wireless phone company.
Because I want the books to be like nothing else. I think exclusivity
matters—if the journalist has contacts that nobody else has or if the author
has stories that only he or she can tell. Something I haven’t heard before.
Every Sunday, Chris Matthews says on his talk show, “Tell me something I don’t
know.” That ought to be where every editor or publisher starts. “What didn’t I
already know here?”

I really am amazed by how often
publishers decide to do something because a similar book succeeded. That is
flawed reasoning. Books catch on for any number of reasons, and it’s not a
mathematical formula that can be reproduced. Even more insidious is the idea
that sometimes creeps into acquisition decisions in a really cynical and
negative way, where people say, “Well, that nondescript work caught on, so this
nondescript work could too.” I just don’t understand why you would want to go
down that road. It makes no sense to me. I would think that you would feel as
if you were going through your life just imitating other people, doing
something you didn’t really believe in. I’m genuinely mystified by that.

Then I look for an originality of expression. If I see a cliché, it’s
out. Any writer who uses clichés is telling me, “I am not original.” So that’s
easy, and I think most editors would tell you that. But I’m surprised by how
many editors seem to be willing to acquire books with clichés in them. I’ve
never understood why. It seems to me it’s the first sign of a pedestrian work.

I think a lot of the things I think about come from my journalistic
background. Would you want to talk about this? Would you want to spend time
with this person? There are certain things
that will always get my attention: somebody who, like Jonathan Harr or Robert
Caro or David Halberstam, has spent years on a work, really trying to figure it
out. In an age in which nobody’s held accountable for anything, and information
comes and goes so fast, there is great power in the idea of a person who has
concentrated and rigorously worked to make sense of things. I don’t think you
can place enough emphasis on that. It is the single thing publishers can
provide better than anybody else: authority. So if you show me an author who
has taken the time to really wrestle with a subject, in fiction or nonfiction,
and figure it out and unearth the truth, and if that subject has some kind of a
constituency, and I can envision enough people caring about that subject to
gravitate to the book, I’m going to be very interested. I think those books are
hard to come by. It’s hard to expect a writer to spend years on a subject.

Once you
find those things and sign up the book, what are you thinking about with regard
to marketing? What are you and Cary trying to do differently than other
publishers?
It’s the same
thing. We’re trying to make each marketing campaign specific to the book. We’re
really trying to do each book differently. But I stand by what I was saying
before: that the things publishers do, in terms of marketing, are marginal when
compared to the primal aspects of the book. Those aspects are simply, “Do you
care about this?”

Let me give you
my negative example, which I wrote about in a piece and got into a disagreement
over. I went to my local Barnes & Noble and I looked at what was out. There
was a book on the shelf called The Purity Myth: How America’s Obsession with
Virginity Is Hurting Young Women. I was
agog that somebody would think that that book would sell and that it even
needed to be a book. Now, I haven’t read the book. For all I know it is the
most brilliant argument ever made about the pernicious aspects of virginity.
But it just seems to me that, on the surface of things, virgins aren’t going to
want to read a book telling them that they shouldn’t hold onto their virginity,
and I can’t imagine why anybody who’s lost their virginity would care. So I see
no audience for the book at all. It’s a polemic, so it could probably be five
thousand words—there’s no narrative there. It makes no sense.

I look at the
Publishers Lunch deal memo every day, and almost every day there’s some book
that I can’t conceive of more than a handful of people ever being interested
in. I just don’t understand why publishers go for this stuff. Now, I think the
major publishers are a little more discerning, and I understand that there is a
wonderful diversity of readers and that the whole point of certain kinds of
books is that they appeal to niche audiences. But there’s a niche audience and
then there’s, you know, fractal niche.

I still want
to try to get a better sense of how you guys are approaching marketing. Everybody’s
trying to figure out what to do to sell books anymore.
Well, this
probably isn’t very interesting for readers, but we have a great director of
publicity in Cary Goldstein. This guy is extraordinary. The best decision I
made was hiring Cary. I mean, here’s an example of why Hachette is a good
company. They hired me and they gave me a full year to ramp it up. No pressure.
You don’t have to publish a book in five months. Take a full year, do a real
launch, and hire the right person to do your publicity. So I had a full year to
hire the best person. I did research. I called up the people at the New
Yorker and asked them, “Who do you respect?
Who do you listen to?” And Cary Goldstein’s name kept coming back to me.

If you’re
speaking with a credible voice, and you have the right books, why shouldn’t
people listen to you? I mean, yes, I think we’ve done some good ads. The
advertising department of Hachette is first-rate. I think we’ve done some
clever online promotions. But I think that, for the most part, it has largely
been publishing books on subjects that appeal to people and that people are
able to find out about. And they find out about them because the publicity
department is really good.

Now let me say
something else. I go to my local bookstore and see books that I’ve never heard
of. I haven’t heard a thing about them. I think, about ten years ago, the idea
crept into the conventional wisdom that if you simply paid for display, people
would find the book. This is false. People have to know about a book in order
to buy the book. Just reading the flap copy and looking at the same generic
blurbs is not going to sell the book. You need endorsements from reviewers, you
need people talking about the book on the radio, you need the online component.
And we’re just trying to do it extensively and intensively for every book. A
very, very good publisher, Ivan Held, has said that there are only six things
you can ever do for any book. You can name the six things: You can advertise,
you can do co-op, you can do galleys, etcetera. There are a finite number of
things. Our goal is to do one special, original, out-of-the-box thing for each
book. But beyond that, it’s simply about execution.

Tell me
about a clever online thing that you think has worked.
We’re doing a ton
of smart online outreach for NurtureShock
by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman, thanks largely to Po and Ashley. They have
given us extensive lists of bloggers who have written about parenting or
science or the science of parenting. We’ve approached people to have them speak
at parenting conferences and we’ve got something like thirty dates lined up.
We’re doing a kind of open source book club where people will be able to
comment on chapters publicly. We’re doing very targeted online advertising on
parenting blogs. So it’s a multipronged marketing approach that really speaks
directly to the people who we think are going to be the first buyers of the
book: highly engaged parents.

Another example
involves a book we’ve got coming out right now called The Liar in Your Life. Rather than putting blurbs on the back cover, we
solicited the lies that people tell most frequently and used those in place of
blurbs. Then we hired a polling firm to poll the lies to determine which ones
are the most common. We’re going to release that information online and we
think it might generate some attention. So that’s our one out-of-the-box idea.

The Hitchens
example really is the best. But again, that’s about a really creative director
of publicity. Cary Goldstein had this idea that Christopher Hitchens should
debate Al Sharpton at the New York Public Library. And I have to tell you, when
Cary told me he wanted to do this, I thought he was nuts. I mean, Al Sharpton?
Who would take him seriously? Well, they
had the debate, and Al Sharpton stepped right into a big morass when he brought
up Mitt Romney’s Mormon beliefs. That event got picked up on cable news and was
all over TV for two full days. That’s all because of a really good publicity
director.

One way of
looking at what you’re trying to do with Twelve is that you’re trying to get
away from disposable books, which you’ve written about and called a syndrome in
the Washington Post. You
acknowledged that there’s nothing new about the syndrome and that it’s driven
by the need for growth in a business that is essentially flat. But what is at
the heart of the syndrome, in your opinion? What is the fundamental reason for
it?
First of all,
there are many ways to publish good books, and I don’t believe that our way is
the only way. I’ve thought about this a lot and I’ve said this in every
interview, but it hasn’t gotten picked up. I think that you can have a backlist
model or a frontlist model. The major publishing companies have a legitimate
reason for publishing as much as they’re publishing. If you’re trying to
accumulate the biggest and best backlist, it makes sense to put more out there,
and you can even make an argument that letting the market decide what sticks is
viable and actually makes more sense in the end. There are publishers who are
activists—who want to make their work known—but there are also publishers who
want to publish a broad range of books, let the public decide what they want,
and then give the public more of that. I think that’s a legitimate business
decision, and it can work. It can give you the capital to do things on a big
scale and to market books, when you want to, very aggressively.

My criticism of
the publishing industry and the major publishers is not specific to companies.
I’ve seen what a great publishing company can do for worthy books. I mean,
Random House put Seabiscuit and
Shadow Divers and The Orchid
Thief on the map, and it wouldn’t have been
able to do that if it didn’t have real leverage in the marketplace—if it
didn’t have the marketing prowess and marketing resources to do that. So I
think it’s completely legitimate that certain publishers would seek hegemony
through volume. I really believe that.

That sounds
like a hedge to me. In your heart of hearts don’t you have to believe that the
way you’re doing it is the best way?
Look, it’s not
for me, at this point in my career.

Why?
Because I think
that there are enough really good authors who want focus and attention and who
want it promised and guaranteed. And that’s harder to do at a big company.

You honestly
don’t believe that what you’re doing is the best way?
I think it’s
the best way for me in the year 2009. I’ve really thought about this a lot. And
I’ve written this before: I don’t think that people who live in glass
publishing houses should throw stones. I don’t think it’s right for me to get
up on my soapbox and say that my way is the best way. What I do think is that
the Twelve model makes a great deal of sense for unknown authors or authors who
want to break out. I think that’s true. I think that this is the best way to
publish a midlist author or an author who’s on the way up.

Let me put it
another way: I think it would behoove the major publishing houses to publish
fewer books with more focus. I think that everybody would benefit from that.
What I don’t know is whether the companies can meet their targets doing it. I’d
have to be a CFO to know that, and it would be arrogant of me to say that a
major publisher can get by without disposable books. I don’t know the answer to
that. What I know is that I’m working for a company that publishes a lot less than the other major publishers with a more
concentrated marketing approach and seems to be making a lot of money doing it.
One of the reasons I came to this company was because it was in the DNA of the
company to do fewer books with more marketing force. That was what the Time
Warner Book Group had always been about, that’s what Hachette is about, and
that’s what Twelve is about. I wanted to be here for that reason. 

When I was at
Random House, I felt like I was missing out on something because I thought that
Larry Kirshbaum and Jamie Raab and Maureen Egan and Michael Pietsch were
publishing books in a really smart, aggressive way. I saw what they did for
writers like David Sedaris and Malcolm Gladwell and David Baldacci and Nicholas
Sparks, and I really respected that. I thought, “They’ve got cojones. They’re
putting their full force behind these books. I want to be a part of that.” 

I saw this
remarkable statistic on your website that you’ve published twenty-five books so
far and thirteen have been New York Times best-sellers. People in the industry know that having a book hit
the list isn’t necessarily an indicator of profitability. Of the books you’ve
published, how many have made money?
To be honest, I
haven’t actually counted them one by one. I can’t give you that off the top of
my head.

But what’s
your sense?
I know that the
imprint is profitable.

You’re in
the black?
Yeah, I know
that. And off the top of my head I would say that roughly half of the books
have been profitable.

That’s
incredible to me.
But it is
minimal compared to what other people within Hachette are doing. You know, it’s
very flattering that you’re talking to me, but you should talk to Megan
Tingley, who discovered Twilight. That
is carrying the company. Talk to Little, Brown about the way they’ve built up Malcolm Gladwell over
the years. That’s been an extraordinary job of publishing. Jamie Raab has
arguably the best track record of anyone in the industry: Nicholas Sparks, Jon
Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Michael Moore, a number of Oprah picks. It’s an
incredible track record. So this is a company that has a lot of acuity,
specifically with regard to acquisition and marketing. 

I have a
highly original question for you. In the first few years with Twelve, what has
surprised you the most, what has enchanted you the most, what has humbled you
the most, and what has troubled you the most?
Wow, that’s a
long one.

It’s the
question Jeff Zeleny asked Obama after his first hundred days, and Obama took
it seriously because he was on TV and didn’t have any choice. But you can dodge
it if you want.
No, I’ll answer
it, although I’m worried that I may lack Obama’s introspectiveness. I guess I
was surprised that it took me as long as it did to get books into the pipeline.
When I started the imprint, the idea was to do four discoveries, four midlist
books that could take off, and four books that were so obvious that a monkey
could publish them. I had no trouble with the discoveries or the midlist books.
Surprisingly, there were a lot of other people who wanted to publish the monkey
books.

Big surprise
to you? [Laughter.]
I was surprised. I thought there would be enough of those
obvious books that I would acquire them very easily. But it turns out that this
simian mentality is pervasive. So I was surprised by that.

I was enchanted
by the success of God Is Not Great,
because it came from such a sincere place. I was having lunch with Steve
Wasserman. He was a new literary agent and I was a new book publisher. He told
me that he was working with Christopher Hitchens. I said, “I’ve been a fan of
his for years.” In fact, I’d gotten his email address from Christopher Buckley
and was going to propose that he write a book about Congress. Steve said,
“Well, no, he doesn’t want to do that. I think he’s going to write a book about
the case against religion.” My eyes lit up. Because ever since 9/11, I’ve been
one of these people who was pointing the finger of responsibility at
religion—all religion—for inculcating violence in the culture and, at least
in politics, a false sense of piety. After lunch I came back and talked to
Jamie Raab about it and we decided to just put money on the table, right then
and there. He didn’t talk to any other publishers. He didn’t do a proposal. We
just bought that book based on a lunch conversation. I don’t think I even
talked to Christopher about it. The manuscript came in and it was one of those
books that you read and want to go out and tell everybody about. You want to
proselytize. “You’ve got to read this book! It’ll change your view of this!”
And it immediately took off. So that was an enchanting experience. Any time you
have a number one best-seller, it had better be enchanting. [Laughter.] 

I was humbled
when we published a book called The Film Club, because we did everything right. The sales force loved it,
independent booksellers loved it, the media loved it. We got rapturous review
attention, we got the author on network TV, we had him all over the radio, we
toured him. And it still didn’t break out. It sold well—we made our money back
and I think it’s going to have a long life in paperback—but The Film
Club was one of these books that I thought
could have sold a million copies. I felt like it had everything. It was a
really well written, engaging, and moving story about a relationship that I
thought almost anybody could relate to, and yet it was also unconventional. I
mean, the idea of a father agreeing to let his son drop out of school if he
would just watch movies with him? It was a story that stuck to me, and I was sure I could get it to stick to other people. And it
humbled me because it reminded me, once again, just how hard it is. At that
point we’d had a few best-sellers in a row. Everything was working. I was sure that this one was going to catch on, and it just
didn’t make the best-seller list. I wish it had. 

I was troubled,
like everybody else, by the layoffs in the industry. I was troubled by the
number of really good, hard-working editors who were let go for no reason other
than a bad economy. I was deeply troubled by that, and there but for the grace
of God go all of us. But then again I’m an atheist so I guess I should put it
another way. There but for the grace of Hitchens go all of us.

Can we talk
briefly about the piece you wrote for Publishers Weekly that offered twelve steps for better book
publishing? One of your suggestions was “imprints for everyone.”
Yes, I believe
that. I think that the editor is the best publisher of the book.

So why don’t
more publishing houses do it?
Some of them
do. Penguin has that model, to some degree. Reagan Arthur has an imprint. Megan
Tingley has one. I think that it may become more prevalent. But why don’t more
companies do it? I suppose that you need to have entrepreneurial editors. And
when I say that the editor is the best publisher, I should expand that to say
that I think the editorially driven publishers are the best ones. I think you
can be a marketing person with a great editorial sensibility. But I think it
has to begin with what’s on the page.

I think that
some editors may not want the responsibility. And some editors may not be ready
to assume that role because they’re more interested in the text than in the
world into which the text is launched. It requires a certain kind of
sensibility. But I also think that the principal reason there aren’t more
imprints is probably because a lot of publishers are reluctant to let go of
their power and trust it to other people. That’s a difficult thing to do for
some people. When I was a senior editor at Random House, working for Ann
Godoff, I felt like I was the publisher of those books as much as she
was—because she had the confidence and the generosity of spirit to share in
that endeavor. 

Another idea
you talked about in the piece is that if a book that is bought on proposal
doesn’t deliver on its promise, we should give the author the chance to take it
elsewhere. If that isn’t possible, we should publish it as an e-book or print
on demand with no marketing. Did you hear from agents about that idea?
I didn’t hear
any criticism from agents but that’s because—with all due respect to
agents—to their eyes I am a human ATM machine. They need to push the right
buttons for the money to come out, and telling me that I am moronic might not
serve their best interests. However, I would like to say to all those agents
that I’m happy to be called a moron. I welcome criticism, and I actually
respect people even more when they tell me the truth. The only criticism I got
from an agent was from someone I deeply respect, Heather Schroder at ICM, who
called me up and said that she didn’t agree that there should only be one
bidder at each company. And I respected her for having the candor to say that
to me. 

Another thing you wrote somewhere
is that all good stories are about transformation. What else would you add to
that in terms of your ideas about storytelling in the big picture?
The thing I drill into writers all the time is this idea of deep
immersion into your subject, and real command of it, and authority. That’s the
quality that any discerning editor immediately cottons to. Beyond that, I don’t
think writers often enough appreciate just how important it is to be
conceptually distinct. If you’re talking about fiction, it’s always struck me
as elemental that a novel should be novel.
So I’ve never understood why somebody would write a novel knowing that the
story has been done millions of times before. If your work is not novel on the
conceptual level, I’m not sure why you should expect somebody to stop what he’s
doing and pay attention, given the vast opportunities for distraction in
society.

I was struck by something I read years
ago in an interview with Norman Mailer, who said that if he’d gotten started
later in life, he probably would have been a movie director so he would have
had more influence. He also said that he thought novelists would eventually
have the cultural influence of landscape painters. I’m not saying that I agree
with that. I just think it’s interesting that a writer of Norman Mailer’s
stature would recognize how difficult it is for fiction to maintain its
cultural centrality or impact.

So if you’re setting out to write a
novel, or literary nonfiction, for that matter, I think you have to have very high
standards. Now, I say that—and I mean it—but I also understand that
not every reader is coming to a book with the very high expectations that I
seem to have for just about everything I read. I suppose if you’re just looking
for something to escape with on an airplane, you can set the bar a little
lower. But I would still ask the same question: Why your airplane novel rather than the five thousand others
that are published every year?

This is the magazine’s MFA issue.
Do you have an opinion about MFA programs?
I think they’re great, and here’s why: Writers need a support system for
developing their work. I also think, to be realistic, writers need economic
support. These MFA programs provide it for both graduate students and teachers.
I don’t know very many novelists who support themselves solely through their
fiction. Even the most successful novelists I’ve worked with usually have other
jobs, either in academia or in the media. I think that’s very useful. It
provides balance and keeps you from losing touch with a certain aspect of life.
It also probably makes you happier. It’s funny, I read an interview with Tom
Clancy in which he described his life as a miserable existence of time in
solitude confronting the limits of his imagination. Now maybe he was just in a
bad mood the day he gave that interview. But all the research on happiness
indicates that social interaction is to our benefit, and, therefore, it might
behoove writers to get out into the world a little bit more. I think it results
in better fiction.

You have a unique perspective on
editors. Put yourself in the shoes of a beginning writer who is lucky enough to
have multiple offers and has to decide which editor to go with. What advice
would you give her about
navigating that situation?
I think you should reduce it to the
simple question of “Who can you best imagine yourself conversing with on a
regular basis over a sustained period of time?” If you’re intimidated or bored
or uninspired by the editor, those are easy reasons to eliminate people.
Obviously it always helps if the editor says something that is meaningful or
significant about your work. That is usually a good indication of a shared
sensibility. You also might want to think about what happens if that editor
leaves, because that happens to a lot of writers and I think it’s good to deal
with it up front—to know that there’s at least one other person at the company
who’s a real advocate for the work. A lot of authors get orphaned and
think it’s the reason their book hasn’t succeeded. It usually isn’t the reason,
but that’s what they think. It’s important to know that somebody else at the
company will stand behind you if your editor leaves.

Tell writers something you know
about agents that they might not know.
I would say to listen to them. I’m surprised at how often authors, even
published authors, fail to hear the nuance in what their agents are telling
them and are too quick to follow their own needs rather than what their agents
are telling them to do. I have very rarely seen agents give authors bad advice.
The longer I’ve been doing the job, the more I realize that usually the agent
knows that the book doesn’t work or the proposal doesn’t work but they’ve had
to submit it because they didn’t feel they could put the writer through another
draft—because either the writer was balking or they didn’t think the writer
could handle it. 

Writers probably think that agents
have all the power and they have to do what their agents say. But the reality
is that a lot of agents are very sensitive to either alienating the writer or
causing a crisis of confidence. So the agents begin to walk on eggshells. I
think that writers should be very aggressive in seeking the truth from their
agents. I’m always struck by what authors tell me about their work. They’ll
say, “My friends tell me they love it!” I feel like saying, “Did you really,
really drill down and ask your friends what they really thought? Did you force them to tell you one thing
about it that they didn’t like? Can you handle the truth?” Frequently, the
writer hasn’t done that. It’s hard to tell the writer when something isn’t
working, and some agents don’t always articulate it quite as clearly and
forcefully as they should, largely because they know they’re dealing with a
delicate ego. So my advice to writers would be to aggressively seek the
truth—forget about your ego—and do one more draft than your agent asks you
to. The writers who I have noticed being successful are the ones who are making
their agents wait for that next draft. It’s the authors who don’t pursue that
next project until they’re sure it’s the right one for them. It’s the ones who
turn down the easy overture from the publisher for the quickie book and wait to
do the book that they can really commit to.

page_5: 

Considering the fragility you just
mentioned, do you ever pull your punches when you’re editing? What’s your
philosophy on that?
I believe in complete honesty, and, as
I learned from Kate Medina, there is a good way to deliver any news. The way to
do it is usually through an appreciation of what works followed by a very
clinical deconstruction of what doesn’t. And it needs to be done in writing so
the author has time to absorb it, curse you, go through the fifteen stages of
mourning, and then address it. I remember a few times when I was starting out
as an editor, I gave the criticism verbally, and the writers simply didn’t hear
it. It wasn’t that they didn’t understand it. They just didn’t hear it. They
were so overwhelmed by the sensory experience of receiving feedback on something
that they cared so much about, from somebody who would be so instrumental in
determining the future of the work, that they were not equipped to process the
information I was giving them. It has to be in writing.

What do agents do that frustrates
you?
The auctions are frequently
frustrating, and I think some agents could learn a thing from Bob Barnett, who
is not an agent but a lawyer. Bob is a joy to work with because he sends you
the material, or has the meeting, and tells you when the auction is going to
be. There’s no running around and there are never any preempts. Then he has the
auction. It’s always in rounds and it’s very clear what’s going on. And when
it’s done you feel as if everything made sense. I wish more things worked that
way. I wish that agents had enough confidence in the work they’re representing
to just say, “This is the date. These are the terms. Go at it.” The problem is
that every submission is different and that, in reality, you have to handle
every situation differently. But I wish that literary agents were less eager to
try to sell the book within five minutes. Give people time to think about it. I
mean, the reason that some of them probably don’t give people time to think
about it is because they have a responsibility to get the best deal and there
is a legitimate reason to be concerned that the deal could go away. So I’m not
blaming them. I just wish that the auctions could be conducted in a more
orderly, thoughtful, and deliberative way.

Another thing that frustrates me is when
they submit widely and ask us to spend a lot of time reading when the odds of
its winding up with us are slim. I wish the submission lists were smaller. I
don’t see any point in submitting to four people within the same company and
making all four of them run around and talk to one another. I think you should
know the editors you’re submitting to well enough to have a sense of whether
they might want it. I would just rather avoid this pack mentality of having a
lot of people chasing the same thing. I think it’s bad for the soul. [Laughter.] And I’m not even sure it’s good business for
the agents. I think they would be taken more seriously—and would get faster
reactions—if the editors to whom they were submitting felt that the project
was really special and they were coming to them for a reason.

Another
editor I interviewed thought that it was their way of generating excitement
because everything has gotten so difficult with acquisitions by committee.
Which you’re not subject to anymore.
But I get less excited when I know ten people have had it. It’s
actually gotten to the point now where I want other people within the company
to read the submission first. If they want it, they can have it. It’s only
after they’ve rejected it that I may read it and make my own determination.

It can also
make things easier for editors who are not as autonomous as you to acquire
something.
Sure. But if
that’s the case I would say that the publishers those editors are working for
are behaving in a craven and irrational manner. They should think for
themselves and make their own decision about whether or not a book is worthy
and not be looking over their shoulder at what Publishers B and C are doing.
Because Publishers B and C might be even kookier than Publisher A. There are enough
really smart people in the publishing industry that we can all afford to think
for ourselves. 

You are not
known as somebody who overpays wildly. I’m curious about the decision to go as
high as you did for the Ted Kennedy book. Eight million dollars is a lot of
money.
I can neither
confirm nor deny the size of the advance. It was a story that nobody else could
ever tell. It’s by a central figure in the last fifty years of American
political history with a unique vantage point into one of the most storied
families in American history. It was simply irresistible. On top of that, when
you look at the eventfulness of the man’s life, the enormity of his life, the
unbelievably compelling aspects of his personal story, combined with the impact
he’s had on the country through the years, it’s simply a book like no other.
I’ve never, in my twenty years, encountered a story like this.

But it’s a
lot to pay.
Well, by the
time this interview comes out, we’ll know whether we got it right.

Did you
worry about spending as much as you did?
Look, I worry
about ten thousand dollar advances. I worry about everything. There is no limit
to the things that I will worry about. It’s my favorite form of exercise. If I
were ever to write an advice book I’d call it Sweat the Small Stuff. I even wrote a song called “I Worry”: When
I hear about the rain forests, I
worry. It just isn’t smart to turn the jungle into Wal-Mart. I worry. I’m recycling everything. I’m even
listening to Sting. I worry.

You do a lot
of political books. Do you evaluate them the same way you evaluate any other
book, or are there different things you think about?
If it’s a book
by a politician, I think the politician has to transcend the moment and be an
individual of real substance and character. I’m very proud to have worked with
two of the great senators, John McCain and Edward Kennedy. I also approached
Henry Waxman to write this book on how Congress really works. I’d wanted to do
a book on Congress for years, and the more I read about Henry Waxman, the more
I thought he was the person who could really take me inside the chamber and
show me how it gets done. He has a thirty-year record, and his legislation has
made a difference in basic aspects of our lives, from food labeling to smoking
laws, and now health care. So I felt like he was the right person to approach.

In terms of
issue books, I try very hard to imagine that the book could actually move the
needle—in terms of public debate—and that there isn’t anything else like it. 

Are there
any recent political books that you wish you could have published? Or editors
you’re admiring for their taste in political books?
I think that
Sara Bershtel and the people at Metropolitan Books are doing extraordinarily
good work. A number of their books have made an important contribution to the
debate and are books I wish I had published. I’m thinking of The Limits of
Power by Andrew Bacevich, Chalmers
Johnson’s trilogy—especially The Sorrows of Empire and Nemesis—and Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine. Several of those books grew out of this American
Empire Project that two editors named Steve Fraser and Tom Engelhardt started.
Their books are also significant because they’re expanding the parameters of
debate in this country. I’m personally frustrated by how one-dimensional the
conversation is with regard to America’s involvement in the world and our
foreign policy—what Chalmers Johnson refers to as the cost of empire. I feel
like these books are shining a light on America’s use of power and questioning
what our national priorities should be. You hear very few politicians
questioning our military spending, and these writers are doing that. So those
are all books I wish I’d published.

I had a shot at
publishing Fast Food Nation by Eric
Schlosser and I didn’t offer enough. I deeply regret that. I knew Eric. I’d
taken him out. I saw him a mile away and knew he was doing important work. But
I just wasn’t sure we could sell enough copies of a book about fast food. 

I also
acquired, with Peter Bernstein, Samantha Power’s Pulitzer Prize–winning
book on genocide. When I left Random House for my seven weeks in the movie
business, she got reassigned. Then I really didn’t do the right thing, and I
wish I had gotten her back.

How about
mistakes you’ve made in a broader sense?
In several
instances I have acquired books where I thought I had a particular insight into
the subject that I was going to bestow upon the author. In every one of those
instances, it didn’t make the book any better. If I had it to do it over again,
I would not have acquired those books. Because I think it’s a mistake for an
editor or publisher to think that he knows more than the author or has
something to teach the author. Jason Epstein, the great editor, said that, at
best, an editor is a valet, bringing the work into the world and taking the
dust off of the garment. The work is truly done in the margins, and, from this
point on, I will only acquire books by writers whose writing doesn’t need my
help. Because even under the best of circumstances, a writer is going to need
editorial feedback. But if you enter into the relationship knowing they need
your help, I think you’ve probably already made a fatal mistake.

But you’re
also in a position where the best writers come to you.
But you know
something? If you don’t hold out for great stuff, you won’t get great stuff.
I’m not saying that everything I’ve done is great. I’ve made plenty of
mistakes, and sometimes my judgment is wrong, just like everybody else’s. But I
really am trying. I’ve never, in recent years, signed up somebody who I thought
I was going to have to drag across the finish line. 

What are the hardest decisions you
make as an editor and publisher?
The acquisitions. I’m only publishing
twelve books a year, so I really anguish over these manuscripts and proposals.
I really do. I read them all. I take the submissions very seriously. I take the
agents I deal with very seriously. If they think something is good, I think
there’s usually a reason for that. I try to have very good reasons both for
doing books and for not doing them. There have been a lot of projects that I
would have done if I were publishing more than twelve books a year—projects
that interested me and were worthy. 

What disqualifies them most often?
It’s usually that I just don’t feel a
strong enough connection with the work. That’s often code for “I don’t see
enough relevance here” or “I don’t think it’s special enough” or “It didn’t
really intrigue me.”

Why do you
think you’ve been more successful with nonfiction than with fiction?
I think it’s
because I’m a guy. It may have something to do with neuroscience and the
logical part of my brain. It may have to do with my journalistic background and
my nose for a story. I guess I just love it when things are true. I think the
truth is so powerful. Some people even say it sets you free. [Laughter.]

Does it
bother you?
Yeah. I don’t
think any of us like to be put into a box. At least half of the books that made
me want to get into the publishing business were novels. I would love to make a
greater contribution to the culture by publishing some more great novelists.

If you could change one thing about
the industry, what would it be?
The thing I care the most about is getting the
word out about the books, so I wish we had more avenues for publicizing our
works to the readers who care most about them. I think this could be done in a
number of ways. The most intriguing to me right now would be working with
independent booksellers and book-specific media in major cities to create new
forums for local discussion of books and authors. The reason why most
publishers are not touring authors to the extent that they used to is because
there’s less local media to talk about books. I don’t think that all media has
to come through the Internet. I still think that people experience books in
their local environment and that publishers should find new ways to create
media locally. Maybe that needs to come through investment, either through the
American Booksellers Association or through some kind of new consortium of
publishers who create a fund to spread the seed of book coverage. I don’t think
that enough people know about books. It’s as simple as that. There
aren’t enough ways to let people know about really interesting books. I have
published many books that I think a lot of people would have benefited from,
enjoyed, and been better for having read, but they just never knew about them.
I think that’s a tragedy.

Do you worry
about the future of publishing?
I don’t. I
don’t worry about it at all. I have an idealistic hope that as more and more
media becomes disposable, books will be increasingly regarded as the permanent
expression of thought and feeling and wisdom. So publishers who can offer
definitive material will thrive. Now, as I say, that’s idealistic. Plenty of
publishers are going to continue to do well publishing derivative material that
they don’t really believe in. But I think it’s going to be harder for them.
It’s going to be harder for them to survive. I think there will be some
displacement—some houses will shrink and other houses will grow. I could see
some pure play digital publishers who aren’t encumbered by the weight of
overhead and the history of their business relationships becoming influential
factors in the publishing world. So I think it’s a transitional time and a
transformative time. But it’s always been that way. I don’t think anything
should be regarded as permanent. All we ultimately have is our belief in the
particular books. And as long as you have that, you’re fine.

Tell me a little
more about where your head is at with the electronic stuff. I saw a Times piece about the $9.99 price point for the Kindle
where you were quoted as saying, “Let’s just take a breath and see how long
this lasts.”
There’s more
heat than light at this point, but there are going to be changes. Publishers
are going to have to rethink price points and distribution and all aspects of
the publishing process. But that’s always been the case. There was the same
kind of hysteria when the big-box retailers became a force in the business. I
just don’t think it’s wise to be fearful about it. I think we should embrace a
new mode of distribution—it’s simply a new way of getting books to readers. I
find it funny that e-book buyers are demanding instant gratification when, only
a few years ago, their needs were perfectly well met by traditional books.

With the
Kennedy book you made the decision to not release the electronic version
simultaneously with the hardcover. Do you want to talk about why?
Not really. [Laughter.] The thing I would emphasize is that this is about
distribution, and just as indoor plumbing was a wonderful advance in society,
so is the digital delivery of reading material. But we’re still just talking
about distribution. It’s the content that matters. Now, if you want to talk
about the ways in which content is changed by the distribution, that’s a
different conversation, and perhaps a more interesting one. But I remember
when, back in the 1980s, people were writing about hypertext and how computers
were going to change the way stories were told. I don’t really think that
happened very much. I do think that as attention spans continue to become
shorter, and we’re stimulated so much more by the constant influx of
information, we must certainly be reading differently and experiencing
information, on a cognitive level, in a different way. But I still think it
ultimately comes down to one writer telling a story to one person. I don’t
think that’s going to radically change.

But the
thing people seem to be worried about is that it could have huge business
implications on the industry.
Yes, but I
remember when Random House and William Morris were at loggerheads over CD-ROM
rights in the 1990s, and that obviously never happened. [Laughter.] So, yes, this is important. This is significant.
This is transformative. But I think that putting too much focus on it is
misleading because it’s ultimately still about the authors. I just keep coming
back to that, and unfortunately that’s not a story that you can keep writing in
the newspapers every day—nobody would read it. But the publishers who thrive
will be the ones who have the best authors. It’s as simple as that.

Who do you
admire in the industry, and what makes you admire them?
I admire a lot
of people. I admire the editors at Norton. I think they have very high
standards and are very focused and publish a lot of interesting books. They’ve
given us Michael Lewis and Mary Roach and Fareed Zakaria. Obviously I think
Knopf is the gold standard. What more can you say? They have the ability to
publish across the spectrum, from literary fiction to high-quality nonfiction.
Penguin Press, of course. I’m really impressed by Algonquin and Workman. I
think the Workman books are so unique and cleverly designed. My daughter loves
that Gallop! book of theirs with the
Scanimation effect they seem to have created. I already mentioned the people at
Metropolitan. I think they’re doing really important publishing and giving the
left a voice it has lacked in the culture. Paul Golob at Times Books is also
doing really smart, interesting books.

There are too
many people at Hachette to name, but I owe everything to Jamie Raab for
bringing me here and being such an incredibly supportive colleague. I think
Michael Pietsch and Geoff Shandler have done an incredible job with Little,
Brown, and I am in awe of what Megan Tingley has accomplished with Little,
Brown Books for Young Readers.

How about
agents?
There are a lot
of agents that I admire—too many to name. It’s funny. I really enjoy working
with literary agents, but I’m not socially friendly with any of them. I kind of
feel like it’s a business relationship. But I enjoy their companionship at
lunch and I love talking to them about their projects. Even when I pass on
their projects, I genuinely enjoy talking to them, the give and take. There are
literary agents who I’ve known for fifteen years who I’m just finally doing
books with. Molly Friedrich was one who I’d wanted to work with forever and
finally found a novel we both loved. I’ve known Stuart Krichevsky since I was
in my late twenties, and he’s trusted me with Sebastian Junger, for which I am
eternally grateful. Rob Weisbach is incredibly creative and he’s going to do
great things. I could talk to Tina Bennett and Heather Schroder forever. There
really are a lot.

What makes
you admire these people?
To bring it
down to one word, it’s conviction.
Simple as that. Every single person I mentioned believes in what he or she is
doing, and they are engaged by it.

Are there
any younger or less established agents who you’ve been impressed by lately?
There are a
number of them. Larry Weissman. Eric Lupfer at William Morris. Jennifer Joel at
ICM. Gillian MacKenzie. Everything they send me is fascinating, and I think
that’s the mark of a good literary agent.

What are the most rewarding
experiences in your life as a publisher?
I think the most satisfying has been
working with Po Bronson. From the beginning, when we were both
twenty-eight-year-old guys, I felt like his work was speaking for me and for
our generation. Over numerous books, we’ve grown together and pushed each other
and learned from each other. And he keeps surprising me. He never writes the
same book twice, which sometimes makes them a little harder to publish, but I
respect the creative impulse there. [Laughter.] It’s really satisfying to see the way he has
built a readership, and to see that his life has been improved through our
working together. I’ve published a lot of first novelists and a lot of new
nonfiction writers, and to be able to give those people a chance, and to help
them realize their dreams, is incredibly gratifying.

How about the most exciting
experience?
I would probably say having dinner in
Hyannis Port, at the table where John Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy and Edward
M. Kennedy and the rest of the family sat, and talking about American history
and politics with Senator Kennedy. Listening to his stories. I don’t think it
can get much more exciting than that. If I were a journalist or an academic, it
would have been the opportunity of a lifetime. As a publisher, it was just a great evening. And it was one of many. I’d tell you
more but I had to sign a nondisclosure agreement. [Laughter.]

What are your darkest moments as an
editor and publisher?
It’s when a book doesn’t catch on. I
die a death along with that book. The single worst moment may have been a bad
review by Michiko Kakutani of a novel that I truly believed was a classic. I
read the review and I was sick to my stomach. The only time I’ve ever felt
worse was when I found out that Ann Godoff was leaving Random House. Those are
probably the two darkest moments.

But more broadly it’s whenever a book
is perceived as being flawed or just doesn’t catch on. I’m still terribly
depressed by that—terribly, profoundly, irrevocably depressed. And I’m not
saying that I think that’s a good thing. My happiness and self-esteem should
not be wrapped up in the commercial and critical reception that a book
receives. So I’m not proud of that. I think I should be able to transcend it by
now. But I also think that maybe the fact that I care is one of the reasons why
authors still want to work with me. If I ever do start to transcend it, I might
find writers leaving me in droves. 

You’ve
thought about leaving the industry and trying other things, and you even have
left briefly. What is it that keeps you coming back and makes it something you
can’t get away from?
Look, I’m forty-five years old. This
is my twentieth year in the business. If I keep at it and manage not to get hit
by a bus, presumably I’m at the halfway point. For the first twenty years,
what’s kept me coming back is simply having good books to look forward to. I’m
so excited to be publishing Sebastian Junger and Senator Kennedy and Po
Bronson. I’m looking forward to those books and all the others. I just signed
up this superb journalist, Evan Osnos, who’s the China correspondent for the New
Yorker. He’s only getting started
on his book now, so it may not come in for a couple of years, but I can’t wait
to publish Evan Osnos and
introduce him to book readers. Because his journalism is outstanding.

So, unfortunately, my answer to your
question is microscopic and quotidian, and it’s one of the reasons why I wanted
to publish one book a month: to always have something to look forward to the
next month. I get a little bit antsy when I don’t have a really good book to
look forward to. So that’s what’s kept me going so far, and I will only keep
doing it for as long as I’m challenged and growing and nourished by it. I hope
that continues. I don’t, at this moment, have a Plan B.

But I have always felt that you should
never feel trapped in a job. I’ve heard other good publishers say that they
were ready to do the next thing, if they had to. If you start making decisions
out of fear or insecurity that you might lose your job, or that there’s nothing
better out there, I think you make bad decisions. I am incredibly happy and
grateful to be here, and I hope it lasts forever. And if it doesn’t, I hope
there’s something else even better.

Jofie Ferrari-Adler is an editor at Grove/Atlantic.

Agents & Editors: Jonathan Karp

In the final installment of his long-running series of interviews with publishing professionals, Jofie Ferrari-Adler talked with Jonathan Karp, the publisher and editor in chief of Twelve, an imprint of the Hachette Book Group. Among the many topics they discussed in Karp’s office were the editor’s ideas about great storytelling and whether the late U. S. senator Ted Kennedy’s memoir,True Compass, published by Twelve in September, was worth the reported eight-million-dollar advance they paid for it.

Tags: 
editors

Agents & Editors: A Q&A With Agent Georges Borchardt

by

Jofie Ferrari-Adler

September/October 2009
9.1.09
In Print and Online

Every industry has its share of hidden gems—those people
who are cherished by their colleagues and peers but barely known outside of the
business. Book publishing is no exception, which is why the name Georges Borchardt
probably doesn’t ring a bell unless you’ve worked with him or are lucky enough
to be one of his clients. Relatively unknown outside of publishing circles for
more than fifty years, he seems to lack the gene for self-promotion.

Borchardt was born in Berlin in 1928. His early life, spent
in Paris, was marked by war and heartbreak: His father died of cancer when he
was eleven, and his mother and much of the rest of his family was killed in the
concentration camps. As a teenager, Borchardt spent almost two years in hiding
at a school in Aix-en-Provence, where his name did not appear on the official
roll. “I was a sort of nonperson,” he says. After the war he moved to America
and found work at a literary agency that specialized in foreign writers. (When
he arrived, it had just sold Albert Camus’ The Stranger to Knopf for $350.) Borchardt served as the agency’s
assistant and soon began to look for authors of his own. In 1953 he came across
an Irish playwright and novelist who wrote in French and, after selling three
of his books to Grove Press, American readers were introduced to the work of
Samuel Beckett. Other early authors included Laurent de Brunhoff, Marguerite
Duras, Eugène Ionesco, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Michel Foucault. In 1959 Borchardt
took on the task of finding an American publisher for Elie Wiesel’s Night. After numerous rejections, he finally placed the memoir
with a small press, Hill and Wang, for an advance of $250. Since then the book
has been translated into more than twenty-five languages and sold more than ten
million copies in the United States alone.

Over the past half century, Borchardt; his wife, Anne; and their daughter, Valerie (who joined
the Borchardt Agency in 1999) have built a staggering list of clients. They
include poets John Ashbery, Robert Bly, Rafael Campo, and Philip Schultz;
fiction writers T. C. Boyle, Robert Coover, David Guterson, Charles Johnson,
Ian McEwan, Claire Messud, and Susan Minot; nonfiction writers Anne Applebaum,
Stanley Crouch, Susan Jacoby, Tracy Kidder, and Kate Millett; and the estates
of Hannah Arendt, Samuel Beckett, Robert Fagles, John Gardner, Aldous Huxley,
and Tennessee Williams.

While Borchardt’s credentials are impressive—and go a long
way toward explaining why he is considered a luminary within the industry—they
pale in comparison with his extraordinary charm and personal magnetism. His
laugh, a high staccato that welled up frequently during our conversation, is a
particular delight. T. C. Boyle has especially strong feelings about his agent,
once describing him as “the most wonderful man who ever lived on this earth.”
After spending just a little time with him, I can understand why.

Your background is quite
different than a lot of people in publishing.
My background is different
primarily because most literary agents in America have English as their native
language. But I started out without knowing the language. I grew up in Paris. I
was in France during the war, so I spent pretty much two years in hiding. My
father died early on, when I was eleven, and my mother and most of my family
were deported to the concentration camps and died there. But I had two older
sisters who survived. I was in hiding in Aix-en-Provence. I was at the lycée
there. Through connections, the head of the lycée had allowed me to stay there
as a boarder. But I wasn’t on any roll. In other words I was a sort of
non-person. So as a result I was able to get my two baccalaureates. And when I
went back to Paris, my sisters and I actually got our apartment back, but it
was emptied of all its furniture and it was rather gloomy to camp in the empty
rooms. I went to law school for a year but I was really too young for it—I was
seventeen—and too unbalanced by what had happened. I really didn’t like it. My
sisters had worked in the American field hospital in Aix-en-Provence when
France was liberated, where they had met all of these gorgeous American G.I.s who
were distributing marvelous goodies like Spam and Wonder Bread, and they
dreamed of going to America. We had relatives who had gone to America. So I
figured I’d go with them for a year, which would be an honorable way of not
continuing with law school.

When was the first time that you
were really aware of books? Were you interested in them as a young boy?
Books were a big thing in my
family. Today if you give a book to a child for his or her birthday the child
feels rather annoyed. It’s like a punishment. But when I was a child I had a
list of books that I wanted for my birthday. I would sometimes ask if I could
have one of my favorite books bound—French books are all softcover—and then
it was a matter of going to a shop and selecting the leather and the endpapers
and so on. I liked books as objects. I liked to read all the things that boys
liked to read then. Alexandre Dumas. James Fenimore Cooper. I remember one
novel that I particularly loved called Ivanhoé, which I think in English is called Ivanhoe. So I was interested in books but not any more than
anyone else. When I was sixteen or so, like most of the more literate people my
age, I was totally in love with André Gide. I remember walking down the street
in Aix-en-Provence and sort of reciting as a mantra the opening line of Gide’s Les
Nourritures Terrestres: “Nathanaël, je
t’enseignerai la ferveur.” Well, Nathanaël, of course, in English is Nathaniel, but somehow Nathanaël has much more resonance than Nathaniel,
which sounds ordinary. Nathanaël sounds like the trumpets in a Handel piece. I
don’t think I ever really thought about the meaning of the sentence; I just
liked the way it resonated.

In France when I
was in school, every year you read a play by Molière, a play by Racine, a play
by Corneille, and you also had a special subject called “recitation” for which
you memorized either poems or parts of these plays. In France you got not only
a grade in every subject but you also got ranked. So you could be first in your
class or twenty-eighth, or somewhere in between. It was a sort of public
humiliation. Being first didn’t make you popular but being last made you
ridiculous. And in recitation I was practically always first. I was always
assigned the major parts in these tragedies, which was usually the female role
because in most of the plays, certainly the Racine plays, that was usually the
central character. So I think language was always very much a part of what I
was interested in. But I certainly never thought of working in publishing and
didn’t know anything about publishing. I thought I would work in the music
industry because my father was the head of a phonograph record firm. So I
always had a lot of records at home. It was mostly classical music except that
the star of the firm was Édith Piaf, so I had a bit of everything.

What year was it when you came
over?
It was ’47. I knew some English
because I’d had it for six years in school, just as I had Latin for six years,
and I knew English pretty much the way I knew Latin. I was very good at both,
in school, which meant translating texts from Latin into French and from French
into Latin as well as from French into English and from English into
French—and maybe memorizing the occasional poem about daffodils. But I didn’t
speak the language. It wasn’t taught that way in French schools at the time. So
when I came here, to my great chagrin, I didn’t understand a word of what
people were saying. It would always take me a long time to get a sentence
together in my head. By the time my sentence was ready and polished, the
conversation was already miles away from where it had been, and what I was
going to say no longer fit it. I would also mispronounce things and, as I’m
sure you know from traveling in foreign countries, when you mispronounce
something and people start laughing, it’s very embarrassing.

How did you get into publishing?
A friend of mine helped me compose
two ads that I put in the New York Times.
I don’t remember exactly what they said but it was something like,
“Nineteen-year-old Frenchman blah blah blah,” and the other one would have said
something similar.

These were ads that people would
place when they were looking for work?
Yes. They would say, “This is who I
am, and I’m looking for a job.” There was a lot of that going on. I’d gone to
various employment agencies and they all said, “What is your American
experience?” Well, I had no American experience. When I put the ad in the paper
I expected a good amount of mail. Still, I figured I could carry it by myself,
so I went to Times Square to get it. There were only two letters, one for each
ad, but both from the same person. The letterhead said “Authors and Publishers
Representative.” One said, “If you’re interested in the letterhead, come in
next Tuesday at ten.” The other one said, “If you’re interested, call for an
appointment.” My English was not very good, and it was even worse on the phone,
so I decided to go in person. The woman who owned the agency was named Marion
Saunders. She was the daughter of a British Foreign officer, so she’d spent a
lot of time in Berlin and Paris and all over. She spoke quite a few languages,
and she enjoyed speaking them, and our interview was primarily in French so that
she could practice her French. She was very pleased with the way it went, and
at the end of the interview she said, “I think I’ll probably offer you the job,
but I wrote to one other person from whom I haven’t heard yet.” I took out the
other letter and said, “I am the other person.” So that’s how I got into
publishing.

What was the agency like?
It was primarily doing foreign
rights for other agencies but also representing a French literary agent who
controlled most of what was coming out of France because, in France, most
authors don’t have agents. They give the rights to the publishers. And this
agent in Paris, who was represented by my boss in New York, had an arrangement
with Gallimard, the main literary house in France, to represent all of its
authors. The husband of the Paris agent had been a friend of Hemingway’s and
various other American authors who had been in Paris at the time and had sold
Hemingway, Dos Passos, and practically all of the other major American authors
of that period to Gallimard. In exchange, Gallimard was giving her many of its
French authors who had come out of World War II, people like Sartre and Camus.
When I got there she had just sold a book by Camus called The Stranger to Knopf for, I think, three hundred fifty dollars.
I was nineteen and I was amazed that you could get paid to read books. Although
I was also a gofer. I did all the dirty work. I did the filing. I did the
bookkeeping. I’d go to the post office to get stamps or to the bank to get
money because in those days you still used those things. But the main thing I
liked was reading the books that came in. And instead of just limiting it to
the books that came from the agent in Paris, I started going through the French
equivalent of Publishers Weekly
to see if there was anything else that might be interesting. I had no idea what
we could sell, but when I’d see something that I wanted to read, I would ask
for a sample copy. It was a good way to build up a little personal library. You
have to remember that books were extremely valuable in France because during
the war there was no paper. There were really small printings. So if you owned
a book by André Gide, for example, all of your friends would want to borrow it.
You owned something really valuable.

So I’d go through
these catalogues and if something caught my eye I’d ask for it. At one point I
asked for three books by this Irishman who was writing in French called
Beckett. I read them and thought, “This is really quite interesting.” I started
sending them around—they were in French—and I’d get letters saying, you know,
“Pale imitator of Joyce” or “Unreadable prose.” Finally, one day, a man named
Don Allen came to the office. He was working for Grove but on a freelance
basis. He was doing the same thing for New Directions. He saw these worn copies
of the three Beckett books on my desk and said, “Oh, you have Beckett?” I
probably said, “You’ve heard of him?” He
took the books and about a month later Barney [Rosset] called and said he
wanted to buy them. He made a very generous offer: a thousand dollars for the
three of them. Since everybody knows that novels sell better than plays, we
divided it up so it was two hundred dollars for Waiting for Godot and four hundred dollars for each of the novels,
which were the first two novels in the trilogy, Molloy and Malone Dies. The third one, The Unnamable, wasn’t written yet. And then it took ages for the books to be
published because Beckett decided he wanted to translate them himself, which
meant rewriting them.

Who were some of the other
writers who were important to the early part of your career?
There was Camus. There was Sartre.

Did you have relationships with
those guys?
Not with them. Sartre did actually
come to New York during that time. But he stayed in a cold-water flat that had
no telephone, so it was difficult to communicate and I didn’t get to meet him.
I was only at the agency for three years before I got drafted into the army.
This was in 1950 during the Korean War. I had a choice of serving in the French
army or the American army. The French consul told me that I would be better fed
and better paid in the American army, so I decided to serve in the American
army, and I did for two years. I was sent to Fort Devens for basic training and
was put in a Tennessee National Guard unit that had been activated and needed
to be brought to full strength with draftees. We were sent to Iceland to defend
Keflavik Airport against a possible Communist takeover. This was in the days
before jet engines were common and planes couldn’t cross the Atlantic without
stopping somewhere. When we got to Iceland, the army, which was not any more
efficient than publishing, realized there was no one to pay the troops except
for a warrant officer who was leaving. They looked for a volunteer to take over
the job. Most of the Tennessee boys were totally illiterate and couldn’t do
arithmetic, so I started paying the troops. And when the air force came in,
they kept me because I had all the records. I was in charge of a little
division that looked after travel pay. I would compute officers’ claims for
reimbursements or per diems and so forth. I had two air force people working
under me as well as an American civilian girl named Bunny, who I didn’t consort
with after hours because she’d go to the officers mess and…who knows what she
was doing. [Laughter.] Anyway, I was
very good at my job and the officers loved me because they usually had a hard
time getting their money. As a result of that I got two thirty-day leaves to go
to Paris, hitchhiking on air force planes. So I spent two longish periods in
Paris and got to meet the French publishers for whom I’d been selling books in
America. One was rather terrified when he saw me because he was a member of the
Communist party—he was the rights director at Gallimard—and to be seen with
someone wearing an American uniform did not give him much pleasure. Those trips
were very useful because I’d corresponded with these publishers but I hadn’t
met them.

When
I got out of the army, I’d agreed to go back to the agency for a year, but I
didn’t really want to. I thought maybe I would work for a publishing house
instead. But nobody seemed particularly interested in hiring me because having
a language was not considered any more useful than it is now because nobody
wanted to do translations. So when I left the agency after another year, I got
a letter from the head of one of the French publishing houses, Editions du
Seuil, that said, “Should you decide to start your own agency, I’d like you to
represent us in America.” I was sort of amazed by that because I was shy, I was
in my early twenties, I didn’t have much self-confidence, and the idea of
somebody else having any confidence in me seemed amazing. So I decided to do
that, sort of on the side, while also taking advantage of the G.I. Bill of
Rights and taking courses toward a master’s at NYU, where I’d already, at
night, gotten a B.A. in English. When I went down to NYU I met a woman in the
elevator named Germaine Brée who had just become the head of the French
department that day. We started chatting and I said, “Let me know if you ever
need somebody to teach a conversation course. I’m very shy and maybe that will
help me get over it.” She said, “Fine,” and the next day her secretary called
and said, “You’ve got three courses.” But they weren’t conversation
courses—they were languages courses. So that’s what I did. I got a master’s
and taught French for six years and did agenting on the side. But I only
represented French publishers. No one else was doing that. I would go over
catalogues and go to France twice a year, which was tax deductible. Not that
there was much to deduct since none of this was bringing in much money. But I
was actually being paid by the G.I. Bill—it was different than the World War
II G.I. Bill—and I didn’t have to pay for my courses since I was a graduate
student. I was getting a bit of money from NYU, maybe a thousand dollars a
year, a bit of money from the government, and a bit of money from selling the
occasional book for very little money.

Tell me about some of the
editors you were getting to know.
The one I knew best, and the one
who was incredibly nice and generous to me, even before I went into the army,
was Mike Bessie, who was then at Harper and later started Atheneum and then
went back to Harper. He was very interested in France. He’d been a journalist,
he was fluent in French, he’d been in army intelligence in World War II, and he
was very cultured. I did, of course, meet Blanche Knopf, who was also fluent in
French but knew very little about literature. I was somewhat intimidated by her
but I also found her slightly ridiculous. With Sartre she had decided that he
was a novelist and a playwright but systematically turned down all of his
nonfiction. So all of his essays and philosophical writings were published by
minor firms like Philosophical Library or Citadel. When I took him over it was
with The Words, which I sold to
Braziller. But all of those books should have been with Knopf. I remember
having lunch with Blanche. She was extremely gracious. If we had lunch in a
restaurant she’d say, “Last year when we had lunch you ordered gigot, but I
remember that you like it rare and I don’t think they do it very well here.
Maybe you should try….” She was sort of amazing in that way. But I also remember
having lunch at her apartment, which was in the building where Michael’s is
now, on Fifty-fifth, where the Italian Pavilion used to be. It would be the two
of us and her poodle, Fifi. She’d say, with her raspy smoker’s voice, “Mr.
Borchardt, what is interesting in Paris right now?” I’d say, “Well, there’s
Michel Butor, who’s just written a new—” She’d lean over and say, “Fifi! Don’t
do that! This is my Balenciaga suit! I’m not going back to Paris until next
spring! You were saying, Mr. Borchardt?” [Laughter.]

What other editors and
publishers made a big impression?
I became very close with Bob
Gottlieb, who was at Simon & Schuster. He knew French, and his French was
particularly fluent if he’d had a drink. At one point later I was very
impressed when he decided to memorize the whole of Valéry’s “Le Cimetière
Marin,” which is a very long French poem. That was really quite impressive. He
was a junior editor at Simon & Schuster when I started agenting on my own.
I had been introduced to someone important at Simon & Schuster, who of
course didn’t want anything to do with a somewhat useless agent who had
practically no books, and she handed me off to Bob, who then called about once
a month and said, “They just gave me money to take someone out to lunch. When
are you free?” I think he called me so often because he couldn’t take out a
real agent, who would have been insulted to be seen at lunch with this kid, who
not only was fairly young but looked ten years younger. He may have been
twenty-five, but he looked fifteen. He wore sneakers when nobody was wearing
sneakers. He looked terribly unimportant. And he was fairly unimportant, although by then I think he was
already allowed to buy the occasional book. So we would have lunch, sometimes
in a restaurant and sometimes in Central Park, and I actually sold him Michel
Butor and eventually de Gaulle’s war memoirs, even though the first volume had
been published by Viking and had done very badly. He also asked me to help out
a friend of his named Richard Howard, who stupidly enough had translated a
short novel by Jean Giraudoux without checking to make sure the rights were
free. But they were, and I got it published by a little firm called Noonday
Press, which was an independent house at the time. And then this same Richard
Howard started translating other books, many of them for Grove. He also
translated de Gaulle’s war memoirs for Bob and he got invited to the Elysée in
Paris.

So
there was Bob. There was also a very smart editor at Knopf who spoke French
named Henry Carlisle, who was the father of Michael Carlisle and who later became a
writer. But the editors were all sort of in the background. They weren’t listed
in the Literary Market Place. Editors
were considered, by many publishers, a semi-necessary evil who were nearly as
unpleasant to deal with as authors or agents. [Laughter.] Agents were at the bottom, then authors, then
editors. If all three of them could have been gotten rid of, publishing would
have been a nicer, more clubby industry. I remember selling Henry a book called
The Notebooks of Major Thompson
that became a mini best-seller. Knopf had this little bulletin in which Alfred
would write a letter, and in one of them it said, “Next spring we are
publishing The Notebooks of Major Thompson by Pierre Daninos, which Blanche snapped up in Paris on her last
trip.” I remember calling Henry and saying, “This is outrageous! You bought
this book here, from me, and you should be the one who gets the credit.” He
said, “Oh, no, calm down, that’s just how it is….” [Laughter.]

I’ve
already mentioned Mike Bessie. I was able to sell him The Last of the Just, which was Atheneum’s first best-seller. There were
the Wolffs at Pantheon, Kurt and Helen, to whom I tried to sell Night. But nobody wanted Night. I have a letter from Blanche Knopf saying something
like, “You’re wasting your time with Elie Wiesel. He will never find an
audience in this country.” I have a long letter from Kurt Wolff, which
unfortunately says nothing. It says, “You’re right. This is a great book.
Usually when you send a book you don’t make many comments. I assume that if
you’re sending it, it means you feel we should publish it. In this case you
said it’s something we have to publish. And you’re right. But for reasons that
I’ll explain to you the next time we have lunch, we just can’t do it.” I don’t
remember if we ever had that lunch or if he ever explained their reasons, so
I’m afraid that will be missing from your interview. I could, like most people
who write their memoirs, invent a nice story. I’ve never understood how people
can write their memoirs in such detail. I don’t remember details about 99
percent of what has happened in my life.

There’s
Braziller, who bought a lot of French things even though he didn’t know French
himself. From time to time he would take out an ad in the French equivalent of Publishers
Weekly, and many French publishers thought
he was one of the biggest American publishers. Dick Seaver worked for him for a
while before he moved over to Grove, where I dealt with him a lot because he
was Barney [Rosset]’s French guy. Barney knows some French but Seaver was
really quite fluent and he’d lived in Paris.
Dick
and I were friends for years and years.

Do you have any great stories
about Dick or Barney?
With Barney the relationship always
had its ups and downs. I liked him a lot, and I liked the books he did. I also
sold him a lot of books, including Story of O, which, later, during one of his bankruptcies, he had to give to
Random House. It’s still selling very well. I remember him often being angry at
me for one reason or another. I remember complaining to Don Allen once and
saying, “What’s wrong? I’m bringing him all these books and I’m certainly not
hurting him in any way….” Don said something like, “Barney is a rooster. You
can’t have two roosters in one henhouse.” [Laughter.] I think that is sort of true of Barney. But Barney
can also be very generous. And I like him.

But there were moments when he would
get very angry at me for one thing or another. I remember once going down to
Grove Press because they hadn’t paid their royalties or something. The first
thing Barney said was, “I never bought a book from you that I hadn’t heard
about before.” I said, “That may be true, but you still owe me….” [Laughter.] But to some extent he was probably right. It was
sort of irrelevant, but he was probably right because everybody had potentially
heard of these French books. They were published in France. And I had heard
about them and asked to represent them. Although by then I had exclusive
arrangements with several of the publishing houses, two of which we still
represent: Seuil, the original one, and Minuit, who have been Beckett’s
publisher and also publish Elie Wiesel’s Night. Night,
incidentally, now sells about six hundred thousand copies a year in its Hill
and Wang trade paperback edition in America.

How did you meet Elie Wiesel?
I met him because I was trying to
sell Night, unsuccessfully. The French
publisher wrote to me and said, “Elie Wiesel now lives in New York,” where he’d
come from Paris to be the UN correspondent of an Israeli newspaper. One day he
came over to my apartment, which was also my office at the time, limping with a
cane. I thought it was the result of his concentration camp experience but it
turned out that he’d been hit by a taxi and broken practically every bone in
his body and was still recovering. I have a letter, actually, where I wrote to
the French publisher saying, “I met Elie Wiesel and you’re right, he seems
quite nice.” We finally sold the book to Arthur Wang.

How much did you get for it?
Two hundred fifty dollars, payable
in two installments and on condition that I find a British partner to share the
translation cost.

[Laughter.] How much money do you think
they’ve made on that book?
That’s the irony when you see how
publishing works. You don’t necessarily make the money out of the flavor of the
month. The real money, if you’re in it for the duration, comes from books like
that—from books nobody wanted—be they by William Faulkner or Elie Wiesel or Beckett
or many others. Unfortunately, that argument is totally unconvincing to
publishers now. If you’re an editor at Random House or one of the other large
firms, you can’t say, “We’re not going to make any money on this book for the
next three years, but in ten years everybody will be envious of us for having
it.” The guy you’re saying it to has two years to go on his contract, which is
about to be renegotiated next year. What good does it do him to have a book
that will bring in money ten years from now? He couldn’t care less! He wants
the book that makes money now so he can
tell his bosses, “You should give me another contract for five years at twice
the salary.” So it’s become different, and I think that’s what’s weighing on
publishing, more than any of the other crises that come and go.

Did you become close with
Wiesel?
I did. We were both bachelors at
the time. We had the kind of relationship where you call up at six o’clock and
say, “Are you doing anything tonight? You want to meet at the Italian place on
Fifty-sixth?” He lived in a one-room studio on upper Riverside Drive. It wasn’t
much bigger than this room but it was filled with records and books. For some
reason he had a car and would sometimes drive me to the airport. I was living,
before getting married to her, with a woman who had been a student of mine at
NYU. In Elie’s memoirs he says something like, “I drove Georges and Anne to the
airport and during the drive Georges mentioned that Anne had decided to change
her last name to Borchardt. That’s how I found out that they had gotten
married.” Whether that’s true or not, I don’t know. It could be. But we had,
indeed, gotten married, partly because we found it too complicated not to be
married. I would be invited to dinner by, say, Roger Straus. FSG was also
buying French books, and Roger had been very nice to me and would invite me to
dinner parties at his townhouse with really important people like George
Weidenfeld. These were fairly formal dinners and it was awkward to say, “Can I
bring a date?” If I was invited it was probably because they were a man short,
and by bringing somebody you upset the balance of the dinner. It seemed simpler
to be married. People had to invite both of you. So one day we went down to
City Hall and got married and then went back to work. [Laughter.]

My wife and I did the same
thing.
You probably had the same
experience. It gets too cumbersome to always have to explain the situation. And
your wife meets people who might ask her out for a date. It’s just simpler if
you’re married. I remember we were at a party, maybe at Henry Carlisle’s, and
there were several people there. Somebody told Anne about this new firm that
was starting: Atheneum. But by the time we got home, she’d forgotten the names
of the people who were involved, including the name of the person who had told
her, who had also asked her for a date, which she had turned down. I said,
“This one you probably should have accepted! I want to know who’s starting the
firm!” [Laughter.]

Did you make any big mistakes
when you were starting out that you look back on with regret?
I probably should have started to
take on English language writers sooner. But I was sort of nervous about it.
There were all these brilliant agents who had gone to Harvard and were members
of the Harvard Club, where all the editors would meet. Everybody in publishing
had gone to Harvard. Except the people at Scribner’s, who had gone to
Princeton. [Laughter.] I was a sort of
outsider, and I thought I’d remain an outsider, so it took me a while.

How did you come to represent
John Gardner?
We had a group of writers who came
more or less at the same time that included Stanley Elkin, Bob Coover, John
Gardner, and Sol Yurick. For some reason I seem to remember that Sol Yurick
came to us through George Steiner. He was a very close friend of Bob Coover’s,
who had been with Candida Donadio but became disenchanted with her. Bob had met
a marvelous editor named Hal Scharlatt who was at Random House at the time. He
had a collection of stories called Pricksongs & Descants. He told Hal Scharlatt that he was sick and tired of
agents and wanted to do the deal with him directly. Hal said, “You can’t do
that. If you do the deal with me directly, I’ll have to screw you [on the terms
of the contract].” Hal told him to come and see me. To humor Hal, he came to
see me, having already decided to tell Hal that it would not work. But for some
reason he decided to come to us, and he’s been our author ever since. He also
sent us Tom Boyle. They tend to come to us through each other. I can’t remember
exactly how John Gardner came to us.

Tell me about your experience
with him.
His editor was David Segal, who was
good friends with Hal Scharlatt. They both had been editors at McGraw-Hill and
I think both of them had been fired from there. The three of us became friends.
We were all sort of outsiders. They were interested in writers whom nobody else
wanted, and I was interested in the same writers. And since nobody else wanted
them, they were also the only writers I could get, particularly since people
would probably discourage American authors from coming to us by saying, “Oh,
isn’t that the French agent?” If you say that in a certain way it becomes very
negative. It took us a while to change that image. So John probably came to us
through David Segal. I know that David had published one of John’s books by the
time John sent us two manuscripts, The Wreckage of Agathon and The Sunlight Dialogues. I also remember, quite vividly, that, being an
extremely kind person, I gave Anne the shorter book to read, Wreckage
of Agathon, and decided to work my way
through the long one, Sunlight Dialogues, not realizing that I’d given myself the much better book. [Laughter.] And I loved that book. By then David Segal had been fired by McGraw and gone to
NAL [New American Library]. The person who had fired him at McGraw had just
been appointed editor in chief at NAL. David called me and said, “I’ll be the
first editor to be fired twice by the same person.” He had probably called many
people saying the same thing, and he didn’t actually get fired, but I think
agents stopped sending him books because they figured he would. Then he moved
to Harper, which always seemed to have, at least briefly, a literary sort of
editor, although they were mainly doing nonfiction. And he acquired nothing but
duds. Not only did he publish John Gardner, but also Cynthia Ozick and Fred
Exley and other people who lost Harper money. So he got fired again. Then he
got hired by Bob Gottlieb at Knopf. But while he was at Harper I sent him Wreckage
of Agathon and Sunlight Dialogues. He said, “I can do the short book but until this
author acquires an audience we wouldn’t be able to price the long one.” So he
only bought Wreckage of Agathon.
When he left and went to Knopf, I sent him Grendel and Sunlight Dialogues and he said the same thing. I said, “You can’t do
that. You have to publish Sunlight,
too. If you want to, you can publish Grendel first.” So he talked Bob Gottlieb into giving us a
two-book contract. They published Grendel, which did quite well—it probably sold about twelve thousand copies,
which was good, then or now—and then David died, in his early forties, having
pretty much drunk himself to death. Hal Scharlatt died at age thirty-eight,
walking off a tennis court. Those were big losses, two superb editors with good
taste and good noses. You need instincts in this business. It’s so
unscientific. You can never really explain why you love something. It’s like
any other form of love: you can’t really explain why you’re in love with
somebody or something. I think of the often-quoted sentence by Montaigne, when
he was asked about his friendship for La Boétie. He said, “Because it was he,
because it was I.” That’s about as close to explaining it as you can get.

Did you become friends with
Gardner?
We became good friends. I remember
he and his first wife taking our daughter and their two kids to the circus when
they were in New York. I remember going to Chinatown with them. They’d just
been in Greece, and his daughter was being very obnoxious—she isn’t anymore,
she’s very sweet—and trying to get attention by offering her Greek change to a
Chinese vendor. I have letters from John saying, “I know I’m one of the major
writers of my generation. All these people who don’t recognize me will regret
it.” Of course he was right, and one of the admirable things about writers is
that they really know they’re writers. I
mean, any normal human being would just give up. Why would you do something
that nobody wants? But they do, and they have this sort of inner feeling. He
was one of a kind. People often ask me, “What kind of relationship do you have
with your authors?” Well, each one is different, just as you have a
different relationship with each one of your friends. And you’re not exactly
the same person for each one of them, either.

Do you have any great stories
about Coover?
One amusing story about Bob comes
to mind. Some years ago he was asked by the New York Times to write an op-ed piece about the Intifada and
Valentine’s Day. The dates coincided. It was to run on a Monday, which was
Valentine’s Day. He called me on Friday evening to say that he had just heard
from the editor that they’d killed the piece because some higher-up at the Times objected to its ending, which was something like “as
the birds do, do.” Evidently the juxtaposition of the two dos was just too much for the Times. So they killed it. Bob asked me what I could do. I
said, “What can I do? It’s Friday night. Valentine’s Day is Monday. The most we
can probably do is get a story about what the Times did published in a magazine. But that would be
months from now.”

I sort of tossed and turned all night, and the next morning I
went to the office. It was Saturday morning. I remember that it was snowing. I
called Jack Miles, who was also one of our authors and whom I’d met when he was
the book review editor at the Los Angeles Times. Now he was a freelance writer for them and he knew
everybody there. I told him the story and said, “I know the L.A.
Times hates the New York Times. This is a very good piece. Do you think they could
run it on Monday?” He said he’d make a phone call. I walked home for lunch in
the snow. The minute I got home, Jack called and said they wanted me to fax the
piece so they could read it. So I went back through the snow to the office.
When I got there I realized I’d never used the fax machine, which at the time
was fairly new. So I called Anne on the phone and eventually managed to fax the
thing. By then I’d gone back and forth through the snow several times and
wasn’t in a very good mood. I knew nothing would happen anyway. We were having
dinner with friends that night, and five minutes before we went off to dinner,
the phone rang. It was the L.A. Times. They said, “We’d like to run the piece, but we can only pay three
hundred fifty dollars.” Well, the New York Times, at the time, paid two hundred fifty dollars, which
I was going to make them pay anyway because they’d really accepted the piece.
So now Bob would be getting six hundred instead of two-fifty. I said, “Oh,
that’s okay.” [Laughter.] I
remember telling the story at dinner that night. When I was finished my
friend’s husband said, “But how much money do you make out of this?” I said, “Normally we would have
gotten twenty-five dollars before expenses, but this way we get sixty dollars
before expenses.” He looked at me as if I were totally insane. But to me this
was one of the highlights of my career.

You also represent T. C. Boyle.
Didn’t he say somewhere that in his opinion you are the greatest person who has
ever lived?
He tends to exaggerate, a little
bit, from time to time. But most of the time he’s right, of course. [Laughter.] When I first met him, he was the assistant fiction
editor at the Iowa Review and Bob
Coover was the fiction editor. But Bob had moved to England and Tom was doing
most of the work. I think Tom was impressed by the fact that I was actually
submitting short stories to the Iowa Review, which was paying something like thirty-five dollars
a story. One day he wrote me and said he had a collection of stories. Many of
them had been published in literary journals but also magazines like Esquire, maybe Playboy, but not the New Yorker,
which at the time wouldn’t have touched any of these authors because they were
using words that the New Yorker
didn’t recognize. And we managed to find a publisher for his collection without
too much trouble. Maybe three people turned it down. We sold it to Peter
Davison at Atlantic Monthly Press. Then he wrote a novel called Water
Music, which was also published by
Atlantic. But Peter didn’t like his second novel, Budding Prospects, so we had to find him a new publisher. We sold it
to Amanda Vaill at Viking. Paul Slovak was the publicity director. He and Tom,
both towering over everyone else, got into the habit of hiking together and
became good friends. And then Paul later became his editor. Tom doesn’t really
require much editing. His books come in pretty much ready to go. And Tom and I
have become close friends over the years. It’s been great fun, and we’ve been
able to get him published all over the world. He’s a real writer. I often say
to people in the office that the kind of writer I like to take on is somebody
whose book you can open to any page, read a paragraph, and say, “Here’s a
writer.”

You also represent one of my
favorite nonfiction writers, Tracy Kidder. How did you meet him?
Tracy, too, is a superb stylist.
And there, too, we’ve become good friends. He had written a book for which he
had an agent. I don’t remember who published it or what it was about, but it
was a terrible experience and he doesn’t want to hear about that book anymore.
Then he wrote Soul of a New Machine,
which he sold to Atlantic-Little, Brown himself. I don’t know how he got
my name, but I remember that he came to see me, feeling that he had made a big
mistake, that he should have used an agent, that the publisher wasn’t going to
do anything for the book. This was before it was published. He was very upset.
I said to him, “There isn’t much I can do at this point. The first thing you
should do is call them and ask what the book’s advertising budget is.” In those
days publishers still had individual budgets for each book. Sometimes it was
zero, but they still had it. Now they just advertise their two main books and
do nothing for the others. But I told him that, and maybe one or two other
things, and within two weeks—I think the book had become a main selection of
the Book of the Month Club—he sent me a bottle of wine with his thanks. I had
really done nothing. I explained to him that he was more grateful to me for
having done nothing than most of my authors were when I actually had done
something. [Laughter.]

Then
he sent me three proposals for his second book. Two were business books and one
was a book about building a house. Well, to me, building a house was of no
interest whatsoever. In France, if you want a house, you buy some old stone
thing and make something out of it. But putting all this wood together? I don’t
know. To me it was totally uninteresting. And, in addition, the obvious
commercial follow-up to Soul of a New Machine was another business book. So he’d asked me to rank them, and I ranked
the two business books first and House third. Two weeks later he called me and said, “You know, House is really the book I would like to write.” I said,
“That’s fine. We’ll get you a little less money, but we’ll definitely get you a
contract. Don’t worry about it.”

Had Soul of a New Machine already won the Pulitzer?
Probably. I think that had already
happened. Anyway, I think he felt a little annoyed by my reaction, and he then
produced the most amazing outline I had ever seen for House. I called him and said, “I’ve changed the ranking.
This is now number one and the business books are two and three.” How he did
it, I don’t know. It was an impossible book to write a proposal for because it
was going to be an account of what would happen but hadn’t happened yet. I got
him an enormous contract for the
book. He was very surprised. He said, “Are you sure?” and so on. [Laughter.]

How did you sell it? Was it an
auction?
No. We just sent it to
Atlantic-Little, Brown, which had just been bought by Mort Zuckerman. We
asked for a certain amount of money and they reluctantly gave it to us. Mort
Zuckerman even came to see me at the time of the negotiation. It didn’t start
out very well because he saw a copy of Harper’s on our reception table and said, “Why do you have Harper’s and not the Atlantic?” I said, “Because Harper’s is giving us a free subscription and the Atlantic is not.” [Laughter.] I thought he wanted to meet because he might want
to renegotiate the advance. But not at all. He wanted to see about the
possibility of getting first serial rights for the Atlantic. He didn’t realize that if they had asked to make
that part of the contract I probably would have thrown it in. But they hadn’t.
[Laughter.] So he went back to
Boston with his scalp—that is, my concession that he could have first look at
first serial—and I did end up selling them first serial for another
twenty-five thousand dollars or so, even though the book itself ended up being
published by Houghton Mifflin. We’ve been Tracy’s agents ever since. And he’s
lovely.

Are there any writers who got
away? Whom you wanted desperately?
Oh, many. The one I probably regret
most is Jhumpa Lahiri. She would have been perfect for us and vice versa. She
just did a marvelous interview with one of our authors, Mavis Gallant, for Granta. I got the impression that Mavis Gallant is her
favorite author, and it sort of reopened the wound because I thought, “Did I
mention to her that we represent Mavis Gallant? Would that have made a
difference?” But maybe not.

You’ve witnessed such a long arc of contemporary
literature. You’ve seen fads come and go, seen various schools of writing come
and go. I’m curious about what seeing all that has taught you about the craft
of writing and what makes great writing.
It’s a gift, and I don’t know where
it comes from. I don’t think the writing schools bring you that gift. They may
help you develop it in some way, and they put you in contact with other writers
so that you feel less isolated and less lonely, but essentially what makes a
Cézanne a Cézanne or a Picasso a Picasso or a Proust a Proust or a Joyce a
Joyce, I don’t know. I can’t tell you.

So there’s nothing specific that
you’re looking for in a piece of writing?
No. I just want to fall in love
with it. Ask an eighteen-year-old kid who tells you that he wants to fall in
love, “What do you want to fall in love with?” What is he going to tell you? You don’t know until you’ve found it.
But when you find it, you know. How, and why, I don’t know.

I’m curious about your take on
nonfiction with regard to memoir and the issues of truth and accuracy that are
always being raised now, especially because you come from Europe where there
are different traditions.
I’m certainly not in favor of
lying. I think, basically, that nonfiction should be truthful. There are
certain liberties that the reader will accept. It’s a sort of silent covenant
between the reader and the writer. The reader cannot really expect the author
of a memoir to remember absolutely every detail. The reader has to allow the
author to say, “It was a very gray morning when I was taken to jail” even if it
turns out to have been a sunny day if you look up the weather in the almanac. I
don’t think that sort of thing really matters. There are things that are more
and less important. But I don’t think the author should deliberately lie to the
reader.

I recently read a
rather interesting book that the author quite honestly calls a novel. It’s been
published in France but doesn’t exist in English. It’s by the Moroccan writer Tahar
Ben Jelloun, and it’s a book about his mother. His mother was not literate. She
was married twice, had several children, and lived a long life. He wanted to
tell her story, about how she was sort of married off. He says himself that she
wasn’t going to tell him the whole truth, and he had no way of finding it out.
She’s not a historical figure. There are no records. He said, “I’m telling the
story as I see it, and I’m filling in some of the details with what I imagine
it must have been like.” That, I think, is fine. Even if he didn’t call it a
novel—which it isn’t, totally, either—all he has to do is write a brief
foreword to explain how he approached the story. He’s not cheating. He’s just
giving his subject a bit more body and substance. And there is a truth that you
can find in fiction that is just as powerful as the truth you find in
nonfiction.

But you can’t change things. I feel
very strongly—it’s one of my strongest feelings, I think—about lying. I
absolutely hate lying. But we all lie in a way. As I’m talking to you, I’m not
telling you everything I think. Nor are you telling me everything you think.
But I don’t consider that lying. It’s part of social discourse. I lied
constantly during the war, but it was a question of survival. I think that’s
fine. It’s unfortunate, but I had no choice. But I despise gratuitous lies or
lies that are meant to make you sound better than you are or, in a book, add
more panache to a story that might not work otherwise. If you need to do that,
you should write fiction. It’s a question of not betraying the trust of the
reader. But the fact that there’s an error? That doesn’t bother me at all. The
writer says there were eight people at the party and it turns out there were
twelve? I couldn’t care less. We don’t have perfect memories. You probably
haven’t been married very long, but you will find out that when you go to
parties, your wife will tell a story about something that you remember being
totally different. There may be elements that are the same, but it didn’t
happen when you were in St. Louis, it was when you were in Ottawa. As you get
older there will be more and more of those things. You will also realize that
you’re not 100 percent sure that you’re totally right either. And in the end it
doesn’t matter. In the early part of your marriage, which you’re still in, you
will still tell your wife, “That isn’t the way it happened!” But after a few
years you’ll realize that it really makes absolutely no difference.

Let’s
talk a little about the industry. You’ve been in it for several decades, over
the course of which it’s changed a lot, or at least that’s what people seem to
say. What’s your take on that?
It
has changed. Mainly it’s the shift from individual ownership to corporate
ownership. The individuals who owned the firms were, for the most part, the
sons of millionaires. They didn’t need to take money out of the firm. They
lived well before, they lived well during, and they had something very valuable
afterward. Knopf became very valuable. Farrar, Straus became very valuable. So
the heirs, I suppose, got a good amount of money. But the purpose [of founding
those firms] wasn’t really to make money. The purpose was the excitement
of publishing. It’s totally different now. Not so much at Grove/Atlantic or
Norton—those are two firms for which what I’m saying doesn’t apply—except
that they are competing against these giants. So if Grove/Atlantic has a book
that becomes a major best-seller, it can’t hold on to the author, even if the
author has made lots of protestations about how he will never leave the firm
because he’s in love with all the people who work there. Either he, or his
agent, or both, will decide that rather than taking a million from little
Grove/Atlantic, they’re better off taking six million from somebody bigger. So
they are affected by it too. The corporate thing has sort of poisoned the whole
industry.

What has that meant for writers?
It’s mainly meant that they’ve
become products. And that their main relationship is more with their literary
agent. In a way it has worked well for the agents. Their main relationship is
much more seldom with the editor because the editor’s position is very
precarious. You’ve already changed jobs like four times. That was most unusual
when I started in publishing. If you were an editor at Knopf, you stayed an
editor at Knopf. There are still editors at Knopf who have been there forever:
Judith Jones; Ash Green, who just retired; Bill Koshland, who was not an editor
but more the business person. When Bill was chairman emeritus, well after
Alfred had died and Bob Gottlieb had taken over, he would still take all the
royalty statements home and look at them to be sure they were right. Now
there’s no one on the editorial side of a publishing house who even sees the royalty statements. They have no idea what’s on
them. They have no idea whether the reserve for returns is outrageous or
justified. The person who decides on the reserve doesn’t know either. The whole
climate has changed.

What else has it meant for
writers?
Even the little things have
changed. There used to be a publication date for a book. Now nobody even knows
what the publication date is except when there’s an embargo. The pub date used
to mean the author would get a bouquet of roses or there would be a party.
There was practically always a party for the author. The birth of the book was
something to be celebrated. Now it’s just the question of “Do we admit to the
author that the actual printing is only one-fourth of the announced printing?”
It’s totally different. In fact, even the idea of two different figures for
printings—the announced printing and the actual printing—has come with corporate
publishing. Before, you printed a certain number of copies and that was what
you printed. There wasn’t the lie and the truth.

You’ve always been a champion of
so-called midlist writers. Has it become more difficult for those writers to
sustain their careers today?
I think publishers used to be more
committed to a specific author. But not always. I think the authors who are
really successful are even more successful today, in financial terms. Among our
authors, people like Tracy Kidder or Ian McEwan or T. C. Boyle. The authors
like Stanley Elkin always had to support themselves by teaching and would have
to today. So that isn’t very different except for the fact that maybe they see
one of their students being offered a six-figure advance all of a sudden
because he or she is doing something that a publisher thinks it can really
sell. Now, if the book doesn’t work, that’s the end of that career, half the
time.

It’s different. As
I’ve already told you with examples like Beckett and Elie Wiesel, the doors were
not wide open to those people either. The success of Grove Press, when it
started, was due to the fact that there were all of these marvelous authors who
nobody else wanted. Evergreen Review was
a marvelous enterprise that not only opened its doors to interesting writers
but also fed writers into the publishing company. Nobody has that kind of thing
now, even though Evergreen Review
was not unique at the time. There was also Ted Solotaroff’s American
Review and New American Review. I think Ted was the first to publish Ian McEwan,
Philip Roth, Kate Millett. These publications were very, very important, and
there’s nothing like that now. There isn’t any publisher who’s really
interested in doing that—in nursing these seedlings and planning for the future.
Everybody wants instant gratification. So of course that has affected the
authors too.

But, in
general, good authors have always been fairly miserable. They are now. They
were then. It’s always been a somewhat alien existence. Most authors still need
to have a profession, usually in academia but not always, to sustain
themselves. Especially the better ones, who don’t want to compromise and just
want to write what they feel like writing. But I don’t think it has become much
more difficult. It has always been difficult. I would not advise any of my
friends to become writers as a career.

I think
you’re an artist because you have to be an artist. I don’t think it’s ever been
easy. It’s not easy for musicians. It’s not easy for painters. But it has never
been easy for those people. When Cézanne showed his first paintings, people
laughed at him. They thought they were ludicrous. Van Gogh only sold one painting
in his lifetime. To be an artist has always been
difficult. To be an artist in the United States has been probably even more
difficult than elsewhere because the arts are not considered all that valuable
here.

If somebody asks
you what you do and you say, “I’m a writer,” the next question will be, “But
what do you do for a living?”

page_5: 

How has your job changed as the
industry has changed?
I think there is more frustration.
We have to deal with all kinds of bureaucrats. We spend a lot of time arguing
about contract clauses. Every time a publisher hires a new lawyer or contract
manager, they decide to have new clauses and you have to argue about the
wording. And the bigger the firm, the less flexible it will be. Also, there
aren’t that many publishers around, so they’re all, in a way, in cahoots. It’s
not that they would sit down together and say, “From now on we’re going to do
this,” because then they would have the antitrust people after them. But they
might ask the assistant house counsel to call his or her buddy who’s the
assistant house counsel at such-and-such house and say, “What do you people do
about this?” And they find out that everybody—that is, the six big firms—are
now paying, say, 25 percent of net receipts on electronic rights. Okay, so
there may be a smaller firm that pays 30 percent, but why can’t they all pay 50
percent of net receipts like they did a few years ago? They can’t because they
have done a very close cost analysis and come to the conclusion, after weeks of
analyzing—analyzing what, nobody knows, because there are no figures to use
for this—that this is the figure. That
it really should probably be between 19.25 percent and 23.2 percent, but
rounding it out at 25 percent is a generous gesture and, in addition, that’s
what everybody else is doing. Now, does this matter at all, since there are no
sales of electronic books to speak of? I don’t know. But we spend a tremendous
amount of time dealing with these things because it might be worth something
and, like everybody else, we agents feel that if the publishers think it’s
worth something to them, it must be worth something to us.

But basically we
do what we’ve always done. I remember something my French mentor said to me
years ago when there were other issues. He said, “In the end the only thing
that really counts is the poor author in his attic in front of his typewriter
with his blank piece of paper and what he puts on it.” The only thing that has
changed is that maybe now he is no longer writing in the attic, and he has a
computer instead of a typewriter. But it’s still what goes on the page that
counts. And everything else really doesn’t. Eventually publishers sort of have
to do what the more important authors want. Look at the electronic thing. If
electronic publishing really takes over, the authors may discover that they
don’t need the publishers at all. But the publishers will always need the
authors to write something.

What would you change about the
industry if you could change one thing?
I would love to see half a dozen
sons or daughters of millionaires start their own firms, the way it used to be.
I think it would put pressure on the established houses to pay attention to
things they don’t pay enough attention to anymore. But I don’t think that will
happen. This question also isn’t something I think about very much because of
my own temperament. I’m very empirical. I feel that you deal with a certain
situation and make the best of it. I don’t really spend much time dreaming
about what could be. I’m not really interested in that.

One thing that always interests
me is how people view their jobs and their various responsibilities. How do you
view yours?
The main thing, obviously, is to do
the very best we can for our authors. To advise them as best we can. It’s
really different from author to author. It’s not necessarily advising them to
do what brings in the largest amount of money in the shortest period of time.
We have to think of their career—where they are, what their needs are—so it’s
different with each one. It’s not as complicated as it may sound. It’s usually
fairly clear and simple. But you have to be able to figure it out, and then you
have to find a way to come as close as possible to getting them what they want.
Practically any of our more successful authors could make more money by moving
to another house—you always get more when you’re auctioning the rights. But
you don’t want to do that with every book. With some authors the amount of the
advance is not the essential point because there’s a constant flow of money
coming in from their earlier books. For some authors, ego is the main concern
and the mere thought that someone else may be getting more money is much more
important. So everything has to be taken into account.

It feels like there are a lot of
different threats to authors out there today. What do you think is the biggest?
The main issue is that people may
read less. But there’s nothing I can do about that. It’s true—it’s always been
true in this country—that people seem to read a lot in college and then get
out of college and get a job and basically stop reading. We have two
granddaughters. They read when they’re on vacation, and one of them—the
younger one—has been reading all of these Stephenie Meyer books. But they
don’t read the way I read or their mother read. They don’t read regularly or
with the same kind of passion. They’re busy with their computers and phones.
They’re constantly chatting with each other in one way or another. And all of
that is changing reading. On the other hand, I’m encouraged by the fact that
more and more people are going to college. Some of our books that are read in
college—the Michel Foucault books, for example—are probably read more from
year to year. Beckett is probably read more. So all of the signals are not bad.
But there’s no point in worrying too much about things over which you have no
control, and where your opinions have absolutely no effect one way or the other
except possibly to get you depressed.

Do you feel competitive with
other agents?
I don’t really feel competitive. I
sometimes feel envious. Most people don’t like to admit to one of the cardinal
sins, and envy is perhaps the worst, but I think we all feel envy. Authors feel
envy when they see a book, even if it’s by a friend of theirs, reviewed on the
cover of the New York Times Book Review.
We’re all human. So yes, of course I feel envy, just as you would feel envious
if one of your best friends, who is an editor at God knows where or even at
Grove, gets a manuscript that becomes a hit and is written up everywhere.

Are editors different than they
were thirty or forty years ago?
I think they used to feel more
self-confident because they were rarely fired. Now, nobody knows if they’ll
still have a job the following week. I think they used to be allowed to spend
more time with their authors. In the old days, saying, “I don’t know how Joe is
progressing with his book and I’m going to spend a week with him to find out”
would not have been considered just another expression of the editor’s laziness
and unwillingness to do some real work in the office. The editor might even
have been encouraged to spend time somewhere with the author. Maxwell Perkins,
who is always held up as an example even though he turned down Faulkner for
Scribner’s, spent a tremendous amount of time editing two of the authors for
whom he’s best known, Fitzgerald and Wolfe. But now I think Maxwell would be
called in to his boss’s office: “You’re wasting too much time with this author.
His previous books haven’t sold very well and this probably won’t do any
better. Can’t you bring in somebody like Dan Brown who will really bring us
money?”

What do you think the best
editors do for their writers?
First of all, they encourage them.
They stay in touch with them without nagging too much. You have to find the
right balance. It varies with each author. But they should try to spend some
time with them. I think most authors would like to have a close relationship
with their editor. I have several authors who were so disgusted with their
editors that they have an editor whom they pay to edit their books before they
get sent in to their editor at the publishing house. Nobody ever hears about
it, and if they win the Pulitzer Prize or whatever, the official editor is the
one who gets the credit.

You’re not going to tell me who
those writers are, are you?
No. [Laughter.]

But can you tell me what editors
you work with in that capacity? Is it people whose names we would know?
The one who has done quite a bit of
this and is supposed to be terrific is Tom Engelhardt, who used to be at
Pantheon years ago. But there are others. Many editors who have been fired do
it.

What is your biggest frustration
with editors today?
The main frustration is one I share
with them: They can’t make a decision on their own. They have to go to
marketing people or other people who know nothing about what the editor and I
are talking about to get an offer approved. It’s not even just the
amount—different firms have different rules about whose approval you need in
order to go above a certain amount of money—as much as it is the mere
decision. When Bob Gottlieb was at Knopf, I’d send him something and he’d call
me three days later and say, “Why should I be publishing this thing? This is
not for me. This is not for Knopf.” Or he’d say, “Okay, what do you want for
it?” I’d tell him. He’d say, “That’s fine” or “We can’t pay that much.” One time
I even remember him saying, “The author can’t do this book for that little.
I’ll give you such and such,” and it was more than the amount I’d asked for.
But the whole thing would take five minutes. When Jim Silberman was the editor
in chief at Random House the negotiation would take two minutes.

Now you have the
feeling that it’s such a cumbersome process. Unless you have an auction going
for a book that everybody wants. Then, of course, it immediately moves to the
upper levels within the publishing house. I remember that Valerie had an
auction for a book that we’d gotten from England, and all of a sudden she had
six or eight editors bidding on it and people whom I won’t name but who are
known to be totally unreachable were calling her and saying, you know, “Just
call me on this number and I’ll do blah blah blah.” But that involved seven
figures. At that level everything is different. But at the normal level, things
are more complicated and you feel less of the enthusiasm. The enthusiasm gets
eaten away by the bureaucracy. But there’s still some of it. The amazing thing
is that publishing still attracts a lot of really good people—young people,
interesting people—who really love to read and want to make it work. They just
accept that it’s more difficult. And so do we. There’s no choice.

That’s a frustration you share
with editors. Is there anything that frustrates you about the way editors have
changed, or the way that younger editors are?
They aren’t very different than
they were before. I mean, some start speaking this sort of corporate language
but others remain themselves. There are some things you see less often now, but
you didn’t see them much before either. I can give you two examples. One
involved Bob Gottlieb when he was the editor in chief of Knopf. He was doing a
book of ours by a French doctor that was called Birth Without Violence. It was a new method of giving birth that involved
giving birth in the dark and so on. I remember that Bob called me and said, “We
just got the cover in for this book. I think you’ll love it. Are you in the office? Can I bring it over?”
There is no editor in chief in New York today who would do that. But there
wasn’t anyone else then either.

I also remember—I
probably shouldn’t say nice things about other agents, but I can’t help it in
this case—something that Steve Wasserman did when he was an editor at Random
House. I sent him a long manuscript by Ted Draper, who used to write for the New
York Review of Books. Steve called me the
next day and said, “I started reading this in the office yesterday and all of a sudden I realized that it was eleven o’clock at night. This is terrific. Of course we want to publish it.” I don’t remember
if he’d actually finished it, or if it took another week to do the deal, but
that’s the kind of reaction I’d like to get more often: people who act on their
instincts; people who are genuinely excited about something. I don’t get it
often, but I never got it often.

Who else do you admire in the
industry? And what makes you admire them?
I admire people who have managed to
stick to their guns and do, essentially, what they set out to do. People like
Nan Talese, Kate Medina, Jonathan Galassi, or several of the editors at Knopf.
Of course they’re influenced by the environment—we all are—but they’ve
essentially been doing what they’ve been doing all along. So has Morgan, for
that matter. I don’t really know Morgan all that well, but I’m sure he could
have chosen an easier way of living. But he’s stuck to it. I greatly admire
Drenka Willen. The main reason I’m not mentioning other agents is that I don’t
really know them that well. Editors know agents much better. We know of each other, but we don’t really know what we’re
like. I’ve never seen another agent dealing with his or her authors. I’ve never
seen an agent dealing with an editor.

Tell me about some of the high
moments in your life as an agent.
One was meeting General de Gaulle
when I was in my early twenties. When I was a kid during the war, he was God,
and the only hope one had. If I’d stayed in France, of course, I never would
have met him. But because I’d come to America and done this thing that nobody
else was doing, it sort of made me different. So after I’d sold his war memoirs
here, his French publisher took me to see him. He was not in power then, but he
had these offices on the Left Bank. He was surrounded by nothing but people who
were six feet five and six feet six and so on. I went with his publisher, who
came from Monte Carlo and had this short Mediterranean build. So there we were:
two dwarves in the land of giants. That was incredibly exciting and heady for me. There was also an
interesting moment. The publisher, like many people from southern France, had a
tendency to talk a lot and very freely. He accidentally mentioned the name of a
magazine editor or journalist who was quite prominent at the time but had been
a collaborator during the war. When he realized what he’d done he tried to sort
of backtrack. But de Gaulle said, in a very kind voice, “Well, I know he was a
collaborator. But he isn’t a collaborator any more.” [Laughter.] So that’s one highlight. I realized that I’d done
something with my life that led me into territory where I never would have been
otherwise.

But
as the years have gone on I think I’ve become a bit blasé. There have been many
highlights—when my authors have won prizes and so on. It gives me great
pleasure, but it has become more frequent. For example I was with Anne
Applebaum when she won the Pulitzer Prize for Gulag. But I was also with her for the National Book
Awards when she didn’t win. I was with her at the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes
when she didn’t win. I may have been with her at the National Book Critics
Circle Awards when she didn’t win. And just as I suffer from envy, I’m also a
sore loser and I don’t like to go to these events unless my author wins. But
the Pulitzer Prize is much more civilized because you know in advance and it’s
not a public humiliation. So that was wonderful.

I
also remember when Charles Johnson was nominated for the National Book Award
for Middle Passage. I pretty much knew
he wouldn’t win because you only have one chance out of five and why would your
author win instead of the four others? It’s a black tie event and I hate
wearing a tuxedo. I was trying to put on the little studs in the shirt that are
very pretty and belonged to my father, one of the few things I have, and I was
having trouble with them. I asked Anne to help. All of a sudden I saw that my
white shirt had little pink polka dots all over it. Anne had pricked her finger
with one of the studs and there were little spots of blood all over my shirt.
So I had to change the shirt. Thank God I had a second one. I don’t even know
why I did because I never wear the wretched things. I thought we’d be late and
I was in a foul mood. We sat at the Atheneum table. Atheneum had been bought by
Scribner, which had been bought by Macmillan. The head of Macmillan was there,
and the editor of the book and the publicist. But the head of Macmillan, who
didn’t know either of them, thought they were a couple. They were just two
employees. But they happened to be young and good looking, so I had to explain
to him that they were his employees and not a couple. Anyway, the whole thing
was stupid and ludicrous, and I was becoming more and more annoyed, and
somebody made a long speech, and then Charles won the National Book Award. [Laughter.] The mood changed totally. I can’t remember any
moment in my life when I had such a quick change in mood. The book had sold six
or seven thousand copies and I remember that people came over from Macmillan
saying, “Barnes & Noble just placed an order for x thousand copies” and so on. All of a sudden the
book had become a best-seller. I remember Charles asking me, “What’s happened?
Isn’t it the same book anymore?” And I said to him, “No, it isn’t!”

When are you the most proud of
what you do?
It’s usually when we have a new
author and I feel that we have really been able to change his or her life. That
would not really be true of people like Elkin and Coover and Gardner and Yurick
who had already been published. But it happens sometimes. I recently met a
writer whose life I feel I sort of changed because she didn’t have a life as a
writer before in a sense. It’s a young woman named Olivia Judson. She is the
daughter of a friend of Mike Bessie’s, who as I told you was one of my mentors.
He called me and asked if I’d be willing to see her as a favor. She had a
doctorate in biology from Oxford and had been deputy science editor of the
Economist and was coming to America and
needed some advice. I immediately knew that she was incredibly bright. The
Economist had allowed her to do two columns
under the name of Dr. Tatiana. They were a sort of mixture of Dr. Ruth and Dear
Abby. Animals would write in about their sexual problems and Dr. Tatiana would
give them an answer that was totally accurate scientifically. They would ask
something like, “My wife bit off an important part of my anatomy last night.
What do I do?” Dr. Tatiana would say, “Well, that’s what women are like, but
don’t worry about it, you’ll grow it back.” I’m making that up, but I do
remember learning from her that most seagulls are lesbians. I was so surprised
that I’d gone through life without knowing that. Anyway, I told her she should
write a book. We sold it to Sara Bershtel at Metropolitan. It was called Dr.
Tatiana’s Sex Advice to All Creation and it
did extremely well. We sold it all over the world. It was serialized in France
in Le Figaro, which is a daily
Parisian paper. We sold movie rights to the Canadian Discovery Channel,
although the result hasn’t been shown in this country because the Americans
found it too obscene. Now she’s writing another book for Metropolitan. She’s
written a number of op-ed pieces for the New York Times. She’s making a living as a writer. And she’s become
a good friend. I love the idea of improving somebody’s life.

There’s
also Bob Fagles, who did the translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey. I met him at a dinner party. He was complaining about the fact that
he’d translated a play that was supposed to be part of a series of translations
for Oxford or somebody. But nobody else had delivered their translations so the
project was stuck. He was very frustrated. The next year I met him again at the
same friend’s. Nothing had happened and he was even more frustrated. I said,
“I’m sure your contract must have a pub date. You can probably cancel it and
take the book somewhere else. Show me the contract.” I sold the book to Viking,
and then he did another one, and then he did the Odyssey, and then the Iliad, and then the Aeneid, and it totally changed his life.

What is the most rewarding part of your job?
It’s
when you can bring good news to one of your authors. Their book just went into
a fifth printing. We found a home for that short story that we both liked but
so-and-so didn’t want. Or we just sold, say, Catalan rights to their book. Or
Basque rights. I didn’t even know there was such a thing! I knew there was a
Basque dialect but I didn’t know that people actually read in Basque. To be
able to make those phone calls gives one so much pleasure. Every day brings
some kind of crisis and unpleasantness, but just about every day also brings
something like that. I don’t make the calls about the translation rights anymore
because that’s our daughter Valerie’s domain. But I get a vicarious pleasure
out of the pleasure she feels, and the author feels, when she gets to make one
of those calls.

Jofie Ferrari-Adler is an editor at Grove/Atlantic.

Agents & Editors: Georges Borchardt

Jofie Ferrari-Adler is back with another installment of his series of interviews with publishing professionals. For the September/October 2009 issue, he visited legendary agent Georges Borchardt at his New York City office and talked with him about changes in the publishing industry, the importance of independent presses, and the question facing readers everywhere: Should I switch to a Sony Reader or Kindle?

Agents & Editors: A Q&A With Four Young Literary Agents

by

Jofie Ferrari-Adler

January/February 2009
1.1.09
In Print and Online

It must be obvious to anyone who has been following this series that I have an unabashed affection for the old guard of book publishing—and an endless appetite for their insights, their war stories, and their wisdom. But after a year in which “change” of one kind or another was never far from anybody’s thoughts, it occurred to me that the series could use a shake-up. Why not give the graybeards a breather and talk with some younger agents and editors? And while I was at it, wouldn’t it be more valuable to writers if I could get a few drinks in them first?

With that idea in mind, I asked the editors of this magazine to select four up-and-coming literary agents to take part in a roundtable conversation on the fine points of contemporary writing and publishing. One night after work we rode the subway to Brooklyn and congregated in the offices of the literary magazine A Public Space—located in a renovated horse stable with huge wooden doors that swing in from the street, vast ceilings, and an abundance of modern furniture and art—which were loaned to us for the evening by its gracious founder and editor, Brigid Hughes.

Within moments of making the necessary introductions, it became clear that I would need to confiscate everyone’s BlackBerry if we were going to get anything done (a problem that had not arisen in my previous interviews). Then the panelists sat down to a spirited conversation that was fueled by Mexican takeout, multiple bottles of wine, and several highly off-the-record digressions—some of which appear as anonymous exchanges at the end—that are probably inevitable at gatherings of this sort. Here are brief biographies of the participants:

JULIE BARER spent six years at Sanford J. Greenburger Associates before starting her own agency, Barer Literary, in 2004. Her clients include Zoë Ferraris, Joshua Ferris, Kathleen Kent, and Gina Ochsner.

JEFF KLEINMAN was an agent at the Graybill & English Literary Agency for seven years before cofounding Folio Literary Management in 2006. His clients include Robert Hicks, Charles J. Shields, Garth Stein, and Neil White.

DANIEL LAZAR is an agent at Writers House, where he has worked for six years. His clients include Tiffany Baker, Ingrid Law, Jennifer McMahon, and Matt Rothschild.

RENEE ZUCKERBROT was an editor at Doubleday before founding her eponymous literary agency in 2002. Her clients include Harley Jane Kozak, Kelly Link, Keith Lee Morris, and Eric Sanderson.

Let’s cut right to the chase. What are you people looking for in a piece of fiction?
BARER: I like what Dan has on his Publishers Marketplace profile: the book that makes me miss my subway stop. I think everybody’s looking for a book that you can’t put down, that you lose yourself in so completely that you forget everything else that’s going on in your life and you just want to stay up and you don’t care if you’re going to be tired in the morning. You just want to keep reading.
ZUCKERBROT: Doesn’t that have to do with voice? It’s about the way that somebody tells a story. It’s about a person’s worldview. There are probably very few new stories. We’re probably all ripping off the ancient Greeks—tragedy, comedy, yada yada—but it’s the way someone sees the world and interprets events. It’s their voice. It’s how they use words. It’s how they can slow things down when they need to. It’s how they build up to a scene. It’s how they describe ordinary things. Walking down Dean Street, for example. If I described that it would be the most prosaic description on the planet. But a really gifted writer will make me see things I’ve never seen even though I may have walked down the street a thousand times. At the end of the day, for me at least, it comes back to voice.
LAZAR: On my Publishers Marketplace page I say—because I’m so wise and pithy—that I want writers to show me new worlds or re-create the ones I already know. I generally find myself liking books that are not set in New York. Give me a weird little small town any day of the week.
BARER: That’s why I love international fiction. I love reading a book where I don’t know anything about the setting. I have this wonderful novel I sold this year that’s set in Sri Lanka. I didn’t know anything about Sri Lanka when I read it. Anything international, anything historical, anything set somewhere really unexpected. This is going to sound crazy, but I read a novel this summer that blew me away, and it’s science fiction. I’m not usually drawn to science fiction, but it was so inventive and original and smart, and it took me somewhere I’d never been. Finishing that book and having it blow my mind was such a reminder of why I love my job: You can read something so unexpected, and fall in love with it, and think, “I never would have thought this would be my kind of thing, but now I can’t stop talking about it.”
KLEINMAN: That’s my second criterion: can’t-stop-talking-about-it. I have three criteria. The first is missing your subway stop. The second is gushing about it to any poor slob who will listen. The third is having editors in mind immediately.
BARER: That’s so important. If you can’t figure out who you’re going to sell a book to from the get-go—if you finish it and think, “Who on earth would buy this?” and you can’t come up with more than three names—it’s a bad sign.
KLEINMAN: Not only that. I want to be thinking, “Oh my God, I’ve got to send this to so-and-so. So-and-so would love this.”
BARER: I have found myself going on and on about books I don’t even represent, books where I’ve lost a beauty contest. I remember one book I was going after. I was so obsessed with it that I couldn’t stop talking about it. I’d have lunch with this editor, dinner with that editor, and then I lost the beauty contest and the book went out on submission and five editors e-mailed me and said, “This was the book you were raving about, right? It’s awesome.”
LAZAR: What was the book?
BARER: It’s an incredible debut novel that’s coming out with Ann Godoff called The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet. Denise Shannon sold it and she did a fantastic job. It’s just one of those incredibly original books and I couldn’t stop talking about it. It was the same thing with The Heretic’s Daughter. I kept being like, “The Salem witch trials! Oh my God! Did you know that they didn’t burn people, they hung people? I didn’t know any of this!” You couldn’t shut me up. I was probably really annoying.

Aside from referrals, where are you finding writers?
LAZAR: I get most of my fiction through slush.
BARER: I found The Heretic’s Daughter in the slush pile. The author had never written a novel before. She had never been in a writing class or an MFA program. She came out of nowhere. She simply had this incredible story, which is that her grandmother, nine generations back, was hanged as a witch in Salem. Just because you have that great story doesn’t mean that you can necessarily tell it well, but it was an incredible book.
ZUCKERBROT: I still read literary magazines, and I’ll write to people whose work I like to see if they’re working on a novel or a short story collection. I found one of my clients—he’s a landscape ecologist who has a book coming out with Abrams—when he was profiled in the New York Times.

Where else?
BARER: Bread Loaf. The Squaw Valley writers conference. Grub Street, in Boston. I found the Sri Lankan novel at Bread Loaf last summer. I heard the author read for five minutes and was so blown away that I was basically like, “You. In the corner. Right now. Don’t talk to anybody else!”
LAZAR: I got a query through Friendster once. It was a good query, so I asked to read the book, and I went on and sold it. This was two or three years ago, when Friendster was still cool.
BARER: I have a lot of love for certain MFA programs. Columbia. Michigan. I try to go to those schools at least once a year and maintain relationships with the professors so they might point out people to me.
ZUCKERBROT: I actually found a writer who had a short story in A Public Space. I’m going to be going out with her collection soon. She’s been published in McSweeney’s, Tin House, etcetera. But I also have a lot of clients who send me writers. I hear things from writers I used to work with back when I was an editor. People in my family will tell me about writers. You sort of hear about writers from everywhere.
BARER: That’s exactly right. Clients come from everywhere and anywhere. And I think that’s one of the biggest misconceptions about agents that some writers have. They think we’re off in our ivory towers and our fancy offices in New York City. But the truth is that we’re looking for them. We’re waiting for them to come knock on our doors. I don’t mean our literal doors. Please don’t show up at our offices.
LAZAR: I once found a client through a mass e-mail forward. It was one of these funny e-mails. It had pictures of kids sitting on Santa’s lap and crying. It took me almost a year to track down where it came from, and it ended up being an annual contest that’s sponsored by the Chicago Tribune. So we put together a proposal and had a nice auction and Harper is publishing it this fall. It’s all pictures of kids sitting on Santa’s lap and crying. If any of my clients ever win a National Book Award or a Pulitzer Prize, nobody’s ever going to know it because I will go down in history as the agent who sold Scared of Santa.
BARER: I think finding an agent is a little like applying to college. If you know anybody who knows anybody who knows somebody who’s heard an agent speak somewhere, you want to try to use those connections. And there are so many resources now. There are so many books and Web sites. The more research you can do to target your query to the right agents, the better chance you have. The thing that frustrates me is when I get queries for the kinds of books that I just don’t do. Ninety percent of my list is fiction, and my Web site says I don’t represent military books or self-help books or prescriptive nonfiction. When I get that stuff I think, “Wow, you just wasted all this time. You should really be focusing on the agents who clearly have done a lot of books like that.”

When you’re looking at all these query letters, what are some things that make you sit up and pay attention?
LAZAR: When Evan Kuhlman wrote to me about Wolf Boy—this is a novel that Shaye Areheart published—he wrote a description of the book, and you could tell from the letter that he was a lovely writer, but I remember that he wrote about one character and the “museum of fucked-up things.” That one line stuck with me. I thought it was very specific and evocative. I think that’s what makes the best query letters. It’s hard to distill your magnum opus that you’ve been working on for ten years into one letter, but it’s great if you can get some of the specific details in the letter.
BARER: As a writer, you should be able to articulate what your book is about in a few lines. Obviously, great novels are about a lot of things. But if you can’t articulate the essence of what the story is, then maybe you haven’t figured that out, which signals to me that maybe the book isn’t coming together.
ZUCKERBROT: We don’t need to hear about all of the characters. You guys probably get the query letters that are like, “Suzy, the housewife…” and it goes on and on and you hear about everybody in the book. I mean, we don’t really need that.
BARER: It should be like flap copy. It should give you just enough that you want to read the book, but not so much that you feel like you already know everything about it.
LAZAR: I disagree with that a little bit. I’ve taken on lots of clients who sometimes have written rambling and kind of disorganized query letters. But there will be lines that jump out at you and you think, “Oh, I need to read this.” Even if the manuscript comes in and it’s rambling and long, if it has that spark that I saw in the query letter, then I don’t care if it’s rambling, because I can fix that. But I can’t fix a lack of spark.
BARER: The one thing that scares me is query letters that come in with accoutrements. Pictures. Little food samples. And the letter is all design-y.
ZUCKERBROT: Or they come on pink paper. All that stuff is a distraction from what’s important. It just tells me that they’re not real writers. I mean, could you ever imagine Marilynne Robinson sending out a query on pink paper? It’s not about the pink paper, and it’s not about the fancy font you choose. It’s about what’s on the page.
KLEINMAN: I just think that when somebody knows how to write, it’s so freaking obvious. It’s in the voice, it’s in the rhythm, and you know it immediately. It has nothing to do with anything else. It can be a letter that’s three pages long or a sentence.
LAZAR: Exactly. I would buy a shopping list if it was written by Stephen King.

Tell me ten things in the query process that can make you want to reject something immediately.
ZUCKERBROT: When I get an e-mail that says, “Dear Agent…” and I can see that I’m one of seventy agents who got it.
KLEINMAN: Bad punctuation, bad spelling, and passive voice.
BARER: Is it wrong of me to say that handwritten letters make me uncomfortable? Does that make me ageist?
LAZAR: Writers who will have a lawyer send you something “on their behalf.” It’s ridiculous, and you also can’t get a sense of the author’s voice, which is what the letter’s all about.
ZUCKERBROT: When people talk about whom they would cast in the movie version of the book. I received three of those this week!
BARER: Anything that says something like, “This is going to be an enormous best-seller, and Oprah’s going to love it, and it will make you millions of dollars.”
KLEINMAN: Desperation is always good. “I’ve been living in a garage for the past sixty years. Nobody will publish my book. You have to help me.”
BARER: I love it when they tell me why nobody else has taken it on—when they tell me why it’s been so unsuccessful.
ZUCKERBROT: Or they’ve come close and they will include an explanation of who else has rejected it and why. “Julie Barer and Jeff Kleinman said…”
LAZAR: If they’re writing a children’s book, they’ll often say, “My children love this book.”
BARER: Right! I don’t care if your children, your mother, or your spouse love it. All of that means nothing to me.
KLEINMAN: When it’s totally the wrong genre. When they send me a mystery or a western or poetry or a screenplay.
BARER: Don’t lie. Don’t say, “I read Kevin Wilson’s short story collection Tunneling to the Center of the Earth and I loved it so much that I thought you’d be great for my book.” Because guess what? That book isn’t coming out until next April. You just read that I sold that book, and you suck. You’re a liar! That kind of thing happens because everybody subscribes to Publishers Marketplace, and nothing against Publishers Marketplace—I live for it, it’s a very useful tool for me—but I think for writers it perpetuates this hugely obsessive cycle of compare and despair.

How else has technology changed things from your perspective?
BARER: The thing about technology that makes me sad is that we used to have a lot more conversations with people. And there are a lot of ways to misinterpret an e-mail. I sometimes have to stop and remind myself to pick up the phone. “It would be nice to catch up with this person and see what else is going on in their life. And we might get more out of it.”
KLEINMAN: I have a question. One of the things that drives me crazy is when editors don’t respond to me. What do you guys do?
[Expletives. Laughter.]
LAZAR: I have a trick that works every time. I use it a lot, so I should probably retire it at this point. But I write in the subject line, “People who owe me a phone call.” Then they open the e-mail and number one is “The Pope.” Number two is “Britney Spears.” Number three is “You.” Then I’ll say, “If you can explain numbers one and two, that would be great, but I’ll settle for number three. I’d love to hear from you.” They always get back to me. [Laughter. Compliments.] It’s good because it’s a little passive-aggressive, but it’s also polite.
BARER: I know an agent who once sent an editor who wouldn’t call the client a fake phone and phone card and a whole little package of messages. Like, “Hello? Pick up the phone!” It’s just astonishing and insulting.
LAZAR: I went over somebody’s head once. I went to the publisher.
BARER: I hate doing that!
ZUCKERBROT: I think it’s okay if you give them warning and say, “If you don’t call the client, I have no choice.”
BARER: But what about the editors who you leave a message with and say, “I have an offer on the table, are you even interested?” and they don’t call you back. Oh my god! It takes five seconds to shoot me an e-mail or have your assistant call me if you’re too busy.
LAZAR: I bide my time, and it never fails that a year later they’re going to come crawling back when they need a book. “Why didn’t you send me that?”

Why is that problem so common in our industry?
LAZAR: I think it’s common in every industry.
BARER: There’s no such thing as too busy. I have colleagues who are such huge agents, and they all find the time. I think it’s an ego thing, to be honest. They feel like “You’re not important enough. I don’t have to call you back.” Or sometimes it’s because they don’t want to give you bad news. That’s the other thing.

I can attest to that.
BARER: The truth is, I would rather have the bad news.

In my head, I know you would.
BARER: But it’s hard to give it.
ZUCKERBROT: I think it’s just bad business sense. I had the good fortune of working for a publisher once who returned every phone call, no matter who it was from, because it’s good business.
BARER: You never know where that submission is coming from. As an editor, obviously you’re inundated with material and you have thousands of agents calling you every week trying to sell you stuff. It must be hard to figure out how quickly you need to pay attention to something from some person you’ve never heard of. But the truth is, great things come out of nowhere. I always say to my authors, “Be really nice to your editor’s assistant. Because one day that editorial assistant is going to be an editor, and they might just be yours. This is a team sport, and if you don’t play well with others and give everybody respect…”
ZUCKERBROT: I also tell them that it’s nice to call your editor sometimes and just say, “Thanks. I’m really happy. I love what you’re doing.” That’s really unusual, and as someone who used to be an editor, that goes a long way. Thank the publicist. Send a letter to the publisher. Tell them how beautiful the book looks.
KLEINMAN: I like that moment, you know, when life is going along and you have this grateful author, and all of the sudden there’s like this switch. You can almost hear it—click—and all of a sudden they become entitled. It’s so cool to watch that. They become demanding. It’s like, “Hold on. You were really grateful last week. When did the switch go off?” I’ve started having conversations with authors about this.
BARER: I think that’s good. There are about five minutes where they’re so bowled over that they have a book deal, and then, five minutes later, not so much. What also happens is that they start to compare themselves to everybody else. “How come so-and-so got a Janet Maslin review? How come so-and-so got an ad in the New York Times Book Review? How come this person got that advance?” You know what? Stop looking around. Focus on your own book. Focus on your own career. It’s not about what everybody else is getting.

Tell me some common problems that you see in the work of beginning writers.
ZUCKERBROT: In a lot of cases, the story just sort of wanders off. You can say, “Well, there’s great dialogue. There’s great this or that.” But if there’s no real story anchoring it, who really cares, at the end of the day? You can have great characters, you can have interesting ideas, but there needs to be some narrative momentum, some narrative thrust.
LAZAR: I would say to start the story where the story starts. So often, the story doesn’t actually start until page five. Sometimes it doesn’t start until page fifty, but page five can be just as bad. As a reader, you just don’t get that far.
KLEINMAN: The big problem I see is that people don’t spend enough time with their books before they send them to agents. People are way too focused on getting published and not focused enough on really working on their craft.
BARER: You should revise it, and then you should put it away, and then you should revise it again. If you’re going to come back to me in three months and say, “I have a better version that you should look at,” then you should not have sent it to me in the first place. It’s amazing how many people do that.
KLEINMAN: Or they say, “I knew there was something wrong and I was hoping you wouldn’t notice.”
ZUCKERBROT: I get those queries that say, “I just finished my novel….” And I think, “Well, now you need to write it three more times.”
BARER: Keep working on it for another year. Show it to everybody but me.

Talk to me about your ideal client.
BARER: I think an ideal client is somebody who is obviously an incredibly gifted writer who also understands that, these days, being a writer is more than just writing a book. A writer who is willing to participate in the publication. Brainstorming. Working with their publicist. Working with their marketing department. Getting themselves out there. Using their connections. It’s hard because I think a lot of writers happen to be introverts who are shy and kind of just want to be left alone to sit at their desks in solitude. I think it’s somewhat unfair that the business has changed so much and that we now rely on them. But we do. And, truthfully, the writers who are the most successful sometimes are the ones who are really willing to be a part of the business aspect of it.
ZUCKERBROT: It’s a business.
KLEINMAN: I would go a step further, or several steps further. I think it’s not just the author who’s really well connected—it’s the author who’s so well connected that he’s sleeping with a producer at ABC News or something.
ZUCKERBROT: You have to get out there. Now is not the time to sit at home and catch up on Sopranos reruns. If you have a high school reunion or anything where you can spread the word about your book, get out there.
BARER: If you’ve written a book, you should want people to buy it.
ZUCKERBROT: From reading Publishers Weekly and Mediabistro and all the newsletters we get, it seems to me that people are still looking for the magic bullet. It’s not Twittering. It’s not videos for books. It’s not whatever the latest trend is. So a lot of that falls on the shoulders of the author.
KLEINMAN: I want somebody who’s well connected and whose subject matter appeals to a specific audience.
BARER: And you have to think about what that audience is and then say to yourself, “Okay, I’ve written a memoir about my mentally ill son. Now I’m going to write an op-ed piece about what happens when you’re poor and a single mother and the state fails you, and then I’m going to write a Modern Love column about how I met my husband and how I should have seen the signs that he was also mentally ill but I missed it and then I realized it when my son became mentally ill….”
LAZAR: This is a real client?
BARER: Yeah!
KLEINMAN: This is her life she’s telling you about. Her life.
BARER: My life. But yeah, this is a client, and she’s doing all of those things. She’s saying, “I want to do outreach to the mental health community.”
KLEINMAN: But that’s a memoir. The issue is novels.
BARER: But even novels. Look at The Heretic’s Daughter. The author was like, “I’m going to reach out to genealogical websites. This is a story about my ancestor and I’m going to reach out to all these places.” And her publicist and online people were amazing at helping her.
LAZAR: See, that’s the thing about these kinds of books. As much as an author can do, you’ve also got to have Little, Brown paying a million dollars for the book and having everybody focused on it.
BARER: Yes. That is absolutely true.
LAZAR: An author who really hustles can sell maybe five thousand copies on their own. But you don’t have a best-seller that everybody’s talking about without having a publisher who’s really throwing down. And they start throwing down by paying for it. Look at a lot of the books that work in a really big way.
BARER: You need the in-house support. Whether they paid five thousand dollars or five hundred thousand dollars, you need the whole company behind it.
ZUCKERBROT: It starts with the editor.
BARER: It starts with the editor. You need to have an editor who has passion, you need to have a publisher who’s behind the editor, you need to have a sales force that loves the book, and you need a publicist who really decides to put their reputation on the line for the book. Without that entire team support, it’s incredibly hard.
LAZAR: Can I clarify something? I’m not saying a book needs a million dollars. When I say a million dollars, I’m pulling a number out of the air, even though it’s not so out of the ordinary these days. I’ve never sold a book for a million dollars. [Author’s Note: This conversation took place two weeks before Lazar sold Anne Fortier’s novel Juliet to Ballantine for seven figures.] But you hear about these books—Jeff—that sell for a million dollars. [Whooping. Laughter.] And that’s how you focus people. Unless you’re an Algonquin and you’re smaller and more nimble and you can get the independent booksellers behind a book. Did anybody read that long article about what they did for Water for Elephants? They didn’t pay a lot of money for that book—actually, for them they paid a lot of money—but they made a concerted effort that a larger house usually wouldn’t make unless they paid five hundred or a million.
BARER: It’s not so much the money, it’s whether or not the house decides, “We are really putting all our energy behind this book. When we go out to lunch with [New York Times book critic] Dwight Garner or People magazine, we are going to talk about this book.”

But that usually only happens for a few people a season at a house.
LAZAR: Exactly. It’s a lottery.

So what are the other people supposed to do?
LAZAR: They’ve got to hustle.

Give me specifics. Tell me what they’re supposed to do.
BARER: In those situations, I end up on the phone with that author brainstorming our asses off. Using every connection I have. Calling the editor and asking who they know, who their friends are. Calling the publicist and saying, “Please, we’ve got to come up with something.”
ZUCKERBROT: You can do a bigmouth mailing on your own.
BARER: You send an e-mail to every friend and family member in your address book and say, “Help this book out.”
KLEINMAN: At Folio we have a marketing director, and this is what she does for a living. But even then, there are certain titles for which there’s nothing she can do. There’s just nowhere to get a toehold. As opposed to books where you can say, “Okay. We have a clearly designated market for this novel, and we can clearly go after x.”
LAZAR: Is there a book that she did that especially well for?
KLEINMAN: Yes. She worked on this Civil War novel I sold, Widow of the South, when it came out in paperback. She went and got a mailing list of five thousand Civil War groups and we sent them postcards and e-mails. Who knew there were five thousand Civil War groups? The point is, if you can figure out who the market is, you can go after them in a systematic way.
ZUCKERBROT: But sometimes publishers do that.
KLEINMAN: Publishers don’t do that. Publishers never do that.
ZUCKERBROT: Okay, maybe not five thousand.
KLEINMAN: They’re way too busy. They’re going to pay for the co-op and everything else, but they’re not going to do specific, grassroots marketing. They just can’t. But the main point is that you’ve got to get a grasp on the audience for a book.
BARER: But that can be hard for literary fiction. Sometimes you have a literary novel that doesn’t have a specific audience.
ZUCKERBROT: That’s where the independent bookstores are still so valuable, even though there aren’t as many.
BARER: But here’s the thing. I am the biggest lover of independents ever. I worked in an independent bookstore. Toby and the people at my local independent bookstore, Three Lives, hand-sold Joshua Ferris’s novel like nobody’s business. But at the end of the day, there’s a limit to the amount of stock that they are physically able to move. I think the ABA and IndieBound are amazing, and they’re looking for ways to build their presence and be a powerful force, but I think it’s still in development. They aren’t always able to move the same number of copies as a B&N Recommends pick. Unfortunately. I think they should. I think more people should be giving them business. Can I get up on a little bit of a pedestal for a minute? This is something I say at every writers conference I attend. If you’re a writer and you want to be published, go out and buy a hardcover debut novel and short-story collection tomorrow. And next month, do it again. Buy one every freaking month. Because if you want to be published and you want people to buy your books, and you are not out there supporting fiction and debut authors, you are the biggest hypocrite in the world and I don’t know who you think you are. I mean, come on, people!
ZUCKERBROT: But when you’re talking about literary fiction—books that can’t be boiled down to a sentence, and where you can’t target a specific group—how do books like that find their audience? You’re saying it’s not independent bookstores anymore. Do you think reviews still play a part?
BARER: I think it’s word-of-mouth. I think word-of-mouth does more than anything else.
ZUCKERBROT: But where is that word-of-mouth happening now? The Internet?
BARER: Everywhere. It has to be one of those books where everybody you know is talking about it, you see it everywhere you go, it’s being reviewed on every Web site.
ZUCKERBROT: Exactly. And the publishers are asking, “How are we supposed to get that buzz going when there’s so much noise and everyone is buzzing?”
KLEINMAN: You know what the answer is? The answer is the editor. I’m convinced that if you have a choice between an editor who is a great editor—who really understands fiction, how it works, how to shape it—versus an editor who is a cheerleader, I will always, from now on and forever afterward, take the cheerleader. For a long time I kept thinking, “It’s so important to have an editor who can shape the book.” I was such a moron.

But let’s talk about what your authors are doing that’s working. What are your authors teaching you about selling books today?
ZUCKERBROT: I have a client who everybody really likes. She’s smart. She’s thoughtful. She’s genuinely nice. Across the board, wherever she goes, everyone just wants to support her. That’s a huge part of it. You’ve got to be on your best behavior, even if you’re in a crappy mood. Always write thank-you notes. Help other writers. I have another client who’s like that too. So aside from being smart and writing something really terrific, I think you have to have people rooting for you.
BARER: I’m going to say something that I think will be really unpopular. It always surprises me when seemingly smart writers—I can’t believe I’m saying this, it’s probably because I’m drunk—who are obviously really talented choose the worst subject matter to write about. I want to say, “Look around you.” I respect and understand that some writers don’t like to look at other books while they’re working on something. But think about who wants to read about this character. If you have spent four hundred pages writing about a deeply unsympathetic person, or an event that’s already been written about ten times, or…I mean, the unlikable character thing is really hard for me to understand. If I don’t like a character, why would I want to spend four hundred pages with them? Why would you write a whole book about them? Am I wrong about that?
LAZAR: No, not at all.
ZUCKERBROT: But there are some authors who you tell that to—”This character isn’t likable”—and they think the character has redeeming qualities and is likable. I have an officemate who has this wonderful nonfiction writer who was working on his or her next book and picked some subject matter that was so obscure. The agent said, “Who is the audience for this?” The writer explained that he or she was really passionate about it. The agent said, “But who’s supposed to read this? You may be passionate about it—”
BARER: But you do want people to buy the book.
ZUCKERBROT: Right. It’s not that you have to write for your audience. But you have to keep your audience in mind. That’s a distinction you have to make. Every once in a while I’ll go to a writers conference and meet someone who says, “I don’t read contemporary fiction.” I think, “Next.” I don’t want to hear that you’re mired in the classics. The classics are great. They’re an amazing foundation to have. But if you are not reading what is being published today, and what is selling, who are you writing for?
KLEINMAN: It just depends on what you want as a writer. If you want to write literary fiction that’s beautifully done but will be published by a university press and won’t get a big print run, then that’s great. But don’t come yelling at us because we can’t sell something that’s not commercial enough. I just think it’s a different marketplace and a different kind of attitude.

I hear a lot of writers complain about how hard it is to get an agent. What do you guys think about that?
BARER: Try how hard it is to sell a book!
ZUCKERBROT: When you see a great query letter, or a book that’s really great, it stands out from the pack. Everyone’s all over it. Part of the problem is that most of the query letters we see are sort of generic sounding. People say, “I’ve written a book” but don’t tell you anything about who they are. They don’t list credentials. They don’t have to have credentials, but they should just say, “This is my first novel.” It’s not easy, but just try to write a really smart and thoughtful letter. I always think about the people in all these writing groups who spend years working on something. Share your query letter with the people in your writing group. Does your letter interest them?
BARER: I would also say that the first twenty pages count more than anything. As an agent, you have a limited amount of time, and if those twenty pages don’t blow you away…
ZUCKERBROT: And you get these people who say, “I enclose the first twenty pages, but it doesn’t get good until page seventy.” Wrong answer! I think, “Ditch pages one through sixty-nine.” I can’t send this to an editor and say, “Here’s this really great novel, and it gets good on page seventy.”
KLEINMAN: But on the other side of the coin, it feels like what people don’t want to hear—readers, editors, agents—is that the premise has been done. Or that it’s so bizarre that you can’t figure out what to do with it. I’ll give you an example. I went to this Web site for writers that I spend a lot of time on, and one writer had written a query letter about his book. The character is this guy who is sitting and trying to do something, and this client of his comes in, sits down, and blows her brains out in front of him. That’s how the book starts. It’s sort of interesting, but there’s also this huge yuck factor. You’re reading it and thinking, “Okay, I can’t imagine calling up an editor and saying, ‘So, I have this really yucky book….'” This author is having a real problem selling the book. No agent wants to even look at it. So what’s he doing wrong? According to everybody else, it’s all about writing a great letter. And that’s what he keeps doing: He’s going back again and again and again to work on the letter and make the letter great. Dude, the problem is—
BARER: You have to think about the story.
KLEINMAN: Exactly.
BARER: Every once in a while I think you can transcend that. You’ll have an author like Elizabeth McCracken who writes a memoir that sounds so devastating and yet she’s so gifted and it’s so well done.
KLEINMAN: But that’s not even the same universe as what we’re talking about. We’re talking about first novelists.
BARER: That’s right. You’re right.
ZUCKERBROT: The thing is, I don’t think there are any hard-and-fast rules. There are guidelines.
KLEINMAN: Do you think The Lovely Bones would have been published if it had been her first book?
ZUCKERBROT: I don’t know what it looked like unedited, so it’s hard to say. I only read the edited version. But I read it in bound galleys and I was hooked from the first sentence. I couldn’t put it down.
KLEINMAN: Well, I so could put it down that I actually threw it out the window. I didn’t even want it in the house with me.
BARER: I was a very bad judge of that book. I really liked it, but I thought, “This will be really hard to break out because it’s so upsetting.”
KLEINMAN: “I’ve got this great book about a dead nine-year-old girl.”
BARER: It’s so hard to say that to a woman. And let’s just put it on the record right now that women buy fiction and men do not. Step up to the fucking plate, men out there, and start buying some fiction—I mean literary fiction—because otherwise we’re all just going to keep that in mind when you’re trying to get published. Show yourselves! Apparently, for some reason, they aren’t. I don’t know why. You have these incredibly talented young male writers like Ben Kunkel and Nat Rich who are publishing books, and where are the young men who should be buying them?
KLEINMAN: Totally playing video games, and I don’t blame them.

What do you mean by that?
KLEINMAN: I just find that so much fiction these days doesn’t capture me.
ZUCKERBROT: Have you read Knockemstiff? Donald Ray Pollock, debut collection, set in Knockemstiff, Ohio, in the sixties and seventies? I read a lot of things and think, “Eh, I like it but I don’t love it.” I went gaga for this book. It’s one of the best collections I’ve ever read. I read it and thought, “I’m jealous that I didn’t represent this.” Now, I don’t know who’s buying it. It’s probably women like me who love Lee K. Abbott, Ray Carver, Richard Ford, those kinds of writers.
KLEINMAN: See, I don’t want to read short fiction. I don’t want to curl up with a collection of short stories. It’s totally boring.
BARER: You’re what’s wrong with literary fiction today.
ZUCKERBROT: It’s not boring at all! How can you say that?
KLEINMAN: I want to get captured by a book and find myself five hundred pages later—
BARER: You can be captured by a short story collection.
ZUCKERBROT: You totally can. Did you read Kissing in Manhattan by David Schickler?
KLEINMAN: No, I keep falling asleep before I can get started on those things. I see their covers and I want to fall asleep.
BARER: Lorrie Moore? Alice Munro?
ZUCKERBROT: Did you ever read Eudora Welty?
BARER: This is why story collections are so fucking hard. Ninety percent of the world doesn’t want to read them.

Tell us what isn’t captivating you.
KLEINMAN: If I want to read a book, and I’m going to spend thirty bucks, I don’t want to read about a bunch of characters who are going to come and go. I want to fall in love with these characters. I want to fall in love with these characters and the world they’re living in so completely—
BARER: Julie Orringer! Jhumpa Lahiri! Nathan Englander! There are so many great collections out there.
ZUCKERBROT: What about the people who say, “I don’t have time to read a novel”? Short story collection! You can start and finish in a short period of time.
KLEINMAN: No, to me the reason they don’t have time to read is because the books are not keeping their interest.

What is not keeping their interest?
KLEINMAN: I think there’s so much MFA stuff with such a standard voice and such a standard protocol. Everything is—
BARER: Jim Shepard’s last short story collection!
KLEINMAN: I’m falling asleep already.
ZUCKERBROT: I think it’s so personal. Seriously, that’s why I love something and another agent turns it down. It depends on your life experiences that you bring to that book at the moment. Does it speak to you or does it not? It’s the same thing with movies. There must be movies you love and I hate. It doesn’t mean they’re good or bad. I think that’s the case with a lot of literary fiction.
BARER: Fiction is subjective, and I really believe that part of what I take on and what I pay attention to depends on the mood I’m in and what’s going on in my life. If I have just had a horrible breakup, and a novel comes in that’s all about some incredibly intense love affair, I’m probably not the best reader for that book.
KLEINMAN: I think it’s much wider than that. I think the problem is that we’re all sheep. I think we’re all coming from the same complex. We’re all either in New York or affiliated with New York and have the same kind of vision because “this is the stuff that sells.” I think there’s a uniformity.

Now you’re talking about a problem with the publishing industry.
KLEINMAN: Let me tell you what I mean. I have a house in Virginia, and I have friends come down and visit. I had this friend of mine who edits diet books come to visit. We went to IHOP for lunch. She ordered an omelet. Have you ever had an IHOP omelet? You get an omelet and pancakes and toast and all this other stuff. When it arrived, she was frantic. She was like, “Oh my God, I can’t believe there’s all this food. What are we going to do? How can these people do this?” She sells diet books. That is her market. That’s what she does for a living. I kept thinking, “You sell diet books and you don’t even know that this is how America eats.” And I honestly feel that’s how it is with fiction, too.
ZUCKERBROT: People in New York are out of touch?
KLEINMAN: New York is a whole different planet. And I don’t think writers and publishers are thinking about the market.
BARER: I disagree. I think there are still—and these might not be the seven-figure or even the six-figure deals—but there are still editors out there who fall in love with a story and feel there is at least enough of a hook that they can use as their marketing angle to take a chance that a book might be the next big thing. Or even if it’s not the next big thing, it’s still a worthy book to pursue. I have sold novels for not a lot of money to editors who feel like, “I just love this story and I can’t let it go. I can’t give it up.” And maybe it’ll be huge, because of some fluke, and maybe it won’t, but clearly this writer is gifted and this is a wonderful book and hopefully they will go on to do bigger and better things and turn into somebody like…think of all those writers for whom publishers got in on the ground floor.
LAZAR: Stephen King.
BARER: Ann Patchett.
ZUCKERBROT: Lorrie Moore.
BARER: Writers who were published for years and years and somehow their third or fourth book exploded, and it was because somebody stuck with them.

But now there’s so much emphasis on the first book because of how bookstores are ordering based on the sales track. If the first book doesn’t sell, you can be in trouble.
LAZAR: My first New York Times best-seller was by a woman whose first book sold for not a huge sum of money. But the reason it worked was because her editor, Jeanette Perez at Harper, threw down for that book from beginning to end. She was there from the beginning of the publication to the end of the publication. She bought the author’s next book, and she bought the author’s third and fourth books. On the first book, they changed the title three times. They changed the cover four times. And because they didn’t pay so much money for the book, it could have fallen through every single crack in the publishing floor. But Jeanette just did not let it happen. She’s wonderful to work with because she will get behind a book and push and push and push. An author can make a world of difference, but the level of success we’re talking about requires a publisher to get behind a book and get a lot of copies out there.
BARER: Put that book into stores. Convince your sales force that they need to convince booksellers to order that book. If the book is in stores, it has 100 percent more chance of selling than if it’s not in stores. If you only print ten thousand copies and people walk into Barnes & Noble and look on the tables and it’s not there, how are they supposed to know to buy it?
KLEINMAN: The publishers pay for that co-op.
LAZAR: Co-op is the most amazing thing. I have a couple of books that I’m watching, and these are not authors who are huge sellers. But they got three or four weeks of co-op and the books are selling twelve hundred or fifteen hundred copies a week. The week the co-op ends, the sales go down to two hundred. It’s like the book just disappears. That’s why I think it’s fair to let authors know that distribution and placement are so important. If you put something in front of people’s faces, they’ll buy it.
BARER: Having worked at an independent bookstore, I think it’s true that a lot of people don’t know what to read. They want to buy a book but they don’t know how to pick a book. And the easiest way to pick a book is if it’s on a table. I think a lot of book buyers don’t know that the reason a book is on a table is because it was paid to be put there. And I think publishers even choose which books are eligible to be paid for.
LAZAR: This is a really interesting subject because it’s something we all know about and talk about all the time, but as agents, we have very little control over. As an agent, one thing that I like is having control over things. Sometimes, watching a publisher publish a book, and knowing everything that we know and all the tools you need and all the things that should fall into place, and just watching a book…it’s so amazing when it happens and it’s so painful when you can just feel in your heart that it’s not happening.
KLEINMAN: That’s the reason we started Folio. I was going so insane thinking about all these things that weren’t happening. I kept thinking, “Why aren’t people doing something?” So we have a marketing person, a lecture agent, a bunch of things like that.
BARER: You took it out of their hands and put it in your hands.
KLEINMAN: When Harper was publishing The Art of Racing in the Rain, they published the James Frey novel on the same day. I was just ballistic. But I could call up the publisher and say, “Okay, I know you have a book that is going to be much more media important for you,” and I could at least say to them, “Let’s use my person.” It was this amazing power thing. All of a sudden I could feel the balance of power changing. “Oh, it’s not always begging the publisher to do something.” That was cool.

Do you guys think editors still edit as much as they used to?
ALL: Yes.
BARER: I think it’s a myth.
ZUCKERBROT: I think it’s a myth that might have been started by dissatisfied and unhappy authors.
KLEINMAN: Who says that stuff?
LAZAR: Just from having read [Michael Korda’s] Another Life, it sounds like in those days, on a scale of one to ten, if a book was at three, an editor could buy it. Today a book has to be at six or seven and then the editor can take it to ten.
BARER: The difference is not that they don’t edit. The difference is that they can’t buy it if it’s not at a certain level.
LAZAR: Yeah. They aren’t any more or less talented than editors fifty years ago, but their hands are tied when a book is not at a certain level. That’s why we have to spend so much time on the editing.
ZUCKERBROT: Also, editors today, as opposed to editors fifty years ago, spend most of their days in meetings. Editing is done at night and on the weekends. It’s a very different thing.
BARER: I think Dan’s point is really true. I will not send out a book until I’ve done three line edits and I cannot think of a single other thing that I can do to help it.
LAZAR: And the writers sometimes get—
BARER: They’re ready to kill me! They’re like, “Please, please let it go. Please, can’t we just try it?” No! I will not send it out until it is perfect to me, and then it will be edited again by your editor. But it will have a chance at actually selling.
LAZAR: What Renee said about meetings is so true. This week, for some reason all of these foreign publishers are coming to meet with us. Yesterday, I had five meetings not including my lunch date. My e-mail piled up, my desk piled up, and I remember getting back to my desk and calling someone back after the whole day had passed and thinking, “I will never again get mad at an editor I like who takes a day to call me back.” Now I understand that I may have caught them on the day when they had their editorial meeting, their jacket meeting, and their positioning meeting, and they just physically were not able to call me back. I remember getting back to my desk and going, “Where the hell did my day go?”

How else have things changed? Did everybody read that end-of-publishing article in New York magazine?
LAZAR: I read it and couldn’t decide if I should buy up every issue I could get my hands on and throw them off the top of the HarperCollins building, or if I should throw myself off and make it faster. But I talked to Amy Berkower and Al Zuckerman and Robin Rue, who have been in this business for a lot longer than I have, and they all said, “We read that same article every single year.”
BARER: People who are not in the business say that to me all the time. “Oh, isn’t publishing dying?”
ZUCKERBROT: But the music industry is dead. Of all the media that’s really dying or dead, it’s music. Books are healthy compared to music. But when people talk about the Kindle and the Sony Reader? Books are pretty much a perfect technology. So all this stuff about how e-books are going to—
KLEINMAN: You freak! What are you talking about? These things [grabs a book] are Paleolithic!
ZUCKERBROT: It’s portable. It lasts. If you want to read something, what’s broken about it?
KLEINMAN: I don’t want to read it there. I can’t search that. It’s heavy.
ZUCKERBROT: Are you serious?
KLEINMAN: I’m totally serious.
LAZAR: I agree with you, but I don’t think the Kindle is the answer. It’s going to be something that’s not here yet.
ZUCKERBROT: Maybe in fifteen or twenty years.
LAZAR: But whatever the iPod of books is going to be, it’s going to come sooner than we think. It’s going to change things.
ZUCKERBROT: But does that change the fact that people don’t read the way they go to the movies or the way they buy music? That’s the question.
KLEINMAN: No, the point is that you simply have to make the device and the medium more interesting to people who do listen to music and go to the movies.
ZUCKERBROT: Don’t you have to make the words on the page more interesting? Or is it a combination of the two?
LAZAR: Yeah, I think it’s both.

I just don’t see how the iPod-for-books analogy works. Books and music are different. The problem with music was that you had to carry around all these CDs or tapes. But you’re only reading one book at a time. Most people, anyway. And you want people in the café to be able to see what you’re reading so you can look cool and pick up girls.
BARER: It’s always all about picking up girls.
KLEINMAN: My wife and daughter do books on tape, and they love them. They take them to the car, then they carry them in to the CD player in the house, then they carry them upstairs and listen to them in the bedroom. The idea that an audio book is different from a printed book strikes me as just ludicrous. They’re the same thing.
LAZAR: I listened to audio books all through high school, and I loved them. But it’s different.
KLEINMAN: It’s a different experience, but it’s the same stuff, whether it’s on the page or you’re listening to it. It’s the same book. I’m saying that we should be thinking about something totally different. There should be a device that deals with the text in whatever medium it’s in, and obviously that’s why Amazon bought Audible.
ZUCKERBROT: Reading the words on a page and listening to them are not the same experience. I wish I was a neuroscientist so I could really explain it.
KLEINMAN: You’re doing the head of the pin thing. It’s not important. The point is that you have content that you’re downloading into your brain, and it doesn’t matter if you’re reading it or listening to it or touching the page with Braille. Words are traveling into your head, and however they’re getting there, they’re getting there. We need a single device that will do that and make it somehow interesting and exciting and fun and interactive. There’s all this stuff that books can do, and they’re not doing it. The answer is always, “This [holds up a book] is the perfect device. It’s perfect. It’s been perfect for five hundred years….”
ZUCKERBROT: What I meant is that when we talk about how to create more readers, people aren’t not reading books because carrying them in your bag is so difficult, or opening it to the page is so difficult.
KLEINMAN: I think it is.
ZUCKERBROT: It’s not. This is a technology that’s been around for a long, long time, and it works, unless you happen to leave it out in the rain.
LAZAR: I bet the Kindle would break if you left it out in the rain, too.
ZUCKERBROT: The point is, how do we create a new generation of readers? That’s one of the many reasons why Harry Potter has been so fabulous. We have to grow new generations of readers. And technology can help. I’m a dinosaur. I grew up with books and typewriters. But this new generation wants all the gadgets. They want to be able to play with it and they want to be nimble.
BARER: I have to say, I really hate this debate of either/or. That we’re either going to become this electronic world or we’re going to be dinosaurs. Hopefully we will continue to grow readers, and people will read in several mediums, whether it’s on their computers or on their e-book-version whatevers or on the printed page. The goal of agents and publishers is to keep finding ways in which we can reach as many of those readers as possible and provide as many opportunities for them to read our books as we can. Not just one way, but many ways.
KLEINMAN: That’s the problem. I don’t think that’s what publishers are doing now. They are going by the same old Paleolithic ways of doing things. They are translating this ancient technique of reading into the Kindle. But it’s the same thing. And I think it needs to be something different.

How do you feel that the consolidation of publishers has affected being a writer today?
KLEINMAN: It’s totally a drag.
ZUCKERBROT: As an agent, you have fewer places to submit. It’s supposed to be about competition. But if you go to Penguin, only one imprint can bid. At Simon & Schuster there’s a house bid.
BARER: At Random House they can bid but they can’t be bidding against just each other.
KLEINMAN: It’s not just that, it’s the loss of personalities.
BARER: They all used to have such distinctive personalities.
ZUCKERBROT: And now every house has like twenty-five imprints. The editors have their own personalities and their own styles, but sometimes I can’t differentiate which houses want what because there’s so much crossover. After a while, they lose their identities. What’s the difference between Imprint A and Imprint B?
KLEINMAN: It’s so insane when you go to these various imprints that sound so similar—they’re doing the same kinds of books—and they say, “This isn’t the kind of book we publish. This isn’t right for our list.” You’re like, “Dudes, your lists are all generic now. What are you talking about?” You don’t always get that, but sometimes you do.
BARER: Look at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. I love HMH. But I loved being able to go to both of them because I felt like they had distinct flavors.
ZUCKERBROT: It goes back to what an agent can do with your book, and how to place it. That’s where it hurts writers.
BARER: Here is what kills me: Everybody is looking for a big book. Nobody wants to take the chance on a kind of unknown, odd debut novel that maybe you don’t pay a lot for. Even the houses that you used to think of, now they read the book and say, “We’re not sure we could get out fifteen thousand copies, and if we can’t do that, we don’t really want to do it.” It’s like, how do you know you can’t get out fifteen thousand unless you buy the book and convince yourself to try? They want a sure thing.
KLEINMAN: But you don’t know who the market is, you don’t know how to position this thing, you don’t know how to sell it to somebody. It’s a commodity.
BARER: But I also think it’s about the fact that every publisher wants a book that everybody reads. And when we’re talking about fiction, it’s impossible to know.
KLEINMAN: No. They just want books for which you can clearly delineate the market. It has nothing to do with everybody.
BARER: But I’m talking about literary fiction where maybe…I’ll give you an example. Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go is one of my favorite books of the last decade. I must have recommended that book to at least fifty people, half of whom were like, “You’re right, this is one of the best books I’ve ever read,” and half of whom were like, “You’re fucking crazy. I don’t get it. It’s weird. What is this book supposed to be? Is it science fiction?” If that was a debut novel, if it wasn’t Ishiguro, and I had said to a publisher, “Here’s a book that some people are going to love and some people are going to think is fucking weird,” it’s possible that a publisher would have said, “We’re looking for something that everybody’s going to love. We want a book that has mass commercial appeal.” That is not that book, and the times when publishers are willing to take chances on those books are fewer and farther between.
LAZAR: It’s true. But I think one of the reasons why agents exist is that after a while, fingers crossed, you get to a point where something like that can be a big book because you say so. “Because I say this is a big book, this is a big book.” Even if it’s weird. Look what Eric Simonoff did for The Gargoyle. Whether or not it sold well, he said, “This is a big book,” and it was.
ZUCKERBROT: If Nicole Aragi says, “This is a big book,” you don’t think editors sit up and listen?
BARER: Now we’ve just convinced all these writers to send their books to Nicole and Eric instead of us!
ZUCKERBROT: Everyone already knows who they are.

That’s an interesting point. How do you guys compete with people who have been around longer?
LAZAR: I compete. I either lose the author or I win them over with my enthusiasm, my speed, my ideas for their book, and the books I’ve done that I can point to.
BARER: I am so picky about what I take on. I really don’t take on a lot of stuff. So if I am so crazy about a book that I want to take it on, somewhere deep inside of me I believe that it’s not possible for somebody else to be as crazy about it as I am. So you will never have as passionate an agent as you will have in me.
ZUCKERBROT: But you also talk to them about your vision for the book.
BARER: You do a lot of editorial work with them.
LAZAR: You give free notes.
ZUCKERBROT: And sometimes you lose.
BARER: Sometimes it works against you. Some writers don’t want those notes. I have lost books where I have said, “Here’s what this book needs. I know exactly how to take it to the next level.”
LAZAR: Then you know what? You would not have been the right agent. For example, when I read The Art of Racing in the Rain, I admired it very much but I thought it needed a little more x, y, z, let’s say. I remember writing a very nice note to Garth and saying, “This is very impressive, but blah blah blah.” Well, the next thing you know, some other motherfucker sells it for $1.25 million the way it was. [Laughter.]
KLEINMAN: Call me a mofo.
LAZAR: Okay, a mofo. If I had taken that book on the way it was, I either would have put him through editorial hell or I would have sent it out the way it was and maybe—not intentionally—underpitched it and if someone tried to preempt it for, you know, a hundred thousand dollars, I would have been grateful.
KLEINMAN: You want to know how I handled that, just because I think it’s kind of interesting? I read the first fifty pages and knew exactly what was wrong with the book. I called him and said, “Here’s what you need to do to fix it.” He said, “Do you want to see the rest?” I was like, “No. There’s no point. I know you have to fix this first.” He was like, “Yeah, you’re right. I see exactly what you mean.” All I can say is, I don’t feel like I’m competing against other agents.
BARER: You never feel like you’re competing against them?
KLEINMAN: I don’t want to think about it like that. I feel like I’ve got to have a relationship with the author, and it’s me and the author.
BARER: Do you ever lose things?
KLEINMAN: Constantly.

Do the rest of you feel competitive?
LAZAR: I feel competitive with a certain pool of agents.
BARER: I feel competitive all the time. But some of the people I compete with the most are the people I admire the most. So when they get a book that I really wanted, I feel validated and really happy for them. But it’s impossible to not feel competitive in this industry.
KLEINMAN: What I hate is when you don’t know if something is out with other people. I had this woman, and I should have known that she had her book out with other agents. I wrote her this nice rejection letter, gave her my comments, and thought I was sort of done. Then she calls me up and we have a conversation about the freaking book. Then we meet at some conference and I talk to her about the book. She implements everything and sends me the book, and a week later I get, “I have an offer of representation.”
ZUCKERBROT: But maybe she was taking comments from a whole bunch of agents.
KLEINMAN: Probably.
ZUCKERBROT: And you could have asked her.
KLEINMAN: Oh, yeah, I totally should have. But I don’t think about it.
BARER: You don’t have to give exclusives to agents, but you have to be up-front and say, “Other people have this.”
ZUCKERBROT: I hate it when I’m in the middle of reading something and somebody e-mails me and says, “I just want to let you know that I’ve received an offer of representation and I’m taking it.”
BARER: Yeah, kiss my ass! Thanks so much for giving me an opportunity! But I think it’s okay to say, “I’ve gotten an offer, I’m considering it, and I’d love for you to read it as soon as possible and let me know.”
ZUCKERBROT: That’s the way to do it.
BARER: There’s no clock on this. If one agent offers you representation, and you have the book out with other people, that offer, if it’s genuine, will not evaporate. Take your time. Ask questions. Give other agents a chance. Don’t jump at the first guy who offers you a ring.
ZUCKERBROT: But they get scared. The other thing to remember is that you’re hiring an agent to work for you. It’s been flipped in such an odd way. You have all these writers who are so desperate. But the truth of the matter is, they’re hiring us to work for them.
KLEINMAN: So much of it’s about responsiveness. My favorite story is about this book I got from a doctor in San Francisco. He’d written this novel. He sent it to me on a Wednesday, and I was doing the whole “I’m going to be an important literary person” thing and I thought, “I’ll read it on my at-home reading day on Friday.” So I took it home on Friday and read the book and totally loved it. I called the author and said, “I would love to represent you.” He said, “Well, Elaine Koster just offered representation, and I’m going to go with her.”
LAZAR: Oh, man.
BARER: Not even a conversation.
KLEINMAN: The book was called The Kite Runner. [Extended whooping and laughter.] And I think he did absolutely the right thing. She was totally on the ball.
LAZAR: You lost The Kite Runner? I lost The Art of Racing in the Rain, but you lost The Kite Runner? That trumps everything.
KLEINMAN: The point is, I think so much of this business is egotistical agents who make writers wait.
BARER: But you weren’t making him wait.
KLEINMAN: I totally did. I was like, “I’ll read it on Friday.”
ZUCKERBROT: But that’s only forty-eight hours!
LAZAR: You know what? Thank God for those agents who make people wait. Because then we have an advantage. We’re faster.

What should writers know about agents that they don’t know?
ZUCKERBROT: We’re human.
KLEINMAN: Nooooo.
LAZAR: Don’t tell them that.
ZUCKERBROT: We’re overworked like everyone else?
BARER: We’re subjective readers.
ZUCKERBROT: We’re basically decent people who are just overwhelmed with submissions. What I always hear is, “Agents never get back to me. They don’t do this, they don’t do that.”
BARER: I had 175 e-mails today. I just can’t humanly get back to everybody in one day!
ZUCKERBROT: We’re always looking for new writers, but our priority is our existing clients. It’s a balance between taking care of our existing clients and finding new writers.
KLEINMAN: I have two things to say. First of all, I think all agents are sheep. I think they all follow the herd. They’re subjective, but they’re subjective within a limited vocabulary. They want to do certain kinds of things. So if they do commercial fiction, they like the same kind of commercial fiction. Because they know it sells. So that’s the first thing—agents are sheep. And the second thing…crap, I had this really good second thing and now I can’t remember what it is. Forget it, there’s only one thing.

What about you, Dan?
LAZAR: I’m so irritated by what he just said that I can’t think of anything.
BARER: I have to agree. I think that’s so wrong. I’m not a sheep.
ZUCKERBROT: Maybe a lemming.
BARER: I’m not a sheep or a lemming!
KLEINMAN: I just remembered the other thing. I think agents are absolutely no busier than any other human being in modern times. So Julie got 175 e-mails today. I’ll bet you most first-year lawyers get 175 e-mails a day. I honestly think it’s a job like everybody else’s—it just may take a little longer than others.
BARER: I’m not complaining about the fact that I get 175 e-mails a day. But I do want to speak to the busyness. Just because it may take me two or three days longer than another agent to read your material doesn’t necessarily mean that I won’t be the best agent once I read it and fall in love with it.
KLEINMAN: I actually agree. Because you could have a bad agent read it fast.
BARER: Absolutely.
KLEINMAN: However, I think responsiveness is important. I think there’s a huge problem in this business because the balance is so shifted. I have gone out to lunch with big agents and felt like we had to order for three—me, the agent, and the agent’s ego.
BARER: But to me it’s not about ego. To me it’s that I want to give all my clients everything I have. I spend my day giving my clients as much attention as they need. Which means that it’s harder to find the time for new writers.
LAZAR: It’s also supply and demand. There are just a lot more writers out there who need agents than there are agents.
BARER: But the thing is, I’m always looking for new writers, and I want to represent new clients, but I really want to take care of the clients I’ve already made a commitment to. So if I have a client who calls me and is having a meltdown because they’re stuck in Arizona or something or they can’t finish a chapter….
LAZAR: What are you, a travel agent?
BARER: Yes! I am shrink and mom and lawyer and editor and marriage counselor. There are days when I spend five hours handling problems for somebody.
KLEINMAN: I think that’s a woman thing. I don’t feel like I do that at all.
BARER: That is 50 percent of my job.
LAZAR: That’s a dangerous thing to say: “I think that’s a woman thing.”
ZUCKERBROT: You don’t get calls from clients who say, “My husband’s left me,” or “Oh my God, my house burned down”?
BARER: “I’m stuck on this chapter and my kid’s in school now and I think that’s part of what’s making it so hard”? My job is to help them get through that.
LAZAR: You do become sort of an amateur therapist and an amateur financial advisor.

What is getting harder about your job?
BARER: Selling books. Selling good literary fiction is getting harder.
ZUCKERBROT: BookScan. If you have a literary writer with great reviews, but the sales aren’t going in the right direction, it’s really tough. The editor punches in the ISBN and there’s the sales history. It’s really tough if the writer’s third book hasn’t taken off.

So what are you guys doing, or trying to do, for writers who find themselves in that situation?
KLEINMAN: This is why we have people on staff. We have a marketing person and a lecture person. I think it’s really important for people in this business to be thinking outside the box. I really feel like so many of these agents are dinosaurs. They have a model that works for them because they have a huge backlist. Those backlist books keep selling, and that’s the way they work. But I don’t think that’s going to work in ten years. I think you have to be thinking of other ways of doing it. One of them, for instance, is speaking. People are speaking in different kinds of venues and selling books. The question is, How can you get those books tracked through BookScan? But there are answers to that kind of thing.
BARER: I think it’s important to think carefully about what the next book is. I often say to my writers, “What are you thinking about writing next, and why?”
KLEINMAN: But that’s still passive.
BARER: I disagree. I’ve had writers who had first books that didn’t perform extraordinarily well hand me fifty or one hundred pages of their second novel and I’ve said to them, “This will not break you out. I can sell this book. It will keep you in the midlist, but it will not help your career. Put this book aside and start something else.” And they have.
KLEINMAN: Can I ask a question here? I want to figure out how to change the dynamics of the power. Because no matter how you’re doing it, it’s, “Okay, write another book.” It’s always us saying to the publisher, “Please get that co-op.” It’s all about distribution. And we are powerless.
LAZAR: We aren’t powerless. But we can’t do everybody’s job. If that were the case, then I should just quit being an agent and become a publisher and do it myself. Which I’m not going to do, because I don’t know how to do it.
KLEINMAN: If you do, can I come work for you?
LAZAR: No.
KLEINMAN: He means that in a nice way. But to me a lot of it has to be a question of shifting the power and figuring out what the publisher can do really well and how we can get them to focus on the stuff they do really well. And the stuff that they can do really well and we can’t is distribution and co-op and getting those books into stores.
LAZAR: And they can do it aggressively and excitedly when they have a book that’s exciting. I think Julie’s point is a good one. I had an author whose first book, without going into too many details, just tanked. It probably sold less than a thousand copies. We had a long, long talk, and she’s really smart, and she changed her new book around. She got a new idea. She looked at books that were working and changed the way she constructed her second novel. And if that first book sold under a thousand copies, the new one isn’t going to sell a million copies, but it’s probably selling between five and ten thousand copies. Which is a step in the right direction.
BARER: It can sound really crass to talk in those kinds of terms. Sometimes I’ll meet writers and they’ll say, “Well, you’re not talking about the craft, you’re talking about the commercial aspect.” No, I’m talking about both. If you’re a really strong writer, then you should be able to really think about story. What story is going to appeal to a large number of people and what story is going to appeal to five people? The books that don’t work these days are those wonderful little books that I loved in the eighties—those very quiet, introspective, interior, family coming-of-age books. I loved those books. But they just don’t work anymore.

What is the worst part of your job?
LAZAR: Rejection on a book you love. When no one can see how brilliant you are. You think, “This book is brilliant and I’m brilliant for loving it,” but nobody agrees.
KLEINMAN: For me it’s getting fired. I’ve been fired by two authors so far, and I will never, ever forget it.
BARER: I would say that not being able to sell a book and having a book that you’ve spent two years editing, selling, and publishing die upon publication are equally horrible experiences. The other thing that writers may not realize about agents is that I lie awake in bed at night and I think about the books I couldn’t sell or the books I sold that didn’t work and it’s all I can do not to cry myself to sleep. It hurts us as much as it hurts them.
ZUCKERBROT: And you do postmortems. I sometimes think, “Why doesn’t everybody see this book’s brilliance? Did I somehow not do my job selling it?”
BARER: “Did I let the author down? Was there another editor I could have tried?”
ZUCKERBROT: “Did I go to the wrong editor at this house?”

What’s the best part about your job?
ZUCKERBROT: Discovering a great new voice and having lots of editors want to buy the book and then making a great deal. That’s really what it’s all about.
BARER: I have to agree. I think the first part is the greatest part of the job. When you finish a book and think, “Oh. My. God. This book is so amazing, and right now I am one of the few people in the world who knows how incredible it is, and pretty soon everybody will know. And I will help make that happen.” But nothing comes close to calling a writer and saying, “Your book is going to be published.”
LAZAR: Selling the book that you’ve had a hard time selling, and then having it work. Calling the author is really cool too. Their reactions are so funny because they range from dumbfounded silence to screaming in your ear. I’m like, “I’m not fucking kidding you, I’m not fucking kidding you.” One of the absolute coolest things is being on the subway and seeing someone reading one of your books.
KLEINMAN: I like plotting. I love the whole process that you’re all talking about, but I also love when you’re sitting down with this team of people and coming up with these plans, and you’re thinking it through, and you feel like you’re all working together. That’s really cool.
BARER: Acknowledgments! I love the acknowledgments! I love going to a bookstore and being like, “Look, there’s my name!”
LAZAR: Authors should always do that. When I get a finished copy of a book and it doesn’t have acknowledgments, I don’t feel bad, but it feels much better when you get acknowledged.

page_5: 

AGENTS ANONYMOUS
In the third hour of the conversation, glutted with food and alcohol, the panel agreed to speak anonymously on a range of subjects that would be awkward to discuss for attribution. The participants swore a blood oath never to reveal who said what, and a number of verbal tics have been altered in order to throw any sleuths off the scent.

Tell writers something they should know about editors but may not.
Editors are worried about their jobs. It’s a fact of life. It’s a business, and they can get fired, and they have to keep their jobs.

You’re probably going to have your agent for a lot longer than you’re going to have your editor.

The smaller the editor’s list, and the smaller the imprint, the more freedom they have to be selective about what they take on and the more time they have to be really responsive and really detail-oriented. It’s a lot harder for an editor who’s under pressure to buy a lot of books to be able to really be with you every minute.

Tell me about some editors who you think are really good for fiction.
I really like working with Stacy Creamer. I think she’s really smart and has a great commercial eye.

Reagan Arthur. She’s really selective, so when she loves something, you know that she’s insanely in love with it. She will go to the mat and do anything for the book. And I never feel like she is lying to me or giving me company bullshit.

The best editors are the ones who can get people in-house to pay attention. And they have the track record to show for it. You said Reagan, who has an amazing track record, and I would say Sally Kim.

I would sell a kidney to have a book with Courtney Hodell. She’s one of the smartest, most interesting people I know. When she buys a book, she is so passionate and articulate about it.

When writers are trying to pick an agent, what are some warning signs that they should watch out for?
They try to charge you money.

They promise you the sun, the moon, and the stars. They say, “I can get you six figures. I can get you national media.”

Agents who say, “This needs an edit, and let me recommend you to someone” who will charge you ten thousand dollars. A real agent should be able to help you shape something.

Somebody who says, “I’m really excited about your book and I’d like to sign you up,” and then three months later you still haven’t heard back from them.

Tell me how you feel about lunch.
Lunch is part of the job. Some days it’s really fun and you come back totally energized and inspired, and some days you come back and think, “In six months, that person is leaving publishing and I will never send them anything, they will never buy anything, and that was an enormous waste of my time.”

Sometimes you come back from lunch and you feel small and insulted and insecure.

It’s like having five blind dates a week.

Sometimes you score big time, and sometimes you’re like, “Could I have the waiter call me on my cell phone and pretend that I have an emergency?”

My most terrifying lunch, which turned out to be absolutely terrific, was when I had worked up the guts to start submitting to Julie Grau. After a while she invited me out to lunch. She called me the day before and said, “I’m going to bring Cindy [Spiegel] with me, too. Is that okay?” It turned out to be lovely, but I was so scared.

I had that same lunch with Sonny Mehta. I was like, “I…I…I…I’m not even sure I’m going to be able to get through this lunch and speak coherently.”

What are the dumbest mistakes that writers can make in terms of dealing with their editor or agent?
Saying bad things about them. Ever.

Sending seventeen e-mails about seventeen different things in one day. I mean, put it all together in one e-mail and think about whether you really need to be asking these questions. Think about how busy your editor is.

Going over your editor’s head unnecessarily.

When they don’t tell you about their next project. For example, they’ve written a great thriller that you sell, and then they write a horror novel. They say, “Guess what? I just wrote a horror novel.” You’re standing there with this horror novel and thinking, “What am I going to do with this?” They have to communicate about what they’re thinking about doing next.

Be very careful about what you blog. Not just talking about the publisher once you’re being published, but even before that. If I am submitting your book to publishers and an editor wants to buy it, they’re probably going to Google you before they even call me. And if they find things out there that are curious or disturbing? Just know that whatever you’re putting online is going to influence their perception of you.

If you take my rejection letter and post it on your Web site, there are few other agents who are going to be willing to put anything in writing to you. We look upon those writers in a bad way.

What are the biggest things that editors do that drive you crazy?
Besides not getting back to us?

I hate when an editor calls me and says, “I’m really, really excited about this project,” and then a week or two later they call back and say, “On second thought….” That usually means the publisher shot them down. A lot of young editors do this. They think that if they call back and say, “My publisher shot me down,” I won’t send them anything else. In reality, it’s the exact opposite. I’d much rather hear them say, “I love this book. I fought for this book. But the publisher said no.” What better excuse is there?

At least I’ll submit to you again. But if I think of you as a flip-flopper?

I hate it when editors toe the corporate line. They give you, “We don’t do that. At our house, we don’t do that.” Or they say, “We’re doing a great job. We are doing everything we can. I don’t know what you would expect from another house. We are doing everything that any other publisher would do.” You know what? It’s not true. You people only know what you’re doing, and I know what everyone else is doing.

I’d rather hear them say, “I have fought tooth and nail for more money for marketing, and they will not give it to me. I don’t know what to tell you.” At least they’re being honest. In those situations I blame the marketing department, I don’t blame them. Some of the most powerful editors in the world aren’t necessarily going to be able to convince the publicity or marketing departments to give their books more money.

Then they can come to me and say, “Here’s the thing. I fought tooth and nail for x, y, z. I couldn’t get it. You might consider—off the record—calling so-and-so or emailing so-and-so. Or going to your author and asking if they can contribute some funds to this.”

The editor who is honest with you about the real situation is giving you an opportunity to fix that situation.

But just to play devil’s advocate, I will call editors up and say, “Look, it’s just you and me here. We’re working together. We both want this book to succeed, despite the fact that your marketing and publicity people suck.” And the editor will say, “We’re doing everything we can,” as opposed to saying, “Okay, here’s the problem.” But if the agent is a certain type of very loud and powerful person who will go over the editor’s head and cause problems, then I can see why they don’t want to level with you.

But if you have a good relationship with the editor and they say, “Listen, here’s the deal. We have these five books all publishing this month. The other ones have really obvious hooks. Ours doesn’t. Sales is not responding to it. I don’t know how we’re going to get it attention,” then at least try to do something about it. But if you hide behind the corporate façade, then there’s no chance the book will ever work. And I will always feel like you are that team’s player and not our team’s player.

Are writers conferences useful for writers?
Yes, but not for the reason they think. The problem with writers conferences is that most of them are aimed toward getting the book published, and they should be aimed toward forming a community of writers who can communicate and help one another get endorsements and things like that.

When you’re on the fence about taking something on, what are the things that will push you one way or another?
Am I still thinking about it when I wake up the next morning?

I think, “I shouldn’t be on the fence.”

For me, “maybe” equals “no.”

Jofie Ferrari-Adler is an editor at Grove/Atlantic.

Agents & Editors: A Q&A With Agent Molly Friedrich

by

Jofie Ferrari-Adler

September/October 2008
9.1.08
In Print and Online

A
few months ago, I was at lunch with a literary agent who shall remain nameless,
and the conversation turned to the subject of our favorite movers and shakers
in the industry. When Molly Friedrich’s name came up, my lunch companion—no
small dealmaker herself—lowered her voice and said something that surprised
me. “If I were a writer, I don’t see why you would sign with me or any other
agent when Molly is out there. What else could you possibly want in an agent?”

It’s a sentiment
that’s hard to dispute. The daughter of two children’s book authors, Friedrich
was born in London, raised in suburban Long Island, and graduated from Barnard
in 1974. She began her career in publishing a few days later as an intern at
Doubleday. Over the next two years she was promoted twice, first to assistant
editor and then to director of publicity at the company’s paperback imprint,
Anchor Press. After a year in publicity she took another new job—and a risky
step backward—as an assistant to the agent Phyllis Seidel. Soon she moved
again, joining the Aaron Priest Literary Agency, where she remained for the
next twenty-eight years. In 2006, she set out on her own and formed the
Friedrich Agency.

I
don’t think I can adequately convey the whirlwind of charm, passion, and sheer
personal magnetism that Friedrich has spent the last three decades unleashing
on the publishing world in service of her clients. Like many of her
authors—Melissa Bank, Sue Grafton, Frank McCourt, Terry McMillan, Esmeralda
Santiago, Jane Smiley, and Elizabeth Strout among them—she is a force of
nature. But behind the deep voice and the big laugh, there is also a Long
Island girl who was forced to grow up fast under challenging circumstances; a
young wife who left the corporate world because she didn’t want to raise her kids
by telephone; a brass-knuckle agent who admits she will go to the wall for any
novel—flawed or not—that makes her cry three times; and a mother of four who
wrote a children’s book, You’re Not My Real Mother!
(Little, Brown, 2004), after her adopted daughter told her precisely that one
day.

When
I arrive at Friedrich’s office in New York City for our conversation, I am
ushered in by another of her daughters, Lucy, who just graduated from college
and is working as her mother’s assistant for the summer. Friedrich’s office is
bright, warm, and unpretentious. The walls are painted with wide
yellow-and-white stripes that run vertically from floor to ceiling. But its
most remarkable feature has to be a memento that hangs on a wall in the corner:
a framed newspaper clipping from Christmas Day 2005, when two of her clients’
books, Sue Grafton’s S Is for Silence (G. P. Putnam’s Sons) and
Frank McCourt’s Teacher Man (Scribner), sat side by
side atop the New York Times best-seller lists for
fiction and nonfiction. As my lunch companion might have observed: How the heck
are you supposed to compete with that?

I always like
to start with a little background. Where are you from?
I’m the daughter
of two writers. I grew up in a family in which language was very important. The
one who is known, my father, is the one who got published and didn’t raise the
children. My mother, Priscilla, is the one who raised us. The two of them
collaborated on thirteen children’s books. The best book they wrote is called The
Easter Bunny That Overslept, and it’s been
in print since 1957. It has been illustrated not once but three times and was
even made into a miserable television show for a while.

The
first exotic thing about me is that I was born in London. My parents met in
France and were married in Paris—they were both writing, my mother was
painting—and they lived a kind of faux-glamorous expatriate life. They had
three children in quick succession. The first was in Frankfurt, I was in
London, and my brother was in Paris. Then they moved from Paris to Long Island,
and they were penniless. They had no support from either set of parents. Those
were the days when even if you were educated and had children, you were
expected to suck it up and fend for yourself. The first place they lived was
with William Gaddis’s mother. She had a home in Massapequa and her house had an
unrenovated barn. And that’s where we lived—in the unrenovated barn. My one
claim to literary fame is that apparently there is a scene in The Recognitions in which the main character is describing a naked
two-year old on a summer lawn who’s putting pennies into a Woolworth’s plastic
beaded purse. Apparently that is yours truly. When I learned about it I
thought, “God, full circle! Even then I was counting money!” But I haven’t gone
back to see if it’s true. It’s a piece of family lore. I’m not going to
egomaniacally go back through that very long book searching for a possible
portrait of my two-year-old self.

I
guess the point is that I grew up very comfortable around books, comfortable
around writers who would come out to dinner parties and were always sort of
around. My father started out at Newsweek
and then was at the Saturday Evening Post for years. He started writing books then. He wrote a couple of
honestly not-very-good novels and then he wrote many books as a cultural historian.
But he never gave up his journalistic work. He needed to earn a steady,
consistent living because by then there were five children, the third and
fourth of whom were retarded. Today I am their guardian. The fifth child was
born eight years after the fourth one, and he’s the one who died in a plane
crash. So it’s a large and noisy family that’s complicated in the way of all
interesting families.

Where did you
go to college?
I went to
college at Barnard and graduated with a BA in Art History. My father would not
allow me to major in English. He felt very strongly that if he was going to pay
tuition, which he did, and that if I was going to be reading books all my life,
then there was absolutely no reason for him to underwrite four years of
studying Melville. So I tried to figure out the thing I could study that would
be the one thing he didn’t know about, and that was art history. I studied the
early Italian renaissance. Then, of course, there was the question of “What do
you do?” What do you do with a BA in Art History from Barnard, when you
basically can’t do anything but analyze the diagonal composition of a great
painting? Not useful! My parents were very consistently clear that when we graduated
there would be no support. We were not to have any kind of meltdown, we were
not to reveal any learning disorders—if we had them we were to keep them to
ourselves. We were to get on with it, and sort ourselves out, and always live
within our own incomes.

How did you
get started in publishing?
When I was still
in Barnard I was renting a room from Connie and Tom Congdon, who was an editor
in the apex of his fabulous commercial book editing life because he was the
editor of Jaws. Tom said, “You should go
into publishing.” I called my father because he was the one who could be
counted on for an honest response. He said, “Absolutely not. Publishing is what
people go into when they don’t know what else to do.” I said, “But that applies
to me!” Congdon said not to pay attention to my father. He said he’d get me an
interview at Doubleday. And I do give good interview, as you will learn by the
end of this evening. I was a great interview—very confident—and I had done
all kinds of interesting things because I’d been working every summer from the
age of thirteen on. I’d also gotten pretty poised about being around adults,
kind of old beyond my years, I guess, especially with my brother and sister as
they were.

But
then I had to take the typing test. They knocked off ten points for every
mistake, which gave me a score of negative thirty-five. They said, “We’d love
to hire you, but…” and I went away. I decided to spend the second semester of
my senior year typing the op-ed page of the Times every day. I went back for that typing test two more times, and I was
finally hired at thirty-seven words per minute as an intern at Doubleday. I
think I was hired really for tenacity alone. It was a great program that they
have long since discontinued. You got to spend about two weeks working in every
conceivable department: the different editorial departments of Doubleday, the
copyediting department, rights and permission. You got to go out to Garden City
and deal with the purchasing offices. You got to go on the road with a sales
rep and watch books not get placed. Even back then, in 1974, books were
skipped. It was really a devastating experience to observe secondhand.

At
the end of four months you got to choose where you wanted to go, and naturally
I said editorial because I have no imagination. I had the choice of working
either in Doubleday trade or Anchor paperback, which back then was about eleven
people. It was really big. I went to work as the assistant to Loretta Barrett,
who was the editorial director. It should be noted that almost everybody who
was at Anchor at the time—aside from Bill Strachan, who has no sense—has
become an agent. Marie Brown, Elizabeth Knappman, Loretta Barrett herself, Liv
Blumer. We are all agents.

Tell me what
those early days were like for you.
Anchor’s list
was fairly academic back then. There were about 135 books published a year, of
which 60 percent were reprints and 40 percent were trade paperback originals.
The fact is, I had grown up in a family of extremes. My youngest brother, Tony,
was brilliant, and so was my older sister, Liesel. I didn’t test well. I didn’t
learn easily. And I didn’t consider myself especially bright. But I was a huge
overachiever. It wasn’t until I went to college that I realized that if I
simply worked harder than anybody else, I would do fine. I saw the same thing
at Doubleday. It was great. People would give me work and I would do whatever I
was told. I had all kinds of time because my husband was still a sophomore in
college—I’d gotten married by then—and he had no time to talk to me anyway.
In those days you also got paid overtime, which was essential because I was
making six thousand dollars a year. We were really quite penniless, and
overtime was what kept the wolf at the door. So I did whatever I was told. I
wrote flap copy. I put books into production. I consulted the art department on
jackets. I gave books their titles when no one else could think of one. I read
whatever I was told to read and even what I was not asked to read.

Mostly,
I taught myself how to do the job. When I started working for Loretta, I had
inherited this adorable little office—it was really an outer office—with a
huge window. But I had no view because the window was blocked by old filing
that was stacked up and covering it. I decided that I was going to see my view
by the end of six months. That was my goal. Very Prussian. So every night I
would stay late and file. And I never filed anything without reading it. That’s
how I learned how things worked. I learned how people were presenting books,
who was buying what books, what Sam Vaughan had decided to publish as opposed
to what Lisa Drew was doing in trade, etcetera. I honestly had nothing better
to do than to be ferociously ambitious. And there was nothing stopping me.

And you immediately
knew that you enjoyed the work?
Oh, yeah. It was
great because everybody was so grateful. People were so happy that I was there.
Loretta would always thank me. The authors were grateful. But even then I think
I had a sense of myself. I remember there was this one agent who called up for
Loretta. I guess Loretta hadn’t returned her call, and the agent just started
screaming at me. I said, “Excuse me. You
are not speaking to Loretta. You are speaking to Loretta’s assistant. You may
not talk to me like this. Would you like me to have her return your call? And
if she doesn’t, you can count on the fact that it is not because I didn’t tell
her. But do not scream at me.” This woman immediately backed off. When I met
her years later, I said, “You’re the screamer!” She had no recollection of it
at all. But I guess even then, if I think about twenty-two-year-olds and how
easily frightened they are, I had one thing that was working to my advantage. I
didn’t realize it was an advantage until I was in the business a little longer:
I had a really good voice. I had a voice that was low, and a voice that bespoke
an authority I did not feel. I could use my voice to help me wing it. I would
speak to authors who I had never met—they were all over the country—when I was
impossibly young as though I knew what I was talking about. I would just try
and get the job done, solve the problem at hand, give my boss as little as
possible to get aggravated about. And the response from Loretta was enormous
gratitude.

So
I’d put books into production. I’d say, “Would you like me to edit this book?”
She’d say, “Well, yeah.” And why not?
Who says that I couldn’t edit? Why not learn by doing? What is editing, really,
except an experienced eye learning how to respond to a manuscript? Learning
when a passage in a manuscript simply falls apart. Obviously Loretta read all
the editorial letters that I wrote at midnight and one in the morning, showing
off for her. My job at Doubleday was to distinguish myself. And I did.

How did you
work your way up?
Oh, fast. They
had a sort of indentured servant system. You know, first you were an intern,
then an assistant, then an assistant to the editor, then an editorial
assistant, then an associate editor…. I mean, talk about hierarchical! You
could die waiting. You could be thirty.
I had no time for that. I’d been there for about two years. Everything was
going very well. I was a fully contributing, noisy person. I went to all the
editorial meetings. People were learning that they could count on me. If
somebody gave me something to read, I would never let them down. I might let
them down with my opinion, but I wouldn’t let them down by making an excuse of
my life. I made it clear that I was somebody who could be approached for almost
any problem. I spent a lot of time socializing, going to the cantina, whatever.
I’m very social.

So
then the Anchor Press publicity director, Liv Blumer, left to become the
director of publicity for Doubleday trade, and I was offered her old job as
head of publicity for Anchor. That was a big jump. I wasn’t sure that I wanted
to be in publicity, but I recognized it for what it was, which was a big jump.
It seemed like a really good thing to do—to learn how to run something, to
hire people, to learn how to promote and publicize books. And I knew I’d be
good at it. That job was very good training for me when I became a baby agent,
a year later, because it taught me how to present books that no one really
wanted to hear about.

Did you like
doing publicity?
In my opinion,
the two jobs that are the most exhausting in this business are the jobs of the
foreign scout and the publicist. The reason is that there is never an end to the job. If you’re a scout, there is
always another book you can cover, another house you can do well by, another
report you can write. If you’re a publicist, for every eighty letters you
write, and eighty ideas you try, there are seventy-nine that don’t work. But
the only ones that the author hears about—and the editor hears about and your
boss hears about—are the ones that work. It is a thankless and really
difficult job. But I did it.

Were you any
good at it?
I had one
fabulous moment. I’d started, and I was doing everything. I had hired a woman
who had no experience in publicity. She had just finished getting her MA in
Shakespeare’s Apocrypha at NYU, which proved to be totally useless. So there
were the two of us—clueless. Meanwhile, the big book on Doubleday’s trade list
that year was Alex Haley’s Roots, so no
one wanted to listen to a publicist for Anchor Press. Everyone was deliciously
over-focused on Roots.

After
six months at the new job, I decided I had earned a vacation. One of the books
I had been publicizing was from the “Foxfire” series. It was a wonderful book
by Eliot Wigginton called I Wish I Could Give My Son a Wild Raccoon. In my reading I had come across a newsletter that
was written by a woman named Kay Sexton. It was a newsletter called the “B.
Dalton Newsletter” that was put out by the bookstore chain. I read the
newsletter and thought, “This woman really needs to know about the specialness
of this book.” So I wrote her one of my two-page letters introducing myself and
telling her what the book was about and why she had to know about it and get
behind it. “All the proceeds are going to Reading Is Fundamental…. Eliot
Wigginton is wonderfulness himself….” I never heard a word from her. So I was
going on this two-week vacation, and before I left I told my assistant that I
was going to call at the end of the first week to check in. This was in the
days before cell phones, obviously. So I called my assistant from a payphone in
a bathing suit and said, “Anything going on?” She said, “Molly, you won’t
believe it. You’ve got three bouquets of flowers!” I said, “What?” She said,
“It’s so exciting—your entire letter is the subject of the ‘B. Dalton
Newsletter.'” Kay had written something like, “In all my years of doing this
newsletter, I’ve never heard from anybody at Doubleday until I finally received
this extraordinary letter from one Molly Friedrich, who urged me to take a
serious look at I Wish I Could Give My Son a Wild Raccoon. Her letter is so powerful that I print it here in
full. Please adjust your orders accordingly.” The reason I was getting flowers
is that you could see a direct difference from before the newsletter came out
and after. Usually, the marketing people, who pay the advertising people, are
always taking credit. You never know whether you have actually, tangibly made a
difference. Except this one time. So that was my terrific moment in the sun.

Why did you
leave Doubleday to become an agent?
I did the
publicity job for a year and then I got a phone call from an agent at the time,
Phyllis Seidel. She worked out of her Upper East Side brownstone and she’d
never had anyone work for her. She said that she was interested in turning her
cottage industry into something a bit more fast-moving and professional, and
she said she’d heard wonderful things about me from two people who were so
different that she was intrigued. She asked if I would come up for an
interview. By this point I had learned that it is incredibly important to never
say, “No,” and I’d been in the business long enough to see that agents were
really essential to the industry. I had also been in the business long enough
to see that, on the publishing side, there were a lot of meetings. There was a
lot of time spent gathering your insecurities together and having them
reflected in a group meeting where you got to shore yourselves up. You know:
“Well, nineteen of us like the jacket, what do you think of it?” That kind of
thing. There was a lot of inefficiency.

Plus,
I was married by then and knew I wanted children. I didn’t know if corporate
America was that hospitable to having children, at least for somebody who
really wanted to be around them and actively help them grow up. There weren’t a
whole lot of senior people at Doubleday at the time who had young children. I
decided that I wanted to find an angle of this business that would allow me to
continue working but to work around my life and my children. It was a really conscious
decision. I also had been exposed to a lot of agents—some of them wonderful,
some of them appallingly bad—a whole raft of agents from the sublime to the
really questionably professional. But I had been around that angle of the
business long enough to see that if you really worked hard to build up a stable
of great writers, it might be a good way to earn a living.

So
with that sort of young, unformed knowledge in mind, I took the subway up and interviewed
with Phyllis. She offered me two things. First, she was willing to allow me
take on writers of my own if it didn’t intrude with the business. That was
really important to me because, after all, I had been a boss already and this
was already taking a step back and becoming an assistant again, apprenticing
myself to her in order to learn the business. And second, she said she would
give me 4 percent of anything I brought in, which was kind of the carrot before
the donkey’s nose. It wasn’t going to cost her anything to give me 4 percent,
and I don’t think she even thought I would bring in anything interesting. So
she did it. But it sure was useful later on, and it set a precedent that I used
as part of my negotiation when I left a year later to join Aaron Priest. I took
that 4 percent commission with me as part of my negotiation.

Tell me about some of your early clients.
The very first client I sold was
Phyllis Theroux, who has a book right now that I’m trying to sell and will die
trying. I began working with Aaron Priest in 1978, and six months into working
for him—it was just Aaron and me, impossibly small—Aaron decided that he
wanted to move to California to open an office in L.A. This was a huge job
change. He had made it very clear when I started that he did not want me to
take on clients. He wanted me to be his assistant. I said, “Fine. But can I
work on finding clients as long as it’s not at your inconvenience?” He said, “I
don’t care what you do, just don’t inconvenience me.” So I would work at night
because my husband was busy with law school I was writing letters to short
story writers at Redbook, all that stuff. When Aaron got in
his car and was driving across the country with his wife and kids, he would
call once a day. He’d say, “Hi. I’m in Iowa. Anything doing?” I’d say, “Nah.”
But by the time he got to California, five days later, I had sold three books.
I had literally been waiting to be released. And the first book was Phyllis
Theroux’s, which I auctioned to Julie Houston at Morrow for twenty-five
thousand dollars. It was called California and Other States of Grace.
It was absolutely wonderful, and she went on to write others. But that was my
first book, which makes me sentimental about selling all of her books.

Eventually
it became clear to Aaron that I might be more valuable as a baby agent than as
only his assistant. I said, “Come on, let me hire an assistant part-time. It’s
not going to cost that much.” Then, when Aaron came back from California six
months later, there was no question. I wasn’t going to go backward. I got very
lucky that way. I could have been his assistant for four or five years without
ever having the opportunity to really step out. It was his decision to go to
California that really gave me the breathing room I needed to show off. To show
what I wanted to do. To show what I could do.

How did you build a list in those early years? Were you
getting referrals, was it the letters you were writing, were you reading the
slush?
Certainly I was reading slush, and nothing was coming out of
the slush. Some of it was the letters I was writing. And I never said, “No.”
Let me give you an example of what I mean. There’s a movie agent named Geoff
Sanford. One day he came blowing through the Aaron Priest offices. When he walked
in, Aaron wasn’t around. Don’t forget that I had this scary voice, the gift of
gab, the ability to make someone feel at home, whatever you want to call it. I
said, “Geoff! Come on in! How are you?” We talked for a while and he said, “Oh,
you’re going to be great.” We didn’t do any business, but about a year later he
called me up and said there was this writer named Sue Grafton. He said he
really liked her, she was a really good egg, and she had written a book called A
Is for Alibi.
Then he told me she was leaving her agent and asked if I might want to take a
look. I said, “Are you kidding? I’m starving to death. Of course I’m
interested.” But I also said, “Why does she want to leave her agent?” And Sue had
told him and I can tell you because Sue has always been very straightforward
about it. Kathy Robbins was her agent at the time, and Kathy was in the process
of taking her authors from a 10 percent commission to a 15 percent commission.
Sue liked Kathy enormously, but she felt, like death and taxes, that no one
should ever charge more than 10 percent. She just felt very strongly about it.

I love finding something and getting the whole world to read it. Changing somebody’s life. Changing a writer’s life.

What is the lesson there, beyond never saying “No”?
When you’re an agent, you must be open to
every single person. There is no one who doesn’t have an opportunity to see me.
I really mean that. There is no little person who will be turned away by me. I
mean, why not? What on earth does it cost me? The business of being an agent is
the business of forming relationships, and everything is a seedling. If you go
to a writers conference, as faculty, you will probably not take on anybody at
that writers conference. But within five years, if you have done your job and
been open to the universe—not to sound too California—you will eventually
have a terrific client approach you who knew somebody who was the brother of
someone who was at the conference five years ago and scribbled down your name.
This has happened over and over and over again.

I’ll
give you another example. Many years ago, an editor at the Atlantic suggested to me that
there was a writer named Elisabeth Hyde who was working on a novel. He thought
I should check it out. So I wrote to her immediately. You know, “I hear from
so-and-so that you’re working on a novel.” It turned out that she had just
signed on with an agent. The letter I wrote back was something like, “Oh, drat.
I have a two-year-old so I’m not allowed to swear. Well, best of luck to you,
be well, blah blah blah, and I’ll look forward to reading your book between
hard covers.” Well, she held on to that letter. A couple of years ago—when my
daughter who was then two was now twenty-five—Elisabeth Hyde wrote back to me.
She sent me the letter I had written to her more than twenty years ago. She
said her agent retired, and she inherited another agent who didn’t much like
her work, and then she went with another agent who didn’t like her novel at
all. She asked the agent if it was all right for her to try to sell the book on
her own. This agent, apparently, said, “Yeah, sure. Fine.” She said, “If I find
a publisher, will you help me with the contract?” He said, “Yes.” So she finds
a publisher on her own, MacAdam/Cage, and the agent negotiated the contract for
zero advance, a fifty-fifty world rights split, and took 15 percent. I mean,
honestly! At that point it occurred to Elisabeth that maybe she should find an
agent who really liked her stuff. So she went back to her file and that’s when
she found my letter.

See
how important it is to be remembered in this business? When you interact with
someone, you want to make the molecules in the air change a little. You want
somebody to say, “God, she’s good!” You want to be remembered. You want to make
an imprint. As an agent, you have to be able to do that.

I just read this great novel you sold by James Collins called
Beginner’s Greek. He came to writing late, and I’m curious how he came to
you.
He came to me
recommended by a magazine editor. I’m not going to tell you who it was because
if I do, then all the hard-working agents, if they’re really doing their jobs, will
call this editor up and ask to buy him or her a meal. I have to keep some of my
fabulous contacts to myself. But I was totally in love with this book and
really, really wanted to get Jim Collins. I knew that he was seeing three or
four other people, and I knew that he was well connected. I knew that my competition
was going to be horrible. Hateful. You always want the competition to be
someone who is really different from you, not just someone who is another
version of you. So I didn’t know what to do to distinguish myself. Jim decided
to come to New York to meet with people. Of course I had read the book really
carefully. I thought, “I’m going to take this guy to lunch. I’ve got to get
this guy.”

So
I blow-dried my hair and put on a suit and put on Erase under my eyes. I’m
taking him to Patroon—this very manly place, a guy place—and of course I get
there early because I’m nervous, which is so typical of me. I don’t know what
he looks like. I’m waiting in these seats against the wall. There’s a guy next
to me who is also clearly waiting for somebody. We’re both waiting. So I decide
to balance my checkbook in order to stay calm while I wait. A guy walks in and
I ask him if he’s Jim, and he says no. He goes off and sits with this other
guy. About five minutes later, another guy sits down. And I say, “Oh, I love your book.” He says, “You do?” And I start to go on
and on and on about how amazing his book is. He looks at me and says, “I can’t
tell you how sorry I am not to be the person you are expecting.” I say, “You’re
not Jim Collins?” He says, “No. I’m the owner of the restaurant. You ate here
once before, so you’re in the computer, and I was coming to introduce myself
and say hello.” I couldn’t believe it. I was like, “Now I’ve lost all my mojo!
Get out of here!”

So
finally Jim came in and I said, “Are you Jim? You had better be Jim Collins.” I was so exhausted by then that it
was just ridiculous. But it was him. He looked kind of formal, in a
double-breasted suit, and very tall, and slightly nervous, but in a way that
was deeply appealing. I was just as nervous as he was. And we just talked. I
asked if I was his last meeting—I wanted to be his last meeting—and then I
told him that I thought he should not be allowed to leave the table without saying
yes to me. “Just say yes!”

You said
that?
What did I have
to lose? I think he was charmed, and he could see that I was serious. What does
a writer want? A writer wants your passion. They want you to see the book in
the same way that they’ve written it, and they want you to go to your death
trying to sell it. They want to see that you are able to speak coherently and
articulately about why you love the book. And I told him it was too long. I
told him he needed to do this, that, and the other thing. I told him there were
places where it was overly precious, where there was too much throat-clearing.
I was very open with him. But he didn’t disagree. So I did the best I could to
win him over. He was one of those very intimidating people because he really listened. I hate it when people listen too well because then
I tend to fill in the blanks and start talking too quickly and get really
Latinate and formal and nervous. Anyway, it was a great meeting. I said, “You
have to let me know. I really don’t wait well. Please.” And I told him something else. I told him there
were other agents who could sell this book as well as I could, but nobody could
sell it better. And then he called me up. Now it’s in its fourth printing. It’s
doing very well, and it’s gotten very widely reviewed, and we’ve sold it around
the world. It’s just been great.

You also
represent Melissa Bank, who has gotten all tangled up in this issue of chick
lit. Tell me what you think about that.
I don’t consider
her chick lit. I don’t know what chick lit is. First of all, is there anybody
out there who doesn’t know that the easiest thing to sell is plot? But the
thing that everybody wants is an original voice. And the thing that’s kind of
stuck in the middle is character. So here we have a collection of short
stories—The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing—that doesn’t have a single plot because it’s made up of loosely
connected short stories with one story that isn’t even part of the rest of it.
But what everybody loved about that book is what is absolutely not genre. I mean, chick lit has become a category,
right? But I didn’t sell that book as part of chick lit. First of all I wasn’t
even sure that I knew what chick lit was. And the thing that everybody, to a
person, loved about Melissa’s book is that it had an original voice.

Now,
what is an original voice? Well, think of it like this: Go to Bonfire of the
Vanities and close your eyes and pick a
page and have someone read you two paragraphs. If you can’t identify those
paragraphs as the rhythms and cadences that belong to Tom Wolfe, you’re
finished. I’m convinced that eight times out of ten, with Melissa Bank, you
could do the same thing. Now that is saying something. So I don’t know. What is
chick lit? Does it mean fiction that primarily attracts the interest of women
readers? Well, that would include Jane Austen. Is Jane Austen chick lit? Absolutely
not. Has Jane Austen ever written about anything other than marriage proposals,
linens, china, and who has a good dowry? No. I adore her. I read her every
year. But that is what her books are about. So is she the queen of chick lit? I
don’t know. It seems kind of silly to me, to be honest. If I read a short story
by Melissa Bank, I can always identify it as Melissa because of the voice, and
my view of the world is altered for having read her work. That’s a lot for a
short story to have succeeded in doing, and that’s what her stories do. So I
don’t know, and I don’t care, whether Melissa Bank is considered part of the
chick-lit world. What I do know is: One, that I love her; and two, that I
respect her. And there are many writers who I love and many writers who I
respect. But there are very few whom I both love and respect, and Melissa is in that small group.

Tell me how
Terry McMillan came to your attention.
Terry was
recommended to me by a young editor at Houghton Mifflin named Larry Kessenich.
She had sold her first book to Houghton Mifflin, and she didn’t like the contract
and she didn’t like the agent. Right in the middle of the deal, she decided
that she didn’t want anything to do with the agent, and it just fell apart. She
wasn’t under contract yet, and it just fell apart. Larry put my name out there
as an agent she should talk to. I always tell editors, “You don’t have to
recommend me exclusively. I know that’s a terrible burdensome thing for you if
things don’t work out. But just put me on a short list. Or put me on a long
list. Just put me on a list. I promise you I will read this quickly. I will not
embarrass you. I will read this well. And if it’s really wonderful, I won’t
necessarily send it to you exclusively, but I won’t fuck you over, either.” I
was always good to my word, so it was easy for me to be recommended.

With
Terry, I was on a short list of maybe six agents. I loved the pages, and she came to meet me. I said, “Oh,
you’re great. You’re going to be a star. I don’t know how effective I can be,
but I will fight very hard on your behalf.” She had already seen four people
and she said, “I want to go with you. I like your energy.” But I said, “No. Wrong. You’ve already made an appointment with this last
person, who comes very highly recommended, and I want you to see that last
person.” She said, “Why?” I said, “Because if you and I ever have a fight, or a
temper tantrum, I don’t ever want you to wonder what that other agent would
have been like. I want you to come to me with a full education of having met
five other people who were highly recommended to you. Besides, you made an
appointment and it’s wrong to cancel your appointment. Go ahead and continue
your education of finding an agent.” So she did, and in the end she came back
and told me that she still wanted me, which was great.

What was it
about her writing that you responded to?
I fell in love
with Terry’s writing because she had an original voice. Go back and read the
first page of Mama, when Mildred, the
mother, is wielding an ax. It’s like, “Whoa!” It springs off the page. That’s
why it happened. But Terry built a career by believing in herself more than
anybody else did. She really worked hard. She had a two-year-old son, and she
was living in a sixth-floor walk-up in Brooklyn. She was doing programming or
something in a law office. Things were not easy for her. But she just got on
the phone with all these bookstores and said, “I want to set up a reading” and
“You’re going to want me” and “You must want me.”

I
remember that Houghton Mifflin got an offer of ten thousand dollars for
paperback rights. This was before we knew how Mama would perform. I called them up and said, “No, no,
no, no, no. You have to understand who you are dealing with. You are dealing
with a force of nature, and it’s a force of nature has not been felt yet. You
will make a terrible mistake if you sell reprint rights for ten thousand dollars.
Believe me, if you hang on a little bit longer, you’ll be rewarded.” And they
did, and they were.

So
to go back to your question about how you build up a list, the answer is that
you just keep fighting on your authors’ behalf. Sometimes the fighting is not
effective—it doesn’t work, it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t make a difference.
But sometimes it is effective, and when it is, and your efforts have been
proven right, people start to remember. They start to think, “Maybe she knows
what she’s doing.” Then it gets to the point where it gets out of control with
editors who want to see your submissions and become really upset if they don’t.

Tell me about
that.
I remember one
editor who started to cry at lunch. This was one of the people to whom I did
not say “No.” She’s crying and she says, “I just really want to know what I can
do to get on your submission list.” I thought, “This is really appalling. I am
now in an official tight spot.” Sometimes you have lunch with people and you
know by the time the breadbasket is empty that you will not be submitting to
them anytime soon. It’s usually when somebody says, “So! Tell me about your
list!” I think, “You jerk. You moron. How dare you have lunch with anybody
and not know that stuff.” When I have a first lunch with anybody, I know what
they’ve published. I know how to spell their name. I take the time to learn who
my audience is.

But
when this person started sobbing and saying, “What can I do?” I was very gentle
with her. I said, “The thing is, it’s not easy.” I’m not a mean person, and there
is a part of me that’s deeply maternal. But I knew she was a disaster. I said,
“You have to find your own people in the beginning. You can’t expect agents to
just submit their most beloved thing to you. If they haven’t done business with
you, that is a huge risk for them.” I said, “Tell me about some books you have
published that you have found on your own and won and done well by. Books that
you’ve really published well. And this is not a test. I don’t mean to put you
on the spot. But if you don’t have an answer—and I suspect you don’t because
you are, after all, very young—then two things have to happen. One is that you
have to build a list a little bit, and the other is that you have to be right
about a book at least two times in the next five to seven years. If you do
that, people will start to send you things, because you will have stepped out
on an editorial limb and proven yourself right. That’s the way to get
attention. You have to be right.”

I
think that’s how it works. You hang around long enough, and you insist, like
Scarlett O’Hara just before the intermission, “As God as my witness…this book
will sell!” And if it does sell, and you were right, and everyone else was
wrong, then you build up credibility. But it takes time. Here I am, thirty years
later. I’m old! I’m fifty-five years old! But seriously, it is a business of
staying with it long enough to really build up credibility and respect and a
reputation for honesty. Always for
honesty. God, this is a small business. I can tell you exactly which agents
exaggerate the interest they have. I can tell you who lies. They’re out there.
I know who these people are. It’s my job to know.

How should an author choose which agent to go with?
First of all, I don’t think an author
should approach an agent before they have a manuscript. I had an author come to
me who didn’t think he’d be ready for seven to ten years. He’d had a huge first
success and he was leaving his agent and wanted to sign on with somebody new. I
asked him why he was leaving his agent. It was clear the agent had done a
wonderful job selling the book, a wonderful job on foreign rights. And now the
author wanted someone new to exchange letters with him—talk to him, be his
friend, be his sponsor—for five years or seven years before his next book was
ready? He said, “I’ve left that agent because I want someone more prestigious.”
I said, “I don’t want you. I don’t want to read what you’ve written. I don’t
want to read what you will write in seven years. I don’t want you. I want you
to go back to that first agent and show some loyalty, because you have a really
shabby reason for leaving that agent. That agent has done everything possible
to secure and establish your career. You’ve done something too—you’ve written
a good book. You have every reason to write a second good book. But for you to
leave because you want someone more prestigious? That sucks. Bye!” He wrote me
a letter saying he admired my moxie.

But
you know what’s really sad? That author did go with someone else, a very
well-known agent, and that very well-known agent sold the book for three
hundred thousand dollars. So you know what? I’m sorry to say it, but this
author was sort of right. Not right to leave his agent, but right to think that
going with an agent who was very well known might have helped him. We’ll never
know what the poor, sad, sorry, hardworking first agent who would have gone to
bat for life for this guy would have done. But would that editor have paid ten
times what the first book was sold for? I don’t know, but it really stinks.

So how is an author supposed to know whom to choose?
Okay, so the first rule is that an author should never
approach an agent until they have something. If I met every person who wanted
to just have a chat before they sent their book, I’d go out of business. If
they have a book and they are sending it out, they should always say in the
letter if they are doing multiple submissions. That is common courtesy. I would
also say that I want to know the circumstances under which I am reading
something. Have you sent this to ninety-five other people? Have you sent this
to one other person? Do I have this exclusively? Because if I push aside my own
reading, which is the tyranny of all our lives, in order to be fast, at least
tell me what I need to do. The other thing is that the author should agree—if
the author is playing consumer here and sending it to five agents who want to
read it—that he’s not going to make a decision until he has heard from all
five people. You should respect an agent’s time. Do we get paid for our time?
No. Respect a busy agent’s time. The thing I want to kill someone for is when I
read something over the weekend and I’m about to pick up the phone to tell them
it’s the most wonderful book since War and Peace, and they say, “Oh,
sorry, I’ve signed on with Joe Blow who called on Sunday morning.” No. No, no,
no, no, no. That is really wrong. Be fair. If you are going to put us on the
spot, give us all a fair chance.

The
first thing you are going to look for is: Who responds? The second thing to
look for is: What do they say? And what do they think about the book? Now this
is where it gets murky, because a lot of agents get the author by saying, “Oh,
it’s wonderful! Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful!” Then they sign the author on
and begin the hard work of getting the book into shape. That tends not to be my
style. I tend to be very up-front about what I think the book needs from the
very beginning. And I have lost authors because of it. Sometimes I wonder,
“Should I become dishonest?” Should I say, “It’s great!” to get the author and
then deconstruct the manuscript over the course of twenty painful weeks? I
don’t know what the answer is. I know you always have to be true to yourself
and your own style, and my style is to be utterly frank about what I think the
manuscript requires, how I would position the book, and what I would do on its
behalf.

Then
the author may say, “Oh God, I can’t decide! You’re all so wonderful!” If
that’s the case I would say to get on a plane and come meet us. Figure it out.
You should never be afraid to talk to your agent. Some authors are terrified of
their agents. On the other hand, there are some agents who have very different
styles and are overly friendly. They become “the girlfriend.” They become so
close with their authors that we arrive at what shrinks call “the boundary
problem.” This is also problematic, because then the agent loses the authority
they are supposed to have in the author’s life.

What kind of questions should an author ask potential
agents?
You are fully within your rights to ask an agent whom else
he represents. You are also within your rights to ask an agent to tell you
about a couple of authors whose books he’s sold recently. You can’t live on
your laurels and sit around bragging about your top five best-known clients.
“What have you sold recently, and how’d it go?” And maybe ask, “What did you
love that you weren’t able to sell?” Everyone thinks I sell everything I touch.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. There’s loads of stuff I take on and don’t sell. It’s
extremely painful. So I think it’s fair to talk about these things. I think you
want to see what kind of a match you are. Can you talk with this agent frankly?
Do you feel comfortable?

But
it also goes the other way. It’s a mutual interview process. There are many
people I talk to and realize that I may love this person’s work but I do not
love this person. This person is going to
be trouble. Big trouble. I had one author who I took on. It was a beauty
contest, and I won her. She was a nonfiction writer, and I don’t have much
nonfiction, so I want nonfiction. She’d been published before and had a raft of
fabulous journalistic credits to her name. I worked with her a little bit on
the proposal—you know, shoring it up—but she was a true pro and didn’t need
much help. I got three offers and sold the book for six figures. It was great.
But by the time the contract arrived, this woman had so exhausted me that I
called her up and said, “I’m not going to tell the publisher this because I don’t
want the publisher to be nervous
about it, but once the contract comes in and it’s signed, I want you to know
that I am leaving you. I’m giving you my full 15 percent. You can take it. I
want you to thrive. But you have exhausted me. I’m sorry, but it just isn’t a
good match.” Nonfiction books don’t take six months to write. They take years
to write! And the prospect of having this woman in my life for years filled me
with such a chill that I thought, “I can’t do this. Let’s solve this.”

Tell writers one
thing they don’t know about editors, something that you know and they don’t.
I would say that
they must view the fawning, deeply complimentary praise that marks the honeymoon
phase of their relationship with an editor for what it is. They must not buy into
it. They must realize that editors will say almost anything to get a book when
they have to have a book. The problem is that what you need from editors is to
have them be there for the long haul. Not just the long haul of the publication
process, but for the next book and the book after that as well. When the first
review comes in and it’s terrible, you need your editor to say, “That fucker!
He didn’t understand the book at all. Ignore it and go on.” An editor needs to
be deeply, lastingly loyal to an author and a book that he decides to buy,
because bad things will happen and that loyalty will be tested.

Tell me what you’re looking for when you’re reading a
first novel or memoir.
That’s so easy. I’m looking for the
first page to be good. Then I’m looking for the second page to also be good.
Really! The first page has to be good so that I will go to the second page and
the third and the fourth. It’s true that sometimes I get all the way to the end
knowing that I’m going to turn a book down—I’ve come under the book’s spell
but the spell is not holding me—and then I may feel committed to reading it
and showing off with a fabulous editorial letter. That does happen. But the
main thing I look for is immediate great writing.

I
think the world of memoir is divided into two camps. One camp is the memoir of
an unbelievably fascinating life. Huge! Can you top this? Death, famine,
child abuse, all kinds of terrible and extraordinary events…but the author
can’t write. In the other camp you get beautiful writing—magnificent
writing—with a kind of pointillist attention to every marvelous detail in the
course of a life in which nothing interesting has happened. It’s usually one or
the other. So when you can combine those two things in one book—an interesting
life and good writing—then you have pay dirt. But it’s hard. It’s hard to sell
memoir, especially if it’s not big in an obvious way.

What about with fiction?
Fiction is being published less and less. The stakes are
higher. All editors say the same thing to me. They say, “I’ve got money to
spend. I’d really love to do business with you. I’d love to buy a book from
you.” That’s code. What they mean is they’d love to buy a book, for which they
can possibly overpay, that is big in obvious and immediate ways. And most books
are not big in obvious and immediate ways. They simply aren’t. Something has to
change.

I
have sold books for many millions of dollars and I have sold books for two
thousand dollars and pretty much everything in between. I have experienced the
fantastical joys of selling books for a whole lot of money. It is a joyous
moment. But it isn’t necessarily the best thing in the world. It isn’t. Perhaps
it’s blasphemous for me to say that. But if you sell a first novel for a
million dollars, you are putting so much pressure on that book to perform at a
certain moment, in a certain season, at a certain level. And most books don’t
perform immediately. Something, I think, has to give.

If
I’m going to say that maybe we shouldn’t take a million dollars for a first
novel, that we should take less money, then it seems to me that we all have to
think more imaginatively—we agents and editors and publishers, all of us
collectively. I think the place to do that is in the royalty rate. You’re
always taught, coming up as an agent, that the royalty is the thing in the
boilerplate that essentially doesn’t change. You know: 10 percent on the first
five thousand copies, 12.5 percent on the next five thousand, 15 percent after
that. We are told that these percentages are pretty inviolate, certainly for
most fiction. But where is it written that you have to stop at 15 percent? If
you don’t want the burden to be up front, with the large advance that sunders
all plans if it doesn’t work out, then change the royalty structure. Give the
writer 20 percent. Go on, do it! And if you’re a small publisher, definitely do
it. Hold on to your writers!

page_5: 

But don’t you
think most writers want the big advance?
Not necessarily.
You need to be able to read your author. Some authors don’t want the big
advance. Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not talking about going from an advance of
a million dollars to an advance of ten thousand. It’s really unfortunate, but
to some extent an advance is How much do you love me? I decided about ten years ago that the differential
of love in an auction is about seventy-five hundred dollars, which is really
unfortunate. So sometimes when I’m in an auction, and I know that the author
really wants to be with a certain publisher but the underbidder is determined
to have the book and will offer more to win the author, basically I go to the
underbidder and say, “Don’t offer any more. Don’t do it.” Because the author
has made up her mind and I don’t want the editor to be humiliated. I don’t want
them to be embarrassed. I don’t want to financially mug a publisher, get the
top amount, and then say, “Hey, guess what? Thanks for letting me use you, but
actually we never wanted you in the first place!” That’s terrible. I have to
stay in business with these people. My job is to do the best job I can for my
author without ever being in collusion with the publisher. That’s a very tricky
business.

Tell me
something that you often see beginning writers doing wrong.
I think they can
over-hype themselves. If they have a writing teacher, a letter will arrive from
the writing teacher. It’s so transparent. It’s not genuine. It feels like a
form of logrolling. And it doesn’t really work with me. Or they will make false
comparisons between their book and other books.

This is the
magazine’s Independent Press Issue. As you’ve watched the industry become more
and more corporate over the years, do you think it’s been a good thing or a bad
thing for writers?
It’s been a
terrible thing for writers.

Why?
First of all,
there are fewer publishers. When I started out, there were publishers all over
the place, all kinds of publishers that were legitimate companies, in business
legitimately, in New York. I mean, what’s happening at Harcourt and Houghton is
just another nail in the coffin. I remember having a drink with Dick Snyder
maybe twenty-five years ago. He said something that I found appalling at the
time. He said that in twenty years—remember that this was twenty-five years
ago—there would be four publishers left. And we’re not that far away from
that. We’re really not. It’s bad for writers in the same way that it’s bad for
publishers to pick one or two big books and dump all your efforts and resources
into those books. It’s great if you’re the agent of one of those books. It’s
terrific. Enjoy the ride. But you too will be on the other end of it if you
stay in this business long enough.

But
I think the main thing that has been lost is a sense of diversity. I mean,
everybody complains about this. There just seems to be a terrible sameness, and
maybe it’s because of the book groups and book clubs in this country, but it
feels like readers in America are only having one of three or four
conversations a month. Look, I love Khaled Hosseini. I love Elaine Koster. I
love Susan Petersen Kennedy. I love everyone connected with The Kite Runner. But I read that book in bound galleys four or five
years ago, and really, if one more person comes up to me on the beach this
summer and says, “Oh! I love books too! Have you read The Kite
Runner?” I really will kill myself. The
opposite of that are the people who come up to me all the time saying that
there is nothing to read. There
is so much to read.

But what are
the implications for writers? Why is it bad?
It’s bad for
writers because there is a sameness to conversations in the larger public. And
also because they have fewer choices. If you look at Publishers Lunch, you’ll
see nonfiction, nonfiction, nonfiction, romance novel, paperback original,
nonfiction, nonfiction, and then there will be one novel that was sold. Everybody wants it to be obvious
and easy, but most books aren’t. It would really be interesting to see whether
a book like The Beans of Egypt, Maine would be published today. It’s a great book. Or take Annie Proulx. How
about that? Try describing that to
your editorial department and see how far you get. She’s an extraordinary
writer, but you wouldn’t get far at all.

So where do
we go from here?
I guess you have
to just keep putting your face to the wind, and never stop trying, and you have
to give publishers a chance to build an audience and a sense of family. I mean,
were doing that with Leif Enger’s second book [So Brave, Young, and Handsome]. Paul Cirone, in this office, is the agent.
Honestly, we could’ve had an aggressive auction for that book. The trade
paperback sales of his first book [Peace Like a River] is one of the great sales stories of all time. Do
you know what the returns on that book are? They’re zero! It’s sold eight
hundred thousand copies! But we didn’t shop him around. We wanted to do what
was right for the author, and the author was very comfortable with the deal we
came up with. The deal we came up with was unorthodox, but why not do that if you can? And Grove
was very happy. Their first printing is very hopeful, and it’s on the extended New
York Times list, and he’s doing this huge
tour. It might be a slightly old-fashioned business model, but it’s one that
works for that particular author and that particular house. So why not stick
with it? I think that loyalty is
very important. Just like reader loyalty is important, loyalty to a publisher
is important.

How has
technology changed the business from your perspective?
I’ll tell you,
what is hard about being an agent now is the Internet. The Internet is both the
joy and the bane of everybody’s existence. The bane part of it for me, for an
agent, is that it used to be that authors were in isolation. Which was partly
bad, obviously, but it was also a good thing because they really got to focus
on their work and confront what was on the page. They weren’t distracted and
hyped up by too much information. Today, if you are a writer of a certain
genre, you feel that you’ve got to get blurbs, you’ve got to cultivate all
these people, you’ve got to go to this or that event, and on and on. So you
have writers who aren’t really being given enough time to write the best book
they can write. And meanwhile they have become a kind of awful consumer. There
are a lot of conversations about who has what. Like, “Well, Joe Blow has shelf
talkers. Why don’t I have shelf talkers?” No! I don’t want to hear about Joe
Blow’s shelf talkers. You don’t have shelf talkers because your career is set
within an entirely different context than the person you just mentioned. They
all compare notes. They compare advances. Part of it is that they have been
told it’s no longer enough to just write a good book. They are told that they
have to get out there, press the flesh, have blogs, have Web pages, and get
advance quotes from everybody and their dogs. Then they’re told, “By the way,
don’t you think it would be a good idea to do two books this year?” This is
insane! It is altogether too fast. Everything in this business is too fast.

But how can
you build a career anymore if you don’t do that stuff as an author?
You can. You
have to have some luck. I mean, look at Paul Cirone’s author, Megan Abbott.
She’s building a career. She’s on her third or fourth book. She just won an
Edgar. She’s under contract. She’s with the same publisher. She hasn’t had
outrageously great sales, but she’s building an audience. She is a great, edgy,
funny, noir mystery writer.

What about
for a literary writer? Maybe a writer who has published a couple of books that
haven’t sold too well?
They are in
trouble. I’m not going to soft-pedal that. It’s very, very, very painful.

So what do
they do?
Well, thirty or
forty or eighty years ago when people said, “Don’t give up your day job,” there
was probably some wisdom to that. Certainly, if you get a large enough advance
and decide to recklessly give up your day job, at least don’t give up your
insurance. Hang on to one writing class, which gives you insurance and protects
you and gives you the potential for tenure. Don’t give it up. The first thing I
tell my authors when they sell their first book is to try to live as though
they don’t have the money yet. Don’t start building additions on your house.
Don’t start taking expensive trips to Sicily. Try to remember that this might
not happen again. It’s very important to me that people live within their income,
whether your income is thirty thousand dollars a year or thirty times that.

Tell me how
you spend most days.
I would say
being on the phone. Of course I do a lot of e-mail now, and I see the
advantages of hiding behind e-mail. A lot of the day is spent getting
information. Learning. I really read every catalogue that is sent to me. I
genuinely want to know what people are doing. From the moment I take a project
on, there is not a book I’m reading—if it’s remotely relevant to building an
argument or a case for positioning that book—that won’t in some way inform or
aid me in selling that book, or in understanding that project or the
marketplace. A lot of time is spent doing that, and getting information. Who’s
selling what? The stuff in Publishers Lunch, I’m sorry to say, is rarely the
big deals. Those can be the people who want the publicity, they want to be out
there. It’s great for them. Good. Fine. But it’s not the big deals. Sometimes
the big deals aren’t even in the rights guides.

What is the hardest thing for you about your job?
The whining. I won’t have it. I don’t
whine. I don’t want whining from editors. I don’t want whining from my authors.
I don’t want to read about authors I don’t represent who whine. I want every
single person who gets published to be grateful that they get to be published,
because many of their colleagues don’t get to be published. I don’t want
whining about money or any aspect of the business. Of course that doesn’t mean
I don’t want to know when you have a problem. It is my job to help you figure
out whether a problem is legitimate or whether it is just nervousness,
paranoia, insecurity, fear, dread, the sense that the world is passing you by
and you haven’t heard from anybody. You’ve got to get a writers group, a mother,
a spouse. You have to seek your support system elsewhere. Because that’s not
the job of an agent. When I see a problem, believe me, I’m already going at it.
The question is: Do I get on the phone with the editor or do I get on the phone
with the author and tell him I’m going to get on the phone with the editor, and
then not have time to get on the phone with the editor? In other words, you
have to trust that your agent is doing her job. When your agent says, “I will
take care of this,” chances are really good that the agent will take care of
it. But at the same time, you can’t assume that agents are always effective. I
can howl, scream, beg, sob, and implore, but it doesn’t always mean that my
howling will make a difference. Sometimes the answer is just, “No. We’ve decided
not to publish this book in paperback. The sales of this book in hardcover were
three thousand copies, and we won’t publish it in paperback.”

What do you love most about your job?
Here is the thing about me as an agent:
I am not only looking for literature that may be a contender. If I cry at three
different points in a manuscript—even if it is lumpy, and overlong, and deeply
flawed—then I am going to go to bat for it. I love finding something and
getting the whole world to read it. Changing somebody’s life. Changing a
writer’s life. I love the thrill of loving something and really believing in
it, and then selling it really well. All agents know when they’ve done a good
job. They know when they’ve done a crappy job too. They know when they’ve let
their author down and when they’ve let themselves down by extension. It doesn’t
matter if you’ve sold the book for a song or really aggressively. You know when
you’ve done well by a book and the book’s author. And then having it all work out?
Having it be published well? Being part of that ride? I mean, it’s great to be
right. It’s wonderfully validating. It’s thrilling to share in an author’s
success. Frank
McCourt is an obvious example. What gets better than that? And to have an
author who remains unspoiled, like Frank has? It is just a joy to represent an
author like that. He always has been. He’s so appreciative and never complains.
And when he does complain it’s because he’s making a joke out of it. He called
me up one time, maybe a year after Angela’s Ashes had come out, and he
said, “Oh Lord, Molly, the taxes.” And I said, “No, no, no, no, no. If you’re
making enough money to complain about taxes, you don’t get to complain about
taxes.” He laughed and said, “All right, fine!” He’s just a joy to work with.

Is there anything you haven’t accomplished that you still
want to?
No. I just want to always be in the
game. I
want to work for at least another ten years. I don’t want to retire when I’m in
a walker. The reason why this is such a great job, first of all, is
that I’ve been able to work around my children and my life. I have been able to
call my hours my own to an unusual extent, in a way that would not have been
possible if I stayed at Doubleday. But I have a very highly developed work
ethic. I work really hard. What is extraordinary about this business is that we
get to be more interesting than we would otherwise be. Because of our work.
That’s really important. In other words, we do go to dinner parties, and we do
meet interesting people, and reading remains and will always remain a great
common currency. It’s fantastic to work in the world of ideas, and great plots,
and the great insights that are given to us by writers. I don’t ever want to be
far away from that. And I won’t be. I refuse. I feel deeply privileged to be in
this business. So what if it’s changing? I’m not going to change as quickly as
it changes—there’s room for troglodytes like me. And I’m never going to rest
on my laurels. Because if you aren’t always excited to get something in that is
fresh and new, then you shouldn’t be in this business. If you’re just going
along like a hamster in a wheel, then you’ve lost the pure white heat that
makes this business so much fun. And it should be
challenging. That’s what separates the great agents from the good agents.

Jofie Ferrari-Adler is an editor at
Grove/Atlantic.

Agents & Editors: A Q&A With Agent Lynn Nesbit
Agents & Editors: A Q&A With Agent Nat Sobel
Agents & Editors: A Q&A With Editor Janet Silver
Agents & Editors: A Q&A With Editor Pat Strachan

Agents & Editors: A Q&A With Agent Nat Sobel

Agents & Editors: A Q&A With Editor Chuck Adams

by

Jofie Ferrari-Adler

November/December 2008
11.1.08
In Print and Online

Like anyone, I’m a sucker for a good underdog story. In a world where the bad guys always seem to come out on top, give me Gary Cooper in High Noon or Fred Exley in A Fan’s Notes or even, I’m sorry to admit, Meg Ryan in You’ve Got Mail. Who doesn’t appreciate a life-affirming tale of triumph and redemption in the face of adversity?

Not long ago, I went down to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, to seek out the protagonist of one such story: Chuck Adams of Algonquin Books. A native of Virginia who was educated at Duke, Adams moved to New York City in 1967 and found an entry-level job at Holt, Rinehart and Winston. He moved on to Macmillan, then Dell, where he built a reputation as a brilliant line editor, and was eventually recruited by Simon & Schuster to work alongside celebrated editor Michael Korda. In the years that followed, Adams edited and acquired an extraordinary range of best-selling and award-winning books by authors such as Sandra Brown, James Lee Burke, Susan Cheever, Mary Higgins Clark, Kinky Friedman, Ellen Gilchrist, Joseph Heller, Ronald Reagan, and Elizabeth Taylor. In all, nearly one hundred of the books he’s edited have gone on to become best-sellers.

In the winter of 2004, however, like many editors of a certain age (and pay grade), Adams was rewarded for his years of service with a pink slip. The news hit him hard. Believing that his career was essentially over, he moved back to North Carolina, where he had gone to school and still owned a house. Not long afterward he got a call from a literary agent and friend who told him that Algonquin Books, the small literary publisher in Chapel Hill, was looking for an editor. He landed the job and soon acquired a book by a little-known novelist named Sara Gruen that her previous publisher had rejected. Anyone who’s walked into a bookstore in the past year probably knows the rest: Water for Elephants has gone on to become a publishing phenomenon, spending a year and counting on the New York Times best-seller list with sales of more than two million copies to date.

But the redemption story is only part of why I wanted to talk with Adams. I heard a rumor that he was a straight shooter, and I had a hunch that his experience at publishing houses both large and small, and his extensive background with commercial authors, would yield some unique insights that writers of all stripes might find useful. In our wide-ranging conversation, Adams spoke with rare candor about everything from how to craft a compelling narrative to what the best agents do for their clients to the intricacies of working with an editor. We talked in his office, one wall of which is dominated by a thank-you gift from Gruen: a large, wildly colorful abstract painting that was made by—you guessed it—an elephant.

I’ve read conflicting things about your background. Where are you from?
I was born in Virginia, but just over the border. I think it was Publishers Weekly that said I was from North Carolina. I went to school at Duke—I did undergrad and then law school and spent seven years here. So coming back to Chapel Hill and Durham is coming home for me. I studied English as an undergrad and then went to law school because my father wanted me to go to law school, and Vietnam was happening and I didn’t want to go there. The irony is that when I finally finished law school and had to go for my physical I didn’t pass it because of a hereditary skin disorder—psoriasis, the heartbreak of psoriasis—and I had thrown away three years for nothing, I thought at the time, because I knew I didn’t want to be a lawyer. But I did know that I wanted to go to New York. So I took a job as a lawyer with a bank in New York just to get there. I kept not taking the bar, and they finally said, “You don’t really want to practice, do you?” I said, “No, I really don’t.” By then I had become acclimated to the city and basically just took the law degree off my resumé and went out and found a job at Holt. It was an entry-level job in production. I spent about three or four years there and worked my way up pretty quickly. Then I went to Macmillan and was hired as a managing editor. I think I was hired because they had been fighting for so long over who to hire that they basically said, “We’re hiring the next person who walks through the door.” I was the next person who walked through the door. I had to learn the job, and I was terrible at it.

How did you make the transition to becoming an acquisitions editor?
I made a couple other moves and eventually wound up at Dell. By then I knew what I was doing. I was good. Dell was very much into movie tie-ins. As managing editor, I oversaw a lot of stuff, but there was an editor who did the acquiring of all the tie-ins. At some point they decided they weren’t going to do that anymore. They fired that editor and said, “Chuck, you take over the tie-ins. It’s basically just getting the artwork from the movie companies anyway.” I said, “But if something comes my way, can I acquire it?” They said, “Sure.” The first think I bought was a tie-in to a miniseries called The Blue and the Gray. It was a complicated situation, and the author and I didn’t get along. He had come up with the idea for the miniseries and somebody else had written the screenplay. But he retained the rights to novelize the thing. So he wrote the novel but he didn’t have the approval of the edit—the producer had that. I read the novel and called the producer and said, “This is terrible. I can’t accept it like this, or, if I do, it has to be rewritten, and I will rewrite it because I want to make it a success.” He said, “Do whatever you want.” So I completely rewrote it. The author was really upset. You know, I had destroyed his career and everything. We published it that way, as a paperback original, and it went on the New York Times best-seller list. We sold it to something like fifty foreign countries. It was a huge success. We made a fortune off it. So I’d taken my first book and turned it into a big success, and after that they encouraged me to acquire more. Eventually, Susan Moldow made me just an editor. But my reputation thereafter was based primarily not on my successes but on the books I didn’t buy.

What do you mean by that?
I got a reputation for wanting to buy certain tie-ins and being told, “That’s a terrible idea.” For example, I was desperate to buy the tie-in to Cocoon. When I told them the plot, they practically laughed me out of the editorial meeting. Another was V. Another was The Last Starfighter. They all went on to be huge best-sellers. I was a big I-told-you-so person. When it came my turn in the editorial meetings, and they’d ask if I had anything that week, I would stand up and read the New York Times best-seller list to them. So I had this reputation for knowing what I was doing but never getting to do it. Eventually it became apparent to them that I did have talent as an editor. I’m good at it. I had done it a lot more than I had realized. I could type, which was rare back then before computers. I’d taken a typing class in high school, and in college I was the only guy on my floor who could type. I’d be typing guys’ papers for them all the time, and I’d say, “This isn’t very good. Do you mind if I change a few things?” They’d say, “Sure, go ahead. I don’t know what I’m doing.” So I’d rewrite their papers, and sure enough they would get much better grades. So I knew a long time ago that I actually did know how to write.

So you basically taught yourself how to edit?
Yes. Completely. Nobody mentored me, nothing like that. I got a reputation for being a really strong line editor, and eventually I heard that Michael Korda was looking for somebody to come work with him. That’s how I got hired at Simon & Schuster.

Did you know Michael before you went to work with him?
No, I’d never met him. What happened is that a headhunter, Bert Davis, called me and said, “I’ve got a job for you. You’ve just got to promise me that you aren’t an alcoholic or a drug addict.” I said, “Okay, I’m not.” He said, “Don’t ask.” It turned out they had hired somebody for the job and it became clear very quickly that he had a real problem—I don’t know if it was drugs or alcohol or what—and it didn’t work out. I guess they figured that was the one question they forgot to ask. So I went over and had an interview with HR. I was really pissed about that. I thought, “They called me. I’m not applying for this job, am I? Why am I having to go to human resources?” I remember the question that cinched the job for me. The HR woman said, “Rate yourself on a scale of one to ten.” I said, “Ten!” She said, “Good, that’s good.” I realized that was what they wanted—belief in yourself and arrogance. Because it was more in my nature to say, “Oh, you know, like a seven and a half.” I think I was just irritated with her.

When I met Michael I immediately loved him, of course. At one point in the interview he said, “What do you think is your greatest talent?” I said, “I grovel well.” That may be the thing I said that got me the job. I didn’t mention this earlier, but one of the other things that happened at Dell was that I started being assigned to a lot of problem authors. I’ve always been a placater or a mediator—my shrink tells me it’s because I grew up in an abusive environment with a lot of drunks, not my parents necessarily, but I was around a lot of that—and it became clear to the people at Dell that I could get along with anyone. They would just throw people at me and say, “Let Chuck handle this one.” So when I told Michael I groveled well, I think he liked that. I was basically hired the day I met him.

Tell me how your relationship developed.
On a personal level, we liked each other and still do. We just became friends, and we still talk on a regular basis. On a professional level, Michael is probably the most talented editor I have ever known. There were sessions with him and writers—I’m thinking of times when a writer was having trouble with an idea—and on a day when Michael completely focused, he was brilliant beyond belief. I remember one day in particular with an author who was stymied on this one plot problem. I had thought about it and hadn’t come up with anything either. We went in and sat down with Michael and he just started to talk. He talked for about half an hour—talking through the story—and he resolved the problem and went on from there. It was a hair-raising experience. I was so moved by it. It was so exciting. I thought, “This man is brilliant.”

Michael could do anything—I’m sure he’s a great line editor—but he was more than happy to let me do the line editing. So, for the most part, I did the heavy line work on books and he did the more developmental side. That’s especially true with Mary Higgins Clark. Mary is a dream to work with, one of the nicest people in the world, and I think an extremely talented writer, because she’s a great storyteller, and I put storytelling ability above fine writing. When she was starting on a book, she and Michael and I would meet, usually for dinner. She would say what the idea was, and then Michael would spin this whole thing. She’d take that and run with it and do her own thing, but Michael helped her come up with the direction. Then I would go in and line edit the book.

Michael and I had a great working relationship, and we had that relationship with most of the authors we shared. Every now and then there would be somebody who I didn’t work with. For example, Michael took on Philip Roth, who I got to know ever so slightly, but Philip Roth is Philip Roth and you basically leave it alone. I didn’t work with Larry McMurtry at all. Larry is not the easiest person in the world to get along with, and he and Michael had a great relationship, so I was happy to stay out of that.

How did it work, technically? Would you both acquire your own books and then acquire some of them together?
I acquired books on my own, but usually, if an agent sent me something that I really liked, I would go to Michael and say, “I really like this and I want to try and buy it.” And 90 percent of the time Michael would say, “I like it, too. Let’s buy it together.” So that’s what we would do, and he would do the same thing with me. Every now and then he would get something—he was in the RAF and knew about planes—where there was no reason to involve me. We didn’t do every book together, but we did the majority of them together. Usually agents would send the big authors to him. But Sandra Brown and James Lee Burke were submitted to me.

When you look back, what did those years working with Michael teach you?
Well, I learned an awful lot about the business from Michael, of course, because Michael is incredibly savvy. I also learned the limits of ego.

What does that mean?
I believe it’s never, never, never about the editor. That was the only thing with Michael that I sometimes disagreed about. The most important thing is to have a really strong relationship with the writer and have them be confident in you and the house. As the editor, I’m not important in that equation. I genuinely believe that. I mean, I have an ego, but it’s not important. Michael would occasionally let his ego get in the way of things. There was one celebrity—we did a lot of celebrity books—and they had a fight, the likes of which…. I had seen it coming. I knew it was going to happen. And it ended up that I was the only one she would talk to. His ego could occasionally get in the way. I have come close to losing my temper with authors, but I’ve only actually done it twice, once here and once, famously, at Dell.

Famously?
Well, it was famous there, not anywhere else. Again, it was me trying to prove myself when I was young and trying to prove myself. I bought a work of nonfiction about an FBI guy who went undercover and got so deeply undercover that he became a criminal himself. A journalist had written a proposal to write this story. Susan bought it, and when it came in she gave it to me to edit. It was terrible. The guy was a good reporter—he dug and dug and dug—but he hadn’t a clue about writing or putting a book together. I looked back at his credits and realized that he had been with People magazine, and his articles always said they were “reported by” him but written by somebody else. So I thought, “Okay, we’re going to make this work.”

I started rewriting it. When I was done with the first chapter I sent it to him. He said, “Oh, I see.” I said, “Can you do this now? Can you look at what I’ve done to this chapter and redo the rest of the book?” He sent it back and it was still terrible. No better. I thought, “Either I reject it or I rewrite the whole book.” So I started rewriting the whole book. At some point he started pestering me about when I was going to be done. I sent him the first half. He called me and said, “Forgive me. This is brilliant. I love what you’re doing. Keep going.” So I kept working on it and got about another hundred pages done—it’s like four hundred pages long—but then he called me again. Now, I’ll admit, it had been three or four months by this point. But he called me again and said, “Where’s the rest of it?” I kept putting him off, but eventually he started calling me every day. One day he called me and said, “I’m really getting upset about how long you’re taking with this.”

I have a terrible temper, but I don’t lose it very often. I’m usually able to keep myself from going off the handle. But that day I was just in a bad mood or something, and I said, “You know what? I hate you and I hate your book.” And I slammed down the phone. I was sitting there, kind of hyperventilating, and then I heard Susan’s phone ring, and about thirty seconds later I heard her walking down the hallway to me. She yelled at me, of course, but she was nice about it. She said, “You should have rejected this. You should have come to me and said, ‘This is terrible.'” I said that I just didn’t want to give up on it.

Tell me about some of your more memorable celebrity experiences at S&S.
There were so many. Going to Cher’s house and sitting in her strange living room and just talking with her—that was pretty awesome. I liked her. I can’t say I ever got to know her. I think she’s very afraid of exposing herself. So she limits her world to people who are right around her and she trusts, and we were never going to be part of that. But it was fun to work with her anyway. Esther Williams was memorable and probably one of my proudest publishing experiences, because everyone laughed at me when I bought the book. They said, “What a joke. Nobody cares.” But thanks to two other people I worked with—one in subrights, one in publicity—who also loved Esther and loved the book, it became a big best-seller. It probably sold 120,000 copies, which was great for a book that everyone said I was stupid to buy. And I loved working with Esther.

Two of my more memorable experiences involved celebrities I never actually did books with. One was having lunch with Diana Ross with Michael at the Four Seasons when her memoir was being shopped around. She wanted Michael to be her editor and I think it had been requested that we have lunch with her. I was immediately besotted with her. I just thought she was the most exciting person I had ever met. It may have all been a performance—it probably was—but when I walked out of that restaurant I was ten feet off the ground. I was just in love with her. The other one was dinner with Sidney Poitier when his book was being shopped, and he was wonderful and brilliant and charming.

Working with Charlton Heston was great. I loved him. We never talked politics or gun control, and he was just a genuinely sweet man. I even said to him at one point, “I’ve worked with a lot of celebrities and they are many things but they are usually not nice. How can you be so nice and be a household name?” He said, “Good thing you didn’t know me thirty years ago.” He was really well grounded. Meeting Elizabeth Taylor was exciting. There were a few people I worked with who I got to know pretty well. Neil Simon and I became pretty friendly when we were working together. Paul Mazursky, the director, was another. Maureen Stapleton was a sweetheart.

You mentioned Diana Ross coming to Michael. There is obviously a cult of personality with some editors…
Michael, having been a child of Hollywood himself, made a lot of these people feel comfortable. The drawback was that sometimes I think they felt he was also competing with them.

As you were coming up were there any other people who had an important influence on you?
Susan Moldow was a huge influence, just because she gave me a chance and encouraged me. Carole Baron was one of the greatest people I’ve ever worked with. I just loved her. Ray Roberts at Macmillan was a huge influence on me. I love him. He and I were incredibly close friends. He gave me confidence in myself about what I could do.

Is that because your personality type was similar? You didn’t have to be an oversized personality?
Exactly. There was an editor at Macmillan at the time who just died this week, Eleanor Friede, and she was an oversized personality. She was kind of daunting. I liked her a lot but, you know, it was like, “Now that’s an editor.” I could never be like that. I could never be like Michael; I could never be like Nan Talese. I just don’t have that in me. I was always happiest just being in my office and working and not necessarily being out there.

Why were you were ultimately pushed out at S&S?
It’s a complicated story, and I’m not sure I know the whole story. I was told that they had to cut back and that Michael had declined to retire. They wanted him to retire. And because he wouldn’t retire, they were going to fire me. They wanted me to continue editing [on a freelance basis], but they told me I should just retire.

You were making too much money?
I guess. It didn’t seem like it to me, but I don’t know what everybody else made. I was certainly well paid. But, mind you, when David Rosenthal came to Simon & Schuster he immediately gave me a raise. He said, “You’re not making enough.” I was never one who went and lobbied for big raises. So I think it was a combination of things.

How did the Algonquin job come about?
When I was fired from Simon & Schuster, I was given something like four months notice, mainly because they wanted me to finish editing the new Mary Higgins Clark, which had to go to press in March. So I had until the end of March to clear out. An agent, Cynthia Manson, who is a friend and a wonderful person, called me and said that Peter Workman was looking to hire somebody. She knew Peter and asked if I would be interested in talking to him. I said that would be serendipity because Algonquin was in North Carolina, where I already had a house and spent a lot of time.

But, to be honest, I had little hope for it because…Mary Higgins Clark? Jackie Collins? Those weren’t exactly the kind of authors I thought of when I thought of Algonquin. But Peter could not have been nicer or more inviting. He basically said, “I don’t what you to learn to do Algonquin books. I want them to learn how to do the books that you’re comfortable with.” So that gave me some hope that this actually might work. No one else offered me a job, and I could’ve done freelance and probably made more money than I’m making here, but I didn’t want to do that.

The thing that I love about what we do as editors is, first of all, working with the authors. But I also love this excitement when a new manuscript comes in and you think, “Okay, I’m ready to fall in love again.” It doesn’t happen very often, but when it does it’s just unbeatable. I didn’t want to give that up. I could have kept editing on a freelance basis, but I would have missed that love experience. So we worked out everything and I was very happy to take the job down here, and it has been, I think, the most exciting thing that has ever happened in my career. I mean, who would have thought? I got a third act here.

I read somewhere that Water for Elephants is the biggest seller in Algonquin’s history. Tell me about the acquisition.
The acquisition process was simple. Emma Sweeney e-mailed the book to me and told me that it had been under contract to Morrow—I believe this is right—and they had rejected it because they wanted another romantic contemporary book like Sara’s first book. I had been the underbidder on Sara’s first book [Riding Lessons] at Simon & Schuster, and I had met her when she came around to meet people. So that was the reason the new book came to me. I started reading it and immediately just loved it. I gave a copy to Ina Stern, our associate publisher, on a Friday. We both came in on Monday and went, “Oh my God! We have to have this book.” It was the first and, with the exception of one other book I’ve brought in, the only time that every editor here and the publisher said, “We have to have this book.” Usually there’s one naysayer, and sometimes several, but in this case everyone agreed. I remember saying at the editorial meeting, “I don’t know that this book will be a best-seller. But I think this author will be a best-seller because she’s an animal person and will continue to write about animals.” Her first book had involved horses. I said, “You’ve got the opportunity for off-the-book-page publicity because you have an author you can promote,” which is infinitely easier than just promoting the book. So we took it on with great enthusiasm.

Was it a competitive situation or did you have it exclusively?
It was out with a number of other houses. I told Emma, “Look, I really just want to take this off the table.” I think I offered her fifty thousand for world rights. She asked me if I could go up, so I went up a little bit, and we got it. A few months later, after the book had been edited and everything—it didn’t take much editing because it was really clean—our publicity and marketing people had a meeting to talk about the next season. They meet every season and choose one or two books—we promote all of our books a lot—but they choose one or two that they hope can be especially big. They chose another novel as the big book for that season. But it turned out that our marketing director, Craig Popelars, hadn’t read the novel yet. So, after that meeting, he read it. Afterward, I remember, he walked in here with the manuscript and said, “Best-seller. We can make this a best-seller. I can give this to my mother, I can give this to my father, I can give this to my wife, I can give this to my old college roommate. This book is universal.” I was a little jaded by that point, so I said, “Sure, you go ahead and make it a best-seller.” And damned if he didn’t. Craig along with Michael Taeckens, the publicity director, and Ina Stern, the associate publisher, got behind this book and just made it happen.

In the lead-up to publication, what are some of the key things that you and your colleagues did?
Craig got on the phone or emailed thirty or forty key independent bookstore people around the country. He said, “I want to send you a manuscript that I think is going to be huge. If you like it as much as I think you will, I want you to give me a quote that I can use to put together an ad.” He sent out the manuscript and the comments that came back were universal. There wasn’t one negative response. The independent booksellers got behind the book in a huge way. He took those quotes to sales conference in New York, and the sales reps had started reading the book and agreed that it could be a best seller. Michael started putting together a thirty-city tour. We had started out thinking the first printing would be fifteen thousand copies, but by the time we actually went to press it was fifty thousand.

Did the author do any key things in terms of promotion?
Well, Sara’s got a great personality, but I don’t think she’d mind me saying that she’s not a natural in front of crowds. She actually can have a little stage fright. But once she’s there, her charm and her warmth come through, and she did an amazing job on the road selling the book. That was a huge thing. But ultimately, I think, it’s about the book. People love it. We just went back to press, this week, and printed our two-millionth paperback copy. It’s been an amazing ride.

What was the most exciting moment for you?
The first time it got on the New York Times list. And the millionth paperback copy. That was fun—the entire office went out to dinner. We had champagne here and then went out to dinner.

Tell me about trying to keep her.
We tried very hard.

I imagine that you put together some kind of creative offer.
Yes. I don’t want to talk about the amounts, but we put together a very creative offer. It was a reasonable amount of money up front and guarantees of more if certain things happened. It was a shared risk situation. Financially, we just can’t afford to pay millions of dollars and have a failure. Other companies can. We can’t. We just can’t take the risk. So it was a shared risk—more money if this happens, more money if this happens. I would have loved to have kept her.

You’re on record as saying you understand her decision.
I do. I do, completely.

But it must also be frustrating.
It is. It’s particularly frustrating for the others here who worked so hard to create the book’s success. I mean, it hurt. I can’t say that our feelings weren’t hurt a little bit. But I put myself in her shoes and I think, “x dollars here versus x-x-x-x-x dollars there?”

Tell me about the major changes you’ve seen in the industry over the course of your career.
Things have changed a lot. I started at Holt in 1969, but because I was in production I can’t say I had a great feel for the industry because the industry, let’s face it, revolves around editorial and publicity and so forth. By the time I got to Dell, which is where my career really began, I did understand what I was getting into. Dell was a big mass market house, and the mass market kind of ruled. I remember when Nancy Friday’s My Mother / My Self reached one hundred thousand hardcover copies and everyone went, “Oh, God! That’s amazing!” Now one hundred thousand is nothing—you may not get on the best-seller list with that. There’s been a shift away from the mass market side.

Now things have just become big business. Advances have gotten kind of out of control. I’m not saying I liked it better the old way, it’s just that I’ve never been one who liked to pay big advances. I’m not tight with money—God knows I waste a lot of it—I just hate risking things. I want to see the company make money. I’ve seen too may authors’ careers go down the toilet because of big advances. I had an author at Simon & Schuster who I just loved. He was a great writer and he was great to work with. I had done a nonfiction book with him, and I encouraged him to do novels. So I bought two novels from him for something like fifty thousand dollars. The first one was great and got terrific reviews—a daily New York Times review, the cover of the Los Angeles Times Book Review—and sold moderately well, fifteen or twenty thousand copies. That was good for a first novel. It launched his career. The second book was just okay—it wasn’t great—and it did okay but not great. When it came time to negotiate for the next novel, his agent wanted three hundred thousand dollars. We tried to get to a reasonable amount, but the truth was there was another editor who wanted him and I think had already put the money down. So he left for the money, and the third book sold like the second book and the first book. And the fourth book sold like that. And now he’s not writing anymore, to the best of my knowledge. He could have built a career if he’d just been patient and hadn’t become greedy and gone for the money.

But it’s hard to resist that kind of money.
I know it is. I just get frustrated when agents and authors go for the money like that and don’t think about building careers. I think sometimes we all just get carried away with this need to buy these things without any thought of what we’re really going to do with them. But here, fortunately, we only do twenty books a year and we can’t do that. We have to think carefully about everything we buy. But in a culture like at Simon & Schuster, and before that at Delacorte, to some extent, you would just buy things because you needed to fill up a list. You know, every month you had to have your three or four big books, but you also needed to have another fifteen or twenty down at the bottom. You would just buy stuff and fill them in. Too often, books that are acquired for hundreds of thousands of dollars get put in the midlist because they decide they aren’t going to sell. “We can’t make it into a big book, so we’ll just put it there.” I’ve had books like that. I’ve been guilty of this. I guess there’s no way we cannot pay big advances because that’s the culture we’re in, but I think it’s bad for so many careers.

I just took on a book this week where I was one of the bidders when it was sold a year or more ago. The author interviewed all the editors and went with another house that offered a lot more money than I offered—almost three times what I offered. But he called me out of the blue a few weeks ago and said, “I made a mistake. I really wanted to come with you but the money was just irresistible.” So he’s buying himself out of the contract and coming here. He just felt like he wasn’t getting the guidance he wanted. I don’t know if we’ll have a great success or not. I think he’s really talented. But the money is almost impossible to resist, I think.

It seems to me that publishers are responsible for a lot of these problems, especially the problem of the midlist writer whose career has stalled. What should publishers be doing better?
I think they should be publishing fewer books, or publishing more carefully. At Algonquin, because of the kind of house we are, doing twenty books a year, every book has to work for us. We can’t afford to just throw something out there. We have to work like crazy. We’ll say, “Okay, we think there may be fifty thousand people out there who will buy this book. So let’s go find those fifty thousand people.” That’s what marketing and publicity do here. They dig for those readers. They don’t always succeed, but they always try.

How are they doing that?
A lot of it is on the Internet. A lot of it is contact with booksellers. Take this book by Roland Merullo, American Savior. It’s a satirical novel about Jesus coming back and running for president. We’re taking a big position on this book in the way we’re positioning it with bookstores. But we’ve also been in touch with all sorts of religious organizations, especially liberal religious organizations, trying to get them interested and supportive. We just go after all these different things that the larger companies don’t have time to do because they’re publishing so many books, and they’re going to put their effort behind the ones they paid the millions of dollars for. So, here, because we only do ten books a season, we work those ten books to death. We’re not afraid to take somebody who has languished in the midlist. If we feel like they’re capable of rising above that.

Do you think the industry is healthier now than it was when you first started?
Well, it’s much bigger, so I suspect it’s less healthy. Originally it was small operations that weren’t publicly owned. You didn’t have corporations demanding that you meet certain budgets. I saw this at Simon & Schuster. We had one year when Judith Regan, who I like a lot, had Howard Stern and I believe Rush Limbaugh in one year, and another editor had The Book of Virtues, and there were a lot of other books that worked. So let’s say the year before we had made ten million dollars and our budget for that year was eleven million. But it was such a great year that instead of making 11 million, we made more like 111 million. So next year, does Paramount or Viacom say, “Your budget this year is twelve million”? No. They say we’re supposed to make 112 million. So all of a sudden the bar has been raised that much higher. If you make the budget, keep in mind, you get not only a pat on the back—you get a bonus. So everybody wants to make the budget. When May or June comes around and you start looking at the numbers, you think, “We’re not going to make our budget. What can we do?” What you do is start taking books that were supposed to be published later on and moving them up, throwing them into November and December just to get the numbers out. A lot of books and authors get sacrificed that way.

What does all of that mean for the future? Are the large corporations ever going to realize that the industry doesn’t have the kind of growth they want and give up?
I don’t know. Going back to the beginning of my career, when I was at Holt and we were owned by CBS, I remember the people at Holt laughing at the people at CBS. The powers that be at CBS had called the people at Holt and said, “You’re doing something wrong here. If we put a dollar into our broadcast operations, we usually get back $1.75. You’re only giving us back a $1.02. You’re doing something wrong.” They just didn’t have any idea. They hadn’t even researched what they were doing. In our business, $1.02 on the dollar is not bad. Any profit is good. But these corporations expect big growth. It’s creating mega hits, and that’s fine. Simon & Schuster is one of the best at that—they’re amazing at event publishing. But so many little books, so many promising little books and talented authors, get sacrificed.

But what do you see on the horizon—do you think it’s going to keep going the way it’s going?
I have no idea. Seeing Warner get out of the business is probably a good thing. Viacom will probably ultimately get out of the business—it’s actually CBS now, I don’t know how they’ll figure that out. Bertelsmann is probably pretty solid. They seem to know what they’re doing. I don’t know what kind of pressures are on people in-house on a bunch of things. I don’t know what it’s like. I bet it’s not too dissimilar, but at least it’s not publicly owned, so you don’t have the Wall Street pressure. I think that’s probably one of the biggest problems: the pressures from the stockholders and so forth. It’s not a business that’s ever going to function like a normal manufacturing operation or a normal big business. It’s just not. So much depends on the personalities and quirks. There are so many ways to go wrong in this business, and it’s so difficult to get it right.

Did you read Jon Karp’s recent essay in the Washington Post?
No, I didn’t see it, but somebody was telling me about it.

He was basically arguing that the future of books is quality stuff and not the sort of quickie schlock that a lot of publishers make a lot of money from.
I haven’t read the article, but I don’t necessarily agree. Look at Judith Regan. She’s a good example. I think she’s brilliant. I think she showed us something we all kind of know but don’t like to admit, and it’s that we’re in fucking show business. She showed us that if you give people what they want, they will buy it. You can call it schlock if you want to. Books on wrestling, and books by porno stars, are not things that I necessarily want to read. But that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be published. There are people who want to read them, and she gave that market what they wanted. And, okay, it’s schlock, but it got people into bookstores, and they bought books. I’ve always thought, “Give me more Harlequin romances.” Get people reading! You just want people to read. I don’t put down any form of publishing if there’s a market for it. For too long, in New York, we’ve been in this culture of publishing what we like and not what readers want. Hopefully, we’ll come around to trying to understand what people really want to read so we can interest them in reading in the first place.

When I was at Simon & Schuster, they started this thing on diversity in publishing, and we were all supposed to go through diversity training. To my knowledge, I’m the only person who was not summoned to go through diversity training. I think it was because I wrote them such a scathing reply to their initial query of “How do you feel about diversity in publishing?” I said, “There is no diversity in publishing and we’re not likely to get it as long as you just pay lip service to it.” There are virtually no African Americans in this business, there are virtually no Hispanics, virtually no Asian Americans. It’s because we don’t pay competitive salaries, we don’t make an effort to recruit them, and, frankly, if they came in and really had a sense of their area of publishing, the bosses wouldn’t know what to do with them and probably wouldn’t give them a chance to do anything anyway. They expect you to be white like all the rest of us. There’s too much of the elitist school culture in New York. The only people who can afford to take jobs in publishing are those who come from enough money and whose parents will help support them. We don’t encourage a diversity of people in the business. We don’t. We just want more of the same because they’re the ones who can afford to work in it. And I don’t see that changing. I know that profits are a problem and you can’t afford to pay huge salaries. I know the argument. But it’s a problem. And when somebody like Judith comes along and really tries something different and gets pilloried for it? Okay, she overstepped the bounds. I’ll give you that. But she showed us that there is a readership out there if you’re not too proud to go there.

Let’s talk about agents. There are a lot of them, and I’m curious about the factors that you would look at if you were a writer, knowing what you know, and had your pick of a few.
I would want them to ask certain questions. “Who do you think the audience for my book will be?” “How do you think my career should progress?” I think writers should be asking about career, not just about selling this particular book. “What do you think I should be working on now to follow-up this book?” I would want a very careful reading of the book in order to make sure that they did read it and really understood it and weren’t just hyping me up. I would do as much research as I could. I’d want to know who their other clients are and how their careers are advancing. I’d want to talk to some of their authors, if possible. I’d look at how well the books that this agent has sold are being published.

You want an agent who is both incredibly easy to get along with and incredibly determined to get the best they can for their authors. The best agents are the ones who keep after me and don’t leave me alone. You know, “What are you doing? What’s going to happen next?” They want to keep on top of things. The ones I’m leery of are the ones I hear from only once or twice a year. Marly Rusoff, for example, is a great agent. She works so hard for her writers. Well, she was an editor, too. I think some of the best agents used to be editors—because they know the business. And so many editors are now agents, of course, because you can make more money.

What do agents do that drives you crazy?
Oh, there are so many things. The worst thing an agent has ever done to me involved a novel by a Hollywood-based person who had been in show business. This person had written a memoir before, and he was a pretty good writer, but the novel was a mess. The writing was pretty good and the background was interesting—the material was all there—but it just wasn’t well done. So I passed. But when I passed, I said, “I do like this. I think there’s potential here, but it’s not ready. If you don’t sell it, and the author wants to talk to me about reworking it, I’d be glad to have a conversation with him.” They didn’t sell it. The author called me and we went back and forth—calling, e-mailing—and he started to rework it. He said, “I think I’ve got a great idea now, so thank you.” A couple of months later, my assistant drops the revision on my desk. It has a letter from the agent on top—multiple submission. I called up and said, “What are you doing?” The agent said, “You didn’t really expect to get this exclusively, did you?” I said, “Well, I’m passing. Thank you.” She said, “You’re not going to read it?” I said, “No.” I couldn’t believe that.

Here, I have actually taken options on two books in that situation. I’m working with the authors now, trying to get the books right, and if we get them right we have an agreed upon purchase price. It’s a formalized way of doing what I did in that case, and it protects us, obviously. When you read a book and you see something there, and it’s a good writer, I’m loath to give up on it.

Are there any younger or less well-known agents out there who are really good but who maybe writers aren’t aware of yet?
There are two agents in particular, right now, who I send people to when I’m asked for help in finding an agent. I think of them first and I go to them first: Doug Stewart at Sterling Lord and Daniel Lazar at Writers House. Both have sent me really, really good things. I have not bought anything yet from Doug—actually I did because I sent him an author and then I bought the book. I’ve bought a couple of things from Daniel, who has consistently amazed me with the stuff he sends. It’s off the wall sometimes, but I just love it.

What are you looking for in a piece of writing?
The first thing is the voice. If it’s got a strong voice, I’m going to keep reading. And if a story sneaks in there, I’m going to keep reading. To me, those are the two most important things. I want a voice and I want to be hooked into a story. I believe very strongly that books are not about writers, and they’re definitely not about editors—they’re about readers. You’ve got to grab the reader right away with your voice and with the story you’re telling. You can’t just write down words that sound pretty. It’s all about the reader. You’ve got to bring the reader into it right away. If the writing is poetic and so forth, that’s nice. I’m reading something right now that has an amazing voice, and I’m only fifty-six pages into it, but I’m already getting a little tired because it’s so nice, if you know what I mean. It’s so pretty. It’s like every page is a bon bon, and I want a little break somewhere. It’s become self-conscious, in a way. I want the author to surprise me and excite me, and so far he hasn’t. He’s just made me think, “Oh, that’s nice.” I even called somebody and read them half a page because I thought it was so nice. I don’t know. I’ll give it another fifty pages and see.

How long does it take you to know?
You can usually tell after a paragraph—a page, certainly—whether or not you’re going to get hooked. Every now and then, something will surprise you. I remember one novel at Simon & Schuster that I was reading, more as a favor than anything else. The writing wasn’t great, and the story was a little on the predictable side—it was okay, but a little boring—but then I got to the end and it surprised the hell out of me. I went back and thought, “Fuck, this is really something. I would have given up after fifty pages if I hadn’t promised somebody that I would read it.” I ended up buying it and it did really well.

Are there any specific elements of craft that beginning writers tend to neglect?
I think beginning writers tend to not think about a reader. They tend to think about themselves. They think about making themselves sound smart and good, and they forget that this is really all about telling stories. I used to joke that I was going to put a big sign over my desk that said, “Quit writing and tell me a story.” The problem is that they just write. They fall in love with their own voice. They write and write and write, and they lose sight of the fact that they’re trying to entertain somebody. You have to reel them in.

Do you have any pet peeves about mistakes that you see writers making again and again?
Oh, there are little things. “‘I like you,’ she smiled.” [Laughter.] And you see that kind of thing from fairly good writers sometimes. You know, if you want to get the smile in there, it’s “‘I like you,’ she said with a smile.” It’s just little things like that. But if I’m reading something and I’m on the fence and I see too many of those, it goes against the book. I don’t see it a lot, but every now and then, I read a novel that someone has obviously written with a thesaurus beside him. I’m not a stupid person. But I don’t know every word. When I have to get up from my desk and look up words to understand what I’m reading, that’s another thing that sends me to the other side of the fence.

You have said that you work very closely with the writer, with the reader in mind, to make every book as commercial as possible. Why is that important to you?
It’s very difficult to make a living in this business. I’m told that there are something like two hundred writers who actually make a living at writing. Or maybe fewer. The others have to supplement their incomes in order to make a living. If a writer really wants to make a living as a writer, they need to sell copies. I want them to be successful. If they’re successful, we’re successful. To some extent, it comes down to money.

But I don’t believe in just going after stories to make money, obviously. There are some books I’ve been able to publish here—one example is An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England—that have been a fight. So many people here hated that book. It’s interesting. I haven’t done this in six months or a year, but it used to be that if you looked at the Amazon page for that book, the reviews were split fifty-fifty between five stars and one star. Half the reviews were like, “This is the greatest book I’ve ever read,” and the other half were like, “I would give this book zero stars if I could.” It gets that kind of reaction. It makes people angry. I love that kind of book. It inspires people to really talk about it. Some people despise it and start to sputter because they hate it so much, and other people go crazy over it.

Go back to this notion of working very closely with an author—with the reader in mind—to make something as commercial as possible. What are the nuts and bolts of that process? What does the page look like?
Physically, it’s a mess. I write all over it. I’m not a shy editor. I edit in ink, and I just sit down as a reader. I start reading, and when I come to a word or whatever that makes me stop, then I think, “Okay, there’s a problem.” Because any time a reader stops—whether it’s because they didn’t understand something, or the word is an odd choice and it throws them off, or a character does something slightly out of character—then you have to stop and say, “This is a problem. How do we fix it?” Usually I will have a fix that I just go ahead and write in. I always tell the authors, of course, that my fixes are suggestions. I say, “You don’t have to do it this way, but you’ve got to do something here. Whenever I find a problem, you’ve got to address it. You can’t ignore it. You can find your own solution, but you have to do something.”

I go through the whole manuscript that way. Sometimes I just write in the margins, sometimes I write pages of notes and type them up and send them to the author. Sometimes it’s just a matter of cutting and connecting and writing little one- or two-word transitions. But it’s always a matter of taking the reader with me. I want them to be able to follow everything that’s going on and not have to stop and puzzle anything out.

What’s the most satisfying big edit you’ve ever done?
It was probably Kitty Dukakis’s memoir. It was one of the first manuscripts I was given to edit at Simon & Schuster. It was an unusual situation: It had been bought jointly by Alice Mayhew and Michael Korda, who are two radically different editors. The manuscript was huge, about five hundred pages. Alice called me into her office and said, “Chuck, there’s way too much in here about politics. People want to know the personal story. You need to cut out a lot of this political stuff.” Michael called me into his office and said, “Chuck, there’s way too much personal stuff in here. People want to know about the politics. You’ve got to get rid of a lot of this personal stuff.”

I sat down and thought, “Okay, who are you going to please?” I decided to just please the reader. I went through it and did what I wanted to do as a reader. The cowriter on the book was wonderful, but she had not controlled Kitty in any way. Kitty had just rambled and the cowriter had organized everything but hadn’t cut it at all. For example, every time Kitty had gone to a different town and had a different hairdresser, she’d spend a paragraph thanking that hairdresser for doing such a great job. I said, “Kitty, there’s an acknowledgments page. That’s where all of this has got to go.” I went through the book and just carved. It was almost like carving a block of marble or granite or whatever to try and get the statue that was beneath. I painstakingly went through the thing a couple of times and carved away and connected things. When I was done, I thought it was great. And both Alice and Michael did, too. I was really proud of that. I knew I had done a good job, and they were really proud of it too. It went on to be a big best-seller for us.

This is the magazine’s MFA issue. Do you have anything to say about them?
Obviously a lot of good writers have come out of MFA programs—you see it in their bios—so I know there’s a lot of good work being done. I will confess that many of the MFA novels I see are better written than they are good books, if you know what I mean. There’s a lot of good writing, but that doesn’t necessarily add up to a good book. I feel like perhaps in those programs too much emphasis is being put on style and word choices rather than actually thinking about how to communicate with people. It’s too much about—to make it sound terrible—but it’s too much about showing off and not enough about trying to please a reader.

Again, I go back to the whole thing about storytelling. I’m old enough to have started reading back when it really was primarily about stories. I guess there were a lot of quality literary books being published then, but my mother didn’t buy them. I read what was around the house: Edna Ferber and Daphne du Maurier and Mary Renault and Thomas B. Costain. These are writers you don’t hear anything about anymore, but they were brilliant storytellers. They were also good writers, mind you, but they were brilliant storytellers. They would grab the reader right away and just not let go.

Today, I’m seeing better writing than the writing in those books, but I’m not seeing better storytelling. That was why Water for Elephants excited me. Sara is a really good writer. She’s not a great stylist or anything—you’re not going to sit down and read her sentences just for the beauty of them—but she tells such a great story. She knows how to pace a story. She knows how to make it work for the reader. When I read the book, I said, “This is like Edna Ferber. She’s taken an intimate story and played it out against a very large backdrop.” And it works beautifully. Look at Michael Chabon. He’s had success from the beginning, but it wasn’t until he wrote The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, where he took his formula of two guys and a girl and put it against this big panorama—the Holocaust, the Depression, World War II—that he turned the intimate little stories he’d been writing into a big story. It’s not that difficult to do. It’s not easy to do, either. But when you really look at what he did, you just have to come up with the right backdrop and put the story in front of it and make the story one that people really relate to and care about.

I’m trying to get Susan Cheever to write a novel for me here. I love her. I think she’s a brilliant writer, and I don’t think she’s ever gotten the attention she should have because people unfortunately review her name and not her books. They resent her name, for whatever reason. I think she’s capable of writing a really great novel. We keep talking about what it should be. I keep saying, “Look, write Romeo and Juliet or write Jane Eyre or whatever. But put it against a big backdrop. Steal somebody’s else idea, but just make it your own.”

page_5: 

What you’re talking about just emphasizes to me how important the elements of a story are. Are the elements appealing? Are they things that people really want to read about?
Kathy Pories was reading a novel this week, and she asked me to read a part of it too. We all share everything here. I loved the writing. The voice was great. I was immediately drawn into the story. I hadn’t read much, maybe twenty or thirty pages, and I told her, “I really like this.” She said, “Well, wait until you get to the end.” What happens is, you’re reading along, you like the main character; he’s interesting and complex. All along, you know that something bad has happened. And then he rapes somebody, in the first person. You read that and you’re like, “Um, you can’t do that.” Fortunately, the author understands, so hopefully Kathy will get to buy the book. But she’s got to go back through it and find a way to get rid of that problem. You lose your reader immediately when you do something like that.

Do you think literary writers need to be effective self-promoters to have a successful career today?
It’s a lot easier to promote an author than a book. If you have an author whom you can get on NPR, for whom you can get some kind of press coverage because of their personality or something in their background or some quirk like that, and they’re willing to be promoted that way, then that’s a big plus. We always take that into consideration when we’re talking about taking on somebody. Because you know that if you have a situation where you can promote only the book, it’s harder. I have an author who unfortunately is in a wheelchair and we can’t do the kind of tour that this company likes to do. But we’re getting really great reviews, and we can capitalize on that, so I think the book is going to do fine. But without that, we would have had a real problem. It helps, obviously, if you have an author who is willing to promote.

As far as self-promotion is concerned, I’m always happy when an author says, “I’m going to network. I’m going to blog. I’ve got a list of people to whom I’m going to mail postcards.” That’s always great. It also helps when writers are well connected and their books come with guaranteed blurbs.

What would your ideal author be like?
My ideal author would be one who is anxious—not just willing—but anxious to work with me. I don’t mean me, Chuck Adams. I mean me, the editor. Someone who understands that, while they are happy with what they’ve done, there may be room for improvement. They’re open to listening to my suggestions and, once I have shared my wisdom with them, they do something with it. As I said, when I make these suggestions for changes in the manuscript, I don’t want to be ignored. Because I’m not wrong. “There’s a problem there, and we need to work on it.” I may be wrong with the fix I suggest, but I’m not wrong with the need for a fix, and I want the author to respond to that and not argue with me. I see the creation of a successful book as very much a collaborative thing. The author always has to be happy with the book, or otherwise it doesn’t matter, but I also have to be happy with it for the company’s sake. We’ve got to feel like we can go out with confidence and make money on this book.

I’m working with an author right now on a novel that I think is brilliantly conceived and could be extremely successfully because when I describe it to people, they go, “Oh, God, I want to read that!” I’m in the editing process with him right now, and he’s got his little darlings in there, as Stephen King calls them. He loves his little darlings. Trying to convince him to kill those darlings off, because they’re getting in the way of the story, is difficult. I think I’ll prevail because he has an agent who’s very good and very proactive and understands what I’m doing and basically agrees with me. I think, together, we’ll get the manuscript we need. This experience will in no way keep me from wanting to work with this author again. But I do want him to wise up. I’m not making these suggestions because I’m trying to make this Chuck Adams’s book—I’m making them because I want the book to sell and to reach a big audience. I think he understands that and it’s starting to sink in.

That can take time.
It does. Look, I know how much effort goes into writing a novel. I know how hard it is to hear someone say, “Okay, these sixty pages go in the garbage.” They say, “But that’s my best work!”

Continuing with this ideal author, how about after the editing? How involved would they be in the publishing process?
They should be thinking about ways they can help us. We’re going to be doing our best to convince bookstores to stock this book. In some cases, we’ll actually buy placement, and in other cases we have to depend on bookstores to do that. We will do everything we can to get reviews, but there’s no guarantee. Everybody wants a New York Times review and everybody wants Oprah. Well? You just get very few. Anything they can do to help us—any contacts they may have, for example—I want to know about them. I want them to say, “You should know that I went to school with so-and-so.” Good, get on the phone with them. Talk to them. Tell them about your book. Promote yourself. Don’t be shy about it.

That is the one thing I don’t understand about writers sometimes. It takes so much work to write a book. It takes a lot of ego to write a book. And then they finish it and find a publisher and go, “Oh, I’d feel cheap trying to sell it.” Bullshit. That’s part of the process. You wrote the book for a reason: You want people to read it. Help us. Help us get it out there. I want writers to be as proactive as they can be. Not to the point of being a nuisance, however. Don’t expect miracles, and don’t call up and say, “Why isn’t this happening? Why isn’t that happening?” Believe me, we’re doing everything we can to make it happen. Don’t keep after me about why it isn’t happening.

But some writers, maybe not at Algonquin, know that their publishers are not doing what they can. They’re putting their efforts behind the books that have gotten the huge advances. What should those writers do?
Anything they can to get people into the bookstore to buy the book. I don’t know what their resources might be, but if they have any personal connections that can help get the word out—again, the Internet is a great way to reach people—that’s the key.

Having worked at both big and small publishers, what would you say to a writer who finds himself with identical offers of, say, twenty-five thousand dollars from a big house and a smaller house?
When I was at Simon & Schuster, I would use the argument of “This is Simon & Schuster” for why an author should come there, knowing that I probably wasn’t doing him a favor but also knowing that I needed to buy books and I liked this book. I was not a good person sometimes. We all have to fill our quota of books, and if the publisher liked the book, and I could buy it, I would pull the trump card of “This is Simon & Schuster,” knowing that the author probably might be better off at another house. Now that I’m at the other house, I can admit that I did that. I think a writer who gets bought here is lucky. I really do. We don’t succeed every time. But we try every time. And I can’t say that’s true with the big houses. There are other houses like Algonquin—we’re not alone—who really think about what they’re doing with every book.

First of all, if a writer is offered a choice between a Simon & Schuster and an Algonquin, I think their agent should advise them about what’s going to be best for them. I think agents would generally say to go with Algonquin. The author should talk to both editors—I think authors should always ask to have a conversation with an editor before committing. Then they should go with the one they like best, hopefully at the smaller house where they’re going to get more attention.

The problem with a company like Simon & Schuster or any of the large houses isn’t that they’re not good publishers—they’re really great publishers—it’s just that they’re not great publishers of all the books they do. Your book is either going to be one of the ones that gets attention or you’re just going to be thrown out there with the rest of them. A writer has to think about that before they commit. A lot of effort goes into every book at the smaller houses, because the smaller houses can’t afford to bury anything.

If somebody gave you a magic wand and you could change one thing about the industry, what would it be?
I guess I’d go back to what we talked about earlier, the idea that we need more diversity in this business. We need to become a more encompassing business. We need to recognize the fact that we are serving a very narrow portion of the marketplace. There are people out there who we probably could get to read if we published books that they would enjoy—if we didn’t feel so fucking superior to them all the time. There’s a tendency of publishers to pooh-pooh books that are really commercial. You get this at writers’ conferences sometimes. “Oh, how can you edit Mary Higgins Clark?” People just shiver because they think she’s not a great writer. I’m sorry, she’s a great storyteller, and she satisfies millions of readers. I’m all for that. Again, Harlequin romances—give me more of them. A lot of good writers have come out of Harlequin romances: Nora Roberts, Sandra Brown, Barbara Delinsky, to name three right there. I think literary fiction is great, and the ideal book is one that is beautifully written and tells a great story, but if it’s just a great story that’s written well enough to be readable, that’s good too.

Are you worried about the decline of independent booksellers?
Of course. I worry that there’s nobody out there to sell books. I don’t mean to put down people who work at the big chains. We’ve hired an assistant here who works part time at Barnes & Noble, so I know there are good people out there working at Barnes & Noble. But too often they could be selling shoes or light bulbs. They don’t have any real passion for books. I think people need to be passionate about books in order to sell them. They have to believe in the book and love it.

I saw that with Water for Elephants when we went out to Lexington, Kentucky, at the request of Joseph-Beth. They were doing a thing in conjunction with the Lexington newspaper, and they wanted Sara and me on a panel. The booksellers were so excited about that book. It wasn’t even a book yet—it was still in galleys—but they had all read it. Everybody in the store had read it, and they couldn’t stop talking about it. That kind of passion is what sells a book. Without the independents, without that kind of passion, I don’t know.

It’s great that Barnes & Noble puts a book in the window, when you pay them to, and it’s great that they put it on the front table, when you pay them to, but it means so much more when the independent bookstores really get behind something. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not against Barnes & Noble. I think they have made reading sexy, in a way, and they’ve made it fun with their coffee shops and all that stuff. I think they’ve done a great service in many ways. I just worry that the price we’ll pay will be the loss of the independent bookstores.

How are you liking the culture at an independent house compared to the culture at S&S?
To be honest, I didn’t dislike the culture at Simon & Schuster. I lived in it for a long time and felt comfortable with it. I loved my job at Simon & Schuster. I don’t have bad things to say about Simon & Schuster. It was a good company to work for. It was a difficult company to work for. When I first went there, my friends said, “You’ll never survive. You’re too nice.” What my friends should have known, and what I said, was, “I’m not nice. I’m pleasant, but I’m not nice.” They found out pretty soon at Simon & Schuster that I’m not that nice. And they found out here that I’m not nice. In fact, I think I surprised a few people because I came here with this reputation of being so nice.

How does that manifest itself?
I’m stubborn as hell. I’m like a dog that won’t let go when something gets me, either positively or negatively. I’m just not going to stop until you’ve listened to me, until I’ve been paid attention to, and, usually, until I get my way. One of the things that I guess surprised them here is how demanding I can be sometimes. I know what I want, and that’s what I’m going to get.

What does that usually involve?
The cover. The type. Things like that. I mean, I don’t necessarily have to have my way. But I have to be listened to, and they have to try and placate me, or I’m just not going to stop complaining. I don’t think people realized that about me. I heard Kathy Pories telling somebody that I surprised them when I came here because everyone thought I was going to be a pushover for everything, because I had that reputation. But I’m not. At Simon & Schuster I didn’t have occasion to fight about things as much. I fought with the publisher all the time—and I think that’s one of the reasons why I got fired—but I didn’t have to fight with other people there.

At the end of the day, what’s the most satisfying part of the job for you?
At the end of the day in the big picture, feeling like we’ve published a book well and done well for the author. At the end of the individual day, it’s usually that I’ve started reading something I’m excited about, and I’m looking forward to getting back to it.

Jofie Ferrari-Adler is an editor at Grove/Atlantic.

Agents & Editors: A Q&A With Agent Molly Friedrich
Agents & Editors: A Q&A With Agent Nat Sobel
Agents & Editors: A Q&A With Editor Janet Silver
Agents & Editors: A Q&A With Editor Pat Strachan

Agents & Editors: A Q&A With Editor Janet Silver
Agents & Editors: A Q&A With Editor Pat Strachan

Agents & Editors: A Q&A With Jonathan Galassi

by

Jofie Ferrari-Adler

July/August 2009
7.1.09
In Print and Online

If you’re anything like the writers I meet at
conferences and MFA programs, the word sweet probably isn’t the first
adjective that comes to mind when you think of the head of a major New York
publishing house. I hear a lot of other words (many of them unprintable in a
wholesome writer’s magazine), but the takeaway is often the same: They are
snakes in suits whose only loyalty is to the bottom line. While it’s true that
such creatures exist—I could tell you stories—they are far less common than
you might think.

Take the case of Jonathan
Galassi, president and publisher of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, who got where he
is, in part, by being one of the most gentlemanly editors in the business. Born
in Seattle and raised in small-town Massachusetts, Galassi grew up surrounded
by books and was, by his own admission, a “typical geeky kid.” At thirteen he
went away to boarding school and fell in love with poetry and languages; he
discovered the thrill of editing other people’s work when he got the
opportunity to publish a friend’s short story in the school literary magazine.
At Harvard he studied with Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop. In 1973, after
two years in England on a Marshall Scholarship, he moved back to the States and
took an internship at Houghton Mifflin. Before long he earned a reputation as
an adroit literary editor and was appointed head of the company’s New York
office. One early acquisition was Alice McDermott’s debut novel, A
Bigamist’s Daughter, which he took with him when he moved to Random House in 1981. As it
turned out, the publication of McDermott’s novel was a rare bright spot in an
otherwise dismal tenure. At Random House, Galassi’s books won critical acclaim
but sold modestly, and in 1986, after five years with the company, he was
fired.

Redemption was both swift
and satisfying. Within months of accepting a job at FSG, an independent house that
specialized in the kind of serious work he loved, Galassi surprised everyone by
taking on a thriller by a Chicago attorney named Scott Turow. The novel, Presumed
Innocent,
became a runaway best-seller that propelled Galassi up the editorial ranks and
ultimately positioned him as the heir to FSG’s founder, Roger Straus. In his spare time, Galassi
published two volumes of his own poetry, translated the work of Italian
modernist Eugenio Montale, and spent a decade as poetry editor of the Paris
Review. He
also accumulated every major editing award in existence.

Today Galassi says his job
is to ensure that FSG stays true to its mission of publishing important voices
as effectively as possible. When I asked him what he’d change about his job if
he could, he lamented that he doesn’t have as much time to read as he used to;
he also wishes he had “more of that immediate engagement with new authors.”
Note to readers: If you can find a way to make Galassi’s wishes come true,
yours might not be far behind either.

I don’t want
to bore you with a lot of questions about your childhood but I am curious if
there were any books that had a big impact on you at an early age.
I was a big
reader as a kid. I used to go to the little library in the town where we lived
in Massachusetts and read voraciously. I read everything. I was in the Weekly
Reader children’s book club and I remember loving The Wind in the Willows and Johnny Tremain and books like that. My grandmother was a big
reader. She lived in Boston and would come down and bring books like The
Alexandria Quartet or The Fall or Passage to India. I remember the romance and the exotic quality of
those books. I remember what they looked like, what they felt like. Eventually
all of my grandparents’ books ended up in our house, so there were a lot of old
books around. It wasn’t that I would sit and read them all. It was more that I
would pore over them and feel the textures of them. My grandfather was Italian,
so there were all these books about Italy, and I would pore through them and
look at the pictures of the different places. I was just very absorbed by books
as a way of escape and as something to escape into.

But there was
no particular book that altered the direction of your life?
I don’t think I
can point to any one book. But I was bookish. I was very unathletic. I had bad
eyesight. I was a typical geeky kid. I remember reading The Count of Monte
Cristo when I had the mumps or something
and just being overwhelmed by the romance of the story. I loved stories that
had a medieval or foreign feel. I loved The Golden Warrior and books about the ancient world. I loved all of
that stuff. And then I went away to school when I was thirteen and got very
interested in languages and poetry. In high school I got interested in
everything that I’m interested in now. That’s where I started to write and
edit. I was an editor of the school literary magazine. I remember the
experience of working with my friends on their writing and how exciting that
was to me, and how rewarding it was, even more than my own writing. I felt a
real sense of connection to them, and a certain effectiveness. That was a
powerful experience. I remember that my best friend, who wasn’t a particularly
literary guy—he was a jock, really—wrote a short story that ended up being
the best story published in the magazine in our time. I was blown away by the
intensity and the power of that story. I got a real thrill out of being present
at the creation of somebody else’s work.

Do you think your work as a poet and translator informs your work as
an editor and publisher?
That has always been secondary to my work as an
editor. I mean, maybe it wasn’t always secondary in my deepest heart, but when
I started to work in publishing I decided that I was going to put editing
first. And I’ve never had regrets about it. I guess I think of those things as
flowing into and out of each other.

When I started writing I didn’t have much confidence in my
own powers, but I think over time I’ve become more comfortable with what I can
do as a writer. That came through working on translation. I was translating
Montale, which was a deep interest that went on for many, many years. That
taught me a lot about writing. And obviously I’ve also learned a lot from
working with writers over the years. But I’ve never felt any ambivalence about
being a publisher as opposed to being a writer.

But is there anything in your experience as a
poet and translator that informs how you go about the business of being an
editor?
Perhaps I don’t think of authors as different
animals. I can give authors a sense of realism about what can be done in the
world with their work. I would never want to put myself on the same plane as
the writers I work with, but because I know what it is to write, I think I can
empathize with their desires and frustrations. There are some publishers who
think of the work as something for them to mold, and I don’t think of it quite
that way. But I wouldn’t want to convey the impression that I’m a writer who’s
also a publisher. I’m a publisher who’s also a writer. And as a rule I don’t
talk about my own writing with my authors, unless they bring it up. Because I’m
here to work for them.

Did you teach
yourself how to edit?
I guess so. My
first job was as an intern in the editorial department at Houghton Mifflin in
Boston in 1973. They just sort of threw you into it. Nobody was sitting there
and teaching you how to do it. I think you learn it by watching how the people
around you work with authors, and it happens almost by osmosis. There are many
different styles of editing, too. It’s an apprenticeship. There are courses you
can take to learn the mechanics of the business, like the Radcliffe course, but
I don’t think they teach you how to edit. Editing is more by-the-hip. You look
at a text and ask yourself how it can be improved. One thing I have noticed is
that when you’re a younger editor, you’re more intense about it. As you go
along, you relax a little. More and more, I feel that the book is the author’s.
You give the author your thoughts and it’s up to him or her to decide what to
do. One time [Jonathan] Franzen made fun of me about that. He didn’t take some
suggestion I had made and I said, “Well, it’s your book,” and he sort of mocked
me for that. [Laughter.] But that’s what
I really believe. I believe it with poetry, too. The texts are so personal.
Yes, there are times when I’ve worked with poets to edit their work, but
usually you either buy into what they’re doing or you don’t. If you don’t, you
shouldn’t be working with them, and if you do, you realize that they know what
they’re doing.

What were the hardest lessons for you to learn
when you were a younger editor?
One of the really hard lessons was realizing how
much of a crapshoot publishing is—how you can love something and do everything
you can for it, and yet fail at connecting it to an audience. Maybe you
misjudged it. Maybe it didn’t get the right breaks. One of the hardest things
to come to grips with is how important the breaks are. There’s luck in publishing, just like in
any human activity. And if you don’t get the right luck—if Mitchi [Michiko
Kakutani of the New York Times] writes an uncomprehending review, or if you don’t get
the right reviews, or if books aren’t in stores when the reviews come, or
whatever the hell it is—it may not happen. That was one of the hardest
lessons: how difficult it is to actually be effective.

Another
really hard thing is that, as a young editor, each book is like your baby. I
remember wanting to publish Peter Schjeldahl’s biography of Frank O’Hara so
desperately. I lost it to some other editor who paid more money, and I was
melancholy about it for months. Of course the book ended up never being written.
[Laughter.] But at the time I felt like
a piece of me had somehow been sawn off. I wanted to pour myself into that
project so much, and it takes time for that sense of wanting, and
identification—which is what publishers live on, really—to relax a little. I
see my young editors going through that and I empathize so much. But you have
to learn to let go of things. That was a very painful lesson.

But when I was young I had
so much reverence for writing. Elizabeth Bishop was my teacher in college—she was
my favorite teacher, and I revered her work, and I loved her as a person very,
very much—and I remember that when she would invite us over for dinner I would
get almost physically ill. It was this combination of conflicting feelings:
excitement, discomfort, a sense of unworthiness. It mattered so deeply that it
made me almost physically ill. Caring that much was painful. I don’t know if
that’s a lesson but it was certainly something where the intensity of my
devotion was overwhelming.

How did you
end up in New York?
I started in
Boston in 1973, and in 1975 they sent me down here. I wanted to be in New York.
After college I’d gone to England for a couple of years on a fellowship. I was
in Cambridge, but I spent a lot of time in London, and I realized that I wanted
to live in a metropolis. So I came down here. But I was working for Houghton
Mifflin, which was a Boston company that had very conflicted feelings about New
York. I was very interested in publishing young writers, and I felt that
Houghton was kind of stick-in-the-mud-ish and that a place like Knopf or Random
House would do that better. It was sort of callow of me because Houghton had
been very good to me. They had let me
start a poetry series, they had let me publish first novels. And I learned so
much there.

But
I was a young man in a hurry and eventually I was offered a job at Random
House. Jason [Epstein] was the one who hired me. And that didn’t go well. There
were a number of reasons, some of which were my fault. Jason had a sort of
sink-or-swim approach, which was fine, but he was also not terribly interested
in what other people were doing. I was used to being the kid who got to do what
he wanted. But I wasn’t a kid anymore and there was a lot of internal
competition and I just didn’t respond well to that. I didn’t do well. And Random House had Knopf next door, where
Bob Gottlieb was at the apogee of his effectiveness. He was a terrific
publisher. Random House was always sort of vying to live up to that. The books
I was doing were Knopf-y, within Random House, and I just didn’t know how to
make that work. Someone else could have, I think.

What did you
take away from those years at Random House?
I learned a huge
amount. Not all of it was pleasant. I learned a lot about competition and how
literary life really worked, because Houghton Mifflin was a little bit off to
the side. Random House had a kind of glossiness to it that wasn’t really me,
even though they were a very effective publisher. In the Bennett Cerf days,
Random House had been in some ways an ideal publisher because they were what I
would call a “best of breed” publisher. They could publish Gertrude Stein, and
Faulkner, and O’Neill, but also a lot of very commercial books. And they all
sat next to each other comfortably. By the time I got there that had dissipated
and there were all sorts of other pressures. But they were a much more
confident publisher than Houghton Mifflin.

Knopf
was also there, and you saw that it was about a sort of consistency of
commitment. They knew how to publish literary books. They published one after
another, and some of them would work and some of them wouldn’t, and they had a
system that was very well oiled. They had a place in the publishing universe,
so a lot of their work was already done for them. If they committed to
publishing an author, you knew that the Times Book Review was going to pay attention, and this, that, and the
other thing were going to happen. That’s what that little machine existed for,
and they ran it very well.

I actually think that when Bob left publishing,
to go to the New Yorker, everything
changed in my business. Bob was such a dominant figure in literary publishing
that he kind of controlled prices. A lot of people would go to him to be
published without auctions because they wanted to be with him. He sort of set
the prices in the sense that he wouldn’t participate in auctions. It wasn’t
that he was unfair—he was fair and generous. But he was reasonable. When he
left, that was over. Auctions became much more a part of how most books were
sold, and the prices went up, and the whole game became more about money. This
was in the mid-eighties, and it was a watershed moment in publishing.

I learned some other lessons that were not so
nice. It wasn’t a collegial place. People really didn’t wish each other well,
which I wasn’t used to. But looking back on it I think it was a difficult
situation that I could have responded to differently. I think I grew up a lot
during that time.

How did you
get from there to FSG?
After I was
fired, Roger [Straus] gave me a job. FSG was pretty far down at that point.
Roger’s son, Rog, had come back to the company and I think they were trying to
revivify it. Luckily, they hired me. And the minute I got there, things clicked
and I felt like I was totally at home.

This was a
real turning point for you.
It was.
Basically the first book I signed up was Presumed Innocent, which was a huge best-seller. It was a first for
FSG, and it was exactly the kind of book I was supposed to have been publishing
at Random House. Of course there was great joy in Mudville about that. [Laughter.] But you have to remember that when I was in
college, Lowell and Bishop were my teachers, and both of them were published by
FSG. So FSG books had an aura of sanctity. To come and work here was amazing. I
just felt like FSG was good at doing the kinds of books I wanted to do. It was
still the old days then—it was still a small independent publisher and that
was still a viable thing. But it had taken me a long time to get going as an editor.
I’d been in publishing for over ten years before I got to FSG and it all came
together.

Tell me a
little about the atmosphere of the place.
Did you ever
visit the old offices? When I came we were on the fourth floor of 19 Union
Square West. Calvin Trillin said it looked like a branch office of a failing
insurance company. It looked like something out of a porn magazine. It was
dirty linoleum and cockroaches and just really, really gross. When we moved up
to the old Atlantic Monthly Press office on the eleventh floor, my health
improved.

What about
the personalities?
In those days
Roger was there, of course. Pat [Strachan] was there. Bob Giroux was still
around. Michael di Capua. Aaron Asher was gone, but David Reiff was working
there as an editor. Rog was there. It was a very personality-filled company
with a lot of smart people who were very dedicated. But they never took
themselves too seriously. That’s one thing I’ve always loved about FSG. With
Knopf I always felt that there was a snootiness—they would look down their
noses. That was never true at FSG. It was scrappy; it was irreverent. I mean,
they took literature extremely seriously, but they never took themselves
seriously. It was a very good-natured place where people wished each other well.
I think people felt like they were doing something good. The pay was terrible,
and the conditions were terrible, but everybody knew why they were there. And
we all felt like it was a privilege to work there. I think both Roger and Bob
were responsible for that in different ways. Roger loved the game of
publishing. He loved competing. He loved having enemies, being outrageous,
swearing, making nasty comments. That was fun for him. Bob was more bankerly
and serious, but literature had an unquestioned importance for him. It was a
part of life that really mattered. I wouldn’t say that that doesn’t exist in
publishing today, but it does feel different today. At that time books had a
cultural primacy that they don’t quite have now. Books have been sort of moved
to the side by other media. It’s not that people don’t read books. But books
are one among a smorgasbord of options. Whereas in those days books were still
where cultural life was centered. People were decrying the influence of
television, but books were still more at the center.

A couple
years after that you became editor in chief. Was there any friction between you
and Roger?
Not a lot. I
think I was lucky that I came along at the moment in his life when I did. He
and Rog loved each other, but they were not natural business partners. I was
able to be a kind of business son in a way that his real son couldn’t. We had
some set-tos, but not a lot. He was much mellower and less threatened in his
later years. There had been a time when a number of really talented editors
didn’t survive at FSG.

What would
you and Roger argue about?
Well, he didn’t
always like what I liked, but he was pretty tolerant. There would be issues
involving money and how much we could pay for things. Roger loved to fight with
people. I always thought that wasn’t good business practice. I thought it was
better to get along with people so you could have another deal with them down
the line. I remember one time when I said, “Don’t you think we should make up
with so-and-so?” He said, “Don’t give me any of that Christian stuff, Galassi.
I’m a vindictive Jew.” [Laughter.] He enjoyed having enemies. But all in all we had fun together,
and he was like a father to me in a lot of ways.

Tell me about
the transition from editor in chief to publisher.
That was a
little difficult in the sense that it had to do with Roger’s mortality. When he
sold the company in 1994, the deal was that he would run it as long as he
could. He did, and he continued to act like an independent for many years. But
he slowed down eventually. One of the difficulties I had was that there was a
lot of deferred maintenance. In other words, things kept going in a certain way
longer than maybe they should have in some areas. The company remained a very
personal fiefdom of Roger’s even after it had been owned by someone else for a
long time. And with that goes what I would call deferred maintenance. The
biggest and most significant change I made was bringing in Andrew Mandel to be
the deputy publisher. He helped organize and rationalize our practices in a lot
of ways. It’s still an editorially driven house—the editors still decide what
we’re going to publish—but the business aspects are a little less
seat-of-the-pants and a little more planned out and fiscally responsible. The
other thing is that I wasn’t editor in chief anymore. I do fewer books and have
a lot of other responsibilities. I usually have another editor work with me on
projects. I’ve had to step back from some things. I can’t edit these
thousand-page books with the kind of assiduity that I used to. I’m still
editing a lot of books, but there are just more other things I have to do. It’s
like how I said earlier that the book is your baby—now the company becomes
your baby. You’re thinking about ways to strategize for the future. You’re
thinking about, “How is FSG going to continue to be a literary publisher?” It’s
more about the organism as a whole and less about any single book. You’re
asking yourself, “How can we maximize the lives of all the books we do, both in the current environment and
in the future?”

What are you
looking at when you’re thinking about those things?
I’m thinking
about the proportions of what we publish, for example. Another one of the
things I’ve been excited about recently is bringing Mitzi Angel here to run
Faber. Stephen Page and I decided to take Faber and make it a bigger player in
the conspectus of American publishing. That’s a really exciting thing and I
think Mitzi’s doing a fabulous job. So we’re trying to expand our bouquet. We
also have people like Lorin [Stein] and Courtney [Hodell] coming along who are
doing really fresh publishing, and we’re trying to give them the support they
need. We’re also trying to expand our nonfiction publishing to balance the
literary publishing because a lot of serious readers read nonfiction and we
want those readers too.

Tell me about some of the high moments in your
life as a publisher.
One of my happy moments has to do with Denis
Johnson. We published two books by Denis in the early nineties: Jesus’ Son, which was one of the best
books I ever published, and Resuscitation of a Hanged Man, which was also a wonderful
book. But then Denis left. He went to Robert Jones at Harper. He was
dissatisfied. He didn’t think that we were doing enough for his books. But he came
back to us for Tree of Smoke and it became a New York Times best-seller and won the
National Book Award. So there was a great sense of happiness and accomplishment
that we came back together and were able to help him achieve so much.

What are some other great moments like that?
When the manuscript of [Marilynne Robinson’s] Gilead came in. This is a book that
had been under contract for so many years that…it wasn’t that we forgot about
it, but we didn’t know if or when it would appear. And then it came in. It was
perfect. Almost nothing was done to it. It was one of those experiences of
spiritual uplift. To come across a book that you knew was a great book? And you
were reading it first!

The second great moment is when it actually becomes a book—a
physical thing. I always feel that when you put a book into proofs it gets
better just by virtue of being set in print. I know a lot of writers feel that
way too. It takes on a kind of permanence. And then it’s even more satisfying
when it becomes an actual book.

How did you
meet Alice McDermott?
Alice was sent
to me by Harriet Wasserman, who was a very important person in the beginning of
my publishing life. Her office at Russell & Volkening was in the same
building as Houghton Mifflin’s New York office. I got to know her and
eventually became very close to her. We did a number of really interesting
projects together and Alice was one of the first. She gave me these pages from
this book about a young woman working at a vanity press, and that was the
beginning of A Bigamist’s Daughter. She
was such an assured writer. She had such definition and wit and this very
subtle, cool, deadpan humor. She’s one of the most amazing stylists I know. And
she’s such a modest and well-spoken and well-behaved person. I took that
project with me from Houghton Mifflin to Random House, and I remember that,
after she turned it in, several weeks went by and somehow it came out that I
hadn’t paid her the advance that was due on delivery. I said, “Why didn’t you
tell me? Why didn’t you ask for it?” She was too well-behaved to ask. [Laughter.] She’s someone who didn’t write just one wonderful
book—she’s produced a lot of them. Her methods of writing are very original.
She’s always writing two books at once, and she ends up choosing one. The other
one goes in a drawer somewhere. Which means there are all these incredible,
unrealized books by Alice McDermott somewhere. But she uses one to bring out
the other. I think it’s a very interesting psychological thing. It’s like she’s
always having twins. One twin comes to life and the other twin is still
gestating somewhere.

One thing
that always fascinates me is how people view their jobs and their various
responsibilities. Give me a sense of how you view yours.
I think my
responsibility—my task and my joy—is to try to make FSG as effective an
instrument for publishing as possible. To make it strong and to help it make a
difference in the publishing business. FSG is a lot different than it was when
I came here. But what I don’t think is different is the attitude about what’s
important to publish. That is my biggest responsibility—to make sure that that
stays at the center of what we’re doing. And that we believe literature is
important and that our mission is to enhance the dissemination of it. So while
everything has changed around the core of FSG, I don’t think the core has
changed at all.

And if you
had to articulate that core and what’s important to publish?
I think it’s
about the voices of writers. FSG really became FSG when Bob [Giroux] came and
brought people like Flannery O’Connor and Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop.
Those writers, who were all very distinctive and idiosyncratic, contributed to
the essence of American literature in their time. And our desire is to continue
to be a place where people like that feel at home and feel that we’re doing the
best we can for their work—and the public feels that the books we publish have
value. It’s a business, and I love the fact that it’s a business. I really
think it’s much better for publishing to be a commercial enterprise. But it’s
not just a business. It’s about selling
something that you believe in.

What houses
do you feel competitive with?
I feel very
competitive with Knopf. But I feel competitive—and when I say “competitive” I
also mean that I feel collegial—with people all over. You and Morgan
[Entrekin]. New Directions, who I love. Penguin Press, both in America and in
the UK, is a really fabulous publishing house. I think Cape is great. I think
Chatto is great.

Who do you
feel the most competitive with?
I guess we still
think of Knopf as the big giant. We’re the we-try-harder. But we’re not really
like Knopf. We’re different. We’re smaller. But I think they do a really good
job with a lot of great books.

When you
suspect you’re going up against them for a book, what’s your pitch?
My answer to
that is that it only makes sense for authors to be published here who want to
be published here. In other words, if they buy into our approach and feel that
we will do well by their work, that works. If it’s about money alone we’re not
going to tend to win those contests. Someone else can always come up with more
money. So what we have to offer is ourselves, and our approach, and what I
would do to compete is just tell the author what we think about the book, ask
him what he wants from a publisher, and show him how we’ve done other books in
the past. What else can I do?

What’s the
biggest practical difference, in your mind, between FSG and Knopf?
We’re smaller,
and that means we can give more attention to each project. We have a very good
publishing team. Jeff Seroy is a brilliant publicity and marketing guy. Spencer
Lee, our sales guy, is terrific. And there’s a cohesiveness to what we do.

It can be
difficult to articulate what exactly you’re looking for as an editor, but tell
me about something recently that captivated you for whatever reason, and talk
about why.
The book that
we’re doing now that comes to mind is All the Living by C. E. Morgan. It’s a first novel by a young woman
and it’s about Kentucky. It was sent to me by Ellen Levine, who is Marilynne
Robinson’s agent. We publish Marilynne, and this author admires her a lot. I
think it was offered to other publishers too, and I don’t know if we offered
the most money, but we certainly paid a serious advance for it. What I felt was
so unusual about it was the voice and the consistency of her approach. She’s
created a sort of small myth. It’s concise. It’s intense. It’s very different
from most other fiction we see in that it’s so much about the place. It’s very
American in that way. It’s not ironic. It’s not disabused. It’s very American
in its romance about place and about death and love. I found it very primal and
beautiful in a restrained way.

But right now we’re also publishing John Wray’s
book, Lowboy, which Eric’s doing.
Courtney’s doing the Wells Tower book [Everything Ravaged, Everything
Burned]. Lorin’s about to publish Clancy
Martin’s book, How to Sell. All
of these books are different in terms of their angles of attack, but they’re
all very strong voices. And they don’t sound like anyone else. I think the
voice is the most important thing—and then the shape.

One
thing that I don’t see a lot of today, and that I used to be very taken with,
is the bigger kind of novel. Social novels, even. I think of The
Twenty-seventh City. That was a first novel
that just blew me away. On the one hand there was The Twenty-seventh
City and on the other hand was The
Virgin Suicides.

Another book that I’m really excited about is Amy Waldman’s first
novel, The Submission, which is a social
novel. It’s a fictional account of the attempt to build the World Trade Center
memorial. It’s a fantastic book about politics, art, religion, and all the
different issues there. I very seldom see novels that have that kind of social
reach.

What else are you looking for when you’re
evaluating a piece of fiction? Are you looking for a certain kind of
sensibility or anything like that?
I think that would fall under
voice. I remember when I read [Roberto] Bolaño’s Savage Detectives. I read an Italian version
and just thought it had so much verve and humor. It was so sexy. It had a kind
of buoyancy and it was so alive. Voice is one way of looking at it but
aliveness is another way. And I think voice is kind of being killed in a lot of
writing today. When you look at the New Yorker, the voices are much less idiosyncratic than they
used to be. It’s being edited in a different way than it used to be.

Why do you
think that is?
I don’t know.
They used to publish a lot of long pieces and it may have something to do with
readers’ attention spans being different. We published a very good book last
year, the autobiography of the composer John Adams. The New Yorker ran a piece of it and the author told me that they
tried to iron out the idiosyncrasies of his style. He gave them a fight. He was
very bemused by why they would try to change his little quirks.

One of the books that I was most proud of publishing last year was
the Lowell-Bishop correspondence. The thing that makes that book so wonderful
is the idiosyncrasy of the way they write.

I have a quote for you: “Most words put down on
paper are not interesting, or don’t make sense, or are stilted. You can tell
within two pages that something is not going to work.” That’s you, twelve years
ago. I completely agree and I’m curious what common problems you notice in the
work of beginning writers.
I used to be kind of uptight about writing-school
writing—it can be hard to emerge with your own voice—but I’m less aware of
that now. I think a lot of people learn to write by imitating and that’s
perfectly legitimate. That’s how poets learn to write. I remember that
Elizabeth Bishop used to make us write imitations of other writers. But if you
want to publish your work, you better have moved beyond that. Only a few people
in the world are meant to be writers. And those are people who really can’t say
things the way other people would. It’s involuntary. Milosz had this great line
that poetry should only be written under unbearable pressure and in the hope
that good spirits, not evil, choose us for their instrument. The idea is that
the people who should write are the people who can’t not write. I think there are a
lot of people who want to write, and who want to say something, but a lot of
them don’t have anything to say.

What will make you want to throw a first novel
across the room?
Pretentiousness. When the writer is trying to be
cool, or ironic, or when the work just isn’t genuine. It’s like what [U.S.
Supreme Court Justice] Potter Stewart said about pornography: You know it when
you see it. You can tell when you’re reading something genuine. You feel it.
There are writers whose voices are quite self-conscious and who I think are
great. André Aciman, for example. I’m working on his new novel right now. His
writing is about self-consciousness. It’s about questioning what you just said, revising
what you just said. It’s very Proustian in that way. And I love it. It’s very
genuine. That’s just the way his mind works.

What is it about the work of a debut poet that
will make it stand out from the others enough that you want to take it on? Is
it different than with fiction?
It’s not really different. It’s the voice and the
angle and the attitude. We don’t take on very many debut poets because we have
so many ongoing writers. I miss that. I read that piece in the New Yorker about the Dickman brothers
and felt a little out of it.

Is there a debut poet you’ve taken on recently
who you could talk about?
Maureen McLane is an example. I knew Maureen as a
critic before I read her poetry. She’s a brilliant critic of contemporary
poetry. And then I read her poems, which have a kind of freshness that takes
you back to the modernism of H. D. and Pound. It’s very classical in its
directness. I thought, “This is totally outside the lingo of most poets.” It’s
pure and in touch with tradition in a very direct way. I felt the same way
about Eliza Griswold’s book, which we did a couple of years ago and which won
the Rome Prize. Both of those poets write in ways that are outside of the lingo
of the various schools of poetry. They’re different. You can’t tell who their
teachers were.

You’ve lamented the blockbuster mentality
that’s arisen in publishing, where it’s become easier for a publisher to sell a
first novel and harder for an author to build a career over a number of books
that sell modestly. Can you speak to that for writers?
Suppose I had written a first novel that five
publishers wanted to publish and the range of offers was from fifty thousand
dollars to four hundred thousand. I probably wouldn’t go with the
fifty-thousand-dollar offer, and I might well go with the
four-hundred-thousand-dollar offer. But I hope that I would think through how
the publisher was going to try to make that money back. What’s the publisher’s
idea of what to do with my book? Of course if you’re a young person who has
never made a penny and all of a sudden somebody offers you a lot of money,
you’re going to take it. You need it. But I don’t think that’s necessarily the
right thing to do.

Why?
Because if your book doesn’t do well and earn that
money back, or make a credible showing, you’re going to have a harder time the
next time. That’s why I think the old system was better. Forty years ago, your
agent would likely have sent your book to editors one at a time, but even if it
was done as a multiple submission, the differential between the offers would
not have been as great. The choice would be made on other bases. I know that
this may sound self-serving, but I do think that real careers are built
stepwise. I still believe that. And I haven’t seen a lot of careers built the
other way. I think a lot of agents, especially younger ones, feel that the
commitment the big advance represents is what’s going to bring the author
success. But I don’t think that’s true.

That’s the Andrew Wylie philosophy. You have
said that FSG is a living contradiction to that model, where more money is
perceived as meaning more oomph.
I think that a really good agent should be able to
get the right publisher, which the agent has already figured out, get as much
money as she can from that publisher, and make a deal, rather than have the
amount of money determine the sale. That’s what the best agents do. They may
solicit a lot of action, but they know where they want to place the author.
They may use competition to jack up their preferred publisher as high as they
will go, and there may be times when the differential is so big that they
aren’t going to be able to go with that target publisher, but I think that’s
the right way to do it: for the agent to work the process so that the author
ends up with the right publisher paying as much as they comfortably can.
There’s an edge of commitment that makes the publisher feel they have to be
alert, but they haven’t gone beyond their zone of comfort for the book.

But Andrew
might say that they should be pushed beyond their comfort zone. Is there any
chance he’s right?
I haven’t seen
that here. We don’t sit around and say, “Well, we paid x for this book so we’d better do something special.”
Everyone knows what the situation is. But even if you’d better do it doesn’t
mean that it’s going to work.

But we know
that there are different levels of effort.
Sure.

That’s why I
sometimes wonder if there’s any chance he’s right. I mean, I’m with you. I work
at Grove, for God’s sake.
Part of what I’m
talking about is the agent using the process to push the publisher to the point
where it’s costing them something to acquire the book. They’re not just picking
up the book for nothing and throwing it against the wall and hoping it sticks.
They’re going to have to think and be creative in publishing it. You can blame
Andrew all you want, but the people who are responsible for the overpayments in
publishing are publishers, not agents or authors. The publishers are the ones
who agree to do it, and they’re the only ones who can be blamed for it. We walk
away from books that we’d like to publish every day because they’re out of our
comfort zone—out of our rational calculation of what we think we should be
risking on them. Very good agents, who I have a lot of respect for, have said
to me, “If I were you I wouldn’t be paying big advances.” I think that if we
could inject some of that realism into the process we’d have a healthier
business.

They say that
to you kind of off the record?
Yeah. I’m not
going to say who they are, but yes, very good agents have said that to me.
Because I think they understand that if the publishers kill themselves off, the
agents aren’t going to have people to publish their authors’ work. It’s not
that I don’t want authors to make money. I do. I want them to get rich, because
then their publishers will be doing well too. But I don’t want them to get rich
at the expense of the larger institution. That’s no help to them. It will
weaken the publishers, and then we won’t be effective.

Are there any other insights you can offer
writers about agents?
I think the ideal publishing experience is when the
agent and the publisher can work together to promote the career of the author.
Yes, the agent sometimes barks at the publisher about something, but basically
they all feel that they’re on the same team. That’s how really good agents
operate. Really good agents are also just as devoted to the work as you and I
are. It’s the same profession from a different angle. As I said, authors should
want an agent who knows where to place them—not someone who’s throwing a ball
up in the air and seeing who jumps highest.

But if you’re a writer, and you don’t work in
publishing, it can be hard to figure out which agents do that.
But what you can tell is how they react to your
work. You can listen to what they say about it editorially and aesthetically.
That’s the first thing you would want: someone who understands what you’re
doing and is not trying to make you into something you aren’t.

But once the agent has cleared that hurdle in
your mind, as a writer, how do you figure out the other stuff? How do you know
how good they actually are at placing your work at the right house?
I think it’s like picking a dentist—you go by
recommendation and word of mouth and looking at who else the agent represents.
What’s happened to those other writers? I think that’s how agents get their
clients.

With
nonfiction, agenting has evolved to the point where agents have become very
involved in the proposals.
Sometimes they
write them.

Exactly. Do
you think it’s ethical for agents to work very heavily on a proposal without
disclosing that to prospective editors?
We often talk
about this. I think that a good agent is an editor, but at the same time it’s
not ethical for an agent to write a proposal for an author. The author needs to
write it. The agent can criticize it and suggest improvements—and should—but
sometimes we wonder who actually wrote the proposal. You can usually get a feel
for that. But I don’t think it’s ethical for an agent to do more than make
suggestions to the author. They have to write it themselves.

How do you
feel about the new primacy that agents have assumed in the lives of writers?
Editors and publishers have been displaced to some extent. Are you okay with
that?
What I don’t
like is when an agent tries to interpose his or her body between you and the
author—when the agent is proprietary and everything needs to be communicated
through them and they don’t want you to have your own relationship with the
author. I find that very frustrating and alienating and counter to the idea I
was just talking about where it’s a collaboration between the agent and the
publisher and the author. I think you’re right in that over time the agent has
become more important in the author’s life, partly because authors move around
more than they used to. But when you’ve worked with an author over many years,
you do develop a really close relationship. The agent has his or her own
relationship with the author, and a good agent wants you to be close with the author.

What do you
find most frustrating about agents?
I have a certain
sympathy for agents on the money thing. They’re getting pressure from their
authors. Just the way that you and I feel like, “Well, if we don’t come up with
x amount of money, Ann Godoff will,”
they feel that too. They may lose their author if they can’t deliver what the
author needs. I empathize with that. But I think a strong agent is confident
enough and knowledgeable enough about the business, and about history, and
about how careers work in the long term, that she can say to her author, “Look,
this is what’s in your interest. It may not seem to be in the short term, but
it is in the long term.” And that’s coming from the seat of experience. I’m
close to a number of agents, personally, and I have a lot of respect for their
contribution to our business. And yes, we argue. We don’t always agree. I
sometimes feel that they’re trying to take advantage. But all in all, it’s just
like how I said it only makes sense for authors to be here who want to be here:
The agents who we work with best are the ones who get why FSG is good for their
authors. It’s a collaborative process and doesn’t need to be hostile. A really
good agent is your ally as well as your adversary at times.

On the flip
side of the world of huge advances is the midlist writer, who is really
struggling today because of the computer and the sales track. Put yourself in
that person’s shoes and, knowing what you know, tell me what you’d do to try to
change your fate.
Most books have
to be midlist because only a few can be best-sellers. If you’re a serious
writer, you should be writing the books you’re going to write.

But what if
you have some ambition, as all writers do, and really want a readership and
think that you deserve one?
If they deserve
one, they’ll get one. I believe that. I believe that eventually they will get
their readership. Now, I also think there are way more people writing books
than are going to get a readership. But I think that the books that really make
a difference are going to have a readership. It may not be immediate. There are
many examples of writers who have labored in relative obscurity for a long time
until their ship came in. Look at Bolaño. His great success is posthumous and
not even in his own country.

Writing
is its own reward. It has to be. I really believe that. This is a part of
publishing that’s really hard to come to grips with. But publishers can’t make
culture happen the way they want it to happen. They can stand up for what they
believe in, and they can work to have an impact, but in the end it’s like the
brilliant thing that Helen Vendler said about poets. She was asked, “What’s the
canon?” and she said something like, “The poets are going to decide what the
canon is. The poets who poets read are the canon.” I think that, in the end,
that’s true about all literature. The books that people read over time, and
keep reading, are the books that matter. We can huff and puff and pay money and
advertise and everything else, but in the end, if the readers don’t come, we
can’t do anything about it.

Twenty years ago you called writing “a very
cruel sport.” Has it gotten more or less cruel since then?
I think it’s probably gotten more cruel because
there’s more competition for people’s time as readers. But all sports are
cruel. Golfing is a cruel sport because only a few people are going to play on
the PGA Tour. Poetry is a good bellwether because there are only a few poets
who matter in the end. Even a lot of the poets who win honors are going to be
filtered out in the end. It doesn’t mean they aren’t good. It is cruel. It’s
Darwinian. So if you’re going to be a writer, you’d better take rewards from it
over and above the public recognition. I remember something Montale said to the
effect that even being a minor poet is an honorable thing. Being a novelist or
a poet whose books aren’t popular is a wonderful accomplishment.

In talking about book promotion you once said
something interesting about believing that authors should focus on their work
and leave the promotion to others. Some people would disagree with that.
Unfortunately publishers need authors to do some of
that. We need authors to be able to go on Charlie Rose and the Today show and All Things
Considered.
We’re dying for them to do those things. We’re selling authors, not books. We’re
selling people the illusion of an experience with an author. They want to know
what the author looks like, what he smells like. They want the full experience.
In the old days it was “Read John Updike’s new book.” Now it’s “Meet John
Updike” or “Listen to John Updike on the audio version” or “Watch John Updike
give a reading.” All of that can be very distracting for writers. Certain
writers aren’t any good at it. If you think about it, if a writer has forty
good writing years, and he publishes a book every two years, does he want to
spend a third year of that cycle on selling his book, in the United States and
in Europe and everywhere else? That’s a big chunk out of his working life. Even
though it can make things hard for us, I’m very sympathetic to authors who
don’t want to do that. It’s not what they’re best at. Their real talent is
writing.

What drives you crazy about authors?
It’s hard for them to drive me crazy. I actually
really empathize with authors. Of course there are certain authors who are so
obsessive about every little thing, and sometimes I have to deal with those
things. But I can usually say to them, almost as a joke, “You’re the most
obsessive person I’ve ever worked with!” But their perfectionism is what makes
them that way, and of course that’s something I value in their work. And then
there are authors who are just very, very selfish—just like there are people
who are very selfish. You can’t admire that. They can be mean, sometimes. I
don’t like authors who aren’t appreciative of the people who help them publish
their work. Some of our most famous authors are among our nicest, and then
there are others who have been among our most disliked. They can earn the love
or the contempt of the people who work for them. But by and large I feel that
their problems are very human problems. I think authors are heroic, so I tend
to think that their narcissism is justified. And let’s face it: The authors you
are working with are ones who you’ve decided are important, so you’ve already
bought into them.

You have
lamented how the role of the editor has changed over the years—that it used to
be more about the text and now it’s more about promotion.
I remember being
so impressed by something I was once told by Bob Loomis, who’s still going
strong in his eighties and is one of the great editors at Random House. This is
someone who has published so many award winners and best-sellers of all
different kinds. He once said to me, “I really just work on getting the books
into the best shape possible and I don’t worry that much about the selling and
so forth. That’s other people’s jobs.” I thought, “Wow. That’s the opposite of
what everyone says you should be doing.” In a way, maybe he didn’t have to
worry about it because he has such credibility—people believe what he says
about a book and go to work. I actually think that’s how it works in
publishing: Once you’ve done it successfully a few times, it gets a lot easier.
People pull with you instead of you feeling that you have to pull them along.
It’s true that the editor today should have ideas—he should be market-wise in
acquiring books and have ideas about how to sell them. But it all starts with
the book. I think the editor’s principal job is to identify books and to help
them be the best they can, and then to work with the rest of the company to get
them across. I think Bob was absolutely right about the primary contribution an
editor can make.

But that is
changing, wouldn’t you say?
I guess it is. I
hear a lot of stuff about how editors behave and how they’re playing hopscotch
and how they don’t really care how much they pay for books because they know
they won’t be around when the chickens come home to roost. I just haven’t seen
that. Maybe I’m working in a bit of a bubble because we’re a little different
than some of the other houses. I hear stories about editors who are competitive
with other editors within their publishing house. I think that’s very
counterproductive and kind of takes the fun out of it. It’s a collegial
business. You’re on a team together and not trying to best each other. But I
see people like you and Lorin and Eric coming along who have the same sort of idealism
about it that people in my generation had. I mean, why else would you do it? If
you wanted to make a killing, you wouldn’t go into publishing. You have to be
doing it out of love.

Speaking of
Eric, would you take us inside the FSG editorial meeting? What’s it like?
When I first got
here I wasn’t very happy with the FSG editorial meeting. I remember Bob Giroux
saying, “The editorial meeting is a disaster. Roger has everyone report on what
they’re doing, and Roger has to be in the meeting. He’s too dominant.” That was
very indicative of the struggles between them and their differences in
personalities. It was true, though. There was something about our editorial
meeting that didn’t allow for the kind of free-flowing quality that you want,
where you bat around ideas and talk about the competition and so on. I don’t
think I was ever very good at that—I hate meetings—but Eric runs the meeting
now and he is good at it. He’s much more
relaxed. We go around and talk about various projects, but there’s also some
general discussion. We don’t use the editorial meeting to acquire books. We use
it to talk about what’s being considered and what we might think about doing.
Even in a small house like this, we don’t really know what’s been submitted to
everyone else. There are ways of solving that but they’re quite laborious.
Sometimes I hear about books that were sold and think, “Why didn’t we get to
see that?” Of course we did get
to see it, but I didn’t know about it. There are so many books out there that I
wish we could have published. But as one of my bosses once said, “Don’t worry
about the ones that got away. Worry about the ones you’re stuck with.” [Laughter.] There’s another line that was said by Ferris
Greenslet, who was a famous editor at Houghton Mifflin in the twenties. One of
his little nostrums that was quoted at us was “When in doubt, decline.”

Talk to me a
little about publishing in translation, which is one of the things that FSG is
known for. This year you’ve had amazing success with Bolaño. Do you feel that
it’s getting easier?
I think we’re
getting better at it. I don’t know if I’ve talked about my current little
buzzword that I’m thinking about a lot: essentialism. We should only be doing things that are essential.
I think that’s a good way to approach doing translations. I myself have been
guilty of not always following that rule. But Bolaño is essential. And Gomorrah, by [Roberto] Saviano, is one of the most important
European books of the last five years. We’re just being more selective. Another
book we just bought that I’m wild about is Roberto Calasso’s La Folie
Baudelaire. It’s about Baudelaire’s Paris.
He’s been published by Knopf until recently but for some reason they were in
doubt and declined, and we picked it up.

In
a way, the market in translation is an interesting microcosm of publishing in
general. You have to approach it in the same way that you do as a publisher,
where you’re out selling books to the world that you’re saying are important.
But you know that some of them will turn out to be important and a lot of them
won’t. You can’t just go for the books that all of your foreign colleagues tell
you are their important books—they have their reasons for telling you
that—but the few books that are actually going to have an impact in your
market. You have to look for exactly what you’re looking for as a reader. And
that’s not always the big books. It’s not always the books that are part of the
big commerce of publishing and that you hear about on the fast track. Sometimes
it’s books that are published by small publishers and sort of come in from the
side. On the other hand of that you have Gomorrah, which was the biggest book in Italian publishing in many years and
which we did hear about on the fast track.

What’s your
favorite way to hear about an international book?
From a friend. I
actually have a scout in Italy. It’s the only country where we have a scout.
She’s a really smart woman named Caterina Zaccaroni. I don’t necessarily hear
about the books from her, but I’ll say to her, “What about this one? What about
that one?” and she has opinions about them. She saves me a lot of work. And she
has books that she pushes on me herself—books that she has decided are
important. There’s one book that she’s been trying to get me to publish for
several years now, and I may just cave in and do it because she’s so passionate
about it. But one of the ways that FSG became an important publisher was
because Roger had these people in Europe who would recommend books to him. He
published all of these books in translation that other people hadn’t picked up.
Italian in particular was important for the early FSG. But it’s hard to be
confronted with the number of so-called “important” foreign books and then to
figure out which few are right to publish.

Do you enjoy
the international book fairs?
I love
Frankfurt. Roger loved it and I inherited that love from him. I love the
rituals of Frankfurt. You basically have the same appointments every year. You
see the same people. You see them age and think, “Oh, if they’re aging, I must
be aging.” [Laughter.] It’s more about
relationships than doing business. We try not to buy books at Frankfurt, but
renewing our ties is very important. And Frankfurt is one place where American
publishing doesn’t dominate as much, which is nice to see. A lot of American
publishers don’t really get Frankfurt, and don’t enjoy it, because they don’t
engage with the foreign publishers as much. But that’s the fun part.

What disturbs
you most about the way the industry has changed?
What disturbs me
most about publishing today, or the reading world, is that readers aren’t
loyal. You can’t count on continuity. There’s still a certain base of readers
for an author, but it’s much lower than it used to be. Readers don’t stick with
authors. I think that’s partly because readers are more occasional now, and
they don’t come to books on their own as much as they’re told by somebody.
They’re told by Oprah. They’re told by their book club. So they may read
another book, but the next book is the next
book they’re told they should read. It’s not that they read Anna
Karenina and then go out and read War
and Peace. They’re less informed and less
knowledgeable. They need help. I love book clubs, but I think they’re
indicative of the fact that reading is now an occasional entertainment for a
lot of people and not the kind of obsessive devotion that it used to be. It
feels like a lot more people used to read every novel by John Updike, for
example, and I don’t think those kind of readers are as present as they used to
be.

Should
publishers be doing anything to try to reverse that trend?
I don’t know the
answer to that. I always feels sort of ham-fisted when the ABA or AAP does
those “Get caught reading” campaigns. That’s not what’s going to change
people’s reading habits. I think what publishers should do is try to publish
books as well as possible and try to reach their readers in as innovative ways
as possible. We have these terrible problems—that book reviews don’t matter
anymore, that there are fewer of them all the time. And what is taking their
place? How do you reach your readers? I guess you have to do it through the
Web, but I don’t know if I’m buying any books because of Internet marketing. I
just wonder how we’re going to find the readers. The readers are there. Look,
we’ve sold a hundred thousand copies of 2666. Somehow, people learned about that book and wanted to read it. That
shows you that the readers are there. It’s just getting harder to get their
attention and to get them interested.

What is your take on the current retail landscape?
Bad. Actually, at our sales conference yesterday,
some of the salesmen were saying that neighborhood bookstores are doing better
in the economic crisis because people are more interested in buying locally and
supporting small businesses. I think this crisis could have a lot of good
effects for the culture. It’s slowing things down—slowing down the pace of
change—and making people aware of what’s important in life. It’s not just
more, more, more. But I think all of the traditional bookstore chains are in
trouble. Amazon is very, very effective. But I think Amazon is a potential…it’s
a frenemy. It’s not just interested in being a bookstore. So I think we have to
sell our own books to people.

Are you guys doing that?
We do it. We don’t want to muscle out the
retailers. But I think that in the conspectus of the different players in the
publishing business, the bookstores are the weakest link in the chain. It’s
just like with music. There are always going to be bookstores, but I don’t
think that’s where the future of bookselling is.

page_5: 

Where do you
think the future of bookselling is?
With the
publishers. I think the publishers will be selling the books directly.

Are you
talking about digitally or physical books?
Both. I think
there are always going to be people who want physical books, but I think the
digital part of the business is going to increase. One of the things that all
publishers are worried about now is this idea that a book on Kindle is worth
$9.99. If that establishes the price of what a book is worth, what does that
say? What if I want to sell Maureen McLane’s book as a hardcover for
twenty-four dollars? I think that’s a problem. Again, it’s a lesson from the
music business. People have been used to the idea that intellectual
property—that a book, an artwork—is worth a certain amount of money. It’s a
mark of respect, in a way. But if you turn it into a widget, where every book
is worth the same amount, it’s not good. This is where the author, the agent, and
the publisher should be working together to protect their mutual interest. And
not have the business be decided by a seller.

By Amazon.
Yeah. We should
be deciding what a book is worth, not them. It’s a problem.

Are you
envisioning bookstores going away the way that record stores did?
I think that
bookstores are going to be around, but I don’t think they’re going to be the
major channel. Especially if we go more and more digital.

It will be
like in music, where there’s a nice little record store down the street that
nobody goes to.
They buy their
music on iTunes. I still buy CDs, but a lot of my friends don’t bother. They
download it onto their iPods.

So how do we
protect our authors’ interests and our interests in a situation like this where
it’s very complicated and there are a lot of competing interests, including
bookstores?
Look, I don’t want bookstores to go away. But I think they’re
vulnerable. I just don’t think we should be letting a retailer decide what a
book is worth.

What’s the
bigger issue in your mind? Is it the digital stuff or is it the old issues like
returns? It’s complicated because it’s all happening at different speeds.
In a digital
world there would be no returns. Returns are a huge drag on our business. The
waste is just enormous, and once that is gone it will help our business
enormously.

Do you think
this digital stuff is going to happen that quickly?
Well, it seems
to be speeding up. It’s still a very small part of the business, which is
something you have to keep in mind as you do your business. We’re still selling
physical books, mainly, and mainly through bookstores. But everyone’s obsessed
with change, and everyone’s afraid that if they aren’t on top of it, they’re
going to be eaten. And they should be afraid. But in the meantime we have to
continue publishing the old fashioned way. That’s the thing about these kinds
of changes: They’re all add-ons. Yes, you’re doing Internet marketing, but
you’re still doing all of the old processes too. So that’s a strain on our
systems—we have to do all of this R&D. But still, as I said earlier, when
the dust has cleared from this crisis we’re in, I think we’ll have a smaller
business but a healthier business.

How do you
feel about paperback originals?
I’m for them.
We’re doing more of them. There’s a practical problem with paperback originals,
which is that you can’t pay that much for them. So you have to find an author
who understands that. People always say, “Why don’t you do this book as a
paperback original?” Well, fine. But the advance available for that is going to
be about a quarter of what you might get if we did it in hardcover. We still
haven’t solved that. But we’re doing it more and I think it’s the right way to
publish a lot of books. And if it works, it can launch an author and later they
can do a hardcover book.

You have
voiced concerns about the model of conglomerate publishing and its demands of
growth in a notoriously low-growth business. When you look toward the future
and think about what’s best for authors—serious authors—what would be the
best publishing industry of the future look like?
I think small is
beautiful. I think small houses like yours and mine are very hospitable to
serious writers because they become part of the family. It’s a family business
in many ways. When a relationship is good, and when the results are good, the
author becomes part of the family of the publishing house. There’s a kind of
collaborative emotional component. The fact is, in the digital world where
everybody can do everything at his own desk, it’s not like you have to go to a
Simon & Schuster to get your book published effectively. It can be done by
anybody who’s a pro. What you get in the small house is a connection with
someone who understands you and can promote your work with a personal
commitment.

Do you feel
like the big, publicly traded media companies might give up on book publishing?
I actually think
there is going to be more consolidation. Look at something like Penguin. They
have a lot of little pods—that’s their approach—and it works well for them. I
think it’s possible that some of these companies will get spun off. But if I
were running one of these big companies I would try to have smaller entities
within them. I don’t really know the answer. Look at what’s happening to
Houghton Mifflin. It’s so sad. The midsize companies have really been squeezed
worse than the small ones.

A few years
before FSG was sold, you said the company was doing well because it wasn’t able
to play “the money game.” Now that you are able to play the money game, and
sometimes do pay big advances, why would you say you’re doing well?
I think we’ve
stayed pretty close to our mission. I think we’ve become more focused as a
publisher. With regard to big advances, I’ll tell you a dirty little secret. I
think that very often the big advances you pay, at least for a company like
ours, don’t end up having the result you want. Sometimes you just have to pay
them. But the real successes, which make the difference in our business, don’t
come from the books for which we pay big money. When we pay a big advance our
job is to earn back what we gave the author so that we come out
clean—basically break even or make a small profit. Whereas a book where we
start much lower, and go a big distance, is much more mutually profitable. That
model is also much more what we ought to be about, I think.

So,
no, there aren’t books that we can’t buy because of money. When Becky Saletan
was here we had the chance to bid on Hillary Clinton’s book. And we did. We bid
a lot of money. I always knew we wouldn’t get it because we were being used to
bid up Simon & Schuster. We all knew that. We didn’t offer as much as they
did, but we offered a lot of money, and I suppose we would have made that money
back. But we’re a small house, and a big advance that doesn’t work out can do a
lot more damage to us, relatively speaking, than it does to a Simon &
Schuster, which takes a lot of bets all the time. So yes, we do pay big
advances sometimes, especially for our established authors, but the real
lifeblood of our business is not in doing that.

Do you think
the proliferation of big advances will ever change?
I think it is
changing. Books that seem like a sure thing are always going to be worth a lot
of money, but I don’t think they’re worth quite as much as they were. And if
they don’t work out? I think there’s more realism, even on the part of the
really big authors.

When you find
yourself in a situation where you’re bidding aggressively on a book, how do you
decide whether to go further or to stop?
We try to decide
beforehand what we think the book is worth—we do P&Ls and all of those
calculations—and stick to it. And most of the time we’re pretty disciplined.
But when we stretch? It’s because of belief in the author, the prospect of a
long-term relationship, and passion. But if you stretch beyond the prudent
level it can feel like, “Where’s the morning-after pill? Sure, that was really
great sex, but….” I’d much rather have that experience when we publish the book.

Tell me about
the moments when you feel the burden of your office.
It’s no fun to
tell an editor they can’t do something they really want to do. It’s no fun to
have an unpleasant conversation with an author or an agent. I like to make
people happy, if I can. But I’ve found that it’s just like anything else: The
anticipation of those things is usually much worse than actually carrying them
out. I mean, I’ve been fired, so I know what it’s like on both sides. This will
probably sound callow, but it’s usually better for everyone. If it’s happening,
it’s happening because something isn’t working. So it’s better for both parties
to cut their losses and start anew.

So many
people in the industry admire you. I’m curious about some of the people who you
admire the most.
There are so
many of them. I’m not very good at pulling names out of hats so I’m sure I’ll
wake up tomorrow and think, “Why didn’t I mention this person or that person?”
When I was starting out I had a huge amount of admiration for Bob Gottlieb. He
was just one of many people I admired, but I thought that he was good at so
many different kinds of publishing. He sort of set the standard, in fiction
especially. These days I admire Sonny [Mehta] very much. I admire Pat
[Strachan] a great deal. I admire Morgan [Entrekin]. He’s the last of the breed
that Roger was, as an independent publisher. He does it in a different way than
Roger because the competitive playing field is less even than it was when Roger
was doing it, but he’s definitely a gent and a man of great integrity and a
wonderful publisher. He’s really good for our business. I admire Graywolf
Press—I think Fiona McRae does a fantastic job. I admire Lynn Nesbit, among a
lot of other agents who have been great for our business.

What makes
you admire somebody?
I admire people
who are having fun doing what we do and who do it with passion and devotion and
integrity—and do it really well. I mean, you have to remember that I was a
very slow starter in this business. I slogged along for a long time until I had
some good fortune and found a place where I could do what I believed in. I
think the thing I really admire… Pat is a good example. She’s just kept doing
what she believes in, very, very consistently, for a long time. Drenka [Willen]
is another editor I admire in the same way. I admire Norton—they’ve stuck to
what they do. I grieve for places like Houghton Mifflin and Harcourt, whose
approach to publishing seemed very right and true. I just think that they were
eviscerated by their owners, and it’s a terrible shame. Jonathan Burnham is a
very formidable competitor and someone I admire a lot.

How are you
feeling about Grand Central after losing Scott Turow to them?
I’m very fond of
them, actually. Jamie Raab called me and there are no hard feelings. I’m
absolutely sure that it wasn’t a case of Grand Central going after him. I think
Scott decided that he needed to take a new tack in his career. I’m sure he
decided to go to them because they have his paperbacks. And their approach to
publishing is different than ours. In the days when we sold our paperback
rights, we sold more books to Warner [now Grand Central], at a certain point,
than anyone. They were very good. I also admire St. Martin’s Press—they do a
fabulous job.

Did you read
the proposal for the book they just bought about the history of FSG?
I did read it.
It came into my hands. I actually thought that Boris [Kachka] got the story
really well. I mean, I don’t know who’s going to want to read it…. [Laughter.]

Did they come
to you and ask if they could buy it?
They asked if we
had any objections and I said no. I don’t think we should be censoring things
like that. I don’t think there are any dirty secrets to tell. I’m sure there
are juicy stories, but I don’t think there’s anything to hide.

Are there any books that you feel embarrassed
for not having read?
There are a lot of great books that I haven’t
read. I’ve never read Bleak House, for example. I’ve never read The Brothers
Karamazov.
I haven’t read Thomas Bernhard. How’s that? [Laughter.]

Do you have any big regrets?
If I had been a different person, I might have
tried to be a writer instead of getting a job. My friend Jim Atlas went off and
wrote his Delmore Schwartz book after school. I’ve always thought that was a
very gutsy thing to do. I always admired his courage and craziness in doing
that, and he wrote a great book and it paid off. Or look at someone like
Jonathan Franzen, who went and sat in a room for five years and wrote The
Twenty-seventh City. I’ve always thought, “That’s heroic.” And I’m not heroic. So I don’t know if
that’s a regret but it’s definitely a Walter Mittyish admiration for people who
do that.

I
regret that I was too callow to make my time at Random House productive. I
never learned how to operate in that system. I had been coddled at Houghton
Mifflin, and I think I was cocky, and then I came up against the monolith of
Random House. They weren’t bending to do things my way and I should have tried
to figure out how to do things their way. I think I could have learned more.

You
grieve over relationships. We published Oscar Hijuelos’s book The Mambo
Kings Play Songs of Love, which was another
book I did with Harriet. It won the Pulitzer Prize and did wonderfully. We did
one more book together, and it didn’t go terribly well, and then he left. That
was sad—we had been very close and we aren’t any more. I’m regretful that my
time working with Scott Turow is over and that we aren’t going to be publishing
the sequel to Presumed Innocent,
which would have been a lot of fun. I’m regretful that Tom Wolfe had to leave
FSG. I’m regretful that Pat Strachan left FSG all those years ago. It would
have been fun to have worked together and it would have been enriching for us.
I’m very regretful that Philip Roth left Farrar, Straus. I think that was unnecessary,
and it was very sad. It was a real loss for us—he was a perfect FSG author. I
regret that Joseph Brodsky died so young and that Thom Gunn is no longer with
us.

The
more I think about it, the more regrets I have. [Laughter.]

At the end of the day, what’s the most
rewarding part of your job?
It’s the intimacy with the author—the love affair
with the author. When you’re reading the author’s book, it’s as intimate as any
love experience, really. And if you can give them the kind of unconditional
love and support that goes with that, and they feel that you’re on their side,
and doing good things for them, they give that love back to you. The connection
with the author is very moving. And then a core of trust is built and you’re
sort of bound together at the hip in this aspect of life. That’s one of the
best feelings in the world. That’s what it’s all about for me.

Jofie Ferrari-Adler is an editor at
Grove/Atlantic.

Agents & Editors: Jonathan Galassi

As part of his ongoing series of interviews with publishing professionals, Jofie Ferrari-Adler stopped by the office of Jonathan Galassi, the president and publisher of FSG, and asked him what he would change about his job if he could.

Agents & Editors: A Q&A With Editor Chuck Adams
Agents & Editors: A Q&A With Four Young Literary Agents

Agents and Editors: A Q&A With Four Literary Agents

by

Jofie Ferrari-Adler

May/June 2009
5.1.09
In Print and Online

In “Goodbye to All That,” her 1967 essay about the years she spent in New York City as a young writer, Joan Didion recalls trying to coax a world-weary friend into attending a party by promising him “new faces.” Her friend “laughed literally until he choked” before explaining that “the last time he had gone to a party where he’d been promised ‘new faces,’ there had been fifteen people in the room, and he had already slept with five of the women and owed money to all but two of the men.”

Several decades later, the details may be different—casual sex? what’s that?—but the literary world is every bit as small as it was in Didion’s heyday. The agents who congregated at the offices of the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses for this conversation (and who were chosen, it should be noted, by the editors of this magazine) are not new faces—to one another or to me. During our talk, one of them said that she hopes to “grow old together” with her clients. The same might be said of us publishing people, who, unlike Didion’s friend and especially in these tough times, are likely to view our shared history as a comfort rather than a curse. Some particulars:

 

MARIA MASSIE worked as an agent for twelve years before joining Lippincott Massie McQuilkin as a partner in 2004. A few years ago Maria broke hearts all over town (mine included) when she sold Nigerian priest Uwem Akpan’s Say You’re One of Them to Little, Brown for an ungodly advance. Her other clients include Peter Ho Davies and Tom Perrotta.

JIM RUTMAN, an agent at Sterling Lord Literistic for the past ten years, is mild mannered until he steps onto a basketball court—we play on a publishing team called the Jackals—at which point he turns into a ferociously competitive shooting guard who sometimes scores half our points. His clients include Charles Bock, J. Robert Lennon, and Peter Rock.

 

ANNA STEIN worked at three other agencies before joining the Irene Skolnick Literary Agency in 2006. Once, after a writers conference in New Orleans, Anna took me and my wife to a second-line celebration (imagine a loud, roving bacchanal) in the Ninth Ward. We made our plane, but barely. Her clients include Chloe Aridjis, Yoko Ogawa, and Anya Ulinich.

 

PETER STEINBERG spent twelve years at other agencies before founding the Steinberg Agency in 2007. Peter is a kind of throwback to the golden age of publishing, when men did things like hold doors open for women and send handwritten thank-you notes—not to embarrass him or anything. His clients include Alicia Erian, Keith Donohue, and John Matteson.

Let us inside your heads a little and talk about what you’re looking at and thinking about when you’re evaluating a piece of fiction.
STEIN: It’s really hard to talk about why a piece of writing is good, and moving—even if it’s funny—and what makes us keep thinking about something after we’ve read it. And it’s incredibly subjective. That’s why it’s hard for agents who represent fiction, especially literary fiction, to find it. It’s so rare. We can all talk about the things we don’t like. When I see clichés, for example, on the first page or in the first chapter of a book, that kind of kills it for me immediately. The romance and the chemistry is just over. That’s just one example of the negative side of that question, and I’m sure you guys have a million others. If I knew how to describe in language what makes me fall in love with something, then I would be a writer. All I can say is that if I read the first few pages of a novel and think, “Jesus Christ! Who the fuck is this person? Why are they letting me read this?” then that person is onto something. And we don’t have that feeling very often. But when we do see it, it’s so exciting.

MASSIE: Anna’s right. It’s like you have this moment of clarity and you recognize something that you’re so absorbed with. I read a lot of things that are beautifully written where I say to myself, “Oh, this is good,” but I’m not bowled over or sucked right in. It’s so subjective. I can read something and pass on it and I hear, two days later, that there was a bidding war and it sold for a ton of money, but it just wasn’t the thing that I was going to fall in love with.

STEINBERG: And you’re okay with that.

MASSIE: You have to be okay with it because it’s so subjective. I’m not necessarily going to see what somebody else sees, or read a book the way somebody else reads it. That’s one thing that writers who are looking for an agent should always remember: All agents are different. Everyone has different tastes. What I like to read might be different than Anna or Peter or Jim. That’s a great thing about what we do—there’s so much to choose from. And what you fall in love with is a very personal choice.

RUTMAN: And the reactions are necessarily self-contained. It’s impossible to articulate what you hope to find as an agent. How could you explain to somebody what moves you? Because hopefully you’re capable of being moved by things that you didn’t anticipate being moved by. So you sit down with something, and all the preamble is basically pointless until the moment that you actually start searching around and rummaging for your feelings and response. It might happen on word four, or it might happen on sentence seven, but if it hasn’t happened by page two, will it happen on page two hundred and fifty? I wish it did. But I don’t know that it does.

Are there any specific things that can make you fall in love with a piece of writing?
STEIN: I would say that being able to make me think, especially in dialogue, “Oh, shit. This person has got me. This person has just seen into what we all feel every day but don’t say. This person has looked into our souls, especially the worst sides of us, and sort of ripped them open and put them on the page.” Psychology, to me, is one of the most exciting things to see work well in fiction—when it comes alive on the page and is totally devastating.

STEINBERG: When you read something and think, “I can’t believe they just said what I’ve thought in my deepest thoughts but never articulated,” that is always an eye-opener for me. And it’s also about reading something that doesn’t seem familiar. Writers should realize that agents have a ton of material to read, and when things seem familiar, it’s an easy reason to pass. If it’s something that’s new, it really makes a huge difference. And I’m not talking about something being so wildly creative that it’s ridiculous—not a talking plant falling in love with a turtle or something like that. I’m talking about, in a real sense, something that is genuinely new and also deeply felt. That’s what we’re all looking for. But at the same time, I do get things and think, “How is this like something else that has sold well?” It’s a difficult balance. You have to have one foot in literature and one foot in what’s going on in the marketplace.

RUTMAN: Writers probably shouldn’t trouble themselves too much over that consideration. If they’re aiming to hit some spot that’s been working—trying to write toward the books that have made an impression—that just seems like a pretty pointless chase. You know, “I hear that circus animals are wildly appealing and I’ve had some thoughts about circus animals….” That doesn’t seem like a very good way to go about it.

STEINBERG: A writer was just asking me about that and I said it’s the agent’s job to spin a book for the marketplace—to talk about it being a little like this book and a little like that book or whatever. Writers should put those kinds of thoughts out of their heads and just write.

RUTMAN: I don’t know who to blame for trends. If a run of books comes 
out that are all set in a particular 
country—which happens all the time—to whom do we attribute that? To writers who are looking at things and saying, “Hmmm, I notice that fourteen years ago India was interesting to people. I think that’s where I’m going to set my book”? You can’t blame writers for asking what subjects are interesting these days, even when we’re talking about fiction, and I wish I had a useful answer for them, but I just don’t think it works that way.

STEINBERG: I would basically go with your passion. The subject matter can be very wide ranging, but if you go with your passion, even if it doesn’t work, at least it’s heartfelt.

STEIN: On some level, what else are you going to do? Are you going to write a novel because it’s “commercially viable”? I mean, I guess people do that. But we’re not going to represent them.

Because you hate money?
STEIN: We. Hate. Money. [Laughter.]

But seriously, I sometimes think that people in the business read in different ways than normal readers. Are there things that you’re looking at—contextual things, like who the author is—beyond what’s on the page?
STEINBERG: Those things very much take the backseat for me. It really is just what’s on the page. All of that other stuff comes later. Maybe once I get a third of the way through a novel and I’m loving it, then I will look back and see who the author is and all that stuff. I think it’s important to stress that the synopsis and the cover letter and all of those things are not really important. It’s the work, the work, the work. You have to focus on the work. I think sometimes writers get lost in getting the cover letter and the synopsis and those kinds of professional things right because they’re afraid of focusing on the work.

STEIN: I don’t even read synopses. Do you guys?

STEINBERG: I skip right over them. I go to the first page.

STEIN: I hate synopses. They’re terrible.

RUTMAN: It’s hard to write a synopsis well. And when we’re talking about literary fiction, it will probably not make or break an agent’s interest going into page one. You’re not like, “Oh, there’s going to be an unexpected plot twist two-thirds of the way through. I’m going to hang in there long enough to find out how that goes.”

STEIN: I’m still surprised when I call an editor to pitch a book and he says, “So what’s the novel about?” I’m like, “You actually want me to tell you what happens in the plot? Are you serious? I mean, we can do that if you want.” But that’s not really the point. I don’t want anyone to tell me the plot of a novel. It’s so boring.

But are there any other things you’re looking at beyond what’s on the page? Things that maybe you can sense after years of experience.
MASSIE: Sometimes it’s when you’re reading a manuscript and you can see that the person is a really talented writer with a beautiful voice but the story is not quite there. But you see the potential. Sometimes you sign those people on because you think, “Okay, maybe this isn’t going to be the big book, or maybe it won’t even sell, but this person has a quality—they have the writing, they have the voice—and the potential is there. This writer is going to go far. And maybe the next book will be the one.” I’ve taken people on under those circumstances.

RUTMAN: I mean, reading “professionally,” if that’s what we do, is a compromised process because you are reading a book with an eye toward asking somebody for money. You are reading in a different way than you are when that’s not a consideration. So I think it’s filtered into the experience from the beginning. You are reading to be moved, hopefully, if that’s the kind of novel you work on, but at the same time it probably would be disingenuous to suggest that you’re not taking in some superficial considerations. They are all distantly secondary to the work itself. Because if an agent is reading with an eye toward various recent trends that have worked, he’s probably not going to succeed all that well either. The same thing is true of the reverse. Any categorical dismissal of some kind of novel feels bogus because there’s got to be a counterexample for every single example. So if somebody comes along and has this long list of accolades and prizes, it doesn’t damage your regard for them. And if somebody comes to you on novel fourteen, with twelve of them having done exceptionally well, and the last one maybe less well, you think about that, too. You’re thinking about how difficult it could be given certain practical considerations. But it’s still all pretty far receded from the work itself.

STEIN: There is the question, now more than ever, of whether or not a book is publishable. By publishable I don’t mean, “Is there a great plot and is the writing amazing etcetera?” I mean that if we were in your shoes, as a publisher, how would we publish the book? What kind of jacket would we give it? How would we position it? I mean, we’re talking about literary fiction? You can’t publish literary fiction today. How do you do that? [Laughter.]

RUTMAN: Legally, you can, but…

STEIN: So, given that it’s basically impossible, it’s our responsibility as the first guard to begin to think about, “Is it possible?” And if we’re so bowled over and we’re so in love that we think somebody should publish it, how would we do it? This is something I really struggle with because I’m not very creative. I don’t have the mind for it. I admire publishers all the more today because the ideas they come up with just amaze me. And I’m not trying to flatter them, at all, because I love to talk trash. But it really does amaze me. I’m thinking about a book right now, for example, that I want to sell. I think the author is fantastic and well positioned and that the novel is perfect—there’s nothing wrong with it. But in a way it would be a funny book to publish. In a way, I don’t exactly see how it fits and how it could break out. So I see the problem there, which maybe we didn’t have five years ago as agents. And I see it becoming more and more of a problem as the market contracts. So I’m reading a little differently because of that. I might not be altering my habits about what I take on, but maybe I am.

STEINBERG: I think you’re sort of unconsciously changing and adapting to the marketplace. I find myself doing that. I think when an agent says, “I was following my gut instinct,” what that really means is accumulated wisdom and taking a lot of different variables into account. You spend your day reading Publishers Weekly and Publishers Lunch and you take these things into consideration. You’re having lunch with editors who are saying, “Such-and-such is so hard” and you’re processing all of this information. And when you open a manuscript, you’re reading it with that eye. It’s hard for us to say exactly how we’re looking at material but I think we are taking a lot of different things into account.

Is the economy affecting how you’re reading?
MASSIE: It’s starting to.

STEINBERG: I would say yes too. It feels like things are tough.

MASSIE: Right before Black Wednesday I had a novel out that I was really excited about. I was getting great reads from a bunch of people who were all calling to say, “This is great. This is wonderful.” And one by one they slowly disappeared on me, except for one editor, who actually ended up being the perfect editor. But I did see everything diminish. I had an idea of what the novel was going to sell for and it didn’t quite get there. It was actually shocking, because it’s a wonderful novel and the responses were amazing and I really did see people pull back. Her first novel had done okay but not great and all people could say was, “Her numbers are just not good enough.” Her numbers were not bad for a literary novel. So that was my first moment of a little bit of fear. I haven’t quite gotten to the point where I’m conscious that the economy is affecting my thinking, but I’m sure I will at some point.

RUTMAN: Especially with fiction, you’re largely at the mercy of what comes in. Certainly you solicit your share, but when you’re relying on the kindness of your acquaintances, or referrals, wherever they happen to come from, you can only adjust so much. But it’s certainly nice to glimpse something behind the page whenever you can, whatever it may be. If a novel happens to have a nice, portable summation—if it’s pitchable—that doesn’t upset me.

MASSIE: If there’s a hook.

STEIN: Or when the author has a platform.

MASSIE: When they’ve been published in the New Yorker or something.

RUTMAN: When you’re reading something, one of the things you’re trying to glimpse is whether you can imagine more than a few people warming up to it. But things that work in various ways…I mean, not to be indirectly nepotistic here, but on what planet should 2666 have worked commercially?

STEIN: I wasn’t going to bring it up.

RUTMAN: That’s why I did.

STEIN: Well, let’s start with The Savage Detectives. I mean, why should anybody have finished that book, let alone have it be successful? [Laughter.] Now I’m going to say something nice about the publisher, but it really was a beautiful piece of publishing.

RUTMAN: It was exquisite. How did that work? Why did that work? I want somebody to explain it to me. Gut instincts are referred to retrospectively when they have worked—people don’t really make much reference to their gut instincts when they’re looking back regretfully. It’s not like, “Ugh, my gut instincts. Son of a bitch.” Gut instincts are wrong just as much as they’re right. But there is such a thing as publishing something well, and resourcefully.

STEIN: And I find that inspiring—the fact that Lorin Stein is my brother aside—because we are in the position now where we’re selling books for lowly five figures that we might have sold for six figures very recently. And I don’t want to alter what I take on because of that.

RUTMAN: Do you think you would know how to alter it?

STEIN: I don’t think I would.

RUTMAN: If I could see clearly enough and far enough to think, “If I just adjust my taste this much, I think I’ll be a very successful person,” I would think about trying it. [Laughter.] I just don’t presume to know how that would work.

STEIN: But here’s how I might alter. I might say, “Look, I can’t take on an Icelandic writer right now.” Or, “I can’t afford to invest my time in editing the sample translation of this Icelandic writer right now. It’s just not the time for that. Maybe when things are sunnier.”

STEINBERG: I feel like I can adjust when there are natural inclinations a certain way. For instance, I was reading that young adult books are selling better than adult books. I have kids and I’m starting to read what they’re reading, and I thought, “Oh, I’m sort of interested in this. Maybe I should do a little more young adult.” So that’s something that I’ve consciously done in terms of categories. I think I’ll still look for the same type of material within the young adult category, but I’m definitely thinking about the category a little bit more because of the marketplace.

Where are you finding writers, aside from referrals? Are you reading literary magazines? Are you reading blogs?
MASSIE: No blogs.

RUTMAN: Not for fiction.

STEIN: Hell no.

RUTMAN: Referrals are about 75 percent of how I find writers.

MASSIE: A lot of my clients teach in MFA programs, so I get referrals from them. I get referrals from editors. I get referrals from other agents.

RUTMAN: There’s a big range of where referrals come from.

STEIN: But every now and then there will be something in the slush—and I bet this is true for you guys, too—that’s not just well written but is also well researched and shows that the person knows your list and is really appropriate for your list and also has published well.

MASSIE: And sometimes when I read a short story that I like I’ll send an e-mail. “Are you represented?” Once in a blue moon someone’s not represented.

RUTMAN: There are too many of us.

MASSIE: There are a lot of us.

STEIN: There are way too many of us.

STEINBERG: A lot of times, when people are in literary magazines, it’s too late.

MASSIE: Exactly. Agents are submitting those short stories.

RUTMAN: And MFA students are going about things in an entirely different way.

STEINBERG: They’re savvy.

MASSIE: They’re so savvy.

STEIN: That’s what they pay for.

MASSIE: I was amazed by going to MFA programs and talking to students. The first thing they want to know is, “Okay, what do I need for my query letter? What do I need for this thing or that thing?” It wasn’t questions about the work. Their questions were really about the business side.

 

Do you think that’s healthy?
MASSIE: No. I don’t.

RUTMAN: Ultimately, no. If that is more of a priority than the work, it can’t be all good. I mean, it’s fine that they have a sort of professional track and that they’re exposed to whatever realities they are ultimately going to encounter. But when they take a sort of sporting interest in it…

STEINBERG: It’s a good way to eliminate potential people, for me at least. When they ask me, “What’s the query letter consist of?” I usually think, “Well, that’s probably not a potential client.”

RUTMAN: It’s true.

What do you wish beginning writers would do better?
MASSIE: Take chances. Don’t worry about writing a perfect novel. Sometimes it’s nice to have something that’s a little bit raw and has a little bit of an edge to it. Something that’s just perfect all the way through is sometimes a little boring.

STEIN: I wish they would get their friends, who may be writers or may not be writers, to read their work and tell them, “Don’t say anything nice to me. I don’t want to hear anything nice. I want to hear everything not nice that you have to say.”

STEINBERG: And be smart about picking those people. Find your two or three friends who hate everything.

STEIN: Exactly. And have those people—those hateful friends—give you feedback before you even think about sending out your work.

STEINBERG: I would also say, once you think the work is done, work on it for another year.

STEIN: And never trust your spouse if your spouse says it’s good. Your spouse has no idea. Neither do your mother or your father.

RUTMAN: Check your eagerness to share. A lot of professors may even encourage you, as a way to hasten the process along. You know, “I think it’s time for the world to tell you what they think of this.” It may well not be time for the world to pass judgment just yet. Hold on until you are absolutely certain that it’s ready for broad, indiscriminate exposure. Don’t hurry that.

STEIN: And this is a cliché for us but it seems worth saying that most writers’ first novels aren’t really their first novels. If you have to scrap your first novel, you’ll live. Your first novel probably won’t be the first novel you publish. Maybe your second one will be. But you’ll live. And you’ll be a better writer because of it.

What are some of the common mistakes you see in the submission process?
STEINBERG: Don’t say, “If you don’t like this novel, I have many other I could show you.” Don’t say, “This will make a great movie, too.” Don’t do that fake thing where you pretend you know all about the stuff I’ve agented. It’s funny because I think that’s a piece of advice that writers always gets—research the agent and talk about the other work they’ve sold. But it always comes off as very false to me unless you’ve really read something I’ve sold. And I don’t want you to waste your time reading something of mine just to write a query letter.

STEIN: I would say to go the other way around. Write to agents whose books you’re actually in love with.

STEINBERG: But what if those agents pass and you still want an agent?

STEIN: Then you should read more books. [Laughter.]

What else?
STEINBERG: Don’t talk about a character sweating on the first page or two.

RUTMAN: Sweating?

STEINBERG: Yeah. It happens all the time. The writer’s like, “He was sweating profusely….” It’s supposed to denote tension, I think.

RUTMAN: Also don’t write the phrase “sweating profusely.”

STEINBERG: I have a joke in my office where if a character is sweating in the first two pages, I go, “Sweating!” [Laughter.] Also, people are always “clutching” steering wheels in the first few pages.

STEIN: That’s the cliché thing.

STEINBERG: And don’t wake up from a dream on the first page. No dreams on the first page.

STEIN: It’s best to avoid dreams if possible.

But this is all craft stuff. Let’s go back to the submission process.
STEIN: Don’t write “Because of your interest in international fiction…” or whatever you think the agent’s interest is. That means you’ve been trolling some Web site, and that freaks me out. Don’t let me see that you’ve been trolling some Web site that says I like a certain kind of genre. If you know who I am, you should know who I am because you’ve done some kind of research that has to do with the specific books I represent. That should only be because you’ve fallen in love with one or two of those books. And that’s pretty unlikely because those books haven’t sold very many copies. So you probably shouldn’t be writing to me to begin with. [Laughter.]

RUTMAN: “Just avoid me altogether. I haven’t helped any of these people, really, and I’m not going to help you.”

STEIN: Exactly. There shouldn’t really be anybody writing to me at all.

STEINBERG: That’s off the record, right? Can I say “Off the record” on your behalf?

STEIN: What can I say? I’m funny.

STEINBERG: And of course with the e-mail submissions, don’t cc a hundred agents and say, “Dear Agent….”

STEIN: I got an e-mail query addressed to “Elizabeth” today.

MASSIE: I get those. Those are an instant delete.

STEIN: They are.

RUTMAN: Don’t try to write eye-catching cover letters. It just isn’t really going to enhance my anticipation going into the manuscript.

On the flip side of that, what do you want them to do? I think it can seem really hard to get an agent’s attention when you live in a small town somewhere and you don’t know anybody.
STEINBERG: Well, know somebody. [Laughter.] I’m serious. We’re in the age of e-mail and the Internet. If you e-mail twenty of your friends and say, “Do you know anyone in publishing?” someone has to know somebody. Or somebody who knows somebody. You know what I mean? Find how you know somebody.

STEIN: But you know what? I’ve actually taken on several clients who didn’t know anybody in publishing. I’ll give you an example: Anya Ulinich, who’s done pretty well for somebody who didn’t know anybody. She did some research and asked herself, “Okay, I’m Russian, and my novel has something to do with Russia, so who represents Russian novels?” She did some research and targeted those agents and wrote a query letter that was just really straightforward. It was like, “Here’s my deal. Here’s why I’m writing to you.” It was completely unpretentious and completely straightforward and well written, and because of all that and because there was nothing in it that made me think, “Oh, she’s read some book that tells you how to write query letters”—it was just very natural—I asked to see pages. I don’t think you have to know somebody.

STEINBERG: But it is one way of getting an agent’s attention. I have a lot of clients who didn’t know anyone either. But it is a good way to do it. Because when I get a query from a friend of a friend, it definitely goes in a different pile. I would also say to follow what the agent’s Web site says. If it says, “Send the first twenty-five pages,” do that. And don’t send the thirty-third chapter of your novel. Send the first chapter.

MASSIE: And don’t try too hard. Sometimes I get these queries that describe the book as a cross between this best-seller and that best-seller and ten different other things. I always find that really distracting and unhelpful.

STEIN: And don’t compare the book only to movies.

RUTMAN: I feel like people have generally read something that tells them how to write, at the very least, an unobjectionable cover letter. I like it when they are fairly matter-of-fact. To me that suggests, whether it’s well placed or not, a certain confidence that you’re going to appreciate the pages rather than the letter. I don’t have any sort of pointed advice about what people ought to do in a cover letter. It just doesn’t matter that much. It’s going to get read.

By your assistant. Just to play devil’s advocate.
RUTMAN: Some of it, yes. But she has excellent taste. And if you’re working with someone whose taste you really value and trust, they bring you the things you probably would have plucked out yourself.

MASSIE: And she’s looking for certain things. Has the writer been published before? What are their credits?

RUTMAN: I think if anybody reads a certain number of cover letters they start to sense what is nice to have in a cover letter. But people generally seem to know. And if you’ve already published things, it suggests that you’ve been willing to subject yourself to some of the cruelties of the process and that you realize it’s probably part of the deal.

STEIN: That’s the thing. It’s possible to get published in some good literary magazines without an agent. Very possible. In fact, in some places it’s easier. And if you’re writing fiction, and especially if you have the misfortune of being a short story writer, then you should spend a lot of time and energy getting published in those places before you start looking for an agent. Because it’ll make everybody’s job so much easier.

Does anybody have a success story about finding a writer in a literary magazine?
STEINBERG: I read a great short story in the Southern Review a few years ago and called the writer and eventually sold the novel-in-stories to Ann Patty at Harcourt, who’s great and who unfortunately is no longer at Harcourt. It was called The Circus in Winter by Cathy Day. It’s funny because I originally looked at the story because I liked the author’s last name. I don’t know if that means I’m superficial, but at the time I was interested in writers whose last names were words, and her last name was Day, so—

RUTMAN: This was a phase you went through?

STEINBERG: It was! I also went through a phase of looking for names with alliteration.

STEIN: Note to readers.

STEINBERG: For example, I represent a guy named Brad Barkley.

STEIN: What’s your phase right now? What are you into?

STEINBERG: Now I’m in the supporting-my-three-children phase.

How’s that going?
STEINBERG: It’s going okay. [Laughter.]

How do you guys feel about short stories?
STEIN: If they’re awesome, they’re awesome. Even if we can’t sell them, they’re still awesome.

MASSIE: I’m with Anna. I love short stories.

And can you sell them?
MASSIE: On occasion. It’s hard. It always helps if there’s a novel coming. But if you’ve got a great short story collection, it will stand out. I represent a writer who was referred to me by an editor at a literary magazine. I read it and it blew me away. I sold it, it was published, it got great reviews, but it did not sell very many copies. But then the writer, Robin Romm, went on to write an amazing memoir that was just reviewed on the cover of the New York Times Book Review. She’s a fantastic writer and you never know where a short story writer is going to go or what stories they have left to tell. So, you know, she wasn’t making a lot of money in the beginning, but she’s going to have an amazing career.

STEIN: And here’s another thing. A short story writer might end up just being a short story writer, which might be our nightmare, but what if he ends up being one of those—

MASSIE: Alice Munro or somebody.

RUTMAN: We don’t really have much choice but to represent talent in whatever form it happens to come. And if it happens to come first in short story collection form, that does not make things easier, practically speaking, but it’s not in itself a reason not to do it. The climate hardly encourages it, and it’s not fun to call an editor and say, “What I have for you now—brace yourself—is a collection of short stories.” I mean, that’s like a meta-joke, I suppose, at this point. But you shouldn’t just abandon it. You know it’s going to be hard so you ask yourself, “How fired up am I about trying this?” With a story collection, that question is a good test of how intrinsically great you find it.

STEIN: It had better be super-duper-duper-duper good.

RUTMAN: Right. One of my colleagues gave me a collection not that long ago. It was sort of short, and the author had not really tried to publish any of them, and I took it home, sort of unhappily, and I ended up being like, “Oh. Okay. So this is a person who can do this.” If you feel that way as an agent, what are you going to do, say no? It just doesn’t really feel like a smart option.

STEIN: But novels are beginning to feel that way too. I mean, really—it’s like the novel is the new short story.

RUTMAN: The short story is the new poem…

STEIN: Yeah, the short story is the new poem, novels are the new short story…. It’s hard out there.

RUTMAN: If you’re talking to a certain audience, say an MFA audience, you hear the sentiment of, “Ugh, if only I could get past the short story collection and get on to the novel, easy street can’t be far behind.”

STEIN: There is no easy street.

RUTMAN: Exactly. It doesn’t exist. But there is this unhelpful assumption that you just need to get to a novel, at which point your publishing fortunes will brighten.

STEINBERG: There are probably only a hundred people in the United States who make a living off novel writing.

STEIN: Did you make that number up?

STEINBERG: Yeah, I just made it up.

STEIN: I think that’s a really great point and that number sounds about right to me.

STEINBERG: I think all of my clients have day jobs. Writing is just not going to be a way to stop doing what you’re doing for a living, probably. And I wouldn’t advise it. I have clients who sometimes sell their books for a decent amount of money and are like, “Ooh, should I quit my job?” And I panic and say, “No!” It also affects your work because you start writing for the marketplace too much.

STEIN: And the money is never what the money looks like.

STEINBERG: Exactly. The money has to be gravy and not a base salary.

MASSIE: And you never know what the second book will do, versus the first one, and what the advance for the next book is going to look like.

You are all deep inside this world, but so many writers aren’t. If you were a beginning writer who lived out in Wisconsin or somewhere and didn’t know anybody and you were looking for an agent, how would you do it?
STEINBERG: I would not worry about looking for an agent. I would work on my writing for a long time. And then when I was finally ready, I would ask everyone I know what they thought I should do.

MASSIE: I agree with that. I would concentrate on getting published in well-regarded literary magazines and, chances are, agents will come to you.

RUTMAN: I wouldn’t relish the prospect of looking for an agent if I had not come through a program, where a professor can often steer you in some helpful direction. I guess you’d start at the bookstore.

MASSIE: You pick up your favorite books and look at the acknowledgments and see who represented them and write those people a letter.

STEIN: I’m with Peter. I wouldn’t worry so much about finding an agent. The thing is, there aren’t that many great writers. Right? And there seem to be a lot of people trying to write novels and find agents. If you’re looking for an agent, it means you want to sell your book. But if there are only a hundred people making money as writers—and I think that number sounds about right—and you’re trying to sell your book to make money, then that doesn’t really make sense. It’s like playing the lottery. If I thought I’d written something brilliant, I would hope that, like Peter said, I would be continuing to work on my writing.

RUTMAN: But don’t you think most people who are working on their writing feel kind of persuaded that they are brilliant and have something really unique and wonderful to say?

STEIN: I also think they feel this pressure to get published. With all the MFA programs, and with all the writing conferences and programs that they pay money for, there’s this encouragement to get published.

RUTMAN: Sure. It’s the stated goal.

STEIN: Right. That’s the goal. But for 99 percent of people writing fiction, that shouldn’t necessarily be the goal. Maybe writing should be the thing they work on for many years and then maybe they should think about getting published.

RUTMAN: I think being published has come to feel, for reasons I can’t explain, too achievable. To take a step back, I think the idea of writing a book has come to seem too achievable. I don’t know what to attribute that to. It may be the fact that famous people have access to people who can write a tolerable book for them, which might create the impression that most of us should be thinking about writing a book. I think it used to feel rightfully daunting to write a book. People should be daunted by the prospect of writing a book—and more than they may be at the moment. I’m not saying that writing can’t be a hobby. But professionalizing it? That’s a whole other step, and you then expose yourself to a whole other set of challenges and disappointments that you have to take into consideration. But at some point I feel like there was some kind of fundamental shift that made writing a book—and finishing it and publishing it—seem like not that big a deal. Or not a big enough deal.

STEINBERG: One thing we should convey is how rare it is that a great piece of fiction crosses our desks from someone new.

ALL: Yes.

STEINBERG: It happens maybe, what, once a year? Twice a year? That’s it. It’s so rare. So for people in Wisconsin who might be reading this and trying to figure out how to get published, they should keep that in mind. That’s why stressing the work is so important—because it’s so rare that something extraordinary crosses our desks. I like to think that all of our instincts are good enough, and we’re well trained enough, and we’ve done this long enough, to recognize it when it arrives. But that aspect of it can’t be stressed enough, which is why I say to work on it for a long time. You also only get one shot with an agent. There are no do-overs. When we get letters that say, “I know you passed on this six months ago but I’ve rewritten it,” it’s difficult to look at it again. You really do only get one shot.

Do you guys feel competitive with other agents?
RUTMAN: I’m not sure I feel that competitive. I’m definitely envious of other agents. [Laughter.] But that’s not the same thing.

STEIN: I know Jim’s not competitive because we were competing for a client once and both of us are so uncompetitive that he was like, “No, no, Anna’s so great,” and I was like, “No, no, Jim’s so great.”

Who won?
STEIN: Jim.

RUTMAN: Competitive just feels like the wrong word. I can apply competitiveness to all kinds of other arenas but I have trouble, for some reason, doing it here. Because even competing for a client feels…I mean, maybe if I was a huge rock star I would just sit back and point at my shelf and say, “That’s why you should be represented by me.” When that’s not really an option it becomes a charm expedition. You’re trying to persuade somebody that you care enough, or that you see enough in what they’ve done, to suggest to them that you would be the right person for the job.

Tell me a little about how you view your jobs. How do you think about your obligations and responsibilities to your clients?
RUTMAN: The responsibilities are so amorphous and encompassing that it’s hard to sum up. I’ve never done it very successfully. I guess the boundaries are fairly few. You’re trying to find books that you believe in and feel like you’d be doing the author and yourself a favor by involving yourself with, and then you’re advising them about its readiness to be exposed to these calculating strangers, and then you choose the strangers you’re going to share it with, and then, if you’re lucky enough to have options among those strangers, you’re telling them which one is best. And then the book gets published and the landscape changes to a whole new level of abstraction about what constitutes a good publication experience and what doesn’t. And how many people wind up being published without feeling aggrieved or getting less than what they could have from the experience? A lot of people are disappointed by it. It’s a pretty boundary-less relationship. It extends into all kinds of areas that are personal, that involve editorial work, that involve…. The editorial part’s nice because at least it’s a place to stop. It’s also, for my money, the most interesting part of the process. You’re talking about something that, presumably, has moved you enough to want to think and discuss.

STEIN: It sounds so cheesy to say, and everyone will agree with it, but the job is about finding books that you feel should exist in the world, and should for a long time. I mean, this summer I read Anna Karenina, and it made it impossible for me to even think about taking on a book for months. It’s really important for us to read published books that we don’t represent while we’re reading our own clients’ books. It’s important for us to stay current, but also to read classics. And it reminded me of why I really do what I do. It’s because I want the books I represent to be important, and for a long time. I don’t want to sell a book just to sell a book. I want each one to matter. I mean, that’s a little heavy, and none of your books is ever going to be Anna Karenina—Anna Karenina is Anna Karenina, let’s not touch it—but that’s the idea.

RUTMAN: That’s why the job is interesting. There is always the chance, no matter how remote, that that could happen. It won’t necessarily be Anna Karenina, but you can find something that you didn’t expect, and you can glimpse stuff in it that you couldn’t anticipate, and the writer can change the way you think about something. That is, in a job, a pretty interesting thing, even if it remains largely in the realm of possibility. It’s still a nice possibility to encounter on a daily basis. I mean, that’s better than most jobs I’ve been able to conceive of as possibilities for myself.

MASSIE: It’s terrific. It means that you learn something every day. You pick something up and you don’t know what world it’s going to take you to or what it will teach you, and that’s an incredible thing. I think that’s one of the wonderful things about what we do. If you find something that you’re blown away by, you actually can help get it to a larger audience. It’s amazing when people will say to you, “I read that book you represented. God, that was amazing. It really affected me.” That’s a great feeling.

How about your responsibilities?
MASSIE: I sometimes feel like a cross between a mother, a shrink, an accountant, a lawyer…. You wear so many different hats on a daily basis. You’re juggling so many things, and the clients are so different. They all have different personalities and one person needs handholding or reassurance after every rejection letter and others just want to hear from you when there’s news. It’s different with everybody. I haven’t ever seen myself as doing one thing. I mean, with one client you’re going over royalty statements and with another you’re hearing about her marriage or some trauma she’s going through. It’s a pretty intimate relationship.

STEINBERG: It’s a friendship.

MASSIE: It’s a relationship. You have your ups and downs, and the good and the bad, and it’s the mark of a really great relationship with an author that you can weather the storms and get through the good publications and the bad publications, the good reviews and the bad reviews.

RUTMAN: We’re like disappointment brokers.

STEIN: That’s why trust is so important.

MASSIE: Trust is key.

STEIN: That’s why, from the very beginning of the relationship, the more up-front you are, the better. The way you approach an agent says so much about your personality and your character. So if you’re very straightforward in your query letter and cover letter, that shows us something. And if we’re going to have a long-term and trusting relationship, that’s important. Let’s say you have several agents interested in you. Let’s say you go with one agent and you don’t tell the other agents, or you’re somehow a little dishonest about the process. Things might not work out with that agent—that agent might move to Wisconsin for some reason and decide to leave publishing—and you’re going to have to face those other agents. It’s just really important to have integrity and to be honest and to be gracious from the very beginning.

STEINBERG: I think we’ve all done this long enough that we can sort of suss out when someone’s being false or fake or dishonest. So you really shouldn’t even try.

RUTMAN: Because if you start to get the sense, early enough in the process, that someone seems like trouble, those suspicions are rarely misleading or without some kind of foundation. One time I was in the rare position of dealing with a writer who was wildly and indisputably talented but came with some warning signs. Actually they weren’t warning signs so much as actual warnings from people who knew the writer and said, “I’ll be up-front with you. This writer is remarkable in the most important ways and a challenge in a great many other ways.”

STEIN: “Totally insane” is what they probably said.

RUTMAN: Yeah, that’s what they meant. So what do you do? Is it a measure of how heroic an agent you are if you take them on? Is it a good idea? I’m not so sure that it is.

STEIN: I tried that once. I took on somebody who was insanely talented but also insane. And I tried to be heroic. I tried my very, very best. And it ended, not only in tears, but in legal fees. I made a New Year’s resolution: No more. No more crazy ones, ever again.

STEINBERG: It’s not worth it. Life’s too short.

MASSIE: There are also the clients who are blamers. They’re always looking for somebody to blame. They’re like, “That person didn’t do this” or “You didn’t do that.”

STEIN: Those are agent-jumpers.

MASSIE: Exactly.

STEINBERG: That’s another reason why writers should make sure it’s the right match. You don’t want to switch agents unless you have to. If you have to tell an agent, “Oh, I’ve had two agents and it hasn’t worked out,” the new agent will perceive that as a warning sign. Unless it’s legitimate. Sometimes things don’t work out or the personalities just aren’t right.

STEIN: But in general, everybody wants the relationship to work. I mean, we’re all pretty young and we’re not naïve, but we are a little bit romantic or otherwise we wouldn’t be in this industry—obviously there’s no money in it. We go into the relationship thinking, “We want to grow old together.” It’s a real relationship. It’s like a marriage. We want to grow old together. So if it doesn’t work out it’s usually for pretty serious reasons.

STEINBERG: My clients and I talk about growing old together. We sort of joke about it. “When we’re old we’ll do this or that.”

MASSIE: Right. It always worries me when you’re talking to a writer about representing them and they ask, “So, do you work on a book-by-book basis?” I’m like, “No. I do not work on a book-by-book basis.” I’m not interested in working on a book-by-book basis. For me it’s a long-term relationship.

STEINBERG: That’s one of the reasons why you take on short story writers. You see the relationship in a long-term way—you’re trying to see the forty-year arc. And when you work with storytelling so much, one thing you learn is that there’s a story arc to the client-agent relationship, too. You have an arc of a story in the way that your relationship develops.

What are the hardest decisions you have to make as an agent?
STEINBERG: A lot of times it’s books that you know you could sell for a lot of money but you still say no.

STEIN: Or you take the preempt because you know it’s the right house, or you take the lower offer because you know it’s the right house. And you hope that you’re right.

MASSIE: Another hard one is telling an author that his newest book is not there, or not the one, or you’re not happy with it, or you just don’t see it or know what to do with it. That’s a really hard conversation to have, especially with someone you’ve worked with for a long time. For me, at least, that’s the hardest conversation I ever have.

STEIN: Firing a client.

STEINBERG: Or not being able to sell her work. That’s one of the hardest things about the business. You take things on because you inherently love them. That’s why you do it. You think you’ll sell them, and you think everyone will be happy, and then you come to that end of the road where you’ve done your second round of submissions and wracked your brain for the last three unlikely suspects and they all pass. That’s a very difficult conversation.

STEIN: And that’s the novel that haunts you for years. That’s the novel you think is, in some ways, the best novel you’ve ever taken on.

But that’s not a decision you have to make.
RUTMAN: We’re just eager to get to the “What are the worst features of the job?” question. Can we skip right to that? [Laughter.] Seriously, though, deciding what to take on is probably the hardest decision. I find myself sitting on fences a lot more often than I would like. Sometimes I feel like I just run out of critical faculties. My discernment just isn’t guiding me very authoritatively and I can’t decide whether I ought to be working with a book or not. Because you see its virtues, or your hesitations kind of nullify each other enough to make it hard to decide.

When you guys find yourselves in that situation, how do you decide?
STEIN: If it’s something brand new—if the author is not a client—sometimes it’s about the writer. If I have an editorial conversation with the writer, and I’m sort of feeling out the situation, that will sometimes do it for me. Because if they’re with me, and I feel like we’ll have a good editorial relationship—we need to have a good editorial relationship, probably for a long time, before we send out the book—that will become clear. If we have those initial conversations, and I feel like we won’t work well together, for any number of reasons, then the decision becomes much easier.

MASSIE: If I’m on the fence for too long it’s not a good sign. My feeling is that usually, when I love something, I’m jumping all over it. So if I’m on the fence it’s probably not good for the writer and it’s not good for me. If I can’t imagine myself getting on the phone and calling ten editors and saying, “I love this. You should read this right now,” then it’s probably not right for me. It also wouldn’t be fair to the author for me to take it on.

RUTMAN: You’re right. It’s not fair to the author. But I also have the misfortune of having my enthusiasms located on some difficult-to-access frequency. Sometimes I’m just not sure what I think, and I’ll react differently to a book on different days. I’ve certainly had the experience where I return to a manuscript and think, “I was wavering about this? This is obviously exceptional and I should take it on.” And, less happily, the reverse. It’s nice to have access, or confident access, to your feelings.

STEINBERG: It’s also nice to know when you’re not ready to make a decision. “I’ll wait till tomorrow because I’m in a bad mood or tired or whatever it is.” And I also use the phone call as a sort of determining factor. But, like Maria, I’m not really on the fence that often. I think that’s a good thing.

MASSIE: I just know from experience that if I take something on that I’ve been on the fence about, it won’t necessarily take priority. If I take on something with guns blazing, and I totally love it, that’s at the top of my list all the time. If I’ve been on the fence about something and I decide to take it on thinking, “Okay, I’m on the good side of the fence now,” I’ve been there and I can sense that it won’t take priority and I’m not going to give it as much as I should. It’s just not fair to the author. It’s not fair to me, either, because I have only so many hours in the day.

STEINBERG: I think editors can sense it too.

MASSIE: Editors totally know. They absolutely know.

STEINBERG: Just as we’re good at sensing things, they’re good at knowing when the agent isn’t enthusiastic enough.

STEIN: And you will see all the doubts you had about the book in the rejection letters. You can often gauge your true reaction to a book by the rejections. If it’s something where you’re really guns blazing—if you really love it—when you see the rejection letters you think, “You. Are. Out. Of. Your. Mind. You’re out of your mind!” And that’s how you should feel all the time.

MASSIE: Exactly. You see the rejections and you think, “No. I don’t agree at all. You don’t know what you’re talking about!”

RUTMAN: When you strenuously disagree with a rejection, that’s a really reliable gauge. Because a fair number of times I think, “Oh, well, yeah. I half anticipated that and I suppose I can see your point.” When you sharply disagree, you were right to take it on.

STEINBERG: I think it’s also the art of the agent to anticipate the rejections from the editors and try to fix the material before you get the rejections. One thing that I’m cursed with is that when I read the material I sort of see the rejections go across my eyes. I can see how people will reject it, and you work on the material in light of that. Invariably, whenever I don’t listen to my own instincts and fix that thing that was nagging at the back of my mind, I will get a rejection that says the very thing that I should have fixed. It’s like, “Damn. Listen to your instincts.” That’s a big part of the job these days, especially because editors are looking to pass. They have a billion things on their desks and they think, “Oh, I figured it out. This is how I’m going to pass on this book.” You can’t give them that. You can’t let them find their entry point to pass.

STEIN: Which is why we’ll have that extra paragraph in our pitch letters in a year that will basically say, “This is how you can publish this book. I’ve already thought it through and this is how you can publish it.”

STEINBERG: It’ll be like a marketing section for fiction, just like nonfiction proposals.

MASSIE: Exactly. That’s got to be the next thing, right?

STEINBERG: That’s depressing.

Tell me a little about how you spend your days.
STEIN: The morning is all e-mail.

MASSIE: E-mail, phone, contracts.

RUTMAN: Not reading.

MASSIE: I never read in the office.

STEIN: Manuscripts are for travel. Trains. Planes.

MASSIE: Thank God for the Sony Reader.

STEIN: I can’t get mine to work. I can’t get it to charge.

Sony’s not going to be happy to hear that.
STEIN: Sony can send me some swag to make it up to me. [Laughter.]

MASSIE: I don’t know about you guys, but I feel like I sit in front of my computer doing e-mail all day.

RUTMAN: Sometimes I feel like a typist.

MASSIE: You’re just dealing with whatever’s in front of you. Answering questions. Sending things out.

RUTMAN: How many stray issues are floating in front of you at any given moment? How many small but unignorable questions are hovering at any given moment?

STEIN: By the afternoon I can start returning phone calls and dealing with shit on my desk, whereas the morning is just an e-mail suck.

STEINBERG: It’s reactive.

STEIN: Exactly. It’s e-mail suck reactive. But sometime after lunch you can start—and when I say “after lunch” I don’t necessarily mean going to lunch, because we don’t necessarily go to lunch anymore—but in the afternoon you can start to look at the contracts and return the phone calls and whatever else. Unless you’re submitting a book, in which case it takes up the whole day.

What about after the afternoon?
STEIN: Drinks.

MASSIE: Home to the kids.

RUTMAN: Roundtables, mostly. [Laughter.]

STEIN: If I’m not going out, I work until nine. Not that I do that often, but that’s what I do. And I’m not reading manuscripts. It’s more of the same stuff.

So when do you read?
STEINBERG: If I have to read, I don’t go into the office. I’ve tried that before and thought, “Okay, I’ll do some work and then I’ll read for a few hours.” But it just doesn’t work. You get sucked into your e-mail and the other issues of the day. Sometimes in the morning, when my brain feels fresh and I can really concentrate, I’ll go straight to Starbucks or somewhere that’s not my office and read or work on some material. I try to read late at night but I always fall asleep. My wife finds me on the couch with the manuscript pages fallen off onto the floor.

STEIN: I won’t take a manuscript into my bedroom.

MASSIE: I don’t either.

STEIN: Only books.

MASSIE: Me too. I have to read at least ten pages of a book that I have nothing to do with.

STEIN: For me it’s twenty-five. Not that I actually make it to twenty-five, but I try to set that as my goal. I say twenty-five so that I make it to maybe eight.

MASSIE: I have to do that to clean my head. I try to read for at least an hour after my kids go to bed every night.

STEINBERG: I love to read on airplanes. I get so excited. I’m like, “I’m going to read this whole thing!” That’s a great feeling.

STEIN: As long as there aren’t really good movies on the plane.

STEINBERG: I have a rule that I won’t buy the headphones.

STEIN: I don’t have a TV at home, so I get very excited when I’m in front of one. [Laughter.]

STEINBERG: I also have a rule that if I’m on a train or something, I’m not allowed to buy the newspaper. Because I have to do work. But I’m allowed to look at other people’s newspapers.

You mentioned before that editors are looking for excuses to pass on projects. I’m curious what else you see as changing about your jobs. Or what’s getting harder?
STEINBERG: One thing that’s changing is that everyone is reading on Kindles or Sony Readers. I’ve made an adjustment in my head and when I envision an editor reading the material, they’re sitting somewhere and reading on the Kindle or the Sony Reader. I don’t know how that affects what I submit yet, but it’s certainly something I’m thinking about.

STEIN: With nonfiction I think about trends all the time because it follows trends in a much more obvious way than fiction does. With fiction, none of us follows trends—we fall in love. We also fall in love with nonfiction, but there’s a measure of practicality that goes with it, which also has to do with our own interests. I’m particularly interested in politics but I haven’t wanted to take on a political nonfiction book in several years. And I don’t envision wanting to anytime soon. Well, aside from Cory Booker. Do you hear me, Cory Booker?

What about Jon Favreau? Wouldn’t he be the biggest get right now?
MASSIE: Everyone must want him. Or Reggie Love.

STEIN: But if I’m interested in something and I need to help shape it—because often nonfiction will come in as an idea rather than a real proposal—I definitely try to think about whether there’s a market for it considering where we are now, and where we are in our times. That’s not something that’s different from ten years ago or five years ago. But I think that considering the shrinking market will become all the more important. There just isn’t room for books that are kind of interesting to some people anymore.

MASSIE: I think about the lack of book reviews. All of these places are getting rid of their book review sections. I think about that in terms of “How is a book going to get out there? How are people going to find out about it? What can I do and what should the author be doing beyond what the publisher is doing?” When you think about how overworked publicists are and how small publicity departments are and how many books they’re working on, it will sometimes keep you up at night, especially if one of your clients has a book coming out. I think, “Oh, God. What should we be doing? What should we be thinking about? How do we get the word out?” Because there’s no such thing as a review-driven book anymore.

So what should writers be doing? What are your authors teaching you about that?
MASSIE: To think outside the box. To think about other ways of getting the word out. It used to be that you’d have a meeting with the publicist, or a phone call, and there would be almost a checklist you’d go down. “We’re going to send it to the newspapers and the magazines and this, this, this, and this.” That doesn’t exist anymore. It’s a whole new world. There are so many other distractions out there. You really have to think, “Well, how do people find out about books? Where do they hear about them?”

And what are you learning about that from experiencing it on a daily basis?
MASSIE: I think a lot of it is word of mouth. It seems like there’s a critical mass that a book has to achieve in order to work. You have to get all the big reviews, and if you don’t, how do you get that critical mass? Is it the independent booksellers hand-selling a book? Is it having great placement in the front of Barnes & Noble? I mean, I don’t know. I’m still trying to figure out what you have to do.

STEIN: I do think, with literary fiction, it’s about getting it in the hands of the bloggers, who we don’t read. When I say that I’m joking, but I’m also not joking. I should say the bloggers who a whole new generation of readers are reading. And the social networking. Everyone should have a Facebook page. Part of it is personality. Some authors are incredibly magnetic and funny, and that’s not something you can tell your author to be. You can’t tell your author, “When you do your readings, make the audience fall in love with you.”

RUTMAN: “Be more charismatic.” [Laughter.]

STEIN: That’s something that just happens, and that sells books. There are certain authors who are very funny at their readings and draw crowds, who maybe at a different time wouldn’t have sold as well as they do now. But they’re just the right thing for the blogging atmosphere and just the right thing for buzz. There’s something underground about them because they give almost stand-up comedy routines when they read. I think it’s going to be different for every author in a way that it wasn’t before, and that’s why we have to think about how to publish each book individually in a way that we didn’t have to before.

What else are they teaching you?
STEINBERG: I have a client named Keith Donohue who wrote a book called The Stolen Child, and Amazon optioned it for film. I think it might have been the only time they ever did that. So they had a vested interest in making the book work. And they made it work.

But that sounds like an exception to me.
STEINBERG: That’s my point. We have to do exceptions. With fiction, these days, you have to work under the exception rule because fiction does not have a platform. Publicists are stumped. That’s why I think nonfiction has come to the fore a little more. Publicists are sort of like, “Well, no, we don’t know what to do. We’re not really sure.” They used to be able to rely on reviews and now even that’s gone. One thing I ask myself, even though I said that writers shouldn’t put “I think this could be a great movie” in their query letter, is, “Could this novel become a movie?” I used to work at the agency that represented Chuck Palahniuk, and before the movie version of Fight Club came out, that hardcover had sold about five thousand copies. And after the movie came out I think the tie-in edition sold something like a hundred thousand copies in the first few months. So that’s something I think about. I’m like, “Wow, I need to re-create that for my clients.” If a book is made into a movie, no matter how small, it helps the writer forever.

STEIN: This is kind of an abstract thing to say, and I don’t know exactly what I mean because it hasn’t happened yet, but I think the agent’s relationship with publishers has to change a little bit. I think that it has to become a little bit less adversarial and a little bit more open and cooperative. Which means that the publisher has to do their part so we don’t have to be adversarial. But there can be a way for everybody…. Look, we’re all in a sinking ship. So all fucking hands on deck. I think there’s a little bit of editors not wanting to tell agents what’s really going on and agents feeling like they have to sort of choose their shots with regard to when they call editors and ask for numbers, ask what’s going on with publicity, ask about the marketing plan, all of that stuff. And we shouldn’t have to do that. We’re partners in this thing, and we’re all trying to do the same thing. We shouldn’t have to feel that way, and the editors shouldn’t have to feel like they have to keep secrets. I mean, if there’s a secret, or if there’s something to feel ashamed about, we should figure out what to do about it.

RUTMAN: Preemptive sharing is really great. When editors keep you overly appraised—there’s no such thing, really—and just give you information without having to be asked, it is deeply appreciated. I find that when a book works, it’s almost always in that situation. You feel like all of the parts of the house are working in tandem and the editor is inclined to update you because they’re pleased with the way everything is coming together. If you have to excavate the information—

STEINBERG: It feels like pulling teeth.

RUTMAN: Or there’s just nothing planned.

STEIN: But Jim, let’s say you do have to excavate. Or the editor is in a position where they feel like maybe something at the publishing house has fallen short. In that situation it’s best that the editor is up-front with the agent so that they, with the author—because it’s the author’s job too—can all save the day as much as possible. It’s just got to be all fucking hands on deck. You can’t be all hands on deck if everybody doesn’t know what’s going on.

MASSIE: There’s no transparency. You ask, “What’s in the budget? What’s in the marketing plan?” You’re constantly asking and you think, “Why can’t you just know what’s in the budget for this book? Why can’t you know what’s being allocated for this book?” They’re like, “We’ll see, we’ll see, we’ll see.” No.

RUTMAN: I think there’s an assumption that you will find it lacking, and will want—

MASSIE: But it’s so much better to know. It allows you to manage expectations. It allows you to think about what else you can do. It’s so frustrating to constantly…. Managing an author, especially a first-time author, is difficult enough. Just trying to find out what you have to work with is so frustrating.

STEIN: They aren’t used to this new wave of reasonable agents. [Laughter.]

STEINBERG: It’s also this frustrating catch-22 where they don’t throw money at a book until it does well.

MASSIE: Which means it’s not going to do well. That kills me.

STEINBERG: That is incredibly frustrating to agents because a book isn’t going to do well unless you’re actively doing something for it. You can’t just wait and see if it does well and then try to make it do even better.

I hope you know that that’s frustrating to editors, too. We aren’t the ones making those budgeting decisions.
STEIN: That’s my point. If nobody else at the house is doing anything for a book, the editor and the agent and the author, every now and then, can have a flash of brilliance and come up with something that might work.

STEINBERG: It’s hard. Sometimes you get to that conversation and you’re like, “Let’s think of those out-of-the-box things that no one usually does, and let’s do them,” and there’s sort of silence on the phone.

MASSIE: Total silence. They’re like, “Um…”

STEINBERG: You can hear the crickets. They’re like, “Well, anyway, I’ve gotta go…”

MASSIE: “I’ll think about that and get back to you!”

STEINBERG: “I’m going to brainstorm tonight and I’ll get back to you tomorrow.”

But what are the out-of-the-box things that are working?
MASSIE: I think it depends on the book. But I also think about, “Does John Grisham really need a full-page ad in the New York Times every time he has a new book. Really? Does he? Is he not going to sell those books?”

STEINBERG: His agent would say yes.

MASSIE: Fine. But do the authors who are so well established really need the biggest piece of the marketing budget? Their audience is there. They know when their books are coming out. They’re there and waiting. Why not use that money for establishing an author?

STEIN: Think about when a really big band goes on tour. They always have a couple of opening bands, and those opening bands get exposure. So why isn’t Grisham giving some exposure to a young writer or two? Why isn’t he doing the same thing? Why isn’t he going on tour and saying, “This is my opening act and I’m supporting them”?

MASSIE: That’s a great idea.

STEINBERG: I think somebody like Stephen King has thought of that and is doing it in Entertainment Weekly.

MASSIE: Stephen King definitely does that.

STEIN: Absolutely.

RUTMAN: A book campaign gets interesting when it starts to look like another industry’s campaign. I was lucky enough to work on a book where we did really cool tour posters, for example. And one day the author suggested, “Hey, it would be really nice if you guys would print up some guitar picks. I would throw them out to people at readings.” The publicist said, “That’s a great idea. Let’s print up some guitar picks.” That doesn’t take a huge effort, and I don’t know that it made the difference for the book, but swag is always appreciated. I’m not saying that that’s a uniformly good approach, but thinking about a book as a potentially cool object—something you could covet in a way that you might covet some other cultural product—is, I suppose, the way it’s going. Publishers probably don’t need to be encouraged to treat books more like products, but at the same time, something basic is changing, isn’t it? I mean, if book review outlets are as fleeting as they are.

STEINBERG: I think we’re in an in-between time period. Reviews are going away but there’s nothing there to take their place. It will be the Internet in some form, but nobody knows how, exactly.

STEIN: If those short-form book reviews that are just like, “This is the book, here is the plot, thumb up, thumb down, or thumb in-between,” are the ones going away, so be it. If what’s left behind are the book reviews that actually say something about books, great. Let’s do something exciting with what used to be the space for those, frankly, boring synopses of books.

STEINBERG: I think we can also take a lesson from something I saw in a bookstore in Salt Lake City once. I was there for a writers conference. I went into the YA section and all of these teenage girls were talking about books as if they were cool. I was like, “That’s what we have to do. We have to make books cool again.” How do we do that? I don’t know.

RUTMAN: Was there a time when books were cool? I guess there was.

STEINBERG: I don’t know. But the vibe in that YA section? Those girls were all like, “Oooh, what did you read?” They were trying to one-up each other with what they’d read. It was amazing.

RUTMAN: Kids talk about books differently than adults do, and that’s why a handful of YA books are such spectacular successes. There’s this unself-conscious discussion and inclination to share. I don’t know how we appropriate that and make it a possibility for adults. When we’re considering a manuscript, one of the things that we’re trying to glimpse is whether or not it might be adopted by book clubs. How often do you get something that you feel could become the subject of conversation among people who, you know, maybe their first inclination is not to evaluate the merits of a book. And the books that tend to get that far probably don’t do it because of an especially successful campaign. The frustrating possibility we’re always forced to consider is that it’s not really within anyone’s control, even if a publisher makes a really concerted effort. Part of our job, and certainly part of our responsibility, is to see that the publisher carries out its duty as fully and faithfully as possible. But they certainly do that and books still fail to reach more than a few souls. I don’t know what makes people like books. There’s a basic mystery.

STEIN: But I just saw Revolutionary Road this weekend and walked out of the movie and could hear everyone saying, “Have you read the book? Have you read the book?” I thought, “Thank God. Thank God people are saying that.” And that book is on the best-seller list now.

I find that amazing. It’s one of the bleakest books of all time and it’s been on the best-seller list for fifteen weeks.
STEIN: It’s totally bleak, and it’s brilliant, and it’s so much better than the movie, not because the actors didn’t give it their best shot but because Sam Mendes was a terrible director.

STEIN: But that’s the thing. People want to read that book. That’s exciting. It’s cool and it’s hot and it’s depressing all at the same time. And maybe after they read Revolutionary Road they’ll want to read another depressing novel. It’s cool to read depressing novels.

RUTMAN: There’s little that I find cooler.

You guys work on commission. How does that affect the decisions you make when it comes to selling a book where maybe you have multiple offers?
STEINBERG: It’s always a combination of the money and the right place. What that combination is varies, but you have to take both into account. I’ve taken less money a lot of times to have the right publisher—probably not a lot less money—but a little less money to be published in the right place.

MASSIE: The right place for a little less money, over time, could be more money. It can’t just be about the money. There are so many different factors.

STEINBERG: An advance is an advance against royalties, and royalties are an aspect of it.

MASSIE: Right. And if you don’t earn out that advance, your next one may not be as big.

STEIN: And to clarify, when we say “the right place” we mean the place we think will be just as enthusiastic, or even grow more enthusiastic, from the moment they buy the book until it’s published, and make it a best-seller if possible. And the place where the book won’t disappear if, you know, Alan Greenspan or Hillary Clinton or Obama happens to pop up on their list.

STEINBERG: Stability is also important these days. I was selling a book recently and there were a few publishers that I’d heard weren’t doing so well. I definitely took that into account. Because it can take a year or two for a book to be published after you sell it. Will that place be around in two years? Will the editor be around? Stability is so important to writers, which is why this time period is even tougher than you may think.

RUTMAN: What we do is really hard, readers. We just need you to know that.

STEIN: We have to think a lot. [Laughter.]

You’re joking but my wife is an agent and I know that it is really hard. Especially when you’re less established than some people. How do you compete with people who are more established?
STEIN: I thought you were going to ask, “How do you pay your rent?” [Laughter.]

STEINBERG: If you want to talk about what’s at the forefront of our minds….

But seriously, how do you compete with people who are more established?
STEIN: I don’t. I don’t think that I compete with people who are more established. I think they throw me a bone every now and then, if they’re too busy. People who are really established? If they want a writer? I don’t think I’m going to compete with somebody who’s been in the business for twenty-five years. I think that’s unreasonable. Why would I compete with somebody who’s been in the business for twenty-five years? Unless it’s a perfect match, for some reason. I just can’t see a competitive situation unless, for example, a writer is recommended to an agent who’s been in the business for a long time and some younger agents and there’s very good chemistry and a good match. I think that experience in this industry is really invaluable, and I respect experience a lot. So if I were in the shoes of a writer who was choosing between good chemistry with somebody with a lot of experience and good chemistry with somebody who was young, I would probably go with the person with a lot of experience.

RUTMAN: The only thing at your disposal in that situation—if you’re at an experience and success quotient disadvantage—is the quality of the attention that you can offer the writer.

STEIN: That’s true.

RUTMAN: And that’s what you’re presenting to them. It’s like, “Look, I will talk to you more often.”

MASSIE: “And I won’t pass you off to my assistant.”

RUTMAN: And we’re probably going to be more engaged in things that they want to be engaged in. You know, talking about what’s wrong with the material in a closer way than somebody else. What else can you really offer? And that’s something.

STEIN: “I’ll edit your book.”

RUTMAN: All you can really do is try to work up superior chemistry to the chemistry you think they may be working up with somebody who just doesn’t have the time or inclination for them in the way that you might. I also don’t like to know—I don’t need or want to know—who I’m competing with.

MASSIE: I don’t either. I never want to know.

And they should never tell you, either.
MASSIE: Some people do, though.

But they shouldn’t.
MASSIE: You’re right.

RUTMAN: They shouldn’t. You want to say, “Really? Oh, she’s really good. She likes this? Congratulations!”

STEIN: But how do you guys feel about this. If there’s an agent who you really respect—who’s been in the industry for a long time and who you may even think of as a mentor—and if you were a writer, wouldn’t you go with somebody like that, even if you knew they were busy, over you? Or would you go with you?

RUTMAN: I’m supposed to be me in this scenario?

STEIN: You would give them more attention and more of your time, and that person might have them dealing with their assistant more often, but that person is a mentor to you for a reason. They have so much experience and knowledge that you couldn’t even begin to have.

STEINBERG: In my experience it’s so rare that you compete with other agents. I don’t really think about it too often. It’s not like being an editor, where one agent submits to twelve editors and you know you’re competing with other editors. As an agent, usually it’s a single submission, just to you, because you know the person somehow. Or you get to the material so much faster than everyone else because you’re immediately drawn to it off the slush pile and you know that other agents aren’t involved. In my experience it’s very rare.

RUTMAN: You don’t find that with referrals? Where maybe some thoughtful referree has given the writer three or four names?

MASSIE: Of course. I always assume that.

STEIN: I assume that too.

RUTMAN: And then you think, “Oh, crap. This is really good. Agent so-and-so is probably going to see this too.” And then they do.

So what do you do? That’s what I want to know.
MASSIE: You fight as hard as you can and you argue why you’re the best person for that project and that author and you hope that they agree.

RUTMAN: Or why Anna is, depending on the situation. [Laughter.]

STEIN: Exactly. I try not to get clients as much as possible. Can you tell?

STEINBERG: Speed is a great help in those situations. You can be like, “I’m going to read this tonight and call you tomorrow.”

MASSIE: That is so hard, though. I have two small children so I just can’t do speed.

STEIN: I don’t like to tell writers that they need to make a decision right away if the book is still out with other agents. I think it’s important for them to have a choice, in the same way that we want a choice between editors. We like to be able, if we can, to shop an offer. We like to be able to make a decision between editors. I think authors are entitled to that decision between agents, too.

RUTMAN: You also don’t want them to go with you if they have doubts in their mind. Because that will affect the relationship down the line. There have been instances when I’ve been like, “Oh, go with the other person,” because I could just tell that they wanted to. That’s fine. Sometimes the other agent is a friend and I’m happy for them. Until it hits the best-seller list. [Laughter.]

Talk to me about what editors do that makes you the most frustrated.
STEINBERG: The bandwagon mentality. When I submit a book to them and they call and say, “What’s going on?” They’re not supposed to say, “What’s going on?” They’re supposed to either say “I hate this” or “I love this” or “It’s okay” or whatever. It’s their job to tell me what’s going on at that point. I’ve done the work, I’ve submitted to you, and you’re supposed to tell me what’s going on. If you’re calling me and saying “What’s going on?” then you’re just wondering what you might miss out on because other editors might be interested and you’re not going with your passion.

RUTMAN: Or perhaps don’t call and ask what’s going on without having some intention of your own to offer.

STEINBERG: That’s very frustrating.

MASSIE: Or flip-floppers. Someone who disappears on you. Somebody who sends you an e-mail like, “Don’t do anything without me. I’m loving this and getting other reads,” and you never hear from them again. You’re like, “What happened?”

STEIN: And we all know what happened.

MASSIE: But call and tell me. We need closure. The author’s like, “What did they say? What’s going on?”

STEIN: Show your confidence in your taste. And if you lose in the house…

MASSIE: Just say so. It’s so much easier. And then you trust that editor. They loved it and for whatever reason the other readers didn’t. But be transparent about it. It’s so much easier to know what they’re thinking than to wonder.

STEIN: And you’ll go back to them because you understand their taste.

MASSIE: Yes. And if they don’t tell you, you won’t go back to them. There are editors who I won’t go back to. And I’m sure all of you have your list of those editors.

RUTMAN: Explaining yourself is really helpful. I want to know on what grounds you are saying no, or on what grounds you couldn’t get something through. It’s all useful because it rounds out your sense of who you’re offering a book to.

MASSIE: And it’s so important to an author to hear about how people are responding to their work. When people don’t get back to you, or they disappear, it’s so frustrating because you’re the person stuck in the middle trying to manage your author’s fears and hopes and expectations. If it’s a no, it’s a no. It’s easy.

STEINBERG: I also don’t like when the editor has his assistant write the pass letter. I’m not submitting to the assistant—I’m submitting to you. I didn’t have my assistant work up this submission for you. Because you can tell when the assistant’s doing the form rejection. Agents should not get form rejections. You just don’t do that.

STEIN: It’s also frustrating when editors disappear after they’ve acquired a book. If, for some reason, things aren’t going as well in-house as they’d like, they sometimes hide. Or if they’re just really busy. Look, everybody’s busy. Just say, “I’m busy.” The disappearing act is just unattractive behavior.

Do you resent how collaborative the acquisitions process has become?
STEINBERG: I try to submit to places that aren’t like that. I go out of my way to try to find the few remaining places where people can make decisions because they want to.

RUTMAN: Is that a matter of place or editor selection? Finding an editor whose opinion doesn’t need—

STEINBERG: I guess it’s the person.

STEIN: But I also see it—buying by committee—as something that has become pretty necessary. If an editor is really passionate, and everybody else isn’t so passionate, it’s going to be pretty hard to publish that book. I see it as something that’s more and more necessary these days. If you sell a book to an editor who doesn’t need all of that back-up, it’s kind of tricky. Let’s say you end up with sales and marketing people who just aren’t that psyched about it. That’s not so great for the book. I don’t have so much of a problem with the committee as I do with the taste that the committee is coming up with. Which has just been really mediocre over the past few years.

RUTMAN: Good distinction.

STEIN: I don’t think that the individuals have bad taste. I think it’s just been a taste of fear over the past few years, and I hope that the committees will somehow—and this is just hope—become more courageous over the next few years. That somehow, with the market contracting, instead of thinking, “We need to be more mediocre,” they will be thinking, “If we’re actually going to be publishing literary fiction, it has to be really fucking good.” And that means that some people in the house will kind of hate a book, but see what’s amazing about it, and other people in the house will really, really love it. There wouldn’t have to be consensus within the committee for the committee to get behind it. It would be a little different kind of committee, if that makes sense.

RUTMAN: And I guess this applies more to nonfiction than fiction, but please acknowledge comp titles as the limited and specious resource that they are, at least as the basis for making your decision.

But in the publisher’s defense, it seems like sometimes that’s how the accounts are making their decisions. At least to some extent.
RUTMAN: True. But I feel like a house has to have enough consequence, built in, to persuade a buyer. It’s not like the house can’t anticipate the reluctance that the buyer may ultimately express, and there’s got to be a way to overwhelm that reluctance with the fact that they give a shit.

STEIN: But I think that also comes back to us, and to what we advise our authors to do in our nonfiction proposals now. The comp titles shouldn’t necessarily be limited to the subject they’re writing about. We have to broaden the spectrum to the kinds of books that could possibly work. We have to think about the moment when the sales reps have to face those guys. We have to think, “Jesus, what kind of comp titles could possibly relate to this in a way that could work?” I mean, it’s so boring to have to think about that. But we can’t rely on them to do that job for us anymore, unfortunately. That’s another way that our jobs have changed.

RUTMAN: The anticipation of just about every possible objection. I mean, there are always a lot of possible objections. The list is long. And you try to speak to them as much as possible, even in the introductory conversation. I think we all appreciate how many rounds of approval the editor is responsible for securing, and that they have to create some kind of consensus with a really disparate group of tastes and responsibilities. When you think about all of those different barriers, it’s kind of a wonder that as many books get bought as they do. How do you get this much approval from that many people this often? So it’s kind of amazing when you hear how many books a certain group within Random House or something is going to publish. You guys are going to publish twelve hundred books this year? This one group found enough to agree on twelve hundred times?

Do you guys think the industry is healthy? Just give me a yes or no around the table.
STEINBERG: No.

MASSIE: No.

RUTMAN: I don’t think so.

STEIN: No.

RUTMAN: But I do wonder if there’s ever been a point when you could get four people to say yes.

STEIN: But here’s the silver lining: It’s unhealthy enough that it’s an exciting time. It’s broken enough that publishers and agents and everyone has to change. Everyone has to rethink what they’re doing. So we have a group responsibility, and an opportunity, in a way that the industry has probably never seen before.

RUTMAN: Part of me craves that. If we’re near a precipice, we might as well actually be on it. Let’s get to the moment when some basic model really gives way to whatever other model that really smart people are going to help conceive of. Is this what Jason Epstein’s been talking about for a long time? Maybe. Is the big company going to acknowledge, “Is this business for us, ultimately? We tried this. We kind of gave it a look. Eh, it’s okay. Synergy’s overrated. It’s a stupid word. We’re going to abandon that.” Is it going to become a business for the fewer? Is it going to return to the financial interest of a select few wealthy people who are prepared to collect a really modest profit, if any? And does that make for more interesting publishing? Possibly. Maybe.

STEINBERG: Or will it go the other way, like you were saying before? Will we start making concert posters and guitar picks for publicity and using other industries’ models to promote books? It could go that way and become more like the movie business.

RUTMAN: And those industries are claiming a state of serious unhealthiness as well. So if every single culture industry is ill at the same time, what do we have to look to?

STEINBERG: And maybe we also shouldn’t feel so bad.

MASSIE: It’s an interesting time, if you think about it. Look at how the music industry got hit so hard by iTunes and iPods. They had no time to react. But the book publishing industry actually has a little time to think about things and explore possibilities and try to figure out what the next thing is going to be without being hit so hard.

What are the big problems in your opinions, and who are you looking to—Jim said Jason Epstein—for the solutions? Is it Bob Miller? Is it Jon Karp? Who is it?
STEIN: Those are the first two people I would have mentioned. The big problems are too many books, inflated advances for—

RUTMAN: The few.

MASSIE: Marketing budgets going to big, established authors.

STEINBERG: No one ever hearing about great books that are published.

STEIN: Returns.

RUTMAN: Trend-hunting.

STEINBERG: Barnes & Noble making many decisions for publishers.

STEIN: Inflexible models across the board. For example, it’s time for us to be reasonable as agents. We shouldn’t ask for unreasonable advances. But in exchange, shouldn’t we be able to ask for paperback escalators? Publishers will say, “It’s our company policy not to give paperback escalators.” But we’re going to give a little bit, so publishers should give a little bit.

page_5: 

So who are you looking to?
MASSIE: I don’t know who to look to yet.

STEIN: Nobody’s really stepped up yet except for Bob Miller. He’s really the only one. Jon Karp had a great idea ahead of everybody else but he hasn’t done anything that’s quite like what Bob Miller is doing.

I feel like paperback originals might be one place to look in the short term. What if some established publisher said, “Hardcover books are the eight-track of the publishing industry. They don’t make sense anymore—in this culture, in this economy—and we just aren’t going to do them anymore”? Would you all continue to sell them books?
ALL: Yes.

RUTMAN: Because every house with a serious line of original trade paperbacks is usually publishing some really interesting books. Think about a handful of years ago when Vintage was making a concerted effort and publishing what I guess they were designating as more “difficult” books. One of the most beautiful trade paperbacks they did—it had French flaps—was Notable American Women by Ben Marcus. That thing was just too cool. It was the perfect trade paperback. I thought, “Okay! Maybe this is a kind of turning point.” Not because it was a book that was ever going to sell Jhumpa Lahiri numbers. But that turned out to be a small little experiment that seems all but discontinued.

STEINBERG: I think it’s always attractive to agents when publishers have a vision. If they said, “We’re just going to do trade paperbacks, and we’re going to make it work,” that would be immediately attractive. Because they have a vision. It’s not just like, “Oh, let’s publish this and see what happens. Good luck to us all! Bye!” [Laughter.]

RUTMAN: But if you sell a book and it’s acquired with the intention of making it a trade paperback, and three or four months later the publisher comes back to you and says, “We’ve reconsidered. We’re going to make this a hardcover,” it’s not even implied—it’s basically stated—that “we thought we were acquiring nothing, and we’ve actually had a change of heart. We think we have something. Congratulations to us all.” If you were ever under the delusion that there was no hierarchical relationship between the two, it’s dismissed pretty thoroughly. And what’s going to change that? The Great Depression II might go some way.

STEIN: It used to be about reviews. There was this idea that you couldn’t get reviews for trade paperbacks. But there aren’t reviews anymore so we don’t have to worry about that.

STEINBERG: Silver lining.

MASSIE: Grove’s had a couple of original trade paperbacks on the cover of the New York Times Book Review. So that’s not the story anymore.

STEIN: Grove does wonderful trade paperbacks.

Stop it, you’re going to make Morgan blush. But seriously, I wish the whole economics of advances would change so that we could do more.
RUTMAN: And if e-books are costing about what trade paperbacks cost, maybe we can have a more uniform price for books. So you wouldn’t have this disparity.

STEINBERG: But one of the goals of agents is to get a good advance, and the way that publishers get to higher numbers is by doing hardcovers.

STEIN: But that could change a little bit. If there wasn’t the sort of hardcover-paperback hierarchy, and if we started doing a lot more trade paperbacks, the price of paperbacks could rise a little bit. And there’s no reason we should have such low royalties for paperbacks.

STEINBERG: Someone in publishing told me that that’s why publishing still exists—because publishers held agents off from having escalators on paperbacks. That’s where the money is made.

STEIN: But we need a little of that money if we’re not going to ask for high advances.

What are you most worried about with regard to the industry?
STEINBERG: I think if Barnes & Noble folds, or something like that, it might be so devastating that we can’t get around it. If Barnes & Noble were to fold, what would happen to all of us? I mean, there’s no way that publishing could really continue. We’ve put too many eggs in one basket.

STEIN: Publishing could continue.

STEINBERG: It could continue, but it would be at a much different scale.

STEIN: Agents would just sell the books to Amazon. It would be the publishers that would be out of business.

STEINBERG: Isn’t Barnes & Noble like 50 percent of the market?

RUTMAN: But there is also a pretty astounding percentage of books that are sold in non-book-retailing locations. Which is problematic at least for the likes of most of us because we don’t do so many of those books.

MASSIE: They tend to take a certain kind of book.

STEIN: Which is why, although we’re very grateful to Amazon, we need to keep our bookstores in business. So if you’re going to buy a book, buy it from an actual bookstore.

MASSIE: Look at Harry Schwartz.

It’s really sad.
MASSIE: That was really devastating. And it’s like a new one every day.

STEIN: If you buy a book from Amazon, you’re killing us.

RUTMAN: There, she said it.

STEIN: And you’re killing yourself. Thank you. [Laughter.]

What are the other things you’re most worried about?
RUTMAN: That the balkanization of commercial publishing will be so complete that an even smaller number of books that claim all of the available resources will take up even more available resources and the ghetto for everyone else will end up being vast. That the midlist will come to encompass everything that isn’t a couple of titles.

STEIN: That the midlist, and the kinds of books we do, really will become the new short stories or the new poetry.

RUTMAN: The assumption is that you can still anticipate something that will work commercially. Which I guess sometimes you can, but not often enough to justify that as a prevailing strategy. I mean, can we stop paying senators and politicians—sorry, Flip [Brophy, a colleague at Sterling Lord]—and various other famous people tons of money for stories that are—and I apologize, readers everywhere—insubstantial in the extreme?

With one exception, right?
RUTMAN: Obama. [Laughter.]

He’s a great writer.
RUTMAN: Exactly. If they write their own books and they write them well, then we have a crucial exception. But generally speaking, this thing of giving somebody, on the basis solely of name recognition, disproportionate resources that could be so much better spent elsewhere? Why do we do that?

STEIN: Imagine a world where books would have to be submitted without the author’s name. Obviously there would be no platform. So if the proposal was really shitty, and the writing was really shitty, there would be no sale.

Anna wants a meritocracy in publishing.
RUTMAN: Aw, that’s sweet. [Laughter.]

But that raises an interesting point. Why do you all focus on serious literary work when it’s so obvious that the real money is elsewhere?
MASSIE: It’s what I like to read.

STEINBERG: I like going to work every day and the feeling of liking what I do. I think if someone said to me, “You can do only fiction, and no nonfiction, forever. Will you do that?” I would say, “I don’t think I’ll like that very much, because I still like nonfiction, but I’ll do it.” But if somebody said to me, “You can do only nonfiction. No fiction,” I’d be like, “I’m just going to quit.” There wouldn’t be any point.

RUTMAN: I just don’t feel equipped to make judgments about anything other than what I like. I feel like my capacity to gauge commercial prospects is kind of restricted. The only thing I can really respond to is what I think works in some way that means something to me.

STEIN: I’m a hopeless optimist, and I think somehow, someday…well, look, Revolutionary Road is on the best-seller list right now. I’m an optimist, and because it can happen, I think it will happen, and I want to be on the front lines when it does.

Are you encouraged by anything you’re seeing on the front lines?
STEIN: Our president is a writer. We have a president who loves books and who’s all about promoting the arts. That’s amazing.

STEINBERG: I like the Kindle and the Sony Reader. I think they’re a step forward and sort of address the cool factor. I think it’s cool that with the Kindle you can think of a book you want and have it at your fingertips a minute later.

RUTMAN: It’s also nice because it means that books are eligible to be included in the world of new technology.

STEINBERG: When you’re on the subway, people are intrigued by it. They’re like, “What’s that?” And that intrigue factor is important.

STEIN: Except they can’t see what you’re reading.

MASSIE: It also feels like the YA world has really taken off in the last few years and kids are really excited about reading. It feels like there’s a whole new generation of readers out there, doesn’t it? And it’s not just Harry Potter. There are all these authors, people like Cornelia Funke, and all of my nieces and nephews have their favorites. They’ve all discovered their own different authors who they’re so excited about. It’s great. I feel like there was a generation that sort of skipped that.

RUTMAN: I’m also encouraged by the things that succeed, for the most part. Look at something like A Series of Unfortunate Events. You have this very self-conscious, writerly line of books that kind of flatter kids’ ability to appreciate a certain context in which the books have been written. And kids seem to live in a text-filled world in a way that even we didn’t. I don’t know if it’s the right kind of text, but it might function as the basis for some broader appreciation of written communication.

MASSIE: And look at the YA books that are doing well—they’re doorstops. Look at The Invention of Hugo Cabret, that Brian Selznick book. It’s huge.

STEINBERG: My daughter loves that book.

MASSIE: My son loved it too.

STEIN: Is it good? Have you guys read it?

MASSIE: It’s great. I loved it.

RUTMAN: I think the girth of a fat children’s book is a factor in its success. Kids must feel like they’re being entrusted with something enormous. It’s like, “I don’t care that you’re only eight. You’re going to read 960 pages of epic….” And now that they wheel their backpacks, it’s okay. It’s safe.

At the end of the day, what’s the best part of your job?
MASSIE: Working with great authors. Discovering new voices. When an author’s book arrives for the first time—when you get that messengered package and rip it open and there’s the book. That’s the best feeling. Getting the book in your hands is better than getting the deal.

RUTMAN: Having some part in the creation of a book that you feel strongly about. However incidental your role may be. I mean, I haven’t written any books and it’s really nice to have helped bring some of them about. That’s more than I expected from a workday.

STEIN: I agree with all of those things and, for me, it’s also just about making the author happy—making the author’s hard work pay off in a way that you just know their endorphin rush is going to go on for a week. That’s what makes your endorphin rush happen. It’s not the deal. It’s their scream.

STEINBERG: I love dealing with creative people on a daily basis and just seeing how their minds work. It just makes me so happy. I think that’s probably why I do what I do. I just love what they come up with. Great twists in plot. Things that are unexpected but extraordinary. That’s always the best part. I’m really sad when I’m not reading some great piece of fiction for work.

RUTMAN: Constant access to people who are smarter than you is a really nice part of the job.

STEIN: Smarter. More creative.

STEINBERG: More disciplined.

RUTMAN: Better. Just better.

AGENTS ANONYMOUS
In the third hour of our conversation, with a few bottles of wine sloshing around in their brains, the agents agreed to speak anonymously on a variety of topics that would be difficult to discuss for attribution. Any number of verbal tics have been altered in order to disguise the identities of the speakers.

 

What would you say to writers if you could be anonymous?
Work harder. Be gracious.

Don’t be so needy. Don’t need constant affirmation.

Once you make a decision to go with an agent, trust that agent.

When authors leave their agent to go to a “better” agent, it is almost always the author’s fault. I don’t blame agents for poaching. I blame authors for allowing themselves to be poached.

And nine times out of ten it’s the wrong decision.

Tell me about some overrated publishers, in your opinion.
Little Random. I think the reputation they built in the era before we came into the industry has gone out the window in the past five years. I can’t think of one book of theirs that I’ve read in the past five years that I’ve admired. They have no vision. There used to be some good literary editors there—Dan Menaker, Ann Godoff—who had some vision. I think the house publishes schlock now, for the most part.

Spiegel & Grau. They just care about the celebrity-type books. Even if the writer is not an actual celebrity, they only want to buy big books by the sort of literary celebrities. They pretend they’re in it for the art but in my view they’re not.

Scribner. It’s kind of strange because they have this great literary reputation, and I’ve always thought of them as a great literary house, but I just can’t think of anything of theirs that I’ve admired in a long time. Maybe a little bit of their nonfiction, but not much of it. I can’t figure out why that is because, you know, it’s Nan Graham and that shouldn’t be the case.

Riverhead, these days—after Cindy [Spiegel] and Julie [Grau] left—has not found its footing yet. I mean, the books that have done well for Riverhead lately were under contract already. Junot Díaz. Khaled Hosseini. Aleksandar Hemon, but Sean [McDonald, his editor] was there before the new regime. We’ll see what Becky [Saletan] does.

What about on the flip side of that? Which houses do you think are underrated?
Algonquin. They do a great job and they have integrity. They know the right amount to pay but they don’t overpay. And they do great publicity.

I wish more houses were like Norton. They have a pretty big list but they also acquire carefully, for the most part, and there’s a nice range of serious editors. Their acquisition process is rigorous and they don’t often go nuts to overpay for something. They’re an employee-owned company and everybody is invested in what goes on. Their offices are really crappy, which is kind of reassuring. And they take chances on books that are ultra-literary while doing unapologetically commercial stuff too.

I feel like Algonquin uses them almost as a model. They’re similar in a lot of ways.

They’re the last of a dying breed. How many independent houses of that size exist anymore? And there’s a reason we haven’t heard about any cutbacks or financial issues at Norton. They operate responsibly.

Tell me about some editors you really like to work with.
I’m working with an editor I’ve never worked with before, Tom Mayer at Norton. He’s tireless and will do anything for this book. The author wasn’t happy with the cover, and Tom went and got them to hire somebody else. I mean, that never happens. Usually editors are trying to say, “We all love this and the author should too.” I’ve never seen such an advocate for a book.

I would say Kathy Pories at Algonquin. She has amazing taste and she’s also a fantastic editor. She makes novels the 25-percent better that they need to be. She’s such a straight shooter, she’s fun to talk to on the phone… [Laughter.] That can’t be discounted! It’s a joy to call her. And it lets me be a straight shooter myself and not need to spin anything. That’s a nice feeling.

It’s only been one instance, but if somebody’s had a better experience with an editor than I was lucky enough to have with David Ebershoff, I would wish it on all of you. The level of attentiveness and awareness of the whole process from beginning to end was just incredibly heartening, from securing a publicist to being honest about certain potential impediments. His advocacy was inexhaustible.

Molly Barton is the same way. She will not let a book die. She’s still there after publication. She’s still there after paperback publication. She just keeps a book alive and does absolutely everything possible. She does things for her books that I didn’t even know were possible. She came up in a slightly different way and has a sort of big-picture publishing knowledge that a lot of editors don’t have.

Anybody have any horror stories from lunch?
I once had lunch with an editor at HarperCollins, and this was so long ago that I don’t even remember his name or if he’s still there, but he talked the whole time—very excitably, kind of spitting his food—about television shows and action movies. It’s kind of a cliché to talk about going to the bathroom and seeing if you can figure out a way to slip out. But I actually went to the bathroom and thought, “I can’t go back. I can’t get through this lunch. This has got to be Candid Camera. I can’t do it.” But I went back and finished the lunch. I thought the whole thing had to be some sort of joke. But it wasn’t. It was real and he was real.

I had one lunch where the editor called me by the wrong name the entire lunch. He didn’t even know my name! And I didn’t correct him because I was so angry. After lunch I went back to the office and wrote him an e-mail so he’d see my name and know.

Of all the people and places who write about the industry—newspapers, Web sites, blogs—who are the smartest and who are the dumbest?
I feel like Publishers Weekly has really gone downhill. I know it’s a trade magazine so it’s supposed to be boring, but I think it’s really boring. I also don’t trust the reviews. I kind of liked Sara Nelson’s column, though. Just as a barometer of things.

I always feel like when I’m reading Michael Cader he might say something intelligent. Publishers Lunch is one of the better ones.

I thought Boris [Kachka] got a little too much shit for his New York magazine piece. I don’t think it was a dumb article. I felt more sympathetic to what he was trying to do than I think most people did.

I think that guy Leon [Neyfakh] at the Observer is really good at digging in and getting scoops. He really keeps going.

It’s his first job.

And he knows how to become friends with you and get stuff out of you. He’s very good in that way. And he treats publishing like it’s something to care about, which is nice. It’s like he’s always looking for some secret that will be amazing. The things he finds are usually kind of silly, but at least he’s trying.

Which is different than Motoko [Rich, of the New York Times], who approaches it like it’s a business. A business that doesn’t make any money.

Don’t you always feel a little surprised that the Times will cover a publishing development as prominently as they sometimes do? They’re like, “Layoffs at Doubleday!” and you’re like, “That warrants coverage in the New York Times? Really?”

Anything else that you want to get off your chests?
I think book jackets are incredibly important but they’re one of the weakest parts of the business. We need to pay jacket designers more money. We need to attract better people. It’s one thing that we can control.

We should steal all of the indie-rock designers and bring them into books. Because that shit is great. Walk through any record store. They are so consistently good, and they get paid nothing.

I emphatically second that idea. And I think raiding another industry could be the way to do it.

There are so few things you can control, and the jacket is so important. It’s what people look at. Women’s legs are not inherently interesting as cover subjects.

Or shoes.

Or the face of an adolescent girl who is blowing bubbles.

Oh, I disagree with you there. I’d love to support you, but I can’t. [Laughter.]

 

Jofie Ferrari-Adler is an editor at Grove/Atlantic.

Agents & Editors: A Q&A With Agent Molly Friedrich
Agents & Editors: A Q&A With Editor Chuck Adams
Agents & Editors: A Q&A With Four Young Literary Agents

Agents and Editors: A Q&A With Four Young Editors

by

Jofie Ferrari-Adler

March/April 2009
3.1.09
In Print and Online

If the economic Tilt-A-Whirl of the past few months has proven anything, it’s that this carnival life of ours—writing, publishing, trying to find readers—isn’t getting any easier. Booksellers and publishers are in turmoil, with scores of staffers having already lost their jobs to “restructuring,” “integration,” and all the other corporate euphemisms that are dreamed up to soften the harsh reality: It isn’t pretty out there.

While it goes without saying that our problems are nothing compared with those of many industries, one’s heart can’t help but ache for the literary magazines and publishing houses that won’t be around in a year; the unemployed editors, publicists, and marketing people with mortgages to pay; the authors whose first books are being published now, or a month from now, or anytime soon.

But difficult times don’t have to be joyless times. As I listened to these four accomplished young book editors talk about what they do, I was reminded of a simple and enduring truth, trite as it may sound: We are all—writers, agents, publishers, booksellers, librarians, and readers—in this together. And there are concrete things we can do to connect with one another more effectively. These editors are full of insight about how to do just that.

It seems appropriate, at such a humbling moment, that we met over pizza and bottled water (okay, maybe not exclusively water) in the glamorously unglamorous offices of Open City, the independent press and literary magazine based in downtown Manhattan. Over the years its editors, Thomas Beller and Joanna Yas, have introduced readers to some of the most distinctive voices of our time, from Meghan Daum to Sam Lipsyte. Here are short biographies of the participants:

LEE BOUDREAUX was an editor at Random House for almost ten years before leaving to become the editorial director of Ecco in 2005. She has worked with Arthur Phillips, Dalia Sofer, and David Wroblewski.

ERIC CHINSKI worked at Oxford University Press and Houghton Mifflin before moving to Farrar, Straus and Giroux, where he is vice president and editor in chief. He has edited Chris Adrian, Rivka Galchen, and Alex Ross.

ALEXIS GARGAGLIANO worked at Simon & Schuster and Knopf before moving to Scribner, where she is an editor, in 2002. Her authors include Matt Bondurant, Adam Gollner, and Joanna Smith Rakoff.

RICHARD NASH worked as a performance artist and theater director before taking over Soft Skull Press, now an imprint of Counterpoint, in 2001. His authors include Lydia Millet, Matthew Sharpe, and Lynne Tillman. [UPDATE: Richard Nash has resigned as editorial director of Soft Skull Press and executive editor of Counterpoint, effective March 10, 2009.]

Every reader understands the feeling of falling in love with a book. You guys do that for a living. I’m curious if you’ve given any thought to the specific things that can trigger that experience.
GARGAGLIANO: I don’t know if there’s a specific thing, but you know it immediately. The minute I start it I know that it’s the book I want to fall in love with. And that’s the one I keep reading. I will read a hundred pages of something else, but I won’t fall in love with it. You have this immediate sense of texture and place, and you’re just inside it from the first sentence. I think the thing that everybody says about first sentences is true. Everyone should try to get that first sentence perfect. I make my authors do that all the time.
NASH: But if you make them do it, they didn’t quite do it the first time, did they?
GARGAGLIANO: Well, it might be that you’ve had them totally rewrite the opening.
CHINSKI: Do you feel like it’s different for fiction and nonfiction?
GARGAGLIANO: I do. I always hate that with nonfiction, when you read a proposal, you don’t get the writing first. You get the pitch first. I always look to the writing.
CHINSKI: For me, with fiction, there’s that funny moment when you feel like you actually want to meet the author. You want to know who the man or woman who’s writing it is because there’s a real sensibility in the writing. It’s not just that the writing is good—there’s a kind of intensity of imagination to it. You wonder, “Who is this person who’s able to telescope all of these ideas into something that feels accessible?” I think that’s one similarity between nonfiction and fiction, even though obviously they’re different in many ways: It takes the ordinary and makes it extraordinary. You sort of recognize something but it allows you access to it in a totally different way. But I can’t tell you how many times, thirty pages into a novel, I actually want to write the agent and say, “Who is this person?” You just wonder, “Who’s coming up with this?”
BOUDREAUX: I think there’s always a moment of surprise and delight. It comes in the form of a word. You get to the end of a sentence and go, “Wow, I didn’t see that coming. That was perfect.” The language just goes click and the whole thing has gone up a notch and you know at that point that you’re committed to…a hundred pages? Two hundred? Or you’re going the distance with it. The gears just click into place and you realize you’re reading something that is an order of magnitude different than the seventy-five other things that have crossed your desk lately, many of which were perfectly good and perfectly competent.
CHINSKI: And doesn’t it feel like it’s not even just talent? It’s the sensibility of the writer. I think about a writer whom I don’t work with but whom I admire, Aleksandar Hemon. He does that funny thing where he doesn’t use words in an ordinary way, and yet they work and they suggest a whole worldview. Or look at Chris Adrian, whom I do work with and adore. I mean, his writing is really difficult. It’s about dying and suffering children—you can’t imagine a more difficult subject. But again, there’s a kind of intensity of imagination and a way of articulating things that goes beyond good writing. There is a force and energy to the writing. I think that’s the hardest thing to find in fiction, at least for me, and that’s what I find myself responding to again and again.
NASH: For me it’s also when a work of fiction has the force of society behind it on some level. Which is not necessarily to say that it has to be political—I do far less political fiction than people think—but I do want to feel that the writer has access to something larger than himself. To me, the energy you’re talking about is something that possesses social force and a concatenation of relationships and responses to the world lived in a certain kind of way. I try to forbid myself from using the word authenticity because I don’t actually know what the hell it is, but that’s one way of talking about it.
CHINSKI: I have a related question. What do you all think of the word voice? It’s one of those words that we all overuse, but do we actually know what it is? I always find myself reaching for it when I want to describe why I like something and why I don’t like other things that are perfectly well written. But when I really try to figure out exactly what I mean by it, I come back to what I was saying before. Is sensibility the same thing as a writer having a voice?
GARGAGLIANO: If it comes alive for you, and you can hear it in your head, and it sort of lives inside you, that’s when I feel like a writer has a voice. That’s when I’ll keep going back to something again and again. One of my favorite writers when I was falling in love with literature was Jeanette Winterson. It was just about her voice. I kept loving her books even when the stories themselves started to fall apart. I just wanted to hear that voice in my head. For me, with her, it stopped being about the storytelling, which is unusual. I love story. I want plots in my books.
CHINSKI: And you can think about writers who don’t actually tell stories. The Europeans, for example. We always have one: Thomas Bernhard; Sebald; now Bolaño. It feels like there’s always one of these writers who isn’t writing plot-driven fiction. The voice is so strong that that’s what people are responding to. With Bolaño, I find it kind of amazing that you have this nine-hundred-page novel by a dead Spanish-language writer…I mean, I can’t honestly believe that everybody who’s buying it is reading the whole thing. But it goes back to what you were saying, Richard, about the voice having the force of history and almost being haunted by these bigger issues.
NASH: Haunted is totally the word. Beckett had it too, obviously.
CHINSKI: Or look at Philip Roth. Even in his lesser novels, you can always recognize that kind of force in his writing.
NASH: What you just said reminds me of an artist named Bruce Nauman. I went to see a retrospective of his before I was in publishing. There was this sense, as you went from room to room, that the guy just had access to something that he wasn’t going to lose access to. You know what I mean? There was a certain frequency of the world to which he was tuned in. It could express itself in different ways, but he wasn’t going to lose his capacity to listen to it, as a result of which the work was always going to be operating on a certain level. He might vary between, I don’t know, brilliant and mind-blowing, but he wasn’t going to fuck up. Those voices, and those Europeans you were mentioning, are probably at the very upper level.
CHINSKI: That’s right. They always seem to have a certain set of questions that they’re asking. Even if they’re writing very different novels from book to book, they’re haunted by one or two or three questions, and no matter what they write, they seem to circle around them. That may have something to do with the voice they bring to a book. I mean, even Sasha Hemon, who’s only written three books—you can tell what his obsessions are. That’s another thing: I like writers who are obsessed. Chris Adrian is obsessed too. That’s what’s exciting about reading certain fiction writers.

Aside from what’s on the page, and somebody’s skill as a writer or voice or obsessions, what other things influence your thinking and decision-making?
GARGAGLIANO: One of the things can be when a book taps into something that’s happening in the moment. I’m editing a book right now that’s set after World War II in a psychiatric hospital, and it’s really a book about what happens to soldiers when they come back from war. I find myself obsessed with the news and weeping when I watch Channel Thirteen because I’ve been inside of this story for so long and I understand the psychology of these men coming back. I’m hoping that there will be a resonance when we publish it. You’re always trying to process things in the world, and when you read a really good piece of fiction, it helps you process things.
CHINSKI: The word necessary always comes to mind for me. Beyond a good story, beyond good writing, does the novel feel necessary? A lot of good books are written, and I’m not saying that they shouldn’t be published, but as an editor you can’t work on everything, and the ones I tend to be drawn to are the ones that either feel personally necessary or globally necessary in some vague way that’s hard to define. And that should be at the sentence level, too. People who can write really well sometimes get carried away by their own writing and forget what’s actually necessary on the page. I would also raise the question of believability. A book can be surreal and fantastical and all that, so it’s not believable in any straight sense, but it has to be believable in the sense that the author believes in what he or she is doing. Sometimes you feel like an author is just writing for the sake of writing, and that is a big turnoff. It’s got to feel necessary at every level.
BOUDREAUX: As an editor, you know how difficult the in-house process is going to be—the process of getting a book out there. The necessary quotient comes up when you ask yourself, “Is this something that really fires me up? What’s going to happen when I give it to these two reps to read? Are they going to have the same reaction to some pretty significant extent and feel the need to convey their enthusiasm down the line?” Because I think word of mouth remains the best thing we can ever do for a book. So is there that necessary thing? Is there that urgency? Is it in some significant way different from any number of other novels that purport to talk about the same topic? It’s almost like an electrical pulse traveling down a wire. It starts with the author, then the agent, then the editor, and then there are a lot of telephone poles it’s got to go through from there. If it’s lacking in any way, you know that the electricity is going to peter out. Sometimes you can almost see it happen. You can watch it happen between one sales rep and another sales rep. You’re like, “Oh, that just petered out between those two telephone poles.” And the book is only going to do so much.

When a lot of us were starting out I think we may have felt like, “Oh, it’s a little book, but it’s my job to make it work, and I’m going to.” I feel less like that now. Because you can’t work on everything, and you can’t do everything for every book. Even when you do do everything you can think of, so many good books get ignored. So many good books go by the wayside. You’ve got to be able to figure out if each one is necessary enough that you can really do something with it. Because it’s not that rewarding as the editor, or as the author, to just have a book sit there—when it dies a quiet death and nobody even hears it sink. “We tried! We’ll do better with the paperback!” The number of times you hear that! You know you’re lying and they know you’re lying and everyone’s just going to pretend it will be totally different a year from now.

It’s got to have enough juice in it to go somewhere. I feel like that juice can take any number of forms. It’s an ineffable quality, but you kind of know it when you’ve got it in front of you. Everyone is not going to agree on fiction, either. I do pretty much all fiction. When I want to buy something, in most cases nobody else is going to read the whole thing. They’re going to believe me when I say it’s good all the way to the end. They just like the voice and then we run with it. You’re never going to get a whole roomful of people to agree on fiction the way you sometimes can with nonfiction: “Is this the right book at the right time by the right person with the right platform to write the book on whatever?” With fiction it’s all sort of amorphous, and you’ve just got to feel like you’re picking the ones that are potent enough to go the distance.
NASH: We’re all just proxies for the reader. But we’re going to have different ideas about who the reader is and how we connect to that reader. Do we have commonality with this imaginary reader? But I certainly find that I am powerfully animated by the sense of having a duty to connect the writer with the reader. Is this a book that’s going to get one person to tell another person that they’ve got to read it? Which is the closest thing, I think, at least in the land of fiction, that’s going to pass for figuring out what the hell is meant by the word commercial. As you said, your own energy can always get one other person to read the book. But is that one other person going to get the next person to read the book?

Are there any other things, besides what’s on the page, that you’re looking at when a book is submitted?
GARGAGLIANO: This was one of the hardest lessons for me. Unlike what Eric was saying earlier, when I used to read fiction before I was in publishing, I never wanted to know who the author was. I didn’t want to look at their pictures. I just wanted to exist in the worlds that they had created. That was it. When I got into the industry, I quickly learned that that was not acceptable. The first thing I get asked at our editorial meeting is, “Where have they published?” You want to know that somebody has been publishing their short stories, even if a total of a hundred people have read them. It’s always the first question.
CHINSKI: One thing I’m looking for is experience in the world. I keep coming back to Chris Adrian, not for any particular reason. But he’s somebody who has an MFA, he’s a practicing doctor specializing in pediatric oncology, he’s in divinity school, and you can feel all of that in his writing. There’s an urgency, a sense of questioning, and an obsession. You can tell that all of that experience is getting distilled into his writing. He wants to understand something about loss and our relationship to transcendence. I feel like with the best writers, you recognize that in their work. It’s exciting to me to feel like it’s being drawn not just out of the desire to write an interesting story and find readers. It’s a different form of necessity that they feel they need to wrestle with because of their own life experience.
BOUDREAUX: I’ve never been able to say what my books have in common. I’ll make an argument for escapism. I want to be transported. I don’t care where you take me, but I want to have that moment that we all had when we were reading as kids, when the real world ceases to exist and your mother tells you to come have dinner and it’s like resurfacing from the bottom of a swimming pool. “Where am I? What am I doing?” That’s what I want. I’m not looking for any particular kind of book, I’m just looking for the intensity of that experience. It doesn’t matter what agent it comes from. It doesn’t matter if it’s long or short. It doesn’t matter if it’s a young voice or something that’s more mature. I just feel like you sit there as a proxy for the reader, open to having a new experience. And if they can give it to you, great. I don’t even need it to happen in the first sentence. I’ll give it three or four pages sometimes. [Laughter.] I’m seven months pregnant so I’m feeling patient and maternal toward the world—I’ll give them four or five pages to say something that I find interesting.

On the flip side of that, give me some things that you find beginning writers doing wrong.
NASH: Not listening. Not listening to the world around them.
GARGAGLIANO: Trying to sell stories that aren’t really a book. They’re not a cohesive whole. There’s no vision to the whole thing that makes me feel like this person has a reason for writing a story collection other than that they had twelve stories.
NASH: Assuming that having an attitude equals…anything.
CHINSKI: Or assuming that good writing is enough. I’m sure we all see a lot of stuff where the writing is really good. It’s well crafted and you can tell that the writer has talent. But, again, you don’t really feel like the writer necessarily believes in his or her ability to open it up into a novel. I know the old adage “write what you know.” I’d kind of rather somebody write what they don’t know. And figure out, beyond their own personal experience, why what they’re doing should matter to the reader.
BOUDREAUX: I’ve always wanted to give people that advice too. “Do you have to write what you know? If you know it, I might know it. Which means I’ve already read it. Which means that your book is the nineteenth novel about a mother-daughter relationship. And I. Don’t. Care.” The crudest way to put it is the “Who cares?” factor. Why, why, why do I need to read four hundred pages about this? The necessary thing, and the authentic thing, and the voice thing are all much better ways of saying it than the “Who cares?” factor, but it’s basically the same thing. “What is the necessity of reading this? What are you doing that is different?”
CHINSKI: I’d rather somebody be ambitious and fail a little bit than read a perfectly crafted, tame novel.
NASH: I have published novels, especially first novels, that I knew failed on some level because of what they were trying to do. I felt that that was okay.
CHINSKI: That’s more exciting.
NASH: But what would be the version of that that actually answered your question?
CHINSKI: “Have courage”?
NASH: Don’t try to be perfect. Don’t be boring.
CHINSKI: That’s really what it is 99.9 percent of the time—good writing, but boring. And it’s the hardest thing to turn down because you think, “This is good. But it doesn’t do anything for me.”
BOUDREAUX: That’s the thing. You’re like, “There’s nothing wrong with this. I’ve got nothing to tell you to do to fix it. It’s just…there.”
CHINSKI: And that’s a hard rejection letter to write, too. Because it’s not like you can point to this, that, and the other thing that are wrong with it. It just doesn’t move you in any way. It doesn’t feel necessary.

Do you think it’s too hard to get published today?
GARGAGLIANO: I think it’s hard but not too hard. I don’t know how many more books we could have out there.
BOUDREAUX: I think we all kind of know that too many books get published. You can listen to your own imprint’s launch meeting, you can listen to all the other imprints’ launch meetings, and multiply that by every other house, and you know that every book did not feel necessary to every editor. When you think about it that way, it doesn’t seem all that hard to get published.
CHINSKI: But there are also a lot of people who can’t get published.
NASH: There was a great little moment in an article in Wired about a year ago. It was an article about the million-dollar prize that Netflix is giving for anyone who can improve their algorithm—”If you liked this, you’ll like that”—by 10 percent. One of the people in the article was quoted as saying that the twentieth century was a problem of supply, and the twenty-first century is a problem of demand. I think that describes a lot about the book publishing business right now. For a long time, racism, classism, and sexism prevented a whole array of talent from having access to a level of educational privilege that would allow them to write full-length books. That hasn’t been completely solved, but it’s been radically improved since the 1950s. Far more persons of color, women, and people below the upper class have access now. An entire agent community has arisen to represent them. But finding the audience is the big problem. I guess I’m imposing my own question on the question you asked—”Is it too hard to get published?”—and I think we all may have heard a slightly different version of that question. The version of it that I heard was, “Are there too many books?” I personally don’t feel that way. And I get a lot of submissions at Soft Skull. I get about 150 a week. And it’s hell having so much supply. But we didn’t exist before 1993, and you guys all existed before that, so you are feeding off a different supply and we’re enabling this new supply. I love the fact that Two Dollar Radio exists, and all the other new indie presses that have erupted. I think that’s healthy. I don’t think a solution to the problems we face as an industry is to say we’re going to reduce consumer choice by publishing fewer books. Now, at the level of the individual publisher, I totally understand it as a rational decision that a given executive committee would make at a large company. My comment that there are not too many books published has to do with culture rather than a given economic enterprise. I think we could publish more books. You just have to recognize that they may be read by five hundred people. And that’s perfectly legitimate. Blogs can be read by fifty people. You just have to think, “What’s the economically and environmentally rational thing to do with this thing that has an audience—but that audience is just 150 or 250 people?” It may not be to print the book. It may be to publish it through a labor-of-love operation that is completely committed to a given set of aesthetic principles and will print it in a way that is environmentally sensitive—chapbook publishing, let’s say. The poetry model could have a lot to say to fiction and nonfiction publishing.

I think about the midlist writer a lot and I feel like it’s harder and harder to build a career the old-fashioned way—slowly, over several books that might not be perfect but allow you to develop as a writer. Part of that has to do with the electronic sales track. Put yourself in the shoes of a beginning writer and speak to that.
BOUDREAUX: When we published Serena by Ron Rash it was such a proud moment of doing that thing—of almost reinventing a writer. So I feel like it can still happen. The model of building somebody hasn’t gone completely out the window. It gets hard with the “This is what we sold of the last book, this is all we’re ordering this time.” And you’re stuck with it. But a lot of editors and a lot of publishers stick with people.
GARGAGLIANO: I feel like Scribner is really good about that. We can’t do it with everyone, but there is definitely a stable of authors. I have writers for whom I haven’t had to fight that hard to buy their second or third books. It’s because everyone recognizes their talent.
NASH: It can be because the reps love selling them. The reps love reading that galley, even if they’re going to get [orders of] ones and twos. But it makes them so happy to read that galley that they’re not going to fight you when you present it to them.
CHINSKI: You have to think about the identity of the list as a whole, too. Sometimes it means paying an author less than what they’ve received before, but it doesn’t mean we’re giving up on those authors. I think, speaking for FSG, it’s important to us to try to build writers. Roger Straus apparently said, and Jonathan always says, “We publish authors, not books.” That’s more difficult today, given the way of the world, but it’s still the guiding principle. Think about Jonathan Franzen, who published two novels that got great reviews but didn’t sell particularly well. Then The Corrections came along. There are tons of examples like that.

But aren’t you guys and FSG the exception to that in a lot of ways?
CHINSKI: I wonder if it’s really that new. Obviously the mechanics have changed, but there’s always been a huge midlist. We remember the really important writers. We probably don’t even remember the best-selling writers from twenty years ago. You remember the important ones—or the ones that have been canonized as important. The economics have changed and obviously the chain bookstores are a different part of the equation than they were fifty years ago, but I suspect there’s always been a vast midlist.
GARGAGLIANO: I also don’t think it’s very constructive for authors to think about that too much. You’re sort of fortunate if you get published at all. You’re fortunate to find an editor who you have a great relationship with and a house that believes in you in which everybody works as hard as they can for you. There’s only so much you can do.
NASH: If you’re going to stress about something, be worrying about your reader. Don’t stare at your Amazon ranking and don’t stare at the number of galleys your publisher is printing. Get out into the world. And if you don’t have the personality to get out into the world, then you have to ask yourself, “Why does everybody else have to have the personality to get out into the world, but I don’t? What makes me so special that everybody else has to go out and bang the drum for me, but I don’t?” I have a fairly limited tolerance for people who assume that it is everybody else’s job to sell their books while they get to be pure and pristine. They don’t have to get the book-publishing equivalent of dirt under their fingernails. Which involves whoring, to use a sexist term, but one that I use to describe myself. [Laughter.] Go out and find a reader. It’s not about selling a reader a $14.95 book. If you have ten more books under your thumb, then that reader could be worth $150 to you, and it might actually be worth three minutes of your time to respond to their e-mail or chat with them for an extra two minutes after that reading at which it seemed like no one showed up. Those eight people might have some influence out in the world. None of us is in this for the money. It’s sort of mind-boggling how many people think that we’re sitting there behind our cushy desks. There’s just no one in publishing who couldn’t have made more money doing something else. At a certain point, yes, we may have become unemployable in any other industry. But there was a period of time in everyone’s career when he or she could have gone in a different direction and made more money, and chose not to.
GARGAGLIANO: Can I add one more thing? We keep talking about self-promotion, and I think there’s a stigma that it’s a negative thing. It’s really an extension of that deep involvement we were talking about earlier. It’s about being really passionate about your book. It’s a way to figure out how to make the world of your book bigger, and to give other people access to it. I think it’s helpful if authors can wrap their heads around looking at it from a different perspective. I have a lot of authors who are afraid to go out there. They think it’s about them. It’s actually about the book. It’s about the writing. It’s not about you personally.
NASH: It’s about being part of the world around you. One of the freelance publicists I know—I’ve never been able to afford to use her, but I’m friendly with her—does something that I think is brilliant in terms of dealing with a new author. Rather than trying to make an author blog, which is always hell, she says, “Here are twenty blogs that you should read.” And by doing that, they get into it. They start commenting. All of the sudden they start getting that this act of communication is no different than a conversation between two people. It gets the author to start realizing that they’re in a community, and that participating in that community is what we’re talking about when we say “self-promotion.” It isn’t this tawdry, icky activity that will demean them. It will help make them feel more connected to the world, and happier.
GARGAGLIANO: I’ll give you an example. I published this book about fruit—talk about obsessive people—called The Fruit Hunters. The author is this guy who was writing food stories for magazines and became obsessed with fruit and went on to discover this whole obsessive world of fruit lovers. The book came out and got a lot of attention, and the sales were okay, but it has fostered this whole community of people who are also obsessed. The other day they had an event in a community garden in the East Village. They call themselves the Fruit Hunters, after the book, and they’re going to take trips together and everything. There are already a hundred of them. It’s this amazing little story of obsession. It’s exciting. The author is very involved online. He’s happy to engage with anyone who wants to talk to him. He’s just really present, and that makes all the difference.

I’m interested in how you guys view your jobs. It seems to me that things have changed quite a bit over time and I’m curious how you see what you do.
CHINSKI: Things have changed a lot. But in terms of the actual editing and acquiring, I don’t feel like I’m thinking very differently about what I’m signing up, and in terms of the editing, I still have the same basic ideas of what my role is, which is to make the book more of what it already is—rather than coming in with some foreign idea and imposing it on the book. I try to understand what the writer is trying to do with the book and edit it along those lines. But when I first started in publishing, I had no idea that the role of the editor was to communicate to the marketing and sales departments. I had this very dark-and-stormy-night vision of the editor sitting in a room poring over manuscripts. But you very quickly realize that a natural part of being excited about a book is wanting to tell other people about it, in the same way we do as readers. That’s what our job is in-house. And obviously it probably is different now, in terms of the chain stores and all these other things. But I think an editor’s job is basically to fall in love with a book and then to help it be more of what it already is.
GARGAGLIANO: I feel very similarly. I’m the first reader, and I’m there to make the book what it wants to be, and then I’m its best advocate. I’m its advocate to people in the company because often they’re not going to read it—they’re only going to get my take on it—and then I’m its advocate to the rest of the world. I write handwritten notes to booksellers. I write to magazine people. I’m constantly promoting my authors. I feel like I’m the one who was responsible for getting them into the company, and I’m the one who’s responsible for getting them into the world. I have to take care of them.
BOUDREAUX: The most fun part of being an editor is getting to actually edit—getting to sit and play puzzle with the book. God, that is so much fun! That’s what we like to do. We need to do all of these other things…but sitting there with the paper, which you only get to do on the weekends? That’s when you get excited. Like, “I’m a real editor!” But this myth that nobody edits anymore compared with a hundred years ago? I’ve never worked with an editor who doesn’t edit all weekend long, every single night. That’s the fun part.
CHINSKI: I think that’s important to emphasize. I think we all hear that editors don’t edit anymore.
BOUDREAUX: I just don’t know who they’re talking about. Having worked at two different houses, I literally do not know who they are talking about. Who just acquires and doesn’t edit? I feel like everybody I’ve ever worked with sweats blood over manuscripts. And you reap the rewards of doing that.
NASH: I suspect that agents are doing more editorial work on books before they submit them in order to polish the apple. To some extent the process of acquisition has become more collegial, and it’s helpful if a book is not a dog’s dinner when you’re showing it to people before you can start working on it yourself. That can create the perception that not much happened after it was acquired. And when you have the goal of helping to make a book as much like itself as it can be, that can involve a level of editing that doesn’t look very intense on the surface but actually can be quite important. It doesn’t have to involve a whole lot of red ink. But the right red ink in the right places, especially when it’s subtractive rather than additive, can really make a book fluoresce.

Why did you all become editors instead of agents? And why do you stay editors when by all accounts you could make a lot more money being an agent?
CHINSKI: Has anybody here ever worked at an agency? My first job, for three months, was at an agency. That’s why I’m an editor. But sometimes I do think that agents get a more global view of things. Dealing with film and foreign rights and so on.

But in other ways they get a more limited view because they don’t have to do all the things to make a book work.
CHINSKI: I think that’s true. Wouldn’t that be more fun? [Laughter.] But seriously, when I was working there I didn’t leave because I didn’t like working at an agency. It just wasn’t working as a job. I have a really hard time imagining myself as an agent. It’s partly just the obvious stuff of doing the deal and so on. I think you have to have a certain personality to get really excited about that. I’d rather go home and really devote myself to doing the editing. I know that some agents do that. But it’s not, kind of nominally, what they are there for.
BOUDREAUX: I literally didn’t know there was such a thing as a literary agent. I didn’t know anything. I was like, “I guess those people who get to work with books would be editors.” I just didn’t know any better. And I love to play with the words, which they also get to do, but they’re not the final word on it. I also don’t do enough nonfiction, which I feel like any editor who’s got any sense learns to do. But I just don’t have the antenna for it. As an agent it would be even scarier to have a list that is 95 percent fiction. You probably need a balanced portfolio in a way that an editor can still get away with being more fiction-heavy.

What are the hardest decisions you have to make as editors?
CHINSKI: Jackets. I find that the most harrowing part of the whole process. As an editor, you’re in this funny position of both being an advocate for the house to the author and agent but also being an advocate for the author to everybody in-house. The editor is kind of betwixt and between. And for a lot of books, especially fiction, the jacket is the only marketing tool you have. It’s really difficult. I also find that I know what I don’t like, but I don’t have the visual vocabulary to describe what I think might work.
BOUDREAUX: And the cover is so important. Even if it’s not the only thing that’s being done for a book, it’s still got to be one of the most important things. You’ve got reviews and word-of-mouth, and then you’ve just got the effect it has when somebody walks into the store and sees it. I think it’s so important to work somewhere where your art people will read the book and come up with something that you never would have come up with yourself. The idea of a jacket meeting where you have twelve people around a table and you bring it down to the lowest common denominator of “It’s a book about this set there. We need a crab pot at sunset with a…” People do that! They think it’s a marketing-savvy way to go about it. “We need a young person on the cover. But you shouldn’t be able to see the person’s face. It has to be from behind!”
GARGAGLIANO: The same thing happens when the author tries to deconstruct the cover.
CHINSKI: Exactly. That’s one thing that’s changed a lot. When I first started, we would send the author hard copies of the [proposed] jacket. Now we email it to them and they send it to everybody in their family. You can predict exactly what’s going to happen.

What are the other hard decisions you have to make?
GARGAGLIANO: I have two, and they’re related. One of them is when I love a book but I don’t actually think that we’re going to do the best job of publishing it. I anguish about that because I want the book for myself, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the right thing for the author. The step beyond that is when you’ve already been publishing someone, and it’s the question of what’s best for their career. You offer a certain amount of money, and the agent wants to take the author somewhere else, and you have to ask yourself whether or not you go to bat for that person and get more money because you want to keep working with them despite whether the house might really support them. That’s a hard thing to figure out.

I think part of what makes it hard is that editors serve different masters—the authors, the agents, the house. How do you guys navigate those allegiances and responsibilities?
NASH: I will confess that I came into this business not motivated to become an editor. I was a theater director and happened upon Soft Skull because the guy who founded it was a playwright whose plays I directed. The whole thing was going belly up in the middle of my friendship with this dude. He basically did a runner, and there were these two twenty-two-year-olds at the company, and no one else, and there were all these authors, and the whole thing was fucked. I had a messiah complex and came in and tried to be Mr. Messiah for six months. And in the middle of my messiah complex, I fell in love with the process of publishing. So in a weird way, I did not come in with the idea of working with writers. I came in as a problem solver, and that’s all I’ve ever been in a certain sense. The problem I try to solve is, “How do you connect writers and readers?” Those are the two masters for me. Recently I’ve been trying to think, believe it or not, of the publishing business as a service industry in which we provide two services simultaneously, to the author and to the reader. We may pretend to offer a service to the agent, and we may pretend to offer a service to the company. But only to the extent that we fulfill those other two services—to the writer and to the reader—are we truly serving the agent or the company. And we have to use our own instincts on a minute-to-minute psychological basis. Obviously you’re accountable to the bottom line and P&Ls etcetera, but you’re being asked to use your own instincts, and that’s what you have to use in order to bring writers and readers together.
GARGAGLIANO: There are moments when it’s sticky. When you’re dealing with a jacket, for example. But on the whole, everybody wants the same thing, and that makes it easy. The thing that I always have to remind myself is that the people who are on the sales end also love books, and they also love to read, and they could be making more money in some other industry too. When you remember that, it makes your job much easier.
CHINSKI: I agree that we do all want the same thing, but don’t you find that sometimes people don’t behave that way?
GARGAGLIANO: Sometimes. But sometimes they do.
CHINSKI: It just amazes me how combative the relationship can become. I mean, it doesn’t happen that often, but it does become combative sometimes. When we were talking before about authors saying that editors don’t edit…there’s just this assumption that the publisher isn’t doing enough. Sometimes agents don’t quite understand how things actually work in the publishing house. I’m not saying that across the board. But it does happen. I find those situations really difficult, where you feel like you’re being accused of somehow not caring enough about the author when we all know how many hurdles there are. I mean, we wouldn’t be doing this if we didn’t care.
GARGAGLIANO: I’ve been very lucky with my authors. I haven’t had many bad ones. The relationship is all about trust, and once you start that relationship and you start that dialogue, they trust that you’re taking care of them. But there is a point when it’s out of the editor’s hands. And if they’ve trusted you that far, most of the time they’ll accept whatever happens, in my experience. Usually the call I get will be from the agent.
BOUDREAUX: It’s like you can almost have two different conversations. In one of them the agent gets what’s going on and is just being helpful and trying to get everyone on the same page. And in the other one somebody is making demands or accusations that aren’t going to actually help anything. It’s more just for show. You know, “Emboss this part of the jacket” for no good reason. You do get the feeling sometimes that they are fulfilling their service to the author in a way that actually doesn’t have that much to do with the book.
GARGAGLIANO: But that’s the agent. I’m more worried about my author’s happiness.
CHINSKI: I agree with that. A combative relationship with an author is pretty rare. Obviously it happens sometimes, but I’m thinking more about the agent. I don’t want to overstate it, but sometimes it does feel like we should all understand more that we do all actually want the same thing. No publisher or editor signs up a book in order to sink it. Who would do that? We’re not getting paid enough to be in this business for any reason other than we actually love the books we’re working on.

What do you wish writers knew about you that they sometimes don’t?
GARGAGLIANO: I think most writers don’t realize that every editor goes home and reads and edits for four hours—that they’re not doing that in the office. That in the office they’re advocating for all of the authors they already have.
NASH: I don’t even get to read when I go home. When I go home, I’m continuing to advocate. I haven’t been able to read at all recently. I’ve really just become a pure pimp.
CHINSKI: I thought you were a whore.
NASH: I’m both at once! It depends on the street I’m walking down.

What else?
GARGAGLIANO: I think it’s important for writers to remember that we’re not their enemy. We love books and we’re looking for books that we love.
CHINSKI: And ads are not love.
GARGAGLIANO: And ads do not equal sales.
BOUDREAUX: If those two things appear in print—that we’re working nights and weekends and ads don’t sell books—we have all done a fine job here. We are martyrs to the cause and ads are ridiculous. But I think editors like ads too. It’s like having your business card published in the New York Times.

Have you guys ever gotten any great advice about your jobs from a colleague or a mentor?
CHINSKI: I can quote somebody, Pat Strachan, who is one of the most elegant, serious, and lovely people in the business. She said to me, “Just remember, when you’re all stressed out, that the lives of young children are not at stake.” And I do think that’s worth remembering. We all love what we do and we take it really seriously, but you have to keep things in perspective. I also have one from David Rosenthal. He used to say, “If you’re going to overpay for a book, you should at least be able to imagine the things that have to happen for it to work at that level, even if it may not actually work at that level.”
BOUDREAUX: It should be in the realm of possibility.
CHINSKI: Yeah, and you should be able to picture, very concretely, what would have to happen and how you might go about making those things happen. You don’t want to just buy something blindly.

What have your authors taught you about how to do your job?
GARGAGLIANO: To be honest with them. I often have the impulse to protect my authors and treat them as if they are more fragile than they actually are. It’s better if I can have an open conversation with them. If I start that early on, the better our relationship is going to be going forward, and the easier it will be to talk about tough things. That took me a while to figure out.
BOUDREAUX: They teach you over and over and over—and this is so obvious—but they will always have a better solution to an editing problem than anything you could come up with. If you just raise the question, they will solve it. The universe of their book is more real to them than it could ever be to anyone else. You trust them with the internal logic of what’s going on. You just show them where the web is a little weak—where everything that was so fully imagined in their head has not quite made it down to the page. Not only, as you said, are they not that fragile, but the world they’ve created is not that fragile. You can poke at it endlessly, and you’ll just get really good answers and really good solutions. When you bring something up, you never find that you will unravel the whole sleeve. I’ve never had that happen. Where it’s like, “Oooooh, we’d better hope that nobody notices that.”

How do you guys measure your success as an editor?
NASH: Survival.

Tell me more.
NASH: For me, for a long time, there was a very direct correspondence between the success of my books and my ability to eat pizza. Now, in the last year, it has become less direct, since I don’t have to make payroll, least of all my own, anymore. Because in the past, in order to make payroll, I would do it by not making my own payroll.

But what about in a deeper sense?
NASH: I suppose I was answering as a publisher, which is what I was and in a sense what I am anterior to being an editor.

I think I just mean more internally, in a more internal way.
NASH: When the book becomes what you imagined it was going to be based on the fact that it was almost already there. And you helped it get there.
CHINSKI: But we all want more than that, too, don’t we?

That’s what I’m trying to get at.
CHINSKI: We all want our books to have an impact. Beyond sales in any kind of simple sense. You want people to talk about them. You want people to find each other because of them. I worked with a writer who very elegantly described a book as a table that everybody can sit around and start a conversation around. And I think, not to sound terribly cheesy about it, that’s what we all want. We want our books to have an impact in the world. And that’s really rare. Sometimes it has nothing to do with sales. So I think it’s more than just feeling like you did your job on the page. It’s feeling like you did your job in the world.
GARGAGLIANO: That it went beyond you.
CHINSKI: Yeah. Books should transcend themselves in some way, and I think that’s what we all really want.
NASH: The reason I got excited about publishing, compared to theater, was that the theater I was doing had no fucking impact on the world whatsoever.
GARGAGLIANO: Do you feel like it’s better in publishing?
NASH: It’s immensely better. Now, it may be that the joy I get from publishing is relative to how hard it was in downtown, experimental, Richard Foreman-acolyte theater. I set the bar so low for myself! [Laughter.] But in publishing, even indie publishing, thousands of people who I will never meet, who don’t want to act for me, will actually buy one of my books.
CHINSKI: That reminds me of another great quote that I’ll probably get slightly wrong. I remember when Philip Roth came to sales conference at Houghton Mifflin. I think it was for The Human Stain. He gave a presentation to the sales force and basically talked about the death of the novel as a force in our culture. “That’ll be a good way to get the sales reps really excited!” [Laughter.] But then he said the most extraordinary thing, which has always stayed with me and which I’ve said to a lot of writers. He said that if his books were to sell ten thousand copies, which doesn’t sound like a whole lot, but if he were to sit in a room, and each one of those people were to walk by him, and he could see them face to face, it would break his heart. I can’t believe I forgot that earlier. That’s probably the best description of why we do what we do. Whether it’s three thousand people buying a novel, or five hundred people buying a book of poetry, it does kind of break your heart if you actually imagine each of those individuals reading the book.
NASH: That’s why it was not a value judgment when I said the audience for a book might only be 150 people, in this world of more books. It’s about the intensity with which that connection might occur.
CHINSKI: Do you guys all remember one moment where you felt really content? Whether it was something specific that happened or just a moment in your career? Where you felt like, “Okay, this is it. Now I’m kind of happy. This is all I could ever want.” Where you actually slept well for one night?

I like the question.
GARGAGLIANO: That is a good question. [Laughter]
CHINSKI: I mean, I’m just wondering, was it when a book hit the best-seller list? Was it when a book got a great review? I’m curious what those different feelings are.
BOUDREAUX: I’m trying to come up with something that won’t sound like complete dorkiness. I mean, yeah, the best-seller list feels amazing. It feels amazing because of all the great books we watch not get read. When you see one that’s actually getting read? Boy is that an amazing feeling. But that little moment of satisfaction? I was trying to think, “What was the first time as an editor that I really felt that way?” Maybe being promoted to editor was my greatest moment. You know, Ann Godoff was doing the benediction and it was kind of like, “You are now an editor. On your tombstone they can say you were an editor.” I had this little glimmering moment of, “Yeah! I came here, I didn’t even know what publishing was, barely, and now…” Thank God for the Radcliffe Publishing Course. I wouldn’t have had any idea of how anybody moves to New York or gets a job had I not ended up doing that. I had been working at Longstreet Press in Atlanta, where we published Jeff Foxworthy’s You Might Be a Redneck If… That’s actually my proudest moment—what was I doing forgetting that? But seriously, I did that course because I didn’t know anything about anything and I thought I’d go back to Longstreet and work there. But then I thought, “Well, gosh, maybe I’ll try New York for one year. I’m sure I’ll end up back down in Atlanta before long, hoping that somebody at Algonquin would die so that somebody from the South could get a job at a slightly bigger publisher whose books you actually occasionally heard about.” You know, I think actually getting promoted to editor was sort of like, “Wow, here I am. This is really a job that I’m really going to get to do.” I still sort of feel amazed at that.
GARGAGLIANO: Getting a good review is also amazing. It’s so gratifying when you have loved this thing for so long and somebody in the public says that they love it too. It’s a thrill.
BOUDREAUX: Getting a review in a place that’s always been hard to crack. I’d bring up Ron Rash again. He was a regional author who had never been reviewed in the Times, never been reviewed in the Washington Post. He had this Southern fan base. The booksellers loved him. The San Francisco and L.A. papers had been good to him in the past. But everybody else ignored him. Getting him a daily review in the Times was such a bursting-buttons proud moment for him. I’ve never been happier about the work I’ve seen my company do on a book. Because we knew what he had felt like he’d been missing. And there it was, lining up—the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Yorker—when everybody had been ignoring him.
NASH: For me it was the summer of 2002, when there were two things that persuaded me that I should stay in the business. One was the first book I ever acquired, by a woman named Jenny Davidson, who I’d gone to college with. I was not even sure what one did at a publisher, and I thought, “I should acquire something.” We had to find books because there was nothing in the pipeline. So I asked around and my old college friend had a novel that no one wanted to publish. I didn’t know what galleys were at that point. But at one point our distributor asked us for some galleys, so we printed out manuscripts and tape-bound them and sent them some places. And the book ended up getting a full-page review in the Times. It ended up being pretty much the only review it got. It didn’t get any prepubs because I probably didn’t send it to the prepubs on time. But for whatever reason, some editor at the Times Book Review decided to review it. So I had this sense of not having fucked up—this absence of failure in a world where you’re up against it.

The second thing that happened had to do with the second book I acquired, Get Your War On. I’d look at my distributor’s website and see the sales and the backorders. And one order came in—I think it was the second order that the book got—and it was Harvard Bookstore, which ordered forty copies. That was more convincing than the Times Book Review. It was the first time a bookseller had ever trusted me, the first time a bookseller had ever said, “You’re not an idiot.” I don’t think in either of those situations did I realize how hard it was. It was only later, when I tried to get the second Times review and the second forty-copy-order from an indie bookstore, that I realized how good it was.

But the second thing was bigger than the first thing because ultimately it’s about survival. I wasn’t being glib when I was talking about survival. There was a very direct, one-to-one translation between my ability to sell books and my ability to stay in business and pay everyone. There is a British publisher call Souvenir Press, apparently they’ve been around for a long time, and I got a catalog of theirs one time. It included a letter from the publisher, and in the letter he quoted some other august independent publisher, saying something to the effect of, “A publisher’s first duty to his authors is to remain solvent.” Which was instructive because if you don’t, it’s not some glorious failure. All of your authors go out of print. And one of the reasons I ended up selling the company—one of the reasons was that I fucking had to because PGW had gone tits up and there was just no way to avoid that—but there was also a sense that if I fucked up too badly, the whole thing would go kaput, and I had an accountability to the authors to not let it all go kaput because it was not going to be some cute little failure where everybody would be like, “All right, peace, Soft Skull. It was very nice but now we’ll all move on.” It was like, “Oh, there are a number of authors whose careers actually depend on this.”

Let’s talk about agents. Tell me about the difference between a good one and a bad one.
GARGAGLIANO: A good agent knows what to send you. They’re playing matchmaker, and they do it well. Those are the happiest relationships—those authors are happiest with their agents and they’re happiest with their editors.
CHINSKI: A good agent also understands the process inside the publishing house and the kinds of issues and questions that an editor has to deal with on a daily basis. But I think, most importantly, they know what they’re sending and who they’re sending it to.
BOUDREAUX: A good agent can be very helpful when you get to those sticky wickets, whether it’s the cover, or an ending that still doesn’t work, or something else. An agent who can honestly appraise the work along with you and add their voice to the chorus of why, for example, the author needs to change that title. You want it to be about the book and you want it to be about the author, but every now and then the sales force knows what the hell they’re talking about with a “This is going to get lost because it is black and it has no title on the cover. It’s not going to degrade the integrity of the book if you change it.” An agent can either be helpful in that conversation or they can sit there and be a roadblock and let you be the bad cop. An agent who’s willing to be the bad cop with you can save an author from impulses—and help them understand why it’s the right thing to do in a world where two hundred thousand books get published every year.
GARGAGLIANO: The same thing is true on the publicity front, when you have an author who wants something and you have an agent who’s able to make the additional phone call and work on the team with the publicist and the editor. It’s much better than getting a phone call from an agent who’s just yelling at you.
CHINSKI: Just to step back a little bit, obviously the agent’s job is to be the advocate for the author. But, along the lines of what you were both saying, that doesn’t always mean agreeing with everything the author says. I think sometimes the agent forgets that. That, actually, they can be most constructive for the author—not just for that book, but their career—by explaining some difficult things to their client.
GARGAGLIANO: And encouraging their author not to be difficult, which doesn’t win any fans in the house. If the agent is able to step in and say something in a constructive fashion, that is often helpful.
CHINSKI: It’s human nature. We don’t like to admit it, but people like to work for somebody who’s appreciative. That doesn’t mean, in a saccharine way, just affirming everything that the editor and publisher are doing. Obviously, we all make mistakes. But the conversation has to be constructive. We’ve all seen it over and over and over again. If an author, even if they don’t agree with you, is appreciative and trying to work constructively with the house, and so is the agent, it just changes the energy of the way people respond to that project—from the publicist to the designer to whoever. It goes back to what we were saying before: We all want the same thing, and if everybody can keep that in mind, it just makes everybody want to work all the harder on behalf of the book.
NASH: The squeaky wheel theory is bullshit in our business. It’s just complete bullshit. It doesn’t work.
CHINSKI: I have a sense that authors sometimes get that as concrete advice—to be a squeaky wheel—and for everyone out there, there’s a way to express your convictions without being…
GARGAGLIANO: And that ties into being proactive for yourself. If you’re out there doing a lot of work for yourself, that energy is—
NASH: So inspirational. When you have an author who shows up at a bookstore and then a week later the sales rep shows up at the store and the rep emails me and says, “Guess what? So-and-so just came by Third Place last week. The buyer was so excited to meet him.” Then the rep emails everyone else on the sales force and says, “Look how hard this author is working.” It’s amazing how effective an engaged author is. But if the author is like, “Why aren’t my books in Third Place?” it accomplishes nothing.

We all know that there are less than great agents out there. How are writers supposed to avoid ending up with one of them? Put yourself in their shoes.
CHINSKI: I think they need to do a lot of research, for one thing, even before they get an agent. It amazes me how many times we get query letters from agents who clearly haven’t looked at our catalog. I think they need to ask a lot of questions of whatever agent they’re thinking about signing up with and make sure the agent knows who they’re submitting to and why and so on.

But what if the author doesn’t know any of that stuff?
GARGAGLIANO: The author should know. It’s their business.
CHINSKI: So much information is available online. There’s no excuse now to not know what a house is doing and even what individual editors are doing.
GARGAGLIANO: Every time you read a book, the editor’s name is in the acknowledgments. It’s very simple.
NASH: The fact that agents don’t charge money to read is so widely an established fact online that it’s mind-boggling that you still get submissions from agents who are obviously functioning that way. The agenting equivalent of chop-shops.

I mean more the difference between a B+ agent and an A+ agent.
GARGAGLIANO: I think that goes back to what we were talking about with the author’s relationship to their editor. It’s a personal connection. You want someone who understands your work and is articulate about it and has the same vision for it and can talk to you about your whole career and not just the thing that’s in front of them. And then that conversation extends to the editor and the editor’s conversation extends to the house.
NASH: With regard to the so-called “A+” and “B+” agents, when I’ve seen authors switch agents to get somebody more high-powered it pretty much has always failed. So if that’s what meant by the difference between a B+ agent and an A+ agent, there is no difference. If they met the criteria that Alexis just articulated, then the odds are that they’re the right agent for you. I mean, there’s not a whole lot of variance in the advances I pay—there’s not a lot of variance in what I can accomplish and not accomplish. Maybe there is with you guys. I’ve always had this theory—I could be wrong—that who the agent is might make a 20 percent difference in the advance an editor is going to offer. But it’s not going to make an order-of-magnitude difference. Probably. It’s not going to be the difference between ten thousand and a hundred thousand, let’s say.
GARGAGLIANO: I think that’s true 90 percent of the time. I think there are a very select group of agents who people just pay attention to before they even know what the book is. And that sets expectations.

We may as well name them.
NASH: Nicole Aragi, presumably.
GARGAGLIANO: Tina Bennett. Lynn Nesbit. Jennifer Rudolph Walsh. Suzanne Gluck.
CHINSKI: Eric Simonoff. I mean, I know from friends at other houses that when a manuscript comes in from certain agents, they start circulating it before they even read it because they presume it’s going to go really quickly and for a lot of money. And that’s not true with other agents. It just changes the game entirely. I think an author has to understand what they want. They have to do some soul searching, for lack of a better phrase, and figure out if it’s just the money they need or if they need something else. And it’s hard to hold that against someone. I know that editors always bitch about having to pay too much, and obviously it can have big consequences in a house—if a book doesn’t earn out and so on—but you can’t really hold that against the author. We never know exactly what their circumstances are. Maybe they have five children who they need to send to college. But they need to figure out what their priorities are. I do think we’ve often stumbled up against this thing where, in the same way that people think advertising equals love, they think that the advance equals love. And that’s just not always true. But people assume that the more you pay, the more you love a book—that if you offer fifty thousand dollars more than another house, then you love it more and will be more devoted to it—and that’s not necessarily the case. I think a good agent will explain to the author what all the different variables are, and specifically within the context of what the author needs, whether it’s financial or their career more generally, and that is the ideal way to make the decision.

How do you guys feel about auctions?
CHINSKI: We try to avoid them if we can.
BOUDREAUX: I don’t mind an auction as much as I hate a best-bids [auction]. And I don’t mind a best-bids as much as I hate a best-bids and then the top three get to do it again. What the hell? Everybody does that now. It’s insane to me. And the other thing is, does everybody have to talk to the author now, or meet the author, before you get to make an offer? What happened to the arranged marriage? “Eric likes me, Eric likes you, how ’bout we do a book together.” I mean—
CHINSKI: Have you gotten the one where you don’t get to talk to the author unless you promise to make an offer in advance?
GARGAGLIANO: Oh, that’s horrible.
BOUDREAUX: That happened recently. You weren’t allowed to talk to the author unless you’d ponied up however many six figures.
CHINSKI: There’s an admission price to even talk to the author. That drives me crazy. At FSG, we try to avoid auctions. We decide what we think a book is worth, make the offer, and the author either decides to come or not come, and we bow out if it doesn’t happen.
NASH: I mean, any economist will tell you that the winner of an auction has overpaid. In a lot of worlds, outside the publishing one, certain auctions get structured so that the second highest bidder wins. Because the presumption is that the overbidder has overpaid in such a way that it could imperil the business.
BOUDREAUX: I love that! Second place wins—let’s hear it for all the B-students!
CHINSKI: All you A-students are crazy.

I hear what you’re saying, Richard, but what about with books like Everything Is Illuminated or Edgar Sawtelle? You’re not the loser if you won those auctions.
NASH: But I mean in aggregate. Any of these things are statistical, so there are always outliers.
CHINSKI: Actually, I came in second on Everything Is Illuminated.
BOUDREAUX: Were you the underbidder?
CHINSKI: I was, actually.

Apparently I was wrong.
GARGAGLIANO: To be fair, there is a benefit to an auction, which is that, at least in my position, the whole house has to pay attention to the book. You end up getting more people reading it and talking about it, and that creates a certain excitement that isn’t to be negated entirely. As long as you don’t overpay too much, within that excitement, I think it can benefit the book.
CHINSKI: But what about the problem—this is rare, but we’ve all seen it happen—where the money becomes the story behind the book. That gives me a queasy feeling. Even if it doesn’t happen in a negative way, which we’ve obviously seen happen. But if that’s the driving momentum that gets a book attention? I guess, on one level, great. We’ll take what we can get. But on another level it just makes me queasy.
GARGAGLIANO: There’s a huge difference between an auction that ends at two hundred thousand and an auction that ends at a million. There’s a huge spectrum there. But if you’re in an auction with five different houses, your publishers are going to pay attention. Because everybody else is paying attention.

 

Do you guys think you feel the money you’re spending in the same way that maybe Richard does?
BOUDREAUX: I don’t know if you sweat the difference between 150 [$150,000] and 175 [$175,000]. But you definitely…One [$100,000] and five [$500,000] are different. And five [$500,000] and three million are different. I’ll tell you what’s easier: three million. Because then everybody did have to get on board. You are not out there on your own saying, “I believe!” But those middle, lot-of-money numbers when maybe nobody else read the whole thing and somebody is letting you do it? You do feel responsible for that in a “Boy do I need to make sure I don’t make a single misstep the whole time. The manuscript has to be ready early. I’ve got to have blurbs early. We’ve got to get the cover right. I’ve got to write those hand-written notes to people.” You feel the need to justify it. But at the same time, you don’t have to lose sleep every night because you won the auction by going up ten or fifteen thousand dollars. I think auctions can be not horrible when you agree on the number beforehand. What I hate is feeling like the ego contest has begun and somebody thinks so-and-so across town has it and you’re trying to guess who it is—or somebody inside the house, when there’s a house bid situation. The bullshit competition drives me up the wall. Being in an auction and saying we think it’s worth three hundred or we think it’s worth eight hundred—I don’t sweat that if we’re making a decision beforehand. It’s when you get into the middle of it and suddenly the book that you thought was a great two hundred thousand dollar book…You’re paying four [$400,000]? Just because there are still four people in it? I mean, when an agent calls and says they have interest, that’s fine and dandy. But it’s not going to change my mind about whether I liked the book or not, and I don’t want the publisher deciding because three other houses are in and “We should get in on that, too.” So if you can make these decisions before the craziness starts, it’s fine. It’s when the craziness begins—
CHINSKI: The feeding frenzy.

But it seems like that’s how it works now. You’re getting that email from the agent right away.
GARGAGLIANO: Noooo.
CHINSKI: But don’t you feel like you get that more and more?
GARGAGLIANO: I don’t feel like it changes my mind, though.
CHINSKI: No, I just mean more as a strategy to get people to pay attention.
BOUDREAUX: I feel like, when you get a submission, you know that it’s so easy to send that everybody on earth has it already. And it’s twenty a day and there they are on your Sony Reader and the attention paid to things has diminished just by the ease with which everything gets slotted in and slotted out. And then the agent’s like, “I’ve got interest! I’ve got interest!” Well, “I’ve got a ‘No!'” I can email fast, too! [Laughter.] Unfortunately, that’s how it ends up working sometimes. “You’ve got to get back to me quickly!” “Okay, well I guess I won’t be deliberating over this very long. I’ve read ten pages and we can be done, then.” If everybody just wants to speed it up that much.
CHINSKI: But I’ve heard so many agents say that it’s becoming more and more difficult to sell a literary first novel that it almost seems like this is compensation for that. There’s so much resistance now—everybody’s trying to find a reason why they shouldn’t buy something because it is so difficult. It seems like we get more emails now that say “There’s a lot of interest” just to kind of built up that intensity from their side.
NASH: What I get to do in those situations is say, “Congratulations. I’m thrilled for the author. Next time.” I just can’t play at that level. That makes my life a lot easier. It’s a much less complicated thing than what you guys have to go through in terms of evaluating the difference between two hundred [$200,000] and four hundred [$400,000]. That’s one thing I don’t ever have to worry about. But I really learned a lot from what you were saying about how when the money gets really big, you aren’t accountable anymore. Not that you aren’t accountable—but there’s a lot of shared responsibility and the buck isn’t stopping entirely with you. Whereas there’s an in-between spot where it’s large enough that you’re exposed but not so large that anybody else is going to be wearing the flak jacket with you.
BOUDREAUX: The first book I ever preempted, I hadn’t finished reading it. It had come in to another editor who gave it to me. So I was starting it late and I hadn’t finished it and I went in to tell the publisher, “We’ve heard that somebody else is going to preempt.” The publisher said, “Okay, go offer” several hundred thousand dollars. “Okay!” So I did, and we got it—what do you know?—and the next day the publisher asked, “So what happens at the end?” I still hadn’t finished it! I was like, “They all…leave…and go home.” I didn’t know what happened! [Laughter.] That was kind of scary, and I did feel like “This one is all on me”—because not only had nobody else read the thing, but I wasn’t even certain it would hold up. As I was editing it I was like, “I hope that’s what happens at the end….” Otherwise the author’s going to be like, “Really? Why would you suggest that at the end?” I’d have to be like, “I just think it’s important that everything works out that way.”

When you look at the industry, what are the biggest problems we face right now?
CHINSKI: I think they’re all so obvious. Returns. Blogs.
GARGAGLIANO: And just finding readers.
CHINSKI: The end of cultural authority. That’s something we talk about a lot at FSG. Reviews don’t have the same impact that they used to. The one thing that really horrifies me and that seems to have happened within the last few years is that you can get a first novel on the cover of the New York Times Book Review, a long review in The New Yorker, a big profile somewhere, and it still doesn’t translate into sales. Whereas six years ago, or some mythical time not that long ago, that was the battle—to get all that attention—and if you got it, you didn’t necessarily have a best-seller, but you knew that you would cross a certain threshold. Whereas now you can get all of that and still not see the sales. I think that phenomenon is about the loss of cultural authority. There’s just so much information out there now that people don’t know who to listen to, except their friends, to figure out what to read. And that’s the question we wrestle with the most. I think publishers have to communicate more directly with readers—that’s the big barrier we’re all trying to figure out. How much to use our websites to sell directly and talk to our readers directly?

So what are you doing to try to do that? What are you experimenting with?
CHINSKI: I can think of one thing. I mean, it’s a small thing, but we recently started the FSG Reading Series uptown at the Russian Samovar. It’s amazing. It’s actually turned into a kind of scene. The New York Observer and the New Yorker have written about it. And I mean “scene” in a good way. In all the ways that we were talking about before, what makes us most happy is when a book forges a community around itself. It’s a small thing, but now if we can somehow bring that online, or expand it in some way, it will be a way for FSG as a name to mean something, which will mean that we have another way to bring our writers to readers. The names of publishers, notoriously, are not like “Sony” or other companies where the name means a whole lot to readers. It may mean something to reviewers or booksellers, but I think we all need to figure out ways to make our names mean something. That’s another way to establish authority so that people become interested in the individual books. That’s a big challenge, and there’s no easy solution to it.

What else are you guys trying to do, beyond the hand-written notes and the bigmouth mailings? What are you lying awake at night thinking about doing for this novel you’re publishing that doesn’t seem to be going anywhere?
BOUDREAUX: I pray that the people in our new media department who are supposed to be figuring out this problem are staying up late at night. That’s what I think about as I roll around at night. And they are always coming up with things that I hope will work.
CHINSKI: And now we have this amplification system, supposedly—the Internet—which is supposed to amplify our ability to create word-of-mouth. But I don’t think anybody’s quite figured out exactly how to do that—or at least how to make it translate directly into sales. We all can see, in certain cases, our books being talked about a lot online. But what does that mean in terms of sales?
NASH: In our case, we’ve never really relied much on cultural authority, although we’ve certainly used it here and there. But for the most part, to the extent that we’ve been successful, it’s been through the things that you’re asking about. I check our Web metrics several times a week, whether it’s Quantcast, Alexa, or Compete. These are places for measuring traffic. I try to figure out what the traffic is and what the demographics are. So I’m doing a lot of stuff that would probably make you want to shoot yourself.
BOUDREAUX: I’m glad you’re doing it, though, so I can read about it in this article. Then I can call somebody and say, “You should do that! That’s brilliant!”
NASH: One of your new media people, Amy Baker, was briefly involved with Soft Skull back in the day. She played on our street hockey team that was known as the Soft Skull Sandernistas, which was named after my predecessor. [Laughter.] But seriously, as Eric says, the Internet is amplified word-of-mouth. The things that are happening online are amplifying a process that’s already in place. I mean, the genius of Oprah has never been her ratings. Her ratings aren’t that spectacular compared to a lot of other shows. It’s that Oprah connects to her audience in an intimate way, as if she were one of eight women who have lunch together every Tuesday. And that intensity of relationship—plus the fact that it is able to occur on a reasonably broad scale—is her genius. So what you do is go looking around the world for people with a certain level of trust. Authority, in a certain sense, has been partially replaced by trust. Part of what you can call “trust” today is the remnants of authority. People “trust” the New York Times.
CHINSKI: And people trust their friends.
NASH: Exactly. People trust Liesl Schillinger. People trust Ed Champion. Or they hate them. And you’re just trying to get your stuff to people who are trusted. In my case that involves doing it myself, in a lot of cases.
GARGAGLIANO: This is one of the things that I get most frustrated by, partly because I didn’t care about book reviews when I wasn’t in publishing. I would never read the New York Times Book Review. I just wanted to walk into a bookstore and find something. But people don’t do that anymore. People aren’t interested in the community of books. So it’s finding the niche markets. I just published a book called The Wettest County in the World. It’s a novel about the author’s grandfather and granduncles, who ran a bootlegging ring during Prohibition. It’s amazing. And we’ve gotten IndieBound, we’ve gotten lots of things for it, and it’s gotten amazing reviews. But the sales aren’t going to happen on that alone. So I’ve been mailing it to bloggers who have beer blogs and whiskey blogs, and bourbon drinkers, and distilleries. I’m trying to find the niche market. I think that’s the way things are going. I think that kind of thinking is much more exciting—you’re more likely to find the readers who are interested—but publishers aren’t set up to find niche markets for every single book.
BOUDREAUX: That’s the thing. Do you do the whiskey mailing and then the beer mailing and this mailing and that mailing? It seems like there aren’t enough hours in the day and there isn’t enough staff—the Amy Bakers of the world—to do that.
NASH: That’s where the writer needs to come into it. And interns. That’s one of the ways in which interns can be so valuable. That’s great work for them to do—a Technorati blog search on whatever. It’s not hugely difficult, and it’s kind of interesting.
GARGAGLIANO: It can also be useful for books down the line.
CHINSKI: That raises an interesting thing for writers to consider. I mean, how many times have we all heard that a certain book is going to appeal to this audience, that audience, and everybody else in the world? You just know that it’s not true. But if you can go really deep into one community, you might sell ten thousand copies of a first novel, which most first novels never sell—at least the ones that are supposedly going to appeal to everyone. I don’t think novelists should spend too much time worrying about who their audience is, but it’s something to consider. I just think that line—”This book is going to appeal to everybody because it’s about love or family or whatever”—doesn’t work. I think the author and the publisher need to think more specifically. If you could sell one book to everybody on two city blocks in New York, you’d probably be selling more copies of that book than we do of the ones we just send out into the world and hope are going to sell magically. But how do you reach everybody on those two city blocks in New York and get them to buy the book? That’s the task, metaphorically, that so many of us are facing: how to get to them and make them believe us. Because at the end of the day we’re companies, and all of those people online who are talking to each other aren’t necessarily going to believe that we have their best interests at heart. They’ll think we’re advertising to them through other means. So we have to establish a certain amount of trust with readers, not just as companies but as people who also love books in the same way they do. Again, it’s a small thing, but the idea behind the Samovar reading series—not that it’s a totally new idea—is that the editors at FSG love books, and you guys love books, so let’s get together. And it’s not just about trying to sell our books to you.
NASH: One of the things that that accomplishes that may not be obvious from the get-go is transparency. You’re putting yourself out in the world and exposing yourself in a way—making yourself vulnerable. I have never understood why the staffs of publishing houses are invisible to readers, who are ultimately the people who pay our salaries. I mean, my wife is a corporate lawyer, and her photo and bio are on her firm’s website. Book publishers just refuse to allow their staff visibility to the world. If Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton and Whatever are willing to allow all the partners’ and associates’ photographs and bios to be seen by the world, what about publishing is so important that we can’t be allowed to be seen? I know that part of it is that we don’t want authors bugging us too much. But I think that’s part of what the Samovar reading series accomplishes: a certain willingness to participate.

Just in the space of your careers so far, what has been the most destructive new thing that’s come about in the industry?
NASH: It’s technology. It’s been both constructive and destructive at the same time.
CHINSKI: So do you think e-books have been both?
NASH: E-books are one of the last ways in which technology is playing itself out. One of the first ways was desktop publishing. Another way that’s been more incremental is the ability of digital printing to be commensurate with offset printing and for various machines to flatten the economies of scale. But, yeah, the ability to satisfactorily download a book digitally is turning out to be one of the last things that technology is accomplishing. I guess the other thing is just the capacity of e-mail and the Web—the social Web, in particular—to flatten communication. And it’s all simultaneously destructive and constructive. It’s destroying cultural authority but it’s enhancing one’s ability to cost-effectively reach individuals who might have other kinds of cultural authority. It’s lowering barriers to entry, which is constructive because new presses can come along. BookScan is based on technology and has constructive and destructive components. The kind of supply-chain inventory management that Baker & Taylor and Ingram are doing, where they can now say to us, “We only need two months’ worth of inventory; we don’t need four months of inventory,” is destructive because my working capital needs go up by 20 percent on that one phenomenon alone, but it’s good in that I can actually see Ingram’s demand building and respond to it. If I see big Ingram demand in the month before I publish something, I can say to myself, “I’m going to print advance orders plus two thousand as opposed to advance orders plus five hundred.” So it’s fucking me and helping me at the same time.
CHINSKI: I agree with Richard. Obviously a lot of things are changing right now, and some of them make things a lot more difficult, but they also—and I don’t mean to sound like a Pollyanna—offer some opportunities. I’m always really wary of the sky-is-falling thing, this idea that we’re at the end right now.
GARGAGLIANO: We’re just at a place where we have to reinvent ourselves, and we haven’t figured out how to do that yet. People have started reading in this other way that I don’t understand because I don’t read that way. But it’s our job to figure out how they’re reading, and then to figure out how to deliver something they want to read.
CHINSKI: Are you reading on a Sony Reader?
GARGAGLIANO: Yes, and I love it. It’s the best thing ever.
CHINSKI: I’m still adjusting to it. We just got them in the last few weeks. On one hand it’s great. On the other hand, I still want to write in the margins and it’s hard to go back and forth and figure out where you are in a manuscript. I actually physically find myself reaching to turn the page.
GARGAGLIANO: I do that all the time. It’s really disturbing!
CHINSKI: Your brain gets tricked into thinking you’re actually reading a page. But on the other hand, as I was saying, it’s great, and we’re seeing sales of books…. I mean, I saw something recently about the Kindle. People who have a Kindle are actually buying more books. So on one hand, it scares the shit out of me that people are reading on Kindles and Sony Readers. But on the other hand—
GARGAGLIANO: Why?
CHINSKI: For no reason other than that it’s different.
GARGAGLIANO: I think it’s so exciting.
CHINSKI: That’s what I mean. It’s also really exciting. It will bring a lot more people into reading. And this younger generation is so used to reading online that it doesn’t really matter. It doesn’t mean the death of literature.
BOUDREAUX: I was amazed at how quickly we all got used to the Sony Reader. It’s still a little different from an actual book. But when I first got into publishing I remember reading a manuscript, instead of a finished book, and feeling like it seemed to lack a certain presentational authority. It took me a minute to take a manuscript seriously. It will be the same way with the Sony Reader. But, my God, we’ve all adapted in a period of months? Imagine the twenty-year-olds who are reading everything online all the time and switching back and forth among seven screens that are open all the time. The notion of not reading that way must seem odd to them.
GARGAGLIANO: I think that in several years the book object is going to be more beautiful and more precious.
BOUDREAUX: It’s going to be like vinyl records.
GARGAGLIANO: Exactly.

page_5: 

I feel the same way—that these changes are going to happen. But the thing I don’t understand is why hardcover books still exist.
GARGAGLIANO: I don’t understand it.
NASH: It’s because of the library market.
GARGAGLIANO: I published a book this fall that we crashed into the schedule because it was shortlisted for the Booker. We did a hardcover just for the libraries and a trade paperback for everybody else.
NASH: I mean, you’re right. I was being semi-glib but not entirely glib. The question is, “Why will the print book survive?”

No, I’m literally talking about the hardcover book. Right now, at this moment, why does it exist? I’m looking at a hardcover and a paperback side by side and asking what the consumer is getting for almost twice as much money. Two pieces of cardboard?
CHINSKI: Well, we get two shots to publish the book.

But do we really, with the way the accounts are ordering, or do we just say that?
CHINSKI: But there’s still that idea. Also, there’s still the hangover of thinking that critics won’t pay attention to a paperback in the same way. I know that’s not as true as it used to be, but—
NASH: The existence of the hardcover has to do with history. It has to do with certain structures that are in place that haven’t been replaced—structures varying from the library market to perceptions about reviewers to perceptions about quality in the mind of the customer. It also has to do with customers wanting certain books at whatever price. They don’t care whether it’s fifteen dollars or twenty-five dollars—they just want it because of who it’s written by. But that’s not going to last.
CHINSKI: But here’s an interesting case: Bolaño’s 2666. We did the hardcover and a three-volume paperback edition in a slipcase. They’re priced the same. Which do you think would be selling more? I guess because they’re priced the same it’s not quite a fair question, but people do seem to be gravitation toward the hardcover just because it’s the more conventional format. The paperback is selling well too, but the hardcover seems to have some kind of recognition factor. So I don’t think it’s just publishers sticking their heads in the sand. It’s also readers still thinking that that’s the way they discover new books.

Even when they cost ten dollars more for no apparent value?
GARGAGLIANO: I wonder that too. We don’t really do very much—
NASH: Value is created in the mind. A classic thing that happens in American retail capitalism is that people will buy the more expensive thing. It’s been proven over and over again. If you’re at Barneys and there’s an eighty-dollar lampshade and a fifty-dollar lampshade, you buy the eighty-dollar lampshade because you think it’s worth more. That is endemic in American retail capitalism. But I think the distressing thing in publishing is that we’re not making more beautiful objects. I think that one of the things that electronic publishing will allow us to do is free the print object of its need to have a given exact unit cost that is our mass-market way of delivering the product at a given price. The download will allow us to generate volume, and then we can create this gorgeous, elaborate fetish object for which we can charge gloriously outrageous sums of money.

But who’s going to be selling them if that happens? Look at what happened to the music business.
NASH: Precisely. Look at the Radiohead model. Radiohead has already done it. Eighty bucks for the limited edition but only ninety-nine cents for the download. That’s the model. It’s just a question of “How do we get there in a way that doesn’t involve complete chaos?” But it seems like that’s where we’re going. And I think it will be customer-driven—we’ll go there as fast as the customers will be willing to go there.

What are you guys seeing in the industry that you find encouraging?
NASH: Fan fiction.

Which is?
NASH: People so in love with a given story and set of characters, or a given world, that they are doing their own version of it. I just think that’s spectacular. Not necessarily as writing, but as a cultural phenomenon.

Anybody else? Come on, there’s got to be something that’s encouraging.
GARGAGLIANO: This is not a good time to ask that question. [Laughter.]
CHINSKI: It’s like what Richard was saying—some of these things that are scary are also encouraging. The Kindle and the Sony Reader are bringing people to books who might not have come to them otherwise. I mean, that’s something.
NASH: Look at the thing Eric said about people who own a Kindle buying more books than they did before they had a Kindle.
CHINSKI: That’s pretty encouraging.
BOUDREAUX: And beyond that, I had it in my head that Kindles and Sony Readers would exist in the way audio books did—that it wouldn’t be exactly the same. There would be certain kinds of books that really lent themselves to that format in the same way it was for audio books where you had businessmen driving on business trips. You couldn’t get a novel published by your own audio publisher—they weren’t interested—but a certain kind of practical nonfiction flew off the shelves. But Edgar Sawtelle has been a huge seller on the Kindle, which is not at all the kind of book I would have thought would be selling well in that format. It’s six hundred pages long—there’s a good reason to put it on a Sony Reader instead of reading a hardcover—but I just wasn’t expecting the number of downloads to be such a close ratio to what’s selling in a bookstore. I thought we’d have to figure out what categories worked, and once again fiction would be the category that would be left out as everybody read self-help books or Freakonomics on their Kindle. And I find it encouraging that people are downloading this big fat debut novel.

Anything else?
NASH: The use of social media to talk about books: Goodreads, LibraryThing, Shelfari. Reading books is a solitary activity, but books are also the richest kind of social glue, and the profusion of ways to be social with one another will be tremendously advantageous to books. The commonality that having read the same book introduces between two people is so much richer and more dynamic than the commonality of having watched the same TV show, for example.

It seems like agents lament the consolidation of the industry because it gives them less options. How do you guys feel about it?
BOUDREAUX: It doesn’t seem to lessen their options when they submit to every single imprint in the house and then you’re on the hot-button contest to see who reads it first.
NASH: I think it’s kind of pointless to think about it. As individuals, there’s sweet fuck-all we can do about it. With everything else we’ve talked about, human beings at our level can affect things. We can affect the outcome of a given book. We just cannot affect the outcome of a corporate merger.
BOUDREAUX: And for a group of people who’ve only been doing this for a decade, in which this has always been the case and it was already the death knell of publishing back when we were first getting into it and everybody lamented consolidation—
CHINSKI: When I saw The Last Days of Disco, it was heartbreaking. [Laughter.] That’s when I realized what we’ve lost. As you were saying, it’s hard to know because it’s the world we live in. It seems like even within the force of consolidation, there are so many imprints blossoming within these places. I don’t quite understand what the corporate thinking is behind that. But that’s just because I’m not making the decisions, I’m sure.
BOUDREAUX: You’ve also got a group of people here who have ended up at certain kinds of imprints within those places. So we’ve all clearly struggled, those of us who are in the corporate world, to find a place that’s least like a corporate structure. I mean, that’s the great thing about Ecco. When Dan Halpern sold it to HarperCollins he had an agreement with Jane Friedman that basically said, “But we will never have to act like we are a part of corporate publishing. We will keep doing it exactly how we’ve been doing it.” So you get to pretend you’re this little thing attached to this big thing, which is how I imagine it being at Scribner and FSG. You get to have the benefits of the deep pockets, and somebody’s figuring out the new media thing and revamping this site and that site, and you have the economies of scale of getting your shipping done or whatever, and you still get to sit there and work on your books. So we’ve also self-selected for a certain kind of publishing within corporate publishing.

And you really did, because you left Random House without having new a job lined up.
BOUDREAUX: I did. I thought I’d go see if anybody wanted me to come do fiction. Thank God Dan Halpern was out there. God bless him. Because it’s true: Who doesn’t want to do the small list inside the big house, which is just a different kind of experience? I mean, it seems the best way to make that deal with the devil. As you say, Richard, the conglomeration isn’t going to go away.
CHINSKI: It doesn’t actually mean that writers have less choice, I don’t think. There are so many imprints within these companies. It’s become an easy straw man to point the finger at. “Oh, these big corporate publishers that don’t understand what books are.” There are still a lot of editors working at imprints within these big corporations who care about books in the same way that somebody working at Scribner when it was independent cared about books. I think it’s really easy, because there are so many frustrations that we all have as writers and editors and agents, to just blame it on some Corporate culture with a capital C. As Richard said, there are a lot of things that we can’t control but there are also a lot of things that we can try to control, at least at a certain level. And that probably hasn’t changed that much from fifty years ago.
BOUDREAUX: And certainly, the competition in-house is every bit as fierce as the competition out of house, when you and so-and-so from Simon & Schuster both have the book and there’s a house bid.
GARGAGLIANO: The agent gets the same benefit of the imprints within the house riling each other up and competing against one another to put on the best show for the author, and the author gets the benefit of choosing between all of these different imprints. I don’t think, for the author, it’s a major difference. But I wasn’t around when it wasn’t like that.
NASH: I suspect that to the extent that consolidation has created problems in the industry, the problems are farther downstream than acquisitions. Retail consolidation is the real issue.

Speak to that. How do you feel about so much power being concentrated on Fifth Avenue and in Ann Arbor and Seattle?
NASH: It was all going to happen anyway. The book business was just later to the party, quite frankly, than the clothing business or the cereal business. The real estate was all the same. One of the reasons why we’ve become really dependent on social media is that it’s a kind of hand-selling at a time when the 1,000 people who used to be able to hand-sell are now down to 150. And the capacity of the corporate retailers to hand-sell is either purchased or anecdotal. When I say anecdotal I mean it hasn’t completely vanished. I can tell that the B&N in Union Square is putting Soft Skull books on the countertop that weren’t paid to be put there. So there is anecdotal hand-selling going on. But you have a situation where the capacity of the retailer to sell a given book to a given, recognized individual has virtually disappeared—down to percentage points. It will work with a few titles—I’m sure you guys have all published books that have been made by independent retailers. But their ability to be a part of the social network of the community of books is gone and we have to find some other means of generating that word-of-mouth. Retailers just exist to shelve the books and make them visible in a given community. They’re not selling them to the community.
CHINSKI: But don’t you think they understand the crisis they’re in, to a certain degree, too? That’s why Barnes & Noble has B&N Recommends now, and Starbucks is getting involved, and everybody’s trying to—
NASH: Yeah, you’re right. I think they realize what they have wrought. Well, they do but they don’t. Half the time they’re trying to sell on price—they’re doing inventory churn—and then the other half of the time they’re trying to go intimate. I think they’re kind of schizophrenic about it. I think that’s part of the problem. I mean, a lot of the independents that went out of business deserved to go out of business. They weren’t actually trying very hard to hand-sell. They were just taking the finite number of books that publishers could then publish and saying, “Okay, you pick from these five hundred books.” But the great ones are the ones that we have with us right now—St. Mark’s and Prairie Lights and the rest. They’re doing a great job of being retailers. But you’re exactly right about the chains. At times they are definitely trying to find that community-oriented approach.
CHINSKI: The way they’ll host book clubs in the stores, for example. In the same way that people like to blame the corporate publishers, it’s really easy to point your finger at the chains. I’m not saying they don’t present a certain set of problems. But it’s interesting that, in a way, they’re wrestling with the same kind of issues that we’re wrestling with in trying to find a way to interact more directly with their customers. It’s a kind of funny crisis all around.

At the end of the day, what makes it all worthwhile?
CHINSKI: Pizza.
NASH: This roundtable.
BOUDREAUX: The glamour of this!
CHINSKI: Going home and editing for four hours.

That’s funny. That was actually going to be my next question, but I was going to do it in the anonymous section at the end so you wouldn’t have to lie about it. Seriously, though, what makes it worthwhile for you?
BOUDREAUX: Books mean enormous things to people. They are things that save people’s lives, at times.
NASH: Even the lives of children!
BOUDREAUX: That’s right! The lives of children! I don’t think any children have ever lost their lives because of something an editor did, but children have most definitely had their lives improved by something that a writer, and an editor, put out there.
CHINSKI: We’re doing it for the kids!
BOUDREAUX: Why don’t we make that, “We’re doing it for our children, and our children’s children.”

EDITORS ANONYMOUS
Later, after the pizza was gone and even the most constitutionally strong among us were getting a little punchy—and understandably so—the panel agreed to speak anonymously on a range of topics that would be awkward to discuss for attribution. As usual, a number of verbal tics have been altered in order to preserve anonymity.

Does it bother you that so much of your work has to be done on nights and weekends?
Sure, every once in a while it catches up with you. But you can’t concentrate in the office so it’s just the way it is. But I’d be lying if I didn’t say that sometimes you don’t feel resentful. I always have that in the summer because I find that authors all deliver at the beginning of the summer because they want to go on their summer vacations.

Yeah, it’s always just before Christmas, just before New Year’s, just before the Fourth of July. The book’s might be three years late but they go and deliver it on July 3rd.

Publishers have to let you have some time out of the office. And I feel like that is increasingly looked on as this sort of three-martini-lunch thing—that the editor needs the occasional Tuesday to edit at home. You can power through an awful lot, but at a certain point there are too many manuscripts stacked up, and it’s been going on for so many years, that you’ve got to be given some time to do it that isn’t just every Saturday of your life.

Such a big part of the job is to pay attention to what the rest of the world is doing and what’s being written everywhere else and what other people are interested in and what you yourself are interested in—because you take all of those obsessions and you find the books that you’re passionate about on all of those topics—but I don’t really have time to do that.

That’s my biggest frustration: not having enough time to read published books.

And it’s a great disservice to your own job not to ever be able to read anything for pleasure—and not to ever be able to read the other books your company is publishing—because you’ve got x number of submissions to read and your own new authors’ backlists to read and what your house is doing that’s working because you just need to understand what that thing is that so-and-so just published. About eight rungs down you get to read something just because it sounds good—something that you’re not reading to learn something about your job.

What do agents do that drives you crazy?
Ask for ads.

Submit the next book when you haven’t even published the first book and you don’t even know how many you’re printing.

Assume that just because one book did really well you have to pay for your previous success.

And with fiction, more and more, the success of one novel does not mean that the next novel is going to sell at the same level. And I don’t think that a lot of agents have caught up with that fact.

“Have you read it yet? Have you read it yet?” I want to be like, “Have you prepared for your launch meeting yet? Have you written your tip sheets yet?” They don’t realize that you may have something from the four other big agents. I’m being flip about it, but they do tend to forget that. Two days later it’s “Have you read it?” “No, I’m actually editing your author who’s under contract.”

There’s also a tendency to misinterpret an early read for actual depth of publishing program behind that early read. Sure, being the first editor to get back to them on a novel may well mean a particular enthusiasm and a good match, but it also may not. So to require that everybody be in on day two, set up meetings on day three, and be ready to do the auction on day four? Is that all the thought that you want us to put into it?

And using the weekends and holidays as a tactic. I hate the Friday e-mail saying, “Just in time for you to enjoy this weekend…” Or over Labor Day weekend! It’s like the new destination wedding. You know, in the same way that you hate your friends who picked the three-day weekend to get married on so you can all go to Hawaii. I’m like, “Really? You had to save this for Labor Day weekend? I had all summer when I didn’t have shit to read.”

What are the biggest mistakes that writers can make in dealing with their editor or agent?
I think the bigger problem is dealing with their publicist. You have to be very nice to your publicist. You should send them flowers.

I had an author who used to leave messages at four in the morning saying that she didn’t want us to publish her book anymore. She wanted us to take them off the shelves! That was fun.

Despite the fact that there is a real personal connection, authors should realize that we’re not their therapists, we’re not their best friends in the world, etcetera. I can fix your book but I can’t fix your whole life.

What about when an author calls because there aren’t enough hangers in his hotel closet? [Laughter.] That’s happened!

Tell me about a few up-and-coming agents who you feel are great for fiction or memoir.
I think Jim Rutman at Sterling Lord is really smart. He’s both a no bullshit guy and a genuinely nice guy. That may sound naïve, but it really does matter.

I think Maria Massie is fabulous. If I could publish the writers of only one agent, it would be Maria.

Julie Barer. I did a book with her and she went about getting blurbs like nobody I’ve ever seen. She brought them to me, every day, like a cat bringing me a bird. Eight in a row. I’ve never had an agent who went to bat that much and called in that many favors. It was amazing.

There’s also Anna Stein, who’s wonderful. She’s got a very cosmopolitan worldview and she’s also got a taste for a certain kind of political nonfiction that is quite interesting. The first book I got from her was a left-wing case for free trade, which you don’t necessarily expect from Ira Silverberg’s former foreign rights person.

You know who else is good? Robert Guinsler. He’s really smart and really enthusiastic about his books. He has a lot of smart projects.

What kind of information will you withhold from your authors?
I never tell them when my bosses don’t love their book. Or when it’s been a battle to get them attention on the list.

I will hold back particularly bad feedback. If it’s a novel, not everybody is going to agree on it. I’ve never had such a tsunami of bad feedback that I thought they really needed to hear it.

Do you send them all of their bad reviews?

I leave that up to the author.

I’ve started telling debut authors, “A lot of writers who have been through this don’t want to see the bad reviews. Will you give me permission to not send you the bad reviews?”

When it comes to sales figures, I give them the information. I mean, I don’t go out of my way to do it if the news is not good. If it’s great news and I can say, “We did this and we did that and we did this,” I give it to them all the time. But I don’t go out of my way to say, “You’re holding steady. Nothing’s happening.”

What other editors or houses are you impressed with lately?
I think Penguin Press is doing a great job. You look at their list and there’s a consistency to it that is really amazing. I don’t know how the finances look. But just as books, they’re incredibly consistent.

I think Bob Miller and Jon Karp are doing a great job.

I’ve been impressed with a house called Two Dollar Radio. The reason I’m impressed is their own tagline: “They make more noise than a two-dollar radio.”

Jofie Ferrari-Adler is an editor at Grove/Atlantic.

Agents & Editors: A Q&A With Agent Molly Friedrich
Agents & Editors: A Q&A With Editor Chuck Adams
Agents & Editors: A Q&A With Editor Janet Silver
Agents & Editors: A Q&A With Four Young Literary Agents

Agents and Editors: A Q&A With Four Young Editors

by

Jofie Ferrari-Adler

March/April 2009
3.1.09
In Print and Online

If the economic Tilt-A-Whirl of the past few months has proven anything, it’s that this carnival life of ours—writing, publishing, trying to find readers—isn’t getting any easier. Booksellers and publishers are in turmoil, with scores of staffers having already lost their jobs to “restructuring,” “integration,” and all the other corporate euphemisms that are dreamed up to soften the harsh reality: It isn’t pretty out there.

While it goes without saying that our problems are nothing compared with those of many industries, one’s heart can’t help but ache for the literary magazines and publishing houses that won’t be around in a year; the unemployed editors, publicists, and marketing people with mortgages to pay; the authors whose first books are being published now, or a month from now, or anytime soon.

But difficult times don’t have to be joyless times. As I listened to these four accomplished young book editors talk about what they do, I was reminded of a simple and enduring truth, trite as it may sound: We are all—writers, agents, publishers, booksellers, librarians, and readers—in this together. And there are concrete things we can do to connect with one another more effectively. These editors are full of insight about how to do just that.

It seems appropriate, at such a humbling moment, that we met over pizza and bottled water (okay, maybe not exclusively water) in the glamorously unglamorous offices of Open City, the independent press and literary magazine based in downtown Manhattan. Over the years its editors, Thomas Beller and Joanna Yas, have introduced readers to some of the most distinctive voices of our time, from Meghan Daum to Sam Lipsyte. Here are short biographies of the participants:

LEE BOUDREAUX was an editor at Random House for almost ten years before leaving to become the editorial director of Ecco in 2005. She has worked with Arthur Phillips, Dalia Sofer, and David Wroblewski.

ERIC CHINSKI worked at Oxford University Press and Houghton Mifflin before moving to Farrar, Straus and Giroux, where he is vice president and editor in chief. He has edited Chris Adrian, Rivka Galchen, and Alex Ross.

ALEXIS GARGAGLIANO worked at Simon & Schuster and Knopf before moving to Scribner, where she is an editor, in 2002. Her authors include Matt Bondurant, Adam Gollner, and Joanna Smith Rakoff.

RICHARD NASH worked as a performance artist and theater director before taking over Soft Skull Press, now an imprint of Counterpoint, in 2001. His authors include Lydia Millet, Matthew Sharpe, and Lynne Tillman. [UPDATE: Richard Nash has resigned as editorial director of Soft Skull Press and executive editor of Counterpoint, effective March 10, 2009.]

Every reader understands the feeling of falling in love with a book. You guys do that for a living. I’m curious if you’ve given any thought to the specific things that can trigger that experience.
GARGAGLIANO: I don’t know if there’s a specific thing, but you know it immediately. The minute I start it I know that it’s the book I want to fall in love with. And that’s the one I keep reading. I will read a hundred pages of something else, but I won’t fall in love with it. You have this immediate sense of texture and place, and you’re just inside it from the first sentence. I think the thing that everybody says about first sentences is true. Everyone should try to get that first sentence perfect. I make my authors do that all the time.
NASH: But if you make them do it, they didn’t quite do it the first time, did they?
GARGAGLIANO: Well, it might be that you’ve had them totally rewrite the opening.
CHINSKI: Do you feel like it’s different for fiction and nonfiction?
GARGAGLIANO: I do. I always hate that with nonfiction, when you read a proposal, you don’t get the writing first. You get the pitch first. I always look to the writing.
CHINSKI: For me, with fiction, there’s that funny moment when you feel like you actually want to meet the author. You want to know who the man or woman who’s writing it is because there’s a real sensibility in the writing. It’s not just that the writing is good—there’s a kind of intensity of imagination to it. You wonder, “Who is this person who’s able to telescope all of these ideas into something that feels accessible?” I think that’s one similarity between nonfiction and fiction, even though obviously they’re different in many ways: It takes the ordinary and makes it extraordinary. You sort of recognize something but it allows you access to it in a totally different way. But I can’t tell you how many times, thirty pages into a novel, I actually want to write the agent and say, “Who is this person?” You just wonder, “Who’s coming up with this?”
BOUDREAUX: I think there’s always a moment of surprise and delight. It comes in the form of a word. You get to the end of a sentence and go, “Wow, I didn’t see that coming. That was perfect.” The language just goes click and the whole thing has gone up a notch and you know at that point that you’re committed to…a hundred pages? Two hundred? Or you’re going the distance with it. The gears just click into place and you realize you’re reading something that is an order of magnitude different than the seventy-five other things that have crossed your desk lately, many of which were perfectly good and perfectly competent.
CHINSKI: And doesn’t it feel like it’s not even just talent? It’s the sensibility of the writer. I think about a writer whom I don’t work with but whom I admire, Aleksandar Hemon. He does that funny thing where he doesn’t use words in an ordinary way, and yet they work and they suggest a whole worldview. Or look at Chris Adrian, whom I do work with and adore. I mean, his writing is really difficult. It’s about dying and suffering children—you can’t imagine a more difficult subject. But again, there’s a kind of intensity of imagination and a way of articulating things that goes beyond good writing. There is a force and energy to the writing. I think that’s the hardest thing to find in fiction, at least for me, and that’s what I find myself responding to again and again.
NASH: For me it’s also when a work of fiction has the force of society behind it on some level. Which is not necessarily to say that it has to be political—I do far less political fiction than people think—but I do want to feel that the writer has access to something larger than himself. To me, the energy you’re talking about is something that possesses social force and a concatenation of relationships and responses to the world lived in a certain kind of way. I try to forbid myself from using the word authenticity because I don’t actually know what the hell it is, but that’s one way of talking about it.
CHINSKI: I have a related question. What do you all think of the word voice? It’s one of those words that we all overuse, but do we actually know what it is? I always find myself reaching for it when I want to describe why I like something and why I don’t like other things that are perfectly well written. But when I really try to figure out exactly what I mean by it, I come back to what I was saying before. Is sensibility the same thing as a writer having a voice?
GARGAGLIANO: If it comes alive for you, and you can hear it in your head, and it sort of lives inside you, that’s when I feel like a writer has a voice. That’s when I’ll keep going back to something again and again. One of my favorite writers when I was falling in love with literature was Jeanette Winterson. It was just about her voice. I kept loving her books even when the stories themselves started to fall apart. I just wanted to hear that voice in my head. For me, with her, it stopped being about the storytelling, which is unusual. I love story. I want plots in my books.
CHINSKI: And you can think about writers who don’t actually tell stories. The Europeans, for example. We always have one: Thomas Bernhard; Sebald; now Bolaño. It feels like there’s always one of these writers who isn’t writing plot-driven fiction. The voice is so strong that that’s what people are responding to. With Bolaño, I find it kind of amazing that you have this nine-hundred-page novel by a dead Spanish-language writer…I mean, I can’t honestly believe that everybody who’s buying it is reading the whole thing. But it goes back to what you were saying, Richard, about the voice having the force of history and almost being haunted by these bigger issues.
NASH: Haunted is totally the word. Beckett had it too, obviously.
CHINSKI: Or look at Philip Roth. Even in his lesser novels, you can always recognize that kind of force in his writing.
NASH: What you just said reminds me of an artist named Bruce Nauman. I went to see a retrospective of his before I was in publishing. There was this sense, as you went from room to room, that the guy just had access to something that he wasn’t going to lose access to. You know what I mean? There was a certain frequency of the world to which he was tuned in. It could express itself in different ways, but he wasn’t going to lose his capacity to listen to it, as a result of which the work was always going to be operating on a certain level. He might vary between, I don’t know, brilliant and mind-blowing, but he wasn’t going to fuck up. Those voices, and those Europeans you were mentioning, are probably at the very upper level.
CHINSKI: That’s right. They always seem to have a certain set of questions that they’re asking. Even if they’re writing very different novels from book to book, they’re haunted by one or two or three questions, and no matter what they write, they seem to circle around them. That may have something to do with the voice they bring to a book. I mean, even Sasha Hemon, who’s only written three books—you can tell what his obsessions are. That’s another thing: I like writers who are obsessed. Chris Adrian is obsessed too. That’s what’s exciting about reading certain fiction writers.

Aside from what’s on the page, and somebody’s skill as a writer or voice or obsessions, what other things influence your thinking and decision-making?
GARGAGLIANO: One of the things can be when a book taps into something that’s happening in the moment. I’m editing a book right now that’s set after World War II in a psychiatric hospital, and it’s really a book about what happens to soldiers when they come back from war. I find myself obsessed with the news and weeping when I watch Channel Thirteen because I’ve been inside of this story for so long and I understand the psychology of these men coming back. I’m hoping that there will be a resonance when we publish it. You’re always trying to process things in the world, and when you read a really good piece of fiction, it helps you process things.
CHINSKI: The word necessary always comes to mind for me. Beyond a good story, beyond good writing, does the novel feel necessary? A lot of good books are written, and I’m not saying that they shouldn’t be published, but as an editor you can’t work on everything, and the ones I tend to be drawn to are the ones that either feel personally necessary or globally necessary in some vague way that’s hard to define. And that should be at the sentence level, too. People who can write really well sometimes get carried away by their own writing and forget what’s actually necessary on the page. I would also raise the question of believability. A book can be surreal and fantastical and all that, so it’s not believable in any straight sense, but it has to be believable in the sense that the author believes in what he or she is doing. Sometimes you feel like an author is just writing for the sake of writing, and that is a big turnoff. It’s got to feel necessary at every level.
BOUDREAUX: As an editor, you know how difficult the in-house process is going to be—the process of getting a book out there. The necessary quotient comes up when you ask yourself, “Is this something that really fires me up? What’s going to happen when I give it to these two reps to read? Are they going to have the same reaction to some pretty significant extent and feel the need to convey their enthusiasm down the line?” Because I think word of mouth remains the best thing we can ever do for a book. So is there that necessary thing? Is there that urgency? Is it in some significant way different from any number of other novels that purport to talk about the same topic? It’s almost like an electrical pulse traveling down a wire. It starts with the author, then the agent, then the editor, and then there are a lot of telephone poles it’s got to go through from there. If it’s lacking in any way, you know that the electricity is going to peter out. Sometimes you can almost see it happen. You can watch it happen between one sales rep and another sales rep. You’re like, “Oh, that just petered out between those two telephone poles.” And the book is only going to do so much.

When a lot of us were starting out I think we may have felt like, “Oh, it’s a little book, but it’s my job to make it work, and I’m going to.” I feel less like that now. Because you can’t work on everything, and you can’t do everything for every book. Even when you do do everything you can think of, so many good books get ignored. So many good books go by the wayside. You’ve got to be able to figure out if each one is necessary enough that you can really do something with it. Because it’s not that rewarding as the editor, or as the author, to just have a book sit there—when it dies a quiet death and nobody even hears it sink. “We tried! We’ll do better with the paperback!” The number of times you hear that! You know you’re lying and they know you’re lying and everyone’s just going to pretend it will be totally different a year from now.

It’s got to have enough juice in it to go somewhere. I feel like that juice can take any number of forms. It’s an ineffable quality, but you kind of know it when you’ve got it in front of you. Everyone is not going to agree on fiction, either. I do pretty much all fiction. When I want to buy something, in most cases nobody else is going to read the whole thing. They’re going to believe me when I say it’s good all the way to the end. They just like the voice and then we run with it. You’re never going to get a whole roomful of people to agree on fiction the way you sometimes can with nonfiction: “Is this the right book at the right time by the right person with the right platform to write the book on whatever?” With fiction it’s all sort of amorphous, and you’ve just got to feel like you’re picking the ones that are potent enough to go the distance.
NASH: We’re all just proxies for the reader. But we’re going to have different ideas about who the reader is and how we connect to that reader. Do we have commonality with this imaginary reader? But I certainly find that I am powerfully animated by the sense of having a duty to connect the writer with the reader. Is this a book that’s going to get one person to tell another person that they’ve got to read it? Which is the closest thing, I think, at least in the land of fiction, that’s going to pass for figuring out what the hell is meant by the word commercial. As you said, your own energy can always get one other person to read the book. But is that one other person going to get the next person to read the book?

Are there any other things, besides what’s on the page, that you’re looking at when a book is submitted?
GARGAGLIANO: This was one of the hardest lessons for me. Unlike what Eric was saying earlier, when I used to read fiction before I was in publishing, I never wanted to know who the author was. I didn’t want to look at their pictures. I just wanted to exist in the worlds that they had created. That was it. When I got into the industry, I quickly learned that that was not acceptable. The first thing I get asked at our editorial meeting is, “Where have they published?” You want to know that somebody has been publishing their short stories, even if a total of a hundred people have read them. It’s always the first question.
CHINSKI: One thing I’m looking for is experience in the world. I keep coming back to Chris Adrian, not for any particular reason. But he’s somebody who has an MFA, he’s a practicing doctor specializing in pediatric oncology, he’s in divinity school, and you can feel all of that in his writing. There’s an urgency, a sense of questioning, and an obsession. You can tell that all of that experience is getting distilled into his writing. He wants to understand something about loss and our relationship to transcendence. I feel like with the best writers, you recognize that in their work. It’s exciting to me to feel like it’s being drawn not just out of the desire to write an interesting story and find readers. It’s a different form of necessity that they feel they need to wrestle with because of their own life experience.
BOUDREAUX: I’ve never been able to say what my books have in common. I’ll make an argument for escapism. I want to be transported. I don’t care where you take me, but I want to have that moment that we all had when we were reading as kids, when the real world ceases to exist and your mother tells you to come have dinner and it’s like resurfacing from the bottom of a swimming pool. “Where am I? What am I doing?” That’s what I want. I’m not looking for any particular kind of book, I’m just looking for the intensity of that experience. It doesn’t matter what agent it comes from. It doesn’t matter if it’s long or short. It doesn’t matter if it’s a young voice or something that’s more mature. I just feel like you sit there as a proxy for the reader, open to having a new experience. And if they can give it to you, great. I don’t even need it to happen in the first sentence. I’ll give it three or four pages sometimes. [Laughter.] I’m seven months pregnant so I’m feeling patient and maternal toward the world—I’ll give them four or five pages to say something that I find interesting.

On the flip side of that, give me some things that you find beginning writers doing wrong.
NASH: Not listening. Not listening to the world around them.
GARGAGLIANO: Trying to sell stories that aren’t really a book. They’re not a cohesive whole. There’s no vision to the whole thing that makes me feel like this person has a reason for writing a story collection other than that they had twelve stories.
NASH: Assuming that having an attitude equals…anything.
CHINSKI: Or assuming that good writing is enough. I’m sure we all see a lot of stuff where the writing is really good. It’s well crafted and you can tell that the writer has talent. But, again, you don’t really feel like the writer necessarily believes in his or her ability to open it up into a novel. I know the old adage “write what you know.” I’d kind of rather somebody write what they don’t know. And figure out, beyond their own personal experience, why what they’re doing should matter to the reader.
BOUDREAUX: I’ve always wanted to give people that advice too. “Do you have to write what you know? If you know it, I might know it. Which means I’ve already read it. Which means that your book is the nineteenth novel about a mother-daughter relationship. And I. Don’t. Care.” The crudest way to put it is the “Who cares?” factor. Why, why, why do I need to read four hundred pages about this? The necessary thing, and the authentic thing, and the voice thing are all much better ways of saying it than the “Who cares?” factor, but it’s basically the same thing. “What is the necessity of reading this? What are you doing that is different?”
CHINSKI: I’d rather somebody be ambitious and fail a little bit than read a perfectly crafted, tame novel.
NASH: I have published novels, especially first novels, that I knew failed on some level because of what they were trying to do. I felt that that was okay.
CHINSKI: That’s more exciting.
NASH: But what would be the version of that that actually answered your question?
CHINSKI: “Have courage”?
NASH: Don’t try to be perfect. Don’t be boring.
CHINSKI: That’s really what it is 99.9 percent of the time—good writing, but boring. And it’s the hardest thing to turn down because you think, “This is good. But it doesn’t do anything for me.”
BOUDREAUX: That’s the thing. You’re like, “There’s nothing wrong with this. I’ve got nothing to tell you to do to fix it. It’s just…there.”
CHINSKI: And that’s a hard rejection letter to write, too. Because it’s not like you can point to this, that, and the other thing that are wrong with it. It just doesn’t move you in any way. It doesn’t feel necessary.

Do you think it’s too hard to get published today?
GARGAGLIANO: I think it’s hard but not too hard. I don’t know how many more books we could have out there.
BOUDREAUX: I think we all kind of know that too many books get published. You can listen to your own imprint’s launch meeting, you can listen to all the other imprints’ launch meetings, and multiply that by every other house, and you know that every book did not feel necessary to every editor. When you think about it that way, it doesn’t seem all that hard to get published.
CHINSKI: But there are also a lot of people who can’t get published.
NASH: There was a great little moment in an article in Wired about a year ago. It was an article about the million-dollar prize that Netflix is giving for anyone who can improve their algorithm—”If you liked this, you’ll like that”—by 10 percent. One of the people in the article was quoted as saying that the twentieth century was a problem of supply, and the twenty-first century is a problem of demand. I think that describes a lot about the book publishing business right now. For a long time, racism, classism, and sexism prevented a whole array of talent from having access to a level of educational privilege that would allow them to write full-length books. That hasn’t been completely solved, but it’s been radically improved since the 1950s. Far more persons of color, women, and people below the upper class have access now. An entire agent community has arisen to represent them. But finding the audience is the big problem. I guess I’m imposing my own question on the question you asked—”Is it too hard to get published?”—and I think we all may have heard a slightly different version of that question. The version of it that I heard was, “Are there too many books?” I personally don’t feel that way. And I get a lot of submissions at Soft Skull. I get about 150 a week. And it’s hell having so much supply. But we didn’t exist before 1993, and you guys all existed before that, so you are feeding off a different supply and we’re enabling this new supply. I love the fact that Two Dollar Radio exists, and all the other new indie presses that have erupted. I think that’s healthy. I don’t think a solution to the problems we face as an industry is to say we’re going to reduce consumer choice by publishing fewer books. Now, at the level of the individual publisher, I totally understand it as a rational decision that a given executive committee would make at a large company. My comment that there are not too many books published has to do with culture rather than a given economic enterprise. I think we could publish more books. You just have to recognize that they may be read by five hundred people. And that’s perfectly legitimate. Blogs can be read by fifty people. You just have to think, “What’s the economically and environmentally rational thing to do with this thing that has an audience—but that audience is just 150 or 250 people?” It may not be to print the book. It may be to publish it through a labor-of-love operation that is completely committed to a given set of aesthetic principles and will print it in a way that is environmentally sensitive—chapbook publishing, let’s say. The poetry model could have a lot to say to fiction and nonfiction publishing.

I think about the midlist writer a lot and I feel like it’s harder and harder to build a career the old-fashioned way—slowly, over several books that might not be perfect but allow you to develop as a writer. Part of that has to do with the electronic sales track. Put yourself in the shoes of a beginning writer and speak to that.
BOUDREAUX: When we published Serena by Ron Rash it was such a proud moment of doing that thing—of almost reinventing a writer. So I feel like it can still happen. The model of building somebody hasn’t gone completely out the window. It gets hard with the “This is what we sold of the last book, this is all we’re ordering this time.” And you’re stuck with it. But a lot of editors and a lot of publishers stick with people.
GARGAGLIANO: I feel like Scribner is really good about that. We can’t do it with everyone, but there is definitely a stable of authors. I have writers for whom I haven’t had to fight that hard to buy their second or third books. It’s because everyone recognizes their talent.
NASH: It can be because the reps love selling them. The reps love reading that galley, even if they’re going to get [orders of] ones and twos. But it makes them so happy to read that galley that they’re not going to fight you when you present it to them.
CHINSKI: You have to think about the identity of the list as a whole, too. Sometimes it means paying an author less than what they’ve received before, but it doesn’t mean we’re giving up on those authors. I think, speaking for FSG, it’s important to us to try to build writers. Roger Straus apparently said, and Jonathan always says, “We publish authors, not books.” That’s more difficult today, given the way of the world, but it’s still the guiding principle. Think about Jonathan Franzen, who published two novels that got great reviews but didn’t sell particularly well. Then The Corrections came along. There are tons of examples like that.

But aren’t you guys and FSG the exception to that in a lot of ways?
CHINSKI: I wonder if it’s really that new. Obviously the mechanics have changed, but there’s always been a huge midlist. We remember the really important writers. We probably don’t even remember the best-selling writers from twenty years ago. You remember the important ones—or the ones that have been canonized as important. The economics have changed and obviously the chain bookstores are a different part of the equation than they were fifty years ago, but I suspect there’s always been a vast midlist.
GARGAGLIANO: I also don’t think it’s very constructive for authors to think about that too much. You’re sort of fortunate if you get published at all. You’re fortunate to find an editor who you have a great relationship with and a house that believes in you in which everybody works as hard as they can for you. There’s only so much you can do.
NASH: If you’re going to stress about something, be worrying about your reader. Don’t stare at your Amazon ranking and don’t stare at the number of galleys your publisher is printing. Get out into the world. And if you don’t have the personality to get out into the world, then you have to ask yourself, “Why does everybody else have to have the personality to get out into the world, but I don’t? What makes me so special that everybody else has to go out and bang the drum for me, but I don’t?” I have a fairly limited tolerance for people who assume that it is everybody else’s job to sell their books while they get to be pure and pristine. They don’t have to get the book-publishing equivalent of dirt under their fingernails. Which involves whoring, to use a sexist term, but one that I use to describe myself. [Laughter.] Go out and find a reader. It’s not about selling a reader a $14.95 book. If you have ten more books under your thumb, then that reader could be worth $150 to you, and it might actually be worth three minutes of your time to respond to their e-mail or chat with them for an extra two minutes after that reading at which it seemed like no one showed up. Those eight people might have some influence out in the world. None of us is in this for the money. It’s sort of mind-boggling how many people think that we’re sitting there behind our cushy desks. There’s just no one in publishing who couldn’t have made more money doing something else. At a certain point, yes, we may have become unemployable in any other industry. But there was a period of time in everyone’s career when he or she could have gone in a different direction and made more money, and chose not to.
GARGAGLIANO: Can I add one more thing? We keep talking about self-promotion, and I think there’s a stigma that it’s a negative thing. It’s really an extension of that deep involvement we were talking about earlier. It’s about being really passionate about your book. It’s a way to figure out how to make the world of your book bigger, and to give other people access to it. I think it’s helpful if authors can wrap their heads around looking at it from a different perspective. I have a lot of authors who are afraid to go out there. They think it’s about them. It’s actually about the book. It’s about the writing. It’s not about you personally.
NASH: It’s about being part of the world around you. One of the freelance publicists I know—I’ve never been able to afford to use her, but I’m friendly with her—does something that I think is brilliant in terms of dealing with a new author. Rather than trying to make an author blog, which is always hell, she says, “Here are twenty blogs that you should read.” And by doing that, they get into it. They start commenting. All of the sudden they start getting that this act of communication is no different than a conversation between two people. It gets the author to start realizing that they’re in a community, and that participating in that community is what we’re talking about when we say “self-promotion.” It isn’t this tawdry, icky activity that will demean them. It will help make them feel more connected to the world, and happier.
GARGAGLIANO: I’ll give you an example. I published this book about fruit—talk about obsessive people—called The Fruit Hunters. The author is this guy who was writing food stories for magazines and became obsessed with fruit and went on to discover this whole obsessive world of fruit lovers. The book came out and got a lot of attention, and the sales were okay, but it has fostered this whole community of people who are also obsessed. The other day they had an event in a community garden in the East Village. They call themselves the Fruit Hunters, after the book, and they’re going to take trips together and everything. There are already a hundred of them. It’s this amazing little story of obsession. It’s exciting. The author is very involved online. He’s happy to engage with anyone who wants to talk to him. He’s just really present, and that makes all the difference.

I’m interested in how you guys view your jobs. It seems to me that things have changed quite a bit over time and I’m curious how you see what you do.
CHINSKI: Things have changed a lot. But in terms of the actual editing and acquiring, I don’t feel like I’m thinking very differently about what I’m signing up, and in terms of the editing, I still have the same basic ideas of what my role is, which is to make the book more of what it already is—rather than coming in with some foreign idea and imposing it on the book. I try to understand what the writer is trying to do with the book and edit it along those lines. But when I first started in publishing, I had no idea that the role of the editor was to communicate to the marketing and sales departments. I had this very dark-and-stormy-night vision of the editor sitting in a room poring over manuscripts. But you very quickly realize that a natural part of being excited about a book is wanting to tell other people about it, in the same way we do as readers. That’s what our job is in-house. And obviously it probably is different now, in terms of the chain stores and all these other things. But I think an editor’s job is basically to fall in love with a book and then to help it be more of what it already is.
GARGAGLIANO: I feel very similarly. I’m the first reader, and I’m there to make the book what it wants to be, and then I’m its best advocate. I’m its advocate to people in the company because often they’re not going to read it—they’re only going to get my take on it—and then I’m its advocate to the rest of the world. I write handwritten notes to booksellers. I write to magazine people. I’m constantly promoting my authors. I feel like I’m the one who was responsible for getting them into the company, and I’m the one who’s responsible for getting them into the world. I have to take care of them.
BOUDREAUX: The most fun part of being an editor is getting to actually edit—getting to sit and play puzzle with the book. God, that is so much fun! That’s what we like to do. We need to do all of these other things…but sitting there with the paper, which you only get to do on the weekends? That’s when you get excited. Like, “I’m a real editor!” But this myth that nobody edits anymore compared with a hundred years ago? I’ve never worked with an editor who doesn’t edit all weekend long, every single night. That’s the fun part.
CHINSKI: I think that’s important to emphasize. I think we all hear that editors don’t edit anymore.
BOUDREAUX: I just don’t know who they’re talking about. Having worked at two different houses, I literally do not know who they are talking about. Who just acquires and doesn’t edit? I feel like everybody I’ve ever worked with sweats blood over manuscripts. And you reap the rewards of doing that.
NASH: I suspect that agents are doing more editorial work on books before they submit them in order to polish the apple. To some extent the process of acquisition has become more collegial, and it’s helpful if a book is not a dog’s dinner when you’re showing it to people before you can start working on it yourself. That can create the perception that not much happened after it was acquired. And when you have the goal of helping to make a book as much like itself as it can be, that can involve a level of editing that doesn’t look very intense on the surface but actually can be quite important. It doesn’t have to involve a whole lot of red ink. But the right red ink in the right places, especially when it’s subtractive rather than additive, can really make a book fluoresce.

Why did you all become editors instead of agents? And why do you stay editors when by all accounts you could make a lot more money being an agent?
CHINSKI: Has anybody here ever worked at an agency? My first job, for three months, was at an agency. That’s why I’m an editor. But sometimes I do think that agents get a more global view of things. Dealing with film and foreign rights and so on.

But in other ways they get a more limited view because they don’t have to do all the things to make a book work.
CHINSKI: I think that’s true. Wouldn’t that be more fun? [Laughter.] But seriously, when I was working there I didn’t leave because I didn’t like working at an agency. It just wasn’t working as a job. I have a really hard time imagining myself as an agent. It’s partly just the obvious stuff of doing the deal and so on. I think you have to have a certain personality to get really excited about that. I’d rather go home and really devote myself to doing the editing. I know that some agents do that. But it’s not, kind of nominally, what they are there for.
BOUDREAUX: I literally didn’t know there was such a thing as a literary agent. I didn’t know anything. I was like, “I guess those people who get to work with books would be editors.” I just didn’t know any better. And I love to play with the words, which they also get to do, but they’re not the final word on it. I also don’t do enough nonfiction, which I feel like any editor who’s got any sense learns to do. But I just don’t have the antenna for it. As an agent it would be even scarier to have a list that is 95 percent fiction. You probably need a balanced portfolio in a way that an editor can still get away with being more fiction-heavy.

What are the hardest decisions you have to make as editors?
CHINSKI: Jackets. I find that the most harrowing part of the whole process. As an editor, you’re in this funny position of both being an advocate for the house to the author and agent but also being an advocate for the author to everybody in-house. The editor is kind of betwixt and between. And for a lot of books, especially fiction, the jacket is the only marketing tool you have. It’s really difficult. I also find that I know what I don’t like, but I don’t have the visual vocabulary to describe what I think might work.
BOUDREAUX: And the cover is so important. Even if it’s not the only thing that’s being done for a book, it’s still got to be one of the most important things. You’ve got reviews and word-of-mouth, and then you’ve just got the effect it has when somebody walks into the store and sees it. I think it’s so important to work somewhere where your art people will read the book and come up with something that you never would have come up with yourself. The idea of a jacket meeting where you have twelve people around a table and you bring it down to the lowest common denominator of “It’s a book about this set there. We need a crab pot at sunset with a…” People do that! They think it’s a marketing-savvy way to go about it. “We need a young person on the cover. But you shouldn’t be able to see the person’s face. It has to be from behind!”
GARGAGLIANO: The same thing happens when the author tries to deconstruct the cover.
CHINSKI: Exactly. That’s one thing that’s changed a lot. When I first started, we would send the author hard copies of the [proposed] jacket. Now we email it to them and they send it to everybody in their family. You can predict exactly what’s going to happen.

What are the other hard decisions you have to make?
GARGAGLIANO: I have two, and they’re related. One of them is when I love a book but I don’t actually think that we’re going to do the best job of publishing it. I anguish about that because I want the book for myself, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the right thing for the author. The step beyond that is when you’ve already been publishing someone, and it’s the question of what’s best for their career. You offer a certain amount of money, and the agent wants to take the author somewhere else, and you have to ask yourself whether or not you go to bat for that person and get more money because you want to keep working with them despite whether the house might really support them. That’s a hard thing to figure out.

I think part of what makes it hard is that editors serve different masters—the authors, the agents, the house. How do you guys navigate those allegiances and responsibilities?
NASH: I will confess that I came into this business not motivated to become an editor. I was a theater director and happened upon Soft Skull because the guy who founded it was a playwright whose plays I directed. The whole thing was going belly up in the middle of my friendship with this dude. He basically did a runner, and there were these two twenty-two-year-olds at the company, and no one else, and there were all these authors, and the whole thing was fucked. I had a messiah complex and came in and tried to be Mr. Messiah for six months. And in the middle of my messiah complex, I fell in love with the process of publishing. So in a weird way, I did not come in with the idea of working with writers. I came in as a problem solver, and that’s all I’ve ever been in a certain sense. The problem I try to solve is, “How do you connect writers and readers?” Those are the two masters for me. Recently I’ve been trying to think, believe it or not, of the publishing business as a service industry in which we provide two services simultaneously, to the author and to the reader. We may pretend to offer a service to the agent, and we may pretend to offer a service to the company. But only to the extent that we fulfill those other two services—to the writer and to the reader—are we truly serving the agent or the company. And we have to use our own instincts on a minute-to-minute psychological basis. Obviously you’re accountable to the bottom line and P&Ls etcetera, but you’re being asked to use your own instincts, and that’s what you have to use in order to bring writers and readers together.
GARGAGLIANO: There are moments when it’s sticky. When you’re dealing with a jacket, for example. But on the whole, everybody wants the same thing, and that makes it easy. The thing that I always have to remind myself is that the people who are on the sales end also love books, and they also love to read, and they could be making more money in some other industry too. When you remember that, it makes your job much easier.
CHINSKI: I agree that we do all want the same thing, but don’t you find that sometimes people don’t behave that way?
GARGAGLIANO: Sometimes. But sometimes they do.
CHINSKI: It just amazes me how combative the relationship can become. I mean, it doesn’t happen that often, but it does become combative sometimes. When we were talking before about authors saying that editors don’t edit…there’s just this assumption that the publisher isn’t doing enough. Sometimes agents don’t quite understand how things actually work in the publishing house. I’m not saying that across the board. But it does happen. I find those situations really difficult, where you feel like you’re being accused of somehow not caring enough about the author when we all know how many hurdles there are. I mean, we wouldn’t be doing this if we didn’t care.
GARGAGLIANO: I’ve been very lucky with my authors. I haven’t had many bad ones. The relationship is all about trust, and once you start that relationship and you start that dialogue, they trust that you’re taking care of them. But there is a point when it’s out of the editor’s hands. And if they’ve trusted you that far, most of the time they’ll accept whatever happens, in my experience. Usually the call I get will be from the agent.
BOUDREAUX: It’s like you can almost have two different conversations. In one of them the agent gets what’s going on and is just being helpful and trying to get everyone on the same page. And in the other one somebody is making demands or accusations that aren’t going to actually help anything. It’s more just for show. You know, “Emboss this part of the jacket” for no good reason. You do get the feeling sometimes that they are fulfilling their service to the author in a way that actually doesn’t have that much to do with the book.
GARGAGLIANO: But that’s the agent. I’m more worried about my author’s happiness.
CHINSKI: I agree with that. A combative relationship with an author is pretty rare. Obviously it happens sometimes, but I’m thinking more about the agent. I don’t want to overstate it, but sometimes it does feel like we should all understand more that we do all actually want the same thing. No publisher or editor signs up a book in order to sink it. Who would do that? We’re not getting paid enough to be in this business for any reason other than we actually love the books we’re working on.

What do you wish writers knew about you that they sometimes don’t?
GARGAGLIANO: I think most writers don’t realize that every editor goes home and reads and edits for four hours—that they’re not doing that in the office. That in the office they’re advocating for all of the authors they already have.
NASH: I don’t even get to read when I go home. When I go home, I’m continuing to advocate. I haven’t been able to read at all recently. I’ve really just become a pure pimp.
CHINSKI: I thought you were a whore.
NASH: I’m both at once! It depends on the street I’m walking down.

What else?
GARGAGLIANO: I think it’s important for writers to remember that we’re not their enemy. We love books and we’re looking for books that we love.
CHINSKI: And ads are not love.
GARGAGLIANO: And ads do not equal sales.
BOUDREAUX: If those two things appear in print—that we’re working nights and weekends and ads don’t sell books—we have all done a fine job here. We are martyrs to the cause and ads are ridiculous. But I think editors like ads too. It’s like having your business card published in the New York Times.

Have you guys ever gotten any great advice about your jobs from a colleague or a mentor?
CHINSKI: I can quote somebody, Pat Strachan, who is one of the most elegant, serious, and lovely people in the business. She said to me, “Just remember, when you’re all stressed out, that the lives of young children are not at stake.” And I do think that’s worth remembering. We all love what we do and we take it really seriously, but you have to keep things in perspective. I also have one from David Rosenthal. He used to say, “If you’re going to overpay for a book, you should at least be able to imagine the things that have to happen for it to work at that level, even if it may not actually work at that level.”
BOUDREAUX: It should be in the realm of possibility.
CHINSKI: Yeah, and you should be able to picture, very concretely, what would have to happen and how you might go about making those things happen. You don’t want to just buy something blindly.

What have your authors taught you about how to do your job?
GARGAGLIANO: To be honest with them. I often have the impulse to protect my authors and treat them as if they are more fragile than they actually are. It’s better if I can have an open conversation with them. If I start that early on, the better our relationship is going to be going forward, and the easier it will be to talk about tough things. That took me a while to figure out.
BOUDREAUX: They teach you over and over and over—and this is so obvious—but they will always have a better solution to an editing problem than anything you could come up with. If you just raise the question, they will solve it. The universe of their book is more real to them than it could ever be to anyone else. You trust them with the internal logic of what’s going on. You just show them where the web is a little weak—where everything that was so fully imagined in their head has not quite made it down to the page. Not only, as you said, are they not that fragile, but the world they’ve created is not that fragile. You can poke at it endlessly, and you’ll just get really good answers and really good solutions. When you bring something up, you never find that you will unravel the whole sleeve. I’ve never had that happen. Where it’s like, “Oooooh, we’d better hope that nobody notices that.”

How do you guys measure your success as an editor?
NASH: Survival.

Tell me more.
NASH: For me, for a long time, there was a very direct correspondence between the success of my books and my ability to eat pizza. Now, in the last year, it has become less direct, since I don’t have to make payroll, least of all my own, anymore. Because in the past, in order to make payroll, I would do it by not making my own payroll.

But what about in a deeper sense?
NASH: I suppose I was answering as a publisher, which is what I was and in a sense what I am anterior to being an editor.

I think I just mean more internally, in a more internal way.
NASH: When the book becomes what you imagined it was going to be based on the fact that it was almost already there. And you helped it get there.
CHINSKI: But we all want more than that, too, don’t we?

That’s what I’m trying to get at.
CHINSKI: We all want our books to have an impact. Beyond sales in any kind of simple sense. You want people to talk about them. You want people to find each other because of them. I worked with a writer who very elegantly described a book as a table that everybody can sit around and start a conversation around. And I think, not to sound terribly cheesy about it, that’s what we all want. We want our books to have an impact in the world. And that’s really rare. Sometimes it has nothing to do with sales. So I think it’s more than just feeling like you did your job on the page. It’s feeling like you did your job in the world.
GARGAGLIANO: That it went beyond you.
CHINSKI: Yeah. Books should transcend themselves in some way, and I think that’s what we all really want.
NASH: The reason I got excited about publishing, compared to theater, was that the theater I was doing had no fucking impact on the world whatsoever.
GARGAGLIANO: Do you feel like it’s better in publishing?
NASH: It’s immensely better. Now, it may be that the joy I get from publishing is relative to how hard it was in downtown, experimental, Richard Foreman-acolyte theater. I set the bar so low for myself! [Laughter.] But in publishing, even indie publishing, thousands of people who I will never meet, who don’t want to act for me, will actually buy one of my books.
CHINSKI: That reminds me of another great quote that I’ll probably get slightly wrong. I remember when Philip Roth came to sales conference at Houghton Mifflin. I think it was for The Human Stain. He gave a presentation to the sales force and basically talked about the death of the novel as a force in our culture. “That’ll be a good way to get the sales reps really excited!” [Laughter.] But then he said the most extraordinary thing, which has always stayed with me and which I’ve said to a lot of writers. He said that if his books were to sell ten thousand copies, which doesn’t sound like a whole lot, but if he were to sit in a room, and each one of those people were to walk by him, and he could see them face to face, it would break his heart. I can’t believe I forgot that earlier. That’s probably the best description of why we do what we do. Whether it’s three thousand people buying a novel, or five hundred people buying a book of poetry, it does kind of break your heart if you actually imagine each of those individuals reading the book.
NASH: That’s why it was not a value judgment when I said the audience for a book might only be 150 people, in this world of more books. It’s about the intensity with which that connection might occur.
CHINSKI: Do you guys all remember one moment where you felt really content? Whether it was something specific that happened or just a moment in your career? Where you felt like, “Okay, this is it. Now I’m kind of happy. This is all I could ever want.” Where you actually slept well for one night?

I like the question.
GARGAGLIANO: That is a good question. [Laughter]
CHINSKI: I mean, I’m just wondering, was it when a book hit the best-seller list? Was it when a book got a great review? I’m curious what those different feelings are.
BOUDREAUX: I’m trying to come up with something that won’t sound like complete dorkiness. I mean, yeah, the best-seller list feels amazing. It feels amazing because of all the great books we watch not get read. When you see one that’s actually getting read? Boy is that an amazing feeling. But that little moment of satisfaction? I was trying to think, “What was the first time as an editor that I really felt that way?” Maybe being promoted to editor was my greatest moment. You know, Ann Godoff was doing the benediction and it was kind of like, “You are now an editor. On your tombstone they can say you were an editor.” I had this little glimmering moment of, “Yeah! I came here, I didn’t even know what publishing was, barely, and now…” Thank God for the Radcliffe Publishing Course. I wouldn’t have had any idea of how anybody moves to New York or gets a job had I not ended up doing that. I had been working at Longstreet Press in Atlanta, where we published Jeff Foxworthy’s You Might Be a Redneck If… That’s actually my proudest moment—what was I doing forgetting that? But seriously, I did that course because I didn’t know anything about anything and I thought I’d go back to Longstreet and work there. But then I thought, “Well, gosh, maybe I’ll try New York for one year. I’m sure I’ll end up back down in Atlanta before long, hoping that somebody at Algonquin would die so that somebody from the South could get a job at a slightly bigger publisher whose books you actually occasionally heard about.” You know, I think actually getting promoted to editor was sort of like, “Wow, here I am. This is really a job that I’m really going to get to do.” I still sort of feel amazed at that.
GARGAGLIANO: Getting a good review is also amazing. It’s so gratifying when you have loved this thing for so long and somebody in the public says that they love it too. It’s a thrill.
BOUDREAUX: Getting a review in a place that’s always been hard to crack. I’d bring up Ron Rash again. He was a regional author who had never been reviewed in the Times, never been reviewed in the Washington Post. He had this Southern fan base. The booksellers loved him. The San Francisco and L.A. papers had been good to him in the past. But everybody else ignored him. Getting him a daily review in the Times was such a bursting-buttons proud moment for him. I’ve never been happier about the work I’ve seen my company do on a book. Because we knew what he had felt like he’d been missing. And there it was, lining up—the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Yorker—when everybody had been ignoring him.
NASH: For me it was the summer of 2002, when there were two things that persuaded me that I should stay in the business. One was the first book I ever acquired, by a woman named Jenny Davidson, who I’d gone to college with. I was not even sure what one did at a publisher, and I thought, “I should acquire something.” We had to find books because there was nothing in the pipeline. So I asked around and my old college friend had a novel that no one wanted to publish. I didn’t know what galleys were at that point. But at one point our distributor asked us for some galleys, so we printed out manuscripts and tape-bound them and sent them some places. And the book ended up getting a full-page review in the Times. It ended up being pretty much the only review it got. It didn’t get any prepubs because I probably didn’t send it to the prepubs on time. But for whatever reason, some editor at the Times Book Review decided to review it. So I had this sense of not having fucked up—this absence of failure in a world where you’re up against it.

The second thing that happened had to do with the second book I acquired, Get Your War On. I’d look at my distributor’s website and see the sales and the backorders. And one order came in—I think it was the second order that the book got—and it was Harvard Bookstore, which ordered forty copies. That was more convincing than the Times Book Review. It was the first time a bookseller had ever trusted me, the first time a bookseller had ever said, “You’re not an idiot.” I don’t think in either of those situations did I realize how hard it was. It was only later, when I tried to get the second Times review and the second forty-copy-order from an indie bookstore, that I realized how good it was.

But the second thing was bigger than the first thing because ultimately it’s about survival. I wasn’t being glib when I was talking about survival. There was a very direct, one-to-one translation between my ability to sell books and my ability to stay in business and pay everyone. There is a British publisher call Souvenir Press, apparently they’ve been around for a long time, and I got a catalog of theirs one time. It included a letter from the publisher, and in the letter he quoted some other august independent publisher, saying something to the effect of, “A publisher’s first duty to his authors is to remain solvent.” Which was instructive because if you don’t, it’s not some glorious failure. All of your authors go out of print. And one of the reasons I ended up selling the company—one of the reasons was that I fucking had to because PGW had gone tits up and there was just no way to avoid that—but there was also a sense that if I fucked up too badly, the whole thing would go kaput, and I had an accountability to the authors to not let it all go kaput because it was not going to be some cute little failure where everybody would be like, “All right, peace, Soft Skull. It was very nice but now we’ll all move on.” It was like, “Oh, there are a number of authors whose careers actually depend on this.”

Let’s talk about agents. Tell me about the difference between a good one and a bad one.
GARGAGLIANO: A good agent knows what to send you. They’re playing matchmaker, and they do it well. Those are the happiest relationships—those authors are happiest with their agents and they’re happiest with their editors.
CHINSKI: A good agent also understands the process inside the publishing house and the kinds of issues and questions that an editor has to deal with on a daily basis. But I think, most importantly, they know what they’re sending and who they’re sending it to.
BOUDREAUX: A good agent can be very helpful when you get to those sticky wickets, whether it’s the cover, or an ending that still doesn’t work, or something else. An agent who can honestly appraise the work along with you and add their voice to the chorus of why, for example, the author needs to change that title. You want it to be about the book and you want it to be about the author, but every now and then the sales force knows what the hell they’re talking about with a “This is going to get lost because it is black and it has no title on the cover. It’s not going to degrade the integrity of the book if you change it.” An agent can either be helpful in that conversation or they can sit there and be a roadblock and let you be the bad cop. An agent who’s willing to be the bad cop with you can save an author from impulses—and help them understand why it’s the right thing to do in a world where two hundred thousand books get published every year.
GARGAGLIANO: The same thing is true on the publicity front, when you have an author who wants something and you have an agent who’s able to make the additional phone call and work on the team with the publicist and the editor. It’s much better than getting a phone call from an agent who’s just yelling at you.
CHINSKI: Just to step back a little bit, obviously the agent’s job is to be the advocate for the author. But, along the lines of what you were both saying, that doesn’t always mean agreeing with everything the author says. I think sometimes the agent forgets that. That, actually, they can be most constructive for the author—not just for that book, but their career—by explaining some difficult things to their client.
GARGAGLIANO: And encouraging their author not to be difficult, which doesn’t win any fans in the house. If the agent is able to step in and say something in a constructive fashion, that is often helpful.
CHINSKI: It’s human nature. We don’t like to admit it, but people like to work for somebody who’s appreciative. That doesn’t mean, in a saccharine way, just affirming everything that the editor and publisher are doing. Obviously, we all make mistakes. But the conversation has to be constructive. We’ve all seen it over and over and over again. If an author, even if they don’t agree with you, is appreciative and trying to work constructively with the house, and so is the agent, it just changes the energy of the way people respond to that project—from the publicist to the designer to whoever. It goes back to what we were saying before: We all want the same thing, and if everybody can keep that in mind, it just makes everybody want to work all the harder on behalf of the book.
NASH: The squeaky wheel theory is bullshit in our business. It’s just complete bullshit. It doesn’t work.
CHINSKI: I have a sense that authors sometimes get that as concrete advice—to be a squeaky wheel—and for everyone out there, there’s a way to express your convictions without being…
GARGAGLIANO: And that ties into being proactive for yourself. If you’re out there doing a lot of work for yourself, that energy is—
NASH: So inspirational. When you have an author who shows up at a bookstore and then a week later the sales rep shows up at the store and the rep emails me and says, “Guess what? So-and-so just came by Third Place last week. The buyer was so excited to meet him.” Then the rep emails everyone else on the sales force and says, “Look how hard this author is working.” It’s amazing how effective an engaged author is. But if the author is like, “Why aren’t my books in Third Place?” it accomplishes nothing.

We all know that there are less than great agents out there. How are writers supposed to avoid ending up with one of them? Put yourself in their shoes.
CHINSKI: I think they need to do a lot of research, for one thing, even before they get an agent. It amazes me how many times we get query letters from agents who clearly haven’t looked at our catalog. I think they need to ask a lot of questions of whatever agent they’re thinking about signing up with and make sure the agent knows who they’re submitting to and why and so on.

But what if the author doesn’t know any of that stuff?
GARGAGLIANO: The author should know. It’s their business.
CHINSKI: So much information is available online. There’s no excuse now to not know what a house is doing and even what individual editors are doing.
GARGAGLIANO: Every time you read a book, the editor’s name is in the acknowledgments. It’s very simple.
NASH: The fact that agents don’t charge money to read is so widely an established fact online that it’s mind-boggling that you still get submissions from agents who are obviously functioning that way. The agenting equivalent of chop-shops.

I mean more the difference between a B+ agent and an A+ agent.
GARGAGLIANO: I think that goes back to what we were talking about with the author’s relationship to their editor. It’s a personal connection. You want someone who understands your work and is articulate about it and has the same vision for it and can talk to you about your whole career and not just the thing that’s in front of them. And then that conversation extends to the editor and the editor’s conversation extends to the house.
NASH: With regard to the so-called “A+” and “B+” agents, when I’ve seen authors switch agents to get somebody more high-powered it pretty much has always failed. So if that’s what meant by the difference between a B+ agent and an A+ agent, there is no difference. If they met the criteria that Alexis just articulated, then the odds are that they’re the right agent for you. I mean, there’s not a whole lot of variance in the advances I pay—there’s not a lot of variance in what I can accomplish and not accomplish. Maybe there is with you guys. I’ve always had this theory—I could be wrong—that who the agent is might make a 20 percent difference in the advance an editor is going to offer. But it’s not going to make an order-of-magnitude difference. Probably. It’s not going to be the difference between ten thousand and a hundred thousand, let’s say.
GARGAGLIANO: I think that’s true 90 percent of the time. I think there are a very select group of agents who people just pay attention to before they even know what the book is. And that sets expectations.

We may as well name them.
NASH: Nicole Aragi, presumably.
GARGAGLIANO: Tina Bennett. Lynn Nesbit. Jennifer Rudolph Walsh. Suzanne Gluck.
CHINSKI: Eric Simonoff. I mean, I know from friends at other houses that when a manuscript comes in from certain agents, they start circulating it before they even read it because they presume it’s going to go really quickly and for a lot of money. And that’s not true with other agents. It just changes the game entirely. I think an author has to understand what they want. They have to do some soul searching, for lack of a better phrase, and figure out if it’s just the money they need or if they need something else. And it’s hard to hold that against someone. I know that editors always bitch about having to pay too much, and obviously it can have big consequences in a house—if a book doesn’t earn out and so on—but you can’t really hold that against the author. We never know exactly what their circumstances are. Maybe they have five children who they need to send to college. But they need to figure out what their priorities are. I do think we’ve often stumbled up against this thing where, in the same way that people think advertising equals love, they think that the advance equals love. And that’s just not always true. But people assume that the more you pay, the more you love a book—that if you offer fifty thousand dollars more than another house, then you love it more and will be more devoted to it—and that’s not necessarily the case. I think a good agent will explain to the author what all the different variables are, and specifically within the context of what the author needs, whether it’s financial or their career more generally, and that is the ideal way to make the decision.

How do you guys feel about auctions?
CHINSKI: We try to avoid them if we can.
BOUDREAUX: I don’t mind an auction as much as I hate a best-bids [auction]. And I don’t mind a best-bids as much as I hate a best-bids and then the top three get to do it again. What the hell? Everybody does that now. It’s insane to me. And the other thing is, does everybody have to talk to the author now, or meet the author, before you get to make an offer? What happened to the arranged marriage? “Eric likes me, Eric likes you, how ’bout we do a book together.” I mean—
CHINSKI: Have you gotten the one where you don’t get to talk to the author unless you promise to make an offer in advance?
GARGAGLIANO: Oh, that’s horrible.
BOUDREAUX: That happened recently. You weren’t allowed to talk to the author unless you’d ponied up however many six figures.
CHINSKI: There’s an admission price to even talk to the author. That drives me crazy. At FSG, we try to avoid auctions. We decide what we think a book is worth, make the offer, and the author either decides to come or not come, and we bow out if it doesn’t happen.
NASH: I mean, any economist will tell you that the winner of an auction has overpaid. In a lot of worlds, outside the publishing one, certain auctions get structured so that the second highest bidder wins. Because the presumption is that the overbidder has overpaid in such a way that it could imperil the business.
BOUDREAUX: I love that! Second place wins—let’s hear it for all the B-students!
CHINSKI: All you A-students are crazy.

I hear what you’re saying, Richard, but what about with books like Everything Is Illuminated or Edgar Sawtelle? You’re not the loser if you won those auctions.
NASH: But I mean in aggregate. Any of these things are statistical, so there are always outliers.
CHINSKI: Actually, I came in second on Everything Is Illuminated.
BOUDREAUX: Were you the underbidder?
CHINSKI: I was, actually.

Apparently I was wrong.
GARGAGLIANO: To be fair, there is a benefit to an auction, which is that, at least in my position, the whole house has to pay attention to the book. You end up getting more people reading it and talking about it, and that creates a certain excitement that isn’t to be negated entirely. As long as you don’t overpay too much, within that excitement, I think it can benefit the book.
CHINSKI: But what about the problem—this is rare, but we’ve all seen it happen—where the money becomes the story behind the book. That gives me a queasy feeling. Even if it doesn’t happen in a negative way, which we’ve obviously seen happen. But if that’s the driving momentum that gets a book attention? I guess, on one level, great. We’ll take what we can get. But on another level it just makes me queasy.
GARGAGLIANO: There’s a huge difference between an auction that ends at two hundred thousand and an auction that ends at a million. There’s a huge spectrum there. But if you’re in an auction with five different houses, your publishers are going to pay attention. Because everybody else is paying attention.

 

Do you guys think you feel the money you’re spending in the same way that maybe Richard does?
BOUDREAUX: I don’t know if you sweat the difference between 150 [$150,000] and 175 [$175,000]. But you definitely…One [$100,000] and five [$500,000] are different. And five [$500,000] and three million are different. I’ll tell you what’s easier: three million. Because then everybody did have to get on board. You are not out there on your own saying, “I believe!” But those middle, lot-of-money numbers when maybe nobody else read the whole thing and somebody is letting you do it? You do feel responsible for that in a “Boy do I need to make sure I don’t make a single misstep the whole time. The manuscript has to be ready early. I’ve got to have blurbs early. We’ve got to get the cover right. I’ve got to write those hand-written notes to people.” You feel the need to justify it. But at the same time, you don’t have to lose sleep every night because you won the auction by going up ten or fifteen thousand dollars. I think auctions can be not horrible when you agree on the number beforehand. What I hate is feeling like the ego contest has begun and somebody thinks so-and-so across town has it and you’re trying to guess who it is—or somebody inside the house, when there’s a house bid situation. The bullshit competition drives me up the wall. Being in an auction and saying we think it’s worth three hundred or we think it’s worth eight hundred—I don’t sweat that if we’re making a decision beforehand. It’s when you get into the middle of it and suddenly the book that you thought was a great two hundred thousand dollar book…You’re paying four [$400,000]? Just because there are still four people in it? I mean, when an agent calls and says they have interest, that’s fine and dandy. But it’s not going to change my mind about whether I liked the book or not, and I don’t want the publisher deciding because three other houses are in and “We should get in on that, too.” So if you can make these decisions before the craziness starts, it’s fine. It’s when the craziness begins—
CHINSKI: The feeding frenzy.

But it seems like that’s how it works now. You’re getting that email from the agent right away.
GARGAGLIANO: Noooo.
CHINSKI: But don’t you feel like you get that more and more?
GARGAGLIANO: I don’t feel like it changes my mind, though.
CHINSKI: No, I just mean more as a strategy to get people to pay attention.
BOUDREAUX: I feel like, when you get a submission, you know that it’s so easy to send that everybody on earth has it already. And it’s twenty a day and there they are on your Sony Reader and the attention paid to things has diminished just by the ease with which everything gets slotted in and slotted out. And then the agent’s like, “I’ve got interest! I’ve got interest!” Well, “I’ve got a ‘No!'” I can email fast, too! [Laughter.] Unfortunately, that’s how it ends up working sometimes. “You’ve got to get back to me quickly!” “Okay, well I guess I won’t be deliberating over this very long. I’ve read ten pages and we can be done, then.” If everybody just wants to speed it up that much.
CHINSKI: But I’ve heard so many agents say that it’s becoming more and more difficult to sell a literary first novel that it almost seems like this is compensation for that. There’s so much resistance now—everybody’s trying to find a reason why they shouldn’t buy something because it is so difficult. It seems like we get more emails now that say “There’s a lot of interest” just to kind of built up that intensity from their side.
NASH: What I get to do in those situations is say, “Congratulations. I’m thrilled for the author. Next time.” I just can’t play at that level. That makes my life a lot easier. It’s a much less complicated thing than what you guys have to go through in terms of evaluating the difference between two hundred [$200,000] and four hundred [$400,000]. That’s one thing I don’t ever have to worry about. But I really learned a lot from what you were saying about how when the money gets really big, you aren’t accountable anymore. Not that you aren’t accountable—but there’s a lot of shared responsibility and the buck isn’t stopping entirely with you. Whereas there’s an in-between spot where it’s large enough that you’re exposed but not so large that anybody else is going to be wearing the flak jacket with you.
BOUDREAUX: The first book I ever preempted, I hadn’t finished reading it. It had come in to another editor who gave it to me. So I was starting it late and I hadn’t finished it and I went in to tell the publisher, “We’ve heard that somebody else is going to preempt.” The publisher said, “Okay, go offer” several hundred thousand dollars. “Okay!” So I did, and we got it—what do you know?—and the next day the publisher asked, “So what happens at the end?” I still hadn’t finished it! I was like, “They all…leave…and go home.” I didn’t know what happened! [Laughter.] That was kind of scary, and I did feel like “This one is all on me”—because not only had nobody else read the thing, but I wasn’t even certain it would hold up. As I was editing it I was like, “I hope that’s what happens at the end….” Otherwise the author’s going to be like, “Really? Why would you suggest that at the end?” I’d have to be like, “I just think it’s important that everything works out that way.”

When you look at the industry, what are the biggest problems we face right now?
CHINSKI: I think they’re all so obvious. Returns. Blogs.
GARGAGLIANO: And just finding readers.
CHINSKI: The end of cultural authority. That’s something we talk about a lot at FSG. Reviews don’t have the same impact that they used to. The one thing that really horrifies me and that seems to have happened within the last few years is that you can get a first novel on the cover of the New York Times Book Review, a long review in The New Yorker, a big profile somewhere, and it still doesn’t translate into sales. Whereas six years ago, or some mythical time not that long ago, that was the battle—to get all that attention—and if you got it, you didn’t necessarily have a best-seller, but you knew that you would cross a certain threshold. Whereas now you can get all of that and still not see the sales. I think that phenomenon is about the loss of cultural authority. There’s just so much information out there now that people don’t know who to listen to, except their friends, to figure out what to read. And that’s the question we wrestle with the most. I think publishers have to communicate more directly with readers—that’s the big barrier we’re all trying to figure out. How much to use our websites to sell directly and talk to our readers directly?

So what are you doing to try to do that? What are you experimenting with?
CHINSKI: I can think of one thing. I mean, it’s a small thing, but we recently started the FSG Reading Series uptown at the Russian Samovar. It’s amazing. It’s actually turned into a kind of scene. The New York Observer and the New Yorker have written about it. And I mean “scene” in a good way. In all the ways that we were talking about before, what makes us most happy is when a book forges a community around itself. It’s a small thing, but now if we can somehow bring that online, or expand it in some way, it will be a way for FSG as a name to mean something, which will mean that we have another way to bring our writers to readers. The names of publishers, notoriously, are not like “Sony” or other companies where the name means a whole lot to readers. It may mean something to reviewers or booksellers, but I think we all need to figure out ways to make our names mean something. That’s another way to establish authority so that people become interested in the individual books. That’s a big challenge, and there’s no easy solution to it.

What else are you guys trying to do, beyond the hand-written notes and the bigmouth mailings? What are you lying awake at night thinking about doing for this novel you’re publishing that doesn’t seem to be going anywhere?
BOUDREAUX: I pray that the people in our new media department who are supposed to be figuring out this problem are staying up late at night. That’s what I think about as I roll around at night. And they are always coming up with things that I hope will work.
CHINSKI: And now we have this amplification system, supposedly—the Internet—which is supposed to amplify our ability to create word-of-mouth. But I don’t think anybody’s quite figured out exactly how to do that—or at least how to make it translate directly into sales. We all can see, in certain cases, our books being talked about a lot online. But what does that mean in terms of sales?
NASH: In our case, we’ve never really relied much on cultural authority, although we’ve certainly used it here and there. But for the most part, to the extent that we’ve been successful, it’s been through the things that you’re asking about. I check our Web metrics several times a week, whether it’s Quantcast, Alexa, or Compete. These are places for measuring traffic. I try to figure out what the traffic is and what the demographics are. So I’m doing a lot of stuff that would probably make you want to shoot yourself.
BOUDREAUX: I’m glad you’re doing it, though, so I can read about it in this article. Then I can call somebody and say, “You should do that! That’s brilliant!”
NASH: One of your new media people, Amy Baker, was briefly involved with Soft Skull back in the day. She played on our street hockey team that was known as the Soft Skull Sandernistas, which was named after my predecessor. [Laughter.] But seriously, as Eric says, the Internet is amplified word-of-mouth. The things that are happening online are amplifying a process that’s already in place. I mean, the genius of Oprah has never been her ratings. Her ratings aren’t that spectacular compared to a lot of other shows. It’s that Oprah connects to her audience in an intimate way, as if she were one of eight women who have lunch together every Tuesday. And that intensity of relationship—plus the fact that it is able to occur on a reasonably broad scale—is her genius. So what you do is go looking around the world for people with a certain level of trust. Authority, in a certain sense, has been partially replaced by trust. Part of what you can call “trust” today is the remnants of authority. People “trust” the New York Times.
CHINSKI: And people trust their friends.
NASH: Exactly. People trust Liesl Schillinger. People trust Ed Champion. Or they hate them. And you’re just trying to get your stuff to people who are trusted. In my case that involves doing it myself, in a lot of cases.
GARGAGLIANO: This is one of the things that I get most frustrated by, partly because I didn’t care about book reviews when I wasn’t in publishing. I would never read the New York Times Book Review. I just wanted to walk into a bookstore and find something. But people don’t do that anymore. People aren’t interested in the community of books. So it’s finding the niche markets. I just published a book called The Wettest County in the World. It’s a novel about the author’s grandfather and granduncles, who ran a bootlegging ring during Prohibition. It’s amazing. And we’ve gotten IndieBound, we’ve gotten lots of things for it, and it’s gotten amazing reviews. But the sales aren’t going to happen on that alone. So I’ve been mailing it to bloggers who have beer blogs and whiskey blogs, and bourbon drinkers, and distilleries. I’m trying to find the niche market. I think that’s the way things are going. I think that kind of thinking is much more exciting—you’re more likely to find the readers who are interested—but publishers aren’t set up to find niche markets for every single book.
BOUDREAUX: That’s the thing. Do you do the whiskey mailing and then the beer mailing and this mailing and that mailing? It seems like there aren’t enough hours in the day and there isn’t enough staff—the Amy Bakers of the world—to do that.
NASH: That’s where the writer needs to come into it. And interns. That’s one of the ways in which interns can be so valuable. That’s great work for them to do—a Technorati blog search on whatever. It’s not hugely difficult, and it’s kind of interesting.
GARGAGLIANO: It can also be useful for books down the line.
CHINSKI: That raises an interesting thing for writers to consider. I mean, how many times have we all heard that a certain book is going to appeal to this audience, that audience, and everybody else in the world? You just know that it’s not true. But if you can go really deep into one community, you might sell ten thousand copies of a first novel, which most first novels never sell—at least the ones that are supposedly going to appeal to everyone. I don’t think novelists should spend too much time worrying about who their audience is, but it’s something to consider. I just think that line—”This book is going to appeal to everybody because it’s about love or family or whatever”—doesn’t work. I think the author and the publisher need to think more specifically. If you could sell one book to everybody on two city blocks in New York, you’d probably be selling more copies of that book than we do of the ones we just send out into the world and hope are going to sell magically. But how do you reach everybody on those two city blocks in New York and get them to buy the book? That’s the task, metaphorically, that so many of us are facing: how to get to them and make them believe us. Because at the end of the day we’re companies, and all of those people online who are talking to each other aren’t necessarily going to believe that we have their best interests at heart. They’ll think we’re advertising to them through other means. So we have to establish a certain amount of trust with readers, not just as companies but as people who also love books in the same way they do. Again, it’s a small thing, but the idea behind the Samovar reading series—not that it’s a totally new idea—is that the editors at FSG love books, and you guys love books, so let’s get together. And it’s not just about trying to sell our books to you.
NASH: One of the things that that accomplishes that may not be obvious from the get-go is transparency. You’re putting yourself out in the world and exposing yourself in a way—making yourself vulnerable. I have never understood why the staffs of publishing houses are invisible to readers, who are ultimately the people who pay our salaries. I mean, my wife is a corporate lawyer, and her photo and bio are on her firm’s website. Book publishers just refuse to allow their staff visibility to the world. If Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton and Whatever are willing to allow all the partners’ and associates’ photographs and bios to be seen by the world, what about publishing is so important that we can’t be allowed to be seen? I know that part of it is that we don’t want authors bugging us too much. But I think that’s part of what the Samovar reading series accomplishes: a certain willingness to participate.

Just in the space of your careers so far, what has been the most destructive new thing that’s come about in the industry?
NASH: It’s technology. It’s been both constructive and destructive at the same time.
CHINSKI: So do you think e-books have been both?
NASH: E-books are one of the last ways in which technology is playing itself out. One of the first ways was desktop publishing. Another way that’s been more incremental is the ability of digital printing to be commensurate with offset printing and for various machines to flatten the economies of scale. But, yeah, the ability to satisfactorily download a book digitally is turning out to be one of the last things that technology is accomplishing. I guess the other thing is just the capacity of e-mail and the Web—the social Web, in particular—to flatten communication. And it’s all simultaneously destructive and constructive. It’s destroying cultural authority but it’s enhancing one’s ability to cost-effectively reach individuals who might have other kinds of cultural authority. It’s lowering barriers to entry, which is constructive because new presses can come along. BookScan is based on technology and has constructive and destructive components. The kind of supply-chain inventory management that Baker & Taylor and Ingram are doing, where they can now say to us, “We only need two months’ worth of inventory; we don’t need four months of inventory,” is destructive because my working capital needs go up by 20 percent on that one phenomenon alone, but it’s good in that I can actually see Ingram’s demand building and respond to it. If I see big Ingram demand in the month before I publish something, I can say to myself, “I’m going to print advance orders plus two thousand as opposed to advance orders plus five hundred.” So it’s fucking me and helping me at the same time.
CHINSKI: I agree with Richard. Obviously a lot of things are changing right now, and some of them make things a lot more difficult, but they also—and I don’t mean to sound like a Pollyanna—offer some opportunities. I’m always really wary of the sky-is-falling thing, this idea that we’re at the end right now.
GARGAGLIANO: We’re just at a place where we have to reinvent ourselves, and we haven’t figured out how to do that yet. People have started reading in this other way that I don’t understand because I don’t read that way. But it’s our job to figure out how they’re reading, and then to figure out how to deliver something they want to read.
CHINSKI: Are you reading on a Sony Reader?
GARGAGLIANO: Yes, and I love it. It’s the best thing ever.
CHINSKI: I’m still adjusting to it. We just got them in the last few weeks. On one hand it’s great. On the other hand, I still want to write in the margins and it’s hard to go back and forth and figure out where you are in a manuscript. I actually physically find myself reaching to turn the page.
GARGAGLIANO: I do that all the time. It’s really disturbing!
CHINSKI: Your brain gets tricked into thinking you’re actually reading a page. But on the other hand, as I was saying, it’s great, and we’re seeing sales of books…. I mean, I saw something recently about the Kindle. People who have a Kindle are actually buying more books. So on one hand, it scares the shit out of me that people are reading on Kindles and Sony Readers. But on the other hand—
GARGAGLIANO: Why?
CHINSKI: For no reason other than that it’s different.
GARGAGLIANO: I think it’s so exciting.
CHINSKI: That’s what I mean. It’s also really exciting. It will bring a lot more people into reading. And this younger generation is so used to reading online that it doesn’t really matter. It doesn’t mean the death of literature.
BOUDREAUX: I was amazed at how quickly we all got used to the Sony Reader. It’s still a little different from an actual book. But when I first got into publishing I remember reading a manuscript, instead of a finished book, and feeling like it seemed to lack a certain presentational authority. It took me a minute to take a manuscript seriously. It will be the same way with the Sony Reader. But, my God, we’ve all adapted in a period of months? Imagine the twenty-year-olds who are reading everything online all the time and switching back and forth among seven screens that are open all the time. The notion of not reading that way must seem odd to them.
GARGAGLIANO: I think that in several years the book object is going to be more beautiful and more precious.
BOUDREAUX: It’s going to be like vinyl records.
GARGAGLIANO: Exactly.

page_5: 

I feel the same way—that these changes are going to happen. But the thing I don’t understand is why hardcover books still exist.
GARGAGLIANO: I don’t understand it.
NASH: It’s because of the library market.
GARGAGLIANO: I published a book this fall that we crashed into the schedule because it was shortlisted for the Booker. We did a hardcover just for the libraries and a trade paperback for everybody else.
NASH: I mean, you’re right. I was being semi-glib but not entirely glib. The question is, “Why will the print book survive?”

No, I’m literally talking about the hardcover book. Right now, at this moment, why does it exist? I’m looking at a hardcover and a paperback side by side and asking what the consumer is getting for almost twice as much money. Two pieces of cardboard?
CHINSKI: Well, we get two shots to publish the book.

But do we really, with the way the accounts are ordering, or do we just say that?
CHINSKI: But there’s still that idea. Also, there’s still the hangover of thinking that critics won’t pay attention to a paperback in the same way. I know that’s not as true as it used to be, but—
NASH: The existence of the hardcover has to do with history. It has to do with certain structures that are in place that haven’t been replaced—structures varying from the library market to perceptions about reviewers to perceptions about quality in the mind of the customer. It also has to do with customers wanting certain books at whatever price. They don’t care whether it’s fifteen dollars or twenty-five dollars—they just want it because of who it’s written by. But that’s not going to last.
CHINSKI: But here’s an interesting case: Bolaño’s 2666. We did the hardcover and a three-volume paperback edition in a slipcase. They’re priced the same. Which do you think would be selling more? I guess because they’re priced the same it’s not quite a fair question, but people do seem to be gravitation toward the hardcover just because it’s the more conventional format. The paperback is selling well too, but the hardcover seems to have some kind of recognition factor. So I don’t think it’s just publishers sticking their heads in the sand. It’s also readers still thinking that that’s the way they discover new books.

Even when they cost ten dollars more for no apparent value?
GARGAGLIANO: I wonder that too. We don’t really do very much—
NASH: Value is created in the mind. A classic thing that happens in American retail capitalism is that people will buy the more expensive thing. It’s been proven over and over again. If you’re at Barneys and there’s an eighty-dollar lampshade and a fifty-dollar lampshade, you buy the eighty-dollar lampshade because you think it’s worth more. That is endemic in American retail capitalism. But I think the distressing thing in publishing is that we’re not making more beautiful objects. I think that one of the things that electronic publishing will allow us to do is free the print object of its need to have a given exact unit cost that is our mass-market way of delivering the product at a given price. The download will allow us to generate volume, and then we can create this gorgeous, elaborate fetish object for which we can charge gloriously outrageous sums of money.

But who’s going to be selling them if that happens? Look at what happened to the music business.
NASH: Precisely. Look at the Radiohead model. Radiohead has already done it. Eighty bucks for the limited edition but only ninety-nine cents for the download. That’s the model. It’s just a question of “How do we get there in a way that doesn’t involve complete chaos?” But it seems like that’s where we’re going. And I think it will be customer-driven—we’ll go there as fast as the customers will be willing to go there.

What are you guys seeing in the industry that you find encouraging?
NASH: Fan fiction.

Which is?
NASH: People so in love with a given story and set of characters, or a given world, that they are doing their own version of it. I just think that’s spectacular. Not necessarily as writing, but as a cultural phenomenon.

Anybody else? Come on, there’s got to be something that’s encouraging.
GARGAGLIANO: This is not a good time to ask that question. [Laughter.]
CHINSKI: It’s like what Richard was saying—some of these things that are scary are also encouraging. The Kindle and the Sony Reader are bringing people to books who might not have come to them otherwise. I mean, that’s something.
NASH: Look at the thing Eric said about people who own a Kindle buying more books than they did before they had a Kindle.
CHINSKI: That’s pretty encouraging.
BOUDREAUX: And beyond that, I had it in my head that Kindles and Sony Readers would exist in the way audio books did—that it wouldn’t be exactly the same. There would be certain kinds of books that really lent themselves to that format in the same way it was for audio books where you had businessmen driving on business trips. You couldn’t get a novel published by your own audio publisher—they weren’t interested—but a certain kind of practical nonfiction flew off the shelves. But Edgar Sawtelle has been a huge seller on the Kindle, which is not at all the kind of book I would have thought would be selling well in that format. It’s six hundred pages long—there’s a good reason to put it on a Sony Reader instead of reading a hardcover—but I just wasn’t expecting the number of downloads to be such a close ratio to what’s selling in a bookstore. I thought we’d have to figure out what categories worked, and once again fiction would be the category that would be left out as everybody read self-help books or Freakonomics on their Kindle. And I find it encouraging that people are downloading this big fat debut novel.

Anything else?
NASH: The use of social media to talk about books: Goodreads, LibraryThing, Shelfari. Reading books is a solitary activity, but books are also the richest kind of social glue, and the profusion of ways to be social with one another will be tremendously advantageous to books. The commonality that having read the same book introduces between two people is so much richer and more dynamic than the commonality of having watched the same TV show, for example.

It seems like agents lament the consolidation of the industry because it gives them less options. How do you guys feel about it?
BOUDREAUX: It doesn’t seem to lessen their options when they submit to every single imprint in the house and then you’re on the hot-button contest to see who reads it first.
NASH: I think it’s kind of pointless to think about it. As individuals, there’s sweet fuck-all we can do about it. With everything else we’ve talked about, human beings at our level can affect things. We can affect the outcome of a given book. We just cannot affect the outcome of a corporate merger.
BOUDREAUX: And for a group of people who’ve only been doing this for a decade, in which this has always been the case and it was already the death knell of publishing back when we were first getting into it and everybody lamented consolidation—
CHINSKI: When I saw The Last Days of Disco, it was heartbreaking. [Laughter.] That’s when I realized what we’ve lost. As you were saying, it’s hard to know because it’s the world we live in. It seems like even within the force of consolidation, there are so many imprints blossoming within these places. I don’t quite understand what the corporate thinking is behind that. But that’s just because I’m not making the decisions, I’m sure.
BOUDREAUX: You’ve also got a group of people here who have ended up at certain kinds of imprints within those places. So we’ve all clearly struggled, those of us who are in the corporate world, to find a place that’s least like a corporate structure. I mean, that’s the great thing about Ecco. When Dan Halpern sold it to HarperCollins he had an agreement with Jane Friedman that basically said, “But we will never have to act like we are a part of corporate publishing. We will keep doing it exactly how we’ve been doing it.” So you get to pretend you’re this little thing attached to this big thing, which is how I imagine it being at Scribner and FSG. You get to have the benefits of the deep pockets, and somebody’s figuring out the new media thing and revamping this site and that site, and you have the economies of scale of getting your shipping done or whatever, and you still get to sit there and work on your books. So we’ve also self-selected for a certain kind of publishing within corporate publishing.

And you really did, because you left Random House without having new a job lined up.
BOUDREAUX: I did. I thought I’d go see if anybody wanted me to come do fiction. Thank God Dan Halpern was out there. God bless him. Because it’s true: Who doesn’t want to do the small list inside the big house, which is just a different kind of experience? I mean, it seems the best way to make that deal with the devil. As you say, Richard, the conglomeration isn’t going to go away.
CHINSKI: It doesn’t actually mean that writers have less choice, I don’t think. There are so many imprints within these companies. It’s become an easy straw man to point the finger at. “Oh, these big corporate publishers that don’t understand what books are.” There are still a lot of editors working at imprints within these big corporations who care about books in the same way that somebody working at Scribner when it was independent cared about books. I think it’s really easy, because there are so many frustrations that we all have as writers and editors and agents, to just blame it on some Corporate culture with a capital C. As Richard said, there are a lot of things that we can’t control but there are also a lot of things that we can try to control, at least at a certain level. And that probably hasn’t changed that much from fifty years ago.
BOUDREAUX: And certainly, the competition in-house is every bit as fierce as the competition out of house, when you and so-and-so from Simon & Schuster both have the book and there’s a house bid.
GARGAGLIANO: The agent gets the same benefit of the imprints within the house riling each other up and competing against one another to put on the best show for the author, and the author gets the benefit of choosing between all of these different imprints. I don’t think, for the author, it’s a major difference. But I wasn’t around when it wasn’t like that.
NASH: I suspect that to the extent that consolidation has created problems in the industry, the problems are farther downstream than acquisitions. Retail consolidation is the real issue.

Speak to that. How do you feel about so much power being concentrated on Fifth Avenue and in Ann Arbor and Seattle?
NASH: It was all going to happen anyway. The book business was just later to the party, quite frankly, than the clothing business or the cereal business. The real estate was all the same. One of the reasons why we’ve become really dependent on social media is that it’s a kind of hand-selling at a time when the 1,000 people who used to be able to hand-sell are now down to 150. And the capacity of the corporate retailers to hand-sell is either purchased or anecdotal. When I say anecdotal I mean it hasn’t completely vanished. I can tell that the B&N in Union Square is putting Soft Skull books on the countertop that weren’t paid to be put there. So there is anecdotal hand-selling going on. But you have a situation where the capacity of the retailer to sell a given book to a given, recognized individual has virtually disappeared—down to percentage points. It will work with a few titles—I’m sure you guys have all published books that have been made by independent retailers. But their ability to be a part of the social network of the community of books is gone and we have to find some other means of generating that word-of-mouth. Retailers just exist to shelve the books and make them visible in a given community. They’re not selling them to the community.
CHINSKI: But don’t you think they understand the crisis they’re in, to a certain degree, too? That’s why Barnes & Noble has B&N Recommends now, and Starbucks is getting involved, and everybody’s trying to—
NASH: Yeah, you’re right. I think they realize what they have wrought. Well, they do but they don’t. Half the time they’re trying to sell on price—they’re doing inventory churn—and then the other half of the time they’re trying to go intimate. I think they’re kind of schizophrenic about it. I think that’s part of the problem. I mean, a lot of the independents that went out of business deserved to go out of business. They weren’t actually trying very hard to hand-sell. They were just taking the finite number of books that publishers could then publish and saying, “Okay, you pick from these five hundred books.” But the great ones are the ones that we have with us right now—St. Mark’s and Prairie Lights and the rest. They’re doing a great job of being retailers. But you’re exactly right about the chains. At times they are definitely trying to find that community-oriented approach.
CHINSKI: The way they’ll host book clubs in the stores, for example. In the same way that people like to blame the corporate publishers, it’s really easy to point your finger at the chains. I’m not saying they don’t present a certain set of problems. But it’s interesting that, in a way, they’re wrestling with the same kind of issues that we’re wrestling with in trying to find a way to interact more directly with their customers. It’s a kind of funny crisis all around.

At the end of the day, what makes it all worthwhile?
CHINSKI: Pizza.
NASH: This roundtable.
BOUDREAUX: The glamour of this!
CHINSKI: Going home and editing for four hours.

That’s funny. That was actually going to be my next question, but I was going to do it in the anonymous section at the end so you wouldn’t have to lie about it. Seriously, though, what makes it worthwhile for you?
BOUDREAUX: Books mean enormous things to people. They are things that save people’s lives, at times.
NASH: Even the lives of children!
BOUDREAUX: That’s right! The lives of children! I don’t think any children have ever lost their lives because of something an editor did, but children have most definitely had their lives improved by something that a writer, and an editor, put out there.
CHINSKI: We’re doing it for the kids!
BOUDREAUX: Why don’t we make that, “We’re doing it for our children, and our children’s children.”

EDITORS ANONYMOUS
Later, after the pizza was gone and even the most constitutionally strong among us were getting a little punchy—and understandably so—the panel agreed to speak anonymously on a range of topics that would be awkward to discuss for attribution. As usual, a number of verbal tics have been altered in order to preserve anonymity.

Does it bother you that so much of your work has to be done on nights and weekends?
Sure, every once in a while it catches up with you. But you can’t concentrate in the office so it’s just the way it is. But I’d be lying if I didn’t say that sometimes you don’t feel resentful. I always have that in the summer because I find that authors all deliver at the beginning of the summer because they want to go on their summer vacations.

Yeah, it’s always just before Christmas, just before New Year’s, just before the Fourth of July. The book’s might be three years late but they go and deliver it on July 3rd.

Publishers have to let you have some time out of the office. And I feel like that is increasingly looked on as this sort of three-martini-lunch thing—that the editor needs the occasional Tuesday to edit at home. You can power through an awful lot, but at a certain point there are too many manuscripts stacked up, and it’s been going on for so many years, that you’ve got to be given some time to do it that isn’t just every Saturday of your life.

Such a big part of the job is to pay attention to what the rest of the world is doing and what’s being written everywhere else and what other people are interested in and what you yourself are interested in—because you take all of those obsessions and you find the books that you’re passionate about on all of those topics—but I don’t really have time to do that.

That’s my biggest frustration: not having enough time to read published books.

And it’s a great disservice to your own job not to ever be able to read anything for pleasure—and not to ever be able to read the other books your company is publishing—because you’ve got x number of submissions to read and your own new authors’ backlists to read and what your house is doing that’s working because you just need to understand what that thing is that so-and-so just published. About eight rungs down you get to read something just because it sounds good—something that you’re not reading to learn something about your job.

What do agents do that drives you crazy?
Ask for ads.

Submit the next book when you haven’t even published the first book and you don’t even know how many you’re printing.

Assume that just because one book did really well you have to pay for your previous success.

And with fiction, more and more, the success of one novel does not mean that the next novel is going to sell at the same level. And I don’t think that a lot of agents have caught up with that fact.

“Have you read it yet? Have you read it yet?” I want to be like, “Have you prepared for your launch meeting yet? Have you written your tip sheets yet?” They don’t realize that you may have something from the four other big agents. I’m being flip about it, but they do tend to forget that. Two days later it’s “Have you read it?” “No, I’m actually editing your author who’s under contract.”

There’s also a tendency to misinterpret an early read for actual depth of publishing program behind that early read. Sure, being the first editor to get back to them on a novel may well mean a particular enthusiasm and a good match, but it also may not. So to require that everybody be in on day two, set up meetings on day three, and be ready to do the auction on day four? Is that all the thought that you want us to put into it?

And using the weekends and holidays as a tactic. I hate the Friday e-mail saying, “Just in time for you to enjoy this weekend…” Or over Labor Day weekend! It’s like the new destination wedding. You know, in the same way that you hate your friends who picked the three-day weekend to get married on so you can all go to Hawaii. I’m like, “Really? You had to save this for Labor Day weekend? I had all summer when I didn’t have shit to read.”

What are the biggest mistakes that writers can make in dealing with their editor or agent?
I think the bigger problem is dealing with their publicist. You have to be very nice to your publicist. You should send them flowers.

I had an author who used to leave messages at four in the morning saying that she didn’t want us to publish her book anymore. She wanted us to take them off the shelves! That was fun.

Despite the fact that there is a real personal connection, authors should realize that we’re not their therapists, we’re not their best friends in the world, etcetera. I can fix your book but I can’t fix your whole life.

What about when an author calls because there aren’t enough hangers in his hotel closet? [Laughter.] That’s happened!

Tell me about a few up-and-coming agents who you feel are great for fiction or memoir.
I think Jim Rutman at Sterling Lord is really smart. He’s both a no bullshit guy and a genuinely nice guy. That may sound naïve, but it really does matter.

I think Maria Massie is fabulous. If I could publish the writers of only one agent, it would be Maria.

Julie Barer. I did a book with her and she went about getting blurbs like nobody I’ve ever seen. She brought them to me, every day, like a cat bringing me a bird. Eight in a row. I’ve never had an agent who went to bat that much and called in that many favors. It was amazing.

There’s also Anna Stein, who’s wonderful. She’s got a very cosmopolitan worldview and she’s also got a taste for a certain kind of political nonfiction that is quite interesting. The first book I got from her was a left-wing case for free trade, which you don’t necessarily expect from Ira Silverberg’s former foreign rights person.

You know who else is good? Robert Guinsler. He’s really smart and really enthusiastic about his books. He has a lot of smart projects.

What kind of information will you withhold from your authors?
I never tell them when my bosses don’t love their book. Or when it’s been a battle to get them attention on the list.

I will hold back particularly bad feedback. If it’s a novel, not everybody is going to agree on it. I’ve never had such a tsunami of bad feedback that I thought they really needed to hear it.

Do you send them all of their bad reviews?

I leave that up to the author.

I’ve started telling debut authors, “A lot of writers who have been through this don’t want to see the bad reviews. Will you give me permission to not send you the bad reviews?”

When it comes to sales figures, I give them the information. I mean, I don’t go out of my way to do it if the news is not good. If it’s great news and I can say, “We did this and we did that and we did this,” I give it to them all the time. But I don’t go out of my way to say, “You’re holding steady. Nothing’s happening.”

What other editors or houses are you impressed with lately?
I think Penguin Press is doing a great job. You look at their list and there’s a consistency to it that is really amazing. I don’t know how the finances look. But just as books, they’re incredibly consistent.

I think Bob Miller and Jon Karp are doing a great job.

I’ve been impressed with a house called Two Dollar Radio. The reason I’m impressed is their own tagline: “They make more noise than a two-dollar radio.”

Jofie Ferrari-Adler is an editor at Grove/Atlantic.

Agents & Editors: A Q&A With Agent Molly Friedrich
Agents & Editors: A Q&A With Editor Chuck Adams
Agents & Editors: A Q&A With Editor Janet Silver
Agents & Editors: A Q&A With Four Young Literary Agents

Agents and Editors: A Q&A With Four Literary Agents

by

Jofie Ferrari-Adler

May/June 2009
5.1.09
In Print and Online

In “Goodbye to All That,” her 1967 essay about the years she spent in New York City as a young writer, Joan Didion recalls trying to coax a world-weary friend into attending a party by promising him “new faces.” Her friend “laughed literally until he choked” before explaining that “the last time he had gone to a party where he’d been promised ‘new faces,’ there had been fifteen people in the room, and he had already slept with five of the women and owed money to all but two of the men.”

Several decades later, the details may be different—casual sex? what’s that?—but the literary world is every bit as small as it was in Didion’s heyday. The agents who congregated at the offices of the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses for this conversation (and who were chosen, it should be noted, by the editors of this magazine) are not new faces—to one another or to me. During our talk, one of them said that she hopes to “grow old together” with her clients. The same might be said of us publishing people, who, unlike Didion’s friend and especially in these tough times, are likely to view our shared history as a comfort rather than a curse. Some particulars:

 

MARIA MASSIE worked as an agent for twelve years before joining Lippincott Massie McQuilkin as a partner in 2004. A few years ago Maria broke hearts all over town (mine included) when she sold Nigerian priest Uwem Akpan’s Say You’re One of Them to Little, Brown for an ungodly advance. Her other clients include Peter Ho Davies and Tom Perrotta.

JIM RUTMAN, an agent at Sterling Lord Literistic for the past ten years, is mild mannered until he steps onto a basketball court—we play on a publishing team called the Jackals—at which point he turns into a ferociously competitive shooting guard who sometimes scores half our points. His clients include Charles Bock, J. Robert Lennon, and Peter Rock.

 

ANNA STEIN worked at three other agencies before joining the Irene Skolnick Literary Agency in 2006. Once, after a writers conference in New Orleans, Anna took me and my wife to a second-line celebration (imagine a loud, roving bacchanal) in the Ninth Ward. We made our plane, but barely. Her clients include Chloe Aridjis, Yoko Ogawa, and Anya Ulinich.

 

PETER STEINBERG spent twelve years at other agencies before founding the Steinberg Agency in 2007. Peter is a kind of throwback to the golden age of publishing, when men did things like hold doors open for women and send handwritten thank-you notes—not to embarrass him or anything. His clients include Alicia Erian, Keith Donohue, and John Matteson.

Let us inside your heads a little and talk about what you’re looking at and thinking about when you’re evaluating a piece of fiction.
STEIN: It’s really hard to talk about why a piece of writing is good, and moving—even if it’s funny—and what makes us keep thinking about something after we’ve read it. And it’s incredibly subjective. That’s why it’s hard for agents who represent fiction, especially literary fiction, to find it. It’s so rare. We can all talk about the things we don’t like. When I see clichés, for example, on the first page or in the first chapter of a book, that kind of kills it for me immediately. The romance and the chemistry is just over. That’s just one example of the negative side of that question, and I’m sure you guys have a million others. If I knew how to describe in language what makes me fall in love with something, then I would be a writer. All I can say is that if I read the first few pages of a novel and think, “Jesus Christ! Who the fuck is this person? Why are they letting me read this?” then that person is onto something. And we don’t have that feeling very often. But when we do see it, it’s so exciting.

MASSIE: Anna’s right. It’s like you have this moment of clarity and you recognize something that you’re so absorbed with. I read a lot of things that are beautifully written where I say to myself, “Oh, this is good,” but I’m not bowled over or sucked right in. It’s so subjective. I can read something and pass on it and I hear, two days later, that there was a bidding war and it sold for a ton of money, but it just wasn’t the thing that I was going to fall in love with.

STEINBERG: And you’re okay with that.

MASSIE: You have to be okay with it because it’s so subjective. I’m not necessarily going to see what somebody else sees, or read a book the way somebody else reads it. That’s one thing that writers who are looking for an agent should always remember: All agents are different. Everyone has different tastes. What I like to read might be different than Anna or Peter or Jim. That’s a great thing about what we do—there’s so much to choose from. And what you fall in love with is a very personal choice.

RUTMAN: And the reactions are necessarily self-contained. It’s impossible to articulate what you hope to find as an agent. How could you explain to somebody what moves you? Because hopefully you’re capable of being moved by things that you didn’t anticipate being moved by. So you sit down with something, and all the preamble is basically pointless until the moment that you actually start searching around and rummaging for your feelings and response. It might happen on word four, or it might happen on sentence seven, but if it hasn’t happened by page two, will it happen on page two hundred and fifty? I wish it did. But I don’t know that it does.

Are there any specific things that can make you fall in love with a piece of writing?
STEIN: I would say that being able to make me think, especially in dialogue, “Oh, shit. This person has got me. This person has just seen into what we all feel every day but don’t say. This person has looked into our souls, especially the worst sides of us, and sort of ripped them open and put them on the page.” Psychology, to me, is one of the most exciting things to see work well in fiction—when it comes alive on the page and is totally devastating.

STEINBERG: When you read something and think, “I can’t believe they just said what I’ve thought in my deepest thoughts but never articulated,” that is always an eye-opener for me. And it’s also about reading something that doesn’t seem familiar. Writers should realize that agents have a ton of material to read, and when things seem familiar, it’s an easy reason to pass. If it’s something that’s new, it really makes a huge difference. And I’m not talking about something being so wildly creative that it’s ridiculous—not a talking plant falling in love with a turtle or something like that. I’m talking about, in a real sense, something that is genuinely new and also deeply felt. That’s what we’re all looking for. But at the same time, I do get things and think, “How is this like something else that has sold well?” It’s a difficult balance. You have to have one foot in literature and one foot in what’s going on in the marketplace.

RUTMAN: Writers probably shouldn’t trouble themselves too much over that consideration. If they’re aiming to hit some spot that’s been working—trying to write toward the books that have made an impression—that just seems like a pretty pointless chase. You know, “I hear that circus animals are wildly appealing and I’ve had some thoughts about circus animals….” That doesn’t seem like a very good way to go about it.

STEINBERG: A writer was just asking me about that and I said it’s the agent’s job to spin a book for the marketplace—to talk about it being a little like this book and a little like that book or whatever. Writers should put those kinds of thoughts out of their heads and just write.

RUTMAN: I don’t know who to blame for trends. If a run of books comes 
out that are all set in a particular 
country—which happens all the time—to whom do we attribute that? To writers who are looking at things and saying, “Hmmm, I notice that fourteen years ago India was interesting to people. I think that’s where I’m going to set my book”? You can’t blame writers for asking what subjects are interesting these days, even when we’re talking about fiction, and I wish I had a useful answer for them, but I just don’t think it works that way.

STEINBERG: I would basically go with your passion. The subject matter can be very wide ranging, but if you go with your passion, even if it doesn’t work, at least it’s heartfelt.

STEIN: On some level, what else are you going to do? Are you going to write a novel because it’s “commercially viable”? I mean, I guess people do that. But we’re not going to represent them.

Because you hate money?
STEIN: We. Hate. Money. [Laughter.]

But seriously, I sometimes think that people in the business read in different ways than normal readers. Are there things that you’re looking at—contextual things, like who the author is—beyond what’s on the page?
STEINBERG: Those things very much take the backseat for me. It really is just what’s on the page. All of that other stuff comes later. Maybe once I get a third of the way through a novel and I’m loving it, then I will look back and see who the author is and all that stuff. I think it’s important to stress that the synopsis and the cover letter and all of those things are not really important. It’s the work, the work, the work. You have to focus on the work. I think sometimes writers get lost in getting the cover letter and the synopsis and those kinds of professional things right because they’re afraid of focusing on the work.

STEIN: I don’t even read synopses. Do you guys?

STEINBERG: I skip right over them. I go to the first page.

STEIN: I hate synopses. They’re terrible.

RUTMAN: It’s hard to write a synopsis well. And when we’re talking about literary fiction, it will probably not make or break an agent’s interest going into page one. You’re not like, “Oh, there’s going to be an unexpected plot twist two-thirds of the way through. I’m going to hang in there long enough to find out how that goes.”

STEIN: I’m still surprised when I call an editor to pitch a book and he says, “So what’s the novel about?” I’m like, “You actually want me to tell you what happens in the plot? Are you serious? I mean, we can do that if you want.” But that’s not really the point. I don’t want anyone to tell me the plot of a novel. It’s so boring.

But are there any other things you’re looking at beyond what’s on the page? Things that maybe you can sense after years of experience.
MASSIE: Sometimes it’s when you’re reading a manuscript and you can see that the person is a really talented writer with a beautiful voice but the story is not quite there. But you see the potential. Sometimes you sign those people on because you think, “Okay, maybe this isn’t going to be the big book, or maybe it won’t even sell, but this person has a quality—they have the writing, they have the voice—and the potential is there. This writer is going to go far. And maybe the next book will be the one.” I’ve taken people on under those circumstances.

RUTMAN: I mean, reading “professionally,” if that’s what we do, is a compromised process because you are reading a book with an eye toward asking somebody for money. You are reading in a different way than you are when that’s not a consideration. So I think it’s filtered into the experience from the beginning. You are reading to be moved, hopefully, if that’s the kind of novel you work on, but at the same time it probably would be disingenuous to suggest that you’re not taking in some superficial considerations. They are all distantly secondary to the work itself. Because if an agent is reading with an eye toward various recent trends that have worked, he’s probably not going to succeed all that well either. The same thing is true of the reverse. Any categorical dismissal of some kind of novel feels bogus because there’s got to be a counterexample for every single example. So if somebody comes along and has this long list of accolades and prizes, it doesn’t damage your regard for them. And if somebody comes to you on novel fourteen, with twelve of them having done exceptionally well, and the last one maybe less well, you think about that, too. You’re thinking about how difficult it could be given certain practical considerations. But it’s still all pretty far receded from the work itself.

STEIN: There is the question, now more than ever, of whether or not a book is publishable. By publishable I don’t mean, “Is there a great plot and is the writing amazing etcetera?” I mean that if we were in your shoes, as a publisher, how would we publish the book? What kind of jacket would we give it? How would we position it? I mean, we’re talking about literary fiction? You can’t publish literary fiction today. How do you do that? [Laughter.]

RUTMAN: Legally, you can, but…

STEIN: So, given that it’s basically impossible, it’s our responsibility as the first guard to begin to think about, “Is it possible?” And if we’re so bowled over and we’re so in love that we think somebody should publish it, how would we do it? This is something I really struggle with because I’m not very creative. I don’t have the mind for it. I admire publishers all the more today because the ideas they come up with just amaze me. And I’m not trying to flatter them, at all, because I love to talk trash. But it really does amaze me. I’m thinking about a book right now, for example, that I want to sell. I think the author is fantastic and well positioned and that the novel is perfect—there’s nothing wrong with it. But in a way it would be a funny book to publish. In a way, I don’t exactly see how it fits and how it could break out. So I see the problem there, which maybe we didn’t have five years ago as agents. And I see it becoming more and more of a problem as the market contracts. So I’m reading a little differently because of that. I might not be altering my habits about what I take on, but maybe I am.

STEINBERG: I think you’re sort of unconsciously changing and adapting to the marketplace. I find myself doing that. I think when an agent says, “I was following my gut instinct,” what that really means is accumulated wisdom and taking a lot of different variables into account. You spend your day reading Publishers Weekly and Publishers Lunch and you take these things into consideration. You’re having lunch with editors who are saying, “Such-and-such is so hard” and you’re processing all of this information. And when you open a manuscript, you’re reading it with that eye. It’s hard for us to say exactly how we’re looking at material but I think we are taking a lot of different things into account.

Is the economy affecting how you’re reading?
MASSIE: It’s starting to.

STEINBERG: I would say yes too. It feels like things are tough.

MASSIE: Right before Black Wednesday I had a novel out that I was really excited about. I was getting great reads from a bunch of people who were all calling to say, “This is great. This is wonderful.” And one by one they slowly disappeared on me, except for one editor, who actually ended up being the perfect editor. But I did see everything diminish. I had an idea of what the novel was going to sell for and it didn’t quite get there. It was actually shocking, because it’s a wonderful novel and the responses were amazing and I really did see people pull back. Her first novel had done okay but not great and all people could say was, “Her numbers are just not good enough.” Her numbers were not bad for a literary novel. So that was my first moment of a little bit of fear. I haven’t quite gotten to the point where I’m conscious that the economy is affecting my thinking, but I’m sure I will at some point.

RUTMAN: Especially with fiction, you’re largely at the mercy of what comes in. Certainly you solicit your share, but when you’re relying on the kindness of your acquaintances, or referrals, wherever they happen to come from, you can only adjust so much. But it’s certainly nice to glimpse something behind the page whenever you can, whatever it may be. If a novel happens to have a nice, portable summation—if it’s pitchable—that doesn’t upset me.

MASSIE: If there’s a hook.

STEIN: Or when the author has a platform.

MASSIE: When they’ve been published in the New Yorker or something.

RUTMAN: When you’re reading something, one of the things you’re trying to glimpse is whether you can imagine more than a few people warming up to it. But things that work in various ways…I mean, not to be indirectly nepotistic here, but on what planet should 2666 have worked commercially?

STEIN: I wasn’t going to bring it up.

RUTMAN: That’s why I did.

STEIN: Well, let’s start with The Savage Detectives. I mean, why should anybody have finished that book, let alone have it be successful? [Laughter.] Now I’m going to say something nice about the publisher, but it really was a beautiful piece of publishing.

RUTMAN: It was exquisite. How did that work? Why did that work? I want somebody to explain it to me. Gut instincts are referred to retrospectively when they have worked—people don’t really make much reference to their gut instincts when they’re looking back regretfully. It’s not like, “Ugh, my gut instincts. Son of a bitch.” Gut instincts are wrong just as much as they’re right. But there is such a thing as publishing something well, and resourcefully.

STEIN: And I find that inspiring—the fact that Lorin Stein is my brother aside—because we are in the position now where we’re selling books for lowly five figures that we might have sold for six figures very recently. And I don’t want to alter what I take on because of that.

RUTMAN: Do you think you would know how to alter it?

STEIN: I don’t think I would.

RUTMAN: If I could see clearly enough and far enough to think, “If I just adjust my taste this much, I think I’ll be a very successful person,” I would think about trying it. [Laughter.] I just don’t presume to know how that would work.

STEIN: But here’s how I might alter. I might say, “Look, I can’t take on an Icelandic writer right now.” Or, “I can’t afford to invest my time in editing the sample translation of this Icelandic writer right now. It’s just not the time for that. Maybe when things are sunnier.”

STEINBERG: I feel like I can adjust when there are natural inclinations a certain way. For instance, I was reading that young adult books are selling better than adult books. I have kids and I’m starting to read what they’re reading, and I thought, “Oh, I’m sort of interested in this. Maybe I should do a little more young adult.” So that’s something that I’ve consciously done in terms of categories. I think I’ll still look for the same type of material within the young adult category, but I’m definitely thinking about the category a little bit more because of the marketplace.

Where are you finding writers, aside from referrals? Are you reading literary magazines? Are you reading blogs?
MASSIE: No blogs.

RUTMAN: Not for fiction.

STEIN: Hell no.

RUTMAN: Referrals are about 75 percent of how I find writers.

MASSIE: A lot of my clients teach in MFA programs, so I get referrals from them. I get referrals from editors. I get referrals from other agents.

RUTMAN: There’s a big range of where referrals come from.

STEIN: But every now and then there will be something in the slush—and I bet this is true for you guys, too—that’s not just well written but is also well researched and shows that the person knows your list and is really appropriate for your list and also has published well.

MASSIE: And sometimes when I read a short story that I like I’ll send an e-mail. “Are you represented?” Once in a blue moon someone’s not represented.

RUTMAN: There are too many of us.

MASSIE: There are a lot of us.

STEIN: There are way too many of us.

STEINBERG: A lot of times, when people are in literary magazines, it’s too late.

MASSIE: Exactly. Agents are submitting those short stories.

RUTMAN: And MFA students are going about things in an entirely different way.

STEINBERG: They’re savvy.

MASSIE: They’re so savvy.

STEIN: That’s what they pay for.

MASSIE: I was amazed by going to MFA programs and talking to students. The first thing they want to know is, “Okay, what do I need for my query letter? What do I need for this thing or that thing?” It wasn’t questions about the work. Their questions were really about the business side.

 

Do you think that’s healthy?
MASSIE: No. I don’t.

RUTMAN: Ultimately, no. If that is more of a priority than the work, it can’t be all good. I mean, it’s fine that they have a sort of professional track and that they’re exposed to whatever realities they are ultimately going to encounter. But when they take a sort of sporting interest in it…

STEINBERG: It’s a good way to eliminate potential people, for me at least. When they ask me, “What’s the query letter consist of?” I usually think, “Well, that’s probably not a potential client.”

RUTMAN: It’s true.

What do you wish beginning writers would do better?
MASSIE: Take chances. Don’t worry about writing a perfect novel. Sometimes it’s nice to have something that’s a little bit raw and has a little bit of an edge to it. Something that’s just perfect all the way through is sometimes a little boring.

STEIN: I wish they would get their friends, who may be writers or may not be writers, to read their work and tell them, “Don’t say anything nice to me. I don’t want to hear anything nice. I want to hear everything not nice that you have to say.”

STEINBERG: And be smart about picking those people. Find your two or three friends who hate everything.

STEIN: Exactly. And have those people—those hateful friends—give you feedback before you even think about sending out your work.

STEINBERG: I would also say, once you think the work is done, work on it for another year.

STEIN: And never trust your spouse if your spouse says it’s good. Your spouse has no idea. Neither do your mother or your father.

RUTMAN: Check your eagerness to share. A lot of professors may even encourage you, as a way to hasten the process along. You know, “I think it’s time for the world to tell you what they think of this.” It may well not be time for the world to pass judgment just yet. Hold on until you are absolutely certain that it’s ready for broad, indiscriminate exposure. Don’t hurry that.

STEIN: And this is a cliché for us but it seems worth saying that most writers’ first novels aren’t really their first novels. If you have to scrap your first novel, you’ll live. Your first novel probably won’t be the first novel you publish. Maybe your second one will be. But you’ll live. And you’ll be a better writer because of it.

What are some of the common mistakes you see in the submission process?
STEINBERG: Don’t say, “If you don’t like this novel, I have many other I could show you.” Don’t say, “This will make a great movie, too.” Don’t do that fake thing where you pretend you know all about the stuff I’ve agented. It’s funny because I think that’s a piece of advice that writers always gets—research the agent and talk about the other work they’ve sold. But it always comes off as very false to me unless you’ve really read something I’ve sold. And I don’t want you to waste your time reading something of mine just to write a query letter.

STEIN: I would say to go the other way around. Write to agents whose books you’re actually in love with.

STEINBERG: But what if those agents pass and you still want an agent?

STEIN: Then you should read more books. [Laughter.]

What else?
STEINBERG: Don’t talk about a character sweating on the first page or two.

RUTMAN: Sweating?

STEINBERG: Yeah. It happens all the time. The writer’s like, “He was sweating profusely….” It’s supposed to denote tension, I think.

RUTMAN: Also don’t write the phrase “sweating profusely.”

STEINBERG: I have a joke in my office where if a character is sweating in the first two pages, I go, “Sweating!” [Laughter.] Also, people are always “clutching” steering wheels in the first few pages.

STEIN: That’s the cliché thing.

STEINBERG: And don’t wake up from a dream on the first page. No dreams on the first page.

STEIN: It’s best to avoid dreams if possible.

But this is all craft stuff. Let’s go back to the submission process.
STEIN: Don’t write “Because of your interest in international fiction…” or whatever you think the agent’s interest is. That means you’ve been trolling some Web site, and that freaks me out. Don’t let me see that you’ve been trolling some Web site that says I like a certain kind of genre. If you know who I am, you should know who I am because you’ve done some kind of research that has to do with the specific books I represent. That should only be because you’ve fallen in love with one or two of those books. And that’s pretty unlikely because those books haven’t sold very many copies. So you probably shouldn’t be writing to me to begin with. [Laughter.]

RUTMAN: “Just avoid me altogether. I haven’t helped any of these people, really, and I’m not going to help you.”

STEIN: Exactly. There shouldn’t really be anybody writing to me at all.

STEINBERG: That’s off the record, right? Can I say “Off the record” on your behalf?

STEIN: What can I say? I’m funny.

STEINBERG: And of course with the e-mail submissions, don’t cc a hundred agents and say, “Dear Agent….”

STEIN: I got an e-mail query addressed to “Elizabeth” today.

MASSIE: I get those. Those are an instant delete.

STEIN: They are.

RUTMAN: Don’t try to write eye-catching cover letters. It just isn’t really going to enhance my anticipation going into the manuscript.

On the flip side of that, what do you want them to do? I think it can seem really hard to get an agent’s attention when you live in a small town somewhere and you don’t know anybody.
STEINBERG: Well, know somebody. [Laughter.] I’m serious. We’re in the age of e-mail and the Internet. If you e-mail twenty of your friends and say, “Do you know anyone in publishing?” someone has to know somebody. Or somebody who knows somebody. You know what I mean? Find how you know somebody.

STEIN: But you know what? I’ve actually taken on several clients who didn’t know anybody in publishing. I’ll give you an example: Anya Ulinich, who’s done pretty well for somebody who didn’t know anybody. She did some research and asked herself, “Okay, I’m Russian, and my novel has something to do with Russia, so who represents Russian novels?” She did some research and targeted those agents and wrote a query letter that was just really straightforward. It was like, “Here’s my deal. Here’s why I’m writing to you.” It was completely unpretentious and completely straightforward and well written, and because of all that and because there was nothing in it that made me think, “Oh, she’s read some book that tells you how to write query letters”—it was just very natural—I asked to see pages. I don’t think you have to know somebody.

STEINBERG: But it is one way of getting an agent’s attention. I have a lot of clients who didn’t know anyone either. But it is a good way to do it. Because when I get a query from a friend of a friend, it definitely goes in a different pile. I would also say to follow what the agent’s Web site says. If it says, “Send the first twenty-five pages,” do that. And don’t send the thirty-third chapter of your novel. Send the first chapter.

MASSIE: And don’t try too hard. Sometimes I get these queries that describe the book as a cross between this best-seller and that best-seller and ten different other things. I always find that really distracting and unhelpful.

STEIN: And don’t compare the book only to movies.

RUTMAN: I feel like people have generally read something that tells them how to write, at the very least, an unobjectionable cover letter. I like it when they are fairly matter-of-fact. To me that suggests, whether it’s well placed or not, a certain confidence that you’re going to appreciate the pages rather than the letter. I don’t have any sort of pointed advice about what people ought to do in a cover letter. It just doesn’t matter that much. It’s going to get read.

By your assistant. Just to play devil’s advocate.
RUTMAN: Some of it, yes. But she has excellent taste. And if you’re working with someone whose taste you really value and trust, they bring you the things you probably would have plucked out yourself.

MASSIE: And she’s looking for certain things. Has the writer been published before? What are their credits?

RUTMAN: I think if anybody reads a certain number of cover letters they start to sense what is nice to have in a cover letter. But people generally seem to know. And if you’ve already published things, it suggests that you’ve been willing to subject yourself to some of the cruelties of the process and that you realize it’s probably part of the deal.

STEIN: That’s the thing. It’s possible to get published in some good literary magazines without an agent. Very possible. In fact, in some places it’s easier. And if you’re writing fiction, and especially if you have the misfortune of being a short story writer, then you should spend a lot of time and energy getting published in those places before you start looking for an agent. Because it’ll make everybody’s job so much easier.

Does anybody have a success story about finding a writer in a literary magazine?
STEINBERG: I read a great short story in the Southern Review a few years ago and called the writer and eventually sold the novel-in-stories to Ann Patty at Harcourt, who’s great and who unfortunately is no longer at Harcourt. It was called The Circus in Winter by Cathy Day. It’s funny because I originally looked at the story because I liked the author’s last name. I don’t know if that means I’m superficial, but at the time I was interested in writers whose last names were words, and her last name was Day, so—

RUTMAN: This was a phase you went through?

STEINBERG: It was! I also went through a phase of looking for names with alliteration.

STEIN: Note to readers.

STEINBERG: For example, I represent a guy named Brad Barkley.

STEIN: What’s your phase right now? What are you into?

STEINBERG: Now I’m in the supporting-my-three-children phase.

How’s that going?
STEINBERG: It’s going okay. [Laughter.]

How do you guys feel about short stories?
STEIN: If they’re awesome, they’re awesome. Even if we can’t sell them, they’re still awesome.

MASSIE: I’m with Anna. I love short stories.

And can you sell them?
MASSIE: On occasion. It’s hard. It always helps if there’s a novel coming. But if you’ve got a great short story collection, it will stand out. I represent a writer who was referred to me by an editor at a literary magazine. I read it and it blew me away. I sold it, it was published, it got great reviews, but it did not sell very many copies. But then the writer, Robin Romm, went on to write an amazing memoir that was just reviewed on the cover of the New York Times Book Review. She’s a fantastic writer and you never know where a short story writer is going to go or what stories they have left to tell. So, you know, she wasn’t making a lot of money in the beginning, but she’s going to have an amazing career.

STEIN: And here’s another thing. A short story writer might end up just being a short story writer, which might be our nightmare, but what if he ends up being one of those—

MASSIE: Alice Munro or somebody.

RUTMAN: We don’t really have much choice but to represent talent in whatever form it happens to come. And if it happens to come first in short story collection form, that does not make things easier, practically speaking, but it’s not in itself a reason not to do it. The climate hardly encourages it, and it’s not fun to call an editor and say, “What I have for you now—brace yourself—is a collection of short stories.” I mean, that’s like a meta-joke, I suppose, at this point. But you shouldn’t just abandon it. You know it’s going to be hard so you ask yourself, “How fired up am I about trying this?” With a story collection, that question is a good test of how intrinsically great you find it.

STEIN: It had better be super-duper-duper-duper good.

RUTMAN: Right. One of my colleagues gave me a collection not that long ago. It was sort of short, and the author had not really tried to publish any of them, and I took it home, sort of unhappily, and I ended up being like, “Oh. Okay. So this is a person who can do this.” If you feel that way as an agent, what are you going to do, say no? It just doesn’t really feel like a smart option.

STEIN: But novels are beginning to feel that way too. I mean, really—it’s like the novel is the new short story.

RUTMAN: The short story is the new poem…

STEIN: Yeah, the short story is the new poem, novels are the new short story…. It’s hard out there.

RUTMAN: If you’re talking to a certain audience, say an MFA audience, you hear the sentiment of, “Ugh, if only I could get past the short story collection and get on to the novel, easy street can’t be far behind.”

STEIN: There is no easy street.

RUTMAN: Exactly. It doesn’t exist. But there is this unhelpful assumption that you just need to get to a novel, at which point your publishing fortunes will brighten.

STEINBERG: There are probably only a hundred people in the United States who make a living off novel writing.

STEIN: Did you make that number up?

STEINBERG: Yeah, I just made it up.

STEIN: I think that’s a really great point and that number sounds about right to me.

STEINBERG: I think all of my clients have day jobs. Writing is just not going to be a way to stop doing what you’re doing for a living, probably. And I wouldn’t advise it. I have clients who sometimes sell their books for a decent amount of money and are like, “Ooh, should I quit my job?” And I panic and say, “No!” It also affects your work because you start writing for the marketplace too much.

STEIN: And the money is never what the money looks like.

STEINBERG: Exactly. The money has to be gravy and not a base salary.

MASSIE: And you never know what the second book will do, versus the first one, and what the advance for the next book is going to look like.

You are all deep inside this world, but so many writers aren’t. If you were a beginning writer who lived out in Wisconsin or somewhere and didn’t know anybody and you were looking for an agent, how would you do it?
STEINBERG: I would not worry about looking for an agent. I would work on my writing for a long time. And then when I was finally ready, I would ask everyone I know what they thought I should do.

MASSIE: I agree with that. I would concentrate on getting published in well-regarded literary magazines and, chances are, agents will come to you.

RUTMAN: I wouldn’t relish the prospect of looking for an agent if I had not come through a program, where a professor can often steer you in some helpful direction. I guess you’d start at the bookstore.

MASSIE: You pick up your favorite books and look at the acknowledgments and see who represented them and write those people a letter.

STEIN: I’m with Peter. I wouldn’t worry so much about finding an agent. The thing is, there aren’t that many great writers. Right? And there seem to be a lot of people trying to write novels and find agents. If you’re looking for an agent, it means you want to sell your book. But if there are only a hundred people making money as writers—and I think that number sounds about right—and you’re trying to sell your book to make money, then that doesn’t really make sense. It’s like playing the lottery. If I thought I’d written something brilliant, I would hope that, like Peter said, I would be continuing to work on my writing.

RUTMAN: But don’t you think most people who are working on their writing feel kind of persuaded that they are brilliant and have something really unique and wonderful to say?

STEIN: I also think they feel this pressure to get published. With all the MFA programs, and with all the writing conferences and programs that they pay money for, there’s this encouragement to get published.

RUTMAN: Sure. It’s the stated goal.

STEIN: Right. That’s the goal. But for 99 percent of people writing fiction, that shouldn’t necessarily be the goal. Maybe writing should be the thing they work on for many years and then maybe they should think about getting published.

RUTMAN: I think being published has come to feel, for reasons I can’t explain, too achievable. To take a step back, I think the idea of writing a book has come to seem too achievable. I don’t know what to attribute that to. It may be the fact that famous people have access to people who can write a tolerable book for them, which might create the impression that most of us should be thinking about writing a book. I think it used to feel rightfully daunting to write a book. People should be daunted by the prospect of writing a book—and more than they may be at the moment. I’m not saying that writing can’t be a hobby. But professionalizing it? That’s a whole other step, and you then expose yourself to a whole other set of challenges and disappointments that you have to take into consideration. But at some point I feel like there was some kind of fundamental shift that made writing a book—and finishing it and publishing it—seem like not that big a deal. Or not a big enough deal.

STEINBERG: One thing we should convey is how rare it is that a great piece of fiction crosses our desks from someone new.

ALL: Yes.

STEINBERG: It happens maybe, what, once a year? Twice a year? That’s it. It’s so rare. So for people in Wisconsin who might be reading this and trying to figure out how to get published, they should keep that in mind. That’s why stressing the work is so important—because it’s so rare that something extraordinary crosses our desks. I like to think that all of our instincts are good enough, and we’re well trained enough, and we’ve done this long enough, to recognize it when it arrives. But that aspect of it can’t be stressed enough, which is why I say to work on it for a long time. You also only get one shot with an agent. There are no do-overs. When we get letters that say, “I know you passed on this six months ago but I’ve rewritten it,” it’s difficult to look at it again. You really do only get one shot.

Do you guys feel competitive with other agents?
RUTMAN: I’m not sure I feel that competitive. I’m definitely envious of other agents. [Laughter.] But that’s not the same thing.

STEIN: I know Jim’s not competitive because we were competing for a client once and both of us are so uncompetitive that he was like, “No, no, Anna’s so great,” and I was like, “No, no, Jim’s so great.”

Who won?
STEIN: Jim.

RUTMAN: Competitive just feels like the wrong word. I can apply competitiveness to all kinds of other arenas but I have trouble, for some reason, doing it here. Because even competing for a client feels…I mean, maybe if I was a huge rock star I would just sit back and point at my shelf and say, “That’s why you should be represented by me.” When that’s not really an option it becomes a charm expedition. You’re trying to persuade somebody that you care enough, or that you see enough in what they’ve done, to suggest to them that you would be the right person for the job.

Tell me a little about how you view your jobs. How do you think about your obligations and responsibilities to your clients?
RUTMAN: The responsibilities are so amorphous and encompassing that it’s hard to sum up. I’ve never done it very successfully. I guess the boundaries are fairly few. You’re trying to find books that you believe in and feel like you’d be doing the author and yourself a favor by involving yourself with, and then you’re advising them about its readiness to be exposed to these calculating strangers, and then you choose the strangers you’re going to share it with, and then, if you’re lucky enough to have options among those strangers, you’re telling them which one is best. And then the book gets published and the landscape changes to a whole new level of abstraction about what constitutes a good publication experience and what doesn’t. And how many people wind up being published without feeling aggrieved or getting less than what they could have from the experience? A lot of people are disappointed by it. It’s a pretty boundary-less relationship. It extends into all kinds of areas that are personal, that involve editorial work, that involve…. The editorial part’s nice because at least it’s a place to stop. It’s also, for my money, the most interesting part of the process. You’re talking about something that, presumably, has moved you enough to want to think and discuss.

STEIN: It sounds so cheesy to say, and everyone will agree with it, but the job is about finding books that you feel should exist in the world, and should for a long time. I mean, this summer I read Anna Karenina, and it made it impossible for me to even think about taking on a book for months. It’s really important for us to read published books that we don’t represent while we’re reading our own clients’ books. It’s important for us to stay current, but also to read classics. And it reminded me of why I really do what I do. It’s because I want the books I represent to be important, and for a long time. I don’t want to sell a book just to sell a book. I want each one to matter. I mean, that’s a little heavy, and none of your books is ever going to be Anna Karenina—Anna Karenina is Anna Karenina, let’s not touch it—but that’s the idea.

RUTMAN: That’s why the job is interesting. There is always the chance, no matter how remote, that that could happen. It won’t necessarily be Anna Karenina, but you can find something that you didn’t expect, and you can glimpse stuff in it that you couldn’t anticipate, and the writer can change the way you think about something. That is, in a job, a pretty interesting thing, even if it remains largely in the realm of possibility. It’s still a nice possibility to encounter on a daily basis. I mean, that’s better than most jobs I’ve been able to conceive of as possibilities for myself.

MASSIE: It’s terrific. It means that you learn something every day. You pick something up and you don’t know what world it’s going to take you to or what it will teach you, and that’s an incredible thing. I think that’s one of the wonderful things about what we do. If you find something that you’re blown away by, you actually can help get it to a larger audience. It’s amazing when people will say to you, “I read that book you represented. God, that was amazing. It really affected me.” That’s a great feeling.

How about your responsibilities?
MASSIE: I sometimes feel like a cross between a mother, a shrink, an accountant, a lawyer…. You wear so many different hats on a daily basis. You’re juggling so many things, and the clients are so different. They all have different personalities and one person needs handholding or reassurance after every rejection letter and others just want to hear from you when there’s news. It’s different with everybody. I haven’t ever seen myself as doing one thing. I mean, with one client you’re going over royalty statements and with another you’re hearing about her marriage or some trauma she’s going through. It’s a pretty intimate relationship.

STEINBERG: It’s a friendship.

MASSIE: It’s a relationship. You have your ups and downs, and the good and the bad, and it’s the mark of a really great relationship with an author that you can weather the storms and get through the good publications and the bad publications, the good reviews and the bad reviews.

RUTMAN: We’re like disappointment brokers.

STEIN: That’s why trust is so important.

MASSIE: Trust is key.

STEIN: That’s why, from the very beginning of the relationship, the more up-front you are, the better. The way you approach an agent says so much about your personality and your character. So if you’re very straightforward in your query letter and cover letter, that shows us something. And if we’re going to have a long-term and trusting relationship, that’s important. Let’s say you have several agents interested in you. Let’s say you go with one agent and you don’t tell the other agents, or you’re somehow a little dishonest about the process. Things might not work out with that agent—that agent might move to Wisconsin for some reason and decide to leave publishing—and you’re going to have to face those other agents. It’s just really important to have integrity and to be honest and to be gracious from the very beginning.

STEINBERG: I think we’ve all done this long enough that we can sort of suss out when someone’s being false or fake or dishonest. So you really shouldn’t even try.

RUTMAN: Because if you start to get the sense, early enough in the process, that someone seems like trouble, those suspicions are rarely misleading or without some kind of foundation. One time I was in the rare position of dealing with a writer who was wildly and indisputably talented but came with some warning signs. Actually they weren’t warning signs so much as actual warnings from people who knew the writer and said, “I’ll be up-front with you. This writer is remarkable in the most important ways and a challenge in a great many other ways.”

STEIN: “Totally insane” is what they probably said.

RUTMAN: Yeah, that’s what they meant. So what do you do? Is it a measure of how heroic an agent you are if you take them on? Is it a good idea? I’m not so sure that it is.

STEIN: I tried that once. I took on somebody who was insanely talented but also insane. And I tried to be heroic. I tried my very, very best. And it ended, not only in tears, but in legal fees. I made a New Year’s resolution: No more. No more crazy ones, ever again.

STEINBERG: It’s not worth it. Life’s too short.

MASSIE: There are also the clients who are blamers. They’re always looking for somebody to blame. They’re like, “That person didn’t do this” or “You didn’t do that.”

STEIN: Those are agent-jumpers.

MASSIE: Exactly.

STEINBERG: That’s another reason why writers should make sure it’s the right match. You don’t want to switch agents unless you have to. If you have to tell an agent, “Oh, I’ve had two agents and it hasn’t worked out,” the new agent will perceive that as a warning sign. Unless it’s legitimate. Sometimes things don’t work out or the personalities just aren’t right.

STEIN: But in general, everybody wants the relationship to work. I mean, we’re all pretty young and we’re not naïve, but we are a little bit romantic or otherwise we wouldn’t be in this industry—obviously there’s no money in it. We go into the relationship thinking, “We want to grow old together.” It’s a real relationship. It’s like a marriage. We want to grow old together. So if it doesn’t work out it’s usually for pretty serious reasons.

STEINBERG: My clients and I talk about growing old together. We sort of joke about it. “When we’re old we’ll do this or that.”

MASSIE: Right. It always worries me when you’re talking to a writer about representing them and they ask, “So, do you work on a book-by-book basis?” I’m like, “No. I do not work on a book-by-book basis.” I’m not interested in working on a book-by-book basis. For me it’s a long-term relationship.

STEINBERG: That’s one of the reasons why you take on short story writers. You see the relationship in a long-term way—you’re trying to see the forty-year arc. And when you work with storytelling so much, one thing you learn is that there’s a story arc to the client-agent relationship, too. You have an arc of a story in the way that your relationship develops.

What are the hardest decisions you have to make as an agent?
STEINBERG: A lot of times it’s books that you know you could sell for a lot of money but you still say no.

STEIN: Or you take the preempt because you know it’s the right house, or you take the lower offer because you know it’s the right house. And you hope that you’re right.

MASSIE: Another hard one is telling an author that his newest book is not there, or not the one, or you’re not happy with it, or you just don’t see it or know what to do with it. That’s a really hard conversation to have, especially with someone you’ve worked with for a long time. For me, at least, that’s the hardest conversation I ever have.

STEIN: Firing a client.

STEINBERG: Or not being able to sell her work. That’s one of the hardest things about the business. You take things on because you inherently love them. That’s why you do it. You think you’ll sell them, and you think everyone will be happy, and then you come to that end of the road where you’ve done your second round of submissions and wracked your brain for the last three unlikely suspects and they all pass. That’s a very difficult conversation.

STEIN: And that’s the novel that haunts you for years. That’s the novel you think is, in some ways, the best novel you’ve ever taken on.

But that’s not a decision you have to make.
RUTMAN: We’re just eager to get to the “What are the worst features of the job?” question. Can we skip right to that? [Laughter.] Seriously, though, deciding what to take on is probably the hardest decision. I find myself sitting on fences a lot more often than I would like. Sometimes I feel like I just run out of critical faculties. My discernment just isn’t guiding me very authoritatively and I can’t decide whether I ought to be working with a book or not. Because you see its virtues, or your hesitations kind of nullify each other enough to make it hard to decide.

When you guys find yourselves in that situation, how do you decide?
STEIN: If it’s something brand new—if the author is not a client—sometimes it’s about the writer. If I have an editorial conversation with the writer, and I’m sort of feeling out the situation, that will sometimes do it for me. Because if they’re with me, and I feel like we’ll have a good editorial relationship—we need to have a good editorial relationship, probably for a long time, before we send out the book—that will become clear. If we have those initial conversations, and I feel like we won’t work well together, for any number of reasons, then the decision becomes much easier.

MASSIE: If I’m on the fence for too long it’s not a good sign. My feeling is that usually, when I love something, I’m jumping all over it. So if I’m on the fence it’s probably not good for the writer and it’s not good for me. If I can’t imagine myself getting on the phone and calling ten editors and saying, “I love this. You should read this right now,” then it’s probably not right for me. It also wouldn’t be fair to the author for me to take it on.

RUTMAN: You’re right. It’s not fair to the author. But I also have the misfortune of having my enthusiasms located on some difficult-to-access frequency. Sometimes I’m just not sure what I think, and I’ll react differently to a book on different days. I’ve certainly had the experience where I return to a manuscript and think, “I was wavering about this? This is obviously exceptional and I should take it on.” And, less happily, the reverse. It’s nice to have access, or confident access, to your feelings.

STEINBERG: It’s also nice to know when you’re not ready to make a decision. “I’ll wait till tomorrow because I’m in a bad mood or tired or whatever it is.” And I also use the phone call as a sort of determining factor. But, like Maria, I’m not really on the fence that often. I think that’s a good thing.

MASSIE: I just know from experience that if I take something on that I’ve been on the fence about, it won’t necessarily take priority. If I take on something with guns blazing, and I totally love it, that’s at the top of my list all the time. If I’ve been on the fence about something and I decide to take it on thinking, “Okay, I’m on the good side of the fence now,” I’ve been there and I can sense that it won’t take priority and I’m not going to give it as much as I should. It’s just not fair to the author. It’s not fair to me, either, because I have only so many hours in the day.

STEINBERG: I think editors can sense it too.

MASSIE: Editors totally know. They absolutely know.

STEINBERG: Just as we’re good at sensing things, they’re good at knowing when the agent isn’t enthusiastic enough.

STEIN: And you will see all the doubts you had about the book in the rejection letters. You can often gauge your true reaction to a book by the rejections. If it’s something where you’re really guns blazing—if you really love it—when you see the rejection letters you think, “You. Are. Out. Of. Your. Mind. You’re out of your mind!” And that’s how you should feel all the time.

MASSIE: Exactly. You see the rejections and you think, “No. I don’t agree at all. You don’t know what you’re talking about!”

RUTMAN: When you strenuously disagree with a rejection, that’s a really reliable gauge. Because a fair number of times I think, “Oh, well, yeah. I half anticipated that and I suppose I can see your point.” When you sharply disagree, you were right to take it on.

STEINBERG: I think it’s also the art of the agent to anticipate the rejections from the editors and try to fix the material before you get the rejections. One thing that I’m cursed with is that when I read the material I sort of see the rejections go across my eyes. I can see how people will reject it, and you work on the material in light of that. Invariably, whenever I don’t listen to my own instincts and fix that thing that was nagging at the back of my mind, I will get a rejection that says the very thing that I should have fixed. It’s like, “Damn. Listen to your instincts.” That’s a big part of the job these days, especially because editors are looking to pass. They have a billion things on their desks and they think, “Oh, I figured it out. This is how I’m going to pass on this book.” You can’t give them that. You can’t let them find their entry point to pass.

STEIN: Which is why we’ll have that extra paragraph in our pitch letters in a year that will basically say, “This is how you can publish this book. I’ve already thought it through and this is how you can publish it.”

STEINBERG: It’ll be like a marketing section for fiction, just like nonfiction proposals.

MASSIE: Exactly. That’s got to be the next thing, right?

STEINBERG: That’s depressing.

Tell me a little about how you spend your days.
STEIN: The morning is all e-mail.

MASSIE: E-mail, phone, contracts.

RUTMAN: Not reading.

MASSIE: I never read in the office.

STEIN: Manuscripts are for travel. Trains. Planes.

MASSIE: Thank God for the Sony Reader.

STEIN: I can’t get mine to work. I can’t get it to charge.

Sony’s not going to be happy to hear that.
STEIN: Sony can send me some swag to make it up to me. [Laughter.]

MASSIE: I don’t know about you guys, but I feel like I sit in front of my computer doing e-mail all day.

RUTMAN: Sometimes I feel like a typist.

MASSIE: You’re just dealing with whatever’s in front of you. Answering questions. Sending things out.

RUTMAN: How many stray issues are floating in front of you at any given moment? How many small but unignorable questions are hovering at any given moment?

STEIN: By the afternoon I can start returning phone calls and dealing with shit on my desk, whereas the morning is just an e-mail suck.

STEINBERG: It’s reactive.

STEIN: Exactly. It’s e-mail suck reactive. But sometime after lunch you can start—and when I say “after lunch” I don’t necessarily mean going to lunch, because we don’t necessarily go to lunch anymore—but in the afternoon you can start to look at the contracts and return the phone calls and whatever else. Unless you’re submitting a book, in which case it takes up the whole day.

What about after the afternoon?
STEIN: Drinks.

MASSIE: Home to the kids.

RUTMAN: Roundtables, mostly. [Laughter.]

STEIN: If I’m not going out, I work until nine. Not that I do that often, but that’s what I do. And I’m not reading manuscripts. It’s more of the same stuff.

So when do you read?
STEINBERG: If I have to read, I don’t go into the office. I’ve tried that before and thought, “Okay, I’ll do some work and then I’ll read for a few hours.” But it just doesn’t work. You get sucked into your e-mail and the other issues of the day. Sometimes in the morning, when my brain feels fresh and I can really concentrate, I’ll go straight to Starbucks or somewhere that’s not my office and read or work on some material. I try to read late at night but I always fall asleep. My wife finds me on the couch with the manuscript pages fallen off onto the floor.

STEIN: I won’t take a manuscript into my bedroom.

MASSIE: I don’t either.

STEIN: Only books.

MASSIE: Me too. I have to read at least ten pages of a book that I have nothing to do with.

STEIN: For me it’s twenty-five. Not that I actually make it to twenty-five, but I try to set that as my goal. I say twenty-five so that I make it to maybe eight.

MASSIE: I have to do that to clean my head. I try to read for at least an hour after my kids go to bed every night.

STEINBERG: I love to read on airplanes. I get so excited. I’m like, “I’m going to read this whole thing!” That’s a great feeling.

STEIN: As long as there aren’t really good movies on the plane.

STEINBERG: I have a rule that I won’t buy the headphones.

STEIN: I don’t have a TV at home, so I get very excited when I’m in front of one. [Laughter.]

STEINBERG: I also have a rule that if I’m on a train or something, I’m not allowed to buy the newspaper. Because I have to do work. But I’m allowed to look at other people’s newspapers.

You mentioned before that editors are looking for excuses to pass on projects. I’m curious what else you see as changing about your jobs. Or what’s getting harder?
STEINBERG: One thing that’s changing is that everyone is reading on Kindles or Sony Readers. I’ve made an adjustment in my head and when I envision an editor reading the material, they’re sitting somewhere and reading on the Kindle or the Sony Reader. I don’t know how that affects what I submit yet, but it’s certainly something I’m thinking about.

STEIN: With nonfiction I think about trends all the time because it follows trends in a much more obvious way than fiction does. With fiction, none of us follows trends—we fall in love. We also fall in love with nonfiction, but there’s a measure of practicality that goes with it, which also has to do with our own interests. I’m particularly interested in politics but I haven’t wanted to take on a political nonfiction book in several years. And I don’t envision wanting to anytime soon. Well, aside from Cory Booker. Do you hear me, Cory Booker?

What about Jon Favreau? Wouldn’t he be the biggest get right now?
MASSIE: Everyone must want him. Or Reggie Love.

STEIN: But if I’m interested in something and I need to help shape it—because often nonfiction will come in as an idea rather than a real proposal—I definitely try to think about whether there’s a market for it considering where we are now, and where we are in our times. That’s not something that’s different from ten years ago or five years ago. But I think that considering the shrinking market will become all the more important. There just isn’t room for books that are kind of interesting to some people anymore.

MASSIE: I think about the lack of book reviews. All of these places are getting rid of their book review sections. I think about that in terms of “How is a book going to get out there? How are people going to find out about it? What can I do and what should the author be doing beyond what the publisher is doing?” When you think about how overworked publicists are and how small publicity departments are and how many books they’re working on, it will sometimes keep you up at night, especially if one of your clients has a book coming out. I think, “Oh, God. What should we be doing? What should we be thinking about? How do we get the word out?” Because there’s no such thing as a review-driven book anymore.

So what should writers be doing? What are your authors teaching you about that?
MASSIE: To think outside the box. To think about other ways of getting the word out. It used to be that you’d have a meeting with the publicist, or a phone call, and there would be almost a checklist you’d go down. “We’re going to send it to the newspapers and the magazines and this, this, this, and this.” That doesn’t exist anymore. It’s a whole new world. There are so many other distractions out there. You really have to think, “Well, how do people find out about books? Where do they hear about them?”

And what are you learning about that from experiencing it on a daily basis?
MASSIE: I think a lot of it is word of mouth. It seems like there’s a critical mass that a book has to achieve in order to work. You have to get all the big reviews, and if you don’t, how do you get that critical mass? Is it the independent booksellers hand-selling a book? Is it having great placement in the front of Barnes & Noble? I mean, I don’t know. I’m still trying to figure out what you have to do.

STEIN: I do think, with literary fiction, it’s about getting it in the hands of the bloggers, who we don’t read. When I say that I’m joking, but I’m also not joking. I should say the bloggers who a whole new generation of readers are reading. And the social networking. Everyone should have a Facebook page. Part of it is personality. Some authors are incredibly magnetic and funny, and that’s not something you can tell your author to be. You can’t tell your author, “When you do your readings, make the audience fall in love with you.”

RUTMAN: “Be more charismatic.” [Laughter.]

STEIN: That’s something that just happens, and that sells books. There are certain authors who are very funny at their readings and draw crowds, who maybe at a different time wouldn’t have sold as well as they do now. But they’re just the right thing for the blogging atmosphere and just the right thing for buzz. There’s something underground about them because they give almost stand-up comedy routines when they read. I think it’s going to be different for every author in a way that it wasn’t before, and that’s why we have to think about how to publish each book individually in a way that we didn’t have to before.

What else are they teaching you?
STEINBERG: I have a client named Keith Donohue who wrote a book called The Stolen Child, and Amazon optioned it for film. I think it might have been the only time they ever did that. So they had a vested interest in making the book work. And they made it work.

But that sounds like an exception to me.
STEINBERG: That’s my point. We have to do exceptions. With fiction, these days, you have to work under the exception rule because fiction does not have a platform. Publicists are stumped. That’s why I think nonfiction has come to the fore a little more. Publicists are sort of like, “Well, no, we don’t know what to do. We’re not really sure.” They used to be able to rely on reviews and now even that’s gone. One thing I ask myself, even though I said that writers shouldn’t put “I think this could be a great movie” in their query letter, is, “Could this novel become a movie?” I used to work at the agency that represented Chuck Palahniuk, and before the movie version of Fight Club came out, that hardcover had sold about five thousand copies. And after the movie came out I think the tie-in edition sold something like a hundred thousand copies in the first few months. So that’s something I think about. I’m like, “Wow, I need to re-create that for my clients.” If a book is made into a movie, no matter how small, it helps the writer forever.

STEIN: This is kind of an abstract thing to say, and I don’t know exactly what I mean because it hasn’t happened yet, but I think the agent’s relationship with publishers has to change a little bit. I think that it has to become a little bit less adversarial and a little bit more open and cooperative. Which means that the publisher has to do their part so we don’t have to be adversarial. But there can be a way for everybody…. Look, we’re all in a sinking ship. So all fucking hands on deck. I think there’s a little bit of editors not wanting to tell agents what’s really going on and agents feeling like they have to sort of choose their shots with regard to when they call editors and ask for numbers, ask what’s going on with publicity, ask about the marketing plan, all of that stuff. And we shouldn’t have to do that. We’re partners in this thing, and we’re all trying to do the same thing. We shouldn’t have to feel that way, and the editors shouldn’t have to feel like they have to keep secrets. I mean, if there’s a secret, or if there’s something to feel ashamed about, we should figure out what to do about it.

RUTMAN: Preemptive sharing is really great. When editors keep you overly appraised—there’s no such thing, really—and just give you information without having to be asked, it is deeply appreciated. I find that when a book works, it’s almost always in that situation. You feel like all of the parts of the house are working in tandem and the editor is inclined to update you because they’re pleased with the way everything is coming together. If you have to excavate the information—

STEINBERG: It feels like pulling teeth.

RUTMAN: Or there’s just nothing planned.

STEIN: But Jim, let’s say you do have to excavate. Or the editor is in a position where they feel like maybe something at the publishing house has fallen short. In that situation it’s best that the editor is up-front with the agent so that they, with the author—because it’s the author’s job too—can all save the day as much as possible. It’s just got to be all fucking hands on deck. You can’t be all hands on deck if everybody doesn’t know what’s going on.

MASSIE: There’s no transparency. You ask, “What’s in the budget? What’s in the marketing plan?” You’re constantly asking and you think, “Why can’t you just know what’s in the budget for this book? Why can’t you know what’s being allocated for this book?” They’re like, “We’ll see, we’ll see, we’ll see.” No.

RUTMAN: I think there’s an assumption that you will find it lacking, and will want—

MASSIE: But it’s so much better to know. It allows you to manage expectations. It allows you to think about what else you can do. It’s so frustrating to constantly…. Managing an author, especially a first-time author, is difficult enough. Just trying to find out what you have to work with is so frustrating.

STEIN: They aren’t used to this new wave of reasonable agents. [Laughter.]

STEINBERG: It’s also this frustrating catch-22 where they don’t throw money at a book until it does well.

MASSIE: Which means it’s not going to do well. That kills me.

STEINBERG: That is incredibly frustrating to agents because a book isn’t going to do well unless you’re actively doing something for it. You can’t just wait and see if it does well and then try to make it do even better.

I hope you know that that’s frustrating to editors, too. We aren’t the ones making those budgeting decisions.
STEIN: That’s my point. If nobody else at the house is doing anything for a book, the editor and the agent and the author, every now and then, can have a flash of brilliance and come up with something that might work.

STEINBERG: It’s hard. Sometimes you get to that conversation and you’re like, “Let’s think of those out-of-the-box things that no one usually does, and let’s do them,” and there’s sort of silence on the phone.

MASSIE: Total silence. They’re like, “Um…”

STEINBERG: You can hear the crickets. They’re like, “Well, anyway, I’ve gotta go…”

MASSIE: “I’ll think about that and get back to you!”

STEINBERG: “I’m going to brainstorm tonight and I’ll get back to you tomorrow.”

But what are the out-of-the-box things that are working?
MASSIE: I think it depends on the book. But I also think about, “Does John Grisham really need a full-page ad in the New York Times every time he has a new book. Really? Does he? Is he not going to sell those books?”

STEINBERG: His agent would say yes.

MASSIE: Fine. But do the authors who are so well established really need the biggest piece of the marketing budget? Their audience is there. They know when their books are coming out. They’re there and waiting. Why not use that money for establishing an author?

STEIN: Think about when a really big band goes on tour. They always have a couple of opening bands, and those opening bands get exposure. So why isn’t Grisham giving some exposure to a young writer or two? Why isn’t he doing the same thing? Why isn’t he going on tour and saying, “This is my opening act and I’m supporting them”?

MASSIE: That’s a great idea.

STEINBERG: I think somebody like Stephen King has thought of that and is doing it in Entertainment Weekly.

MASSIE: Stephen King definitely does that.

STEIN: Absolutely.

RUTMAN: A book campaign gets interesting when it starts to look like another industry’s campaign. I was lucky enough to work on a book where we did really cool tour posters, for example. And one day the author suggested, “Hey, it would be really nice if you guys would print up some guitar picks. I would throw them out to people at readings.” The publicist said, “That’s a great idea. Let’s print up some guitar picks.” That doesn’t take a huge effort, and I don’t know that it made the difference for the book, but swag is always appreciated. I’m not saying that that’s a uniformly good approach, but thinking about a book as a potentially cool object—something you could covet in a way that you might covet some other cultural product—is, I suppose, the way it’s going. Publishers probably don’t need to be encouraged to treat books more like products, but at the same time, something basic is changing, isn’t it? I mean, if book review outlets are as fleeting as they are.

STEINBERG: I think we’re in an in-between time period. Reviews are going away but there’s nothing there to take their place. It will be the Internet in some form, but nobody knows how, exactly.

STEIN: If those short-form book reviews that are just like, “This is the book, here is the plot, thumb up, thumb down, or thumb in-between,” are the ones going away, so be it. If what’s left behind are the book reviews that actually say something about books, great. Let’s do something exciting with what used to be the space for those, frankly, boring synopses of books.

STEINBERG: I think we can also take a lesson from something I saw in a bookstore in Salt Lake City once. I was there for a writers conference. I went into the YA section and all of these teenage girls were talking about books as if they were cool. I was like, “That’s what we have to do. We have to make books cool again.” How do we do that? I don’t know.

RUTMAN: Was there a time when books were cool? I guess there was.

STEINBERG: I don’t know. But the vibe in that YA section? Those girls were all like, “Oooh, what did you read?” They were trying to one-up each other with what they’d read. It was amazing.

RUTMAN: Kids talk about books differently than adults do, and that’s why a handful of YA books are such spectacular successes. There’s this unself-conscious discussion and inclination to share. I don’t know how we appropriate that and make it a possibility for adults. When we’re considering a manuscript, one of the things that we’re trying to glimpse is whether or not it might be adopted by book clubs. How often do you get something that you feel could become the subject of conversation among people who, you know, maybe their first inclination is not to evaluate the merits of a book. And the books that tend to get that far probably don’t do it because of an especially successful campaign. The frustrating possibility we’re always forced to consider is that it’s not really within anyone’s control, even if a publisher makes a really concerted effort. Part of our job, and certainly part of our responsibility, is to see that the publisher carries out its duty as fully and faithfully as possible. But they certainly do that and books still fail to reach more than a few souls. I don’t know what makes people like books. There’s a basic mystery.

STEIN: But I just saw Revolutionary Road this weekend and walked out of the movie and could hear everyone saying, “Have you read the book? Have you read the book?” I thought, “Thank God. Thank God people are saying that.” And that book is on the best-seller list now.

I find that amazing. It’s one of the bleakest books of all time and it’s been on the best-seller list for fifteen weeks.
STEIN: It’s totally bleak, and it’s brilliant, and it’s so much better than the movie, not because the actors didn’t give it their best shot but because Sam Mendes was a terrible director.

STEIN: But that’s the thing. People want to read that book. That’s exciting. It’s cool and it’s hot and it’s depressing all at the same time. And maybe after they read Revolutionary Road they’ll want to read another depressing novel. It’s cool to read depressing novels.

RUTMAN: There’s little that I find cooler.

You guys work on commission. How does that affect the decisions you make when it comes to selling a book where maybe you have multiple offers?
STEINBERG: It’s always a combination of the money and the right place. What that combination is varies, but you have to take both into account. I’ve taken less money a lot of times to have the right publisher—probably not a lot less money—but a little less money to be published in the right place.

MASSIE: The right place for a little less money, over time, could be more money. It can’t just be about the money. There are so many different factors.

STEINBERG: An advance is an advance against royalties, and royalties are an aspect of it.

MASSIE: Right. And if you don’t earn out that advance, your next one may not be as big.

STEIN: And to clarify, when we say “the right place” we mean the place we think will be just as enthusiastic, or even grow more enthusiastic, from the moment they buy the book until it’s published, and make it a best-seller if possible. And the place where the book won’t disappear if, you know, Alan Greenspan or Hillary Clinton or Obama happens to pop up on their list.

STEINBERG: Stability is also important these days. I was selling a book recently and there were a few publishers that I’d heard weren’t doing so well. I definitely took that into account. Because it can take a year or two for a book to be published after you sell it. Will that place be around in two years? Will the editor be around? Stability is so important to writers, which is why this time period is even tougher than you may think.

RUTMAN: What we do is really hard, readers. We just need you to know that.

STEIN: We have to think a lot. [Laughter.]

You’re joking but my wife is an agent and I know that it is really hard. Especially when you’re less established than some people. How do you compete with people who are more established?
STEIN: I thought you were going to ask, “How do you pay your rent?” [Laughter.]

STEINBERG: If you want to talk about what’s at the forefront of our minds….

But seriously, how do you compete with people who are more established?
STEIN: I don’t. I don’t think that I compete with people who are more established. I think they throw me a bone every now and then, if they’re too busy. People who are really established? If they want a writer? I don’t think I’m going to compete with somebody who’s been in the business for twenty-five years. I think that’s unreasonable. Why would I compete with somebody who’s been in the business for twenty-five years? Unless it’s a perfect match, for some reason. I just can’t see a competitive situation unless, for example, a writer is recommended to an agent who’s been in the business for a long time and some younger agents and there’s very good chemistry and a good match. I think that experience in this industry is really invaluable, and I respect experience a lot. So if I were in the shoes of a writer who was choosing between good chemistry with somebody with a lot of experience and good chemistry with somebody who was young, I would probably go with the person with a lot of experience.

RUTMAN: The only thing at your disposal in that situation—if you’re at an experience and success quotient disadvantage—is the quality of the attention that you can offer the writer.

STEIN: That’s true.

RUTMAN: And that’s what you’re presenting to them. It’s like, “Look, I will talk to you more often.”

MASSIE: “And I won’t pass you off to my assistant.”

RUTMAN: And we’re probably going to be more engaged in things that they want to be engaged in. You know, talking about what’s wrong with the material in a closer way than somebody else. What else can you really offer? And that’s something.

STEIN: “I’ll edit your book.”

RUTMAN: All you can really do is try to work up superior chemistry to the chemistry you think they may be working up with somebody who just doesn’t have the time or inclination for them in the way that you might. I also don’t like to know—I don’t need or want to know—who I’m competing with.

MASSIE: I don’t either. I never want to know.

And they should never tell you, either.
MASSIE: Some people do, though.

But they shouldn’t.
MASSIE: You’re right.

RUTMAN: They shouldn’t. You want to say, “Really? Oh, she’s really good. She likes this? Congratulations!”

STEIN: But how do you guys feel about this. If there’s an agent who you really respect—who’s been in the industry for a long time and who you may even think of as a mentor—and if you were a writer, wouldn’t you go with somebody like that, even if you knew they were busy, over you? Or would you go with you?

RUTMAN: I’m supposed to be me in this scenario?

STEIN: You would give them more attention and more of your time, and that person might have them dealing with their assistant more often, but that person is a mentor to you for a reason. They have so much experience and knowledge that you couldn’t even begin to have.

STEINBERG: In my experience it’s so rare that you compete with other agents. I don’t really think about it too often. It’s not like being an editor, where one agent submits to twelve editors and you know you’re competing with other editors. As an agent, usually it’s a single submission, just to you, because you know the person somehow. Or you get to the material so much faster than everyone else because you’re immediately drawn to it off the slush pile and you know that other agents aren’t involved. In my experience it’s very rare.

RUTMAN: You don’t find that with referrals? Where maybe some thoughtful referree has given the writer three or four names?

MASSIE: Of course. I always assume that.

STEIN: I assume that too.

RUTMAN: And then you think, “Oh, crap. This is really good. Agent so-and-so is probably going to see this too.” And then they do.

So what do you do? That’s what I want to know.
MASSIE: You fight as hard as you can and you argue why you’re the best person for that project and that author and you hope that they agree.

RUTMAN: Or why Anna is, depending on the situation. [Laughter.]

STEIN: Exactly. I try not to get clients as much as possible. Can you tell?

STEINBERG: Speed is a great help in those situations. You can be like, “I’m going to read this tonight and call you tomorrow.”

MASSIE: That is so hard, though. I have two small children so I just can’t do speed.

STEIN: I don’t like to tell writers that they need to make a decision right away if the book is still out with other agents. I think it’s important for them to have a choice, in the same way that we want a choice between editors. We like to be able, if we can, to shop an offer. We like to be able to make a decision between editors. I think authors are entitled to that decision between agents, too.

RUTMAN: You also don’t want them to go with you if they have doubts in their mind. Because that will affect the relationship down the line. There have been instances when I’ve been like, “Oh, go with the other person,” because I could just tell that they wanted to. That’s fine. Sometimes the other agent is a friend and I’m happy for them. Until it hits the best-seller list. [Laughter.]

Talk to me about what editors do that makes you the most frustrated.
STEINBERG: The bandwagon mentality. When I submit a book to them and they call and say, “What’s going on?” They’re not supposed to say, “What’s going on?” They’re supposed to either say “I hate this” or “I love this” or “It’s okay” or whatever. It’s their job to tell me what’s going on at that point. I’ve done the work, I’ve submitted to you, and you’re supposed to tell me what’s going on. If you’re calling me and saying “What’s going on?” then you’re just wondering what you might miss out on because other editors might be interested and you’re not going with your passion.

RUTMAN: Or perhaps don’t call and ask what’s going on without having some intention of your own to offer.

STEINBERG: That’s very frustrating.

MASSIE: Or flip-floppers. Someone who disappears on you. Somebody who sends you an e-mail like, “Don’t do anything without me. I’m loving this and getting other reads,” and you never hear from them again. You’re like, “What happened?”

STEIN: And we all know what happened.

MASSIE: But call and tell me. We need closure. The author’s like, “What did they say? What’s going on?”

STEIN: Show your confidence in your taste. And if you lose in the house…

MASSIE: Just say so. It’s so much easier. And then you trust that editor. They loved it and for whatever reason the other readers didn’t. But be transparent about it. It’s so much easier to know what they’re thinking than to wonder.

STEIN: And you’ll go back to them because you understand their taste.

MASSIE: Yes. And if they don’t tell you, you won’t go back to them. There are editors who I won’t go back to. And I’m sure all of you have your list of those editors.

RUTMAN: Explaining yourself is really helpful. I want to know on what grounds you are saying no, or on what grounds you couldn’t get something through. It’s all useful because it rounds out your sense of who you’re offering a book to.

MASSIE: And it’s so important to an author to hear about how people are responding to their work. When people don’t get back to you, or they disappear, it’s so frustrating because you’re the person stuck in the middle trying to manage your author’s fears and hopes and expectations. If it’s a no, it’s a no. It’s easy.

STEINBERG: I also don’t like when the editor has his assistant write the pass letter. I’m not submitting to the assistant—I’m submitting to you. I didn’t have my assistant work up this submission for you. Because you can tell when the assistant’s doing the form rejection. Agents should not get form rejections. You just don’t do that.

STEIN: It’s also frustrating when editors disappear after they’ve acquired a book. If, for some reason, things aren’t going as well in-house as they’d like, they sometimes hide. Or if they’re just really busy. Look, everybody’s busy. Just say, “I’m busy.” The disappearing act is just unattractive behavior.

Do you resent how collaborative the acquisitions process has become?
STEINBERG: I try to submit to places that aren’t like that. I go out of my way to try to find the few remaining places where people can make decisions because they want to.

RUTMAN: Is that a matter of place or editor selection? Finding an editor whose opinion doesn’t need—

STEINBERG: I guess it’s the person.

STEIN: But I also see it—buying by committee—as something that has become pretty necessary. If an editor is really passionate, and everybody else isn’t so passionate, it’s going to be pretty hard to publish that book. I see it as something that’s more and more necessary these days. If you sell a book to an editor who doesn’t need all of that back-up, it’s kind of tricky. Let’s say you end up with sales and marketing people who just aren’t that psyched about it. That’s not so great for the book. I don’t have so much of a problem with the committee as I do with the taste that the committee is coming up with. Which has just been really mediocre over the past few years.

RUTMAN: Good distinction.

STEIN: I don’t think that the individuals have bad taste. I think it’s just been a taste of fear over the past few years, and I hope that the committees will somehow—and this is just hope—become more courageous over the next few years. That somehow, with the market contracting, instead of thinking, “We need to be more mediocre,” they will be thinking, “If we’re actually going to be publishing literary fiction, it has to be really fucking good.” And that means that some people in the house will kind of hate a book, but see what’s amazing about it, and other people in the house will really, really love it. There wouldn’t have to be consensus within the committee for the committee to get behind it. It would be a little different kind of committee, if that makes sense.

RUTMAN: And I guess this applies more to nonfiction than fiction, but please acknowledge comp titles as the limited and specious resource that they are, at least as the basis for making your decision.

But in the publisher’s defense, it seems like sometimes that’s how the accounts are making their decisions. At least to some extent.
RUTMAN: True. But I feel like a house has to have enough consequence, built in, to persuade a buyer. It’s not like the house can’t anticipate the reluctance that the buyer may ultimately express, and there’s got to be a way to overwhelm that reluctance with the fact that they give a shit.

STEIN: But I think that also comes back to us, and to what we advise our authors to do in our nonfiction proposals now. The comp titles shouldn’t necessarily be limited to the subject they’re writing about. We have to broaden the spectrum to the kinds of books that could possibly work. We have to think about the moment when the sales reps have to face those guys. We have to think, “Jesus, what kind of comp titles could possibly relate to this in a way that could work?” I mean, it’s so boring to have to think about that. But we can’t rely on them to do that job for us anymore, unfortunately. That’s another way that our jobs have changed.

RUTMAN: The anticipation of just about every possible objection. I mean, there are always a lot of possible objections. The list is long. And you try to speak to them as much as possible, even in the introductory conversation. I think we all appreciate how many rounds of approval the editor is responsible for securing, and that they have to create some kind of consensus with a really disparate group of tastes and responsibilities. When you think about all of those different barriers, it’s kind of a wonder that as many books get bought as they do. How do you get this much approval from that many people this often? So it’s kind of amazing when you hear how many books a certain group within Random House or something is going to publish. You guys are going to publish twelve hundred books this year? This one group found enough to agree on twelve hundred times?

Do you guys think the industry is healthy? Just give me a yes or no around the table.
STEINBERG: No.

MASSIE: No.

RUTMAN: I don’t think so.

STEIN: No.

RUTMAN: But I do wonder if there’s ever been a point when you could get four people to say yes.

STEIN: But here’s the silver lining: It’s unhealthy enough that it’s an exciting time. It’s broken enough that publishers and agents and everyone has to change. Everyone has to rethink what they’re doing. So we have a group responsibility, and an opportunity, in a way that the industry has probably never seen before.

RUTMAN: Part of me craves that. If we’re near a precipice, we might as well actually be on it. Let’s get to the moment when some basic model really gives way to whatever other model that really smart people are going to help conceive of. Is this what Jason Epstein’s been talking about for a long time? Maybe. Is the big company going to acknowledge, “Is this business for us, ultimately? We tried this. We kind of gave it a look. Eh, it’s okay. Synergy’s overrated. It’s a stupid word. We’re going to abandon that.” Is it going to become a business for the fewer? Is it going to return to the financial interest of a select few wealthy people who are prepared to collect a really modest profit, if any? And does that make for more interesting publishing? Possibly. Maybe.

STEINBERG: Or will it go the other way, like you were saying before? Will we start making concert posters and guitar picks for publicity and using other industries’ models to promote books? It could go that way and become more like the movie business.

RUTMAN: And those industries are claiming a state of serious unhealthiness as well. So if every single culture industry is ill at the same time, what do we have to look to?

STEINBERG: And maybe we also shouldn’t feel so bad.

MASSIE: It’s an interesting time, if you think about it. Look at how the music industry got hit so hard by iTunes and iPods. They had no time to react. But the book publishing industry actually has a little time to think about things and explore possibilities and try to figure out what the next thing is going to be without being hit so hard.

What are the big problems in your opinions, and who are you looking to—Jim said Jason Epstein—for the solutions? Is it Bob Miller? Is it Jon Karp? Who is it?
STEIN: Those are the first two people I would have mentioned. The big problems are too many books, inflated advances for—

RUTMAN: The few.

MASSIE: Marketing budgets going to big, established authors.

STEINBERG: No one ever hearing about great books that are published.

STEIN: Returns.

RUTMAN: Trend-hunting.

STEINBERG: Barnes & Noble making many decisions for publishers.

STEIN: Inflexible models across the board. For example, it’s time for us to be reasonable as agents. We shouldn’t ask for unreasonable advances. But in exchange, shouldn’t we be able to ask for paperback escalators? Publishers will say, “It’s our company policy not to give paperback escalators.” But we’re going to give a little bit, so publishers should give a little bit.

page_5: 

So who are you looking to?
MASSIE: I don’t know who to look to yet.

STEIN: Nobody’s really stepped up yet except for Bob Miller. He’s really the only one. Jon Karp had a great idea ahead of everybody else but he hasn’t done anything that’s quite like what Bob Miller is doing.

I feel like paperback originals might be one place to look in the short term. What if some established publisher said, “Hardcover books are the eight-track of the publishing industry. They don’t make sense anymore—in this culture, in this economy—and we just aren’t going to do them anymore”? Would you all continue to sell them books?
ALL: Yes.

RUTMAN: Because every house with a serious line of original trade paperbacks is usually publishing some really interesting books. Think about a handful of years ago when Vintage was making a concerted effort and publishing what I guess they were designating as more “difficult” books. One of the most beautiful trade paperbacks they did—it had French flaps—was Notable American Women by Ben Marcus. That thing was just too cool. It was the perfect trade paperback. I thought, “Okay! Maybe this is a kind of turning point.” Not because it was a book that was ever going to sell Jhumpa Lahiri numbers. But that turned out to be a small little experiment that seems all but discontinued.

STEINBERG: I think it’s always attractive to agents when publishers have a vision. If they said, “We’re just going to do trade paperbacks, and we’re going to make it work,” that would be immediately attractive. Because they have a vision. It’s not just like, “Oh, let’s publish this and see what happens. Good luck to us all! Bye!” [Laughter.]

RUTMAN: But if you sell a book and it’s acquired with the intention of making it a trade paperback, and three or four months later the publisher comes back to you and says, “We’ve reconsidered. We’re going to make this a hardcover,” it’s not even implied—it’s basically stated—that “we thought we were acquiring nothing, and we’ve actually had a change of heart. We think we have something. Congratulations to us all.” If you were ever under the delusion that there was no hierarchical relationship between the two, it’s dismissed pretty thoroughly. And what’s going to change that? The Great Depression II might go some way.

STEIN: It used to be about reviews. There was this idea that you couldn’t get reviews for trade paperbacks. But there aren’t reviews anymore so we don’t have to worry about that.

STEINBERG: Silver lining.

MASSIE: Grove’s had a couple of original trade paperbacks on the cover of the New York Times Book Review. So that’s not the story anymore.

STEIN: Grove does wonderful trade paperbacks.

Stop it, you’re going to make Morgan blush. But seriously, I wish the whole economics of advances would change so that we could do more.
RUTMAN: And if e-books are costing about what trade paperbacks cost, maybe we can have a more uniform price for books. So you wouldn’t have this disparity.

STEINBERG: But one of the goals of agents is to get a good advance, and the way that publishers get to higher numbers is by doing hardcovers.

STEIN: But that could change a little bit. If there wasn’t the sort of hardcover-paperback hierarchy, and if we started doing a lot more trade paperbacks, the price of paperbacks could rise a little bit. And there’s no reason we should have such low royalties for paperbacks.

STEINBERG: Someone in publishing told me that that’s why publishing still exists—because publishers held agents off from having escalators on paperbacks. That’s where the money is made.

STEIN: But we need a little of that money if we’re not going to ask for high advances.

What are you most worried about with regard to the industry?
STEINBERG: I think if Barnes & Noble folds, or something like that, it might be so devastating that we can’t get around it. If Barnes & Noble were to fold, what would happen to all of us? I mean, there’s no way that publishing could really continue. We’ve put too many eggs in one basket.

STEIN: Publishing could continue.

STEINBERG: It could continue, but it would be at a much different scale.

STEIN: Agents would just sell the books to Amazon. It would be the publishers that would be out of business.

STEINBERG: Isn’t Barnes & Noble like 50 percent of the market?

RUTMAN: But there is also a pretty astounding percentage of books that are sold in non-book-retailing locations. Which is problematic at least for the likes of most of us because we don’t do so many of those books.

MASSIE: They tend to take a certain kind of book.

STEIN: Which is why, although we’re very grateful to Amazon, we need to keep our bookstores in business. So if you’re going to buy a book, buy it from an actual bookstore.

MASSIE: Look at Harry Schwartz.

It’s really sad.
MASSIE: That was really devastating. And it’s like a new one every day.

STEIN: If you buy a book from Amazon, you’re killing us.

RUTMAN: There, she said it.

STEIN: And you’re killing yourself. Thank you. [Laughter.]

What are the other things you’re most worried about?
RUTMAN: That the balkanization of commercial publishing will be so complete that an even smaller number of books that claim all of the available resources will take up even more available resources and the ghetto for everyone else will end up being vast. That the midlist will come to encompass everything that isn’t a couple of titles.

STEIN: That the midlist, and the kinds of books we do, really will become the new short stories or the new poetry.

RUTMAN: The assumption is that you can still anticipate something that will work commercially. Which I guess sometimes you can, but not often enough to justify that as a prevailing strategy. I mean, can we stop paying senators and politicians—sorry, Flip [Brophy, a colleague at Sterling Lord]—and various other famous people tons of money for stories that are—and I apologize, readers everywhere—insubstantial in the extreme?

With one exception, right?
RUTMAN: Obama. [Laughter.]

He’s a great writer.
RUTMAN: Exactly. If they write their own books and they write them well, then we have a crucial exception. But generally speaking, this thing of giving somebody, on the basis solely of name recognition, disproportionate resources that could be so much better spent elsewhere? Why do we do that?

STEIN: Imagine a world where books would have to be submitted without the author’s name. Obviously there would be no platform. So if the proposal was really shitty, and the writing was really shitty, there would be no sale.

Anna wants a meritocracy in publishing.
RUTMAN: Aw, that’s sweet. [Laughter.]

But that raises an interesting point. Why do you all focus on serious literary work when it’s so obvious that the real money is elsewhere?
MASSIE: It’s what I like to read.

STEINBERG: I like going to work every day and the feeling of liking what I do. I think if someone said to me, “You can do only fiction, and no nonfiction, forever. Will you do that?” I would say, “I don’t think I’ll like that very much, because I still like nonfiction, but I’ll do it.” But if somebody said to me, “You can do only nonfiction. No fiction,” I’d be like, “I’m just going to quit.” There wouldn’t be any point.

RUTMAN: I just don’t feel equipped to make judgments about anything other than what I like. I feel like my capacity to gauge commercial prospects is kind of restricted. The only thing I can really respond to is what I think works in some way that means something to me.

STEIN: I’m a hopeless optimist, and I think somehow, someday…well, look, Revolutionary Road is on the best-seller list right now. I’m an optimist, and because it can happen, I think it will happen, and I want to be on the front lines when it does.

Are you encouraged by anything you’re seeing on the front lines?
STEIN: Our president is a writer. We have a president who loves books and who’s all about promoting the arts. That’s amazing.

STEINBERG: I like the Kindle and the Sony Reader. I think they’re a step forward and sort of address the cool factor. I think it’s cool that with the Kindle you can think of a book you want and have it at your fingertips a minute later.

RUTMAN: It’s also nice because it means that books are eligible to be included in the world of new technology.

STEINBERG: When you’re on the subway, people are intrigued by it. They’re like, “What’s that?” And that intrigue factor is important.

STEIN: Except they can’t see what you’re reading.

MASSIE: It also feels like the YA world has really taken off in the last few years and kids are really excited about reading. It feels like there’s a whole new generation of readers out there, doesn’t it? And it’s not just Harry Potter. There are all these authors, people like Cornelia Funke, and all of my nieces and nephews have their favorites. They’ve all discovered their own different authors who they’re so excited about. It’s great. I feel like there was a generation that sort of skipped that.

RUTMAN: I’m also encouraged by the things that succeed, for the most part. Look at something like A Series of Unfortunate Events. You have this very self-conscious, writerly line of books that kind of flatter kids’ ability to appreciate a certain context in which the books have been written. And kids seem to live in a text-filled world in a way that even we didn’t. I don’t know if it’s the right kind of text, but it might function as the basis for some broader appreciation of written communication.

MASSIE: And look at the YA books that are doing well—they’re doorstops. Look at The Invention of Hugo Cabret, that Brian Selznick book. It’s huge.

STEINBERG: My daughter loves that book.

MASSIE: My son loved it too.

STEIN: Is it good? Have you guys read it?

MASSIE: It’s great. I loved it.

RUTMAN: I think the girth of a fat children’s book is a factor in its success. Kids must feel like they’re being entrusted with something enormous. It’s like, “I don’t care that you’re only eight. You’re going to read 960 pages of epic….” And now that they wheel their backpacks, it’s okay. It’s safe.

At the end of the day, what’s the best part of your job?
MASSIE: Working with great authors. Discovering new voices. When an author’s book arrives for the first time—when you get that messengered package and rip it open and there’s the book. That’s the best feeling. Getting the book in your hands is better than getting the deal.

RUTMAN: Having some part in the creation of a book that you feel strongly about. However incidental your role may be. I mean, I haven’t written any books and it’s really nice to have helped bring some of them about. That’s more than I expected from a workday.

STEIN: I agree with all of those things and, for me, it’s also just about making the author happy—making the author’s hard work pay off in a way that you just know their endorphin rush is going to go on for a week. That’s what makes your endorphin rush happen. It’s not the deal. It’s their scream.

STEINBERG: I love dealing with creative people on a daily basis and just seeing how their minds work. It just makes me so happy. I think that’s probably why I do what I do. I just love what they come up with. Great twists in plot. Things that are unexpected but extraordinary. That’s always the best part. I’m really sad when I’m not reading some great piece of fiction for work.

RUTMAN: Constant access to people who are smarter than you is a really nice part of the job.

STEIN: Smarter. More creative.

STEINBERG: More disciplined.

RUTMAN: Better. Just better.

AGENTS ANONYMOUS
In the third hour of our conversation, with a few bottles of wine sloshing around in their brains, the agents agreed to speak anonymously on a variety of topics that would be difficult to discuss for attribution. Any number of verbal tics have been altered in order to disguise the identities of the speakers.

 

What would you say to writers if you could be anonymous?
Work harder. Be gracious.

Don’t be so needy. Don’t need constant affirmation.

Once you make a decision to go with an agent, trust that agent.

When authors leave their agent to go to a “better” agent, it is almost always the author’s fault. I don’t blame agents for poaching. I blame authors for allowing themselves to be poached.

And nine times out of ten it’s the wrong decision.

Tell me about some overrated publishers, in your opinion.
Little Random. I think the reputation they built in the era before we came into the industry has gone out the window in the past five years. I can’t think of one book of theirs that I’ve read in the past five years that I’ve admired. They have no vision. There used to be some good literary editors there—Dan Menaker, Ann Godoff—who had some vision. I think the house publishes schlock now, for the most part.

Spiegel & Grau. They just care about the celebrity-type books. Even if the writer is not an actual celebrity, they only want to buy big books by the sort of literary celebrities. They pretend they’re in it for the art but in my view they’re not.

Scribner. It’s kind of strange because they have this great literary reputation, and I’ve always thought of them as a great literary house, but I just can’t think of anything of theirs that I’ve admired in a long time. Maybe a little bit of their nonfiction, but not much of it. I can’t figure out why that is because, you know, it’s Nan Graham and that shouldn’t be the case.

Riverhead, these days—after Cindy [Spiegel] and Julie [Grau] left—has not found its footing yet. I mean, the books that have done well for Riverhead lately were under contract already. Junot Díaz. Khaled Hosseini. Aleksandar Hemon, but Sean [McDonald, his editor] was there before the new regime. We’ll see what Becky [Saletan] does.

What about on the flip side of that? Which houses do you think are underrated?
Algonquin. They do a great job and they have integrity. They know the right amount to pay but they don’t overpay. And they do great publicity.

I wish more houses were like Norton. They have a pretty big list but they also acquire carefully, for the most part, and there’s a nice range of serious editors. Their acquisition process is rigorous and they don’t often go nuts to overpay for something. They’re an employee-owned company and everybody is invested in what goes on. Their offices are really crappy, which is kind of reassuring. And they take chances on books that are ultra-literary while doing unapologetically commercial stuff too.

I feel like Algonquin uses them almost as a model. They’re similar in a lot of ways.

They’re the last of a dying breed. How many independent houses of that size exist anymore? And there’s a reason we haven’t heard about any cutbacks or financial issues at Norton. They operate responsibly.

Tell me about some editors you really like to work with.
I’m working with an editor I’ve never worked with before, Tom Mayer at Norton. He’s tireless and will do anything for this book. The author wasn’t happy with the cover, and Tom went and got them to hire somebody else. I mean, that never happens. Usually editors are trying to say, “We all love this and the author should too.” I’ve never seen such an advocate for a book.

I would say Kathy Pories at Algonquin. She has amazing taste and she’s also a fantastic editor. She makes novels the 25-percent better that they need to be. She’s such a straight shooter, she’s fun to talk to on the phone… [Laughter.] That can’t be discounted! It’s a joy to call her. And it lets me be a straight shooter myself and not need to spin anything. That’s a nice feeling.

It’s only been one instance, but if somebody’s had a better experience with an editor than I was lucky enough to have with David Ebershoff, I would wish it on all of you. The level of attentiveness and awareness of the whole process from beginning to end was just incredibly heartening, from securing a publicist to being honest about certain potential impediments. His advocacy was inexhaustible.

Molly Barton is the same way. She will not let a book die. She’s still there after publication. She’s still there after paperback publication. She just keeps a book alive and does absolutely everything possible. She does things for her books that I didn’t even know were possible. She came up in a slightly different way and has a sort of big-picture publishing knowledge that a lot of editors don’t have.

Anybody have any horror stories from lunch?
I once had lunch with an editor at HarperCollins, and this was so long ago that I don’t even remember his name or if he’s still there, but he talked the whole time—very excitably, kind of spitting his food—about television shows and action movies. It’s kind of a cliché to talk about going to the bathroom and seeing if you can figure out a way to slip out. But I actually went to the bathroom and thought, “I can’t go back. I can’t get through this lunch. This has got to be Candid Camera. I can’t do it.” But I went back and finished the lunch. I thought the whole thing had to be some sort of joke. But it wasn’t. It was real and he was real.

I had one lunch where the editor called me by the wrong name the entire lunch. He didn’t even know my name! And I didn’t correct him because I was so angry. After lunch I went back to the office and wrote him an e-mail so he’d see my name and know.

Of all the people and places who write about the industry—newspapers, Web sites, blogs—who are the smartest and who are the dumbest?
I feel like Publishers Weekly has really gone downhill. I know it’s a trade magazine so it’s supposed to be boring, but I think it’s really boring. I also don’t trust the reviews. I kind of liked Sara Nelson’s column, though. Just as a barometer of things.

I always feel like when I’m reading Michael Cader he might say something intelligent. Publishers Lunch is one of the better ones.

I thought Boris [Kachka] got a little too much shit for his New York magazine piece. I don’t think it was a dumb article. I felt more sympathetic to what he was trying to do than I think most people did.

I think that guy Leon [Neyfakh] at the Observer is really good at digging in and getting scoops. He really keeps going.

It’s his first job.

And he knows how to become friends with you and get stuff out of you. He’s very good in that way. And he treats publishing like it’s something to care about, which is nice. It’s like he’s always looking for some secret that will be amazing. The things he finds are usually kind of silly, but at least he’s trying.

Which is different than Motoko [Rich, of the New York Times], who approaches it like it’s a business. A business that doesn’t make any money.

Don’t you always feel a little surprised that the Times will cover a publishing development as prominently as they sometimes do? They’re like, “Layoffs at Doubleday!” and you’re like, “That warrants coverage in the New York Times? Really?”

Anything else that you want to get off your chests?
I think book jackets are incredibly important but they’re one of the weakest parts of the business. We need to pay jacket designers more money. We need to attract better people. It’s one thing that we can control.

We should steal all of the indie-rock designers and bring them into books. Because that shit is great. Walk through any record store. They are so consistently good, and they get paid nothing.

I emphatically second that idea. And I think raiding another industry could be the way to do it.

There are so few things you can control, and the jacket is so important. It’s what people look at. Women’s legs are not inherently interesting as cover subjects.

Or shoes.

Or the face of an adolescent girl who is blowing bubbles.

Oh, I disagree with you there. I’d love to support you, but I can’t. [Laughter.]

 

Jofie Ferrari-Adler is an editor at Grove/Atlantic.

Agents & Editors: A Q&A With Agent Molly Friedrich
Agents & Editors: A Q&A With Editor Chuck Adams
Agents & Editors: A Q&A With Four Young Literary Agents
Agents and Editors: A Q&A With Four Young Editors

Agents and Editors: A Q&A With Four Young Editors

by

Jofie Ferrari-Adler

March/April 2009
3.1.09
In Print and Online

If the economic Tilt-A-Whirl of the past few months has proven anything, it’s that this carnival life of ours—writing, publishing, trying to find readers—isn’t getting any easier. Booksellers and publishers are in turmoil, with scores of staffers having already lost their jobs to “restructuring,” “integration,” and all the other corporate euphemisms that are dreamed up to soften the harsh reality: It isn’t pretty out there.

While it goes without saying that our problems are nothing compared with those of many industries, one’s heart can’t help but ache for the literary magazines and publishing houses that won’t be around in a year; the unemployed editors, publicists, and marketing people with mortgages to pay; the authors whose first books are being published now, or a month from now, or anytime soon.

But difficult times don’t have to be joyless times. As I listened to these four accomplished young book editors talk about what they do, I was reminded of a simple and enduring truth, trite as it may sound: We are all—writers, agents, publishers, booksellers, librarians, and readers—in this together. And there are concrete things we can do to connect with one another more effectively. These editors are full of insight about how to do just that.

It seems appropriate, at such a humbling moment, that we met over pizza and bottled water (okay, maybe not exclusively water) in the glamorously unglamorous offices of Open City, the independent press and literary magazine based in downtown Manhattan. Over the years its editors, Thomas Beller and Joanna Yas, have introduced readers to some of the most distinctive voices of our time, from Meghan Daum to Sam Lipsyte. Here are short biographies of the participants:

LEE BOUDREAUX was an editor at Random House for almost ten years before leaving to become the editorial director of Ecco in 2005. She has worked with Arthur Phillips, Dalia Sofer, and David Wroblewski.

ERIC CHINSKI worked at Oxford University Press and Houghton Mifflin before moving to Farrar, Straus and Giroux, where he is vice president and editor in chief. He has edited Chris Adrian, Rivka Galchen, and Alex Ross.

ALEXIS GARGAGLIANO worked at Simon & Schuster and Knopf before moving to Scribner, where she is an editor, in 2002. Her authors include Matt Bondurant, Adam Gollner, and Joanna Smith Rakoff.

RICHARD NASH worked as a performance artist and theater director before taking over Soft Skull Press, now an imprint of Counterpoint, in 2001. His authors include Lydia Millet, Matthew Sharpe, and Lynne Tillman. [UPDATE: Richard Nash has resigned as editorial director of Soft Skull Press and executive editor of Counterpoint, effective March 10, 2009.]

Every reader understands the feeling of falling in love with a book. You guys do that for a living. I’m curious if you’ve given any thought to the specific things that can trigger that experience.
GARGAGLIANO: I don’t know if there’s a specific thing, but you know it immediately. The minute I start it I know that it’s the book I want to fall in love with. And that’s the one I keep reading. I will read a hundred pages of something else, but I won’t fall in love with it. You have this immediate sense of texture and place, and you’re just inside it from the first sentence. I think the thing that everybody says about first sentences is true. Everyone should try to get that first sentence perfect. I make my authors do that all the time.
NASH: But if you make them do it, they didn’t quite do it the first time, did they?
GARGAGLIANO: Well, it might be that you’ve had them totally rewrite the opening.
CHINSKI: Do you feel like it’s different for fiction and nonfiction?
GARGAGLIANO: I do. I always hate that with nonfiction, when you read a proposal, you don’t get the writing first. You get the pitch first. I always look to the writing.
CHINSKI: For me, with fiction, there’s that funny moment when you feel like you actually want to meet the author. You want to know who the man or woman who’s writing it is because there’s a real sensibility in the writing. It’s not just that the writing is good—there’s a kind of intensity of imagination to it. You wonder, “Who is this person who’s able to telescope all of these ideas into something that feels accessible?” I think that’s one similarity between nonfiction and fiction, even though obviously they’re different in many ways: It takes the ordinary and makes it extraordinary. You sort of recognize something but it allows you access to it in a totally different way. But I can’t tell you how many times, thirty pages into a novel, I actually want to write the agent and say, “Who is this person?” You just wonder, “Who’s coming up with this?”
BOUDREAUX: I think there’s always a moment of surprise and delight. It comes in the form of a word. You get to the end of a sentence and go, “Wow, I didn’t see that coming. That was perfect.” The language just goes click and the whole thing has gone up a notch and you know at that point that you’re committed to…a hundred pages? Two hundred? Or you’re going the distance with it. The gears just click into place and you realize you’re reading something that is an order of magnitude different than the seventy-five other things that have crossed your desk lately, many of which were perfectly good and perfectly competent.
CHINSKI: And doesn’t it feel like it’s not even just talent? It’s the sensibility of the writer. I think about a writer whom I don’t work with but whom I admire, Aleksandar Hemon. He does that funny thing where he doesn’t use words in an ordinary way, and yet they work and they suggest a whole worldview. Or look at Chris Adrian, whom I do work with and adore. I mean, his writing is really difficult. It’s about dying and suffering children—you can’t imagine a more difficult subject. But again, there’s a kind of intensity of imagination and a way of articulating things that goes beyond good writing. There is a force and energy to the writing. I think that’s the hardest thing to find in fiction, at least for me, and that’s what I find myself responding to again and again.
NASH: For me it’s also when a work of fiction has the force of society behind it on some level. Which is not necessarily to say that it has to be political—I do far less political fiction than people think—but I do want to feel that the writer has access to something larger than himself. To me, the energy you’re talking about is something that possesses social force and a concatenation of relationships and responses to the world lived in a certain kind of way. I try to forbid myself from using the word authenticity because I don’t actually know what the hell it is, but that’s one way of talking about it.
CHINSKI: I have a related question. What do you all think of the word voice? It’s one of those words that we all overuse, but do we actually know what it is? I always find myself reaching for it when I want to describe why I like something and why I don’t like other things that are perfectly well written. But when I really try to figure out exactly what I mean by it, I come back to what I was saying before. Is sensibility the same thing as a writer having a voice?
GARGAGLIANO: If it comes alive for you, and you can hear it in your head, and it sort of lives inside you, that’s when I feel like a writer has a voice. That’s when I’ll keep going back to something again and again. One of my favorite writers when I was falling in love with literature was Jeanette Winterson. It was just about her voice. I kept loving her books even when the stories themselves started to fall apart. I just wanted to hear that voice in my head. For me, with her, it stopped being about the storytelling, which is unusual. I love story. I want plots in my books.
CHINSKI: And you can think about writers who don’t actually tell stories. The Europeans, for example. We always have one: Thomas Bernhard; Sebald; now Bolaño. It feels like there’s always one of these writers who isn’t writing plot-driven fiction. The voice is so strong that that’s what people are responding to. With Bolaño, I find it kind of amazing that you have this nine-hundred-page novel by a dead Spanish-language writer…I mean, I can’t honestly believe that everybody who’s buying it is reading the whole thing. But it goes back to what you were saying, Richard, about the voice having the force of history and almost being haunted by these bigger issues.
NASH: Haunted is totally the word. Beckett had it too, obviously.
CHINSKI: Or look at Philip Roth. Even in his lesser novels, you can always recognize that kind of force in his writing.
NASH: What you just said reminds me of an artist named Bruce Nauman. I went to see a retrospective of his before I was in publishing. There was this sense, as you went from room to room, that the guy just had access to something that he wasn’t going to lose access to. You know what I mean? There was a certain frequency of the world to which he was tuned in. It could express itself in different ways, but he wasn’t going to lose his capacity to listen to it, as a result of which the work was always going to be operating on a certain level. He might vary between, I don’t know, brilliant and mind-blowing, but he wasn’t going to fuck up. Those voices, and those Europeans you were mentioning, are probably at the very upper level.
CHINSKI: That’s right. They always seem to have a certain set of questions that they’re asking. Even if they’re writing very different novels from book to book, they’re haunted by one or two or three questions, and no matter what they write, they seem to circle around them. That may have something to do with the voice they bring to a book. I mean, even Sasha Hemon, who’s only written three books—you can tell what his obsessions are. That’s another thing: I like writers who are obsessed. Chris Adrian is obsessed too. That’s what’s exciting about reading certain fiction writers.

Aside from what’s on the page, and somebody’s skill as a writer or voice or obsessions, what other things influence your thinking and decision-making?
GARGAGLIANO: One of the things can be when a book taps into something that’s happening in the moment. I’m editing a book right now that’s set after World War II in a psychiatric hospital, and it’s really a book about what happens to soldiers when they come back from war. I find myself obsessed with the news and weeping when I watch Channel Thirteen because I’ve been inside of this story for so long and I understand the psychology of these men coming back. I’m hoping that there will be a resonance when we publish it. You’re always trying to process things in the world, and when you read a really good piece of fiction, it helps you process things.
CHINSKI: The word necessary always comes to mind for me. Beyond a good story, beyond good writing, does the novel feel necessary? A lot of good books are written, and I’m not saying that they shouldn’t be published, but as an editor you can’t work on everything, and the ones I tend to be drawn to are the ones that either feel personally necessary or globally necessary in some vague way that’s hard to define. And that should be at the sentence level, too. People who can write really well sometimes get carried away by their own writing and forget what’s actually necessary on the page. I would also raise the question of believability. A book can be surreal and fantastical and all that, so it’s not believable in any straight sense, but it has to be believable in the sense that the author believes in what he or she is doing. Sometimes you feel like an author is just writing for the sake of writing, and that is a big turnoff. It’s got to feel necessary at every level.
BOUDREAUX: As an editor, you know how difficult the in-house process is going to be—the process of getting a book out there. The necessary quotient comes up when you ask yourself, “Is this something that really fires me up? What’s going to happen when I give it to these two reps to read? Are they going to have the same reaction to some pretty significant extent and feel the need to convey their enthusiasm down the line?” Because I think word of mouth remains the best thing we can ever do for a book. So is there that necessary thing? Is there that urgency? Is it in some significant way different from any number of other novels that purport to talk about the same topic? It’s almost like an electrical pulse traveling down a wire. It starts with the author, then the agent, then the editor, and then there are a lot of telephone poles it’s got to go through from there. If it’s lacking in any way, you know that the electricity is going to peter out. Sometimes you can almost see it happen. You can watch it happen between one sales rep and another sales rep. You’re like, “Oh, that just petered out between those two telephone poles.” And the book is only going to do so much.

When a lot of us were starting out I think we may have felt like, “Oh, it’s a little book, but it’s my job to make it work, and I’m going to.” I feel less like that now. Because you can’t work on everything, and you can’t do everything for every book. Even when you do do everything you can think of, so many good books get ignored. So many good books go by the wayside. You’ve got to be able to figure out if each one is necessary enough that you can really do something with it. Because it’s not that rewarding as the editor, or as the author, to just have a book sit there—when it dies a quiet death and nobody even hears it sink. “We tried! We’ll do better with the paperback!” The number of times you hear that! You know you’re lying and they know you’re lying and everyone’s just going to pretend it will be totally different a year from now.

It’s got to have enough juice in it to go somewhere. I feel like that juice can take any number of forms. It’s an ineffable quality, but you kind of know it when you’ve got it in front of you. Everyone is not going to agree on fiction, either. I do pretty much all fiction. When I want to buy something, in most cases nobody else is going to read the whole thing. They’re going to believe me when I say it’s good all the way to the end. They just like the voice and then we run with it. You’re never going to get a whole roomful of people to agree on fiction the way you sometimes can with nonfiction: “Is this the right book at the right time by the right person with the right platform to write the book on whatever?” With fiction it’s all sort of amorphous, and you’ve just got to feel like you’re picking the ones that are potent enough to go the distance.
NASH: We’re all just proxies for the reader. But we’re going to have different ideas about who the reader is and how we connect to that reader. Do we have commonality with this imaginary reader? But I certainly find that I am powerfully animated by the sense of having a duty to connect the writer with the reader. Is this a book that’s going to get one person to tell another person that they’ve got to read it? Which is the closest thing, I think, at least in the land of fiction, that’s going to pass for figuring out what the hell is meant by the word commercial. As you said, your own energy can always get one other person to read the book. But is that one other person going to get the next person to read the book?

Are there any other things, besides what’s on the page, that you’re looking at when a book is submitted?
GARGAGLIANO: This was one of the hardest lessons for me. Unlike what Eric was saying earlier, when I used to read fiction before I was in publishing, I never wanted to know who the author was. I didn’t want to look at their pictures. I just wanted to exist in the worlds that they had created. That was it. When I got into the industry, I quickly learned that that was not acceptable. The first thing I get asked at our editorial meeting is, “Where have they published?” You want to know that somebody has been publishing their short stories, even if a total of a hundred people have read them. It’s always the first question.
CHINSKI: One thing I’m looking for is experience in the world. I keep coming back to Chris Adrian, not for any particular reason. But he’s somebody who has an MFA, he’s a practicing doctor specializing in pediatric oncology, he’s in divinity school, and you can feel all of that in his writing. There’s an urgency, a sense of questioning, and an obsession. You can tell that all of that experience is getting distilled into his writing. He wants to understand something about loss and our relationship to transcendence. I feel like with the best writers, you recognize that in their work. It’s exciting to me to feel like it’s being drawn not just out of the desire to write an interesting story and find readers. It’s a different form of necessity that they feel they need to wrestle with because of their own life experience.
BOUDREAUX: I’ve never been able to say what my books have in common. I’ll make an argument for escapism. I want to be transported. I don’t care where you take me, but I want to have that moment that we all had when we were reading as kids, when the real world ceases to exist and your mother tells you to come have dinner and it’s like resurfacing from the bottom of a swimming pool. “Where am I? What am I doing?” That’s what I want. I’m not looking for any particular kind of book, I’m just looking for the intensity of that experience. It doesn’t matter what agent it comes from. It doesn’t matter if it’s long or short. It doesn’t matter if it’s a young voice or something that’s more mature. I just feel like you sit there as a proxy for the reader, open to having a new experience. And if they can give it to you, great. I don’t even need it to happen in the first sentence. I’ll give it three or four pages sometimes. [Laughter.] I’m seven months pregnant so I’m feeling patient and maternal toward the world—I’ll give them four or five pages to say something that I find interesting.

On the flip side of that, give me some things that you find beginning writers doing wrong.
NASH: Not listening. Not listening to the world around them.
GARGAGLIANO: Trying to sell stories that aren’t really a book. They’re not a cohesive whole. There’s no vision to the whole thing that makes me feel like this person has a reason for writing a story collection other than that they had twelve stories.
NASH: Assuming that having an attitude equals…anything.
CHINSKI: Or assuming that good writing is enough. I’m sure we all see a lot of stuff where the writing is really good. It’s well crafted and you can tell that the writer has talent. But, again, you don’t really feel like the writer necessarily believes in his or her ability to open it up into a novel. I know the old adage “write what you know.” I’d kind of rather somebody write what they don’t know. And figure out, beyond their own personal experience, why what they’re doing should matter to the reader.
BOUDREAUX: I’ve always wanted to give people that advice too. “Do you have to write what you know? If you know it, I might know it. Which means I’ve already read it. Which means that your book is the nineteenth novel about a mother-daughter relationship. And I. Don’t. Care.” The crudest way to put it is the “Who cares?” factor. Why, why, why do I need to read four hundred pages about this? The necessary thing, and the authentic thing, and the voice thing are all much better ways of saying it than the “Who cares?” factor, but it’s basically the same thing. “What is the necessity of reading this? What are you doing that is different?”
CHINSKI: I’d rather somebody be ambitious and fail a little bit than read a perfectly crafted, tame novel.
NASH: I have published novels, especially first novels, that I knew failed on some level because of what they were trying to do. I felt that that was okay.
CHINSKI: That’s more exciting.
NASH: But what would be the version of that that actually answered your question?
CHINSKI: “Have courage”?
NASH: Don’t try to be perfect. Don’t be boring.
CHINSKI: That’s really what it is 99.9 percent of the time—good writing, but boring. And it’s the hardest thing to turn down because you think, “This is good. But it doesn’t do anything for me.”
BOUDREAUX: That’s the thing. You’re like, “There’s nothing wrong with this. I’ve got nothing to tell you to do to fix it. It’s just…there.”
CHINSKI: And that’s a hard rejection letter to write, too. Because it’s not like you can point to this, that, and the other thing that are wrong with it. It just doesn’t move you in any way. It doesn’t feel necessary.

Do you think it’s too hard to get published today?
GARGAGLIANO: I think it’s hard but not too hard. I don’t know how many more books we could have out there.
BOUDREAUX: I think we all kind of know that too many books get published. You can listen to your own imprint’s launch meeting, you can listen to all the other imprints’ launch meetings, and multiply that by every other house, and you know that every book did not feel necessary to every editor. When you think about it that way, it doesn’t seem all that hard to get published.
CHINSKI: But there are also a lot of people who can’t get published.
NASH: There was a great little moment in an article in Wired about a year ago. It was an article about the million-dollar prize that Netflix is giving for anyone who can improve their algorithm—”If you liked this, you’ll like that”—by 10 percent. One of the people in the article was quoted as saying that the twentieth century was a problem of supply, and the twenty-first century is a problem of demand. I think that describes a lot about the book publishing business right now. For a long time, racism, classism, and sexism prevented a whole array of talent from having access to a level of educational privilege that would allow them to write full-length books. That hasn’t been completely solved, but it’s been radically improved since the 1950s. Far more persons of color, women, and people below the upper class have access now. An entire agent community has arisen to represent them. But finding the audience is the big problem. I guess I’m imposing my own question on the question you asked—”Is it too hard to get published?”—and I think we all may have heard a slightly different version of that question. The version of it that I heard was, “Are there too many books?” I personally don’t feel that way. And I get a lot of submissions at Soft Skull. I get about 150 a week. And it’s hell having so much supply. But we didn’t exist before 1993, and you guys all existed before that, so you are feeding off a different supply and we’re enabling this new supply. I love the fact that Two Dollar Radio exists, and all the other new indie presses that have erupted. I think that’s healthy. I don’t think a solution to the problems we face as an industry is to say we’re going to reduce consumer choice by publishing fewer books. Now, at the level of the individual publisher, I totally understand it as a rational decision that a given executive committee would make at a large company. My comment that there are not too many books published has to do with culture rather than a given economic enterprise. I think we could publish more books. You just have to recognize that they may be read by five hundred people. And that’s perfectly legitimate. Blogs can be read by fifty people. You just have to think, “What’s the economically and environmentally rational thing to do with this thing that has an audience—but that audience is just 150 or 250 people?” It may not be to print the book. It may be to publish it through a labor-of-love operation that is completely committed to a given set of aesthetic principles and will print it in a way that is environmentally sensitive—chapbook publishing, let’s say. The poetry model could have a lot to say to fiction and nonfiction publishing.

I think about the midlist writer a lot and I feel like it’s harder and harder to build a career the old-fashioned way—slowly, over several books that might not be perfect but allow you to develop as a writer. Part of that has to do with the electronic sales track. Put yourself in the shoes of a beginning writer and speak to that.
BOUDREAUX: When we published Serena by Ron Rash it was such a proud moment of doing that thing—of almost reinventing a writer. So I feel like it can still happen. The model of building somebody hasn’t gone completely out the window. It gets hard with the “This is what we sold of the last book, this is all we’re ordering this time.” And you’re stuck with it. But a lot of editors and a lot of publishers stick with people.
GARGAGLIANO: I feel like Scribner is really good about that. We can’t do it with everyone, but there is definitely a stable of authors. I have writers for whom I haven’t had to fight that hard to buy their second or third books. It’s because everyone recognizes their talent.
NASH: It can be because the reps love selling them. The reps love reading that galley, even if they’re going to get [orders of] ones and twos. But it makes them so happy to read that galley that they’re not going to fight you when you present it to them.
CHINSKI: You have to think about the identity of the list as a whole, too. Sometimes it means paying an author less than what they’ve received before, but it doesn’t mean we’re giving up on those authors. I think, speaking for FSG, it’s important to us to try to build writers. Roger Straus apparently said, and Jonathan always says, “We publish authors, not books.” That’s more difficult today, given the way of the world, but it’s still the guiding principle. Think about Jonathan Franzen, who published two novels that got great reviews but didn’t sell particularly well. Then The Corrections came along. There are tons of examples like that.

But aren’t you guys and FSG the exception to that in a lot of ways?
CHINSKI: I wonder if it’s really that new. Obviously the mechanics have changed, but there’s always been a huge midlist. We remember the really important writers. We probably don’t even remember the best-selling writers from twenty years ago. You remember the important ones—or the ones that have been canonized as important. The economics have changed and obviously the chain bookstores are a different part of the equation than they were fifty years ago, but I suspect there’s always been a vast midlist.
GARGAGLIANO: I also don’t think it’s very constructive for authors to think about that too much. You’re sort of fortunate if you get published at all. You’re fortunate to find an editor who you have a great relationship with and a house that believes in you in which everybody works as hard as they can for you. There’s only so much you can do.
NASH: If you’re going to stress about something, be worrying about your reader. Don’t stare at your Amazon ranking and don’t stare at the number of galleys your publisher is printing. Get out into the world. And if you don’t have the personality to get out into the world, then you have to ask yourself, “Why does everybody else have to have the personality to get out into the world, but I don’t? What makes me so special that everybody else has to go out and bang the drum for me, but I don’t?” I have a fairly limited tolerance for people who assume that it is everybody else’s job to sell their books while they get to be pure and pristine. They don’t have to get the book-publishing equivalent of dirt under their fingernails. Which involves whoring, to use a sexist term, but one that I use to describe myself. [Laughter.] Go out and find a reader. It’s not about selling a reader a $14.95 book. If you have ten more books under your thumb, then that reader could be worth $150 to you, and it might actually be worth three minutes of your time to respond to their e-mail or chat with them for an extra two minutes after that reading at which it seemed like no one showed up. Those eight people might have some influence out in the world. None of us is in this for the money. It’s sort of mind-boggling how many people think that we’re sitting there behind our cushy desks. There’s just no one in publishing who couldn’t have made more money doing something else. At a certain point, yes, we may have become unemployable in any other industry. But there was a period of time in everyone’s career when he or she could have gone in a different direction and made more money, and chose not to.
GARGAGLIANO: Can I add one more thing? We keep talking about self-promotion, and I think there’s a stigma that it’s a negative thing. It’s really an extension of that deep involvement we were talking about earlier. It’s about being really passionate about your book. It’s a way to figure out how to make the world of your book bigger, and to give other people access to it. I think it’s helpful if authors can wrap their heads around looking at it from a different perspective. I have a lot of authors who are afraid to go out there. They think it’s about them. It’s actually about the book. It’s about the writing. It’s not about you personally.
NASH: It’s about being part of the world around you. One of the freelance publicists I know—I’ve never been able to afford to use her, but I’m friendly with her—does something that I think is brilliant in terms of dealing with a new author. Rather than trying to make an author blog, which is always hell, she says, “Here are twenty blogs that you should read.” And by doing that, they get into it. They start commenting. All of the sudden they start getting that this act of communication is no different than a conversation between two people. It gets the author to start realizing that they’re in a community, and that participating in that community is what we’re talking about when we say “self-promotion.” It isn’t this tawdry, icky activity that will demean them. It will help make them feel more connected to the world, and happier.
GARGAGLIANO: I’ll give you an example. I published this book about fruit—talk about obsessive people—called The Fruit Hunters. The author is this guy who was writing food stories for magazines and became obsessed with fruit and went on to discover this whole obsessive world of fruit lovers. The book came out and got a lot of attention, and the sales were okay, but it has fostered this whole community of people who are also obsessed. The other day they had an event in a community garden in the East Village. They call themselves the Fruit Hunters, after the book, and they’re going to take trips together and everything. There are already a hundred of them. It’s this amazing little story of obsession. It’s exciting. The author is very involved online. He’s happy to engage with anyone who wants to talk to him. He’s just really present, and that makes all the difference.

I’m interested in how you guys view your jobs. It seems to me that things have changed quite a bit over time and I’m curious how you see what you do.
CHINSKI: Things have changed a lot. But in terms of the actual editing and acquiring, I don’t feel like I’m thinking very differently about what I’m signing up, and in terms of the editing, I still have the same basic ideas of what my role is, which is to make the book more of what it already is—rather than coming in with some foreign idea and imposing it on the book. I try to understand what the writer is trying to do with the book and edit it along those lines. But when I first started in publishing, I had no idea that the role of the editor was to communicate to the marketing and sales departments. I had this very dark-and-stormy-night vision of the editor sitting in a room poring over manuscripts. But you very quickly realize that a natural part of being excited about a book is wanting to tell other people about it, in the same way we do as readers. That’s what our job is in-house. And obviously it probably is different now, in terms of the chain stores and all these other things. But I think an editor’s job is basically to fall in love with a book and then to help it be more of what it already is.
GARGAGLIANO: I feel very similarly. I’m the first reader, and I’m there to make the book what it wants to be, and then I’m its best advocate. I’m its advocate to people in the company because often they’re not going to read it—they’re only going to get my take on it—and then I’m its advocate to the rest of the world. I write handwritten notes to booksellers. I write to magazine people. I’m constantly promoting my authors. I feel like I’m the one who was responsible for getting them into the company, and I’m the one who’s responsible for getting them into the world. I have to take care of them.
BOUDREAUX: The most fun part of being an editor is getting to actually edit—getting to sit and play puzzle with the book. God, that is so much fun! That’s what we like to do. We need to do all of these other things…but sitting there with the paper, which you only get to do on the weekends? That’s when you get excited. Like, “I’m a real editor!” But this myth that nobody edits anymore compared with a hundred years ago? I’ve never worked with an editor who doesn’t edit all weekend long, every single night. That’s the fun part.
CHINSKI: I think that’s important to emphasize. I think we all hear that editors don’t edit anymore.
BOUDREAUX: I just don’t know who they’re talking about. Having worked at two different houses, I literally do not know who they are talking about. Who just acquires and doesn’t edit? I feel like everybody I’ve ever worked with sweats blood over manuscripts. And you reap the rewards of doing that.
NASH: I suspect that agents are doing more editorial work on books before they submit them in order to polish the apple. To some extent the process of acquisition has become more collegial, and it’s helpful if a book is not a dog’s dinner when you’re showing it to people before you can start working on it yourself. That can create the perception that not much happened after it was acquired. And when you have the goal of helping to make a book as much like itself as it can be, that can involve a level of editing that doesn’t look very intense on the surface but actually can be quite important. It doesn’t have to involve a whole lot of red ink. But the right red ink in the right places, especially when it’s subtractive rather than additive, can really make a book fluoresce.

Why did you all become editors instead of agents? And why do you stay editors when by all accounts you could make a lot more money being an agent?
CHINSKI: Has anybody here ever worked at an agency? My first job, for three months, was at an agency. That’s why I’m an editor. But sometimes I do think that agents get a more global view of things. Dealing with film and foreign rights and so on.

But in other ways they get a more limited view because they don’t have to do all the things to make a book work.
CHINSKI: I think that’s true. Wouldn’t that be more fun? [Laughter.] But seriously, when I was working there I didn’t leave because I didn’t like working at an agency. It just wasn’t working as a job. I have a really hard time imagining myself as an agent. It’s partly just the obvious stuff of doing the deal and so on. I think you have to have a certain personality to get really excited about that. I’d rather go home and really devote myself to doing the editing. I know that some agents do that. But it’s not, kind of nominally, what they are there for.
BOUDREAUX: I literally didn’t know there was such a thing as a literary agent. I didn’t know anything. I was like, “I guess those people who get to work with books would be editors.” I just didn’t know any better. And I love to play with the words, which they also get to do, but they’re not the final word on it. I also don’t do enough nonfiction, which I feel like any editor who’s got any sense learns to do. But I just don’t have the antenna for it. As an agent it would be even scarier to have a list that is 95 percent fiction. You probably need a balanced portfolio in a way that an editor can still get away with being more fiction-heavy.

What are the hardest decisions you have to make as editors?
CHINSKI: Jackets. I find that the most harrowing part of the whole process. As an editor, you’re in this funny position of both being an advocate for the house to the author and agent but also being an advocate for the author to everybody in-house. The editor is kind of betwixt and between. And for a lot of books, especially fiction, the jacket is the only marketing tool you have. It’s really difficult. I also find that I know what I don’t like, but I don’t have the visual vocabulary to describe what I think might work.
BOUDREAUX: And the cover is so important. Even if it’s not the only thing that’s being done for a book, it’s still got to be one of the most important things. You’ve got reviews and word-of-mouth, and then you’ve just got the effect it has when somebody walks into the store and sees it. I think it’s so important to work somewhere where your art people will read the book and come up with something that you never would have come up with yourself. The idea of a jacket meeting where you have twelve people around a table and you bring it down to the lowest common denominator of “It’s a book about this set there. We need a crab pot at sunset with a…” People do that! They think it’s a marketing-savvy way to go about it. “We need a young person on the cover. But you shouldn’t be able to see the person’s face. It has to be from behind!”
GARGAGLIANO: The same thing happens when the author tries to deconstruct the cover.
CHINSKI: Exactly. That’s one thing that’s changed a lot. When I first started, we would send the author hard copies of the [proposed] jacket. Now we email it to them and they send it to everybody in their family. You can predict exactly what’s going to happen.

What are the other hard decisions you have to make?
GARGAGLIANO: I have two, and they’re related. One of them is when I love a book but I don’t actually think that we’re going to do the best job of publishing it. I anguish about that because I want the book for myself, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the right thing for the author. The step beyond that is when you’ve already been publishing someone, and it’s the question of what’s best for their career. You offer a certain amount of money, and the agent wants to take the author somewhere else, and you have to ask yourself whether or not you go to bat for that person and get more money because you want to keep working with them despite whether the house might really support them. That’s a hard thing to figure out.

I think part of what makes it hard is that editors serve different masters—the authors, the agents, the house. How do you guys navigate those allegiances and responsibilities?
NASH: I will confess that I came into this business not motivated to become an editor. I was a theater director and happened upon Soft Skull because the guy who founded it was a playwright whose plays I directed. The whole thing was going belly up in the middle of my friendship with this dude. He basically did a runner, and there were these two twenty-two-year-olds at the company, and no one else, and there were all these authors, and the whole thing was fucked. I had a messiah complex and came in and tried to be Mr. Messiah for six months. And in the middle of my messiah complex, I fell in love with the process of publishing. So in a weird way, I did not come in with the idea of working with writers. I came in as a problem solver, and that’s all I’ve ever been in a certain sense. The problem I try to solve is, “How do you connect writers and readers?” Those are the two masters for me. Recently I’ve been trying to think, believe it or not, of the publishing business as a service industry in which we provide two services simultaneously, to the author and to the reader. We may pretend to offer a service to the agent, and we may pretend to offer a service to the company. But only to the extent that we fulfill those other two services—to the writer and to the reader—are we truly serving the agent or the company. And we have to use our own instincts on a minute-to-minute psychological basis. Obviously you’re accountable to the bottom line and P&Ls etcetera, but you’re being asked to use your own instincts, and that’s what you have to use in order to bring writers and readers together.
GARGAGLIANO: There are moments when it’s sticky. When you’re dealing with a jacket, for example. But on the whole, everybody wants the same thing, and that makes it easy. The thing that I always have to remind myself is that the people who are on the sales end also love books, and they also love to read, and they could be making more money in some other industry too. When you remember that, it makes your job much easier.
CHINSKI: I agree that we do all want the same thing, but don’t you find that sometimes people don’t behave that way?
GARGAGLIANO: Sometimes. But sometimes they do.
CHINSKI: It just amazes me how combative the relationship can become. I mean, it doesn’t happen that often, but it does become combative sometimes. When we were talking before about authors saying that editors don’t edit…there’s just this assumption that the publisher isn’t doing enough. Sometimes agents don’t quite understand how things actually work in the publishing house. I’m not saying that across the board. But it does happen. I find those situations really difficult, where you feel like you’re being accused of somehow not caring enough about the author when we all know how many hurdles there are. I mean, we wouldn’t be doing this if we didn’t care.
GARGAGLIANO: I’ve been very lucky with my authors. I haven’t had many bad ones. The relationship is all about trust, and once you start that relationship and you start that dialogue, they trust that you’re taking care of them. But there is a point when it’s out of the editor’s hands. And if they’ve trusted you that far, most of the time they’ll accept whatever happens, in my experience. Usually the call I get will be from the agent.
BOUDREAUX: It’s like you can almost have two different conversations. In one of them the agent gets what’s going on and is just being helpful and trying to get everyone on the same page. And in the other one somebody is making demands or accusations that aren’t going to actually help anything. It’s more just for show. You know, “Emboss this part of the jacket” for no good reason. You do get the feeling sometimes that they are fulfilling their service to the author in a way that actually doesn’t have that much to do with the book.
GARGAGLIANO: But that’s the agent. I’m more worried about my author’s happiness.
CHINSKI: I agree with that. A combative relationship with an author is pretty rare. Obviously it happens sometimes, but I’m thinking more about the agent. I don’t want to overstate it, but sometimes it does feel like we should all understand more that we do all actually want the same thing. No publisher or editor signs up a book in order to sink it. Who would do that? We’re not getting paid enough to be in this business for any reason other than we actually love the books we’re working on.

What do you wish writers knew about you that they sometimes don’t?
GARGAGLIANO: I think most writers don’t realize that every editor goes home and reads and edits for four hours—that they’re not doing that in the office. That in the office they’re advocating for all of the authors they already have.
NASH: I don’t even get to read when I go home. When I go home, I’m continuing to advocate. I haven’t been able to read at all recently. I’ve really just become a pure pimp.
CHINSKI: I thought you were a whore.
NASH: I’m both at once! It depends on the street I’m walking down.

What else?
GARGAGLIANO: I think it’s important for writers to remember that we’re not their enemy. We love books and we’re looking for books that we love.
CHINSKI: And ads are not love.
GARGAGLIANO: And ads do not equal sales.
BOUDREAUX: If those two things appear in print—that we’re working nights and weekends and ads don’t sell books—we have all done a fine job here. We are martyrs to the cause and ads are ridiculous. But I think editors like ads too. It’s like having your business card published in the New York Times.

Have you guys ever gotten any great advice about your jobs from a colleague or a mentor?
CHINSKI: I can quote somebody, Pat Strachan, who is one of the most elegant, serious, and lovely people in the business. She said to me, “Just remember, when you’re all stressed out, that the lives of young children are not at stake.” And I do think that’s worth remembering. We all love what we do and we take it really seriously, but you have to keep things in perspective. I also have one from David Rosenthal. He used to say, “If you’re going to overpay for a book, you should at least be able to imagine the things that have to happen for it to work at that level, even if it may not actually work at that level.”
BOUDREAUX: It should be in the realm of possibility.
CHINSKI: Yeah, and you should be able to picture, very concretely, what would have to happen and how you might go about making those things happen. You don’t want to just buy something blindly.

What have your authors taught you about how to do your job?
GARGAGLIANO: To be honest with them. I often have the impulse to protect my authors and treat them as if they are more fragile than they actually are. It’s better if I can have an open conversation with them. If I start that early on, the better our relationship is going to be going forward, and the easier it will be to talk about tough things. That took me a while to figure out.
BOUDREAUX: They teach you over and over and over—and this is so obvious—but they will always have a better solution to an editing problem than anything you could come up with. If you just raise the question, they will solve it. The universe of their book is more real to them than it could ever be to anyone else. You trust them with the internal logic of what’s going on. You just show them where the web is a little weak—where everything that was so fully imagined in their head has not quite made it down to the page. Not only, as you said, are they not that fragile, but the world they’ve created is not that fragile. You can poke at it endlessly, and you’ll just get really good answers and really good solutions. When you bring something up, you never find that you will unravel the whole sleeve. I’ve never had that happen. Where it’s like, “Oooooh, we’d better hope that nobody notices that.”

How do you guys measure your success as an editor?
NASH: Survival.

Tell me more.
NASH: For me, for a long time, there was a very direct correspondence between the success of my books and my ability to eat pizza. Now, in the last year, it has become less direct, since I don’t have to make payroll, least of all my own, anymore. Because in the past, in order to make payroll, I would do it by not making my own payroll.

But what about in a deeper sense?
NASH: I suppose I was answering as a publisher, which is what I was and in a sense what I am anterior to being an editor.

I think I just mean more internally, in a more internal way.
NASH: When the book becomes what you imagined it was going to be based on the fact that it was almost already there. And you helped it get there.
CHINSKI: But we all want more than that, too, don’t we?

That’s what I’m trying to get at.
CHINSKI: We all want our books to have an impact. Beyond sales in any kind of simple sense. You want people to talk about them. You want people to find each other because of them. I worked with a writer who very elegantly described a book as a table that everybody can sit around and start a conversation around. And I think, not to sound terribly cheesy about it, that’s what we all want. We want our books to have an impact in the world. And that’s really rare. Sometimes it has nothing to do with sales. So I think it’s more than just feeling like you did your job on the page. It’s feeling like you did your job in the world.
GARGAGLIANO: That it went beyond you.
CHINSKI: Yeah. Books should transcend themselves in some way, and I think that’s what we all really want.
NASH: The reason I got excited about publishing, compared to theater, was that the theater I was doing had no fucking impact on the world whatsoever.
GARGAGLIANO: Do you feel like it’s better in publishing?
NASH: It’s immensely better. Now, it may be that the joy I get from publishing is relative to how hard it was in downtown, experimental, Richard Foreman-acolyte theater. I set the bar so low for myself! [Laughter.] But in publishing, even indie publishing, thousands of people who I will never meet, who don’t want to act for me, will actually buy one of my books.
CHINSKI: That reminds me of another great quote that I’ll probably get slightly wrong. I remember when Philip Roth came to sales conference at Houghton Mifflin. I think it was for The Human Stain. He gave a presentation to the sales force and basically talked about the death of the novel as a force in our culture. “That’ll be a good way to get the sales reps really excited!” [Laughter.] But then he said the most extraordinary thing, which has always stayed with me and which I’ve said to a lot of writers. He said that if his books were to sell ten thousand copies, which doesn’t sound like a whole lot, but if he were to sit in a room, and each one of those people were to walk by him, and he could see them face to face, it would break his heart. I can’t believe I forgot that earlier. That’s probably the best description of why we do what we do. Whether it’s three thousand people buying a novel, or five hundred people buying a book of poetry, it does kind of break your heart if you actually imagine each of those individuals reading the book.
NASH: That’s why it was not a value judgment when I said the audience for a book might only be 150 people, in this world of more books. It’s about the intensity with which that connection might occur.
CHINSKI: Do you guys all remember one moment where you felt really content? Whether it was something specific that happened or just a moment in your career? Where you felt like, “Okay, this is it. Now I’m kind of happy. This is all I could ever want.” Where you actually slept well for one night?

I like the question.
GARGAGLIANO: That is a good question. [Laughter]
CHINSKI: I mean, I’m just wondering, was it when a book hit the best-seller list? Was it when a book got a great review? I’m curious what those different feelings are.
BOUDREAUX: I’m trying to come up with something that won’t sound like complete dorkiness. I mean, yeah, the best-seller list feels amazing. It feels amazing because of all the great books we watch not get read. When you see one that’s actually getting read? Boy is that an amazing feeling. But that little moment of satisfaction? I was trying to think, “What was the first time as an editor that I really felt that way?” Maybe being promoted to editor was my greatest moment. You know, Ann Godoff was doing the benediction and it was kind of like, “You are now an editor. On your tombstone they can say you were an editor.” I had this little glimmering moment of, “Yeah! I came here, I didn’t even know what publishing was, barely, and now…” Thank God for the Radcliffe Publishing Course. I wouldn’t have had any idea of how anybody moves to New York or gets a job had I not ended up doing that. I had been working at Longstreet Press in Atlanta, where we published Jeff Foxworthy’s You Might Be a Redneck If… That’s actually my proudest moment—what was I doing forgetting that? But seriously, I did that course because I didn’t know anything about anything and I thought I’d go back to Longstreet and work there. But then I thought, “Well, gosh, maybe I’ll try New York for one year. I’m sure I’ll end up back down in Atlanta before long, hoping that somebody at Algonquin would die so that somebody from the South could get a job at a slightly bigger publisher whose books you actually occasionally heard about.” You know, I think actually getting promoted to editor was sort of like, “Wow, here I am. This is really a job that I’m really going to get to do.” I still sort of feel amazed at that.
GARGAGLIANO: Getting a good review is also amazing. It’s so gratifying when you have loved this thing for so long and somebody in the public says that they love it too. It’s a thrill.
BOUDREAUX: Getting a review in a place that’s always been hard to crack. I’d bring up Ron Rash again. He was a regional author who had never been reviewed in the Times, never been reviewed in the Washington Post. He had this Southern fan base. The booksellers loved him. The San Francisco and L.A. papers had been good to him in the past. But everybody else ignored him. Getting him a daily review in the Times was such a bursting-buttons proud moment for him. I’ve never been happier about the work I’ve seen my company do on a book. Because we knew what he had felt like he’d been missing. And there it was, lining up—the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Yorker—when everybody had been ignoring him.
NASH: For me it was the summer of 2002, when there were two things that persuaded me that I should stay in the business. One was the first book I ever acquired, by a woman named Jenny Davidson, who I’d gone to college with. I was not even sure what one did at a publisher, and I thought, “I should acquire something.” We had to find books because there was nothing in the pipeline. So I asked around and my old college friend had a novel that no one wanted to publish. I didn’t know what galleys were at that point. But at one point our distributor asked us for some galleys, so we printed out manuscripts and tape-bound them and sent them some places. And the book ended up getting a full-page review in the Times. It ended up being pretty much the only review it got. It didn’t get any prepubs because I probably didn’t send it to the prepubs on time. But for whatever reason, some editor at the Times Book Review decided to review it. So I had this sense of not having fucked up—this absence of failure in a world where you’re up against it.

The second thing that happened had to do with the second book I acquired, Get Your War On. I’d look at my distributor’s website and see the sales and the backorders. And one order came in—I think it was the second order that the book got—and it was Harvard Bookstore, which ordered forty copies. That was more convincing than the Times Book Review. It was the first time a bookseller had ever trusted me, the first time a bookseller had ever said, “You’re not an idiot.” I don’t think in either of those situations did I realize how hard it was. It was only later, when I tried to get the second Times review and the second forty-copy-order from an indie bookstore, that I realized how good it was.

But the second thing was bigger than the first thing because ultimately it’s about survival. I wasn’t being glib when I was talking about survival. There was a very direct, one-to-one translation between my ability to sell books and my ability to stay in business and pay everyone. There is a British publisher call Souvenir Press, apparently they’ve been around for a long time, and I got a catalog of theirs one time. It included a letter from the publisher, and in the letter he quoted some other august independent publisher, saying something to the effect of, “A publisher’s first duty to his authors is to remain solvent.” Which was instructive because if you don’t, it’s not some glorious failure. All of your authors go out of print. And one of the reasons I ended up selling the company—one of the reasons was that I fucking had to because PGW had gone tits up and there was just no way to avoid that—but there was also a sense that if I fucked up too badly, the whole thing would go kaput, and I had an accountability to the authors to not let it all go kaput because it was not going to be some cute little failure where everybody would be like, “All right, peace, Soft Skull. It was very nice but now we’ll all move on.” It was like, “Oh, there are a number of authors whose careers actually depend on this.”

Let’s talk about agents. Tell me about the difference between a good one and a bad one.
GARGAGLIANO: A good agent knows what to send you. They’re playing matchmaker, and they do it well. Those are the happiest relationships—those authors are happiest with their agents and they’re happiest with their editors.
CHINSKI: A good agent also understands the process inside the publishing house and the kinds of issues and questions that an editor has to deal with on a daily basis. But I think, most importantly, they know what they’re sending and who they’re sending it to.
BOUDREAUX: A good agent can be very helpful when you get to those sticky wickets, whether it’s the cover, or an ending that still doesn’t work, or something else. An agent who can honestly appraise the work along with you and add their voice to the chorus of why, for example, the author needs to change that title. You want it to be about the book and you want it to be about the author, but every now and then the sales force knows what the hell they’re talking about with a “This is going to get lost because it is black and it has no title on the cover. It’s not going to degrade the integrity of the book if you change it.” An agent can either be helpful in that conversation or they can sit there and be a roadblock and let you be the bad cop. An agent who’s willing to be the bad cop with you can save an author from impulses—and help them understand why it’s the right thing to do in a world where two hundred thousand books get published every year.
GARGAGLIANO: The same thing is true on the publicity front, when you have an author who wants something and you have an agent who’s able to make the additional phone call and work on the team with the publicist and the editor. It’s much better than getting a phone call from an agent who’s just yelling at you.
CHINSKI: Just to step back a little bit, obviously the agent’s job is to be the advocate for the author. But, along the lines of what you were both saying, that doesn’t always mean agreeing with everything the author says. I think sometimes the agent forgets that. That, actually, they can be most constructive for the author—not just for that book, but their career—by explaining some difficult things to their client.
GARGAGLIANO: And encouraging their author not to be difficult, which doesn’t win any fans in the house. If the agent is able to step in and say something in a constructive fashion, that is often helpful.
CHINSKI: It’s human nature. We don’t like to admit it, but people like to work for somebody who’s appreciative. That doesn’t mean, in a saccharine way, just affirming everything that the editor and publisher are doing. Obviously, we all make mistakes. But the conversation has to be constructive. We’ve all seen it over and over and over again. If an author, even if they don’t agree with you, is appreciative and trying to work constructively with the house, and so is the agent, it just changes the energy of the way people respond to that project—from the publicist to the designer to whoever. It goes back to what we were saying before: We all want the same thing, and if everybody can keep that in mind, it just makes everybody want to work all the harder on behalf of the book.
NASH: The squeaky wheel theory is bullshit in our business. It’s just complete bullshit. It doesn’t work.
CHINSKI: I have a sense that authors sometimes get that as concrete advice—to be a squeaky wheel—and for everyone out there, there’s a way to express your convictions without being…
GARGAGLIANO: And that ties into being proactive for yourself. If you’re out there doing a lot of work for yourself, that energy is—
NASH: So inspirational. When you have an author who shows up at a bookstore and then a week later the sales rep shows up at the store and the rep emails me and says, “Guess what? So-and-so just came by Third Place last week. The buyer was so excited to meet him.” Then the rep emails everyone else on the sales force and says, “Look how hard this author is working.” It’s amazing how effective an engaged author is. But if the author is like, “Why aren’t my books in Third Place?” it accomplishes nothing.

We all know that there are less than great agents out there. How are writers supposed to avoid ending up with one of them? Put yourself in their shoes.
CHINSKI: I think they need to do a lot of research, for one thing, even before they get an agent. It amazes me how many times we get query letters from agents who clearly haven’t looked at our catalog. I think they need to ask a lot of questions of whatever agent they’re thinking about signing up with and make sure the agent knows who they’re submitting to and why and so on.

But what if the author doesn’t know any of that stuff?
GARGAGLIANO: The author should know. It’s their business.
CHINSKI: So much information is available online. There’s no excuse now to not know what a house is doing and even what individual editors are doing.
GARGAGLIANO: Every time you read a book, the editor’s name is in the acknowledgments. It’s very simple.
NASH: The fact that agents don’t charge money to read is so widely an established fact online that it’s mind-boggling that you still get submissions from agents who are obviously functioning that way. The agenting equivalent of chop-shops.

I mean more the difference between a B+ agent and an A+ agent.
GARGAGLIANO: I think that goes back to what we were talking about with the author’s relationship to their editor. It’s a personal connection. You want someone who understands your work and is articulate about it and has the same vision for it and can talk to you about your whole career and not just the thing that’s in front of them. And then that conversation extends to the editor and the editor’s conversation extends to the house.
NASH: With regard to the so-called “A+” and “B+” agents, when I’ve seen authors switch agents to get somebody more high-powered it pretty much has always failed. So if that’s what meant by the difference between a B+ agent and an A+ agent, there is no difference. If they met the criteria that Alexis just articulated, then the odds are that they’re the right agent for you. I mean, there’s not a whole lot of variance in the advances I pay—there’s not a lot of variance in what I can accomplish and not accomplish. Maybe there is with you guys. I’ve always had this theory—I could be wrong—that who the agent is might make a 20 percent difference in the advance an editor is going to offer. But it’s not going to make an order-of-magnitude difference. Probably. It’s not going to be the difference between ten thousand and a hundred thousand, let’s say.
GARGAGLIANO: I think that’s true 90 percent of the time. I think there are a very select group of agents who people just pay attention to before they even know what the book is. And that sets expectations.

We may as well name them.
NASH: Nicole Aragi, presumably.
GARGAGLIANO: Tina Bennett. Lynn Nesbit. Jennifer Rudolph Walsh. Suzanne Gluck.
CHINSKI: Eric Simonoff. I mean, I know from friends at other houses that when a manuscript comes in from certain agents, they start circulating it before they even read it because they presume it’s going to go really quickly and for a lot of money. And that’s not true with other agents. It just changes the game entirely. I think an author has to understand what they want. They have to do some soul searching, for lack of a better phrase, and figure out if it’s just the money they need or if they need something else. And it’s hard to hold that against someone. I know that editors always bitch about having to pay too much, and obviously it can have big consequences in a house—if a book doesn’t earn out and so on—but you can’t really hold that against the author. We never know exactly what their circumstances are. Maybe they have five children who they need to send to college. But they need to figure out what their priorities are. I do think we’ve often stumbled up against this thing where, in the same way that people think advertising equals love, they think that the advance equals love. And that’s just not always true. But people assume that the more you pay, the more you love a book—that if you offer fifty thousand dollars more than another house, then you love it more and will be more devoted to it—and that’s not necessarily the case. I think a good agent will explain to the author what all the different variables are, and specifically within the context of what the author needs, whether it’s financial or their career more generally, and that is the ideal way to make the decision.

How do you guys feel about auctions?
CHINSKI: We try to avoid them if we can.
BOUDREAUX: I don’t mind an auction as much as I hate a best-bids [auction]. And I don’t mind a best-bids as much as I hate a best-bids and then the top three get to do it again. What the hell? Everybody does that now. It’s insane to me. And the other thing is, does everybody have to talk to the author now, or meet the author, before you get to make an offer? What happened to the arranged marriage? “Eric likes me, Eric likes you, how ’bout we do a book together.” I mean—
CHINSKI: Have you gotten the one where you don’t get to talk to the author unless you promise to make an offer in advance?
GARGAGLIANO: Oh, that’s horrible.
BOUDREAUX: That happened recently. You weren’t allowed to talk to the author unless you’d ponied up however many six figures.
CHINSKI: There’s an admission price to even talk to the author. That drives me crazy. At FSG, we try to avoid auctions. We decide what we think a book is worth, make the offer, and the author either decides to come or not come, and we bow out if it doesn’t happen.
NASH: I mean, any economist will tell you that the winner of an auction has overpaid. In a lot of worlds, outside the publishing one, certain auctions get structured so that the second highest bidder wins. Because the presumption is that the overbidder has overpaid in such a way that it could imperil the business.
BOUDREAUX: I love that! Second place wins—let’s hear it for all the B-students!
CHINSKI: All you A-students are crazy.

I hear what you’re saying, Richard, but what about with books like Everything Is Illuminated or Edgar Sawtelle? You’re not the loser if you won those auctions.
NASH: But I mean in aggregate. Any of these things are statistical, so there are always outliers.
CHINSKI: Actually, I came in second on Everything Is Illuminated.
BOUDREAUX: Were you the underbidder?
CHINSKI: I was, actually.

Apparently I was wrong.
GARGAGLIANO: To be fair, there is a benefit to an auction, which is that, at least in my position, the whole house has to pay attention to the book. You end up getting more people reading it and talking about it, and that creates a certain excitement that isn’t to be negated entirely. As long as you don’t overpay too much, within that excitement, I think it can benefit the book.
CHINSKI: But what about the problem—this is rare, but we’ve all seen it happen—where the money becomes the story behind the book. That gives me a queasy feeling. Even if it doesn’t happen in a negative way, which we’ve obviously seen happen. But if that’s the driving momentum that gets a book attention? I guess, on one level, great. We’ll take what we can get. But on another level it just makes me queasy.
GARGAGLIANO: There’s a huge difference between an auction that ends at two hundred thousand and an auction that ends at a million. There’s a huge spectrum there. But if you’re in an auction with five different houses, your publishers are going to pay attention. Because everybody else is paying attention.

 

Do you guys think you feel the money you’re spending in the same way that maybe Richard does?
BOUDREAUX: I don’t know if you sweat the difference between 150 [$150,000] and 175 [$175,000]. But you definitely…One [$100,000] and five [$500,000] are different. And five [$500,000] and three million are different. I’ll tell you what’s easier: three million. Because then everybody did have to get on board. You are not out there on your own saying, “I believe!” But those middle, lot-of-money numbers when maybe nobody else read the whole thing and somebody is letting you do it? You do feel responsible for that in a “Boy do I need to make sure I don’t make a single misstep the whole time. The manuscript has to be ready early. I’ve got to have blurbs early. We’ve got to get the cover right. I’ve got to write those hand-written notes to people.” You feel the need to justify it. But at the same time, you don’t have to lose sleep every night because you won the auction by going up ten or fifteen thousand dollars. I think auctions can be not horrible when you agree on the number beforehand. What I hate is feeling like the ego contest has begun and somebody thinks so-and-so across town has it and you’re trying to guess who it is—or somebody inside the house, when there’s a house bid situation. The bullshit competition drives me up the wall. Being in an auction and saying we think it’s worth three hundred or we think it’s worth eight hundred—I don’t sweat that if we’re making a decision beforehand. It’s when you get into the middle of it and suddenly the book that you thought was a great two hundred thousand dollar book…You’re paying four [$400,000]? Just because there are still four people in it? I mean, when an agent calls and says they have interest, that’s fine and dandy. But it’s not going to change my mind about whether I liked the book or not, and I don’t want the publisher deciding because three other houses are in and “We should get in on that, too.” So if you can make these decisions before the craziness starts, it’s fine. It’s when the craziness begins—
CHINSKI: The feeding frenzy.

But it seems like that’s how it works now. You’re getting that email from the agent right away.
GARGAGLIANO: Noooo.
CHINSKI: But don’t you feel like you get that more and more?
GARGAGLIANO: I don’t feel like it changes my mind, though.
CHINSKI: No, I just mean more as a strategy to get people to pay attention.
BOUDREAUX: I feel like, when you get a submission, you know that it’s so easy to send that everybody on earth has it already. And it’s twenty a day and there they are on your Sony Reader and the attention paid to things has diminished just by the ease with which everything gets slotted in and slotted out. And then the agent’s like, “I’ve got interest! I’ve got interest!” Well, “I’ve got a ‘No!'” I can email fast, too! [Laughter.] Unfortunately, that’s how it ends up working sometimes. “You’ve got to get back to me quickly!” “Okay, well I guess I won’t be deliberating over this very long. I’ve read ten pages and we can be done, then.” If everybody just wants to speed it up that much.
CHINSKI: But I’ve heard so many agents say that it’s becoming more and more difficult to sell a literary first novel that it almost seems like this is compensation for that. There’s so much resistance now—everybody’s trying to find a reason why they shouldn’t buy something because it is so difficult. It seems like we get more emails now that say “There’s a lot of interest” just to kind of built up that intensity from their side.
NASH: What I get to do in those situations is say, “Congratulations. I’m thrilled for the author. Next time.” I just can’t play at that level. That makes my life a lot easier. It’s a much less complicated thing than what you guys have to go through in terms of evaluating the difference between two hundred [$200,000] and four hundred [$400,000]. That’s one thing I don’t ever have to worry about. But I really learned a lot from what you were saying about how when the money gets really big, you aren’t accountable anymore. Not that you aren’t accountable—but there’s a lot of shared responsibility and the buck isn’t stopping entirely with you. Whereas there’s an in-between spot where it’s large enough that you’re exposed but not so large that anybody else is going to be wearing the flak jacket with you.
BOUDREAUX: The first book I ever preempted, I hadn’t finished reading it. It had come in to another editor who gave it to me. So I was starting it late and I hadn’t finished it and I went in to tell the publisher, “We’ve heard that somebody else is going to preempt.” The publisher said, “Okay, go offer” several hundred thousand dollars. “Okay!” So I did, and we got it—what do you know?—and the next day the publisher asked, “So what happens at the end?” I still hadn’t finished it! I was like, “They all…leave…and go home.” I didn’t know what happened! [Laughter.] That was kind of scary, and I did feel like “This one is all on me”—because not only had nobody else read the thing, but I wasn’t even certain it would hold up. As I was editing it I was like, “I hope that’s what happens at the end….” Otherwise the author’s going to be like, “Really? Why would you suggest that at the end?” I’d have to be like, “I just think it’s important that everything works out that way.”

When you look at the industry, what are the biggest problems we face right now?
CHINSKI: I think they’re all so obvious. Returns. Blogs.
GARGAGLIANO: And just finding readers.
CHINSKI: The end of cultural authority. That’s something we talk about a lot at FSG. Reviews don’t have the same impact that they used to. The one thing that really horrifies me and that seems to have happened within the last few years is that you can get a first novel on the cover of the New York Times Book Review, a long review in The New Yorker, a big profile somewhere, and it still doesn’t translate into sales. Whereas six years ago, or some mythical time not that long ago, that was the battle—to get all that attention—and if you got it, you didn’t necessarily have a best-seller, but you knew that you would cross a certain threshold. Whereas now you can get all of that and still not see the sales. I think that phenomenon is about the loss of cultural authority. There’s just so much information out there now that people don’t know who to listen to, except their friends, to figure out what to read. And that’s the question we wrestle with the most. I think publishers have to communicate more directly with readers—that’s the big barrier we’re all trying to figure out. How much to use our websites to sell directly and talk to our readers directly?

So what are you doing to try to do that? What are you experimenting with?
CHINSKI: I can think of one thing. I mean, it’s a small thing, but we recently started the FSG Reading Series uptown at the Russian Samovar. It’s amazing. It’s actually turned into a kind of scene. The New York Observer and the New Yorker have written about it. And I mean “scene” in a good way. In all the ways that we were talking about before, what makes us most happy is when a book forges a community around itself. It’s a small thing, but now if we can somehow bring that online, or expand it in some way, it will be a way for FSG as a name to mean something, which will mean that we have another way to bring our writers to readers. The names of publishers, notoriously, are not like “Sony” or other companies where the name means a whole lot to readers. It may mean something to reviewers or booksellers, but I think we all need to figure out ways to make our names mean something. That’s another way to establish authority so that people become interested in the individual books. That’s a big challenge, and there’s no easy solution to it.

What else are you guys trying to do, beyond the hand-written notes and the bigmouth mailings? What are you lying awake at night thinking about doing for this novel you’re publishing that doesn’t seem to be going anywhere?
BOUDREAUX: I pray that the people in our new media department who are supposed to be figuring out this problem are staying up late at night. That’s what I think about as I roll around at night. And they are always coming up with things that I hope will work.
CHINSKI: And now we have this amplification system, supposedly—the Internet—which is supposed to amplify our ability to create word-of-mouth. But I don’t think anybody’s quite figured out exactly how to do that—or at least how to make it translate directly into sales. We all can see, in certain cases, our books being talked about a lot online. But what does that mean in terms of sales?
NASH: In our case, we’ve never really relied much on cultural authority, although we’ve certainly used it here and there. But for the most part, to the extent that we’ve been successful, it’s been through the things that you’re asking about. I check our Web metrics several times a week, whether it’s Quantcast, Alexa, or Compete. These are places for measuring traffic. I try to figure out what the traffic is and what the demographics are. So I’m doing a lot of stuff that would probably make you want to shoot yourself.
BOUDREAUX: I’m glad you’re doing it, though, so I can read about it in this article. Then I can call somebody and say, “You should do that! That’s brilliant!”
NASH: One of your new media people, Amy Baker, was briefly involved with Soft Skull back in the day. She played on our street hockey team that was known as the Soft Skull Sandernistas, which was named after my predecessor. [Laughter.] But seriously, as Eric says, the Internet is amplified word-of-mouth. The things that are happening online are amplifying a process that’s already in place. I mean, the genius of Oprah has never been her ratings. Her ratings aren’t that spectacular compared to a lot of other shows. It’s that Oprah connects to her audience in an intimate way, as if she were one of eight women who have lunch together every Tuesday. And that intensity of relationship—plus the fact that it is able to occur on a reasonably broad scale—is her genius. So what you do is go looking around the world for people with a certain level of trust. Authority, in a certain sense, has been partially replaced by trust. Part of what you can call “trust” today is the remnants of authority. People “trust” the New York Times.
CHINSKI: And people trust their friends.
NASH: Exactly. People trust Liesl Schillinger. People trust Ed Champion. Or they hate them. And you’re just trying to get your stuff to people who are trusted. In my case that involves doing it myself, in a lot of cases.
GARGAGLIANO: This is one of the things that I get most frustrated by, partly because I didn’t care about book reviews when I wasn’t in publishing. I would never read the New York Times Book Review. I just wanted to walk into a bookstore and find something. But people don’t do that anymore. People aren’t interested in the community of books. So it’s finding the niche markets. I just published a book called The Wettest County in the World. It’s a novel about the author’s grandfather and granduncles, who ran a bootlegging ring during Prohibition. It’s amazing. And we’ve gotten IndieBound, we’ve gotten lots of things for it, and it’s gotten amazing reviews. But the sales aren’t going to happen on that alone. So I’ve been mailing it to bloggers who have beer blogs and whiskey blogs, and bourbon drinkers, and distilleries. I’m trying to find the niche market. I think that’s the way things are going. I think that kind of thinking is much more exciting—you’re more likely to find the readers who are interested—but publishers aren’t set up to find niche markets for every single book.
BOUDREAUX: That’s the thing. Do you do the whiskey mailing and then the beer mailing and this mailing and that mailing? It seems like there aren’t enough hours in the day and there isn’t enough staff—the Amy Bakers of the world—to do that.
NASH: That’s where the writer needs to come into it. And interns. That’s one of the ways in which interns can be so valuable. That’s great work for them to do—a Technorati blog search on whatever. It’s not hugely difficult, and it’s kind of interesting.
GARGAGLIANO: It can also be useful for books down the line.
CHINSKI: That raises an interesting thing for writers to consider. I mean, how many times have we all heard that a certain book is going to appeal to this audience, that audience, and everybody else in the world? You just know that it’s not true. But if you can go really deep into one community, you might sell ten thousand copies of a first novel, which most first novels never sell—at least the ones that are supposedly going to appeal to everyone. I don’t think novelists should spend too much time worrying about who their audience is, but it’s something to consider. I just think that line—”This book is going to appeal to everybody because it’s about love or family or whatever”—doesn’t work. I think the author and the publisher need to think more specifically. If you could sell one book to everybody on two city blocks in New York, you’d probably be selling more copies of that book than we do of the ones we just send out into the world and hope are going to sell magically. But how do you reach everybody on those two city blocks in New York and get them to buy the book? That’s the task, metaphorically, that so many of us are facing: how to get to them and make them believe us. Because at the end of the day we’re companies, and all of those people online who are talking to each other aren’t necessarily going to believe that we have their best interests at heart. They’ll think we’re advertising to them through other means. So we have to establish a certain amount of trust with readers, not just as companies but as people who also love books in the same way they do. Again, it’s a small thing, but the idea behind the Samovar reading series—not that it’s a totally new idea—is that the editors at FSG love books, and you guys love books, so let’s get together. And it’s not just about trying to sell our books to you.
NASH: One of the things that that accomplishes that may not be obvious from the get-go is transparency. You’re putting yourself out in the world and exposing yourself in a way—making yourself vulnerable. I have never understood why the staffs of publishing houses are invisible to readers, who are ultimately the people who pay our salaries. I mean, my wife is a corporate lawyer, and her photo and bio are on her firm’s website. Book publishers just refuse to allow their staff visibility to the world. If Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton and Whatever are willing to allow all the partners’ and associates’ photographs and bios to be seen by the world, what about publishing is so important that we can’t be allowed to be seen? I know that part of it is that we don’t want authors bugging us too much. But I think that’s part of what the Samovar reading series accomplishes: a certain willingness to participate.

Just in the space of your careers so far, what has been the most destructive new thing that’s come about in the industry?
NASH: It’s technology. It’s been both constructive and destructive at the same time.
CHINSKI: So do you think e-books have been both?
NASH: E-books are one of the last ways in which technology is playing itself out. One of the first ways was desktop publishing. Another way that’s been more incremental is the ability of digital printing to be commensurate with offset printing and for various machines to flatten the economies of scale. But, yeah, the ability to satisfactorily download a book digitally is turning out to be one of the last things that technology is accomplishing. I guess the other thing is just the capacity of e-mail and the Web—the social Web, in particular—to flatten communication. And it’s all simultaneously destructive and constructive. It’s destroying cultural authority but it’s enhancing one’s ability to cost-effectively reach individuals who might have other kinds of cultural authority. It’s lowering barriers to entry, which is constructive because new presses can come along. BookScan is based on technology and has constructive and destructive components. The kind of supply-chain inventory management that Baker & Taylor and Ingram are doing, where they can now say to us, “We only need two months’ worth of inventory; we don’t need four months of inventory,” is destructive because my working capital needs go up by 20 percent on that one phenomenon alone, but it’s good in that I can actually see Ingram’s demand building and respond to it. If I see big Ingram demand in the month before I publish something, I can say to myself, “I’m going to print advance orders plus two thousand as opposed to advance orders plus five hundred.” So it’s fucking me and helping me at the same time.
CHINSKI: I agree with Richard. Obviously a lot of things are changing right now, and some of them make things a lot more difficult, but they also—and I don’t mean to sound like a Pollyanna—offer some opportunities. I’m always really wary of the sky-is-falling thing, this idea that we’re at the end right now.
GARGAGLIANO: We’re just at a place where we have to reinvent ourselves, and we haven’t figured out how to do that yet. People have started reading in this other way that I don’t understand because I don’t read that way. But it’s our job to figure out how they’re reading, and then to figure out how to deliver something they want to read.
CHINSKI: Are you reading on a Sony Reader?
GARGAGLIANO: Yes, and I love it. It’s the best thing ever.
CHINSKI: I’m still adjusting to it. We just got them in the last few weeks. On one hand it’s great. On the other hand, I still want to write in the margins and it’s hard to go back and forth and figure out where you are in a manuscript. I actually physically find myself reaching to turn the page.
GARGAGLIANO: I do that all the time. It’s really disturbing!
CHINSKI: Your brain gets tricked into thinking you’re actually reading a page. But on the other hand, as I was saying, it’s great, and we’re seeing sales of books…. I mean, I saw something recently about the Kindle. People who have a Kindle are actually buying more books. So on one hand, it scares the shit out of me that people are reading on Kindles and Sony Readers. But on the other hand—
GARGAGLIANO: Why?
CHINSKI: For no reason other than that it’s different.
GARGAGLIANO: I think it’s so exciting.
CHINSKI: That’s what I mean. It’s also really exciting. It will bring a lot more people into reading. And this younger generation is so used to reading online that it doesn’t really matter. It doesn’t mean the death of literature.
BOUDREAUX: I was amazed at how quickly we all got used to the Sony Reader. It’s still a little different from an actual book. But when I first got into publishing I remember reading a manuscript, instead of a finished book, and feeling like it seemed to lack a certain presentational authority. It took me a minute to take a manuscript seriously. It will be the same way with the Sony Reader. But, my God, we’ve all adapted in a period of months? Imagine the twenty-year-olds who are reading everything online all the time and switching back and forth among seven screens that are open all the time. The notion of not reading that way must seem odd to them.
GARGAGLIANO: I think that in several years the book object is going to be more beautiful and more precious.
BOUDREAUX: It’s going to be like vinyl records.
GARGAGLIANO: Exactly.

page_5: 

I feel the same way—that these changes are going to happen. But the thing I don’t understand is why hardcover books still exist.
GARGAGLIANO: I don’t understand it.
NASH: It’s because of the library market.
GARGAGLIANO: I published a book this fall that we crashed into the schedule because it was shortlisted for the Booker. We did a hardcover just for the libraries and a trade paperback for everybody else.
NASH: I mean, you’re right. I was being semi-glib but not entirely glib. The question is, “Why will the print book survive?”

No, I’m literally talking about the hardcover book. Right now, at this moment, why does it exist? I’m looking at a hardcover and a paperback side by side and asking what the consumer is getting for almost twice as much money. Two pieces of cardboard?
CHINSKI: Well, we get two shots to publish the book.

But do we really, with the way the accounts are ordering, or do we just say that?
CHINSKI: But there’s still that idea. Also, there’s still the hangover of thinking that critics won’t pay attention to a paperback in the same way. I know that’s not as true as it used to be, but—
NASH: The existence of the hardcover has to do with history. It has to do with certain structures that are in place that haven’t been replaced—structures varying from the library market to perceptions about reviewers to perceptions about quality in the mind of the customer. It also has to do with customers wanting certain books at whatever price. They don’t care whether it’s fifteen dollars or twenty-five dollars—they just want it because of who it’s written by. But that’s not going to last.
CHINSKI: But here’s an interesting case: Bolaño’s 2666. We did the hardcover and a three-volume paperback edition in a slipcase. They’re priced the same. Which do you think would be selling more? I guess because they’re priced the same it’s not quite a fair question, but people do seem to be gravitation toward the hardcover just because it’s the more conventional format. The paperback is selling well too, but the hardcover seems to have some kind of recognition factor. So I don’t think it’s just publishers sticking their heads in the sand. It’s also readers still thinking that that’s the way they discover new books.

Even when they cost ten dollars more for no apparent value?
GARGAGLIANO: I wonder that too. We don’t really do very much—
NASH: Value is created in the mind. A classic thing that happens in American retail capitalism is that people will buy the more expensive thing. It’s been proven over and over again. If you’re at Barneys and there’s an eighty-dollar lampshade and a fifty-dollar lampshade, you buy the eighty-dollar lampshade because you think it’s worth more. That is endemic in American retail capitalism. But I think the distressing thing in publishing is that we’re not making more beautiful objects. I think that one of the things that electronic publishing will allow us to do is free the print object of its need to have a given exact unit cost that is our mass-market way of delivering the product at a given price. The download will allow us to generate volume, and then we can create this gorgeous, elaborate fetish object for which we can charge gloriously outrageous sums of money.

But who’s going to be selling them if that happens? Look at what happened to the music business.
NASH: Precisely. Look at the Radiohead model. Radiohead has already done it. Eighty bucks for the limited edition but only ninety-nine cents for the download. That’s the model. It’s just a question of “How do we get there in a way that doesn’t involve complete chaos?” But it seems like that’s where we’re going. And I think it will be customer-driven—we’ll go there as fast as the customers will be willing to go there.

What are you guys seeing in the industry that you find encouraging?
NASH: Fan fiction.

Which is?
NASH: People so in love with a given story and set of characters, or a given world, that they are doing their own version of it. I just think that’s spectacular. Not necessarily as writing, but as a cultural phenomenon.

Anybody else? Come on, there’s got to be something that’s encouraging.
GARGAGLIANO: This is not a good time to ask that question. [Laughter.]
CHINSKI: It’s like what Richard was saying—some of these things that are scary are also encouraging. The Kindle and the Sony Reader are bringing people to books who might not have come to them otherwise. I mean, that’s something.
NASH: Look at the thing Eric said about people who own a Kindle buying more books than they did before they had a Kindle.
CHINSKI: That’s pretty encouraging.
BOUDREAUX: And beyond that, I had it in my head that Kindles and Sony Readers would exist in the way audio books did—that it wouldn’t be exactly the same. There would be certain kinds of books that really lent themselves to that format in the same way it was for audio books where you had businessmen driving on business trips. You couldn’t get a novel published by your own audio publisher—they weren’t interested—but a certain kind of practical nonfiction flew off the shelves. But Edgar Sawtelle has been a huge seller on the Kindle, which is not at all the kind of book I would have thought would be selling well in that format. It’s six hundred pages long—there’s a good reason to put it on a Sony Reader instead of reading a hardcover—but I just wasn’t expecting the number of downloads to be such a close ratio to what’s selling in a bookstore. I thought we’d have to figure out what categories worked, and once again fiction would be the category that would be left out as everybody read self-help books or Freakonomics on their Kindle. And I find it encouraging that people are downloading this big fat debut novel.

Anything else?
NASH: The use of social media to talk about books: Goodreads, LibraryThing, Shelfari. Reading books is a solitary activity, but books are also the richest kind of social glue, and the profusion of ways to be social with one another will be tremendously advantageous to books. The commonality that having read the same book introduces between two people is so much richer and more dynamic than the commonality of having watched the same TV show, for example.

It seems like agents lament the consolidation of the industry because it gives them less options. How do you guys feel about it?
BOUDREAUX: It doesn’t seem to lessen their options when they submit to every single imprint in the house and then you’re on the hot-button contest to see who reads it first.
NASH: I think it’s kind of pointless to think about it. As individuals, there’s sweet fuck-all we can do about it. With everything else we’ve talked about, human beings at our level can affect things. We can affect the outcome of a given book. We just cannot affect the outcome of a corporate merger.
BOUDREAUX: And for a group of people who’ve only been doing this for a decade, in which this has always been the case and it was already the death knell of publishing back when we were first getting into it and everybody lamented consolidation—
CHINSKI: When I saw The Last Days of Disco, it was heartbreaking. [Laughter.] That’s when I realized what we’ve lost. As you were saying, it’s hard to know because it’s the world we live in. It seems like even within the force of consolidation, there are so many imprints blossoming within these places. I don’t quite understand what the corporate thinking is behind that. But that’s just because I’m not making the decisions, I’m sure.
BOUDREAUX: You’ve also got a group of people here who have ended up at certain kinds of imprints within those places. So we’ve all clearly struggled, those of us who are in the corporate world, to find a place that’s least like a corporate structure. I mean, that’s the great thing about Ecco. When Dan Halpern sold it to HarperCollins he had an agreement with Jane Friedman that basically said, “But we will never have to act like we are a part of corporate publishing. We will keep doing it exactly how we’ve been doing it.” So you get to pretend you’re this little thing attached to this big thing, which is how I imagine it being at Scribner and FSG. You get to have the benefits of the deep pockets, and somebody’s figuring out the new media thing and revamping this site and that site, and you have the economies of scale of getting your shipping done or whatever, and you still get to sit there and work on your books. So we’ve also self-selected for a certain kind of publishing within corporate publishing.

And you really did, because you left Random House without having new a job lined up.
BOUDREAUX: I did. I thought I’d go see if anybody wanted me to come do fiction. Thank God Dan Halpern was out there. God bless him. Because it’s true: Who doesn’t want to do the small list inside the big house, which is just a different kind of experience? I mean, it seems the best way to make that deal with the devil. As you say, Richard, the conglomeration isn’t going to go away.
CHINSKI: It doesn’t actually mean that writers have less choice, I don’t think. There are so many imprints within these companies. It’s become an easy straw man to point the finger at. “Oh, these big corporate publishers that don’t understand what books are.” There are still a lot of editors working at imprints within these big corporations who care about books in the same way that somebody working at Scribner when it was independent cared about books. I think it’s really easy, because there are so many frustrations that we all have as writers and editors and agents, to just blame it on some Corporate culture with a capital C. As Richard said, there are a lot of things that we can’t control but there are also a lot of things that we can try to control, at least at a certain level. And that probably hasn’t changed that much from fifty years ago.
BOUDREAUX: And certainly, the competition in-house is every bit as fierce as the competition out of house, when you and so-and-so from Simon & Schuster both have the book and there’s a house bid.
GARGAGLIANO: The agent gets the same benefit of the imprints within the house riling each other up and competing against one another to put on the best show for the author, and the author gets the benefit of choosing between all of these different imprints. I don’t think, for the author, it’s a major difference. But I wasn’t around when it wasn’t like that.
NASH: I suspect that to the extent that consolidation has created problems in the industry, the problems are farther downstream than acquisitions. Retail consolidation is the real issue.

Speak to that. How do you feel about so much power being concentrated on Fifth Avenue and in Ann Arbor and Seattle?
NASH: It was all going to happen anyway. The book business was just later to the party, quite frankly, than the clothing business or the cereal business. The real estate was all the same. One of the reasons why we’ve become really dependent on social media is that it’s a kind of hand-selling at a time when the 1,000 people who used to be able to hand-sell are now down to 150. And the capacity of the corporate retailers to hand-sell is either purchased or anecdotal. When I say anecdotal I mean it hasn’t completely vanished. I can tell that the B&N in Union Square is putting Soft Skull books on the countertop that weren’t paid to be put there. So there is anecdotal hand-selling going on. But you have a situation where the capacity of the retailer to sell a given book to a given, recognized individual has virtually disappeared—down to percentage points. It will work with a few titles—I’m sure you guys have all published books that have been made by independent retailers. But their ability to be a part of the social network of the community of books is gone and we have to find some other means of generating that word-of-mouth. Retailers just exist to shelve the books and make them visible in a given community. They’re not selling them to the community.
CHINSKI: But don’t you think they understand the crisis they’re in, to a certain degree, too? That’s why Barnes & Noble has B&N Recommends now, and Starbucks is getting involved, and everybody’s trying to—
NASH: Yeah, you’re right. I think they realize what they have wrought. Well, they do but they don’t. Half the time they’re trying to sell on price—they’re doing inventory churn—and then the other half of the time they’re trying to go intimate. I think they’re kind of schizophrenic about it. I think that’s part of the problem. I mean, a lot of the independents that went out of business deserved to go out of business. They weren’t actually trying very hard to hand-sell. They were just taking the finite number of books that publishers could then publish and saying, “Okay, you pick from these five hundred books.” But the great ones are the ones that we have with us right now—St. Mark’s and Prairie Lights and the rest. They’re doing a great job of being retailers. But you’re exactly right about the chains. At times they are definitely trying to find that community-oriented approach.
CHINSKI: The way they’ll host book clubs in the stores, for example. In the same way that people like to blame the corporate publishers, it’s really easy to point your finger at the chains. I’m not saying they don’t present a certain set of problems. But it’s interesting that, in a way, they’re wrestling with the same kind of issues that we’re wrestling with in trying to find a way to interact more directly with their customers. It’s a kind of funny crisis all around.

At the end of the day, what makes it all worthwhile?
CHINSKI: Pizza.
NASH: This roundtable.
BOUDREAUX: The glamour of this!
CHINSKI: Going home and editing for four hours.

That’s funny. That was actually going to be my next question, but I was going to do it in the anonymous section at the end so you wouldn’t have to lie about it. Seriously, though, what makes it worthwhile for you?
BOUDREAUX: Books mean enormous things to people. They are things that save people’s lives, at times.
NASH: Even the lives of children!
BOUDREAUX: That’s right! The lives of children! I don’t think any children have ever lost their lives because of something an editor did, but children have most definitely had their lives improved by something that a writer, and an editor, put out there.
CHINSKI: We’re doing it for the kids!
BOUDREAUX: Why don’t we make that, “We’re doing it for our children, and our children’s children.”

EDITORS ANONYMOUS
Later, after the pizza was gone and even the most constitutionally strong among us were getting a little punchy—and understandably so—the panel agreed to speak anonymously on a range of topics that would be awkward to discuss for attribution. As usual, a number of verbal tics have been altered in order to preserve anonymity.

Does it bother you that so much of your work has to be done on nights and weekends?
Sure, every once in a while it catches up with you. But you can’t concentrate in the office so it’s just the way it is. But I’d be lying if I didn’t say that sometimes you don’t feel resentful. I always have that in the summer because I find that authors all deliver at the beginning of the summer because they want to go on their summer vacations.

Yeah, it’s always just before Christmas, just before New Year’s, just before the Fourth of July. The book’s might be three years late but they go and deliver it on July 3rd.

Publishers have to let you have some time out of the office. And I feel like that is increasingly looked on as this sort of three-martini-lunch thing—that the editor needs the occasional Tuesday to edit at home. You can power through an awful lot, but at a certain point there are too many manuscripts stacked up, and it’s been going on for so many years, that you’ve got to be given some time to do it that isn’t just every Saturday of your life.

Such a big part of the job is to pay attention to what the rest of the world is doing and what’s being written everywhere else and what other people are interested in and what you yourself are interested in—because you take all of those obsessions and you find the books that you’re passionate about on all of those topics—but I don’t really have time to do that.

That’s my biggest frustration: not having enough time to read published books.

And it’s a great disservice to your own job not to ever be able to read anything for pleasure—and not to ever be able to read the other books your company is publishing—because you’ve got x number of submissions to read and your own new authors’ backlists to read and what your house is doing that’s working because you just need to understand what that thing is that so-and-so just published. About eight rungs down you get to read something just because it sounds good—something that you’re not reading to learn something about your job.

What do agents do that drives you crazy?
Ask for ads.

Submit the next book when you haven’t even published the first book and you don’t even know how many you’re printing.

Assume that just because one book did really well you have to pay for your previous success.

And with fiction, more and more, the success of one novel does not mean that the next novel is going to sell at the same level. And I don’t think that a lot of agents have caught up with that fact.

“Have you read it yet? Have you read it yet?” I want to be like, “Have you prepared for your launch meeting yet? Have you written your tip sheets yet?” They don’t realize that you may have something from the four other big agents. I’m being flip about it, but they do tend to forget that. Two days later it’s “Have you read it?” “No, I’m actually editing your author who’s under contract.”

There’s also a tendency to misinterpret an early read for actual depth of publishing program behind that early read. Sure, being the first editor to get back to them on a novel may well mean a particular enthusiasm and a good match, but it also may not. So to require that everybody be in on day two, set up meetings on day three, and be ready to do the auction on day four? Is that all the thought that you want us to put into it?

And using the weekends and holidays as a tactic. I hate the Friday e-mail saying, “Just in time for you to enjoy this weekend…” Or over Labor Day weekend! It’s like the new destination wedding. You know, in the same way that you hate your friends who picked the three-day weekend to get married on so you can all go to Hawaii. I’m like, “Really? You had to save this for Labor Day weekend? I had all summer when I didn’t have shit to read.”

What are the biggest mistakes that writers can make in dealing with their editor or agent?
I think the bigger problem is dealing with their publicist. You have to be very nice to your publicist. You should send them flowers.

I had an author who used to leave messages at four in the morning saying that she didn’t want us to publish her book anymore. She wanted us to take them off the shelves! That was fun.

Despite the fact that there is a real personal connection, authors should realize that we’re not their therapists, we’re not their best friends in the world, etcetera. I can fix your book but I can’t fix your whole life.

What about when an author calls because there aren’t enough hangers in his hotel closet? [Laughter.] That’s happened!

Tell me about a few up-and-coming agents who you feel are great for fiction or memoir.
I think Jim Rutman at Sterling Lord is really smart. He’s both a no bullshit guy and a genuinely nice guy. That may sound naïve, but it really does matter.

I think Maria Massie is fabulous. If I could publish the writers of only one agent, it would be Maria.

Julie Barer. I did a book with her and she went about getting blurbs like nobody I’ve ever seen. She brought them to me, every day, like a cat bringing me a bird. Eight in a row. I’ve never had an agent who went to bat that much and called in that many favors. It was amazing.

There’s also Anna Stein, who’s wonderful. She’s got a very cosmopolitan worldview and she’s also got a taste for a certain kind of political nonfiction that is quite interesting. The first book I got from her was a left-wing case for free trade, which you don’t necessarily expect from Ira Silverberg’s former foreign rights person.

You know who else is good? Robert Guinsler. He’s really smart and really enthusiastic about his books. He has a lot of smart projects.

What kind of information will you withhold from your authors?
I never tell them when my bosses don’t love their book. Or when it’s been a battle to get them attention on the list.

I will hold back particularly bad feedback. If it’s a novel, not everybody is going to agree on it. I’ve never had such a tsunami of bad feedback that I thought they really needed to hear it.

Do you send them all of their bad reviews?

I leave that up to the author.

I’ve started telling debut authors, “A lot of writers who have been through this don’t want to see the bad reviews. Will you give me permission to not send you the bad reviews?”

When it comes to sales figures, I give them the information. I mean, I don’t go out of my way to do it if the news is not good. If it’s great news and I can say, “We did this and we did that and we did this,” I give it to them all the time. But I don’t go out of my way to say, “You’re holding steady. Nothing’s happening.”

What other editors or houses are you impressed with lately?
I think Penguin Press is doing a great job. You look at their list and there’s a consistency to it that is really amazing. I don’t know how the finances look. But just as books, they’re incredibly consistent.

I think Bob Miller and Jon Karp are doing a great job.

I’ve been impressed with a house called Two Dollar Radio. The reason I’m impressed is their own tagline: “They make more noise than a two-dollar radio.”

Jofie Ferrari-Adler is an editor at Grove/Atlantic.

Agents & Editors: A Q&A With Agent Molly Friedrich
Agents & Editors: A Q&A With Editor Chuck Adams
Agents & Editors: A Q&A With Editor Janet Silver
Agents & Editors: A Q&A With Four Young Literary Agents

Agents & Editors: A Q&A With Jonathan Galassi

by

Jofie Ferrari-Adler

July/August 2009
7.1.09
In Print and Online

If you’re anything like the writers I meet at
conferences and MFA programs, the word sweet probably isn’t the first
adjective that comes to mind when you think of the head of a major New York
publishing house. I hear a lot of other words (many of them unprintable in a
wholesome writer’s magazine), but the takeaway is often the same: They are
snakes in suits whose only loyalty is to the bottom line. While it’s true that
such creatures exist—I could tell you stories—they are far less common than
you might think.

Take the case of Jonathan
Galassi, president and publisher of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, who got where he
is, in part, by being one of the most gentlemanly editors in the business. Born
in Seattle and raised in small-town Massachusetts, Galassi grew up surrounded
by books and was, by his own admission, a “typical geeky kid.” At thirteen he
went away to boarding school and fell in love with poetry and languages; he
discovered the thrill of editing other people’s work when he got the
opportunity to publish a friend’s short story in the school literary magazine.
At Harvard he studied with Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop. In 1973, after
two years in England on a Marshall Scholarship, he moved back to the States and
took an internship at Houghton Mifflin. Before long he earned a reputation as
an adroit literary editor and was appointed head of the company’s New York
office. One early acquisition was Alice McDermott’s debut novel, A
Bigamist’s Daughter, which he took with him when he moved to Random House in 1981. As it
turned out, the publication of McDermott’s novel was a rare bright spot in an
otherwise dismal tenure. At Random House, Galassi’s books won critical acclaim
but sold modestly, and in 1986, after five years with the company, he was
fired.

Redemption was both swift
and satisfying. Within months of accepting a job at FSG, an independent house that
specialized in the kind of serious work he loved, Galassi surprised everyone by
taking on a thriller by a Chicago attorney named Scott Turow. The novel, Presumed
Innocent,
became a runaway best-seller that propelled Galassi up the editorial ranks and
ultimately positioned him as the heir to FSG’s founder, Roger Straus. In his spare time, Galassi
published two volumes of his own poetry, translated the work of Italian
modernist Eugenio Montale, and spent a decade as poetry editor of the Paris
Review. He
also accumulated every major editing award in existence.

Today Galassi says his job
is to ensure that FSG stays true to its mission of publishing important voices
as effectively as possible. When I asked him what he’d change about his job if
he could, he lamented that he doesn’t have as much time to read as he used to;
he also wishes he had “more of that immediate engagement with new authors.”
Note to readers: If you can find a way to make Galassi’s wishes come true,
yours might not be far behind either.

I don’t want
to bore you with a lot of questions about your childhood but I am curious if
there were any books that had a big impact on you at an early age.
I was a big
reader as a kid. I used to go to the little library in the town where we lived
in Massachusetts and read voraciously. I read everything. I was in the Weekly
Reader children’s book club and I remember loving The Wind in the Willows and Johnny Tremain and books like that. My grandmother was a big
reader. She lived in Boston and would come down and bring books like The
Alexandria Quartet or The Fall or Passage to India. I remember the romance and the exotic quality of
those books. I remember what they looked like, what they felt like. Eventually
all of my grandparents’ books ended up in our house, so there were a lot of old
books around. It wasn’t that I would sit and read them all. It was more that I
would pore over them and feel the textures of them. My grandfather was Italian,
so there were all these books about Italy, and I would pore through them and
look at the pictures of the different places. I was just very absorbed by books
as a way of escape and as something to escape into.

But there was
no particular book that altered the direction of your life?
I don’t think I
can point to any one book. But I was bookish. I was very unathletic. I had bad
eyesight. I was a typical geeky kid. I remember reading The Count of Monte
Cristo when I had the mumps or something
and just being overwhelmed by the romance of the story. I loved stories that
had a medieval or foreign feel. I loved The Golden Warrior and books about the ancient world. I loved all of
that stuff. And then I went away to school when I was thirteen and got very
interested in languages and poetry. In high school I got interested in
everything that I’m interested in now. That’s where I started to write and
edit. I was an editor of the school literary magazine. I remember the
experience of working with my friends on their writing and how exciting that
was to me, and how rewarding it was, even more than my own writing. I felt a
real sense of connection to them, and a certain effectiveness. That was a
powerful experience. I remember that my best friend, who wasn’t a particularly
literary guy—he was a jock, really—wrote a short story that ended up being
the best story published in the magazine in our time. I was blown away by the
intensity and the power of that story. I got a real thrill out of being present
at the creation of somebody else’s work.

Do you think your work as a poet and translator informs your work as
an editor and publisher?
That has always been secondary to my work as an
editor. I mean, maybe it wasn’t always secondary in my deepest heart, but when
I started to work in publishing I decided that I was going to put editing
first. And I’ve never had regrets about it. I guess I think of those things as
flowing into and out of each other.

When I started writing I didn’t have much confidence in my
own powers, but I think over time I’ve become more comfortable with what I can
do as a writer. That came through working on translation. I was translating
Montale, which was a deep interest that went on for many, many years. That
taught me a lot about writing. And obviously I’ve also learned a lot from
working with writers over the years. But I’ve never felt any ambivalence about
being a publisher as opposed to being a writer.

But is there anything in your experience as a
poet and translator that informs how you go about the business of being an
editor?
Perhaps I don’t think of authors as different
animals. I can give authors a sense of realism about what can be done in the
world with their work. I would never want to put myself on the same plane as
the writers I work with, but because I know what it is to write, I think I can
empathize with their desires and frustrations. There are some publishers who
think of the work as something for them to mold, and I don’t think of it quite
that way. But I wouldn’t want to convey the impression that I’m a writer who’s
also a publisher. I’m a publisher who’s also a writer. And as a rule I don’t
talk about my own writing with my authors, unless they bring it up. Because I’m
here to work for them.

Did you teach
yourself how to edit?
I guess so. My
first job was as an intern in the editorial department at Houghton Mifflin in
Boston in 1973. They just sort of threw you into it. Nobody was sitting there
and teaching you how to do it. I think you learn it by watching how the people
around you work with authors, and it happens almost by osmosis. There are many
different styles of editing, too. It’s an apprenticeship. There are courses you
can take to learn the mechanics of the business, like the Radcliffe course, but
I don’t think they teach you how to edit. Editing is more by-the-hip. You look
at a text and ask yourself how it can be improved. One thing I have noticed is
that when you’re a younger editor, you’re more intense about it. As you go
along, you relax a little. More and more, I feel that the book is the author’s.
You give the author your thoughts and it’s up to him or her to decide what to
do. One time [Jonathan] Franzen made fun of me about that. He didn’t take some
suggestion I had made and I said, “Well, it’s your book,” and he sort of mocked
me for that. [Laughter.] But that’s what
I really believe. I believe it with poetry, too. The texts are so personal.
Yes, there are times when I’ve worked with poets to edit their work, but
usually you either buy into what they’re doing or you don’t. If you don’t, you
shouldn’t be working with them, and if you do, you realize that they know what
they’re doing.

What were the hardest lessons for you to learn
when you were a younger editor?
One of the really hard lessons was realizing how
much of a crapshoot publishing is—how you can love something and do everything
you can for it, and yet fail at connecting it to an audience. Maybe you
misjudged it. Maybe it didn’t get the right breaks. One of the hardest things
to come to grips with is how important the breaks are. There’s luck in publishing, just like in
any human activity. And if you don’t get the right luck—if Mitchi [Michiko
Kakutani of the New York Times] writes an uncomprehending review, or if you don’t get
the right reviews, or if books aren’t in stores when the reviews come, or
whatever the hell it is—it may not happen. That was one of the hardest
lessons: how difficult it is to actually be effective.

Another
really hard thing is that, as a young editor, each book is like your baby. I
remember wanting to publish Peter Schjeldahl’s biography of Frank O’Hara so
desperately. I lost it to some other editor who paid more money, and I was
melancholy about it for months. Of course the book ended up never being written.
[Laughter.] But at the time I felt like
a piece of me had somehow been sawn off. I wanted to pour myself into that
project so much, and it takes time for that sense of wanting, and
identification—which is what publishers live on, really—to relax a little. I
see my young editors going through that and I empathize so much. But you have
to learn to let go of things. That was a very painful lesson.

But when I was young I had
so much reverence for writing. Elizabeth Bishop was my teacher in college—she was
my favorite teacher, and I revered her work, and I loved her as a person very,
very much—and I remember that when she would invite us over for dinner I would
get almost physically ill. It was this combination of conflicting feelings:
excitement, discomfort, a sense of unworthiness. It mattered so deeply that it
made me almost physically ill. Caring that much was painful. I don’t know if
that’s a lesson but it was certainly something where the intensity of my
devotion was overwhelming.

How did you
end up in New York?
I started in
Boston in 1973, and in 1975 they sent me down here. I wanted to be in New York.
After college I’d gone to England for a couple of years on a fellowship. I was
in Cambridge, but I spent a lot of time in London, and I realized that I wanted
to live in a metropolis. So I came down here. But I was working for Houghton
Mifflin, which was a Boston company that had very conflicted feelings about New
York. I was very interested in publishing young writers, and I felt that
Houghton was kind of stick-in-the-mud-ish and that a place like Knopf or Random
House would do that better. It was sort of callow of me because Houghton had
been very good to me. They had let me
start a poetry series, they had let me publish first novels. And I learned so
much there.

But
I was a young man in a hurry and eventually I was offered a job at Random
House. Jason [Epstein] was the one who hired me. And that didn’t go well. There
were a number of reasons, some of which were my fault. Jason had a sort of
sink-or-swim approach, which was fine, but he was also not terribly interested
in what other people were doing. I was used to being the kid who got to do what
he wanted. But I wasn’t a kid anymore and there was a lot of internal
competition and I just didn’t respond well to that. I didn’t do well. And Random House had Knopf next door, where
Bob Gottlieb was at the apogee of his effectiveness. He was a terrific
publisher. Random House was always sort of vying to live up to that. The books
I was doing were Knopf-y, within Random House, and I just didn’t know how to
make that work. Someone else could have, I think.

What did you
take away from those years at Random House?
I learned a huge
amount. Not all of it was pleasant. I learned a lot about competition and how
literary life really worked, because Houghton Mifflin was a little bit off to
the side. Random House had a kind of glossiness to it that wasn’t really me,
even though they were a very effective publisher. In the Bennett Cerf days,
Random House had been in some ways an ideal publisher because they were what I
would call a “best of breed” publisher. They could publish Gertrude Stein, and
Faulkner, and O’Neill, but also a lot of very commercial books. And they all
sat next to each other comfortably. By the time I got there that had dissipated
and there were all sorts of other pressures. But they were a much more
confident publisher than Houghton Mifflin.

Knopf
was also there, and you saw that it was about a sort of consistency of
commitment. They knew how to publish literary books. They published one after
another, and some of them would work and some of them wouldn’t, and they had a
system that was very well oiled. They had a place in the publishing universe,
so a lot of their work was already done for them. If they committed to
publishing an author, you knew that the Times Book Review was going to pay attention, and this, that, and the
other thing were going to happen. That’s what that little machine existed for,
and they ran it very well.

I actually think that when Bob left publishing,
to go to the New Yorker, everything
changed in my business. Bob was such a dominant figure in literary publishing
that he kind of controlled prices. A lot of people would go to him to be
published without auctions because they wanted to be with him. He sort of set
the prices in the sense that he wouldn’t participate in auctions. It wasn’t
that he was unfair—he was fair and generous. But he was reasonable. When he
left, that was over. Auctions became much more a part of how most books were
sold, and the prices went up, and the whole game became more about money. This
was in the mid-eighties, and it was a watershed moment in publishing.

I learned some other lessons that were not so
nice. It wasn’t a collegial place. People really didn’t wish each other well,
which I wasn’t used to. But looking back on it I think it was a difficult
situation that I could have responded to differently. I think I grew up a lot
during that time.

How did you
get from there to FSG?
After I was
fired, Roger [Straus] gave me a job. FSG was pretty far down at that point.
Roger’s son, Rog, had come back to the company and I think they were trying to
revivify it. Luckily, they hired me. And the minute I got there, things clicked
and I felt like I was totally at home.

This was a
real turning point for you.
It was.
Basically the first book I signed up was Presumed Innocent, which was a huge best-seller. It was a first for
FSG, and it was exactly the kind of book I was supposed to have been publishing
at Random House. Of course there was great joy in Mudville about that. [Laughter.] But you have to remember that when I was in
college, Lowell and Bishop were my teachers, and both of them were published by
FSG. So FSG books had an aura of sanctity. To come and work here was amazing. I
just felt like FSG was good at doing the kinds of books I wanted to do. It was
still the old days then—it was still a small independent publisher and that
was still a viable thing. But it had taken me a long time to get going as an editor.
I’d been in publishing for over ten years before I got to FSG and it all came
together.

Tell me a
little about the atmosphere of the place.
Did you ever
visit the old offices? When I came we were on the fourth floor of 19 Union
Square West. Calvin Trillin said it looked like a branch office of a failing
insurance company. It looked like something out of a porn magazine. It was
dirty linoleum and cockroaches and just really, really gross. When we moved up
to the old Atlantic Monthly Press office on the eleventh floor, my health
improved.

What about
the personalities?
In those days
Roger was there, of course. Pat [Strachan] was there. Bob Giroux was still
around. Michael di Capua. Aaron Asher was gone, but David Reiff was working
there as an editor. Rog was there. It was a very personality-filled company
with a lot of smart people who were very dedicated. But they never took
themselves too seriously. That’s one thing I’ve always loved about FSG. With
Knopf I always felt that there was a snootiness—they would look down their
noses. That was never true at FSG. It was scrappy; it was irreverent. I mean,
they took literature extremely seriously, but they never took themselves
seriously. It was a very good-natured place where people wished each other well.
I think people felt like they were doing something good. The pay was terrible,
and the conditions were terrible, but everybody knew why they were there. And
we all felt like it was a privilege to work there. I think both Roger and Bob
were responsible for that in different ways. Roger loved the game of
publishing. He loved competing. He loved having enemies, being outrageous,
swearing, making nasty comments. That was fun for him. Bob was more bankerly
and serious, but literature had an unquestioned importance for him. It was a
part of life that really mattered. I wouldn’t say that that doesn’t exist in
publishing today, but it does feel different today. At that time books had a
cultural primacy that they don’t quite have now. Books have been sort of moved
to the side by other media. It’s not that people don’t read books. But books
are one among a smorgasbord of options. Whereas in those days books were still
where cultural life was centered. People were decrying the influence of
television, but books were still more at the center.

A couple
years after that you became editor in chief. Was there any friction between you
and Roger?
Not a lot. I
think I was lucky that I came along at the moment in his life when I did. He
and Rog loved each other, but they were not natural business partners. I was
able to be a kind of business son in a way that his real son couldn’t. We had
some set-tos, but not a lot. He was much mellower and less threatened in his
later years. There had been a time when a number of really talented editors
didn’t survive at FSG.

What would
you and Roger argue about?
Well, he didn’t
always like what I liked, but he was pretty tolerant. There would be issues
involving money and how much we could pay for things. Roger loved to fight with
people. I always thought that wasn’t good business practice. I thought it was
better to get along with people so you could have another deal with them down
the line. I remember one time when I said, “Don’t you think we should make up
with so-and-so?” He said, “Don’t give me any of that Christian stuff, Galassi.
I’m a vindictive Jew.” [Laughter.] He enjoyed having enemies. But all in all we had fun together,
and he was like a father to me in a lot of ways.

Tell me about
the transition from editor in chief to publisher.
That was a
little difficult in the sense that it had to do with Roger’s mortality. When he
sold the company in 1994, the deal was that he would run it as long as he
could. He did, and he continued to act like an independent for many years. But
he slowed down eventually. One of the difficulties I had was that there was a
lot of deferred maintenance. In other words, things kept going in a certain way
longer than maybe they should have in some areas. The company remained a very
personal fiefdom of Roger’s even after it had been owned by someone else for a
long time. And with that goes what I would call deferred maintenance. The
biggest and most significant change I made was bringing in Andrew Mandel to be
the deputy publisher. He helped organize and rationalize our practices in a lot
of ways. It’s still an editorially driven house—the editors still decide what
we’re going to publish—but the business aspects are a little less
seat-of-the-pants and a little more planned out and fiscally responsible. The
other thing is that I wasn’t editor in chief anymore. I do fewer books and have
a lot of other responsibilities. I usually have another editor work with me on
projects. I’ve had to step back from some things. I can’t edit these
thousand-page books with the kind of assiduity that I used to. I’m still
editing a lot of books, but there are just more other things I have to do. It’s
like how I said earlier that the book is your baby—now the company becomes
your baby. You’re thinking about ways to strategize for the future. You’re
thinking about, “How is FSG going to continue to be a literary publisher?” It’s
more about the organism as a whole and less about any single book. You’re
asking yourself, “How can we maximize the lives of all the books we do, both in the current environment and
in the future?”

What are you
looking at when you’re thinking about those things?
I’m thinking
about the proportions of what we publish, for example. Another one of the
things I’ve been excited about recently is bringing Mitzi Angel here to run
Faber. Stephen Page and I decided to take Faber and make it a bigger player in
the conspectus of American publishing. That’s a really exciting thing and I
think Mitzi’s doing a fabulous job. So we’re trying to expand our bouquet. We
also have people like Lorin [Stein] and Courtney [Hodell] coming along who are
doing really fresh publishing, and we’re trying to give them the support they
need. We’re also trying to expand our nonfiction publishing to balance the
literary publishing because a lot of serious readers read nonfiction and we
want those readers too.

Tell me about some of the high moments in your
life as a publisher.
One of my happy moments has to do with Denis
Johnson. We published two books by Denis in the early nineties: Jesus’ Son, which was one of the best
books I ever published, and Resuscitation of a Hanged Man, which was also a wonderful
book. But then Denis left. He went to Robert Jones at Harper. He was
dissatisfied. He didn’t think that we were doing enough for his books. But he came
back to us for Tree of Smoke and it became a New York Times best-seller and won the
National Book Award. So there was a great sense of happiness and accomplishment
that we came back together and were able to help him achieve so much.

What are some other great moments like that?
When the manuscript of [Marilynne Robinson’s] Gilead came in. This is a book that
had been under contract for so many years that…it wasn’t that we forgot about
it, but we didn’t know if or when it would appear. And then it came in. It was
perfect. Almost nothing was done to it. It was one of those experiences of
spiritual uplift. To come across a book that you knew was a great book? And you
were reading it first!

The second great moment is when it actually becomes a book—a
physical thing. I always feel that when you put a book into proofs it gets
better just by virtue of being set in print. I know a lot of writers feel that
way too. It takes on a kind of permanence. And then it’s even more satisfying
when it becomes an actual book.

How did you
meet Alice McDermott?
Alice was sent
to me by Harriet Wasserman, who was a very important person in the beginning of
my publishing life. Her office at Russell & Volkening was in the same
building as Houghton Mifflin’s New York office. I got to know her and
eventually became very close to her. We did a number of really interesting
projects together and Alice was one of the first. She gave me these pages from
this book about a young woman working at a vanity press, and that was the
beginning of A Bigamist’s Daughter. She
was such an assured writer. She had such definition and wit and this very
subtle, cool, deadpan humor. She’s one of the most amazing stylists I know. And
she’s such a modest and well-spoken and well-behaved person. I took that
project with me from Houghton Mifflin to Random House, and I remember that,
after she turned it in, several weeks went by and somehow it came out that I
hadn’t paid her the advance that was due on delivery. I said, “Why didn’t you
tell me? Why didn’t you ask for it?” She was too well-behaved to ask. [Laughter.] She’s someone who didn’t write just one wonderful
book—she’s produced a lot of them. Her methods of writing are very original.
She’s always writing two books at once, and she ends up choosing one. The other
one goes in a drawer somewhere. Which means there are all these incredible,
unrealized books by Alice McDermott somewhere. But she uses one to bring out
the other. I think it’s a very interesting psychological thing. It’s like she’s
always having twins. One twin comes to life and the other twin is still
gestating somewhere.

One thing
that always fascinates me is how people view their jobs and their various
responsibilities. Give me a sense of how you view yours.
I think my
responsibility—my task and my joy—is to try to make FSG as effective an
instrument for publishing as possible. To make it strong and to help it make a
difference in the publishing business. FSG is a lot different than it was when
I came here. But what I don’t think is different is the attitude about what’s
important to publish. That is my biggest responsibility—to make sure that that
stays at the center of what we’re doing. And that we believe literature is
important and that our mission is to enhance the dissemination of it. So while
everything has changed around the core of FSG, I don’t think the core has
changed at all.

And if you
had to articulate that core and what’s important to publish?
I think it’s
about the voices of writers. FSG really became FSG when Bob [Giroux] came and
brought people like Flannery O’Connor and Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop.
Those writers, who were all very distinctive and idiosyncratic, contributed to
the essence of American literature in their time. And our desire is to continue
to be a place where people like that feel at home and feel that we’re doing the
best we can for their work—and the public feels that the books we publish have
value. It’s a business, and I love the fact that it’s a business. I really
think it’s much better for publishing to be a commercial enterprise. But it’s
not just a business. It’s about selling
something that you believe in.

What houses
do you feel competitive with?
I feel very
competitive with Knopf. But I feel competitive—and when I say “competitive” I
also mean that I feel collegial—with people all over. You and Morgan
[Entrekin]. New Directions, who I love. Penguin Press, both in America and in
the UK, is a really fabulous publishing house. I think Cape is great. I think
Chatto is great.

Who do you
feel the most competitive with?
I guess we still
think of Knopf as the big giant. We’re the we-try-harder. But we’re not really
like Knopf. We’re different. We’re smaller. But I think they do a really good
job with a lot of great books.

When you
suspect you’re going up against them for a book, what’s your pitch?
My answer to
that is that it only makes sense for authors to be published here who want to
be published here. In other words, if they buy into our approach and feel that
we will do well by their work, that works. If it’s about money alone we’re not
going to tend to win those contests. Someone else can always come up with more
money. So what we have to offer is ourselves, and our approach, and what I
would do to compete is just tell the author what we think about the book, ask
him what he wants from a publisher, and show him how we’ve done other books in
the past. What else can I do?

What’s the
biggest practical difference, in your mind, between FSG and Knopf?
We’re smaller,
and that means we can give more attention to each project. We have a very good
publishing team. Jeff Seroy is a brilliant publicity and marketing guy. Spencer
Lee, our sales guy, is terrific. And there’s a cohesiveness to what we do.

It can be
difficult to articulate what exactly you’re looking for as an editor, but tell
me about something recently that captivated you for whatever reason, and talk
about why.
The book that
we’re doing now that comes to mind is All the Living by C. E. Morgan. It’s a first novel by a young woman
and it’s about Kentucky. It was sent to me by Ellen Levine, who is Marilynne
Robinson’s agent. We publish Marilynne, and this author admires her a lot. I
think it was offered to other publishers too, and I don’t know if we offered
the most money, but we certainly paid a serious advance for it. What I felt was
so unusual about it was the voice and the consistency of her approach. She’s
created a sort of small myth. It’s concise. It’s intense. It’s very different
from most other fiction we see in that it’s so much about the place. It’s very
American in that way. It’s not ironic. It’s not disabused. It’s very American
in its romance about place and about death and love. I found it very primal and
beautiful in a restrained way.

But right now we’re also publishing John Wray’s
book, Lowboy, which Eric’s doing.
Courtney’s doing the Wells Tower book [Everything Ravaged, Everything
Burned]. Lorin’s about to publish Clancy
Martin’s book, How to Sell. All
of these books are different in terms of their angles of attack, but they’re
all very strong voices. And they don’t sound like anyone else. I think the
voice is the most important thing—and then the shape.

One
thing that I don’t see a lot of today, and that I used to be very taken with,
is the bigger kind of novel. Social novels, even. I think of The
Twenty-seventh City. That was a first novel
that just blew me away. On the one hand there was The Twenty-seventh
City and on the other hand was The
Virgin Suicides.

Another book that I’m really excited about is Amy Waldman’s first
novel, The Submission, which is a social
novel. It’s a fictional account of the attempt to build the World Trade Center
memorial. It’s a fantastic book about politics, art, religion, and all the
different issues there. I very seldom see novels that have that kind of social
reach.

What else are you looking for when you’re
evaluating a piece of fiction? Are you looking for a certain kind of
sensibility or anything like that?
I think that would fall under
voice. I remember when I read [Roberto] Bolaño’s Savage Detectives. I read an Italian version
and just thought it had so much verve and humor. It was so sexy. It had a kind
of buoyancy and it was so alive. Voice is one way of looking at it but
aliveness is another way. And I think voice is kind of being killed in a lot of
writing today. When you look at the New Yorker, the voices are much less idiosyncratic than they
used to be. It’s being edited in a different way than it used to be.

Why do you
think that is?
I don’t know.
They used to publish a lot of long pieces and it may have something to do with
readers’ attention spans being different. We published a very good book last
year, the autobiography of the composer John Adams. The New Yorker ran a piece of it and the author told me that they
tried to iron out the idiosyncrasies of his style. He gave them a fight. He was
very bemused by why they would try to change his little quirks.

One of the books that I was most proud of publishing last year was
the Lowell-Bishop correspondence. The thing that makes that book so wonderful
is the idiosyncrasy of the way they write.

I have a quote for you: “Most words put down on
paper are not interesting, or don’t make sense, or are stilted. You can tell
within two pages that something is not going to work.” That’s you, twelve years
ago. I completely agree and I’m curious what common problems you notice in the
work of beginning writers.
I used to be kind of uptight about writing-school
writing—it can be hard to emerge with your own voice—but I’m less aware of
that now. I think a lot of people learn to write by imitating and that’s
perfectly legitimate. That’s how poets learn to write. I remember that
Elizabeth Bishop used to make us write imitations of other writers. But if you
want to publish your work, you better have moved beyond that. Only a few people
in the world are meant to be writers. And those are people who really can’t say
things the way other people would. It’s involuntary. Milosz had this great line
that poetry should only be written under unbearable pressure and in the hope
that good spirits, not evil, choose us for their instrument. The idea is that
the people who should write are the people who can’t not write. I think there are a
lot of people who want to write, and who want to say something, but a lot of
them don’t have anything to say.

What will make you want to throw a first novel
across the room?
Pretentiousness. When the writer is trying to be
cool, or ironic, or when the work just isn’t genuine. It’s like what [U.S.
Supreme Court Justice] Potter Stewart said about pornography: You know it when
you see it. You can tell when you’re reading something genuine. You feel it.
There are writers whose voices are quite self-conscious and who I think are
great. André Aciman, for example. I’m working on his new novel right now. His
writing is about self-consciousness. It’s about questioning what you just said, revising
what you just said. It’s very Proustian in that way. And I love it. It’s very
genuine. That’s just the way his mind works.

What is it about the work of a debut poet that
will make it stand out from the others enough that you want to take it on? Is
it different than with fiction?
It’s not really different. It’s the voice and the
angle and the attitude. We don’t take on very many debut poets because we have
so many ongoing writers. I miss that. I read that piece in the New Yorker about the Dickman brothers
and felt a little out of it.

Is there a debut poet you’ve taken on recently
who you could talk about?
Maureen McLane is an example. I knew Maureen as a
critic before I read her poetry. She’s a brilliant critic of contemporary
poetry. And then I read her poems, which have a kind of freshness that takes
you back to the modernism of H. D. and Pound. It’s very classical in its
directness. I thought, “This is totally outside the lingo of most poets.” It’s
pure and in touch with tradition in a very direct way. I felt the same way
about Eliza Griswold’s book, which we did a couple of years ago and which won
the Rome Prize. Both of those poets write in ways that are outside of the lingo
of the various schools of poetry. They’re different. You can’t tell who their
teachers were.

You’ve lamented the blockbuster mentality
that’s arisen in publishing, where it’s become easier for a publisher to sell a
first novel and harder for an author to build a career over a number of books
that sell modestly. Can you speak to that for writers?
Suppose I had written a first novel that five
publishers wanted to publish and the range of offers was from fifty thousand
dollars to four hundred thousand. I probably wouldn’t go with the
fifty-thousand-dollar offer, and I might well go with the
four-hundred-thousand-dollar offer. But I hope that I would think through how
the publisher was going to try to make that money back. What’s the publisher’s
idea of what to do with my book? Of course if you’re a young person who has
never made a penny and all of a sudden somebody offers you a lot of money,
you’re going to take it. You need it. But I don’t think that’s necessarily the
right thing to do.

Why?
Because if your book doesn’t do well and earn that
money back, or make a credible showing, you’re going to have a harder time the
next time. That’s why I think the old system was better. Forty years ago, your
agent would likely have sent your book to editors one at a time, but even if it
was done as a multiple submission, the differential between the offers would
not have been as great. The choice would be made on other bases. I know that
this may sound self-serving, but I do think that real careers are built
stepwise. I still believe that. And I haven’t seen a lot of careers built the
other way. I think a lot of agents, especially younger ones, feel that the
commitment the big advance represents is what’s going to bring the author
success. But I don’t think that’s true.

That’s the Andrew Wylie philosophy. You have
said that FSG is a living contradiction to that model, where more money is
perceived as meaning more oomph.
I think that a really good agent should be able to
get the right publisher, which the agent has already figured out, get as much
money as she can from that publisher, and make a deal, rather than have the
amount of money determine the sale. That’s what the best agents do. They may
solicit a lot of action, but they know where they want to place the author.
They may use competition to jack up their preferred publisher as high as they
will go, and there may be times when the differential is so big that they
aren’t going to be able to go with that target publisher, but I think that’s
the right way to do it: for the agent to work the process so that the author
ends up with the right publisher paying as much as they comfortably can.
There’s an edge of commitment that makes the publisher feel they have to be
alert, but they haven’t gone beyond their zone of comfort for the book.

But Andrew
might say that they should be pushed beyond their comfort zone. Is there any
chance he’s right?
I haven’t seen
that here. We don’t sit around and say, “Well, we paid x for this book so we’d better do something special.”
Everyone knows what the situation is. But even if you’d better do it doesn’t
mean that it’s going to work.

But we know
that there are different levels of effort.
Sure.

That’s why I
sometimes wonder if there’s any chance he’s right. I mean, I’m with you. I work
at Grove, for God’s sake.
Part of what I’m
talking about is the agent using the process to push the publisher to the point
where it’s costing them something to acquire the book. They’re not just picking
up the book for nothing and throwing it against the wall and hoping it sticks.
They’re going to have to think and be creative in publishing it. You can blame
Andrew all you want, but the people who are responsible for the overpayments in
publishing are publishers, not agents or authors. The publishers are the ones
who agree to do it, and they’re the only ones who can be blamed for it. We walk
away from books that we’d like to publish every day because they’re out of our
comfort zone—out of our rational calculation of what we think we should be
risking on them. Very good agents, who I have a lot of respect for, have said
to me, “If I were you I wouldn’t be paying big advances.” I think that if we
could inject some of that realism into the process we’d have a healthier
business.

They say that
to you kind of off the record?
Yeah. I’m not
going to say who they are, but yes, very good agents have said that to me.
Because I think they understand that if the publishers kill themselves off, the
agents aren’t going to have people to publish their authors’ work. It’s not
that I don’t want authors to make money. I do. I want them to get rich, because
then their publishers will be doing well too. But I don’t want them to get rich
at the expense of the larger institution. That’s no help to them. It will
weaken the publishers, and then we won’t be effective.

Are there any other insights you can offer
writers about agents?
I think the ideal publishing experience is when the
agent and the publisher can work together to promote the career of the author.
Yes, the agent sometimes barks at the publisher about something, but basically
they all feel that they’re on the same team. That’s how really good agents
operate. Really good agents are also just as devoted to the work as you and I
are. It’s the same profession from a different angle. As I said, authors should
want an agent who knows where to place them—not someone who’s throwing a ball
up in the air and seeing who jumps highest.

But if you’re a writer, and you don’t work in
publishing, it can be hard to figure out which agents do that.
But what you can tell is how they react to your
work. You can listen to what they say about it editorially and aesthetically.
That’s the first thing you would want: someone who understands what you’re
doing and is not trying to make you into something you aren’t.

But once the agent has cleared that hurdle in
your mind, as a writer, how do you figure out the other stuff? How do you know
how good they actually are at placing your work at the right house?
I think it’s like picking a dentist—you go by
recommendation and word of mouth and looking at who else the agent represents.
What’s happened to those other writers? I think that’s how agents get their
clients.

With
nonfiction, agenting has evolved to the point where agents have become very
involved in the proposals.
Sometimes they
write them.

Exactly. Do
you think it’s ethical for agents to work very heavily on a proposal without
disclosing that to prospective editors?
We often talk
about this. I think that a good agent is an editor, but at the same time it’s
not ethical for an agent to write a proposal for an author. The author needs to
write it. The agent can criticize it and suggest improvements—and should—but
sometimes we wonder who actually wrote the proposal. You can usually get a feel
for that. But I don’t think it’s ethical for an agent to do more than make
suggestions to the author. They have to write it themselves.

How do you
feel about the new primacy that agents have assumed in the lives of writers?
Editors and publishers have been displaced to some extent. Are you okay with
that?
What I don’t
like is when an agent tries to interpose his or her body between you and the
author—when the agent is proprietary and everything needs to be communicated
through them and they don’t want you to have your own relationship with the
author. I find that very frustrating and alienating and counter to the idea I
was just talking about where it’s a collaboration between the agent and the
publisher and the author. I think you’re right in that over time the agent has
become more important in the author’s life, partly because authors move around
more than they used to. But when you’ve worked with an author over many years,
you do develop a really close relationship. The agent has his or her own
relationship with the author, and a good agent wants you to be close with the author.

What do you
find most frustrating about agents?
I have a certain
sympathy for agents on the money thing. They’re getting pressure from their
authors. Just the way that you and I feel like, “Well, if we don’t come up with
x amount of money, Ann Godoff will,”
they feel that too. They may lose their author if they can’t deliver what the
author needs. I empathize with that. But I think a strong agent is confident
enough and knowledgeable enough about the business, and about history, and
about how careers work in the long term, that she can say to her author, “Look,
this is what’s in your interest. It may not seem to be in the short term, but
it is in the long term.” And that’s coming from the seat of experience. I’m
close to a number of agents, personally, and I have a lot of respect for their
contribution to our business. And yes, we argue. We don’t always agree. I
sometimes feel that they’re trying to take advantage. But all in all, it’s just
like how I said it only makes sense for authors to be here who want to be here:
The agents who we work with best are the ones who get why FSG is good for their
authors. It’s a collaborative process and doesn’t need to be hostile. A really
good agent is your ally as well as your adversary at times.

On the flip
side of the world of huge advances is the midlist writer, who is really
struggling today because of the computer and the sales track. Put yourself in
that person’s shoes and, knowing what you know, tell me what you’d do to try to
change your fate.
Most books have
to be midlist because only a few can be best-sellers. If you’re a serious
writer, you should be writing the books you’re going to write.

But what if
you have some ambition, as all writers do, and really want a readership and
think that you deserve one?
If they deserve
one, they’ll get one. I believe that. I believe that eventually they will get
their readership. Now, I also think there are way more people writing books
than are going to get a readership. But I think that the books that really make
a difference are going to have a readership. It may not be immediate. There are
many examples of writers who have labored in relative obscurity for a long time
until their ship came in. Look at Bolaño. His great success is posthumous and
not even in his own country.

Writing
is its own reward. It has to be. I really believe that. This is a part of
publishing that’s really hard to come to grips with. But publishers can’t make
culture happen the way they want it to happen. They can stand up for what they
believe in, and they can work to have an impact, but in the end it’s like the
brilliant thing that Helen Vendler said about poets. She was asked, “What’s the
canon?” and she said something like, “The poets are going to decide what the
canon is. The poets who poets read are the canon.” I think that, in the end,
that’s true about all literature. The books that people read over time, and
keep reading, are the books that matter. We can huff and puff and pay money and
advertise and everything else, but in the end, if the readers don’t come, we
can’t do anything about it.

Twenty years ago you called writing “a very
cruel sport.” Has it gotten more or less cruel since then?
I think it’s probably gotten more cruel because
there’s more competition for people’s time as readers. But all sports are
cruel. Golfing is a cruel sport because only a few people are going to play on
the PGA Tour. Poetry is a good bellwether because there are only a few poets
who matter in the end. Even a lot of the poets who win honors are going to be
filtered out in the end. It doesn’t mean they aren’t good. It is cruel. It’s
Darwinian. So if you’re going to be a writer, you’d better take rewards from it
over and above the public recognition. I remember something Montale said to the
effect that even being a minor poet is an honorable thing. Being a novelist or
a poet whose books aren’t popular is a wonderful accomplishment.

In talking about book promotion you once said
something interesting about believing that authors should focus on their work
and leave the promotion to others. Some people would disagree with that.
Unfortunately publishers need authors to do some of
that. We need authors to be able to go on Charlie Rose and the Today show and All Things
Considered.
We’re dying for them to do those things. We’re selling authors, not books. We’re
selling people the illusion of an experience with an author. They want to know
what the author looks like, what he smells like. They want the full experience.
In the old days it was “Read John Updike’s new book.” Now it’s “Meet John
Updike” or “Listen to John Updike on the audio version” or “Watch John Updike
give a reading.” All of that can be very distracting for writers. Certain
writers aren’t any good at it. If you think about it, if a writer has forty
good writing years, and he publishes a book every two years, does he want to
spend a third year of that cycle on selling his book, in the United States and
in Europe and everywhere else? That’s a big chunk out of his working life. Even
though it can make things hard for us, I’m very sympathetic to authors who
don’t want to do that. It’s not what they’re best at. Their real talent is
writing.

What drives you crazy about authors?
It’s hard for them to drive me crazy. I actually
really empathize with authors. Of course there are certain authors who are so
obsessive about every little thing, and sometimes I have to deal with those
things. But I can usually say to them, almost as a joke, “You’re the most
obsessive person I’ve ever worked with!” But their perfectionism is what makes
them that way, and of course that’s something I value in their work. And then
there are authors who are just very, very selfish—just like there are people
who are very selfish. You can’t admire that. They can be mean, sometimes. I
don’t like authors who aren’t appreciative of the people who help them publish
their work. Some of our most famous authors are among our nicest, and then
there are others who have been among our most disliked. They can earn the love
or the contempt of the people who work for them. But by and large I feel that
their problems are very human problems. I think authors are heroic, so I tend
to think that their narcissism is justified. And let’s face it: The authors you
are working with are ones who you’ve decided are important, so you’ve already
bought into them.

You have
lamented how the role of the editor has changed over the years—that it used to
be more about the text and now it’s more about promotion.
I remember being
so impressed by something I was once told by Bob Loomis, who’s still going
strong in his eighties and is one of the great editors at Random House. This is
someone who has published so many award winners and best-sellers of all
different kinds. He once said to me, “I really just work on getting the books
into the best shape possible and I don’t worry that much about the selling and
so forth. That’s other people’s jobs.” I thought, “Wow. That’s the opposite of
what everyone says you should be doing.” In a way, maybe he didn’t have to
worry about it because he has such credibility—people believe what he says
about a book and go to work. I actually think that’s how it works in
publishing: Once you’ve done it successfully a few times, it gets a lot easier.
People pull with you instead of you feeling that you have to pull them along.
It’s true that the editor today should have ideas—he should be market-wise in
acquiring books and have ideas about how to sell them. But it all starts with
the book. I think the editor’s principal job is to identify books and to help
them be the best they can, and then to work with the rest of the company to get
them across. I think Bob was absolutely right about the primary contribution an
editor can make.

But that is
changing, wouldn’t you say?
I guess it is. I
hear a lot of stuff about how editors behave and how they’re playing hopscotch
and how they don’t really care how much they pay for books because they know
they won’t be around when the chickens come home to roost. I just haven’t seen
that. Maybe I’m working in a bit of a bubble because we’re a little different
than some of the other houses. I hear stories about editors who are competitive
with other editors within their publishing house. I think that’s very
counterproductive and kind of takes the fun out of it. It’s a collegial
business. You’re on a team together and not trying to best each other. But I
see people like you and Lorin and Eric coming along who have the same sort of idealism
about it that people in my generation had. I mean, why else would you do it? If
you wanted to make a killing, you wouldn’t go into publishing. You have to be
doing it out of love.

Speaking of
Eric, would you take us inside the FSG editorial meeting? What’s it like?
When I first got
here I wasn’t very happy with the FSG editorial meeting. I remember Bob Giroux
saying, “The editorial meeting is a disaster. Roger has everyone report on what
they’re doing, and Roger has to be in the meeting. He’s too dominant.” That was
very indicative of the struggles between them and their differences in
personalities. It was true, though. There was something about our editorial
meeting that didn’t allow for the kind of free-flowing quality that you want,
where you bat around ideas and talk about the competition and so on. I don’t
think I was ever very good at that—I hate meetings—but Eric runs the meeting
now and he is good at it. He’s much more
relaxed. We go around and talk about various projects, but there’s also some
general discussion. We don’t use the editorial meeting to acquire books. We use
it to talk about what’s being considered and what we might think about doing.
Even in a small house like this, we don’t really know what’s been submitted to
everyone else. There are ways of solving that but they’re quite laborious.
Sometimes I hear about books that were sold and think, “Why didn’t we get to
see that?” Of course we did get
to see it, but I didn’t know about it. There are so many books out there that I
wish we could have published. But as one of my bosses once said, “Don’t worry
about the ones that got away. Worry about the ones you’re stuck with.” [Laughter.] There’s another line that was said by Ferris
Greenslet, who was a famous editor at Houghton Mifflin in the twenties. One of
his little nostrums that was quoted at us was “When in doubt, decline.”

Talk to me a
little about publishing in translation, which is one of the things that FSG is
known for. This year you’ve had amazing success with Bolaño. Do you feel that
it’s getting easier?
I think we’re
getting better at it. I don’t know if I’ve talked about my current little
buzzword that I’m thinking about a lot: essentialism. We should only be doing things that are essential.
I think that’s a good way to approach doing translations. I myself have been
guilty of not always following that rule. But Bolaño is essential. And Gomorrah, by [Roberto] Saviano, is one of the most important
European books of the last five years. We’re just being more selective. Another
book we just bought that I’m wild about is Roberto Calasso’s La Folie
Baudelaire. It’s about Baudelaire’s Paris.
He’s been published by Knopf until recently but for some reason they were in
doubt and declined, and we picked it up.

In
a way, the market in translation is an interesting microcosm of publishing in
general. You have to approach it in the same way that you do as a publisher,
where you’re out selling books to the world that you’re saying are important.
But you know that some of them will turn out to be important and a lot of them
won’t. You can’t just go for the books that all of your foreign colleagues tell
you are their important books—they have their reasons for telling you
that—but the few books that are actually going to have an impact in your
market. You have to look for exactly what you’re looking for as a reader. And
that’s not always the big books. It’s not always the books that are part of the
big commerce of publishing and that you hear about on the fast track. Sometimes
it’s books that are published by small publishers and sort of come in from the
side. On the other hand of that you have Gomorrah, which was the biggest book in Italian publishing in many years and
which we did hear about on the fast track.

What’s your
favorite way to hear about an international book?
From a friend. I
actually have a scout in Italy. It’s the only country where we have a scout.
She’s a really smart woman named Caterina Zaccaroni. I don’t necessarily hear
about the books from her, but I’ll say to her, “What about this one? What about
that one?” and she has opinions about them. She saves me a lot of work. And she
has books that she pushes on me herself—books that she has decided are
important. There’s one book that she’s been trying to get me to publish for
several years now, and I may just cave in and do it because she’s so passionate
about it. But one of the ways that FSG became an important publisher was
because Roger had these people in Europe who would recommend books to him. He
published all of these books in translation that other people hadn’t picked up.
Italian in particular was important for the early FSG. But it’s hard to be
confronted with the number of so-called “important” foreign books and then to
figure out which few are right to publish.

Do you enjoy
the international book fairs?
I love
Frankfurt. Roger loved it and I inherited that love from him. I love the
rituals of Frankfurt. You basically have the same appointments every year. You
see the same people. You see them age and think, “Oh, if they’re aging, I must
be aging.” [Laughter.] It’s more about
relationships than doing business. We try not to buy books at Frankfurt, but
renewing our ties is very important. And Frankfurt is one place where American
publishing doesn’t dominate as much, which is nice to see. A lot of American
publishers don’t really get Frankfurt, and don’t enjoy it, because they don’t
engage with the foreign publishers as much. But that’s the fun part.

What disturbs
you most about the way the industry has changed?
What disturbs me
most about publishing today, or the reading world, is that readers aren’t
loyal. You can’t count on continuity. There’s still a certain base of readers
for an author, but it’s much lower than it used to be. Readers don’t stick with
authors. I think that’s partly because readers are more occasional now, and
they don’t come to books on their own as much as they’re told by somebody.
They’re told by Oprah. They’re told by their book club. So they may read
another book, but the next book is the next
book they’re told they should read. It’s not that they read Anna
Karenina and then go out and read War
and Peace. They’re less informed and less
knowledgeable. They need help. I love book clubs, but I think they’re
indicative of the fact that reading is now an occasional entertainment for a
lot of people and not the kind of obsessive devotion that it used to be. It
feels like a lot more people used to read every novel by John Updike, for
example, and I don’t think those kind of readers are as present as they used to
be.

Should
publishers be doing anything to try to reverse that trend?
I don’t know the
answer to that. I always feels sort of ham-fisted when the ABA or AAP does
those “Get caught reading” campaigns. That’s not what’s going to change
people’s reading habits. I think what publishers should do is try to publish
books as well as possible and try to reach their readers in as innovative ways
as possible. We have these terrible problems—that book reviews don’t matter
anymore, that there are fewer of them all the time. And what is taking their
place? How do you reach your readers? I guess you have to do it through the
Web, but I don’t know if I’m buying any books because of Internet marketing. I
just wonder how we’re going to find the readers. The readers are there. Look,
we’ve sold a hundred thousand copies of 2666. Somehow, people learned about that book and wanted to read it. That
shows you that the readers are there. It’s just getting harder to get their
attention and to get them interested.

What is your take on the current retail landscape?
Bad. Actually, at our sales conference yesterday,
some of the salesmen were saying that neighborhood bookstores are doing better
in the economic crisis because people are more interested in buying locally and
supporting small businesses. I think this crisis could have a lot of good
effects for the culture. It’s slowing things down—slowing down the pace of
change—and making people aware of what’s important in life. It’s not just
more, more, more. But I think all of the traditional bookstore chains are in
trouble. Amazon is very, very effective. But I think Amazon is a potential…it’s
a frenemy. It’s not just interested in being a bookstore. So I think we have to
sell our own books to people.

Are you guys doing that?
We do it. We don’t want to muscle out the
retailers. But I think that in the conspectus of the different players in the
publishing business, the bookstores are the weakest link in the chain. It’s
just like with music. There are always going to be bookstores, but I don’t
think that’s where the future of bookselling is.

page_5: 

Where do you
think the future of bookselling is?
With the
publishers. I think the publishers will be selling the books directly.

Are you
talking about digitally or physical books?
Both. I think
there are always going to be people who want physical books, but I think the
digital part of the business is going to increase. One of the things that all
publishers are worried about now is this idea that a book on Kindle is worth
$9.99. If that establishes the price of what a book is worth, what does that
say? What if I want to sell Maureen McLane’s book as a hardcover for
twenty-four dollars? I think that’s a problem. Again, it’s a lesson from the
music business. People have been used to the idea that intellectual
property—that a book, an artwork—is worth a certain amount of money. It’s a
mark of respect, in a way. But if you turn it into a widget, where every book
is worth the same amount, it’s not good. This is where the author, the agent, and
the publisher should be working together to protect their mutual interest. And
not have the business be decided by a seller.

By Amazon.
Yeah. We should
be deciding what a book is worth, not them. It’s a problem.

Are you
envisioning bookstores going away the way that record stores did?
I think that
bookstores are going to be around, but I don’t think they’re going to be the
major channel. Especially if we go more and more digital.

It will be
like in music, where there’s a nice little record store down the street that
nobody goes to.
They buy their
music on iTunes. I still buy CDs, but a lot of my friends don’t bother. They
download it onto their iPods.

So how do we
protect our authors’ interests and our interests in a situation like this where
it’s very complicated and there are a lot of competing interests, including
bookstores?
Look, I don’t want bookstores to go away. But I think they’re
vulnerable. I just don’t think we should be letting a retailer decide what a
book is worth.

What’s the
bigger issue in your mind? Is it the digital stuff or is it the old issues like
returns? It’s complicated because it’s all happening at different speeds.
In a digital
world there would be no returns. Returns are a huge drag on our business. The
waste is just enormous, and once that is gone it will help our business
enormously.

Do you think
this digital stuff is going to happen that quickly?
Well, it seems
to be speeding up. It’s still a very small part of the business, which is
something you have to keep in mind as you do your business. We’re still selling
physical books, mainly, and mainly through bookstores. But everyone’s obsessed
with change, and everyone’s afraid that if they aren’t on top of it, they’re
going to be eaten. And they should be afraid. But in the meantime we have to
continue publishing the old fashioned way. That’s the thing about these kinds
of changes: They’re all add-ons. Yes, you’re doing Internet marketing, but
you’re still doing all of the old processes too. So that’s a strain on our
systems—we have to do all of this R&D. But still, as I said earlier, when
the dust has cleared from this crisis we’re in, I think we’ll have a smaller
business but a healthier business.

How do you
feel about paperback originals?
I’m for them.
We’re doing more of them. There’s a practical problem with paperback originals,
which is that you can’t pay that much for them. So you have to find an author
who understands that. People always say, “Why don’t you do this book as a
paperback original?” Well, fine. But the advance available for that is going to
be about a quarter of what you might get if we did it in hardcover. We still
haven’t solved that. But we’re doing it more and I think it’s the right way to
publish a lot of books. And if it works, it can launch an author and later they
can do a hardcover book.

You have
voiced concerns about the model of conglomerate publishing and its demands of
growth in a notoriously low-growth business. When you look toward the future
and think about what’s best for authors—serious authors—what would be the
best publishing industry of the future look like?
I think small is
beautiful. I think small houses like yours and mine are very hospitable to
serious writers because they become part of the family. It’s a family business
in many ways. When a relationship is good, and when the results are good, the
author becomes part of the family of the publishing house. There’s a kind of
collaborative emotional component. The fact is, in the digital world where
everybody can do everything at his own desk, it’s not like you have to go to a
Simon & Schuster to get your book published effectively. It can be done by
anybody who’s a pro. What you get in the small house is a connection with
someone who understands you and can promote your work with a personal
commitment.

Do you feel
like the big, publicly traded media companies might give up on book publishing?
I actually think
there is going to be more consolidation. Look at something like Penguin. They
have a lot of little pods—that’s their approach—and it works well for them. I
think it’s possible that some of these companies will get spun off. But if I
were running one of these big companies I would try to have smaller entities
within them. I don’t really know the answer. Look at what’s happening to
Houghton Mifflin. It’s so sad. The midsize companies have really been squeezed
worse than the small ones.

A few years
before FSG was sold, you said the company was doing well because it wasn’t able
to play “the money game.” Now that you are able to play the money game, and
sometimes do pay big advances, why would you say you’re doing well?
I think we’ve
stayed pretty close to our mission. I think we’ve become more focused as a
publisher. With regard to big advances, I’ll tell you a dirty little secret. I
think that very often the big advances you pay, at least for a company like
ours, don’t end up having the result you want. Sometimes you just have to pay
them. But the real successes, which make the difference in our business, don’t
come from the books for which we pay big money. When we pay a big advance our
job is to earn back what we gave the author so that we come out
clean—basically break even or make a small profit. Whereas a book where we
start much lower, and go a big distance, is much more mutually profitable. That
model is also much more what we ought to be about, I think.

So,
no, there aren’t books that we can’t buy because of money. When Becky Saletan
was here we had the chance to bid on Hillary Clinton’s book. And we did. We bid
a lot of money. I always knew we wouldn’t get it because we were being used to
bid up Simon & Schuster. We all knew that. We didn’t offer as much as they
did, but we offered a lot of money, and I suppose we would have made that money
back. But we’re a small house, and a big advance that doesn’t work out can do a
lot more damage to us, relatively speaking, than it does to a Simon &
Schuster, which takes a lot of bets all the time. So yes, we do pay big
advances sometimes, especially for our established authors, but the real
lifeblood of our business is not in doing that.

Do you think
the proliferation of big advances will ever change?
I think it is
changing. Books that seem like a sure thing are always going to be worth a lot
of money, but I don’t think they’re worth quite as much as they were. And if
they don’t work out? I think there’s more realism, even on the part of the
really big authors.

When you find
yourself in a situation where you’re bidding aggressively on a book, how do you
decide whether to go further or to stop?
We try to decide
beforehand what we think the book is worth—we do P&Ls and all of those
calculations—and stick to it. And most of the time we’re pretty disciplined.
But when we stretch? It’s because of belief in the author, the prospect of a
long-term relationship, and passion. But if you stretch beyond the prudent
level it can feel like, “Where’s the morning-after pill? Sure, that was really
great sex, but….” I’d much rather have that experience when we publish the book.

Tell me about
the moments when you feel the burden of your office.
It’s no fun to
tell an editor they can’t do something they really want to do. It’s no fun to
have an unpleasant conversation with an author or an agent. I like to make
people happy, if I can. But I’ve found that it’s just like anything else: The
anticipation of those things is usually much worse than actually carrying them
out. I mean, I’ve been fired, so I know what it’s like on both sides. This will
probably sound callow, but it’s usually better for everyone. If it’s happening,
it’s happening because something isn’t working. So it’s better for both parties
to cut their losses and start anew.

So many
people in the industry admire you. I’m curious about some of the people who you
admire the most.
There are so
many of them. I’m not very good at pulling names out of hats so I’m sure I’ll
wake up tomorrow and think, “Why didn’t I mention this person or that person?”
When I was starting out I had a huge amount of admiration for Bob Gottlieb. He
was just one of many people I admired, but I thought that he was good at so
many different kinds of publishing. He sort of set the standard, in fiction
especially. These days I admire Sonny [Mehta] very much. I admire Pat
[Strachan] a great deal. I admire Morgan [Entrekin]. He’s the last of the breed
that Roger was, as an independent publisher. He does it in a different way than
Roger because the competitive playing field is less even than it was when Roger
was doing it, but he’s definitely a gent and a man of great integrity and a
wonderful publisher. He’s really good for our business. I admire Graywolf
Press—I think Fiona McRae does a fantastic job. I admire Lynn Nesbit, among a
lot of other agents who have been great for our business.

What makes
you admire somebody?
I admire people
who are having fun doing what we do and who do it with passion and devotion and
integrity—and do it really well. I mean, you have to remember that I was a
very slow starter in this business. I slogged along for a long time until I had
some good fortune and found a place where I could do what I believed in. I
think the thing I really admire… Pat is a good example. She’s just kept doing
what she believes in, very, very consistently, for a long time. Drenka [Willen]
is another editor I admire in the same way. I admire Norton—they’ve stuck to
what they do. I grieve for places like Houghton Mifflin and Harcourt, whose
approach to publishing seemed very right and true. I just think that they were
eviscerated by their owners, and it’s a terrible shame. Jonathan Burnham is a
very formidable competitor and someone I admire a lot.

How are you
feeling about Grand Central after losing Scott Turow to them?
I’m very fond of
them, actually. Jamie Raab called me and there are no hard feelings. I’m
absolutely sure that it wasn’t a case of Grand Central going after him. I think
Scott decided that he needed to take a new tack in his career. I’m sure he
decided to go to them because they have his paperbacks. And their approach to
publishing is different than ours. In the days when we sold our paperback
rights, we sold more books to Warner [now Grand Central], at a certain point,
than anyone. They were very good. I also admire St. Martin’s Press—they do a
fabulous job.

Did you read
the proposal for the book they just bought about the history of FSG?
I did read it.
It came into my hands. I actually thought that Boris [Kachka] got the story
really well. I mean, I don’t know who’s going to want to read it…. [Laughter.]

Did they come
to you and ask if they could buy it?
They asked if we
had any objections and I said no. I don’t think we should be censoring things
like that. I don’t think there are any dirty secrets to tell. I’m sure there
are juicy stories, but I don’t think there’s anything to hide.

Are there any books that you feel embarrassed
for not having read?
There are a lot of great books that I haven’t
read. I’ve never read Bleak House, for example. I’ve never read The Brothers
Karamazov.
I haven’t read Thomas Bernhard. How’s that? [Laughter.]

Do you have any big regrets?
If I had been a different person, I might have
tried to be a writer instead of getting a job. My friend Jim Atlas went off and
wrote his Delmore Schwartz book after school. I’ve always thought that was a
very gutsy thing to do. I always admired his courage and craziness in doing
that, and he wrote a great book and it paid off. Or look at someone like
Jonathan Franzen, who went and sat in a room for five years and wrote The
Twenty-seventh City. I’ve always thought, “That’s heroic.” And I’m not heroic. So I don’t know if
that’s a regret but it’s definitely a Walter Mittyish admiration for people who
do that.

I
regret that I was too callow to make my time at Random House productive. I
never learned how to operate in that system. I had been coddled at Houghton
Mifflin, and I think I was cocky, and then I came up against the monolith of
Random House. They weren’t bending to do things my way and I should have tried
to figure out how to do things their way. I think I could have learned more.

You
grieve over relationships. We published Oscar Hijuelos’s book The Mambo
Kings Play Songs of Love, which was another
book I did with Harriet. It won the Pulitzer Prize and did wonderfully. We did
one more book together, and it didn’t go terribly well, and then he left. That
was sad—we had been very close and we aren’t any more. I’m regretful that my
time working with Scott Turow is over and that we aren’t going to be publishing
the sequel to Presumed Innocent,
which would have been a lot of fun. I’m regretful that Tom Wolfe had to leave
FSG. I’m regretful that Pat Strachan left FSG all those years ago. It would
have been fun to have worked together and it would have been enriching for us.
I’m very regretful that Philip Roth left Farrar, Straus. I think that was unnecessary,
and it was very sad. It was a real loss for us—he was a perfect FSG author. I
regret that Joseph Brodsky died so young and that Thom Gunn is no longer with
us.

The
more I think about it, the more regrets I have. [Laughter.]

At the end of the day, what’s the most
rewarding part of your job?
It’s the intimacy with the author—the love affair
with the author. When you’re reading the author’s book, it’s as intimate as any
love experience, really. And if you can give them the kind of unconditional
love and support that goes with that, and they feel that you’re on their side,
and doing good things for them, they give that love back to you. The connection
with the author is very moving. And then a core of trust is built and you’re
sort of bound together at the hip in this aspect of life. That’s one of the
best feelings in the world. That’s what it’s all about for me.

Jofie Ferrari-Adler is an editor at
Grove/Atlantic.

Agents & Editors: Jonathan Galassi

As part of his ongoing series of interviews with publishing professionals, Jofie Ferrari-Adler stopped by the office of Jonathan Galassi, the president and publisher of FSG, and asked him what he would change about his job if he could.

Agents & Editors: A Q&A With Editor Chuck Adams
Agents & Editors: A Q&A With Four Young Literary Agents
Agents and Editors: A Q&A With Four Literary Agents
Agents and Editors: A Q&A With Four Young Editors

Agents and Editors: A Q&A With Four Literary Agents

by

Jofie Ferrari-Adler

May/June 2009
5.1.09
In Print and Online

In “Goodbye to All That,” her 1967 essay about the years she spent in New York City as a young writer, Joan Didion recalls trying to coax a world-weary friend into attending a party by promising him “new faces.” Her friend “laughed literally until he choked” before explaining that “the last time he had gone to a party where he’d been promised ‘new faces,’ there had been fifteen people in the room, and he had already slept with five of the women and owed money to all but two of the men.”

Several decades later, the details may be different—casual sex? what’s that?—but the literary world is every bit as small as it was in Didion’s heyday. The agents who congregated at the offices of the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses for this conversation (and who were chosen, it should be noted, by the editors of this magazine) are not new faces—to one another or to me. During our talk, one of them said that she hopes to “grow old together” with her clients. The same might be said of us publishing people, who, unlike Didion’s friend and especially in these tough times, are likely to view our shared history as a comfort rather than a curse. Some particulars:

 

MARIA MASSIE worked as an agent for twelve years before joining Lippincott Massie McQuilkin as a partner in 2004. A few years ago Maria broke hearts all over town (mine included) when she sold Nigerian priest Uwem Akpan’s Say You’re One of Them to Little, Brown for an ungodly advance. Her other clients include Peter Ho Davies and Tom Perrotta.

JIM RUTMAN, an agent at Sterling Lord Literistic for the past ten years, is mild mannered until he steps onto a basketball court—we play on a publishing team called the Jackals—at which point he turns into a ferociously competitive shooting guard who sometimes scores half our points. His clients include Charles Bock, J. Robert Lennon, and Peter Rock.

 

ANNA STEIN worked at three other agencies before joining the Irene Skolnick Literary Agency in 2006. Once, after a writers conference in New Orleans, Anna took me and my wife to a second-line celebration (imagine a loud, roving bacchanal) in the Ninth Ward. We made our plane, but barely. Her clients include Chloe Aridjis, Yoko Ogawa, and Anya Ulinich.

 

PETER STEINBERG spent twelve years at other agencies before founding the Steinberg Agency in 2007. Peter is a kind of throwback to the golden age of publishing, when men did things like hold doors open for women and send handwritten thank-you notes—not to embarrass him or anything. His clients include Alicia Erian, Keith Donohue, and John Matteson.

Let us inside your heads a little and talk about what you’re looking at and thinking about when you’re evaluating a piece of fiction.
STEIN: It’s really hard to talk about why a piece of writing is good, and moving—even if it’s funny—and what makes us keep thinking about something after we’ve read it. And it’s incredibly subjective. That’s why it’s hard for agents who represent fiction, especially literary fiction, to find it. It’s so rare. We can all talk about the things we don’t like. When I see clichés, for example, on the first page or in the first chapter of a book, that kind of kills it for me immediately. The romance and the chemistry is just over. That’s just one example of the negative side of that question, and I’m sure you guys have a million others. If I knew how to describe in language what makes me fall in love with something, then I would be a writer. All I can say is that if I read the first few pages of a novel and think, “Jesus Christ! Who the fuck is this person? Why are they letting me read this?” then that person is onto something. And we don’t have that feeling very often. But when we do see it, it’s so exciting.

MASSIE: Anna’s right. It’s like you have this moment of clarity and you recognize something that you’re so absorbed with. I read a lot of things that are beautifully written where I say to myself, “Oh, this is good,” but I’m not bowled over or sucked right in. It’s so subjective. I can read something and pass on it and I hear, two days later, that there was a bidding war and it sold for a ton of money, but it just wasn’t the thing that I was going to fall in love with.

STEINBERG: And you’re okay with that.

MASSIE: You have to be okay with it because it’s so subjective. I’m not necessarily going to see what somebody else sees, or read a book the way somebody else reads it. That’s one thing that writers who are looking for an agent should always remember: All agents are different. Everyone has different tastes. What I like to read might be different than Anna or Peter or Jim. That’s a great thing about what we do—there’s so much to choose from. And what you fall in love with is a very personal choice.

RUTMAN: And the reactions are necessarily self-contained. It’s impossible to articulate what you hope to find as an agent. How could you explain to somebody what moves you? Because hopefully you’re capable of being moved by things that you didn’t anticipate being moved by. So you sit down with something, and all the preamble is basically pointless until the moment that you actually start searching around and rummaging for your feelings and response. It might happen on word four, or it might happen on sentence seven, but if it hasn’t happened by page two, will it happen on page two hundred and fifty? I wish it did. But I don’t know that it does.

Are there any specific things that can make you fall in love with a piece of writing?
STEIN: I would say that being able to make me think, especially in dialogue, “Oh, shit. This person has got me. This person has just seen into what we all feel every day but don’t say. This person has looked into our souls, especially the worst sides of us, and sort of ripped them open and put them on the page.” Psychology, to me, is one of the most exciting things to see work well in fiction—when it comes alive on the page and is totally devastating.

STEINBERG: When you read something and think, “I can’t believe they just said what I’ve thought in my deepest thoughts but never articulated,” that is always an eye-opener for me. And it’s also about reading something that doesn’t seem familiar. Writers should realize that agents have a ton of material to read, and when things seem familiar, it’s an easy reason to pass. If it’s something that’s new, it really makes a huge difference. And I’m not talking about something being so wildly creative that it’s ridiculous—not a talking plant falling in love with a turtle or something like that. I’m talking about, in a real sense, something that is genuinely new and also deeply felt. That’s what we’re all looking for. But at the same time, I do get things and think, “How is this like something else that has sold well?” It’s a difficult balance. You have to have one foot in literature and one foot in what’s going on in the marketplace.

RUTMAN: Writers probably shouldn’t trouble themselves too much over that consideration. If they’re aiming to hit some spot that’s been working—trying to write toward the books that have made an impression—that just seems like a pretty pointless chase. You know, “I hear that circus animals are wildly appealing and I’ve had some thoughts about circus animals….” That doesn’t seem like a very good way to go about it.

STEINBERG: A writer was just asking me about that and I said it’s the agent’s job to spin a book for the marketplace—to talk about it being a little like this book and a little like that book or whatever. Writers should put those kinds of thoughts out of their heads and just write.

RUTMAN: I don’t know who to blame for trends. If a run of books comes 
out that are all set in a particular 
country—which happens all the time—to whom do we attribute that? To writers who are looking at things and saying, “Hmmm, I notice that fourteen years ago India was interesting to people. I think that’s where I’m going to set my book”? You can’t blame writers for asking what subjects are interesting these days, even when we’re talking about fiction, and I wish I had a useful answer for them, but I just don’t think it works that way.

STEINBERG: I would basically go with your passion. The subject matter can be very wide ranging, but if you go with your passion, even if it doesn’t work, at least it’s heartfelt.

STEIN: On some level, what else are you going to do? Are you going to write a novel because it’s “commercially viable”? I mean, I guess people do that. But we’re not going to represent them.

Because you hate money?
STEIN: We. Hate. Money. [Laughter.]

But seriously, I sometimes think that people in the business read in different ways than normal readers. Are there things that you’re looking at—contextual things, like who the author is—beyond what’s on the page?
STEINBERG: Those things very much take the backseat for me. It really is just what’s on the page. All of that other stuff comes later. Maybe once I get a third of the way through a novel and I’m loving it, then I will look back and see who the author is and all that stuff. I think it’s important to stress that the synopsis and the cover letter and all of those things are not really important. It’s the work, the work, the work. You have to focus on the work. I think sometimes writers get lost in getting the cover letter and the synopsis and those kinds of professional things right because they’re afraid of focusing on the work.

STEIN: I don’t even read synopses. Do you guys?

STEINBERG: I skip right over them. I go to the first page.

STEIN: I hate synopses. They’re terrible.

RUTMAN: It’s hard to write a synopsis well. And when we’re talking about literary fiction, it will probably not make or break an agent’s interest going into page one. You’re not like, “Oh, there’s going to be an unexpected plot twist two-thirds of the way through. I’m going to hang in there long enough to find out how that goes.”

STEIN: I’m still surprised when I call an editor to pitch a book and he says, “So what’s the novel about?” I’m like, “You actually want me to tell you what happens in the plot? Are you serious? I mean, we can do that if you want.” But that’s not really the point. I don’t want anyone to tell me the plot of a novel. It’s so boring.

But are there any other things you’re looking at beyond what’s on the page? Things that maybe you can sense after years of experience.
MASSIE: Sometimes it’s when you’re reading a manuscript and you can see that the person is a really talented writer with a beautiful voice but the story is not quite there. But you see the potential. Sometimes you sign those people on because you think, “Okay, maybe this isn’t going to be the big book, or maybe it won’t even sell, but this person has a quality—they have the writing, they have the voice—and the potential is there. This writer is going to go far. And maybe the next book will be the one.” I’ve taken people on under those circumstances.

RUTMAN: I mean, reading “professionally,” if that’s what we do, is a compromised process because you are reading a book with an eye toward asking somebody for money. You are reading in a different way than you are when that’s not a consideration. So I think it’s filtered into the experience from the beginning. You are reading to be moved, hopefully, if that’s the kind of novel you work on, but at the same time it probably would be disingenuous to suggest that you’re not taking in some superficial considerations. They are all distantly secondary to the work itself. Because if an agent is reading with an eye toward various recent trends that have worked, he’s probably not going to succeed all that well either. The same thing is true of the reverse. Any categorical dismissal of some kind of novel feels bogus because there’s got to be a counterexample for every single example. So if somebody comes along and has this long list of accolades and prizes, it doesn’t damage your regard for them. And if somebody comes to you on novel fourteen, with twelve of them having done exceptionally well, and the last one maybe less well, you think about that, too. You’re thinking about how difficult it could be given certain practical considerations. But it’s still all pretty far receded from the work itself.

STEIN: There is the question, now more than ever, of whether or not a book is publishable. By publishable I don’t mean, “Is there a great plot and is the writing amazing etcetera?” I mean that if we were in your shoes, as a publisher, how would we publish the book? What kind of jacket would we give it? How would we position it? I mean, we’re talking about literary fiction? You can’t publish literary fiction today. How do you do that? [Laughter.]

RUTMAN: Legally, you can, but…

STEIN: So, given that it’s basically impossible, it’s our responsibility as the first guard to begin to think about, “Is it possible?” And if we’re so bowled over and we’re so in love that we think somebody should publish it, how would we do it? This is something I really struggle with because I’m not very creative. I don’t have the mind for it. I admire publishers all the more today because the ideas they come up with just amaze me. And I’m not trying to flatter them, at all, because I love to talk trash. But it really does amaze me. I’m thinking about a book right now, for example, that I want to sell. I think the author is fantastic and well positioned and that the novel is perfect—there’s nothing wrong with it. But in a way it would be a funny book to publish. In a way, I don’t exactly see how it fits and how it could break out. So I see the problem there, which maybe we didn’t have five years ago as agents. And I see it becoming more and more of a problem as the market contracts. So I’m reading a little differently because of that. I might not be altering my habits about what I take on, but maybe I am.

STEINBERG: I think you’re sort of unconsciously changing and adapting to the marketplace. I find myself doing that. I think when an agent says, “I was following my gut instinct,” what that really means is accumulated wisdom and taking a lot of different variables into account. You spend your day reading Publishers Weekly and Publishers Lunch and you take these things into consideration. You’re having lunch with editors who are saying, “Such-and-such is so hard” and you’re processing all of this information. And when you open a manuscript, you’re reading it with that eye. It’s hard for us to say exactly how we’re looking at material but I think we are taking a lot of different things into account.

Is the economy affecting how you’re reading?
MASSIE: It’s starting to.

STEINBERG: I would say yes too. It feels like things are tough.

MASSIE: Right before Black Wednesday I had a novel out that I was really excited about. I was getting great reads from a bunch of people who were all calling to say, “This is great. This is wonderful.” And one by one they slowly disappeared on me, except for one editor, who actually ended up being the perfect editor. But I did see everything diminish. I had an idea of what the novel was going to sell for and it didn’t quite get there. It was actually shocking, because it’s a wonderful novel and the responses were amazing and I really did see people pull back. Her first novel had done okay but not great and all people could say was, “Her numbers are just not good enough.” Her numbers were not bad for a literary novel. So that was my first moment of a little bit of fear. I haven’t quite gotten to the point where I’m conscious that the economy is affecting my thinking, but I’m sure I will at some point.

RUTMAN: Especially with fiction, you’re largely at the mercy of what comes in. Certainly you solicit your share, but when you’re relying on the kindness of your acquaintances, or referrals, wherever they happen to come from, you can only adjust so much. But it’s certainly nice to glimpse something behind the page whenever you can, whatever it may be. If a novel happens to have a nice, portable summation—if it’s pitchable—that doesn’t upset me.

MASSIE: If there’s a hook.

STEIN: Or when the author has a platform.

MASSIE: When they’ve been published in the New Yorker or something.

RUTMAN: When you’re reading something, one of the things you’re trying to glimpse is whether you can imagine more than a few people warming up to it. But things that work in various ways…I mean, not to be indirectly nepotistic here, but on what planet should 2666 have worked commercially?

STEIN: I wasn’t going to bring it up.

RUTMAN: That’s why I did.

STEIN: Well, let’s start with The Savage Detectives. I mean, why should anybody have finished that book, let alone have it be successful? [Laughter.] Now I’m going to say something nice about the publisher, but it really was a beautiful piece of publishing.

RUTMAN: It was exquisite. How did that work? Why did that work? I want somebody to explain it to me. Gut instincts are referred to retrospectively when they have worked—people don’t really make much reference to their gut instincts when they’re looking back regretfully. It’s not like, “Ugh, my gut instincts. Son of a bitch.” Gut instincts are wrong just as much as they’re right. But there is such a thing as publishing something well, and resourcefully.

STEIN: And I find that inspiring—the fact that Lorin Stein is my brother aside—because we are in the position now where we’re selling books for lowly five figures that we might have sold for six figures very recently. And I don’t want to alter what I take on because of that.

RUTMAN: Do you think you would know how to alter it?

STEIN: I don’t think I would.

RUTMAN: If I could see clearly enough and far enough to think, “If I just adjust my taste this much, I think I’ll be a very successful person,” I would think about trying it. [Laughter.] I just don’t presume to know how that would work.

STEIN: But here’s how I might alter. I might say, “Look, I can’t take on an Icelandic writer right now.” Or, “I can’t afford to invest my time in editing the sample translation of this Icelandic writer right now. It’s just not the time for that. Maybe when things are sunnier.”

STEINBERG: I feel like I can adjust when there are natural inclinations a certain way. For instance, I was reading that young adult books are selling better than adult books. I have kids and I’m starting to read what they’re reading, and I thought, “Oh, I’m sort of interested in this. Maybe I should do a little more young adult.” So that’s something that I’ve consciously done in terms of categories. I think I’ll still look for the same type of material within the young adult category, but I’m definitely thinking about the category a little bit more because of the marketplace.

Where are you finding writers, aside from referrals? Are you reading literary magazines? Are you reading blogs?
MASSIE: No blogs.

RUTMAN: Not for fiction.

STEIN: Hell no.

RUTMAN: Referrals are about 75 percent of how I find writers.

MASSIE: A lot of my clients teach in MFA programs, so I get referrals from them. I get referrals from editors. I get referrals from other agents.

RUTMAN: There’s a big range of where referrals come from.

STEIN: But every now and then there will be something in the slush—and I bet this is true for you guys, too—that’s not just well written but is also well researched and shows that the person knows your list and is really appropriate for your list and also has published well.

MASSIE: And sometimes when I read a short story that I like I’ll send an e-mail. “Are you represented?” Once in a blue moon someone’s not represented.

RUTMAN: There are too many of us.

MASSIE: There are a lot of us.

STEIN: There are way too many of us.

STEINBERG: A lot of times, when people are in literary magazines, it’s too late.

MASSIE: Exactly. Agents are submitting those short stories.

RUTMAN: And MFA students are going about things in an entirely different way.

STEINBERG: They’re savvy.

MASSIE: They’re so savvy.

STEIN: That’s what they pay for.

MASSIE: I was amazed by going to MFA programs and talking to students. The first thing they want to know is, “Okay, what do I need for my query letter? What do I need for this thing or that thing?” It wasn’t questions about the work. Their questions were really about the business side.

 

Do you think that’s healthy?
MASSIE: No. I don’t.

RUTMAN: Ultimately, no. If that is more of a priority than the work, it can’t be all good. I mean, it’s fine that they have a sort of professional track and that they’re exposed to whatever realities they are ultimately going to encounter. But when they take a sort of sporting interest in it…

STEINBERG: It’s a good way to eliminate potential people, for me at least. When they ask me, “What’s the query letter consist of?” I usually think, “Well, that’s probably not a potential client.”

RUTMAN: It’s true.

What do you wish beginning writers would do better?
MASSIE: Take chances. Don’t worry about writing a perfect novel. Sometimes it’s nice to have something that’s a little bit raw and has a little bit of an edge to it. Something that’s just perfect all the way through is sometimes a little boring.

STEIN: I wish they would get their friends, who may be writers or may not be writers, to read their work and tell them, “Don’t say anything nice to me. I don’t want to hear anything nice. I want to hear everything not nice that you have to say.”

STEINBERG: And be smart about picking those people. Find your two or three friends who hate everything.

STEIN: Exactly. And have those people—those hateful friends—give you feedback before you even think about sending out your work.

STEINBERG: I would also say, once you think the work is done, work on it for another year.

STEIN: And never trust your spouse if your spouse says it’s good. Your spouse has no idea. Neither do your mother or your father.

RUTMAN: Check your eagerness to share. A lot of professors may even encourage you, as a way to hasten the process along. You know, “I think it’s time for the world to tell you what they think of this.” It may well not be time for the world to pass judgment just yet. Hold on until you are absolutely certain that it’s ready for broad, indiscriminate exposure. Don’t hurry that.

STEIN: And this is a cliché for us but it seems worth saying that most writers’ first novels aren’t really their first novels. If you have to scrap your first novel, you’ll live. Your first novel probably won’t be the first novel you publish. Maybe your second one will be. But you’ll live. And you’ll be a better writer because of it.

What are some of the common mistakes you see in the submission process?
STEINBERG: Don’t say, “If you don’t like this novel, I have many other I could show you.” Don’t say, “This will make a great movie, too.” Don’t do that fake thing where you pretend you know all about the stuff I’ve agented. It’s funny because I think that’s a piece of advice that writers always gets—research the agent and talk about the other work they’ve sold. But it always comes off as very false to me unless you’ve really read something I’ve sold. And I don’t want you to waste your time reading something of mine just to write a query letter.

STEIN: I would say to go the other way around. Write to agents whose books you’re actually in love with.

STEINBERG: But what if those agents pass and you still want an agent?

STEIN: Then you should read more books. [Laughter.]

What else?
STEINBERG: Don’t talk about a character sweating on the first page or two.

RUTMAN: Sweating?

STEINBERG: Yeah. It happens all the time. The writer’s like, “He was sweating profusely….” It’s supposed to denote tension, I think.

RUTMAN: Also don’t write the phrase “sweating profusely.”

STEINBERG: I have a joke in my office where if a character is sweating in the first two pages, I go, “Sweating!” [Laughter.] Also, people are always “clutching” steering wheels in the first few pages.

STEIN: That’s the cliché thing.

STEINBERG: And don’t wake up from a dream on the first page. No dreams on the first page.

STEIN: It’s best to avoid dreams if possible.

But this is all craft stuff. Let’s go back to the submission process.
STEIN: Don’t write “Because of your interest in international fiction…” or whatever you think the agent’s interest is. That means you’ve been trolling some Web site, and that freaks me out. Don’t let me see that you’ve been trolling some Web site that says I like a certain kind of genre. If you know who I am, you should know who I am because you’ve done some kind of research that has to do with the specific books I represent. That should only be because you’ve fallen in love with one or two of those books. And that’s pretty unlikely because those books haven’t sold very many copies. So you probably shouldn’t be writing to me to begin with. [Laughter.]

RUTMAN: “Just avoid me altogether. I haven’t helped any of these people, really, and I’m not going to help you.”

STEIN: Exactly. There shouldn’t really be anybody writing to me at all.

STEINBERG: That’s off the record, right? Can I say “Off the record” on your behalf?

STEIN: What can I say? I’m funny.

STEINBERG: And of course with the e-mail submissions, don’t cc a hundred agents and say, “Dear Agent….”

STEIN: I got an e-mail query addressed to “Elizabeth” today.

MASSIE: I get those. Those are an instant delete.

STEIN: They are.

RUTMAN: Don’t try to write eye-catching cover letters. It just isn’t really going to enhance my anticipation going into the manuscript.

On the flip side of that, what do you want them to do? I think it can seem really hard to get an agent’s attention when you live in a small town somewhere and you don’t know anybody.
STEINBERG: Well, know somebody. [Laughter.] I’m serious. We’re in the age of e-mail and the Internet. If you e-mail twenty of your friends and say, “Do you know anyone in publishing?” someone has to know somebody. Or somebody who knows somebody. You know what I mean? Find how you know somebody.

STEIN: But you know what? I’ve actually taken on several clients who didn’t know anybody in publishing. I’ll give you an example: Anya Ulinich, who’s done pretty well for somebody who didn’t know anybody. She did some research and asked herself, “Okay, I’m Russian, and my novel has something to do with Russia, so who represents Russian novels?” She did some research and targeted those agents and wrote a query letter that was just really straightforward. It was like, “Here’s my deal. Here’s why I’m writing to you.” It was completely unpretentious and completely straightforward and well written, and because of all that and because there was nothing in it that made me think, “Oh, she’s read some book that tells you how to write query letters”—it was just very natural—I asked to see pages. I don’t think you have to know somebody.

STEINBERG: But it is one way of getting an agent’s attention. I have a lot of clients who didn’t know anyone either. But it is a good way to do it. Because when I get a query from a friend of a friend, it definitely goes in a different pile. I would also say to follow what the agent’s Web site says. If it says, “Send the first twenty-five pages,” do that. And don’t send the thirty-third chapter of your novel. Send the first chapter.

MASSIE: And don’t try too hard. Sometimes I get these queries that describe the book as a cross between this best-seller and that best-seller and ten different other things. I always find that really distracting and unhelpful.

STEIN: And don’t compare the book only to movies.

RUTMAN: I feel like people have generally read something that tells them how to write, at the very least, an unobjectionable cover letter. I like it when they are fairly matter-of-fact. To me that suggests, whether it’s well placed or not, a certain confidence that you’re going to appreciate the pages rather than the letter. I don’t have any sort of pointed advice about what people ought to do in a cover letter. It just doesn’t matter that much. It’s going to get read.

By your assistant. Just to play devil’s advocate.
RUTMAN: Some of it, yes. But she has excellent taste. And if you’re working with someone whose taste you really value and trust, they bring you the things you probably would have plucked out yourself.

MASSIE: And she’s looking for certain things. Has the writer been published before? What are their credits?

RUTMAN: I think if anybody reads a certain number of cover letters they start to sense what is nice to have in a cover letter. But people generally seem to know. And if you’ve already published things, it suggests that you’ve been willing to subject yourself to some of the cruelties of the process and that you realize it’s probably part of the deal.

STEIN: That’s the thing. It’s possible to get published in some good literary magazines without an agent. Very possible. In fact, in some places it’s easier. And if you’re writing fiction, and especially if you have the misfortune of being a short story writer, then you should spend a lot of time and energy getting published in those places before you start looking for an agent. Because it’ll make everybody’s job so much easier.

Does anybody have a success story about finding a writer in a literary magazine?
STEINBERG: I read a great short story in the Southern Review a few years ago and called the writer and eventually sold the novel-in-stories to Ann Patty at Harcourt, who’s great and who unfortunately is no longer at Harcourt. It was called The Circus in Winter by Cathy Day. It’s funny because I originally looked at the story because I liked the author’s last name. I don’t know if that means I’m superficial, but at the time I was interested in writers whose last names were words, and her last name was Day, so—

RUTMAN: This was a phase you went through?

STEINBERG: It was! I also went through a phase of looking for names with alliteration.

STEIN: Note to readers.

STEINBERG: For example, I represent a guy named Brad Barkley.

STEIN: What’s your phase right now? What are you into?

STEINBERG: Now I’m in the supporting-my-three-children phase.

How’s that going?
STEINBERG: It’s going okay. [Laughter.]

How do you guys feel about short stories?
STEIN: If they’re awesome, they’re awesome. Even if we can’t sell them, they’re still awesome.

MASSIE: I’m with Anna. I love short stories.

And can you sell them?
MASSIE: On occasion. It’s hard. It always helps if there’s a novel coming. But if you’ve got a great short story collection, it will stand out. I represent a writer who was referred to me by an editor at a literary magazine. I read it and it blew me away. I sold it, it was published, it got great reviews, but it did not sell very many copies. But then the writer, Robin Romm, went on to write an amazing memoir that was just reviewed on the cover of the New York Times Book Review. She’s a fantastic writer and you never know where a short story writer is going to go or what stories they have left to tell. So, you know, she wasn’t making a lot of money in the beginning, but she’s going to have an amazing career.

STEIN: And here’s another thing. A short story writer might end up just being a short story writer, which might be our nightmare, but what if he ends up being one of those—

MASSIE: Alice Munro or somebody.

RUTMAN: We don’t really have much choice but to represent talent in whatever form it happens to come. And if it happens to come first in short story collection form, that does not make things easier, practically speaking, but it’s not in itself a reason not to do it. The climate hardly encourages it, and it’s not fun to call an editor and say, “What I have for you now—brace yourself—is a collection of short stories.” I mean, that’s like a meta-joke, I suppose, at this point. But you shouldn’t just abandon it. You know it’s going to be hard so you ask yourself, “How fired up am I about trying this?” With a story collection, that question is a good test of how intrinsically great you find it.

STEIN: It had better be super-duper-duper-duper good.

RUTMAN: Right. One of my colleagues gave me a collection not that long ago. It was sort of short, and the author had not really tried to publish any of them, and I took it home, sort of unhappily, and I ended up being like, “Oh. Okay. So this is a person who can do this.” If you feel that way as an agent, what are you going to do, say no? It just doesn’t really feel like a smart option.

STEIN: But novels are beginning to feel that way too. I mean, really—it’s like the novel is the new short story.

RUTMAN: The short story is the new poem…

STEIN: Yeah, the short story is the new poem, novels are the new short story…. It’s hard out there.

RUTMAN: If you’re talking to a certain audience, say an MFA audience, you hear the sentiment of, “Ugh, if only I could get past the short story collection and get on to the novel, easy street can’t be far behind.”

STEIN: There is no easy street.

RUTMAN: Exactly. It doesn’t exist. But there is this unhelpful assumption that you just need to get to a novel, at which point your publishing fortunes will brighten.

STEINBERG: There are probably only a hundred people in the United States who make a living off novel writing.

STEIN: Did you make that number up?

STEINBERG: Yeah, I just made it up.

STEIN: I think that’s a really great point and that number sounds about right to me.

STEINBERG: I think all of my clients have day jobs. Writing is just not going to be a way to stop doing what you’re doing for a living, probably. And I wouldn’t advise it. I have clients who sometimes sell their books for a decent amount of money and are like, “Ooh, should I quit my job?” And I panic and say, “No!” It also affects your work because you start writing for the marketplace too much.

STEIN: And the money is never what the money looks like.

STEINBERG: Exactly. The money has to be gravy and not a base salary.

MASSIE: And you never know what the second book will do, versus the first one, and what the advance for the next book is going to look like.

You are all deep inside this world, but so many writers aren’t. If you were a beginning writer who lived out in Wisconsin or somewhere and didn’t know anybody and you were looking for an agent, how would you do it?
STEINBERG: I would not worry about looking for an agent. I would work on my writing for a long time. And then when I was finally ready, I would ask everyone I know what they thought I should do.

MASSIE: I agree with that. I would concentrate on getting published in well-regarded literary magazines and, chances are, agents will come to you.

RUTMAN: I wouldn’t relish the prospect of looking for an agent if I had not come through a program, where a professor can often steer you in some helpful direction. I guess you’d start at the bookstore.

MASSIE: You pick up your favorite books and look at the acknowledgments and see who represented them and write those people a letter.

STEIN: I’m with Peter. I wouldn’t worry so much about finding an agent. The thing is, there aren’t that many great writers. Right? And there seem to be a lot of people trying to write novels and find agents. If you’re looking for an agent, it means you want to sell your book. But if there are only a hundred people making money as writers—and I think that number sounds about right—and you’re trying to sell your book to make money, then that doesn’t really make sense. It’s like playing the lottery. If I thought I’d written something brilliant, I would hope that, like Peter said, I would be continuing to work on my writing.

RUTMAN: But don’t you think most people who are working on their writing feel kind of persuaded that they are brilliant and have something really unique and wonderful to say?

STEIN: I also think they feel this pressure to get published. With all the MFA programs, and with all the writing conferences and programs that they pay money for, there’s this encouragement to get published.

RUTMAN: Sure. It’s the stated goal.

STEIN: Right. That’s the goal. But for 99 percent of people writing fiction, that shouldn’t necessarily be the goal. Maybe writing should be the thing they work on for many years and then maybe they should think about getting published.

RUTMAN: I think being published has come to feel, for reasons I can’t explain, too achievable. To take a step back, I think the idea of writing a book has come to seem too achievable. I don’t know what to attribute that to. It may be the fact that famous people have access to people who can write a tolerable book for them, which might create the impression that most of us should be thinking about writing a book. I think it used to feel rightfully daunting to write a book. People should be daunted by the prospect of writing a book—and more than they may be at the moment. I’m not saying that writing can’t be a hobby. But professionalizing it? That’s a whole other step, and you then expose yourself to a whole other set of challenges and disappointments that you have to take into consideration. But at some point I feel like there was some kind of fundamental shift that made writing a book—and finishing it and publishing it—seem like not that big a deal. Or not a big enough deal.

STEINBERG: One thing we should convey is how rare it is that a great piece of fiction crosses our desks from someone new.

ALL: Yes.

STEINBERG: It happens maybe, what, once a year? Twice a year? That’s it. It’s so rare. So for people in Wisconsin who might be reading this and trying to figure out how to get published, they should keep that in mind. That’s why stressing the work is so important—because it’s so rare that something extraordinary crosses our desks. I like to think that all of our instincts are good enough, and we’re well trained enough, and we’ve done this long enough, to recognize it when it arrives. But that aspect of it can’t be stressed enough, which is why I say to work on it for a long time. You also only get one shot with an agent. There are no do-overs. When we get letters that say, “I know you passed on this six months ago but I’ve rewritten it,” it’s difficult to look at it again. You really do only get one shot.

Do you guys feel competitive with other agents?
RUTMAN: I’m not sure I feel that competitive. I’m definitely envious of other agents. [Laughter.] But that’s not the same thing.

STEIN: I know Jim’s not competitive because we were competing for a client once and both of us are so uncompetitive that he was like, “No, no, Anna’s so great,” and I was like, “No, no, Jim’s so great.”

Who won?
STEIN: Jim.

RUTMAN: Competitive just feels like the wrong word. I can apply competitiveness to all kinds of other arenas but I have trouble, for some reason, doing it here. Because even competing for a client feels…I mean, maybe if I was a huge rock star I would just sit back and point at my shelf and say, “That’s why you should be represented by me.” When that’s not really an option it becomes a charm expedition. You’re trying to persuade somebody that you care enough, or that you see enough in what they’ve done, to suggest to them that you would be the right person for the job.

Tell me a little about how you view your jobs. How do you think about your obligations and responsibilities to your clients?
RUTMAN: The responsibilities are so amorphous and encompassing that it’s hard to sum up. I’ve never done it very successfully. I guess the boundaries are fairly few. You’re trying to find books that you believe in and feel like you’d be doing the author and yourself a favor by involving yourself with, and then you’re advising them about its readiness to be exposed to these calculating strangers, and then you choose the strangers you’re going to share it with, and then, if you’re lucky enough to have options among those strangers, you’re telling them which one is best. And then the book gets published and the landscape changes to a whole new level of abstraction about what constitutes a good publication experience and what doesn’t. And how many people wind up being published without feeling aggrieved or getting less than what they could have from the experience? A lot of people are disappointed by it. It’s a pretty boundary-less relationship. It extends into all kinds of areas that are personal, that involve editorial work, that involve…. The editorial part’s nice because at least it’s a place to stop. It’s also, for my money, the most interesting part of the process. You’re talking about something that, presumably, has moved you enough to want to think and discuss.

STEIN: It sounds so cheesy to say, and everyone will agree with it, but the job is about finding books that you feel should exist in the world, and should for a long time. I mean, this summer I read Anna Karenina, and it made it impossible for me to even think about taking on a book for months. It’s really important for us to read published books that we don’t represent while we’re reading our own clients’ books. It’s important for us to stay current, but also to read classics. And it reminded me of why I really do what I do. It’s because I want the books I represent to be important, and for a long time. I don’t want to sell a book just to sell a book. I want each one to matter. I mean, that’s a little heavy, and none of your books is ever going to be Anna Karenina—Anna Karenina is Anna Karenina, let’s not touch it—but that’s the idea.

RUTMAN: That’s why the job is interesting. There is always the chance, no matter how remote, that that could happen. It won’t necessarily be Anna Karenina, but you can find something that you didn’t expect, and you can glimpse stuff in it that you couldn’t anticipate, and the writer can change the way you think about something. That is, in a job, a pretty interesting thing, even if it remains largely in the realm of possibility. It’s still a nice possibility to encounter on a daily basis. I mean, that’s better than most jobs I’ve been able to conceive of as possibilities for myself.

MASSIE: It’s terrific. It means that you learn something every day. You pick something up and you don’t know what world it’s going to take you to or what it will teach you, and that’s an incredible thing. I think that’s one of the wonderful things about what we do. If you find something that you’re blown away by, you actually can help get it to a larger audience. It’s amazing when people will say to you, “I read that book you represented. God, that was amazing. It really affected me.” That’s a great feeling.

How about your responsibilities?
MASSIE: I sometimes feel like a cross between a mother, a shrink, an accountant, a lawyer…. You wear so many different hats on a daily basis. You’re juggling so many things, and the clients are so different. They all have different personalities and one person needs handholding or reassurance after every rejection letter and others just want to hear from you when there’s news. It’s different with everybody. I haven’t ever seen myself as doing one thing. I mean, with one client you’re going over royalty statements and with another you’re hearing about her marriage or some trauma she’s going through. It’s a pretty intimate relationship.

STEINBERG: It’s a friendship.

MASSIE: It’s a relationship. You have your ups and downs, and the good and the bad, and it’s the mark of a really great relationship with an author that you can weather the storms and get through the good publications and the bad publications, the good reviews and the bad reviews.

RUTMAN: We’re like disappointment brokers.

STEIN: That’s why trust is so important.

MASSIE: Trust is key.

STEIN: That’s why, from the very beginning of the relationship, the more up-front you are, the better. The way you approach an agent says so much about your personality and your character. So if you’re very straightforward in your query letter and cover letter, that shows us something. And if we’re going to have a long-term and trusting relationship, that’s important. Let’s say you have several agents interested in you. Let’s say you go with one agent and you don’t tell the other agents, or you’re somehow a little dishonest about the process. Things might not work out with that agent—that agent might move to Wisconsin for some reason and decide to leave publishing—and you’re going to have to face those other agents. It’s just really important to have integrity and to be honest and to be gracious from the very beginning.

STEINBERG: I think we’ve all done this long enough that we can sort of suss out when someone’s being false or fake or dishonest. So you really shouldn’t even try.

RUTMAN: Because if you start to get the sense, early enough in the process, that someone seems like trouble, those suspicions are rarely misleading or without some kind of foundation. One time I was in the rare position of dealing with a writer who was wildly and indisputably talented but came with some warning signs. Actually they weren’t warning signs so much as actual warnings from people who knew the writer and said, “I’ll be up-front with you. This writer is remarkable in the most important ways and a challenge in a great many other ways.”

STEIN: “Totally insane” is what they probably said.

RUTMAN: Yeah, that’s what they meant. So what do you do? Is it a measure of how heroic an agent you are if you take them on? Is it a good idea? I’m not so sure that it is.

STEIN: I tried that once. I took on somebody who was insanely talented but also insane. And I tried to be heroic. I tried my very, very best. And it ended, not only in tears, but in legal fees. I made a New Year’s resolution: No more. No more crazy ones, ever again.

STEINBERG: It’s not worth it. Life’s too short.

MASSIE: There are also the clients who are blamers. They’re always looking for somebody to blame. They’re like, “That person didn’t do this” or “You didn’t do that.”

STEIN: Those are agent-jumpers.

MASSIE: Exactly.

STEINBERG: That’s another reason why writers should make sure it’s the right match. You don’t want to switch agents unless you have to. If you have to tell an agent, “Oh, I’ve had two agents and it hasn’t worked out,” the new agent will perceive that as a warning sign. Unless it’s legitimate. Sometimes things don’t work out or the personalities just aren’t right.

STEIN: But in general, everybody wants the relationship to work. I mean, we’re all pretty young and we’re not naïve, but we are a little bit romantic or otherwise we wouldn’t be in this industry—obviously there’s no money in it. We go into the relationship thinking, “We want to grow old together.” It’s a real relationship. It’s like a marriage. We want to grow old together. So if it doesn’t work out it’s usually for pretty serious reasons.

STEINBERG: My clients and I talk about growing old together. We sort of joke about it. “When we’re old we’ll do this or that.”

MASSIE: Right. It always worries me when you’re talking to a writer about representing them and they ask, “So, do you work on a book-by-book basis?” I’m like, “No. I do not work on a book-by-book basis.” I’m not interested in working on a book-by-book basis. For me it’s a long-term relationship.

STEINBERG: That’s one of the reasons why you take on short story writers. You see the relationship in a long-term way—you’re trying to see the forty-year arc. And when you work with storytelling so much, one thing you learn is that there’s a story arc to the client-agent relationship, too. You have an arc of a story in the way that your relationship develops.

What are the hardest decisions you have to make as an agent?
STEINBERG: A lot of times it’s books that you know you could sell for a lot of money but you still say no.

STEIN: Or you take the preempt because you know it’s the right house, or you take the lower offer because you know it’s the right house. And you hope that you’re right.

MASSIE: Another hard one is telling an author that his newest book is not there, or not the one, or you’re not happy with it, or you just don’t see it or know what to do with it. That’s a really hard conversation to have, especially with someone you’ve worked with for a long time. For me, at least, that’s the hardest conversation I ever have.

STEIN: Firing a client.

STEINBERG: Or not being able to sell her work. That’s one of the hardest things about the business. You take things on because you inherently love them. That’s why you do it. You think you’ll sell them, and you think everyone will be happy, and then you come to that end of the road where you’ve done your second round of submissions and wracked your brain for the last three unlikely suspects and they all pass. That’s a very difficult conversation.

STEIN: And that’s the novel that haunts you for years. That’s the novel you think is, in some ways, the best novel you’ve ever taken on.

But that’s not a decision you have to make.
RUTMAN: We’re just eager to get to the “What are the worst features of the job?” question. Can we skip right to that? [Laughter.] Seriously, though, deciding what to take on is probably the hardest decision. I find myself sitting on fences a lot more often than I would like. Sometimes I feel like I just run out of critical faculties. My discernment just isn’t guiding me very authoritatively and I can’t decide whether I ought to be working with a book or not. Because you see its virtues, or your hesitations kind of nullify each other enough to make it hard to decide.

When you guys find yourselves in that situation, how do you decide?
STEIN: If it’s something brand new—if the author is not a client—sometimes it’s about the writer. If I have an editorial conversation with the writer, and I’m sort of feeling out the situation, that will sometimes do it for me. Because if they’re with me, and I feel like we’ll have a good editorial relationship—we need to have a good editorial relationship, probably for a long time, before we send out the book—that will become clear. If we have those initial conversations, and I feel like we won’t work well together, for any number of reasons, then the decision becomes much easier.

MASSIE: If I’m on the fence for too long it’s not a good sign. My feeling is that usually, when I love something, I’m jumping all over it. So if I’m on the fence it’s probably not good for the writer and it’s not good for me. If I can’t imagine myself getting on the phone and calling ten editors and saying, “I love this. You should read this right now,” then it’s probably not right for me. It also wouldn’t be fair to the author for me to take it on.

RUTMAN: You’re right. It’s not fair to the author. But I also have the misfortune of having my enthusiasms located on some difficult-to-access frequency. Sometimes I’m just not sure what I think, and I’ll react differently to a book on different days. I’ve certainly had the experience where I return to a manuscript and think, “I was wavering about this? This is obviously exceptional and I should take it on.” And, less happily, the reverse. It’s nice to have access, or confident access, to your feelings.

STEINBERG: It’s also nice to know when you’re not ready to make a decision. “I’ll wait till tomorrow because I’m in a bad mood or tired or whatever it is.” And I also use the phone call as a sort of determining factor. But, like Maria, I’m not really on the fence that often. I think that’s a good thing.

MASSIE: I just know from experience that if I take something on that I’ve been on the fence about, it won’t necessarily take priority. If I take on something with guns blazing, and I totally love it, that’s at the top of my list all the time. If I’ve been on the fence about something and I decide to take it on thinking, “Okay, I’m on the good side of the fence now,” I’ve been there and I can sense that it won’t take priority and I’m not going to give it as much as I should. It’s just not fair to the author. It’s not fair to me, either, because I have only so many hours in the day.

STEINBERG: I think editors can sense it too.

MASSIE: Editors totally know. They absolutely know.

STEINBERG: Just as we’re good at sensing things, they’re good at knowing when the agent isn’t enthusiastic enough.

STEIN: And you will see all the doubts you had about the book in the rejection letters. You can often gauge your true reaction to a book by the rejections. If it’s something where you’re really guns blazing—if you really love it—when you see the rejection letters you think, “You. Are. Out. Of. Your. Mind. You’re out of your mind!” And that’s how you should feel all the time.

MASSIE: Exactly. You see the rejections and you think, “No. I don’t agree at all. You don’t know what you’re talking about!”

RUTMAN: When you strenuously disagree with a rejection, that’s a really reliable gauge. Because a fair number of times I think, “Oh, well, yeah. I half anticipated that and I suppose I can see your point.” When you sharply disagree, you were right to take it on.

STEINBERG: I think it’s also the art of the agent to anticipate the rejections from the editors and try to fix the material before you get the rejections. One thing that I’m cursed with is that when I read the material I sort of see the rejections go across my eyes. I can see how people will reject it, and you work on the material in light of that. Invariably, whenever I don’t listen to my own instincts and fix that thing that was nagging at the back of my mind, I will get a rejection that says the very thing that I should have fixed. It’s like, “Damn. Listen to your instincts.” That’s a big part of the job these days, especially because editors are looking to pass. They have a billion things on their desks and they think, “Oh, I figured it out. This is how I’m going to pass on this book.” You can’t give them that. You can’t let them find their entry point to pass.

STEIN: Which is why we’ll have that extra paragraph in our pitch letters in a year that will basically say, “This is how you can publish this book. I’ve already thought it through and this is how you can publish it.”

STEINBERG: It’ll be like a marketing section for fiction, just like nonfiction proposals.

MASSIE: Exactly. That’s got to be the next thing, right?

STEINBERG: That’s depressing.

Tell me a little about how you spend your days.
STEIN: The morning is all e-mail.

MASSIE: E-mail, phone, contracts.

RUTMAN: Not reading.

MASSIE: I never read in the office.

STEIN: Manuscripts are for travel. Trains. Planes.

MASSIE: Thank God for the Sony Reader.

STEIN: I can’t get mine to work. I can’t get it to charge.

Sony’s not going to be happy to hear that.
STEIN: Sony can send me some swag to make it up to me. [Laughter.]

MASSIE: I don’t know about you guys, but I feel like I sit in front of my computer doing e-mail all day.

RUTMAN: Sometimes I feel like a typist.

MASSIE: You’re just dealing with whatever’s in front of you. Answering questions. Sending things out.

RUTMAN: How many stray issues are floating in front of you at any given moment? How many small but unignorable questions are hovering at any given moment?

STEIN: By the afternoon I can start returning phone calls and dealing with shit on my desk, whereas the morning is just an e-mail suck.

STEINBERG: It’s reactive.

STEIN: Exactly. It’s e-mail suck reactive. But sometime after lunch you can start—and when I say “after lunch” I don’t necessarily mean going to lunch, because we don’t necessarily go to lunch anymore—but in the afternoon you can start to look at the contracts and return the phone calls and whatever else. Unless you’re submitting a book, in which case it takes up the whole day.

What about after the afternoon?
STEIN: Drinks.

MASSIE: Home to the kids.

RUTMAN: Roundtables, mostly. [Laughter.]

STEIN: If I’m not going out, I work until nine. Not that I do that often, but that’s what I do. And I’m not reading manuscripts. It’s more of the same stuff.

So when do you read?
STEINBERG: If I have to read, I don’t go into the office. I’ve tried that before and thought, “Okay, I’ll do some work and then I’ll read for a few hours.” But it just doesn’t work. You get sucked into your e-mail and the other issues of the day. Sometimes in the morning, when my brain feels fresh and I can really concentrate, I’ll go straight to Starbucks or somewhere that’s not my office and read or work on some material. I try to read late at night but I always fall asleep. My wife finds me on the couch with the manuscript pages fallen off onto the floor.

STEIN: I won’t take a manuscript into my bedroom.

MASSIE: I don’t either.

STEIN: Only books.

MASSIE: Me too. I have to read at least ten pages of a book that I have nothing to do with.

STEIN: For me it’s twenty-five. Not that I actually make it to twenty-five, but I try to set that as my goal. I say twenty-five so that I make it to maybe eight.

MASSIE: I have to do that to clean my head. I try to read for at least an hour after my kids go to bed every night.

STEINBERG: I love to read on airplanes. I get so excited. I’m like, “I’m going to read this whole thing!” That’s a great feeling.

STEIN: As long as there aren’t really good movies on the plane.

STEINBERG: I have a rule that I won’t buy the headphones.

STEIN: I don’t have a TV at home, so I get very excited when I’m in front of one. [Laughter.]

STEINBERG: I also have a rule that if I’m on a train or something, I’m not allowed to buy the newspaper. Because I have to do work. But I’m allowed to look at other people’s newspapers.

You mentioned before that editors are looking for excuses to pass on projects. I’m curious what else you see as changing about your jobs. Or what’s getting harder?
STEINBERG: One thing that’s changing is that everyone is reading on Kindles or Sony Readers. I’ve made an adjustment in my head and when I envision an editor reading the material, they’re sitting somewhere and reading on the Kindle or the Sony Reader. I don’t know how that affects what I submit yet, but it’s certainly something I’m thinking about.

STEIN: With nonfiction I think about trends all the time because it follows trends in a much more obvious way than fiction does. With fiction, none of us follows trends—we fall in love. We also fall in love with nonfiction, but there’s a measure of practicality that goes with it, which also has to do with our own interests. I’m particularly interested in politics but I haven’t wanted to take on a political nonfiction book in several years. And I don’t envision wanting to anytime soon. Well, aside from Cory Booker. Do you hear me, Cory Booker?

What about Jon Favreau? Wouldn’t he be the biggest get right now?
MASSIE: Everyone must want him. Or Reggie Love.

STEIN: But if I’m interested in something and I need to help shape it—because often nonfiction will come in as an idea rather than a real proposal—I definitely try to think about whether there’s a market for it considering where we are now, and where we are in our times. That’s not something that’s different from ten years ago or five years ago. But I think that considering the shrinking market will become all the more important. There just isn’t room for books that are kind of interesting to some people anymore.

MASSIE: I think about the lack of book reviews. All of these places are getting rid of their book review sections. I think about that in terms of “How is a book going to get out there? How are people going to find out about it? What can I do and what should the author be doing beyond what the publisher is doing?” When you think about how overworked publicists are and how small publicity departments are and how many books they’re working on, it will sometimes keep you up at night, especially if one of your clients has a book coming out. I think, “Oh, God. What should we be doing? What should we be thinking about? How do we get the word out?” Because there’s no such thing as a review-driven book anymore.

So what should writers be doing? What are your authors teaching you about that?
MASSIE: To think outside the box. To think about other ways of getting the word out. It used to be that you’d have a meeting with the publicist, or a phone call, and there would be almost a checklist you’d go down. “We’re going to send it to the newspapers and the magazines and this, this, this, and this.” That doesn’t exist anymore. It’s a whole new world. There are so many other distractions out there. You really have to think, “Well, how do people find out about books? Where do they hear about them?”

And what are you learning about that from experiencing it on a daily basis?
MASSIE: I think a lot of it is word of mouth. It seems like there’s a critical mass that a book has to achieve in order to work. You have to get all the big reviews, and if you don’t, how do you get that critical mass? Is it the independent booksellers hand-selling a book? Is it having great placement in the front of Barnes & Noble? I mean, I don’t know. I’m still trying to figure out what you have to do.

STEIN: I do think, with literary fiction, it’s about getting it in the hands of the bloggers, who we don’t read. When I say that I’m joking, but I’m also not joking. I should say the bloggers who a whole new generation of readers are reading. And the social networking. Everyone should have a Facebook page. Part of it is personality. Some authors are incredibly magnetic and funny, and that’s not something you can tell your author to be. You can’t tell your author, “When you do your readings, make the audience fall in love with you.”

RUTMAN: “Be more charismatic.” [Laughter.]

STEIN: That’s something that just happens, and that sells books. There are certain authors who are very funny at their readings and draw crowds, who maybe at a different time wouldn’t have sold as well as they do now. But they’re just the right thing for the blogging atmosphere and just the right thing for buzz. There’s something underground about them because they give almost stand-up comedy routines when they read. I think it’s going to be different for every author in a way that it wasn’t before, and that’s why we have to think about how to publish each book individually in a way that we didn’t have to before.

What else are they teaching you?
STEINBERG: I have a client named Keith Donohue who wrote a book called The Stolen Child, and Amazon optioned it for film. I think it might have been the only time they ever did that. So they had a vested interest in making the book work. And they made it work.

But that sounds like an exception to me.
STEINBERG: That’s my point. We have to do exceptions. With fiction, these days, you have to work under the exception rule because fiction does not have a platform. Publicists are stumped. That’s why I think nonfiction has come to the fore a little more. Publicists are sort of like, “Well, no, we don’t know what to do. We’re not really sure.” They used to be able to rely on reviews and now even that’s gone. One thing I ask myself, even though I said that writers shouldn’t put “I think this could be a great movie” in their query letter, is, “Could this novel become a movie?” I used to work at the agency that represented Chuck Palahniuk, and before the movie version of Fight Club came out, that hardcover had sold about five thousand copies. And after the movie came out I think the tie-in edition sold something like a hundred thousand copies in the first few months. So that’s something I think about. I’m like, “Wow, I need to re-create that for my clients.” If a book is made into a movie, no matter how small, it helps the writer forever.

STEIN: This is kind of an abstract thing to say, and I don’t know exactly what I mean because it hasn’t happened yet, but I think the agent’s relationship with publishers has to change a little bit. I think that it has to become a little bit less adversarial and a little bit more open and cooperative. Which means that the publisher has to do their part so we don’t have to be adversarial. But there can be a way for everybody…. Look, we’re all in a sinking ship. So all fucking hands on deck. I think there’s a little bit of editors not wanting to tell agents what’s really going on and agents feeling like they have to sort of choose their shots with regard to when they call editors and ask for numbers, ask what’s going on with publicity, ask about the marketing plan, all of that stuff. And we shouldn’t have to do that. We’re partners in this thing, and we’re all trying to do the same thing. We shouldn’t have to feel that way, and the editors shouldn’t have to feel like they have to keep secrets. I mean, if there’s a secret, or if there’s something to feel ashamed about, we should figure out what to do about it.

RUTMAN: Preemptive sharing is really great. When editors keep you overly appraised—there’s no such thing, really—and just give you information without having to be asked, it is deeply appreciated. I find that when a book works, it’s almost always in that situation. You feel like all of the parts of the house are working in tandem and the editor is inclined to update you because they’re pleased with the way everything is coming together. If you have to excavate the information—

STEINBERG: It feels like pulling teeth.

RUTMAN: Or there’s just nothing planned.

STEIN: But Jim, let’s say you do have to excavate. Or the editor is in a position where they feel like maybe something at the publishing house has fallen short. In that situation it’s best that the editor is up-front with the agent so that they, with the author—because it’s the author’s job too—can all save the day as much as possible. It’s just got to be all fucking hands on deck. You can’t be all hands on deck if everybody doesn’t know what’s going on.

MASSIE: There’s no transparency. You ask, “What’s in the budget? What’s in the marketing plan?” You’re constantly asking and you think, “Why can’t you just know what’s in the budget for this book? Why can’t you know what’s being allocated for this book?” They’re like, “We’ll see, we’ll see, we’ll see.” No.

RUTMAN: I think there’s an assumption that you will find it lacking, and will want—

MASSIE: But it’s so much better to know. It allows you to manage expectations. It allows you to think about what else you can do. It’s so frustrating to constantly…. Managing an author, especially a first-time author, is difficult enough. Just trying to find out what you have to work with is so frustrating.

STEIN: They aren’t used to this new wave of reasonable agents. [Laughter.]

STEINBERG: It’s also this frustrating catch-22 where they don’t throw money at a book until it does well.

MASSIE: Which means it’s not going to do well. That kills me.

STEINBERG: That is incredibly frustrating to agents because a book isn’t going to do well unless you’re actively doing something for it. You can’t just wait and see if it does well and then try to make it do even better.

I hope you know that that’s frustrating to editors, too. We aren’t the ones making those budgeting decisions.
STEIN: That’s my point. If nobody else at the house is doing anything for a book, the editor and the agent and the author, every now and then, can have a flash of brilliance and come up with something that might work.

STEINBERG: It’s hard. Sometimes you get to that conversation and you’re like, “Let’s think of those out-of-the-box things that no one usually does, and let’s do them,” and there’s sort of silence on the phone.

MASSIE: Total silence. They’re like, “Um…”

STEINBERG: You can hear the crickets. They’re like, “Well, anyway, I’ve gotta go…”

MASSIE: “I’ll think about that and get back to you!”

STEINBERG: “I’m going to brainstorm tonight and I’ll get back to you tomorrow.”

But what are the out-of-the-box things that are working?
MASSIE: I think it depends on the book. But I also think about, “Does John Grisham really need a full-page ad in the New York Times every time he has a new book. Really? Does he? Is he not going to sell those books?”

STEINBERG: His agent would say yes.

MASSIE: Fine. But do the authors who are so well established really need the biggest piece of the marketing budget? Their audience is there. They know when their books are coming out. They’re there and waiting. Why not use that money for establishing an author?

STEIN: Think about when a really big band goes on tour. They always have a couple of opening bands, and those opening bands get exposure. So why isn’t Grisham giving some exposure to a young writer or two? Why isn’t he doing the same thing? Why isn’t he going on tour and saying, “This is my opening act and I’m supporting them”?

MASSIE: That’s a great idea.

STEINBERG: I think somebody like Stephen King has thought of that and is doing it in Entertainment Weekly.

MASSIE: Stephen King definitely does that.

STEIN: Absolutely.

RUTMAN: A book campaign gets interesting when it starts to look like another industry’s campaign. I was lucky enough to work on a book where we did really cool tour posters, for example. And one day the author suggested, “Hey, it would be really nice if you guys would print up some guitar picks. I would throw them out to people at readings.” The publicist said, “That’s a great idea. Let’s print up some guitar picks.” That doesn’t take a huge effort, and I don’t know that it made the difference for the book, but swag is always appreciated. I’m not saying that that’s a uniformly good approach, but thinking about a book as a potentially cool object—something you could covet in a way that you might covet some other cultural product—is, I suppose, the way it’s going. Publishers probably don’t need to be encouraged to treat books more like products, but at the same time, something basic is changing, isn’t it? I mean, if book review outlets are as fleeting as they are.

STEINBERG: I think we’re in an in-between time period. Reviews are going away but there’s nothing there to take their place. It will be the Internet in some form, but nobody knows how, exactly.

STEIN: If those short-form book reviews that are just like, “This is the book, here is the plot, thumb up, thumb down, or thumb in-between,” are the ones going away, so be it. If what’s left behind are the book reviews that actually say something about books, great. Let’s do something exciting with what used to be the space for those, frankly, boring synopses of books.

STEINBERG: I think we can also take a lesson from something I saw in a bookstore in Salt Lake City once. I was there for a writers conference. I went into the YA section and all of these teenage girls were talking about books as if they were cool. I was like, “That’s what we have to do. We have to make books cool again.” How do we do that? I don’t know.

RUTMAN: Was there a time when books were cool? I guess there was.

STEINBERG: I don’t know. But the vibe in that YA section? Those girls were all like, “Oooh, what did you read?” They were trying to one-up each other with what they’d read. It was amazing.

RUTMAN: Kids talk about books differently than adults do, and that’s why a handful of YA books are such spectacular successes. There’s this unself-conscious discussion and inclination to share. I don’t know how we appropriate that and make it a possibility for adults. When we’re considering a manuscript, one of the things that we’re trying to glimpse is whether or not it might be adopted by book clubs. How often do you get something that you feel could become the subject of conversation among people who, you know, maybe their first inclination is not to evaluate the merits of a book. And the books that tend to get that far probably don’t do it because of an especially successful campaign. The frustrating possibility we’re always forced to consider is that it’s not really within anyone’s control, even if a publisher makes a really concerted effort. Part of our job, and certainly part of our responsibility, is to see that the publisher carries out its duty as fully and faithfully as possible. But they certainly do that and books still fail to reach more than a few souls. I don’t know what makes people like books. There’s a basic mystery.

STEIN: But I just saw Revolutionary Road this weekend and walked out of the movie and could hear everyone saying, “Have you read the book? Have you read the book?” I thought, “Thank God. Thank God people are saying that.” And that book is on the best-seller list now.

I find that amazing. It’s one of the bleakest books of all time and it’s been on the best-seller list for fifteen weeks.
STEIN: It’s totally bleak, and it’s brilliant, and it’s so much better than the movie, not because the actors didn’t give it their best shot but because Sam Mendes was a terrible director.

STEIN: But that’s the thing. People want to read that book. That’s exciting. It’s cool and it’s hot and it’s depressing all at the same time. And maybe after they read Revolutionary Road they’ll want to read another depressing novel. It’s cool to read depressing novels.

RUTMAN: There’s little that I find cooler.

You guys work on commission. How does that affect the decisions you make when it comes to selling a book where maybe you have multiple offers?
STEINBERG: It’s always a combination of the money and the right place. What that combination is varies, but you have to take both into account. I’ve taken less money a lot of times to have the right publisher—probably not a lot less money—but a little less money to be published in the right place.

MASSIE: The right place for a little less money, over time, could be more money. It can’t just be about the money. There are so many different factors.

STEINBERG: An advance is an advance against royalties, and royalties are an aspect of it.

MASSIE: Right. And if you don’t earn out that advance, your next one may not be as big.

STEIN: And to clarify, when we say “the right place” we mean the place we think will be just as enthusiastic, or even grow more enthusiastic, from the moment they buy the book until it’s published, and make it a best-seller if possible. And the place where the book won’t disappear if, you know, Alan Greenspan or Hillary Clinton or Obama happens to pop up on their list.

STEINBERG: Stability is also important these days. I was selling a book recently and there were a few publishers that I’d heard weren’t doing so well. I definitely took that into account. Because it can take a year or two for a book to be published after you sell it. Will that place be around in two years? Will the editor be around? Stability is so important to writers, which is why this time period is even tougher than you may think.

RUTMAN: What we do is really hard, readers. We just need you to know that.

STEIN: We have to think a lot. [Laughter.]

You’re joking but my wife is an agent and I know that it is really hard. Especially when you’re less established than some people. How do you compete with people who are more established?
STEIN: I thought you were going to ask, “How do you pay your rent?” [Laughter.]

STEINBERG: If you want to talk about what’s at the forefront of our minds….

But seriously, how do you compete with people who are more established?
STEIN: I don’t. I don’t think that I compete with people who are more established. I think they throw me a bone every now and then, if they’re too busy. People who are really established? If they want a writer? I don’t think I’m going to compete with somebody who’s been in the business for twenty-five years. I think that’s unreasonable. Why would I compete with somebody who’s been in the business for twenty-five years? Unless it’s a perfect match, for some reason. I just can’t see a competitive situation unless, for example, a writer is recommended to an agent who’s been in the business for a long time and some younger agents and there’s very good chemistry and a good match. I think that experience in this industry is really invaluable, and I respect experience a lot. So if I were in the shoes of a writer who was choosing between good chemistry with somebody with a lot of experience and good chemistry with somebody who was young, I would probably go with the person with a lot of experience.

RUTMAN: The only thing at your disposal in that situation—if you’re at an experience and success quotient disadvantage—is the quality of the attention that you can offer the writer.

STEIN: That’s true.

RUTMAN: And that’s what you’re presenting to them. It’s like, “Look, I will talk to you more often.”

MASSIE: “And I won’t pass you off to my assistant.”

RUTMAN: And we’re probably going to be more engaged in things that they want to be engaged in. You know, talking about what’s wrong with the material in a closer way than somebody else. What else can you really offer? And that’s something.

STEIN: “I’ll edit your book.”

RUTMAN: All you can really do is try to work up superior chemistry to the chemistry you think they may be working up with somebody who just doesn’t have the time or inclination for them in the way that you might. I also don’t like to know—I don’t need or want to know—who I’m competing with.

MASSIE: I don’t either. I never want to know.

And they should never tell you, either.
MASSIE: Some people do, though.

But they shouldn’t.
MASSIE: You’re right.

RUTMAN: They shouldn’t. You want to say, “Really? Oh, she’s really good. She likes this? Congratulations!”

STEIN: But how do you guys feel about this. If there’s an agent who you really respect—who’s been in the industry for a long time and who you may even think of as a mentor—and if you were a writer, wouldn’t you go with somebody like that, even if you knew they were busy, over you? Or would you go with you?

RUTMAN: I’m supposed to be me in this scenario?

STEIN: You would give them more attention and more of your time, and that person might have them dealing with their assistant more often, but that person is a mentor to you for a reason. They have so much experience and knowledge that you couldn’t even begin to have.

STEINBERG: In my experience it’s so rare that you compete with other agents. I don’t really think about it too often. It’s not like being an editor, where one agent submits to twelve editors and you know you’re competing with other editors. As an agent, usually it’s a single submission, just to you, because you know the person somehow. Or you get to the material so much faster than everyone else because you’re immediately drawn to it off the slush pile and you know that other agents aren’t involved. In my experience it’s very rare.

RUTMAN: You don’t find that with referrals? Where maybe some thoughtful referree has given the writer three or four names?

MASSIE: Of course. I always assume that.

STEIN: I assume that too.

RUTMAN: And then you think, “Oh, crap. This is really good. Agent so-and-so is probably going to see this too.” And then they do.

So what do you do? That’s what I want to know.
MASSIE: You fight as hard as you can and you argue why you’re the best person for that project and that author and you hope that they agree.

RUTMAN: Or why Anna is, depending on the situation. [Laughter.]

STEIN: Exactly. I try not to get clients as much as possible. Can you tell?

STEINBERG: Speed is a great help in those situations. You can be like, “I’m going to read this tonight and call you tomorrow.”

MASSIE: That is so hard, though. I have two small children so I just can’t do speed.

STEIN: I don’t like to tell writers that they need to make a decision right away if the book is still out with other agents. I think it’s important for them to have a choice, in the same way that we want a choice between editors. We like to be able, if we can, to shop an offer. We like to be able to make a decision between editors. I think authors are entitled to that decision between agents, too.

RUTMAN: You also don’t want them to go with you if they have doubts in their mind. Because that will affect the relationship down the line. There have been instances when I’ve been like, “Oh, go with the other person,” because I could just tell that they wanted to. That’s fine. Sometimes the other agent is a friend and I’m happy for them. Until it hits the best-seller list. [Laughter.]

Talk to me about what editors do that makes you the most frustrated.
STEINBERG: The bandwagon mentality. When I submit a book to them and they call and say, “What’s going on?” They’re not supposed to say, “What’s going on?” They’re supposed to either say “I hate this” or “I love this” or “It’s okay” or whatever. It’s their job to tell me what’s going on at that point. I’ve done the work, I’ve submitted to you, and you’re supposed to tell me what’s going on. If you’re calling me and saying “What’s going on?” then you’re just wondering what you might miss out on because other editors might be interested and you’re not going with your passion.

RUTMAN: Or perhaps don’t call and ask what’s going on without having some intention of your own to offer.

STEINBERG: That’s very frustrating.

MASSIE: Or flip-floppers. Someone who disappears on you. Somebody who sends you an e-mail like, “Don’t do anything without me. I’m loving this and getting other reads,” and you never hear from them again. You’re like, “What happened?”

STEIN: And we all know what happened.

MASSIE: But call and tell me. We need closure. The author’s like, “What did they say? What’s going on?”

STEIN: Show your confidence in your taste. And if you lose in the house…

MASSIE: Just say so. It’s so much easier. And then you trust that editor. They loved it and for whatever reason the other readers didn’t. But be transparent about it. It’s so much easier to know what they’re thinking than to wonder.

STEIN: And you’ll go back to them because you understand their taste.

MASSIE: Yes. And if they don’t tell you, you won’t go back to them. There are editors who I won’t go back to. And I’m sure all of you have your list of those editors.

RUTMAN: Explaining yourself is really helpful. I want to know on what grounds you are saying no, or on what grounds you couldn’t get something through. It’s all useful because it rounds out your sense of who you’re offering a book to.

MASSIE: And it’s so important to an author to hear about how people are responding to their work. When people don’t get back to you, or they disappear, it’s so frustrating because you’re the person stuck in the middle trying to manage your author’s fears and hopes and expectations. If it’s a no, it’s a no. It’s easy.

STEINBERG: I also don’t like when the editor has his assistant write the pass letter. I’m not submitting to the assistant—I’m submitting to you. I didn’t have my assistant work up this submission for you. Because you can tell when the assistant’s doing the form rejection. Agents should not get form rejections. You just don’t do that.

STEIN: It’s also frustrating when editors disappear after they’ve acquired a book. If, for some reason, things aren’t going as well in-house as they’d like, they sometimes hide. Or if they’re just really busy. Look, everybody’s busy. Just say, “I’m busy.” The disappearing act is just unattractive behavior.

Do you resent how collaborative the acquisitions process has become?
STEINBERG: I try to submit to places that aren’t like that. I go out of my way to try to find the few remaining places where people can make decisions because they want to.

RUTMAN: Is that a matter of place or editor selection? Finding an editor whose opinion doesn’t need—

STEINBERG: I guess it’s the person.

STEIN: But I also see it—buying by committee—as something that has become pretty necessary. If an editor is really passionate, and everybody else isn’t so passionate, it’s going to be pretty hard to publish that book. I see it as something that’s more and more necessary these days. If you sell a book to an editor who doesn’t need all of that back-up, it’s kind of tricky. Let’s say you end up with sales and marketing people who just aren’t that psyched about it. That’s not so great for the book. I don’t have so much of a problem with the committee as I do with the taste that the committee is coming up with. Which has just been really mediocre over the past few years.

RUTMAN: Good distinction.

STEIN: I don’t think that the individuals have bad taste. I think it’s just been a taste of fear over the past few years, and I hope that the committees will somehow—and this is just hope—become more courageous over the next few years. That somehow, with the market contracting, instead of thinking, “We need to be more mediocre,” they will be thinking, “If we’re actually going to be publishing literary fiction, it has to be really fucking good.” And that means that some people in the house will kind of hate a book, but see what’s amazing about it, and other people in the house will really, really love it. There wouldn’t have to be consensus within the committee for the committee to get behind it. It would be a little different kind of committee, if that makes sense.

RUTMAN: And I guess this applies more to nonfiction than fiction, but please acknowledge comp titles as the limited and specious resource that they are, at least as the basis for making your decision.

But in the publisher’s defense, it seems like sometimes that’s how the accounts are making their decisions. At least to some extent.
RUTMAN: True. But I feel like a house has to have enough consequence, built in, to persuade a buyer. It’s not like the house can’t anticipate the reluctance that the buyer may ultimately express, and there’s got to be a way to overwhelm that reluctance with the fact that they give a shit.

STEIN: But I think that also comes back to us, and to what we advise our authors to do in our nonfiction proposals now. The comp titles shouldn’t necessarily be limited to the subject they’re writing about. We have to broaden the spectrum to the kinds of books that could possibly work. We have to think about the moment when the sales reps have to face those guys. We have to think, “Jesus, what kind of comp titles could possibly relate to this in a way that could work?” I mean, it’s so boring to have to think about that. But we can’t rely on them to do that job for us anymore, unfortunately. That’s another way that our jobs have changed.

RUTMAN: The anticipation of just about every possible objection. I mean, there are always a lot of possible objections. The list is long. And you try to speak to them as much as possible, even in the introductory conversation. I think we all appreciate how many rounds of approval the editor is responsible for securing, and that they have to create some kind of consensus with a really disparate group of tastes and responsibilities. When you think about all of those different barriers, it’s kind of a wonder that as many books get bought as they do. How do you get this much approval from that many people this often? So it’s kind of amazing when you hear how many books a certain group within Random House or something is going to publish. You guys are going to publish twelve hundred books this year? This one group found enough to agree on twelve hundred times?

Do you guys think the industry is healthy? Just give me a yes or no around the table.
STEINBERG: No.

MASSIE: No.

RUTMAN: I don’t think so.

STEIN: No.

RUTMAN: But I do wonder if there’s ever been a point when you could get four people to say yes.

STEIN: But here’s the silver lining: It’s unhealthy enough that it’s an exciting time. It’s broken enough that publishers and agents and everyone has to change. Everyone has to rethink what they’re doing. So we have a group responsibility, and an opportunity, in a way that the industry has probably never seen before.

RUTMAN: Part of me craves that. If we’re near a precipice, we might as well actually be on it. Let’s get to the moment when some basic model really gives way to whatever other model that really smart people are going to help conceive of. Is this what Jason Epstein’s been talking about for a long time? Maybe. Is the big company going to acknowledge, “Is this business for us, ultimately? We tried this. We kind of gave it a look. Eh, it’s okay. Synergy’s overrated. It’s a stupid word. We’re going to abandon that.” Is it going to become a business for the fewer? Is it going to return to the financial interest of a select few wealthy people who are prepared to collect a really modest profit, if any? And does that make for more interesting publishing? Possibly. Maybe.

STEINBERG: Or will it go the other way, like you were saying before? Will we start making concert posters and guitar picks for publicity and using other industries’ models to promote books? It could go that way and become more like the movie business.

RUTMAN: And those industries are claiming a state of serious unhealthiness as well. So if every single culture industry is ill at the same time, what do we have to look to?

STEINBERG: And maybe we also shouldn’t feel so bad.

MASSIE: It’s an interesting time, if you think about it. Look at how the music industry got hit so hard by iTunes and iPods. They had no time to react. But the book publishing industry actually has a little time to think about things and explore possibilities and try to figure out what the next thing is going to be without being hit so hard.

What are the big problems in your opinions, and who are you looking to—Jim said Jason Epstein—for the solutions? Is it Bob Miller? Is it Jon Karp? Who is it?
STEIN: Those are the first two people I would have mentioned. The big problems are too many books, inflated advances for—

RUTMAN: The few.

MASSIE: Marketing budgets going to big, established authors.

STEINBERG: No one ever hearing about great books that are published.

STEIN: Returns.

RUTMAN: Trend-hunting.

STEINBERG: Barnes & Noble making many decisions for publishers.

STEIN: Inflexible models across the board. For example, it’s time for us to be reasonable as agents. We shouldn’t ask for unreasonable advances. But in exchange, shouldn’t we be able to ask for paperback escalators? Publishers will say, “It’s our company policy not to give paperback escalators.” But we’re going to give a little bit, so publishers should give a little bit.

page_5: 

So who are you looking to?
MASSIE: I don’t know who to look to yet.

STEIN: Nobody’s really stepped up yet except for Bob Miller. He’s really the only one. Jon Karp had a great idea ahead of everybody else but he hasn’t done anything that’s quite like what Bob Miller is doing.

I feel like paperback originals might be one place to look in the short term. What if some established publisher said, “Hardcover books are the eight-track of the publishing industry. They don’t make sense anymore—in this culture, in this economy—and we just aren’t going to do them anymore”? Would you all continue to sell them books?
ALL: Yes.

RUTMAN: Because every house with a serious line of original trade paperbacks is usually publishing some really interesting books. Think about a handful of years ago when Vintage was making a concerted effort and publishing what I guess they were designating as more “difficult” books. One of the most beautiful trade paperbacks they did—it had French flaps—was Notable American Women by Ben Marcus. That thing was just too cool. It was the perfect trade paperback. I thought, “Okay! Maybe this is a kind of turning point.” Not because it was a book that was ever going to sell Jhumpa Lahiri numbers. But that turned out to be a small little experiment that seems all but discontinued.

STEINBERG: I think it’s always attractive to agents when publishers have a vision. If they said, “We’re just going to do trade paperbacks, and we’re going to make it work,” that would be immediately attractive. Because they have a vision. It’s not just like, “Oh, let’s publish this and see what happens. Good luck to us all! Bye!” [Laughter.]

RUTMAN: But if you sell a book and it’s acquired with the intention of making it a trade paperback, and three or four months later the publisher comes back to you and says, “We’ve reconsidered. We’re going to make this a hardcover,” it’s not even implied—it’s basically stated—that “we thought we were acquiring nothing, and we’ve actually had a change of heart. We think we have something. Congratulations to us all.” If you were ever under the delusion that there was no hierarchical relationship between the two, it’s dismissed pretty thoroughly. And what’s going to change that? The Great Depression II might go some way.

STEIN: It used to be about reviews. There was this idea that you couldn’t get reviews for trade paperbacks. But there aren’t reviews anymore so we don’t have to worry about that.

STEINBERG: Silver lining.

MASSIE: Grove’s had a couple of original trade paperbacks on the cover of the New York Times Book Review. So that’s not the story anymore.

STEIN: Grove does wonderful trade paperbacks.

Stop it, you’re going to make Morgan blush. But seriously, I wish the whole economics of advances would change so that we could do more.
RUTMAN: And if e-books are costing about what trade paperbacks cost, maybe we can have a more uniform price for books. So you wouldn’t have this disparity.

STEINBERG: But one of the goals of agents is to get a good advance, and the way that publishers get to higher numbers is by doing hardcovers.

STEIN: But that could change a little bit. If there wasn’t the sort of hardcover-paperback hierarchy, and if we started doing a lot more trade paperbacks, the price of paperbacks could rise a little bit. And there’s no reason we should have such low royalties for paperbacks.

STEINBERG: Someone in publishing told me that that’s why publishing still exists—because publishers held agents off from having escalators on paperbacks. That’s where the money is made.

STEIN: But we need a little of that money if we’re not going to ask for high advances.

What are you most worried about with regard to the industry?
STEINBERG: I think if Barnes & Noble folds, or something like that, it might be so devastating that we can’t get around it. If Barnes & Noble were to fold, what would happen to all of us? I mean, there’s no way that publishing could really continue. We’ve put too many eggs in one basket.

STEIN: Publishing could continue.

STEINBERG: It could continue, but it would be at a much different scale.

STEIN: Agents would just sell the books to Amazon. It would be the publishers that would be out of business.

STEINBERG: Isn’t Barnes & Noble like 50 percent of the market?

RUTMAN: But there is also a pretty astounding percentage of books that are sold in non-book-retailing locations. Which is problematic at least for the likes of most of us because we don’t do so many of those books.

MASSIE: They tend to take a certain kind of book.

STEIN: Which is why, although we’re very grateful to Amazon, we need to keep our bookstores in business. So if you’re going to buy a book, buy it from an actual bookstore.

MASSIE: Look at Harry Schwartz.

It’s really sad.
MASSIE: That was really devastating. And it’s like a new one every day.

STEIN: If you buy a book from Amazon, you’re killing us.

RUTMAN: There, she said it.

STEIN: And you’re killing yourself. Thank you. [Laughter.]

What are the other things you’re most worried about?
RUTMAN: That the balkanization of commercial publishing will be so complete that an even smaller number of books that claim all of the available resources will take up even more available resources and the ghetto for everyone else will end up being vast. That the midlist will come to encompass everything that isn’t a couple of titles.

STEIN: That the midlist, and the kinds of books we do, really will become the new short stories or the new poetry.

RUTMAN: The assumption is that you can still anticipate something that will work commercially. Which I guess sometimes you can, but not often enough to justify that as a prevailing strategy. I mean, can we stop paying senators and politicians—sorry, Flip [Brophy, a colleague at Sterling Lord]—and various other famous people tons of money for stories that are—and I apologize, readers everywhere—insubstantial in the extreme?

With one exception, right?
RUTMAN: Obama. [Laughter.]

He’s a great writer.
RUTMAN: Exactly. If they write their own books and they write them well, then we have a crucial exception. But generally speaking, this thing of giving somebody, on the basis solely of name recognition, disproportionate resources that could be so much better spent elsewhere? Why do we do that?

STEIN: Imagine a world where books would have to be submitted without the author’s name. Obviously there would be no platform. So if the proposal was really shitty, and the writing was really shitty, there would be no sale.

Anna wants a meritocracy in publishing.
RUTMAN: Aw, that’s sweet. [Laughter.]

But that raises an interesting point. Why do you all focus on serious literary work when it’s so obvious that the real money is elsewhere?
MASSIE: It’s what I like to read.

STEINBERG: I like going to work every day and the feeling of liking what I do. I think if someone said to me, “You can do only fiction, and no nonfiction, forever. Will you do that?” I would say, “I don’t think I’ll like that very much, because I still like nonfiction, but I’ll do it.” But if somebody said to me, “You can do only nonfiction. No fiction,” I’d be like, “I’m just going to quit.” There wouldn’t be any point.

RUTMAN: I just don’t feel equipped to make judgments about anything other than what I like. I feel like my capacity to gauge commercial prospects is kind of restricted. The only thing I can really respond to is what I think works in some way that means something to me.

STEIN: I’m a hopeless optimist, and I think somehow, someday…well, look, Revolutionary Road is on the best-seller list right now. I’m an optimist, and because it can happen, I think it will happen, and I want to be on the front lines when it does.

Are you encouraged by anything you’re seeing on the front lines?
STEIN: Our president is a writer. We have a president who loves books and who’s all about promoting the arts. That’s amazing.

STEINBERG: I like the Kindle and the Sony Reader. I think they’re a step forward and sort of address the cool factor. I think it’s cool that with the Kindle you can think of a book you want and have it at your fingertips a minute later.

RUTMAN: It’s also nice because it means that books are eligible to be included in the world of new technology.

STEINBERG: When you’re on the subway, people are intrigued by it. They’re like, “What’s that?” And that intrigue factor is important.

STEIN: Except they can’t see what you’re reading.

MASSIE: It also feels like the YA world has really taken off in the last few years and kids are really excited about reading. It feels like there’s a whole new generation of readers out there, doesn’t it? And it’s not just Harry Potter. There are all these authors, people like Cornelia Funke, and all of my nieces and nephews have their favorites. They’ve all discovered their own different authors who they’re so excited about. It’s great. I feel like there was a generation that sort of skipped that.

RUTMAN: I’m also encouraged by the things that succeed, for the most part. Look at something like A Series of Unfortunate Events. You have this very self-conscious, writerly line of books that kind of flatter kids’ ability to appreciate a certain context in which the books have been written. And kids seem to live in a text-filled world in a way that even we didn’t. I don’t know if it’s the right kind of text, but it might function as the basis for some broader appreciation of written communication.

MASSIE: And look at the YA books that are doing well—they’re doorstops. Look at The Invention of Hugo Cabret, that Brian Selznick book. It’s huge.

STEINBERG: My daughter loves that book.

MASSIE: My son loved it too.

STEIN: Is it good? Have you guys read it?

MASSIE: It’s great. I loved it.

RUTMAN: I think the girth of a fat children’s book is a factor in its success. Kids must feel like they’re being entrusted with something enormous. It’s like, “I don’t care that you’re only eight. You’re going to read 960 pages of epic….” And now that they wheel their backpacks, it’s okay. It’s safe.

At the end of the day, what’s the best part of your job?
MASSIE: Working with great authors. Discovering new voices. When an author’s book arrives for the first time—when you get that messengered package and rip it open and there’s the book. That’s the best feeling. Getting the book in your hands is better than getting the deal.

RUTMAN: Having some part in the creation of a book that you feel strongly about. However incidental your role may be. I mean, I haven’t written any books and it’s really nice to have helped bring some of them about. That’s more than I expected from a workday.

STEIN: I agree with all of those things and, for me, it’s also just about making the author happy—making the author’s hard work pay off in a way that you just know their endorphin rush is going to go on for a week. That’s what makes your endorphin rush happen. It’s not the deal. It’s their scream.

STEINBERG: I love dealing with creative people on a daily basis and just seeing how their minds work. It just makes me so happy. I think that’s probably why I do what I do. I just love what they come up with. Great twists in plot. Things that are unexpected but extraordinary. That’s always the best part. I’m really sad when I’m not reading some great piece of fiction for work.

RUTMAN: Constant access to people who are smarter than you is a really nice part of the job.

STEIN: Smarter. More creative.

STEINBERG: More disciplined.

RUTMAN: Better. Just better.

AGENTS ANONYMOUS
In the third hour of our conversation, with a few bottles of wine sloshing around in their brains, the agents agreed to speak anonymously on a variety of topics that would be difficult to discuss for attribution. Any number of verbal tics have been altered in order to disguise the identities of the speakers.

 

What would you say to writers if you could be anonymous?
Work harder. Be gracious.

Don’t be so needy. Don’t need constant affirmation.

Once you make a decision to go with an agent, trust that agent.

When authors leave their agent to go to a “better” agent, it is almost always the author’s fault. I don’t blame agents for poaching. I blame authors for allowing themselves to be poached.

And nine times out of ten it’s the wrong decision.

Tell me about some overrated publishers, in your opinion.
Little Random. I think the reputation they built in the era before we came into the industry has gone out the window in the past five years. I can’t think of one book of theirs that I’ve read in the past five years that I’ve admired. They have no vision. There used to be some good literary editors there—Dan Menaker, Ann Godoff—who had some vision. I think the house publishes schlock now, for the most part.

Spiegel & Grau. They just care about the celebrity-type books. Even if the writer is not an actual celebrity, they only want to buy big books by the sort of literary celebrities. They pretend they’re in it for the art but in my view they’re not.

Scribner. It’s kind of strange because they have this great literary reputation, and I’ve always thought of them as a great literary house, but I just can’t think of anything of theirs that I’ve admired in a long time. Maybe a little bit of their nonfiction, but not much of it. I can’t figure out why that is because, you know, it’s Nan Graham and that shouldn’t be the case.

Riverhead, these days—after Cindy [Spiegel] and Julie [Grau] left—has not found its footing yet. I mean, the books that have done well for Riverhead lately were under contract already. Junot Díaz. Khaled Hosseini. Aleksandar Hemon, but Sean [McDonald, his editor] was there before the new regime. We’ll see what Becky [Saletan] does.

What about on the flip side of that? Which houses do you think are underrated?
Algonquin. They do a great job and they have integrity. They know the right amount to pay but they don’t overpay. And they do great publicity.

I wish more houses were like Norton. They have a pretty big list but they also acquire carefully, for the most part, and there’s a nice range of serious editors. Their acquisition process is rigorous and they don’t often go nuts to overpay for something. They’re an employee-owned company and everybody is invested in what goes on. Their offices are really crappy, which is kind of reassuring. And they take chances on books that are ultra-literary while doing unapologetically commercial stuff too.

I feel like Algonquin uses them almost as a model. They’re similar in a lot of ways.

They’re the last of a dying breed. How many independent houses of that size exist anymore? And there’s a reason we haven’t heard about any cutbacks or financial issues at Norton. They operate responsibly.

Tell me about some editors you really like to work with.
I’m working with an editor I’ve never worked with before, Tom Mayer at Norton. He’s tireless and will do anything for this book. The author wasn’t happy with the cover, and Tom went and got them to hire somebody else. I mean, that never happens. Usually editors are trying to say, “We all love this and the author should too.” I’ve never seen such an advocate for a book.

I would say Kathy Pories at Algonquin. She has amazing taste and she’s also a fantastic editor. She makes novels the 25-percent better that they need to be. She’s such a straight shooter, she’s fun to talk to on the phone… [Laughter.] That can’t be discounted! It’s a joy to call her. And it lets me be a straight shooter myself and not need to spin anything. That’s a nice feeling.

It’s only been one instance, but if somebody’s had a better experience with an editor than I was lucky enough to have with David Ebershoff, I would wish it on all of you. The level of attentiveness and awareness of the whole process from beginning to end was just incredibly heartening, from securing a publicist to being honest about certain potential impediments. His advocacy was inexhaustible.

Molly Barton is the same way. She will not let a book die. She’s still there after publication. She’s still there after paperback publication. She just keeps a book alive and does absolutely everything possible. She does things for her books that I didn’t even know were possible. She came up in a slightly different way and has a sort of big-picture publishing knowledge that a lot of editors don’t have.

Anybody have any horror stories from lunch?
I once had lunch with an editor at HarperCollins, and this was so long ago that I don’t even remember his name or if he’s still there, but he talked the whole time—very excitably, kind of spitting his food—about television shows and action movies. It’s kind of a cliché to talk about going to the bathroom and seeing if you can figure out a way to slip out. But I actually went to the bathroom and thought, “I can’t go back. I can’t get through this lunch. This has got to be Candid Camera. I can’t do it.” But I went back and finished the lunch. I thought the whole thing had to be some sort of joke. But it wasn’t. It was real and he was real.

I had one lunch where the editor called me by the wrong name the entire lunch. He didn’t even know my name! And I didn’t correct him because I was so angry. After lunch I went back to the office and wrote him an e-mail so he’d see my name and know.

Of all the people and places who write about the industry—newspapers, Web sites, blogs—who are the smartest and who are the dumbest?
I feel like Publishers Weekly has really gone downhill. I know it’s a trade magazine so it’s supposed to be boring, but I think it’s really boring. I also don’t trust the reviews. I kind of liked Sara Nelson’s column, though. Just as a barometer of things.

I always feel like when I’m reading Michael Cader he might say something intelligent. Publishers Lunch is one of the better ones.

I thought Boris [Kachka] got a little too much shit for his New York magazine piece. I don’t think it was a dumb article. I felt more sympathetic to what he was trying to do than I think most people did.

I think that guy Leon [Neyfakh] at the Observer is really good at digging in and getting scoops. He really keeps going.

It’s his first job.

And he knows how to become friends with you and get stuff out of you. He’s very good in that way. And he treats publishing like it’s something to care about, which is nice. It’s like he’s always looking for some secret that will be amazing. The things he finds are usually kind of silly, but at least he’s trying.

Which is different than Motoko [Rich, of the New York Times], who approaches it like it’s a business. A business that doesn’t make any money.

Don’t you always feel a little surprised that the Times will cover a publishing development as prominently as they sometimes do? They’re like, “Layoffs at Doubleday!” and you’re like, “That warrants coverage in the New York Times? Really?”

Anything else that you want to get off your chests?
I think book jackets are incredibly important but they’re one of the weakest parts of the business. We need to pay jacket designers more money. We need to attract better people. It’s one thing that we can control.

We should steal all of the indie-rock designers and bring them into books. Because that shit is great. Walk through any record store. They are so consistently good, and they get paid nothing.

I emphatically second that idea. And I think raiding another industry could be the way to do it.

There are so few things you can control, and the jacket is so important. It’s what people look at. Women’s legs are not inherently interesting as cover subjects.

Or shoes.

Or the face of an adolescent girl who is blowing bubbles.

Oh, I disagree with you there. I’d love to support you, but I can’t. [Laughter.]

 

Jofie Ferrari-Adler is an editor at Grove/Atlantic.

Agents & Editors: A Q&A With Agent Molly Friedrich
Agents & Editors: A Q&A With Editor Chuck Adams
Agents & Editors: A Q&A With Four Young Literary Agents
Agents and Editors: A Q&A With Four Young Editors

Agents and Editors: A Q&A With Four Young Editors

by

Jofie Ferrari-Adler

March/April 2009
3.1.09
In Print and Online

If the economic Tilt-A-Whirl of the past few months has proven anything, it’s that this carnival life of ours—writing, publishing, trying to find readers—isn’t getting any easier. Booksellers and publishers are in turmoil, with scores of staffers having already lost their jobs to “restructuring,” “integration,” and all the other corporate euphemisms that are dreamed up to soften the harsh reality: It isn’t pretty out there.

While it goes without saying that our problems are nothing compared with those of many industries, one’s heart can’t help but ache for the literary magazines and publishing houses that won’t be around in a year; the unemployed editors, publicists, and marketing people with mortgages to pay; the authors whose first books are being published now, or a month from now, or anytime soon.

But difficult times don’t have to be joyless times. As I listened to these four accomplished young book editors talk about what they do, I was reminded of a simple and enduring truth, trite as it may sound: We are all—writers, agents, publishers, booksellers, librarians, and readers—in this together. And there are concrete things we can do to connect with one another more effectively. These editors are full of insight about how to do just that.

It seems appropriate, at such a humbling moment, that we met over pizza and bottled water (okay, maybe not exclusively water) in the glamorously unglamorous offices of Open City, the independent press and literary magazine based in downtown Manhattan. Over the years its editors, Thomas Beller and Joanna Yas, have introduced readers to some of the most distinctive voices of our time, from Meghan Daum to Sam Lipsyte. Here are short biographies of the participants:

LEE BOUDREAUX was an editor at Random House for almost ten years before leaving to become the editorial director of Ecco in 2005. She has worked with Arthur Phillips, Dalia Sofer, and David Wroblewski.

ERIC CHINSKI worked at Oxford University Press and Houghton Mifflin before moving to Farrar, Straus and Giroux, where he is vice president and editor in chief. He has edited Chris Adrian, Rivka Galchen, and Alex Ross.

ALEXIS GARGAGLIANO worked at Simon & Schuster and Knopf before moving to Scribner, where she is an editor, in 2002. Her authors include Matt Bondurant, Adam Gollner, and Joanna Smith Rakoff.

RICHARD NASH worked as a performance artist and theater director before taking over Soft Skull Press, now an imprint of Counterpoint, in 2001. His authors include Lydia Millet, Matthew Sharpe, and Lynne Tillman. [UPDATE: Richard Nash has resigned as editorial director of Soft Skull Press and executive editor of Counterpoint, effective March 10, 2009.]

Every reader understands the feeling of falling in love with a book. You guys do that for a living. I’m curious if you’ve given any thought to the specific things that can trigger that experience.
GARGAGLIANO: I don’t know if there’s a specific thing, but you know it immediately. The minute I start it I know that it’s the book I want to fall in love with. And that’s the one I keep reading. I will read a hundred pages of something else, but I won’t fall in love with it. You have this immediate sense of texture and place, and you’re just inside it from the first sentence. I think the thing that everybody says about first sentences is true. Everyone should try to get that first sentence perfect. I make my authors do that all the time.
NASH: But if you make them do it, they didn’t quite do it the first time, did they?
GARGAGLIANO: Well, it might be that you’ve had them totally rewrite the opening.
CHINSKI: Do you feel like it’s different for fiction and nonfiction?
GARGAGLIANO: I do. I always hate that with nonfiction, when you read a proposal, you don’t get the writing first. You get the pitch first. I always look to the writing.
CHINSKI: For me, with fiction, there’s that funny moment when you feel like you actually want to meet the author. You want to know who the man or woman who’s writing it is because there’s a real sensibility in the writing. It’s not just that the writing is good—there’s a kind of intensity of imagination to it. You wonder, “Who is this person who’s able to telescope all of these ideas into something that feels accessible?” I think that’s one similarity between nonfiction and fiction, even though obviously they’re different in many ways: It takes the ordinary and makes it extraordinary. You sort of recognize something but it allows you access to it in a totally different way. But I can’t tell you how many times, thirty pages into a novel, I actually want to write the agent and say, “Who is this person?” You just wonder, “Who’s coming up with this?”
BOUDREAUX: I think there’s always a moment of surprise and delight. It comes in the form of a word. You get to the end of a sentence and go, “Wow, I didn’t see that coming. That was perfect.” The language just goes click and the whole thing has gone up a notch and you know at that point that you’re committed to…a hundred pages? Two hundred? Or you’re going the distance with it. The gears just click into place and you realize you’re reading something that is an order of magnitude different than the seventy-five other things that have crossed your desk lately, many of which were perfectly good and perfectly competent.
CHINSKI: And doesn’t it feel like it’s not even just talent? It’s the sensibility of the writer. I think about a writer whom I don’t work with but whom I admire, Aleksandar Hemon. He does that funny thing where he doesn’t use words in an ordinary way, and yet they work and they suggest a whole worldview. Or look at Chris Adrian, whom I do work with and adore. I mean, his writing is really difficult. It’s about dying and suffering children—you can’t imagine a more difficult subject. But again, there’s a kind of intensity of imagination and a way of articulating things that goes beyond good writing. There is a force and energy to the writing. I think that’s the hardest thing to find in fiction, at least for me, and that’s what I find myself responding to again and again.
NASH: For me it’s also when a work of fiction has the force of society behind it on some level. Which is not necessarily to say that it has to be political—I do far less political fiction than people think—but I do want to feel that the writer has access to something larger than himself. To me, the energy you’re talking about is something that possesses social force and a concatenation of relationships and responses to the world lived in a certain kind of way. I try to forbid myself from using the word authenticity because I don’t actually know what the hell it is, but that’s one way of talking about it.
CHINSKI: I have a related question. What do you all think of the word voice? It’s one of those words that we all overuse, but do we actually know what it is? I always find myself reaching for it when I want to describe why I like something and why I don’t like other things that are perfectly well written. But when I really try to figure out exactly what I mean by it, I come back to what I was saying before. Is sensibility the same thing as a writer having a voice?
GARGAGLIANO: If it comes alive for you, and you can hear it in your head, and it sort of lives inside you, that’s when I feel like a writer has a voice. That’s when I’ll keep going back to something again and again. One of my favorite writers when I was falling in love with literature was Jeanette Winterson. It was just about her voice. I kept loving her books even when the stories themselves started to fall apart. I just wanted to hear that voice in my head. For me, with her, it stopped being about the storytelling, which is unusual. I love story. I want plots in my books.
CHINSKI: And you can think about writers who don’t actually tell stories. The Europeans, for example. We always have one: Thomas Bernhard; Sebald; now Bolaño. It feels like there’s always one of these writers who isn’t writing plot-driven fiction. The voice is so strong that that’s what people are responding to. With Bolaño, I find it kind of amazing that you have this nine-hundred-page novel by a dead Spanish-language writer…I mean, I can’t honestly believe that everybody who’s buying it is reading the whole thing. But it goes back to what you were saying, Richard, about the voice having the force of history and almost being haunted by these bigger issues.
NASH: Haunted is totally the word. Beckett had it too, obviously.
CHINSKI: Or look at Philip Roth. Even in his lesser novels, you can always recognize that kind of force in his writing.
NASH: What you just said reminds me of an artist named Bruce Nauman. I went to see a retrospective of his before I was in publishing. There was this sense, as you went from room to room, that the guy just had access to something that he wasn’t going to lose access to. You know what I mean? There was a certain frequency of the world to which he was tuned in. It could express itself in different ways, but he wasn’t going to lose his capacity to listen to it, as a result of which the work was always going to be operating on a certain level. He might vary between, I don’t know, brilliant and mind-blowing, but he wasn’t going to fuck up. Those voices, and those Europeans you were mentioning, are probably at the very upper level.
CHINSKI: That’s right. They always seem to have a certain set of questions that they’re asking. Even if they’re writing very different novels from book to book, they’re haunted by one or two or three questions, and no matter what they write, they seem to circle around them. That may have something to do with the voice they bring to a book. I mean, even Sasha Hemon, who’s only written three books—you can tell what his obsessions are. That’s another thing: I like writers who are obsessed. Chris Adrian is obsessed too. That’s what’s exciting about reading certain fiction writers.

Aside from what’s on the page, and somebody’s skill as a writer or voice or obsessions, what other things influence your thinking and decision-making?
GARGAGLIANO: One of the things can be when a book taps into something that’s happening in the moment. I’m editing a book right now that’s set after World War II in a psychiatric hospital, and it’s really a book about what happens to soldiers when they come back from war. I find myself obsessed with the news and weeping when I watch Channel Thirteen because I’ve been inside of this story for so long and I understand the psychology of these men coming back. I’m hoping that there will be a resonance when we publish it. You’re always trying to process things in the world, and when you read a really good piece of fiction, it helps you process things.
CHINSKI: The word necessary always comes to mind for me. Beyond a good story, beyond good writing, does the novel feel necessary? A lot of good books are written, and I’m not saying that they shouldn’t be published, but as an editor you can’t work on everything, and the ones I tend to be drawn to are the ones that either feel personally necessary or globally necessary in some vague way that’s hard to define. And that should be at the sentence level, too. People who can write really well sometimes get carried away by their own writing and forget what’s actually necessary on the page. I would also raise the question of believability. A book can be surreal and fantastical and all that, so it’s not believable in any straight sense, but it has to be believable in the sense that the author believes in what he or she is doing. Sometimes you feel like an author is just writing for the sake of writing, and that is a big turnoff. It’s got to feel necessary at every level.
BOUDREAUX: As an editor, you know how difficult the in-house process is going to be—the process of getting a book out there. The necessary quotient comes up when you ask yourself, “Is this something that really fires me up? What’s going to happen when I give it to these two reps to read? Are they going to have the same reaction to some pretty significant extent and feel the need to convey their enthusiasm down the line?” Because I think word of mouth remains the best thing we can ever do for a book. So is there that necessary thing? Is there that urgency? Is it in some significant way different from any number of other novels that purport to talk about the same topic? It’s almost like an electrical pulse traveling down a wire. It starts with the author, then the agent, then the editor, and then there are a lot of telephone poles it’s got to go through from there. If it’s lacking in any way, you know that the electricity is going to peter out. Sometimes you can almost see it happen. You can watch it happen between one sales rep and another sales rep. You’re like, “Oh, that just petered out between those two telephone poles.” And the book is only going to do so much.

When a lot of us were starting out I think we may have felt like, “Oh, it’s a little book, but it’s my job to make it work, and I’m going to.” I feel less like that now. Because you can’t work on everything, and you can’t do everything for every book. Even when you do do everything you can think of, so many good books get ignored. So many good books go by the wayside. You’ve got to be able to figure out if each one is necessary enough that you can really do something with it. Because it’s not that rewarding as the editor, or as the author, to just have a book sit there—when it dies a quiet death and nobody even hears it sink. “We tried! We’ll do better with the paperback!” The number of times you hear that! You know you’re lying and they know you’re lying and everyone’s just going to pretend it will be totally different a year from now.

It’s got to have enough juice in it to go somewhere. I feel like that juice can take any number of forms. It’s an ineffable quality, but you kind of know it when you’ve got it in front of you. Everyone is not going to agree on fiction, either. I do pretty much all fiction. When I want to buy something, in most cases nobody else is going to read the whole thing. They’re going to believe me when I say it’s good all the way to the end. They just like the voice and then we run with it. You’re never going to get a whole roomful of people to agree on fiction the way you sometimes can with nonfiction: “Is this the right book at the right time by the right person with the right platform to write the book on whatever?” With fiction it’s all sort of amorphous, and you’ve just got to feel like you’re picking the ones that are potent enough to go the distance.
NASH: We’re all just proxies for the reader. But we’re going to have different ideas about who the reader is and how we connect to that reader. Do we have commonality with this imaginary reader? But I certainly find that I am powerfully animated by the sense of having a duty to connect the writer with the reader. Is this a book that’s going to get one person to tell another person that they’ve got to read it? Which is the closest thing, I think, at least in the land of fiction, that’s going to pass for figuring out what the hell is meant by the word commercial. As you said, your own energy can always get one other person to read the book. But is that one other person going to get the next person to read the book?

Are there any other things, besides what’s on the page, that you’re looking at when a book is submitted?
GARGAGLIANO: This was one of the hardest lessons for me. Unlike what Eric was saying earlier, when I used to read fiction before I was in publishing, I never wanted to know who the author was. I didn’t want to look at their pictures. I just wanted to exist in the worlds that they had created. That was it. When I got into the industry, I quickly learned that that was not acceptable. The first thing I get asked at our editorial meeting is, “Where have they published?” You want to know that somebody has been publishing their short stories, even if a total of a hundred people have read them. It’s always the first question.
CHINSKI: One thing I’m looking for is experience in the world. I keep coming back to Chris Adrian, not for any particular reason. But he’s somebody who has an MFA, he’s a practicing doctor specializing in pediatric oncology, he’s in divinity school, and you can feel all of that in his writing. There’s an urgency, a sense of questioning, and an obsession. You can tell that all of that experience is getting distilled into his writing. He wants to understand something about loss and our relationship to transcendence. I feel like with the best writers, you recognize that in their work. It’s exciting to me to feel like it’s being drawn not just out of the desire to write an interesting story and find readers. It’s a different form of necessity that they feel they need to wrestle with because of their own life experience.
BOUDREAUX: I’ve never been able to say what my books have in common. I’ll make an argument for escapism. I want to be transported. I don’t care where you take me, but I want to have that moment that we all had when we were reading as kids, when the real world ceases to exist and your mother tells you to come have dinner and it’s like resurfacing from the bottom of a swimming pool. “Where am I? What am I doing?” That’s what I want. I’m not looking for any particular kind of book, I’m just looking for the intensity of that experience. It doesn’t matter what agent it comes from. It doesn’t matter if it’s long or short. It doesn’t matter if it’s a young voice or something that’s more mature. I just feel like you sit there as a proxy for the reader, open to having a new experience. And if they can give it to you, great. I don’t even need it to happen in the first sentence. I’ll give it three or four pages sometimes. [Laughter.] I’m seven months pregnant so I’m feeling patient and maternal toward the world—I’ll give them four or five pages to say something that I find interesting.

On the flip side of that, give me some things that you find beginning writers doing wrong.
NASH: Not listening. Not listening to the world around them.
GARGAGLIANO: Trying to sell stories that aren’t really a book. They’re not a cohesive whole. There’s no vision to the whole thing that makes me feel like this person has a reason for writing a story collection other than that they had twelve stories.
NASH: Assuming that having an attitude equals…anything.
CHINSKI: Or assuming that good writing is enough. I’m sure we all see a lot of stuff where the writing is really good. It’s well crafted and you can tell that the writer has talent. But, again, you don’t really feel like the writer necessarily believes in his or her ability to open it up into a novel. I know the old adage “write what you know.” I’d kind of rather somebody write what they don’t know. And figure out, beyond their own personal experience, why what they’re doing should matter to the reader.
BOUDREAUX: I’ve always wanted to give people that advice too. “Do you have to write what you know? If you know it, I might know it. Which means I’ve already read it. Which means that your book is the nineteenth novel about a mother-daughter relationship. And I. Don’t. Care.” The crudest way to put it is the “Who cares?” factor. Why, why, why do I need to read four hundred pages about this? The necessary thing, and the authentic thing, and the voice thing are all much better ways of saying it than the “Who cares?” factor, but it’s basically the same thing. “What is the necessity of reading this? What are you doing that is different?”
CHINSKI: I’d rather somebody be ambitious and fail a little bit than read a perfectly crafted, tame novel.
NASH: I have published novels, especially first novels, that I knew failed on some level because of what they were trying to do. I felt that that was okay.
CHINSKI: That’s more exciting.
NASH: But what would be the version of that that actually answered your question?
CHINSKI: “Have courage”?
NASH: Don’t try to be perfect. Don’t be boring.
CHINSKI: That’s really what it is 99.9 percent of the time—good writing, but boring. And it’s the hardest thing to turn down because you think, “This is good. But it doesn’t do anything for me.”
BOUDREAUX: That’s the thing. You’re like, “There’s nothing wrong with this. I’ve got nothing to tell you to do to fix it. It’s just…there.”
CHINSKI: And that’s a hard rejection letter to write, too. Because it’s not like you can point to this, that, and the other thing that are wrong with it. It just doesn’t move you in any way. It doesn’t feel necessary.

Do you think it’s too hard to get published today?
GARGAGLIANO: I think it’s hard but not too hard. I don’t know how many more books we could have out there.
BOUDREAUX: I think we all kind of know that too many books get published. You can listen to your own imprint’s launch meeting, you can listen to all the other imprints’ launch meetings, and multiply that by every other house, and you know that every book did not feel necessary to every editor. When you think about it that way, it doesn’t seem all that hard to get published.
CHINSKI: But there are also a lot of people who can’t get published.
NASH: There was a great little moment in an article in Wired about a year ago. It was an article about the million-dollar prize that Netflix is giving for anyone who can improve their algorithm—”If you liked this, you’ll like that”—by 10 percent. One of the people in the article was quoted as saying that the twentieth century was a problem of supply, and the twenty-first century is a problem of demand. I think that describes a lot about the book publishing business right now. For a long time, racism, classism, and sexism prevented a whole array of talent from having access to a level of educational privilege that would allow them to write full-length books. That hasn’t been completely solved, but it’s been radically improved since the 1950s. Far more persons of color, women, and people below the upper class have access now. An entire agent community has arisen to represent them. But finding the audience is the big problem. I guess I’m imposing my own question on the question you asked—”Is it too hard to get published?”—and I think we all may have heard a slightly different version of that question. The version of it that I heard was, “Are there too many books?” I personally don’t feel that way. And I get a lot of submissions at Soft Skull. I get about 150 a week. And it’s hell having so much supply. But we didn’t exist before 1993, and you guys all existed before that, so you are feeding off a different supply and we’re enabling this new supply. I love the fact that Two Dollar Radio exists, and all the other new indie presses that have erupted. I think that’s healthy. I don’t think a solution to the problems we face as an industry is to say we’re going to reduce consumer choice by publishing fewer books. Now, at the level of the individual publisher, I totally understand it as a rational decision that a given executive committee would make at a large company. My comment that there are not too many books published has to do with culture rather than a given economic enterprise. I think we could publish more books. You just have to recognize that they may be read by five hundred people. And that’s perfectly legitimate. Blogs can be read by fifty people. You just have to think, “What’s the economically and environmentally rational thing to do with this thing that has an audience—but that audience is just 150 or 250 people?” It may not be to print the book. It may be to publish it through a labor-of-love operation that is completely committed to a given set of aesthetic principles and will print it in a way that is environmentally sensitive—chapbook publishing, let’s say. The poetry model could have a lot to say to fiction and nonfiction publishing.

I think about the midlist writer a lot and I feel like it’s harder and harder to build a career the old-fashioned way—slowly, over several books that might not be perfect but allow you to develop as a writer. Part of that has to do with the electronic sales track. Put yourself in the shoes of a beginning writer and speak to that.
BOUDREAUX: When we published Serena by Ron Rash it was such a proud moment of doing that thing—of almost reinventing a writer. So I feel like it can still happen. The model of building somebody hasn’t gone completely out the window. It gets hard with the “This is what we sold of the last book, this is all we’re ordering this time.” And you’re stuck with it. But a lot of editors and a lot of publishers stick with people.
GARGAGLIANO: I feel like Scribner is really good about that. We can’t do it with everyone, but there is definitely a stable of authors. I have writers for whom I haven’t had to fight that hard to buy their second or third books. It’s because everyone recognizes their talent.
NASH: It can be because the reps love selling them. The reps love reading that galley, even if they’re going to get [orders of] ones and twos. But it makes them so happy to read that galley that they’re not going to fight you when you present it to them.
CHINSKI: You have to think about the identity of the list as a whole, too. Sometimes it means paying an author less than what they’ve received before, but it doesn’t mean we’re giving up on those authors. I think, speaking for FSG, it’s important to us to try to build writers. Roger Straus apparently said, and Jonathan always says, “We publish authors, not books.” That’s more difficult today, given the way of the world, but it’s still the guiding principle. Think about Jonathan Franzen, who published two novels that got great reviews but didn’t sell particularly well. Then The Corrections came along. There are tons of examples like that.

But aren’t you guys and FSG the exception to that in a lot of ways?
CHINSKI: I wonder if it’s really that new. Obviously the mechanics have changed, but there’s always been a huge midlist. We remember the really important writers. We probably don’t even remember the best-selling writers from twenty years ago. You remember the important ones—or the ones that have been canonized as important. The economics have changed and obviously the chain bookstores are a different part of the equation than they were fifty years ago, but I suspect there’s always been a vast midlist.
GARGAGLIANO: I also don’t think it’s very constructive for authors to think about that too much. You’re sort of fortunate if you get published at all. You’re fortunate to find an editor who you have a great relationship with and a house that believes in you in which everybody works as hard as they can for you. There’s only so much you can do.
NASH: If you’re going to stress about something, be worrying about your reader. Don’t stare at your Amazon ranking and don’t stare at the number of galleys your publisher is printing. Get out into the world. And if you don’t have the personality to get out into the world, then you have to ask yourself, “Why does everybody else have to have the personality to get out into the world, but I don’t? What makes me so special that everybody else has to go out and bang the drum for me, but I don’t?” I have a fairly limited tolerance for people who assume that it is everybody else’s job to sell their books while they get to be pure and pristine. They don’t have to get the book-publishing equivalent of dirt under their fingernails. Which involves whoring, to use a sexist term, but one that I use to describe myself. [Laughter.] Go out and find a reader. It’s not about selling a reader a $14.95 book. If you have ten more books under your thumb, then that reader could be worth $150 to you, and it might actually be worth three minutes of your time to respond to their e-mail or chat with them for an extra two minutes after that reading at which it seemed like no one showed up. Those eight people might have some influence out in the world. None of us is in this for the money. It’s sort of mind-boggling how many people think that we’re sitting there behind our cushy desks. There’s just no one in publishing who couldn’t have made more money doing something else. At a certain point, yes, we may have become unemployable in any other industry. But there was a period of time in everyone’s career when he or she could have gone in a different direction and made more money, and chose not to.
GARGAGLIANO: Can I add one more thing? We keep talking about self-promotion, and I think there’s a stigma that it’s a negative thing. It’s really an extension of that deep involvement we were talking about earlier. It’s about being really passionate about your book. It’s a way to figure out how to make the world of your book bigger, and to give other people access to it. I think it’s helpful if authors can wrap their heads around looking at it from a different perspective. I have a lot of authors who are afraid to go out there. They think it’s about them. It’s actually about the book. It’s about the writing. It’s not about you personally.
NASH: It’s about being part of the world around you. One of the freelance publicists I know—I’ve never been able to afford to use her, but I’m friendly with her—does something that I think is brilliant in terms of dealing with a new author. Rather than trying to make an author blog, which is always hell, she says, “Here are twenty blogs that you should read.” And by doing that, they get into it. They start commenting. All of the sudden they start getting that this act of communication is no different than a conversation between two people. It gets the author to start realizing that they’re in a community, and that participating in that community is what we’re talking about when we say “self-promotion.” It isn’t this tawdry, icky activity that will demean them. It will help make them feel more connected to the world, and happier.
GARGAGLIANO: I’ll give you an example. I published this book about fruit—talk about obsessive people—called The Fruit Hunters. The author is this guy who was writing food stories for magazines and became obsessed with fruit and went on to discover this whole obsessive world of fruit lovers. The book came out and got a lot of attention, and the sales were okay, but it has fostered this whole community of people who are also obsessed. The other day they had an event in a community garden in the East Village. They call themselves the Fruit Hunters, after the book, and they’re going to take trips together and everything. There are already a hundred of them. It’s this amazing little story of obsession. It’s exciting. The author is very involved online. He’s happy to engage with anyone who wants to talk to him. He’s just really present, and that makes all the difference.

I’m interested in how you guys view your jobs. It seems to me that things have changed quite a bit over time and I’m curious how you see what you do.
CHINSKI: Things have changed a lot. But in terms of the actual editing and acquiring, I don’t feel like I’m thinking very differently about what I’m signing up, and in terms of the editing, I still have the same basic ideas of what my role is, which is to make the book more of what it already is—rather than coming in with some foreign idea and imposing it on the book. I try to understand what the writer is trying to do with the book and edit it along those lines. But when I first started in publishing, I had no idea that the role of the editor was to communicate to the marketing and sales departments. I had this very dark-and-stormy-night vision of the editor sitting in a room poring over manuscripts. But you very quickly realize that a natural part of being excited about a book is wanting to tell other people about it, in the same way we do as readers. That’s what our job is in-house. And obviously it probably is different now, in terms of the chain stores and all these other things. But I think an editor’s job is basically to fall in love with a book and then to help it be more of what it already is.
GARGAGLIANO: I feel very similarly. I’m the first reader, and I’m there to make the book what it wants to be, and then I’m its best advocate. I’m its advocate to people in the company because often they’re not going to read it—they’re only going to get my take on it—and then I’m its advocate to the rest of the world. I write handwritten notes to booksellers. I write to magazine people. I’m constantly promoting my authors. I feel like I’m the one who was responsible for getting them into the company, and I’m the one who’s responsible for getting them into the world. I have to take care of them.
BOUDREAUX: The most fun part of being an editor is getting to actually edit—getting to sit and play puzzle with the book. God, that is so much fun! That’s what we like to do. We need to do all of these other things…but sitting there with the paper, which you only get to do on the weekends? That’s when you get excited. Like, “I’m a real editor!” But this myth that nobody edits anymore compared with a hundred years ago? I’ve never worked with an editor who doesn’t edit all weekend long, every single night. That’s the fun part.
CHINSKI: I think that’s important to emphasize. I think we all hear that editors don’t edit anymore.
BOUDREAUX: I just don’t know who they’re talking about. Having worked at two different houses, I literally do not know who they are talking about. Who just acquires and doesn’t edit? I feel like everybody I’ve ever worked with sweats blood over manuscripts. And you reap the rewards of doing that.
NASH: I suspect that agents are doing more editorial work on books before they submit them in order to polish the apple. To some extent the process of acquisition has become more collegial, and it’s helpful if a book is not a dog’s dinner when you’re showing it to people before you can start working on it yourself. That can create the perception that not much happened after it was acquired. And when you have the goal of helping to make a book as much like itself as it can be, that can involve a level of editing that doesn’t look very intense on the surface but actually can be quite important. It doesn’t have to involve a whole lot of red ink. But the right red ink in the right places, especially when it’s subtractive rather than additive, can really make a book fluoresce.

Why did you all become editors instead of agents? And why do you stay editors when by all accounts you could make a lot more money being an agent?
CHINSKI: Has anybody here ever worked at an agency? My first job, for three months, was at an agency. That’s why I’m an editor. But sometimes I do think that agents get a more global view of things. Dealing with film and foreign rights and so on.

But in other ways they get a more limited view because they don’t have to do all the things to make a book work.
CHINSKI: I think that’s true. Wouldn’t that be more fun? [Laughter.] But seriously, when I was working there I didn’t leave because I didn’t like working at an agency. It just wasn’t working as a job. I have a really hard time imagining myself as an agent. It’s partly just the obvious stuff of doing the deal and so on. I think you have to have a certain personality to get really excited about that. I’d rather go home and really devote myself to doing the editing. I know that some agents do that. But it’s not, kind of nominally, what they are there for.
BOUDREAUX: I literally didn’t know there was such a thing as a literary agent. I didn’t know anything. I was like, “I guess those people who get to work with books would be editors.” I just didn’t know any better. And I love to play with the words, which they also get to do, but they’re not the final word on it. I also don’t do enough nonfiction, which I feel like any editor who’s got any sense learns to do. But I just don’t have the antenna for it. As an agent it would be even scarier to have a list that is 95 percent fiction. You probably need a balanced portfolio in a way that an editor can still get away with being more fiction-heavy.

What are the hardest decisions you have to make as editors?
CHINSKI: Jackets. I find that the most harrowing part of the whole process. As an editor, you’re in this funny position of both being an advocate for the house to the author and agent but also being an advocate for the author to everybody in-house. The editor is kind of betwixt and between. And for a lot of books, especially fiction, the jacket is the only marketing tool you have. It’s really difficult. I also find that I know what I don’t like, but I don’t have the visual vocabulary to describe what I think might work.
BOUDREAUX: And the cover is so important. Even if it’s not the only thing that’s being done for a book, it’s still got to be one of the most important things. You’ve got reviews and word-of-mouth, and then you’ve just got the effect it has when somebody walks into the store and sees it. I think it’s so important to work somewhere where your art people will read the book and come up with something that you never would have come up with yourself. The idea of a jacket meeting where you have twelve people around a table and you bring it down to the lowest common denominator of “It’s a book about this set there. We need a crab pot at sunset with a…” People do that! They think it’s a marketing-savvy way to go about it. “We need a young person on the cover. But you shouldn’t be able to see the person’s face. It has to be from behind!”
GARGAGLIANO: The same thing happens when the author tries to deconstruct the cover.
CHINSKI: Exactly. That’s one thing that’s changed a lot. When I first started, we would send the author hard copies of the [proposed] jacket. Now we email it to them and they send it to everybody in their family. You can predict exactly what’s going to happen.

What are the other hard decisions you have to make?
GARGAGLIANO: I have two, and they’re related. One of them is when I love a book but I don’t actually think that we’re going to do the best job of publishing it. I anguish about that because I want the book for myself, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the right thing for the author. The step beyond that is when you’ve already been publishing someone, and it’s the question of what’s best for their career. You offer a certain amount of money, and the agent wants to take the author somewhere else, and you have to ask yourself whether or not you go to bat for that person and get more money because you want to keep working with them despite whether the house might really support them. That’s a hard thing to figure out.

I think part of what makes it hard is that editors serve different masters—the authors, the agents, the house. How do you guys navigate those allegiances and responsibilities?
NASH: I will confess that I came into this business not motivated to become an editor. I was a theater director and happened upon Soft Skull because the guy who founded it was a playwright whose plays I directed. The whole thing was going belly up in the middle of my friendship with this dude. He basically did a runner, and there were these two twenty-two-year-olds at the company, and no one else, and there were all these authors, and the whole thing was fucked. I had a messiah complex and came in and tried to be Mr. Messiah for six months. And in the middle of my messiah complex, I fell in love with the process of publishing. So in a weird way, I did not come in with the idea of working with writers. I came in as a problem solver, and that’s all I’ve ever been in a certain sense. The problem I try to solve is, “How do you connect writers and readers?” Those are the two masters for me. Recently I’ve been trying to think, believe it or not, of the publishing business as a service industry in which we provide two services simultaneously, to the author and to the reader. We may pretend to offer a service to the agent, and we may pretend to offer a service to the company. But only to the extent that we fulfill those other two services—to the writer and to the reader—are we truly serving the agent or the company. And we have to use our own instincts on a minute-to-minute psychological basis. Obviously you’re accountable to the bottom line and P&Ls etcetera, but you’re being asked to use your own instincts, and that’s what you have to use in order to bring writers and readers together.
GARGAGLIANO: There are moments when it’s sticky. When you’re dealing with a jacket, for example. But on the whole, everybody wants the same thing, and that makes it easy. The thing that I always have to remind myself is that the people who are on the sales end also love books, and they also love to read, and they could be making more money in some other industry too. When you remember that, it makes your job much easier.
CHINSKI: I agree that we do all want the same thing, but don’t you find that sometimes people don’t behave that way?
GARGAGLIANO: Sometimes. But sometimes they do.
CHINSKI: It just amazes me how combative the relationship can become. I mean, it doesn’t happen that often, but it does become combative sometimes. When we were talking before about authors saying that editors don’t edit…there’s just this assumption that the publisher isn’t doing enough. Sometimes agents don’t quite understand how things actually work in the publishing house. I’m not saying that across the board. But it does happen. I find those situations really difficult, where you feel like you’re being accused of somehow not caring enough about the author when we all know how many hurdles there are. I mean, we wouldn’t be doing this if we didn’t care.
GARGAGLIANO: I’ve been very lucky with my authors. I haven’t had many bad ones. The relationship is all about trust, and once you start that relationship and you start that dialogue, they trust that you’re taking care of them. But there is a point when it’s out of the editor’s hands. And if they’ve trusted you that far, most of the time they’ll accept whatever happens, in my experience. Usually the call I get will be from the agent.
BOUDREAUX: It’s like you can almost have two different conversations. In one of them the agent gets what’s going on and is just being helpful and trying to get everyone on the same page. And in the other one somebody is making demands or accusations that aren’t going to actually help anything. It’s more just for show. You know, “Emboss this part of the jacket” for no good reason. You do get the feeling sometimes that they are fulfilling their service to the author in a way that actually doesn’t have that much to do with the book.
GARGAGLIANO: But that’s the agent. I’m more worried about my author’s happiness.
CHINSKI: I agree with that. A combative relationship with an author is pretty rare. Obviously it happens sometimes, but I’m thinking more about the agent. I don’t want to overstate it, but sometimes it does feel like we should all understand more that we do all actually want the same thing. No publisher or editor signs up a book in order to sink it. Who would do that? We’re not getting paid enough to be in this business for any reason other than we actually love the books we’re working on.

What do you wish writers knew about you that they sometimes don’t?
GARGAGLIANO: I think most writers don’t realize that every editor goes home and reads and edits for four hours—that they’re not doing that in the office. That in the office they’re advocating for all of the authors they already have.
NASH: I don’t even get to read when I go home. When I go home, I’m continuing to advocate. I haven’t been able to read at all recently. I’ve really just become a pure pimp.
CHINSKI: I thought you were a whore.
NASH: I’m both at once! It depends on the street I’m walking down.

What else?
GARGAGLIANO: I think it’s important for writers to remember that we’re not their enemy. We love books and we’re looking for books that we love.
CHINSKI: And ads are not love.
GARGAGLIANO: And ads do not equal sales.
BOUDREAUX: If those two things appear in print—that we’re working nights and weekends and ads don’t sell books—we have all done a fine job here. We are martyrs to the cause and ads are ridiculous. But I think editors like ads too. It’s like having your business card published in the New York Times.

Have you guys ever gotten any great advice about your jobs from a colleague or a mentor?
CHINSKI: I can quote somebody, Pat Strachan, who is one of the most elegant, serious, and lovely people in the business. She said to me, “Just remember, when you’re all stressed out, that the lives of young children are not at stake.” And I do think that’s worth remembering. We all love what we do and we take it really seriously, but you have to keep things in perspective. I also have one from David Rosenthal. He used to say, “If you’re going to overpay for a book, you should at least be able to imagine the things that have to happen for it to work at that level, even if it may not actually work at that level.”
BOUDREAUX: It should be in the realm of possibility.
CHINSKI: Yeah, and you should be able to picture, very concretely, what would have to happen and how you might go about making those things happen. You don’t want to just buy something blindly.

What have your authors taught you about how to do your job?
GARGAGLIANO: To be honest with them. I often have the impulse to protect my authors and treat them as if they are more fragile than they actually are. It’s better if I can have an open conversation with them. If I start that early on, the better our relationship is going to be going forward, and the easier it will be to talk about tough things. That took me a while to figure out.
BOUDREAUX: They teach you over and over and over—and this is so obvious—but they will always have a better solution to an editing problem than anything you could come up with. If you just raise the question, they will solve it. The universe of their book is more real to them than it could ever be to anyone else. You trust them with the internal logic of what’s going on. You just show them where the web is a little weak—where everything that was so fully imagined in their head has not quite made it down to the page. Not only, as you said, are they not that fragile, but the world they’ve created is not that fragile. You can poke at it endlessly, and you’ll just get really good answers and really good solutions. When you bring something up, you never find that you will unravel the whole sleeve. I’ve never had that happen. Where it’s like, “Oooooh, we’d better hope that nobody notices that.”

How do you guys measure your success as an editor?
NASH: Survival.

Tell me more.
NASH: For me, for a long time, there was a very direct correspondence between the success of my books and my ability to eat pizza. Now, in the last year, it has become less direct, since I don’t have to make payroll, least of all my own, anymore. Because in the past, in order to make payroll, I would do it by not making my own payroll.

But what about in a deeper sense?
NASH: I suppose I was answering as a publisher, which is what I was and in a sense what I am anterior to being an editor.

I think I just mean more internally, in a more internal way.
NASH: When the book becomes what you imagined it was going to be based on the fact that it was almost already there. And you helped it get there.
CHINSKI: But we all want more than that, too, don’t we?

That’s what I’m trying to get at.
CHINSKI: We all want our books to have an impact. Beyond sales in any kind of simple sense. You want people to talk about them. You want people to find each other because of them. I worked with a writer who very elegantly described a book as a table that everybody can sit around and start a conversation around. And I think, not to sound terribly cheesy about it, that’s what we all want. We want our books to have an impact in the world. And that’s really rare. Sometimes it has nothing to do with sales. So I think it’s more than just feeling like you did your job on the page. It’s feeling like you did your job in the world.
GARGAGLIANO: That it went beyond you.
CHINSKI: Yeah. Books should transcend themselves in some way, and I think that’s what we all really want.
NASH: The reason I got excited about publishing, compared to theater, was that the theater I was doing had no fucking impact on the world whatsoever.
GARGAGLIANO: Do you feel like it’s better in publishing?
NASH: It’s immensely better. Now, it may be that the joy I get from publishing is relative to how hard it was in downtown, experimental, Richard Foreman-acolyte theater. I set the bar so low for myself! [Laughter.] But in publishing, even indie publishing, thousands of people who I will never meet, who don’t want to act for me, will actually buy one of my books.
CHINSKI: That reminds me of another great quote that I’ll probably get slightly wrong. I remember when Philip Roth came to sales conference at Houghton Mifflin. I think it was for The Human Stain. He gave a presentation to the sales force and basically talked about the death of the novel as a force in our culture. “That’ll be a good way to get the sales reps really excited!” [Laughter.] But then he said the most extraordinary thing, which has always stayed with me and which I’ve said to a lot of writers. He said that if his books were to sell ten thousand copies, which doesn’t sound like a whole lot, but if he were to sit in a room, and each one of those people were to walk by him, and he could see them face to face, it would break his heart. I can’t believe I forgot that earlier. That’s probably the best description of why we do what we do. Whether it’s three thousand people buying a novel, or five hundred people buying a book of poetry, it does kind of break your heart if you actually imagine each of those individuals reading the book.
NASH: That’s why it was not a value judgment when I said the audience for a book might only be 150 people, in this world of more books. It’s about the intensity with which that connection might occur.
CHINSKI: Do you guys all remember one moment where you felt really content? Whether it was something specific that happened or just a moment in your career? Where you felt like, “Okay, this is it. Now I’m kind of happy. This is all I could ever want.” Where you actually slept well for one night?

I like the question.
GARGAGLIANO: That is a good question. [Laughter]
CHINSKI: I mean, I’m just wondering, was it when a book hit the best-seller list? Was it when a book got a great review? I’m curious what those different feelings are.
BOUDREAUX: I’m trying to come up with something that won’t sound like complete dorkiness. I mean, yeah, the best-seller list feels amazing. It feels amazing because of all the great books we watch not get read. When you see one that’s actually getting read? Boy is that an amazing feeling. But that little moment of satisfaction? I was trying to think, “What was the first time as an editor that I really felt that way?” Maybe being promoted to editor was my greatest moment. You know, Ann Godoff was doing the benediction and it was kind of like, “You are now an editor. On your tombstone they can say you were an editor.” I had this little glimmering moment of, “Yeah! I came here, I didn’t even know what publishing was, barely, and now…” Thank God for the Radcliffe Publishing Course. I wouldn’t have had any idea of how anybody moves to New York or gets a job had I not ended up doing that. I had been working at Longstreet Press in Atlanta, where we published Jeff Foxworthy’s You Might Be a Redneck If… That’s actually my proudest moment—what was I doing forgetting that? But seriously, I did that course because I didn’t know anything about anything and I thought I’d go back to Longstreet and work there. But then I thought, “Well, gosh, maybe I’ll try New York for one year. I’m sure I’ll end up back down in Atlanta before long, hoping that somebody at Algonquin would die so that somebody from the South could get a job at a slightly bigger publisher whose books you actually occasionally heard about.” You know, I think actually getting promoted to editor was sort of like, “Wow, here I am. This is really a job that I’m really going to get to do.” I still sort of feel amazed at that.
GARGAGLIANO: Getting a good review is also amazing. It’s so gratifying when you have loved this thing for so long and somebody in the public says that they love it too. It’s a thrill.
BOUDREAUX: Getting a review in a place that’s always been hard to crack. I’d bring up Ron Rash again. He was a regional author who had never been reviewed in the Times, never been reviewed in the Washington Post. He had this Southern fan base. The booksellers loved him. The San Francisco and L.A. papers had been good to him in the past. But everybody else ignored him. Getting him a daily review in the Times was such a bursting-buttons proud moment for him. I’ve never been happier about the work I’ve seen my company do on a book. Because we knew what he had felt like he’d been missing. And there it was, lining up—the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Yorker—when everybody had been ignoring him.
NASH: For me it was the summer of 2002, when there were two things that persuaded me that I should stay in the business. One was the first book I ever acquired, by a woman named Jenny Davidson, who I’d gone to college with. I was not even sure what one did at a publisher, and I thought, “I should acquire something.” We had to find books because there was nothing in the pipeline. So I asked around and my old college friend had a novel that no one wanted to publish. I didn’t know what galleys were at that point. But at one point our distributor asked us for some galleys, so we printed out manuscripts and tape-bound them and sent them some places. And the book ended up getting a full-page review in the Times. It ended up being pretty much the only review it got. It didn’t get any prepubs because I probably didn’t send it to the prepubs on time. But for whatever reason, some editor at the Times Book Review decided to review it. So I had this sense of not having fucked up—this absence of failure in a world where you’re up against it.

The second thing that happened had to do with the second book I acquired, Get Your War On. I’d look at my distributor’s website and see the sales and the backorders. And one order came in—I think it was the second order that the book got—and it was Harvard Bookstore, which ordered forty copies. That was more convincing than the Times Book Review. It was the first time a bookseller had ever trusted me, the first time a bookseller had ever said, “You’re not an idiot.” I don’t think in either of those situations did I realize how hard it was. It was only later, when I tried to get the second Times review and the second forty-copy-order from an indie bookstore, that I realized how good it was.

But the second thing was bigger than the first thing because ultimately it’s about survival. I wasn’t being glib when I was talking about survival. There was a very direct, one-to-one translation between my ability to sell books and my ability to stay in business and pay everyone. There is a British publisher call Souvenir Press, apparently they’ve been around for a long time, and I got a catalog of theirs one time. It included a letter from the publisher, and in the letter he quoted some other august independent publisher, saying something to the effect of, “A publisher’s first duty to his authors is to remain solvent.” Which was instructive because if you don’t, it’s not some glorious failure. All of your authors go out of print. And one of the reasons I ended up selling the company—one of the reasons was that I fucking had to because PGW had gone tits up and there was just no way to avoid that—but there was also a sense that if I fucked up too badly, the whole thing would go kaput, and I had an accountability to the authors to not let it all go kaput because it was not going to be some cute little failure where everybody would be like, “All right, peace, Soft Skull. It was very nice but now we’ll all move on.” It was like, “Oh, there are a number of authors whose careers actually depend on this.”

Let’s talk about agents. Tell me about the difference between a good one and a bad one.
GARGAGLIANO: A good agent knows what to send you. They’re playing matchmaker, and they do it well. Those are the happiest relationships—those authors are happiest with their agents and they’re happiest with their editors.
CHINSKI: A good agent also understands the process inside the publishing house and the kinds of issues and questions that an editor has to deal with on a daily basis. But I think, most importantly, they know what they’re sending and who they’re sending it to.
BOUDREAUX: A good agent can be very helpful when you get to those sticky wickets, whether it’s the cover, or an ending that still doesn’t work, or something else. An agent who can honestly appraise the work along with you and add their voice to the chorus of why, for example, the author needs to change that title. You want it to be about the book and you want it to be about the author, but every now and then the sales force knows what the hell they’re talking about with a “This is going to get lost because it is black and it has no title on the cover. It’s not going to degrade the integrity of the book if you change it.” An agent can either be helpful in that conversation or they can sit there and be a roadblock and let you be the bad cop. An agent who’s willing to be the bad cop with you can save an author from impulses—and help them understand why it’s the right thing to do in a world where two hundred thousand books get published every year.
GARGAGLIANO: The same thing is true on the publicity front, when you have an author who wants something and you have an agent who’s able to make the additional phone call and work on the team with the publicist and the editor. It’s much better than getting a phone call from an agent who’s just yelling at you.
CHINSKI: Just to step back a little bit, obviously the agent’s job is to be the advocate for the author. But, along the lines of what you were both saying, that doesn’t always mean agreeing with everything the author says. I think sometimes the agent forgets that. That, actually, they can be most constructive for the author—not just for that book, but their career—by explaining some difficult things to their client.
GARGAGLIANO: And encouraging their author not to be difficult, which doesn’t win any fans in the house. If the agent is able to step in and say something in a constructive fashion, that is often helpful.
CHINSKI: It’s human nature. We don’t like to admit it, but people like to work for somebody who’s appreciative. That doesn’t mean, in a saccharine way, just affirming everything that the editor and publisher are doing. Obviously, we all make mistakes. But the conversation has to be constructive. We’ve all seen it over and over and over again. If an author, even if they don’t agree with you, is appreciative and trying to work constructively with the house, and so is the agent, it just changes the energy of the way people respond to that project—from the publicist to the designer to whoever. It goes back to what we were saying before: We all want the same thing, and if everybody can keep that in mind, it just makes everybody want to work all the harder on behalf of the book.
NASH: The squeaky wheel theory is bullshit in our business. It’s just complete bullshit. It doesn’t work.
CHINSKI: I have a sense that authors sometimes get that as concrete advice—to be a squeaky wheel—and for everyone out there, there’s a way to express your convictions without being…
GARGAGLIANO: And that ties into being proactive for yourself. If you’re out there doing a lot of work for yourself, that energy is—
NASH: So inspirational. When you have an author who shows up at a bookstore and then a week later the sales rep shows up at the store and the rep emails me and says, “Guess what? So-and-so just came by Third Place last week. The buyer was so excited to meet him.” Then the rep emails everyone else on the sales force and says, “Look how hard this author is working.” It’s amazing how effective an engaged author is. But if the author is like, “Why aren’t my books in Third Place?” it accomplishes nothing.

We all know that there are less than great agents out there. How are writers supposed to avoid ending up with one of them? Put yourself in their shoes.
CHINSKI: I think they need to do a lot of research, for one thing, even before they get an agent. It amazes me how many times we get query letters from agents who clearly haven’t looked at our catalog. I think they need to ask a lot of questions of whatever agent they’re thinking about signing up with and make sure the agent knows who they’re submitting to and why and so on.

But what if the author doesn’t know any of that stuff?
GARGAGLIANO: The author should know. It’s their business.
CHINSKI: So much information is available online. There’s no excuse now to not know what a house is doing and even what individual editors are doing.
GARGAGLIANO: Every time you read a book, the editor’s name is in the acknowledgments. It’s very simple.
NASH: The fact that agents don’t charge money to read is so widely an established fact online that it’s mind-boggling that you still get submissions from agents who are obviously functioning that way. The agenting equivalent of chop-shops.

I mean more the difference between a B+ agent and an A+ agent.
GARGAGLIANO: I think that goes back to what we were talking about with the author’s relationship to their editor. It’s a personal connection. You want someone who understands your work and is articulate about it and has the same vision for it and can talk to you about your whole career and not just the thing that’s in front of them. And then that conversation extends to the editor and the editor’s conversation extends to the house.
NASH: With regard to the so-called “A+” and “B+” agents, when I’ve seen authors switch agents to get somebody more high-powered it pretty much has always failed. So if that’s what meant by the difference between a B+ agent and an A+ agent, there is no difference. If they met the criteria that Alexis just articulated, then the odds are that they’re the right agent for you. I mean, there’s not a whole lot of variance in the advances I pay—there’s not a lot of variance in what I can accomplish and not accomplish. Maybe there is with you guys. I’ve always had this theory—I could be wrong—that who the agent is might make a 20 percent difference in the advance an editor is going to offer. But it’s not going to make an order-of-magnitude difference. Probably. It’s not going to be the difference between ten thousand and a hundred thousand, let’s say.
GARGAGLIANO: I think that’s true 90 percent of the time. I think there are a very select group of agents who people just pay attention to before they even know what the book is. And that sets expectations.

We may as well name them.
NASH: Nicole Aragi, presumably.
GARGAGLIANO: Tina Bennett. Lynn Nesbit. Jennifer Rudolph Walsh. Suzanne Gluck.
CHINSKI: Eric Simonoff. I mean, I know from friends at other houses that when a manuscript comes in from certain agents, they start circulating it before they even read it because they presume it’s going to go really quickly and for a lot of money. And that’s not true with other agents. It just changes the game entirely. I think an author has to understand what they want. They have to do some soul searching, for lack of a better phrase, and figure out if it’s just the money they need or if they need something else. And it’s hard to hold that against someone. I know that editors always bitch about having to pay too much, and obviously it can have big consequences in a house—if a book doesn’t earn out and so on—but you can’t really hold that against the author. We never know exactly what their circumstances are. Maybe they have five children who they need to send to college. But they need to figure out what their priorities are. I do think we’ve often stumbled up against this thing where, in the same way that people think advertising equals love, they think that the advance equals love. And that’s just not always true. But people assume that the more you pay, the more you love a book—that if you offer fifty thousand dollars more than another house, then you love it more and will be more devoted to it—and that’s not necessarily the case. I think a good agent will explain to the author what all the different variables are, and specifically within the context of what the author needs, whether it’s financial or their career more generally, and that is the ideal way to make the decision.

How do you guys feel about auctions?
CHINSKI: We try to avoid them if we can.
BOUDREAUX: I don’t mind an auction as much as I hate a best-bids [auction]. And I don’t mind a best-bids as much as I hate a best-bids and then the top three get to do it again. What the hell? Everybody does that now. It’s insane to me. And the other thing is, does everybody have to talk to the author now, or meet the author, before you get to make an offer? What happened to the arranged marriage? “Eric likes me, Eric likes you, how ’bout we do a book together.” I mean—
CHINSKI: Have you gotten the one where you don’t get to talk to the author unless you promise to make an offer in advance?
GARGAGLIANO: Oh, that’s horrible.
BOUDREAUX: That happened recently. You weren’t allowed to talk to the author unless you’d ponied up however many six figures.
CHINSKI: There’s an admission price to even talk to the author. That drives me crazy. At FSG, we try to avoid auctions. We decide what we think a book is worth, make the offer, and the author either decides to come or not come, and we bow out if it doesn’t happen.
NASH: I mean, any economist will tell you that the winner of an auction has overpaid. In a lot of worlds, outside the publishing one, certain auctions get structured so that the second highest bidder wins. Because the presumption is that the overbidder has overpaid in such a way that it could imperil the business.
BOUDREAUX: I love that! Second place wins—let’s hear it for all the B-students!
CHINSKI: All you A-students are crazy.

I hear what you’re saying, Richard, but what about with books like Everything Is Illuminated or Edgar Sawtelle? You’re not the loser if you won those auctions.
NASH: But I mean in aggregate. Any of these things are statistical, so there are always outliers.
CHINSKI: Actually, I came in second on Everything Is Illuminated.
BOUDREAUX: Were you the underbidder?
CHINSKI: I was, actually.

Apparently I was wrong.
GARGAGLIANO: To be fair, there is a benefit to an auction, which is that, at least in my position, the whole house has to pay attention to the book. You end up getting more people reading it and talking about it, and that creates a certain excitement that isn’t to be negated entirely. As long as you don’t overpay too much, within that excitement, I think it can benefit the book.
CHINSKI: But what about the problem—this is rare, but we’ve all seen it happen—where the money becomes the story behind the book. That gives me a queasy feeling. Even if it doesn’t happen in a negative way, which we’ve obviously seen happen. But if that’s the driving momentum that gets a book attention? I guess, on one level, great. We’ll take what we can get. But on another level it just makes me queasy.
GARGAGLIANO: There’s a huge difference between an auction that ends at two hundred thousand and an auction that ends at a million. There’s a huge spectrum there. But if you’re in an auction with five different houses, your publishers are going to pay attention. Because everybody else is paying attention.

 

Do you guys think you feel the money you’re spending in the same way that maybe Richard does?
BOUDREAUX: I don’t know if you sweat the difference between 150 [$150,000] and 175 [$175,000]. But you definitely…One [$100,000] and five [$500,000] are different. And five [$500,000] and three million are different. I’ll tell you what’s easier: three million. Because then everybody did have to get on board. You are not out there on your own saying, “I believe!” But those middle, lot-of-money numbers when maybe nobody else read the whole thing and somebody is letting you do it? You do feel responsible for that in a “Boy do I need to make sure I don’t make a single misstep the whole time. The manuscript has to be ready early. I’ve got to have blurbs early. We’ve got to get the cover right. I’ve got to write those hand-written notes to people.” You feel the need to justify it. But at the same time, you don’t have to lose sleep every night because you won the auction by going up ten or fifteen thousand dollars. I think auctions can be not horrible when you agree on the number beforehand. What I hate is feeling like the ego contest has begun and somebody thinks so-and-so across town has it and you’re trying to guess who it is—or somebody inside the house, when there’s a house bid situation. The bullshit competition drives me up the wall. Being in an auction and saying we think it’s worth three hundred or we think it’s worth eight hundred—I don’t sweat that if we’re making a decision beforehand. It’s when you get into the middle of it and suddenly the book that you thought was a great two hundred thousand dollar book…You’re paying four [$400,000]? Just because there are still four people in it? I mean, when an agent calls and says they have interest, that’s fine and dandy. But it’s not going to change my mind about whether I liked the book or not, and I don’t want the publisher deciding because three other houses are in and “We should get in on that, too.” So if you can make these decisions before the craziness starts, it’s fine. It’s when the craziness begins—
CHINSKI: The feeding frenzy.

But it seems like that’s how it works now. You’re getting that email from the agent right away.
GARGAGLIANO: Noooo.
CHINSKI: But don’t you feel like you get that more and more?
GARGAGLIANO: I don’t feel like it changes my mind, though.
CHINSKI: No, I just mean more as a strategy to get people to pay attention.
BOUDREAUX: I feel like, when you get a submission, you know that it’s so easy to send that everybody on earth has it already. And it’s twenty a day and there they are on your Sony Reader and the attention paid to things has diminished just by the ease with which everything gets slotted in and slotted out. And then the agent’s like, “I’ve got interest! I’ve got interest!” Well, “I’ve got a ‘No!'” I can email fast, too! [Laughter.] Unfortunately, that’s how it ends up working sometimes. “You’ve got to get back to me quickly!” “Okay, well I guess I won’t be deliberating over this very long. I’ve read ten pages and we can be done, then.” If everybody just wants to speed it up that much.
CHINSKI: But I’ve heard so many agents say that it’s becoming more and more difficult to sell a literary first novel that it almost seems like this is compensation for that. There’s so much resistance now—everybody’s trying to find a reason why they shouldn’t buy something because it is so difficult. It seems like we get more emails now that say “There’s a lot of interest” just to kind of built up that intensity from their side.
NASH: What I get to do in those situations is say, “Congratulations. I’m thrilled for the author. Next time.” I just can’t play at that level. That makes my life a lot easier. It’s a much less complicated thing than what you guys have to go through in terms of evaluating the difference between two hundred [$200,000] and four hundred [$400,000]. That’s one thing I don’t ever have to worry about. But I really learned a lot from what you were saying about how when the money gets really big, you aren’t accountable anymore. Not that you aren’t accountable—but there’s a lot of shared responsibility and the buck isn’t stopping entirely with you. Whereas there’s an in-between spot where it’s large enough that you’re exposed but not so large that anybody else is going to be wearing the flak jacket with you.
BOUDREAUX: The first book I ever preempted, I hadn’t finished reading it. It had come in to another editor who gave it to me. So I was starting it late and I hadn’t finished it and I went in to tell the publisher, “We’ve heard that somebody else is going to preempt.” The publisher said, “Okay, go offer” several hundred thousand dollars. “Okay!” So I did, and we got it—what do you know?—and the next day the publisher asked, “So what happens at the end?” I still hadn’t finished it! I was like, “They all…leave…and go home.” I didn’t know what happened! [Laughter.] That was kind of scary, and I did feel like “This one is all on me”—because not only had nobody else read the thing, but I wasn’t even certain it would hold up. As I was editing it I was like, “I hope that’s what happens at the end….” Otherwise the author’s going to be like, “Really? Why would you suggest that at the end?” I’d have to be like, “I just think it’s important that everything works out that way.”

When you look at the industry, what are the biggest problems we face right now?
CHINSKI: I think they’re all so obvious. Returns. Blogs.
GARGAGLIANO: And just finding readers.
CHINSKI: The end of cultural authority. That’s something we talk about a lot at FSG. Reviews don’t have the same impact that they used to. The one thing that really horrifies me and that seems to have happened within the last few years is that you can get a first novel on the cover of the New York Times Book Review, a long review in The New Yorker, a big profile somewhere, and it still doesn’t translate into sales. Whereas six years ago, or some mythical time not that long ago, that was the battle—to get all that attention—and if you got it, you didn’t necessarily have a best-seller, but you knew that you would cross a certain threshold. Whereas now you can get all of that and still not see the sales. I think that phenomenon is about the loss of cultural authority. There’s just so much information out there now that people don’t know who to listen to, except their friends, to figure out what to read. And that’s the question we wrestle with the most. I think publishers have to communicate more directly with readers—that’s the big barrier we’re all trying to figure out. How much to use our websites to sell directly and talk to our readers directly?

So what are you doing to try to do that? What are you experimenting with?
CHINSKI: I can think of one thing. I mean, it’s a small thing, but we recently started the FSG Reading Series uptown at the Russian Samovar. It’s amazing. It’s actually turned into a kind of scene. The New York Observer and the New Yorker have written about it. And I mean “scene” in a good way. In all the ways that we were talking about before, what makes us most happy is when a book forges a community around itself. It’s a small thing, but now if we can somehow bring that online, or expand it in some way, it will be a way for FSG as a name to mean something, which will mean that we have another way to bring our writers to readers. The names of publishers, notoriously, are not like “Sony” or other companies where the name means a whole lot to readers. It may mean something to reviewers or booksellers, but I think we all need to figure out ways to make our names mean something. That’s another way to establish authority so that people become interested in the individual books. That’s a big challenge, and there’s no easy solution to it.

What else are you guys trying to do, beyond the hand-written notes and the bigmouth mailings? What are you lying awake at night thinking about doing for this novel you’re publishing that doesn’t seem to be going anywhere?
BOUDREAUX: I pray that the people in our new media department who are supposed to be figuring out this problem are staying up late at night. That’s what I think about as I roll around at night. And they are always coming up with things that I hope will work.
CHINSKI: And now we have this amplification system, supposedly—the Internet—which is supposed to amplify our ability to create word-of-mouth. But I don’t think anybody’s quite figured out exactly how to do that—or at least how to make it translate directly into sales. We all can see, in certain cases, our books being talked about a lot online. But what does that mean in terms of sales?
NASH: In our case, we’ve never really relied much on cultural authority, although we’ve certainly used it here and there. But for the most part, to the extent that we’ve been successful, it’s been through the things that you’re asking about. I check our Web metrics several times a week, whether it’s Quantcast, Alexa, or Compete. These are places for measuring traffic. I try to figure out what the traffic is and what the demographics are. So I’m doing a lot of stuff that would probably make you want to shoot yourself.
BOUDREAUX: I’m glad you’re doing it, though, so I can read about it in this article. Then I can call somebody and say, “You should do that! That’s brilliant!”
NASH: One of your new media people, Amy Baker, was briefly involved with Soft Skull back in the day. She played on our street hockey team that was known as the Soft Skull Sandernistas, which was named after my predecessor. [Laughter.] But seriously, as Eric says, the Internet is amplified word-of-mouth. The things that are happening online are amplifying a process that’s already in place. I mean, the genius of Oprah has never been her ratings. Her ratings aren’t that spectacular compared to a lot of other shows. It’s that Oprah connects to her audience in an intimate way, as if she were one of eight women who have lunch together every Tuesday. And that intensity of relationship—plus the fact that it is able to occur on a reasonably broad scale—is her genius. So what you do is go looking around the world for people with a certain level of trust. Authority, in a certain sense, has been partially replaced by trust. Part of what you can call “trust” today is the remnants of authority. People “trust” the New York Times.
CHINSKI: And people trust their friends.
NASH: Exactly. People trust Liesl Schillinger. People trust Ed Champion. Or they hate them. And you’re just trying to get your stuff to people who are trusted. In my case that involves doing it myself, in a lot of cases.
GARGAGLIANO: This is one of the things that I get most frustrated by, partly because I didn’t care about book reviews when I wasn’t in publishing. I would never read the New York Times Book Review. I just wanted to walk into a bookstore and find something. But people don’t do that anymore. People aren’t interested in the community of books. So it’s finding the niche markets. I just published a book called The Wettest County in the World. It’s a novel about the author’s grandfather and granduncles, who ran a bootlegging ring during Prohibition. It’s amazing. And we’ve gotten IndieBound, we’ve gotten lots of things for it, and it’s gotten amazing reviews. But the sales aren’t going to happen on that alone. So I’ve been mailing it to bloggers who have beer blogs and whiskey blogs, and bourbon drinkers, and distilleries. I’m trying to find the niche market. I think that’s the way things are going. I think that kind of thinking is much more exciting—you’re more likely to find the readers who are interested—but publishers aren’t set up to find niche markets for every single book.
BOUDREAUX: That’s the thing. Do you do the whiskey mailing and then the beer mailing and this mailing and that mailing? It seems like there aren’t enough hours in the day and there isn’t enough staff—the Amy Bakers of the world—to do that.
NASH: That’s where the writer needs to come into it. And interns. That’s one of the ways in which interns can be so valuable. That’s great work for them to do—a Technorati blog search on whatever. It’s not hugely difficult, and it’s kind of interesting.
GARGAGLIANO: It can also be useful for books down the line.
CHINSKI: That raises an interesting thing for writers to consider. I mean, how many times have we all heard that a certain book is going to appeal to this audience, that audience, and everybody else in the world? You just know that it’s not true. But if you can go really deep into one community, you might sell ten thousand copies of a first novel, which most first novels never sell—at least the ones that are supposedly going to appeal to everyone. I don’t think novelists should spend too much time worrying about who their audience is, but it’s something to consider. I just think that line—”This book is going to appeal to everybody because it’s about love or family or whatever”—doesn’t work. I think the author and the publisher need to think more specifically. If you could sell one book to everybody on two city blocks in New York, you’d probably be selling more copies of that book than we do of the ones we just send out into the world and hope are going to sell magically. But how do you reach everybody on those two city blocks in New York and get them to buy the book? That’s the task, metaphorically, that so many of us are facing: how to get to them and make them believe us. Because at the end of the day we’re companies, and all of those people online who are talking to each other aren’t necessarily going to believe that we have their best interests at heart. They’ll think we’re advertising to them through other means. So we have to establish a certain amount of trust with readers, not just as companies but as people who also love books in the same way they do. Again, it’s a small thing, but the idea behind the Samovar reading series—not that it’s a totally new idea—is that the editors at FSG love books, and you guys love books, so let’s get together. And it’s not just about trying to sell our books to you.
NASH: One of the things that that accomplishes that may not be obvious from the get-go is transparency. You’re putting yourself out in the world and exposing yourself in a way—making yourself vulnerable. I have never understood why the staffs of publishing houses are invisible to readers, who are ultimately the people who pay our salaries. I mean, my wife is a corporate lawyer, and her photo and bio are on her firm’s website. Book publishers just refuse to allow their staff visibility to the world. If Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton and Whatever are willing to allow all the partners’ and associates’ photographs and bios to be seen by the world, what about publishing is so important that we can’t be allowed to be seen? I know that part of it is that we don’t want authors bugging us too much. But I think that’s part of what the Samovar reading series accomplishes: a certain willingness to participate.

Just in the space of your careers so far, what has been the most destructive new thing that’s come about in the industry?
NASH: It’s technology. It’s been both constructive and destructive at the same time.
CHINSKI: So do you think e-books have been both?
NASH: E-books are one of the last ways in which technology is playing itself out. One of the first ways was desktop publishing. Another way that’s been more incremental is the ability of digital printing to be commensurate with offset printing and for various machines to flatten the economies of scale. But, yeah, the ability to satisfactorily download a book digitally is turning out to be one of the last things that technology is accomplishing. I guess the other thing is just the capacity of e-mail and the Web—the social Web, in particular—to flatten communication. And it’s all simultaneously destructive and constructive. It’s destroying cultural authority but it’s enhancing one’s ability to cost-effectively reach individuals who might have other kinds of cultural authority. It’s lowering barriers to entry, which is constructive because new presses can come along. BookScan is based on technology and has constructive and destructive components. The kind of supply-chain inventory management that Baker & Taylor and Ingram are doing, where they can now say to us, “We only need two months’ worth of inventory; we don’t need four months of inventory,” is destructive because my working capital needs go up by 20 percent on that one phenomenon alone, but it’s good in that I can actually see Ingram’s demand building and respond to it. If I see big Ingram demand in the month before I publish something, I can say to myself, “I’m going to print advance orders plus two thousand as opposed to advance orders plus five hundred.” So it’s fucking me and helping me at the same time.
CHINSKI: I agree with Richard. Obviously a lot of things are changing right now, and some of them make things a lot more difficult, but they also—and I don’t mean to sound like a Pollyanna—offer some opportunities. I’m always really wary of the sky-is-falling thing, this idea that we’re at the end right now.
GARGAGLIANO: We’re just at a place where we have to reinvent ourselves, and we haven’t figured out how to do that yet. People have started reading in this other way that I don’t understand because I don’t read that way. But it’s our job to figure out how they’re reading, and then to figure out how to deliver something they want to read.
CHINSKI: Are you reading on a Sony Reader?
GARGAGLIANO: Yes, and I love it. It’s the best thing ever.
CHINSKI: I’m still adjusting to it. We just got them in the last few weeks. On one hand it’s great. On the other hand, I still want to write in the margins and it’s hard to go back and forth and figure out where you are in a manuscript. I actually physically find myself reaching to turn the page.
GARGAGLIANO: I do that all the time. It’s really disturbing!
CHINSKI: Your brain gets tricked into thinking you’re actually reading a page. But on the other hand, as I was saying, it’s great, and we’re seeing sales of books…. I mean, I saw something recently about the Kindle. People who have a Kindle are actually buying more books. So on one hand, it scares the shit out of me that people are reading on Kindles and Sony Readers. But on the other hand—
GARGAGLIANO: Why?
CHINSKI: For no reason other than that it’s different.
GARGAGLIANO: I think it’s so exciting.
CHINSKI: That’s what I mean. It’s also really exciting. It will bring a lot more people into reading. And this younger generation is so used to reading online that it doesn’t really matter. It doesn’t mean the death of literature.
BOUDREAUX: I was amazed at how quickly we all got used to the Sony Reader. It’s still a little different from an actual book. But when I first got into publishing I remember reading a manuscript, instead of a finished book, and feeling like it seemed to lack a certain presentational authority. It took me a minute to take a manuscript seriously. It will be the same way with the Sony Reader. But, my God, we’ve all adapted in a period of months? Imagine the twenty-year-olds who are reading everything online all the time and switching back and forth among seven screens that are open all the time. The notion of not reading that way must seem odd to them.
GARGAGLIANO: I think that in several years the book object is going to be more beautiful and more precious.
BOUDREAUX: It’s going to be like vinyl records.
GARGAGLIANO: Exactly.

page_5: 

I feel the same way—that these changes are going to happen. But the thing I don’t understand is why hardcover books still exist.
GARGAGLIANO: I don’t understand it.
NASH: It’s because of the library market.
GARGAGLIANO: I published a book this fall that we crashed into the schedule because it was shortlisted for the Booker. We did a hardcover just for the libraries and a trade paperback for everybody else.
NASH: I mean, you’re right. I was being semi-glib but not entirely glib. The question is, “Why will the print book survive?”

No, I’m literally talking about the hardcover book. Right now, at this moment, why does it exist? I’m looking at a hardcover and a paperback side by side and asking what the consumer is getting for almost twice as much money. Two pieces of cardboard?
CHINSKI: Well, we get two shots to publish the book.

But do we really, with the way the accounts are ordering, or do we just say that?
CHINSKI: But there’s still that idea. Also, there’s still the hangover of thinking that critics won’t pay attention to a paperback in the same way. I know that’s not as true as it used to be, but—
NASH: The existence of the hardcover has to do with history. It has to do with certain structures that are in place that haven’t been replaced—structures varying from the library market to perceptions about reviewers to perceptions about quality in the mind of the customer. It also has to do with customers wanting certain books at whatever price. They don’t care whether it’s fifteen dollars or twenty-five dollars—they just want it because of who it’s written by. But that’s not going to last.
CHINSKI: But here’s an interesting case: Bolaño’s 2666. We did the hardcover and a three-volume paperback edition in a slipcase. They’re priced the same. Which do you think would be selling more? I guess because they’re priced the same it’s not quite a fair question, but people do seem to be gravitation toward the hardcover just because it’s the more conventional format. The paperback is selling well too, but the hardcover seems to have some kind of recognition factor. So I don’t think it’s just publishers sticking their heads in the sand. It’s also readers still thinking that that’s the way they discover new books.

Even when they cost ten dollars more for no apparent value?
GARGAGLIANO: I wonder that too. We don’t really do very much—
NASH: Value is created in the mind. A classic thing that happens in American retail capitalism is that people will buy the more expensive thing. It’s been proven over and over again. If you’re at Barneys and there’s an eighty-dollar lampshade and a fifty-dollar lampshade, you buy the eighty-dollar lampshade because you think it’s worth more. That is endemic in American retail capitalism. But I think the distressing thing in publishing is that we’re not making more beautiful objects. I think that one of the things that electronic publishing will allow us to do is free the print object of its need to have a given exact unit cost that is our mass-market way of delivering the product at a given price. The download will allow us to generate volume, and then we can create this gorgeous, elaborate fetish object for which we can charge gloriously outrageous sums of money.

But who’s going to be selling them if that happens? Look at what happened to the music business.
NASH: Precisely. Look at the Radiohead model. Radiohead has already done it. Eighty bucks for the limited edition but only ninety-nine cents for the download. That’s the model. It’s just a question of “How do we get there in a way that doesn’t involve complete chaos?” But it seems like that’s where we’re going. And I think it will be customer-driven—we’ll go there as fast as the customers will be willing to go there.

What are you guys seeing in the industry that you find encouraging?
NASH: Fan fiction.

Which is?
NASH: People so in love with a given story and set of characters, or a given world, that they are doing their own version of it. I just think that’s spectacular. Not necessarily as writing, but as a cultural phenomenon.

Anybody else? Come on, there’s got to be something that’s encouraging.
GARGAGLIANO: This is not a good time to ask that question. [Laughter.]
CHINSKI: It’s like what Richard was saying—some of these things that are scary are also encouraging. The Kindle and the Sony Reader are bringing people to books who might not have come to them otherwise. I mean, that’s something.
NASH: Look at the thing Eric said about people who own a Kindle buying more books than they did before they had a Kindle.
CHINSKI: That’s pretty encouraging.
BOUDREAUX: And beyond that, I had it in my head that Kindles and Sony Readers would exist in the way audio books did—that it wouldn’t be exactly the same. There would be certain kinds of books that really lent themselves to that format in the same way it was for audio books where you had businessmen driving on business trips. You couldn’t get a novel published by your own audio publisher—they weren’t interested—but a certain kind of practical nonfiction flew off the shelves. But Edgar Sawtelle has been a huge seller on the Kindle, which is not at all the kind of book I would have thought would be selling well in that format. It’s six hundred pages long—there’s a good reason to put it on a Sony Reader instead of reading a hardcover—but I just wasn’t expecting the number of downloads to be such a close ratio to what’s selling in a bookstore. I thought we’d have to figure out what categories worked, and once again fiction would be the category that would be left out as everybody read self-help books or Freakonomics on their Kindle. And I find it encouraging that people are downloading this big fat debut novel.

Anything else?
NASH: The use of social media to talk about books: Goodreads, LibraryThing, Shelfari. Reading books is a solitary activity, but books are also the richest kind of social glue, and the profusion of ways to be social with one another will be tremendously advantageous to books. The commonality that having read the same book introduces between two people is so much richer and more dynamic than the commonality of having watched the same TV show, for example.

It seems like agents lament the consolidation of the industry because it gives them less options. How do you guys feel about it?
BOUDREAUX: It doesn’t seem to lessen their options when they submit to every single imprint in the house and then you’re on the hot-button contest to see who reads it first.
NASH: I think it’s kind of pointless to think about it. As individuals, there’s sweet fuck-all we can do about it. With everything else we’ve talked about, human beings at our level can affect things. We can affect the outcome of a given book. We just cannot affect the outcome of a corporate merger.
BOUDREAUX: And for a group of people who’ve only been doing this for a decade, in which this has always been the case and it was already the death knell of publishing back when we were first getting into it and everybody lamented consolidation—
CHINSKI: When I saw The Last Days of Disco, it was heartbreaking. [Laughter.] That’s when I realized what we’ve lost. As you were saying, it’s hard to know because it’s the world we live in. It seems like even within the force of consolidation, there are so many imprints blossoming within these places. I don’t quite understand what the corporate thinking is behind that. But that’s just because I’m not making the decisions, I’m sure.
BOUDREAUX: You’ve also got a group of people here who have ended up at certain kinds of imprints within those places. So we’ve all clearly struggled, those of us who are in the corporate world, to find a place that’s least like a corporate structure. I mean, that’s the great thing about Ecco. When Dan Halpern sold it to HarperCollins he had an agreement with Jane Friedman that basically said, “But we will never have to act like we are a part of corporate publishing. We will keep doing it exactly how we’ve been doing it.” So you get to pretend you’re this little thing attached to this big thing, which is how I imagine it being at Scribner and FSG. You get to have the benefits of the deep pockets, and somebody’s figuring out the new media thing and revamping this site and that site, and you have the economies of scale of getting your shipping done or whatever, and you still get to sit there and work on your books. So we’ve also self-selected for a certain kind of publishing within corporate publishing.

And you really did, because you left Random House without having new a job lined up.
BOUDREAUX: I did. I thought I’d go see if anybody wanted me to come do fiction. Thank God Dan Halpern was out there. God bless him. Because it’s true: Who doesn’t want to do the small list inside the big house, which is just a different kind of experience? I mean, it seems the best way to make that deal with the devil. As you say, Richard, the conglomeration isn’t going to go away.
CHINSKI: It doesn’t actually mean that writers have less choice, I don’t think. There are so many imprints within these companies. It’s become an easy straw man to point the finger at. “Oh, these big corporate publishers that don’t understand what books are.” There are still a lot of editors working at imprints within these big corporations who care about books in the same way that somebody working at Scribner when it was independent cared about books. I think it’s really easy, because there are so many frustrations that we all have as writers and editors and agents, to just blame it on some Corporate culture with a capital C. As Richard said, there are a lot of things that we can’t control but there are also a lot of things that we can try to control, at least at a certain level. And that probably hasn’t changed that much from fifty years ago.
BOUDREAUX: And certainly, the competition in-house is every bit as fierce as the competition out of house, when you and so-and-so from Simon & Schuster both have the book and there’s a house bid.
GARGAGLIANO: The agent gets the same benefit of the imprints within the house riling each other up and competing against one another to put on the best show for the author, and the author gets the benefit of choosing between all of these different imprints. I don’t think, for the author, it’s a major difference. But I wasn’t around when it wasn’t like that.
NASH: I suspect that to the extent that consolidation has created problems in the industry, the problems are farther downstream than acquisitions. Retail consolidation is the real issue.

Speak to that. How do you feel about so much power being concentrated on Fifth Avenue and in Ann Arbor and Seattle?
NASH: It was all going to happen anyway. The book business was just later to the party, quite frankly, than the clothing business or the cereal business. The real estate was all the same. One of the reasons why we’ve become really dependent on social media is that it’s a kind of hand-selling at a time when the 1,000 people who used to be able to hand-sell are now down to 150. And the capacity of the corporate retailers to hand-sell is either purchased or anecdotal. When I say anecdotal I mean it hasn’t completely vanished. I can tell that the B&N in Union Square is putting Soft Skull books on the countertop that weren’t paid to be put there. So there is anecdotal hand-selling going on. But you have a situation where the capacity of the retailer to sell a given book to a given, recognized individual has virtually disappeared—down to percentage points. It will work with a few titles—I’m sure you guys have all published books that have been made by independent retailers. But their ability to be a part of the social network of the community of books is gone and we have to find some other means of generating that word-of-mouth. Retailers just exist to shelve the books and make them visible in a given community. They’re not selling them to the community.
CHINSKI: But don’t you think they understand the crisis they’re in, to a certain degree, too? That’s why Barnes & Noble has B&N Recommends now, and Starbucks is getting involved, and everybody’s trying to—
NASH: Yeah, you’re right. I think they realize what they have wrought. Well, they do but they don’t. Half the time they’re trying to sell on price—they’re doing inventory churn—and then the other half of the time they’re trying to go intimate. I think they’re kind of schizophrenic about it. I think that’s part of the problem. I mean, a lot of the independents that went out of business deserved to go out of business. They weren’t actually trying very hard to hand-sell. They were just taking the finite number of books that publishers could then publish and saying, “Okay, you pick from these five hundred books.” But the great ones are the ones that we have with us right now—St. Mark’s and Prairie Lights and the rest. They’re doing a great job of being retailers. But you’re exactly right about the chains. At times they are definitely trying to find that community-oriented approach.
CHINSKI: The way they’ll host book clubs in the stores, for example. In the same way that people like to blame the corporate publishers, it’s really easy to point your finger at the chains. I’m not saying they don’t present a certain set of problems. But it’s interesting that, in a way, they’re wrestling with the same kind of issues that we’re wrestling with in trying to find a way to interact more directly with their customers. It’s a kind of funny crisis all around.

At the end of the day, what makes it all worthwhile?
CHINSKI: Pizza.
NASH: This roundtable.
BOUDREAUX: The glamour of this!
CHINSKI: Going home and editing for four hours.

That’s funny. That was actually going to be my next question, but I was going to do it in the anonymous section at the end so you wouldn’t have to lie about it. Seriously, though, what makes it worthwhile for you?
BOUDREAUX: Books mean enormous things to people. They are things that save people’s lives, at times.
NASH: Even the lives of children!
BOUDREAUX: That’s right! The lives of children! I don’t think any children have ever lost their lives because of something an editor did, but children have most definitely had their lives improved by something that a writer, and an editor, put out there.
CHINSKI: We’re doing it for the kids!
BOUDREAUX: Why don’t we make that, “We’re doing it for our children, and our children’s children.”

EDITORS ANONYMOUS
Later, after the pizza was gone and even the most constitutionally strong among us were getting a little punchy—and understandably so—the panel agreed to speak anonymously on a range of topics that would be awkward to discuss for attribution. As usual, a number of verbal tics have been altered in order to preserve anonymity.

Does it bother you that so much of your work has to be done on nights and weekends?
Sure, every once in a while it catches up with you. But you can’t concentrate in the office so it’s just the way it is. But I’d be lying if I didn’t say that sometimes you don’t feel resentful. I always have that in the summer because I find that authors all deliver at the beginning of the summer because they want to go on their summer vacations.

Yeah, it’s always just before Christmas, just before New Year’s, just before the Fourth of July. The book’s might be three years late but they go and deliver it on July 3rd.

Publishers have to let you have some time out of the office. And I feel like that is increasingly looked on as this sort of three-martini-lunch thing—that the editor needs the occasional Tuesday to edit at home. You can power through an awful lot, but at a certain point there are too many manuscripts stacked up, and it’s been going on for so many years, that you’ve got to be given some time to do it that isn’t just every Saturday of your life.

Such a big part of the job is to pay attention to what the rest of the world is doing and what’s being written everywhere else and what other people are interested in and what you yourself are interested in—because you take all of those obsessions and you find the books that you’re passionate about on all of those topics—but I don’t really have time to do that.

That’s my biggest frustration: not having enough time to read published books.

And it’s a great disservice to your own job not to ever be able to read anything for pleasure—and not to ever be able to read the other books your company is publishing—because you’ve got x number of submissions to read and your own new authors’ backlists to read and what your house is doing that’s working because you just need to understand what that thing is that so-and-so just published. About eight rungs down you get to read something just because it sounds good—something that you’re not reading to learn something about your job.

What do agents do that drives you crazy?
Ask for ads.

Submit the next book when you haven’t even published the first book and you don’t even know how many you’re printing.

Assume that just because one book did really well you have to pay for your previous success.

And with fiction, more and more, the success of one novel does not mean that the next novel is going to sell at the same level. And I don’t think that a lot of agents have caught up with that fact.

“Have you read it yet? Have you read it yet?” I want to be like, “Have you prepared for your launch meeting yet? Have you written your tip sheets yet?” They don’t realize that you may have something from the four other big agents. I’m being flip about it, but they do tend to forget that. Two days later it’s “Have you read it?” “No, I’m actually editing your author who’s under contract.”

There’s also a tendency to misinterpret an early read for actual depth of publishing program behind that early read. Sure, being the first editor to get back to them on a novel may well mean a particular enthusiasm and a good match, but it also may not. So to require that everybody be in on day two, set up meetings on day three, and be ready to do the auction on day four? Is that all the thought that you want us to put into it?

And using the weekends and holidays as a tactic. I hate the Friday e-mail saying, “Just in time for you to enjoy this weekend…” Or over Labor Day weekend! It’s like the new destination wedding. You know, in the same way that you hate your friends who picked the three-day weekend to get married on so you can all go to Hawaii. I’m like, “Really? You had to save this for Labor Day weekend? I had all summer when I didn’t have shit to read.”

What are the biggest mistakes that writers can make in dealing with their editor or agent?
I think the bigger problem is dealing with their publicist. You have to be very nice to your publicist. You should send them flowers.

I had an author who used to leave messages at four in the morning saying that she didn’t want us to publish her book anymore. She wanted us to take them off the shelves! That was fun.

Despite the fact that there is a real personal connection, authors should realize that we’re not their therapists, we’re not their best friends in the world, etcetera. I can fix your book but I can’t fix your whole life.

What about when an author calls because there aren’t enough hangers in his hotel closet? [Laughter.] That’s happened!

Tell me about a few up-and-coming agents who you feel are great for fiction or memoir.
I think Jim Rutman at Sterling Lord is really smart. He’s both a no bullshit guy and a genuinely nice guy. That may sound naïve, but it really does matter.

I think Maria Massie is fabulous. If I could publish the writers of only one agent, it would be Maria.

Julie Barer. I did a book with her and she went about getting blurbs like nobody I’ve ever seen. She brought them to me, every day, like a cat bringing me a bird. Eight in a row. I’ve never had an agent who went to bat that much and called in that many favors. It was amazing.

There’s also Anna Stein, who’s wonderful. She’s got a very cosmopolitan worldview and she’s also got a taste for a certain kind of political nonfiction that is quite interesting. The first book I got from her was a left-wing case for free trade, which you don’t necessarily expect from Ira Silverberg’s former foreign rights person.

You know who else is good? Robert Guinsler. He’s really smart and really enthusiastic about his books. He has a lot of smart projects.

What kind of information will you withhold from your authors?
I never tell them when my bosses don’t love their book. Or when it’s been a battle to get them attention on the list.

I will hold back particularly bad feedback. If it’s a novel, not everybody is going to agree on it. I’ve never had such a tsunami of bad feedback that I thought they really needed to hear it.

Do you send them all of their bad reviews?

I leave that up to the author.

I’ve started telling debut authors, “A lot of writers who have been through this don’t want to see the bad reviews. Will you give me permission to not send you the bad reviews?”

When it comes to sales figures, I give them the information. I mean, I don’t go out of my way to do it if the news is not good. If it’s great news and I can say, “We did this and we did that and we did this,” I give it to them all the time. But I don’t go out of my way to say, “You’re holding steady. Nothing’s happening.”

What other editors or houses are you impressed with lately?
I think Penguin Press is doing a great job. You look at their list and there’s a consistency to it that is really amazing. I don’t know how the finances look. But just as books, they’re incredibly consistent.

I think Bob Miller and Jon Karp are doing a great job.

I’ve been impressed with a house called Two Dollar Radio. The reason I’m impressed is their own tagline: “They make more noise than a two-dollar radio.”

Jofie Ferrari-Adler is an editor at Grove/Atlantic.

Agents & Editors: A Q&A With Agent Molly Friedrich
Agents & Editors: A Q&A With Editor Chuck Adams
Agents & Editors: A Q&A With Editor Janet Silver
Agents & Editors: A Q&A With Four Young Literary Agents

The Art of Publicity: How Indie Publicists Work With Writers

by

Tess Taylor

March/April 2018
2.14.18
In Print and Online

This winter, as I resurfaced after a long sabbatical during which I was able to disconnect and work, head down and solitary, on new poems and essays, I found myself thinking about publicity. Maybe it was that, after a flurry of two books and two babies, and after extended time to focus on my writing, I finally had a chance to think holistically about my career. I’d never really thought about publicity strategically before. I’ve had good luck with two books of poems, including Work & Days (Red Hen Press), which magically appeared on the New York Times Best of 2016 list. But even so, my own attempts at publicizing my work have felt a bit haphazard at times—a last-minute scramble of hurried lists and harried galley mailings, carrying packages to the post office—often, it seems, with a baby strapped to my chest. If I’ve occasionally hit the mark, my process of getting work out in the world has mostly been a mixture of luck and happenstance. I wanted to learn to work smarter.

If you want to learn about publicity, talk to a publicist. I thought longingly of a dear novelist friend whose in-house publicist had crafted her a killer press kit, helped her line up freelance articles to dovetail with publication, and arranged a great deal of her national book tour. But not many authors are fortunate enough to work with an in-house publicist. I wondered what independent publicists might have to offer writers who don’t have access to that kind of institutional support and what advice they might give to writers who may not have the resources to hire them. As a book reviewer I deal with publicists all the time. I decided to contact a few indie publicists with a gift for putting writers on the map. I asked about what writers should be doing for themselves, what indie publicists do on behalf of their clients, and how they’d advise me to think about shaping the way I approach getting my own work into the world.

My first call is to Lauren Cerand, a highly sought-after independent publicity guru who exudes an easy bookish glamour. As we chat, Cerand tells me about her early training moving stories through online and traditional media. She had always wanted to be a change agent: She began her work in publicity shaping stories about the labor movement for the AFL-CIO, then the garment workers union. “I began in this really mission-driven sector,” she says. “I believed that the stories I was broadcasting could help change lives.” A few years later, she had a job publicizing programs at the 92nd Street Y in New York City when her then boyfriend published his first book. “The in-house team wasn’t doing that much with it, and I felt like it was going to fall flat, so I decided to leap in,” she says. She pitched the book to Jon Stewart cold, sending over information about the book by fax. To her great delight, the book ended up on The Daily Show before spending four weeks on the New York Times best-seller list. Cerand felt she was onto something, and apparently she was. Since striking out on her own in 2004, her clients have included poets Chris Abani and Eileen Myles and fiction writers Tayari Jones and Daniel Handler.

When I ask Cerand what she does for her clients, she demurs. “I actually want to be invisible,” she says. “I’d love for nobody to know that my clients have a publicist.” Instead, Cerand says she works with writers to refine their own goals for success. “What success really looks like to each of us is actually radically different from person to person. You have a big goal for your life as a writer. My role as a publicist is to help align you with that vision.”

I had naively imagined that publicity was something a publicist just did, a process that involved ticking off the boxes in a list of already established steps for success. Cerand immediately encourages me to think otherwise. “I always ask writers, ‘What do you want that you don’t have?’ And I ask my writers to name not only, say, prizes, but also the principles behind the recognition they want,” she says. “There’s an idea that everyone wants to be successful in the same way, but that’s not true. You might be a food writer who wants to change the way we talk about how we eat, or a poet whose dream is to have your poems on the subway.” Cerand leans into each specific vision, using it to drive a campaign. “What I aim for is a sense of ubiquity, an electric jolt of familiarity and intrigue that appears over and over through media, through experiences, through the way that the authors themselves express their art in the world.” Put simply, Cerand is after more than just book reviews: She’s hoping to create the conditions under which the artist’s practice becomes visible to a wider audience.

I’d also imagined, incorrectly, as it turns out, that a publicist is someone you might easily hire, but Cerand’s services don’t come easy—or cheap. Not only do her campaigns cost $7,000 a month for a minimum of a three months, but she also often begins plotting a course or taking on a client up to two years in advance of a book’s publication. In addition, Cerand takes on just four to six clients a year, working only with books she thinks she can do great justice to. “Everything I do has to be perfect,” she says. “I want to pick books that feel ready to be part of a wider conversation—whether that’s political, or intimate, or just revelatory—about the texture of the world.” She also wants to believe that an author is ready to use her services fully. “Sometimes people come to me when I think that they just need to make their own mailing lists,” she says. “I want to work with people who I know I can create new opportunities for—people who have taken their own journey as far as they can.”

I speak at length with Cerand about social media, about how burned out it can make me feel these days. Instead of a means for connecting, it has become another distracting workspace where everyone clamors to be seen. She encourages me to step back, and spend a day at an art museum or reading a book I love. “You want to think about how to break out of established channels. Social media can be a lonely place,” she says. “You might be wiser building really key human relationships, with editors and other writers and readers, things that are more solid and less ephemeral.”

After digesting my conversation with Cerand, I connect with Kima Jones, who, like Cerand, arrived at book publicity after traveling a roundabout path, starting her career as director of marketing for a drug rehab center in Beverly Hills. Although she’d been writing poems since she was a girl, she was hesistant to join the literary world. Having grown up as the oldest of eight children, she felt a need to be financially self-sufficient. “I grew up poor, and I didn’t want to be poor,” she says. “It did not seem reasonable to me to have a life in publishing. I didn’t feel that I could sustain myself as a poet.” Jones is an avid reader, however, and it irked her that significant books, especially those by black authors, were being overlooked. “They’d come into the store and then just drop out of view after maybe a week. There was no conversation,” she says. “I wanted black work to be taken seriously.” She started to realize that she could create the conditions for those conversations to be both ongoing and highly visible. A nascent dream took shape; Jones’s background in marketing and her love of literature came together when a friend, author Cole Lavalais, asked her to get the word out about her debut, Summer of the Cicadas, which was forthcoming from Willow Books. “The idea of doing publicity for books just clicked,” Jones says. Within months she’d begun to build a business, working eighteen-hour days out of her studio in the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles. Three years later, Jones and two associates work together as Jack Jones Literary Arts, representing four to six books every three months, no more than twenty-four books a year.

The mission of Jack Jones Literary Arts is to enlarge and transform the way the publishing industry represents women of color. Although Jones did work with Tyehimba Jess on his Pulitzer Prize–winning collection, Olio (Wave Books, 2016), 97 percent of her clients are women—a balance she prefers. “I’m aware that my practice looks not a little different but a lot different than the rest of the publishing industry,” she says. “Publishing is overwhelmingly white, and it can be really uncomfortable for emerging writers of color. Working with me takes that off the table. They know that I’m an ally.” Part of her role, Jones says, is a willingness to be a strong interlocutor for each of her clients. “You’re not going to be given a cover that makes you feel tokenized. You’re not going to do events that make you feel played,” she says. “We are going to work together toward new media and new models of representation.” Because Jones herself is relatively new to the business, she often takes on young or first-time authors. “The idea is that our careers are growing together,” she says. “When I worked on Rion Amilcar Scott’s Insurrections, we were simultaneously talking about book two because book one needed to set up those platforms.”

Jack Jones Literary Arts offers a variety of services, from a forty-five-minute consultation that costs $500 to packages for supplemental and primary publicity that start at $10,000. In addition, Jones works with literary nonprofits that serve marginalized communities, and she hosts an annual writers retreat for women of color.

I talk to Jones about gravitas, and public-intellectual status, and about what an author can do to achieve it. My conversation with Jones challenges me to think more deeply and more precisely about my own work and what I am trying to say with it. “In Create Dangerously, Edwidge Danticat talks about how artists create their bodies of work out of the mythologies and hauntings that follow them from their young lives,” she says. “When I’m thinking about a client’s campaign, I’m asking her, ‘What are your obsessions?’ Sometimes she’s not even aware.” Jones adds that this awareness needs to translate into a sense that the arc of a book or project will leap into the national conversation. She reads with questions ready: “Is there something provocative here? If I put my client in conversation with, say, Robin Coste Lewis, is my client going to be able to hold her own?” Jones tells me that before making an offering to the world, it is the job of writers to clarify and hone their own contribution to the wider conversation. She reminds me that the first step in breaking out is actually taking the time to turn inward and look within.

My final call is to Michael Taeckens, the kind, soft-spoken cofounder of the highly regarded Broadside: Expert Literary PR. Taeckens, who studied poetry with Jorie Graham and Robert Hass at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and spent twelve years doing publicity for Algonquin Books, then two years for Graywolf Press, started Broadside with Whitney Peeling and Kimberly Burns three years ago. He represents authors on an independent basis and also helps add steam to in-house campaigns. Taeckens, who is representing books by Ada Limón and Natasha Trethewey this spring and who recently represented Kevin Young for his work on Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News (Graywolf Press, 2017), sees his role as creating the conversation. Like Cerand and Jones, he is judicious about what he takes on. “I want to read the book and feel like I know how to sell it,” he says. “I need to feel that I am able to tell the story of the book with original and authentic passion.” He adds: “Creating buzz happens through hard work, but I’m not performing magic tricks. I’m sharing my enthusiasm and I’m building relationships between authors and gatekeepers and also, eventually, readers.” Taeckens’s work is powered by his own genuine excitement. “There’s something that happens when our conversations and passions sort of bubble up together,” he says. “Things do reach a place where they can cascade.”

Taeckens, who charges $4,000 to $5,000 a month, depending on the genre and scope of the project, for a six-month campaign—and who takes on only six to eight projects per year—wants to remind authors that it’s important to be extremely cautious when making the deep investment in publicists. How proactive are they? How much do they understand your vision? What track record do they have landing print, TV, or radio spots? Do they really know the players? Can they help take your book beyond reviews and into lifestyle pages, or find the stories that surround your book? Do they know how to do the investigative work to find the reviewers who will respond to your book? Taeckens says that a good publicist doesn’t promise the moon. “I’m realistic with authors. Sometimes people just want to be on Fresh Air and we have to think, ‘Well, what really is the story for them here?’” He says that he and his clients talk for a long time so that he can approach the book and the author from many angles. “My goal is that your name becomes an integral part of literary culture,” he says. “I go down a lot of rabbit holes. I have to really think about what will resonate.”

Taeckens slowly draws me out about my third book of poems, which is set in my hometown, a place I’ve left and returned to, a place now undergoing radical transformation. He also gets me to talk about how I’m thinking of shaping a book of essays that I’ve been working on for some time. We begin brainstorming about my dreams, where I’d like to see my work reviewed or placed, what cards I should turn over next, where the next part of my path should lead. Who inside the book world did I dream would read my book? Who outside the book world might want to read it too? While talking with Taeckens, I start jotting down new ideas of publications I want to read more closely, writing phrases like “Book launch at local history museum” and “Make a better national list of favorite bookstores” and “Do more events at wineries” and “Read with geologist or scientist.” I tell him that I can feel the buzz already, and he laughs. “That’s how it starts,” he says. “It becomes a kind of consuming passion.”

As I make new lists and maps, one of Cerand’s questions sticks with me: “What do you want that you don’t have?” A week or so later I write a heartfelt note to Cerand in which I tell her that I want to feel more visible. I also write about wanting to be an ambassador for a kind of poetry that would make us feel more connected and more human, that provides something I think we’re all deeply hungry for now. I write that I want to figure out how to feel a heft in my own work that will get me out of the cycle of posting and retweeting and gabbing online. “I want poetry that brings us back to the body, back to the breath, back to each other,” I write. Cerand calls me back, ready to talk.

I suppose when I began this article, I’d imagined that I might be told to pitch certain great magazines, or to refine my website, to hone my elevator pitch. I was told these things, of course, but when Cerand and I follow up, she has a much simpler, much more down-to-earth suggestion. “Why don’t you find a church or public space in your community and try to host a really simple family-friendly reading? Once a month, a kind of deeply community-inspired poetry outreach?” she asks. “You could include music and food. People could relax.” The idea at first seems deceptively simple. I’ve run reading series before, but in Cerand’s hands, this advice—to slow down and gather real community in real life—seems different. I love the idea of curating a family-friendly space to unplug and just be with the joy of words. Whether or not this will lead to great fame, or be a huge press sensation, it feels right.

“When you want to change the way you’re seen, you also want to work differently, and you want to work out of your principles,” Cerand says. The idea is at once challenging and profound. In this difficult time, when so much news is hurtling toward us online, how can I slow down, ground myself, and connect more deeply to the community around me? Cerand brings me back to thinking about publicity in a way that can nourish me. “You don’t want just to think about the book launch,” she says. “You want to think about the life’s work. What is irreplaceable about this work? What is irreplaceable in a life?”

Years ago, as a somewhat shy college graduate trying to get my first nibbles in publishing in New York City, I was exhausted by the blithe charge to go out and network. At a certain point, I stopped and read a goofy but sweet book—I still remember it—called Never Eat Alone by Keith Ferrazzi. He proposed that networking was not meant to be scary but is really about actively and lovingly cultivating friendships that can sustain you, and in which you also can offer others something that is most genuine about yourself. Remembering that the best “networks” are really made out of only acts of deep humanity was a relief to me.

That feeling of humanizing the process comes back to me as I finish my conversations with Lauren Cerand, Kima Jones, and Michael Taeckens. Sure, there is work, and press, and mailing, and kits, and social media, but what has amazed me while talking to these publicists is that each has reminded me how much more holistic those processes could be. These publicists are, like me, avid readers, passionate about creating conversations, hungry to pass on the gift of great writing, working in the service of connecting people and ideas. Like me, they are idealists—wanting to further the reach of books and ideas they love and perhaps even to change the world with them. As Cerand puts it: “Think about publicity as something that connects you. Try to be as tender about publicity as you have been about making the work—put the work into the world as lovingly as you made it.”

 

Ten Quick Tips from the Publicists

1. Your writing comes first. “Don’t do things that make you anxious about your health or your time,” says Taeckens. “You have to keep making work, and you have to keep making the work that’s most important to your vision.”

2. Focus on real relationships. “Your virtual network might be fun, but really knowing editors and other writers, and caring about them, is so much more valuable as a time investment,” says Cerand.

3. Always be brainstorming. “Go ahead and dream big, and early,” says Taeckens. “You might want to keep a list of any publications you might write for, or do freelance pieces that would go along with your book. That way you’re generating ideas that you can pitch even a year out. Keep in mind that many media venues plan coverage as much as four to six months out.”

4. Remove obstacles. “Your website should be clear. You should have a really easy link to getting to your book,” says Cerand. “You need to remove any obstacles to actually finding your work.”

5. Be a good literary citizen. “Think on the local, regional, and national level,” says Taeckens. This might mean supporting the writers in your city, planning community events, developing a fundraiser for your local library, or serving on a board. “Make a point of showing up for others,” Taeckens says. “You must build your ecosphere.”

6. Refine your elevator pitch. “Having an intriguing one to two sentences about your book is so simple, but so many people don’t quite have it down,” Jones says.

7. Think beyond the press release. “Robust press materials can give the media ideas for ways of approaching and discussing your book,” Taeckens says. “In addition to press releases, consider adding a pitch letter (a more personalized pitch for the book), talking points (a list of topics covered in your book that you can discuss in interviews), Q&As, an extended bio, and a praise sheet.”

8. Envision entering the conversation. “Good solid advice is always to look for tie-in news and trends that will prop up the book project,” says Jones.   

9. Mix it up. “When you feel that you want to be seen differently, work differently,” says Cerand. Maybe you need a Facebook sabbatical. If you feel like you’re tweeting too much about yourself, spend a couple weeks promoting the work of others. Maybe you need to organize more events in your city or consider working in a different genre.

10. Pay it forward. “Always support the work of your contemporaries, your peers, and the next generation,” says Jones. “Today’s debut writers will be writing tomorrow’s blurbs.”

Tess Taylor is the author of The Forage House (2013) and Work & Days (2016), both published by Red Hen Press. She is an on-air reviewer for NPR’s All Things Considered, and this spring she is the Anne Spencer Poet in Residence at Randolph College in Lynchburg, Virginia.

(Photos: Cerand: Jason Rice; Jones: Kayla Reefer; Taeckens: Linwood Hart.)
 
[Corrections: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated the number of projects that Michael Taeckens takes on each month; the number has been updated to reflect how many projects he takes on each year. Additionally, a quote by Kima Jones has been corrected to accurately reflect her perspective on the need to be financially self-sufficient.]

Decisions, Decisions: Three Paths to Publication

by

Alethea Black, Céline Keating, Michelle Toth

July/August 2011
5.3.12
In Print and Online

Late last year we realized that, through some strange sort of serendipity, all our fiction debuts were slated for publication within just months of one another. Although we are all friends—connected by the various shared histories of our education, employment, and writing lives—our individual experiences getting to this point in our careers were quite different. Alethea’s agent had sold her collection of short stories to a commercial publisher, Céline had signed a contract for a novel with an independent press, and Michelle was launching her own press to self-publish her novel. So we decided to sit down to compare notes on the distinct paths that brought us all to the same place—on the verge of our careers as authors. Here’s what we learned.

CHOOSING A PUBLISHER

Keating: “Lately it occurs to me what a long, strange trip it’s been” goes the Grateful Dead lyric. That’s certainly how I feel about my path to publication. I suspected my novel would be a tough sell to a commercial publisher. Although it has a suspenseful plot,Layla is also a political novel, and politics and commercial publishing often don’t mix. I had secured an agent who loved the book and who wanted to try the mainstream publishers, and I saw no harm in trying, but in my heart of hearts I suspected my book truly belonged with a small press.

 

Fast forward a couple of years and many “almosts” later: I lost my agent, who decided to get out of the field, and I was confronted with the choice of putting the manuscript in a box under the bed—or in the shredder—or starting to send it on my own to small presses. I didn’t think I had the energy to go through the submission process, but when I saw an ad in this magazine for “issue-based literary” Plain View Press, I changed my mind. The press was also described as a “cooperative of writers,” and that, too, appealed to me. Another advantage of going with a small press is that they typically keep their books in print forever. I wouldn’t have to worry about the publisher remaindering my book if it didn’t do well out of the gate. Susan Bright, the publisher, responded not only with enthusiasm but also with great insight into my thematic intent. I felt my book was being embraced for the reasons that meant the most to me, and so, without even considering another, I decided on Plain View.

Black: Some of the decision of choosing what type of publishing path to follow was taken care of for me: My agent queried several houses, and we went with the one that felt like the best fit. “Best fit,” as you know, doesn’t necessarily mean the most money; in some cases, it’s a matter of wanting to work with a particular editor, and there can also be intangible elements involved. When we left the official meeting at which Broadway Books first made an offer on my book, my agent, Lisa Bankoff, turned to me. “There was a lot of enthusiasm in that room,” she said. “You don’t feel love like that very often.” Lisa has been at ICM [International Creative Management] long enough to have learned a thing or two, and as we crossed West Fifty-Fifth Street, she told me that things usually work out best when you follow the love. So that was it: I decided to sign with Broadway.

Toth: My thought process was so different. While Alethea and Céline were deciding big or small, commercial or niche, I was deciding whether it was worth it to even try to break in to traditional publishing. Calculating the time and focus it would take to query, find an agent, and from there a publisher, and multiplying each step by the probability of success, then comparing it with the appeal of control, speed, and e-book economics for a category like mine—commercial fiction—all led me to self-publish my first novel.

This is not to say I didn’t try the traditional, proven path. I did, sort of. My writer friends scoff when I tell them I amassed only four rejections and three nonresponses to my querying efforts. They report their number of rejections before landing literary agents with a certain survivors’ pride (seeming to average around twenty-five to thirty, except in the case of one outlier who queried only her dream agent, successfully). But for me it was eye opening to see what happened over the period of time that I did query: I got depressed. Really depressed. The world was changing in unbelievably exciting ways that I had been trained for—as an Internet entrepreneur, in business school—and there I was, pursuing the status quo, an approach to producing books that I feared was falling far behind the times.

I absolutely see the benefits and the appeal of having a publishing house behind you. In fact, now that I’ve been at this awhile, I think that in most cases if you can get a publishing deal, you should take it. But if you find the business side of books almost as creative as the writing side, then self-publishing is a viable, exhilarating option—one that successful “crossover” authors such as Boyd Morrison, Brunonia Barry, and Lisa Genova have shown can actually lead to stellar deals with established large publishers.

EDITING AND PRODUCTION

Black: At the start, I got lucky—my editor, Christine Pride, was a peach. Like the best of editors, she saw both where I was aiming and where I failed and gave me feedback that was sensitive but persuasive. “How tied,” she asked, “are you to the title of your story collection,” which was then “Wise as Serpents, Harmless as Doves”? She was concerned that that title, while interesting, might give the false impression that the book was a religious book. “But,” she said, “some authors are very attached to their titles. Changing it can be as traumatic as changing your name.” Instead she suggested “I Knew You’d Be Lovely,” the title of a story that’s been an audience favorite. I hesitated for a few hours before realizing she was absolutely right.

Keating: The publisher felt my manuscript needed minimal editing, and I went through the galley-correction stages very smoothly. But the press did not have an in-house proofreader, and in hindsight, I should have hired one rather than rely solely on myself. I had to go through an extra round of corrections because I learned it’s really hard to spot errors in your own work.

Toth: One of the biggest downsides to being a self-published author is not having the rigorous review of an agent and editor who have tied themselves professionally to you and your book. When a literary expert has attached his or her reputation (and paycheck, to some extent) to your work, interests are fully aligned. Without such comrades, I’ve needed to personally ensure that Annie Begins meets expected standards of quality. To do this, I hired a manuscript consultant through Grub Street (which cost, in total, about eight hundred dollars) and relied on the advice of a close friend who is a former literary agent for input. I hired a freelance copyeditor (six hundred dollars) and then, after my mother caught eight typos, learned the difference between a copyeditor and a proofreader. I found one through LinkedIn and hired her (for another six hundred dollars). Coincidentally, she was in Alethea’s network so I was able to check her credentials, and she proved to be superb.

In contrast to Céline’s and Alethea’s relatively smooth sailing on the production front, this is where a self-publisher (especially if she has a perfectionist streak) can get tripped up, or at least get sucked into the black hole that is interior book design. While my avowed strategy was to hire experts wherever possible, in this case I found that I couldn’t find freelancers who could work to my standards, timeline, and budget, so I ended up doing most of the print and e-book design myself. I thought it would be a good learning experience, and it has been. I have learned it is exhausting and unbelievably time consuming. I will hire someone next time around.

COVER DESIGN

Black: When my editor first e-mailed me a PDF of what the cover would look like, I opened it and knew it was right. I wrote her back two words: Love it. I loved the way it felt both classic and modern simultaneously; I loved the black and teal coloring; I loved the uncomplicated lines and elegant font. There was just one thing: What was that white silhouette in the lower left corner? A lion? A sexually aroused poodle? The devil? No—it was a couple embracing, with the woman kicking one leg up behind her. Well, this was not exactly clear, in part because the figure appeared to have only three legs—or, rather, two legs and some sort of tail. So Christine sent it back to the art folks with a request that they articulate the image.

Meanwhile I showed the cover to several colleagues, and everyone loved it—except for that white silhouette. Not only was it somewhat inscrutable, they said, but even if you could scrute it, it was too conventional an image for a book of inventive and unpredictable stories. So when the new art arrived, several weeks later, I asked Christine if we could substitute something else entirely (although to this day I have no idea what that would be—a piece of fruit? a guitar? a blender?). This was when Christine informed me that I was working with a publisher who did hundreds of covers a week, and at this late stage in the game, no, they could not send it back and make it a toothbrush. Later we laughed about it, and she said that cover discussions in particular can border on the absurd; she once had an author ask her if she could move the cloud to the left, which has become my personal catchphrase for asking for something I know is unreasonable but I just can’t help myself. (In an interesting twist, a version of that cover remained in place until just weeks before the publication date, when my publisher, based on some early enthusiastic feedback, decided to go with a simpler, more timeless design.)

Keating: One of the biggest benefits of going the small press route, and something crucial to me, was getting to have a say about the cover and the interior design. Authors with mainstream publishers rarely get cover approval in their contracts, while self-published authors have total control in this area. With Plain View, I felt I had the best of both worlds. I would be able to choose the art that would be the basis for the cover and have a say in the book’s interior appearance. At the same time, I was glad to let the press handle design and production. I knew it would be fun to search for the perfect image to represent my book, and when I saw the photo of a strikingly beautiful desert landscape, evocative of the setting of a pivotal scene in the novel, I knew it was “the one.” It had everything I hadn’t known I was looking for: the hint of a young woman, an ambiguous figure in the distance, a sense of longing. Little did I know that it would take two months, and a turn as a detective, to locate the photographer—in Iran! By that point I was more than happy to shell out five hundred bucks for the permission to use it.

Toth: As Céline points out, I had the joy and pain of total control of producing the cover for Annie Begins. Some self-publishers do their own cover design or rely on the templates provided by the author-services companies. Both can be fine options, but I wanted a truly great cover, not something I could produce on PowerPoint. I discovered the Book Cover Archive and became an instant devotee—poring over page after page of fantastic, inspiring design. I clicked my way to a boutique that would create an original cover costing between twenty-five hundred dollars and thirty-five hundred dollars. Yowza.

Then I lucked into finding Tangent Covers, which would allow me to customize from a selection of twenty-one extremely well-designed template covers for much less than a custom option (about three hundred dollars). I thought it over for a day and, as precious as my project is to me, I concluded that Annie Begins is not a baby, it’s a book, and hopefully the first of many, and I needed to start making smart economic decisions with my calculator and not just my heart. I decided to go with Tangent. It’s worth noting that I chose an option that demanded similar constraints to the ones imposed upon Alethea by her in-house designers. However, I don’t think that author in Alethea’s story was wrong to want to move the cloud to the left! I could easily see moving a cloud to the left. Or right. And back again. And I am glad that I retained that option.

I love the cover of Annie Begins for its clean lines and simplicity, but it does lack some of the oomph of the best truly custom designs (and I regret the mostly white cover, which disappeared against the all-white background of Amazon and other online retailers’ sites until a gray line was added). Still, I’m glad I didn’t overinvest, and next time around I might just use crowdsourcing via either crowdSPRING or 99designs. 

From left: Althea Black, Céline Keating, and Michelle Toth. 

(Credit: Black: Nadine Raphael; Keating: Mark Levy; Toth: Block Photography)

FINANCES

Keating: By “cooperative,” Plain View Press didn’t just mean working together in terms of submissions or publicity—it meant taking a financial stake in the book, in the form of pre-buying my first one hundred fifty books. I was uncomfortable with this—it felt a bit like one of those scary vanity presses one hears about. At the same time, I understood the positives: By working in this manner, the press was able to take bigger risks on books that would be shunned by other presses. Royalty and other terms were more than generous. I also liked the fact that the press had been around for more than thirty years and had published award-winning books (including The First Thing and the Last by Allan G. Johnson, which was praised by Publishers Weekly and was chosen as a “Great Read” by O, The Oprah Magazine in April 2010). I was sold when I spoke with another Plain View author, a poet, who had had very positive experiences with the press and had recouped her investment within two months of her book’s publication.

Black: My advance wasn’t life changing (just under twenty-thousand dollars), but it was a good number for a first book of short stories. Of course, if you factor in the cost of building and maintaining an author website and other expenses (this spring I flew to L.A. so I could be at a WordTheatre performance of one of my stories), it’s a little less impressive, but I try to avoid making such calculations. I am fond of saying (and still want to find a T-shirt that says): “Uh, I was told there’d be no math?”

Toth: About Alethea’s advance, I say at least it was a positive number! My expense-laden strategy for self-publishing is to try to replicate everything great about traditional publishing by utilizing top-notch freelancers—manuscript editor, copy-editor, proofreader, book-cover designer, and publicist. (The one thing I cannot realistically replicate is a sales force, so my distribution is almost entirely online.) All of this costs money—lots of it—although plenty of other self-published authors are far more DIY and are producing profitable books for a fraction of what I’ve invested.

MARKETING AND PUBLICITY

Keating: My experience working on marketing and publicity fell somewhere in the middle of the continuum between mainstream publishers, who do most of the heavy lifting, and the self-publishing model. Plain View would be handling distribution and sales, which I absolutely didn’t want to do, as well as presentation of the book at some conventions and book fairs. The press also would prepare a flyer for me and share a mailing list for sending the book out for reviews. But while this was significant support, I knew it was just a fraction of what would be needed to make the book a success.

I contemplated doing the publicity work on my own, but even minimal research—and the advice of my publisher—convinced me that I needed help navigating the thickets of all that should be done in this arena. I’m now aware that I would have been paralyzed by indecision without my publicist, Molly Mikolowski at A Literary Light. Molly, who had headed up marketing for Coffee House Press before setting up her own agency, worked out a plan where I did the easy stuff (such as researching blogs), while she brought her expertise to bear on the more complex aspects of media and bookseller outreach. Expense aside, the actual details of a publicity campaign are probably similar for all three of our publishing models—getting the book into the hands of those who might review it favorably, securing interviews, and setting up readings. These days social media plays a big part, and much of that is up to the author no matter which path to publication is taken. I felt less lonely having someone in my corner day to day.

Black: I agonized over whether to hire an outside publicist. I’d been given the names of some terrific ones, including Jocelyn Kelley at Kelley & Hall Book Publicity and Promotion, whom my agent personally recommended to me, saying, “I don’t think she sleeps.” But I just couldn’t decide what to do. It’s difficult to gauge results—since there’s no control group for a book, it’s hard to know to what to attribute success or failure—and publicists can be expensive. The strongest argument in favor of spending the money (which can range from thirty-five hundred dollars to over ten thousand dollars) was that this book was the culmination of fifteen years of work, so why not do everything in my power to help it reach an audience? In fact, I probably would have gone ahead and hired a publicist had my meeting with the Crown publicity team not gone so well. There were six people in the room, all gushing about the book and what they were going to do to help it—one in a British accent, another in an Australian accent—all of them seeming to have read the stories and to genuinely love them. But to be honest, what I discovered is that a short story collection from an unknown author is just not going to be the top priority at a major publishing house. When three months before the pub date I saw that there were no readings booked, and we didn’t yet have a review from Publishers Weekly or Kirkus, I decided to treat publicity for this book as very DIY. I started e-mailing everyone I knew, offering to be an “opening act” for writers who had books coming out around the same time as mine; alerting contacts at writing conferences that I was willing to be a substitute if they had any last-minute cancellations; querying bookstore owners and artistic directors. It’s a delicate business, though, because in my opinion it’s better to do nothing than to annoy people. It’s also a lot of work, and on many days it feels a bit like operating a lemonade stand on the side of an interstate! But it also feels worth it.

Toth: Céline has talked about the lonely parts of being with a small press and I have to concur—the isolation can be even more pronounced when you wear all the hats. This was one of the reasons I decided to hire a publicist. I needed someone officially on my team. I didn’t have the skills or the contacts to do the publicity in the way I envisioned, and many other writers I know have needed to supplement the in-house publicity teams of their publishers, so I thought it wasn’t such a stretch to do it for my indie project. I have now been working with Jocelyn Kelley (coincidentally, the same person recommended so highly to Alethea by her agent) since late last fall, with a brief hiatus when Jocelyn, who is an Oprah Book Club correspondent, traveled to Australia with Oprah. Although a significant financial investment, publicity is something I cannot do for myself.

SURPRISE, SURPRISE

Keating: Because Plain View is a very small press among small presses, it doesn’t have a sales force, and I didn’t appreciate the significance of that drawback when I made my decision. Getting copies of Layla on bookstore shelves will be difficult—maybe not as difficult as the obstacles that exist for self-published books, as Michelle mentioned, but hard enough. That will be a big consideration for me the next time around.

But the toughest thing for me occurred just before my advance readers’ copies were about to be sent out for review. Susan Bright, my publisher, died unexpectedly. Susan was a special person, the press very much her creation, and her death brought home the reminder that small presses, even one with a thirty-year history, often rest on somewhat precarious foundations. I was extremely lucky that other wonderful and talented people picked up the reins and that my book’s publication was only slightly delayed.

Another surprise for me was how much I enjoyed the collaborative aspects of working with my publicist and also with a web designer, Andrew Beierle. Molly and Andrew made what could have been a very anxious time, before publication, a lot more enjoyable.

Black: A week before Christmas I received my biggest surprise. My editor was taking a job at Hyperion. This was a promotion for Christine, which she was happy about, but she was distressed to have to leave all her authors. Another harsh reality of the publishing industry, as we all know, is that there’s a lot of turnover. Christine was apologetic and kind as ever. But my book, a friend explained to me over the phone, had been orphaned. Fortunately, Lovely didn’t stay orphaned for long. An enthusiastic, equally wise, and equally gorgeous editor (disturbingly, both of my editors have looked like professional models) stepped in. Alexis Washam has been wonderful, and I’m grateful to this day: They say you’ll be lucky to get one good editor, and I was lucky enough to get two.

Toth: I can’t quite wrap my head around how much has happened in self-publishing in the six months I’ve been at it. Barry Eisler recently turned down a half-million-dollar advance in order to self-publish, while indie darling Amanda Hocking is going in the other direction. Everything is shaking out now, and on the eve of my arbitrarily defined self-publication date, I’m pretty happy to be in this position. But talk to me in six months—especially if by then I’ve only sold books to my relatives and Facebook friends.

Keating: Ditto for me!

Black: And me!

Alethea Black is the author of the short story collection I Knew You’d Be Lovely, published by Broadway Books this month. A graduate of Harvard University, she lives in Pawling, New York.

Céline Keating is the author of the novel Layla, published by Plain View Press in June. She earned an MA in creative writing from City College in New York and lives in New York City.

Michelle Toth is the author of the novel Annie Begins, published in April by (sixoneseven) books, an indie  press that she founded in 2010. A graduate of Harvard Business School, she lives in Boston and New York City.

After the Book Party: Three Paths From Publication

by

Alethea Black, Celine Keating, Michelle Toth

July/August 2012
6.30.12
In Print and Online

Last year, after we realized that all our fiction debuts would be released within a few months of one another (Alethea’s story collection was due to be published by a commercial publisher, Céline’s novel was scheduled for release by an independent press, and Michelle planned to publish her novel with an independent company she founded herself), we got together to compare notes about everything from working with an editor and choosing a cover to marketing and publicity. Our discussion was published as “Decisions, Decisions: Three Different Paths to Publication” in the July/August 2011 issue of this magazine.

Now, after a year filled with successes and failures as well as constant challenges and continuing rewards, our books have made their way into the hands of readers. A debut novelist once told Alethea that having a first book come out is like lighting a firecracker that doesn’t go off. While having our debuts published was undoubtedly an exciting event in each of our lives, it didn’t happen precisely the way we had planned. Of course we knew there were no ticker-tape parades for published authors, so the three of us arrived at our publication dates with relatively sober expectations; nevertheless, the postpublication journey was full of surprises. Here’s what we learned.

ON AND OFF THE SHELF

Black: I think the greatest advantage to being with a large publisher was the power it had to get my book into the hands of people who could really help. The best thing to happen to I Knew You’d Be Lovely was that it was chosen for the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers program, and the lion’s share of our sales has been from Barnes & Noble. My publisher also made sure to reach out to independent bookstores, and even had me write a personal letter of introduction, which was then enclosed with the ARCs sent to bookstore owners. The most surprising thing my editor did was ask me for a list of “tastemakers” whom I’d like to receive my book. I didn’t understand. “You mean, like Michelle Obama?” I don’t know who ended up receiving surprise copies of the book, but it was encouraging to feel the publisher was going to bat for me.

Toth: As a self-published author, I knew it made no sense to invest time or resources trying to break into bricks-and-mortar bookstores. Traditional publishers dominate that important sales channel because they have the necessary scale, distribution capabilities, promotional dollars, and stra-tegic partnerships, and if that weren’t enough to dissuade me (it was) the very thought of having to manage returns from bookstores would have. On the plus side, these constraints helped to make my strategy clear: Focus on online distribution via e-books and print-on-demand paperback books. With print-on-demand, there is no inventory. The online sale triggers production of the book, which is then shipped to the consumer. For my paperback I used Amazon’s CreateSpace (which will accept and ship orders not just from Amazon but also from other retailers such as BarnesandNoble.com) and for my e-book I used Kindle Direct Publishing in combination with Smashwords, an independent e-book publishing-and-distribution platform that produces e-books in multiple formats, including those for the Kindle, Nook, and iPad.

Keating: My favorite appearance of Layla on a shelf was in the Occupy Wall Street library at Zuccotti Park. As the novel centers on youth activism, this was perfect. One reason I had chosen to go with a small press was because mainstream publishers found the novel noncommercial. I wanted the thrill of seeing it on bookstore shelves, and the chance at serendipitous purchases. Plain View Press lacks a sales-and-marketing staff, and encouraged me to hire a publicist for outreach to independent bookstores. Although this was somewhat successful, most stores that carry Layla are not in New York City, where I live. Still, I get a charge when I do come upon it in libraries and bookstores.

PUBLICITY AND REVIEWS

Toth: My goal as an indie publisher is to replicate as closely as possible the way a traditional publisher produces and markets a book, so I hired a publicist who secured reviews and mentions from a number of online sites as well as Library Journal. Annie Begins was a semifinalist in the 2011 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award, and reaching that round of the contest resulted in a Publishers Weekly review. Having positive reviews lent credibility and support to my indie effort, and likely made bloggers and other reviewers more open to the book. I also had some excellent exposure in Bookmarks Magazine. My luckiest break was being picked up by Amazon for an e-mail promotion that introduced Annie to a much wider audience. I believe this resulted from the combination of being categorized as a genre book (contemporary romance), garnering a lot of early five-star reviews on Amazon, and my decision to price the e-book at $2.99. The only problem was that a few members of the contemporary romance audience would have appreciated a steamier book, and I did generate my first negative reader reviews after that!

Keating: Layla garnered good reviews and articles, was named a Huffington Post pick, and drew invitations to such blogs as the Quivering Pen and Words With Writers. Overall my marketing efforts felt a bit like throwing spaghetti at a wall. I tried giveaways, offering fifteen books each on LibraryThing and Goodreads, where  two hundred and six hundred people signed up, respectively. More than a hundred people added my book to their To Read lists, and sales jumped. A mistake was paying for inclusion on book club sites. Given the huge number of books listed on such sites, I found it’s best to skip them if you can’t also afford an ad. There’s no shortage of work you can do for your book, and it’s hard to choose where to put limited resources. I wish I’d done more personal outreach to book clubs, bookstores, and libraries. But the path to publication is really a path to a writing career. Rather than put much energy into marketing, I focused on my next book.

Black: Reviews are pivotal when it comes to reaching a larger audience, but even a big publisher can’t force anyone to give your book coverage; in fact, I know a couple of reviewers who feel it’s a turn-off when a book is pushed on them too aggressively. I was up against some steep odds—paperback original, first book, short stories—and I did not get a lot of ink. In fact, one of my reviewers opened by saying she was surprised the book wasn’t being given more attention. Now that I’ve seen how things played out, I do think I might have benefited from an outside publicist. But at the time, I couldn’t justify the cost; I figured I should get health insurance before I got a publicist.

READINGS AND EVENTS

Toth: I did readings and events in only three cities: Boston, New York, and San Francisco. I had a launch event cohosted by Harvard Book Store (where Annie is available on the Espresso Book Machine) and Grub Street, Boston’s independent writing center. It drew an overflow crowd, and I sold all my preprinted copies (which felt good but is really a rookie-publisher mistake, as my writer friends pointed out). I did a round of literary festivals and book clubs—for Annie and also on the topic of self-publishing. I found that Skype book clubs can be a blast, and that when you figure out your core audience and connect directly with it, there’s nothing better. I could have done more and, as an extrovert, would have enjoyed it, but the demands of my day job had increased thanks to an unexpected promotion, and it was a struggle to do just the basics. This is an inherent challenge for any writer with a day job—and surely any self-published writer.

Black: I wanted to take the show on the road, and at one point told my in-house publicist that if she’d book the events, I’d pay the expenses myself. But no events were booked; book tours don’t seem to happen these days, even at a big publisher, unless you’re already well known. Of course, there’s a reason for that: Such efforts don’t typically have a large impact on sales. Nevertheless, I love to give readings—I love the smell and the feel of bookstores, and I love talking to book people—so I put together a small tour myself. You know the Onion headline “Author Promoting Book Gives It Her All Whether It’s Just Three People or a Crowd of Nine”? I drove from New York City to Chicago to give a reading to about twelve people. But the math of finding your audience isn’t linear, and even if you read to only two people, one of them might host a radio show, or be an influential blogger, or fall in love with your book and buy copies for friends.

Keating: At first I considered asking friends to be my public-speaking avatars, as I’m an introvert—but I knew readings would be one of the best ways for Layla to reach readers. Unlike Alethea, I live in dread of a small audience and put in enormous effort to make sure good crowds showed up at every venue. My first event was at Montauk Bookshop on Long Island, where I spend weekends. Although my husband embarrassed me by papering the town with flyers and telling everyone he ran into about the event, that personal touch really paid off. It was the bookstore’s biggest crowd ever, and the owner’s enthusiasm garnered some terrific press coverage after the fact. With personal postcards, e-mails, and Facebook invitations, my book-launch party in New York City was packed to overflowing. Then the timing was right for an official tour—vacation road trip! I traveled throughout the Northeast, where friends generously hosted events and lined up readings. By the fall, bookstore owners, book clubs, and librarians who had actually read Layla were sending me invitations to read, attend book club meetings, and even run a writing workshop. One of the most memorable events was reading with Alethea and Michelle at the Cornelia Street Café in Manhattan. There’s nothing like combining forces with writer friends to fill a space, not to mention to share the anxiety—and the wine.

From left: Althea Black, Céline Keating, and Michelle Toth. 

(Credit: Black: Nadine Raphael; Keating: Mark Levy; Toth: Block Photography)

ADVERTISING AND SALES

Black: Crown Publishing Group, the division of Random House whose imprint Broadway published my book, placed AdReady network ads on sites such as Harper’s, the Atlantic, and Goodreads. Print ads are more expensive—the smallest ad in the New York Times Book Review, a two-fifths-page spot, costs $6,688 for black and white and $12,731 for color—so they didn’t go that route. I personally paid for an ad on Narrative.com and one in Poets & Writers Magazine; both places give you a healthy author discount, and it felt like money well spent. Lovely was in its fourth printing this past April, but that number doesn’t tell you much—we could be in our one-thousandth printing if each print run were ten books. My initial print run was eighty-five hundred, and each of the subsequent runs was under two thousand. When my first royalty check arrived earlier this year, at first I didn’t know what it was; I wasn’t expecting to have earned out my advance. I was surprised that only one e-book was sold for every ten p-books (and I was surprised to learn the term p-book).

Toth: Annie Begins was an Amazon Top 100 Kindle Best Seller and Top 10 in Kindle Contemporary Romance for a time during the summer of 2011, and in the first year of publication e-book sales of more than five thousand dominated paperback sales of around five hundred. I recently elected to participate in an Amazon e-book giveaway that generated more than fifteen thousand downloads in less than a day and drove a significant jump in sales momentum. I also experimented with Facebook ads, which did not pay back the investment in terms of sales. The most effective thing I did was to focus on e-books and Amazon. Controversy aside, Amazon is by far the most important site for e-book sales, and I suggest to all self-publishers that they should not only have an online strategy, but also an Amazon strategy.

Keating: I had modest expectations, as I knew going in that Plain View Press had limited marketing capability. Then the publisher died, throwing the press into turmoil from which it is valiantly recovering. So I’m thrilled that ten months out, Layla is still selling, which I assume means it’s being hand-sold. Sales are actually picking up, and Layla was Plain View’s top seller for 2011. My wildest dream was to sell a thousand books the first year, and it looks like that just might happen. My publisher put out an e-book version of the book recently, so I look forward to taking Michelle’s advice about e-book strategy. 

NEW MEDIA

Toth: Part of the approach my publicist and I agreed on was for me to blog and speak on self-publishing, both because of the momentum of the self-publishing path and because I have a business background. It’s been gratifying to help empower authors by spreading the word about independent publishing, but such exposure does not necessarily translate to book sales. I also put up a Facebook page and did updates when I felt there was real news, believing that readers don’t need more than a couple of reminders to know if they want to buy your book. Mostly, though, I’ve reassessed the trade-off of taking time away from writing my second novel and developing the (sixoneseven) books platform, now structured as a micro press that has published three additional authors—two novelists, one memoirist—and counting. While I appreciate the value of social media, I think the best way to achieve my creative goals is to write and publish more books—of my own, and of other writers!  

Keating: I dove into social media feet first (as in, less brain) and tried everything: Facebook, Twitter, Gather, Goodreads, LibraryThing, She Writes, and Red Room. This was SM—as in sadomasochistic, not social media—overkill. Like a bee amid flowers, I flitted from one site to the next, sipping nectar but producing only exhaustion. But gradually I began to make meaningful connections and tap into a wealth of useful information. And I got a real charge when I put an invitation on She Writes to anyone who lived in a town where I was giving a reading and didn’t know a soul, and a blogger and short story writer showed up! There’s no magic about social media. Just as with connections in the real world, you can’t expect tangible results without a significant investment of quality time.

Black: I’m no good at coming up with real-time 140-character-long observations that would be worth anyone’s attention. My publisher requested that I join Facebook, and I did; but I’m not on Twitter and I’m only minimally on Goodreads. Instead of putting my time into those venues, I tried to continue to write. I wrote a piece for Writer’s Digest about how I wished my dad could read my book, an essay for Narrative Magazine about why I write at night, and I published a new piece of fiction in One Story. I also told a couple of stories onstage for the Moth. The Twitterverse serves a lot of people well, but I think you should play to your strengths. If you’re a fish, don’t try to ride a bike.

LESSONS LEARNED

Keating: Readings not only helped me get past my shyness but also brought me back to my reason for writing in the first place. At a book group in Staten Island, New York, I had the overpowering experience of listening to women quote favorite lines from Layla and describe the metaphors that moved them. There’s nothing more rewarding than that, no matter which path takes you there. But while I’m thrilled I seized the reins by going with a small press, I learned that I don’t have Michelle’s energy and entrepreneurial savvy for DIY. I think it’s really tough to find your audience without adequate sales-and-marketing muscle. So for my new book, which aims for a more commercial audience than Layla, it looks like I’ll be shopping for an agent.

Toth: I’m not at all shy, but I still find self-promotion uncomfortable. One trick that helped me was to separate myself a bit from my book: I talked about what was happening for my character Annie, not myself. I rallied family and friends to join “Team Annie” to help in various promotional activities. And I surrounded myself with supportive writer friends who would understand the unique challenges of willingly subjecting yourself to public judgment and loss of privacy.

Black: It’s possible to promote yourself too much, and I think a lot of first-time authors do themselves a disservice by misusing the megaphone. Yes, a lot of book publicity falls on our shoulders these days, whether you’re with a big house, self-publishing, or somewhere in between. But the injunction “Buy my book” never works. It’s like being on a date and being told, “Like me.” If you have interesting things to say, if you make people laugh or make them curious to learn more about you, buying your book will be a natural consequence. If someone else’s book really wows me, I might make a public fuss about it. But I don’t think the most effective marketing always uses the front door.

SURPRISE, SURPRISE

Toth: My surprises weren’t all specific to my path, but there were several of them nonetheless:

1. I didn’t expect Annie to resonate as much with men as it has, and they’ve provided some of the most illuminating feedback.

2. An editor from a traditional publisher contacted me, having discovered Annie as part of the Amazon contest, and asked to see my next manuscript.

3. Despite my all-digital strategy, I started getting multiple purchase orders, which seemed to have been triggered by the Library Journal review. Suddenly, I became the shipping department I never thought I’d have: packaging and shipping paper books while calculating discounts and sending invoices.

4. I was bemused when some people I gave books to—in the unspoken hope they would provide positive word of mouth to others—made a habit of enthusiastically loaning the book out rather than encouraging people to purchase a copy!

5. If you write in the first person, and borrow anything from your real life, people will assume everything you’ve written is autobiographical.

Black: I need to say an amen to Michelle’s last point. There is so much in these stories that’s true, and so many people who were able to recognize it as true, that they sometimes imagined it’s all true. I had a friend who, after reading a story about a college student who performs a kind of striptease for a homeless man, tried to divine if this was something I’d actually done. When my own mother first read a story about the summer we lost one of my sisters up at Lake Winnipesaukee, she was puzzled by the ending. “That’s not the way it happened,” she said. I had to remind her that this was fiction, not memoir. I got a more troubling surprise when two friends stopped speaking to me because I’d forgotten to put them in the acknowledgments. And I had an ex-boyfriend request that I write a sequel to the story about a threesome—not because he wanted to read the sex scene, but because he disagreed with my ideas about nonpossessive love and wanted to see them challenged.

Keating: My narrator is twenty-two years old, so I thought I’d escape the question of autobiography. No such luck. People ask in hushed voices if I know any real fugitives like those in the book—or perhaps wonder if I am one! But most surprising for me has been how Layla has been perceived. Because editors in mainstream houses felt the novel wasn’t terribly commercial, I’d internalized the perception that it had limited appeal, especially given the political issues it raises. So I’ve been surprised by how strong the emotional response has been. I’d hoped the novel would resonate with people who lived through the 1960s, but it seems to strike more of a nerve with young people and parents in terms of their relationships with each other. A woman I had never spoken to rushed over to give me a hug and thank me for bringing her and her daughter together. I now see my own novel in a completely different light.

Alethea Black is the author of the short story collection I Knew You’d Be Lovely, published by Broadway Books in July 2011.

Céline Keating is the author of the novel Layla, published by Plain View Press in June 2011. She is an editorial associate at Hanging Loose Press.

Michelle Toth is the author of the novel Annie Begins, published in March 2011 as the first title from (sixoneseven) books, an independent publishing company that she founded. Toth is a member of the board of directors of the literary nonprofit organization Grub Street.

Decisions, Decisions: Three Paths to Publication

After the Book Party: Three Paths From Publication

by

Alethea Black, Celine Keating, Michelle Toth

July/August 2012
6.30.12
In Print and Online

Last year, after we realized that all our fiction debuts would be released within a few months of one another (Alethea’s story collection was due to be published by a commercial publisher, Céline’s novel was scheduled for release by an independent press, and Michelle planned to publish her novel with an independent company she founded herself), we got together to compare notes about everything from working with an editor and choosing a cover to marketing and publicity. Our discussion was published as “Decisions, Decisions: Three Different Paths to Publication” in the July/August 2011 issue of this magazine.

Now, after a year filled with successes and failures as well as constant challenges and continuing rewards, our books have made their way into the hands of readers. A debut novelist once told Alethea that having a first book come out is like lighting a firecracker that doesn’t go off. While having our debuts published was undoubtedly an exciting event in each of our lives, it didn’t happen precisely the way we had planned. Of course we knew there were no ticker-tape parades for published authors, so the three of us arrived at our publication dates with relatively sober expectations; nevertheless, the postpublication journey was full of surprises. Here’s what we learned.

ON AND OFF THE SHELF

Black: I think the greatest advantage to being with a large publisher was the power it had to get my book into the hands of people who could really help. The best thing to happen to I Knew You’d Be Lovely was that it was chosen for the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers program, and the lion’s share of our sales has been from Barnes & Noble. My publisher also made sure to reach out to independent bookstores, and even had me write a personal letter of introduction, which was then enclosed with the ARCs sent to bookstore owners. The most surprising thing my editor did was ask me for a list of “tastemakers” whom I’d like to receive my book. I didn’t understand. “You mean, like Michelle Obama?” I don’t know who ended up receiving surprise copies of the book, but it was encouraging to feel the publisher was going to bat for me.

Toth: As a self-published author, I knew it made no sense to invest time or resources trying to break into bricks-and-mortar bookstores. Traditional publishers dominate that important sales channel because they have the necessary scale, distribution capabilities, promotional dollars, and stra-tegic partnerships, and if that weren’t enough to dissuade me (it was) the very thought of having to manage returns from bookstores would have. On the plus side, these constraints helped to make my strategy clear: Focus on online distribution via e-books and print-on-demand paperback books. With print-on-demand, there is no inventory. The online sale triggers production of the book, which is then shipped to the consumer. For my paperback I used Amazon’s CreateSpace (which will accept and ship orders not just from Amazon but also from other retailers such as BarnesandNoble.com) and for my e-book I used Kindle Direct Publishing in combination with Smashwords, an independent e-book publishing-and-distribution platform that produces e-books in multiple formats, including those for the Kindle, Nook, and iPad.

Keating: My favorite appearance of Layla on a shelf was in the Occupy Wall Street library at Zuccotti Park. As the novel centers on youth activism, this was perfect. One reason I had chosen to go with a small press was because mainstream publishers found the novel noncommercial. I wanted the thrill of seeing it on bookstore shelves, and the chance at serendipitous purchases. Plain View Press lacks a sales-and-marketing staff, and encouraged me to hire a publicist for outreach to independent bookstores. Although this was somewhat successful, most stores that carry Layla are not in New York City, where I live. Still, I get a charge when I do come upon it in libraries and bookstores.

PUBLICITY AND REVIEWS

Toth: My goal as an indie publisher is to replicate as closely as possible the way a traditional publisher produces and markets a book, so I hired a publicist who secured reviews and mentions from a number of online sites as well as Library Journal. Annie Begins was a semifinalist in the 2011 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award, and reaching that round of the contest resulted in a Publishers Weekly review. Having positive reviews lent credibility and support to my indie effort, and likely made bloggers and other reviewers more open to the book. I also had some excellent exposure in Bookmarks Magazine. My luckiest break was being picked up by Amazon for an e-mail promotion that introduced Annie to a much wider audience. I believe this resulted from the combination of being categorized as a genre book (contemporary romance), garnering a lot of early five-star reviews on Amazon, and my decision to price the e-book at $2.99. The only problem was that a few members of the contemporary romance audience would have appreciated a steamier book, and I did generate my first negative reader reviews after that!

Keating: Layla garnered good reviews and articles, was named a Huffington Post pick, and drew invitations to such blogs as the Quivering Pen and Words With Writers. Overall my marketing efforts felt a bit like throwing spaghetti at a wall. I tried giveaways, offering fifteen books each on LibraryThing and Goodreads, where  two hundred and six hundred people signed up, respectively. More than a hundred people added my book to their To Read lists, and sales jumped. A mistake was paying for inclusion on book club sites. Given the huge number of books listed on such sites, I found it’s best to skip them if you can’t also afford an ad. There’s no shortage of work you can do for your book, and it’s hard to choose where to put limited resources. I wish I’d done more personal outreach to book clubs, bookstores, and libraries. But the path to publication is really a path to a writing career. Rather than put much energy into marketing, I focused on my next book.

Black: Reviews are pivotal when it comes to reaching a larger audience, but even a big publisher can’t force anyone to give your book coverage; in fact, I know a couple of reviewers who feel it’s a turn-off when a book is pushed on them too aggressively. I was up against some steep odds—paperback original, first book, short stories—and I did not get a lot of ink. In fact, one of my reviewers opened by saying she was surprised the book wasn’t being given more attention. Now that I’ve seen how things played out, I do think I might have benefited from an outside publicist. But at the time, I couldn’t justify the cost; I figured I should get health insurance before I got a publicist.

READINGS AND EVENTS

Toth: I did readings and events in only three cities: Boston, New York, and San Francisco. I had a launch event cohosted by Harvard Book Store (where Annie is available on the Espresso Book Machine) and Grub Street, Boston’s independent writing center. It drew an overflow crowd, and I sold all my preprinted copies (which felt good but is really a rookie-publisher mistake, as my writer friends pointed out). I did a round of literary festivals and book clubs—for Annie and also on the topic of self-publishing. I found that Skype book clubs can be a blast, and that when you figure out your core audience and connect directly with it, there’s nothing better. I could have done more and, as an extrovert, would have enjoyed it, but the demands of my day job had increased thanks to an unexpected promotion, and it was a struggle to do just the basics. This is an inherent challenge for any writer with a day job—and surely any self-published writer.

Black: I wanted to take the show on the road, and at one point told my in-house publicist that if she’d book the events, I’d pay the expenses myself. But no events were booked; book tours don’t seem to happen these days, even at a big publisher, unless you’re already well known. Of course, there’s a reason for that: Such efforts don’t typically have a large impact on sales. Nevertheless, I love to give readings—I love the smell and the feel of bookstores, and I love talking to book people—so I put together a small tour myself. You know the Onion headline “Author Promoting Book Gives It Her All Whether It’s Just Three People or a Crowd of Nine”? I drove from New York City to Chicago to give a reading to about twelve people. But the math of finding your audience isn’t linear, and even if you read to only two people, one of them might host a radio show, or be an influential blogger, or fall in love with your book and buy copies for friends.

Keating: At first I considered asking friends to be my public-speaking avatars, as I’m an introvert—but I knew readings would be one of the best ways for Layla to reach readers. Unlike Alethea, I live in dread of a small audience and put in enormous effort to make sure good crowds showed up at every venue. My first event was at Montauk Bookshop on Long Island, where I spend weekends. Although my husband embarrassed me by papering the town with flyers and telling everyone he ran into about the event, that personal touch really paid off. It was the bookstore’s biggest crowd ever, and the owner’s enthusiasm garnered some terrific press coverage after the fact. With personal postcards, e-mails, and Facebook invitations, my book-launch party in New York City was packed to overflowing. Then the timing was right for an official tour—vacation road trip! I traveled throughout the Northeast, where friends generously hosted events and lined up readings. By the fall, bookstore owners, book clubs, and librarians who had actually read Layla were sending me invitations to read, attend book club meetings, and even run a writing workshop. One of the most memorable events was reading with Alethea and Michelle at the Cornelia Street Café in Manhattan. There’s nothing like combining forces with writer friends to fill a space, not to mention to share the anxiety—and the wine.

From left: Althea Black, Céline Keating, and Michelle Toth. 

(Credit: Black: Nadine Raphael; Keating: Mark Levy; Toth: Block Photography)

ADVERTISING AND SALES

Black: Crown Publishing Group, the division of Random House whose imprint Broadway published my book, placed AdReady network ads on sites such as Harper’s, the Atlantic, and Goodreads. Print ads are more expensive—the smallest ad in the New York Times Book Review, a two-fifths-page spot, costs $6,688 for black and white and $12,731 for color—so they didn’t go that route. I personally paid for an ad on Narrative.com and one in Poets & Writers Magazine; both places give you a healthy author discount, and it felt like money well spent. Lovely was in its fourth printing this past April, but that number doesn’t tell you much—we could be in our one-thousandth printing if each print run were ten books. My initial print run was eighty-five hundred, and each of the subsequent runs was under two thousand. When my first royalty check arrived earlier this year, at first I didn’t know what it was; I wasn’t expecting to have earned out my advance. I was surprised that only one e-book was sold for every ten p-books (and I was surprised to learn the term p-book).

Toth: Annie Begins was an Amazon Top 100 Kindle Best Seller and Top 10 in Kindle Contemporary Romance for a time during the summer of 2011, and in the first year of publication e-book sales of more than five thousand dominated paperback sales of around five hundred. I recently elected to participate in an Amazon e-book giveaway that generated more than fifteen thousand downloads in less than a day and drove a significant jump in sales momentum. I also experimented with Facebook ads, which did not pay back the investment in terms of sales. The most effective thing I did was to focus on e-books and Amazon. Controversy aside, Amazon is by far the most important site for e-book sales, and I suggest to all self-publishers that they should not only have an online strategy, but also an Amazon strategy.

Keating: I had modest expectations, as I knew going in that Plain View Press had limited marketing capability. Then the publisher died, throwing the press into turmoil from which it is valiantly recovering. So I’m thrilled that ten months out, Layla is still selling, which I assume means it’s being hand-sold. Sales are actually picking up, and Layla was Plain View’s top seller for 2011. My wildest dream was to sell a thousand books the first year, and it looks like that just might happen. My publisher put out an e-book version of the book recently, so I look forward to taking Michelle’s advice about e-book strategy. 

NEW MEDIA

Toth: Part of the approach my publicist and I agreed on was for me to blog and speak on self-publishing, both because of the momentum of the self-publishing path and because I have a business background. It’s been gratifying to help empower authors by spreading the word about independent publishing, but such exposure does not necessarily translate to book sales. I also put up a Facebook page and did updates when I felt there was real news, believing that readers don’t need more than a couple of reminders to know if they want to buy your book. Mostly, though, I’ve reassessed the trade-off of taking time away from writing my second novel and developing the (sixoneseven) books platform, now structured as a micro press that has published three additional authors—two novelists, one memoirist—and counting. While I appreciate the value of social media, I think the best way to achieve my creative goals is to write and publish more books—of my own, and of other writers!  

Keating: I dove into social media feet first (as in, less brain) and tried everything: Facebook, Twitter, Gather, Goodreads, LibraryThing, She Writes, and Red Room. This was SM—as in sadomasochistic, not social media—overkill. Like a bee amid flowers, I flitted from one site to the next, sipping nectar but producing only exhaustion. But gradually I began to make meaningful connections and tap into a wealth of useful information. And I got a real charge when I put an invitation on She Writes to anyone who lived in a town where I was giving a reading and didn’t know a soul, and a blogger and short story writer showed up! There’s no magic about social media. Just as with connections in the real world, you can’t expect tangible results without a significant investment of quality time.

Black: I’m no good at coming up with real-time 140-character-long observations that would be worth anyone’s attention. My publisher requested that I join Facebook, and I did; but I’m not on Twitter and I’m only minimally on Goodreads. Instead of putting my time into those venues, I tried to continue to write. I wrote a piece for Writer’s Digest about how I wished my dad could read my book, an essay for Narrative Magazine about why I write at night, and I published a new piece of fiction in One Story. I also told a couple of stories onstage for the Moth. The Twitterverse serves a lot of people well, but I think you should play to your strengths. If you’re a fish, don’t try to ride a bike.

LESSONS LEARNED

Keating: Readings not only helped me get past my shyness but also brought me back to my reason for writing in the first place. At a book group in Staten Island, New York, I had the overpowering experience of listening to women quote favorite lines from Layla and describe the metaphors that moved them. There’s nothing more rewarding than that, no matter which path takes you there. But while I’m thrilled I seized the reins by going with a small press, I learned that I don’t have Michelle’s energy and entrepreneurial savvy for DIY. I think it’s really tough to find your audience without adequate sales-and-marketing muscle. So for my new book, which aims for a more commercial audience than Layla, it looks like I’ll be shopping for an agent.

Toth: I’m not at all shy, but I still find self-promotion uncomfortable. One trick that helped me was to separate myself a bit from my book: I talked about what was happening for my character Annie, not myself. I rallied family and friends to join “Team Annie” to help in various promotional activities. And I surrounded myself with supportive writer friends who would understand the unique challenges of willingly subjecting yourself to public judgment and loss of privacy.

Black: It’s possible to promote yourself too much, and I think a lot of first-time authors do themselves a disservice by misusing the megaphone. Yes, a lot of book publicity falls on our shoulders these days, whether you’re with a big house, self-publishing, or somewhere in between. But the injunction “Buy my book” never works. It’s like being on a date and being told, “Like me.” If you have interesting things to say, if you make people laugh or make them curious to learn more about you, buying your book will be a natural consequence. If someone else’s book really wows me, I might make a public fuss about it. But I don’t think the most effective marketing always uses the front door.

SURPRISE, SURPRISE

Toth: My surprises weren’t all specific to my path, but there were several of them nonetheless:

1. I didn’t expect Annie to resonate as much with men as it has, and they’ve provided some of the most illuminating feedback.

2. An editor from a traditional publisher contacted me, having discovered Annie as part of the Amazon contest, and asked to see my next manuscript.

3. Despite my all-digital strategy, I started getting multiple purchase orders, which seemed to have been triggered by the Library Journal review. Suddenly, I became the shipping department I never thought I’d have: packaging and shipping paper books while calculating discounts and sending invoices.

4. I was bemused when some people I gave books to—in the unspoken hope they would provide positive word of mouth to others—made a habit of enthusiastically loaning the book out rather than encouraging people to purchase a copy!

5. If you write in the first person, and borrow anything from your real life, people will assume everything you’ve written is autobiographical.

Black: I need to say an amen to Michelle’s last point. There is so much in these stories that’s true, and so many people who were able to recognize it as true, that they sometimes imagined it’s all true. I had a friend who, after reading a story about a college student who performs a kind of striptease for a homeless man, tried to divine if this was something I’d actually done. When my own mother first read a story about the summer we lost one of my sisters up at Lake Winnipesaukee, she was puzzled by the ending. “That’s not the way it happened,” she said. I had to remind her that this was fiction, not memoir. I got a more troubling surprise when two friends stopped speaking to me because I’d forgotten to put them in the acknowledgments. And I had an ex-boyfriend request that I write a sequel to the story about a threesome—not because he wanted to read the sex scene, but because he disagreed with my ideas about nonpossessive love and wanted to see them challenged.

Keating: My narrator is twenty-two years old, so I thought I’d escape the question of autobiography. No such luck. People ask in hushed voices if I know any real fugitives like those in the book—or perhaps wonder if I am one! But most surprising for me has been how Layla has been perceived. Because editors in mainstream houses felt the novel wasn’t terribly commercial, I’d internalized the perception that it had limited appeal, especially given the political issues it raises. So I’ve been surprised by how strong the emotional response has been. I’d hoped the novel would resonate with people who lived through the 1960s, but it seems to strike more of a nerve with young people and parents in terms of their relationships with each other. A woman I had never spoken to rushed over to give me a hug and thank me for bringing her and her daughter together. I now see my own novel in a completely different light.

Alethea Black is the author of the short story collection I Knew You’d Be Lovely, published by Broadway Books in July 2011.

Céline Keating is the author of the novel Layla, published by Plain View Press in June 2011. She is an editorial associate at Hanging Loose Press.

Michelle Toth is the author of the novel Annie Begins, published in March 2011 as the first title from (sixoneseven) books, an independent publishing company that she founded. Toth is a member of the board of directors of the literary nonprofit organization Grub Street.

Decisions, Decisions: Three Paths to Publication

A Day in the Life of a Book Editor: Caroline Bleeke of Flatiron Books

by

Michael Bourne

September/October 2018
8.15.18
In Print and Online

Before he got the call from Flatiron Books editor Caroline Bleeke, Neel Patel had spent thirteen years struggling to find success as a writer. Like many aspiring writers, Patel, an Indian American doctor’s son from Champaign, Illinois, had bounced around the job market, working first at Nordstrom, then in an accounting office, while filling his hard drive with unpublished novels and stories.

Finally, in early 2017, Patel finished a collection of stories, If You See Me, Don’t Say Hi, and landed a New York literary agent, Jenni Ferrari-Adler at Union Literary. Not long after he signed with Ferrari-Adler, Patel’s collection, along with fifty pages of a novel-in-progress, landed on Bleeke’s desk. A second, more established editor at another house was also interested in Patel’s work, but when he spoke to Bleeke on the telephone, Patel felt an instant connection. “She’s young,” he says. “She just gets it. We had a great conversation. We have similar tastes. It felt like talking to a friend.”

All aspiring writers dream of one day picking up the phone and finding themselves talking to an editor at a New York publishing house who shares their vision and wants to publish their work. What many writers may not know, however, are the myriad decisions an editor has to make before placing that call and all the tasks, large and small, the editor has to accomplish to shepherd a writer’s work toward publication.

So that we might shed light on the work editors do—much of it invisible to writers and the reading public—Bleeke agreed to let me follow her around for a day this spring, sitting in on staff meetings, listening to her handle queries from colleagues, and looking over her shoulder as she scrolled through an Excel spreadsheet of submitted manuscripts. 

At thirty, Bleeke (pronounced BLAKE-ee) was promoted last year from the associate ranks to become a full-fledged editor, publishing five to six books a year at Flatiron, an imprint of Macmillan, one of the so-called Big Five publishing conglomerates. Named for the iconic wedge-shaped Flatiron Building in Manhattan, where it has its offices, Flatiron Books is itself quite new, having launched five years ago with eight employees, producing two books a month. Since then the imprint has tripled its staff and now produces about fifty books a year. 

Our day begins socially, with a meeting in Bleeke’s sun-filled office overlooking Madison Square Park with Carole Saudejaud, a rights director at the French publishing house Éditions Fayard. For a half hour the two women engage in a delicate dance, mixing talk of sales figures and publishing-industry realities with more informal asides about favorite books and authors. The vibe is relaxed, but this is a business meeting: Saudejaud is here to gauge Flatiron’s interest in publishing English-language editions of Fayard’s books, and Bleeke wants to know if Fayard has any books that might fit her list.

Flatiron publicity manager Amelia Possanza (left) meets with editor Caroline Bleeke to discuss submissions.

 

After politely passing on a pair of nonfiction titles, Bleeke brightens when Saudejaud mentions two French novels, one of which, Au petit bonheur la chance! (“Leave It Up to Chance!”) by Aurélie Valognes, has sold 120,000 copies in France since it was published in March. “I would love to take a look at that,” Bleeke says enthusiastically.

This reaction, I will come to see, is vintage Bleeke. Eight years out of Harvard, where she made Phi Beta Kappa, Bleeke exudes the faintly wonkish literary zeal of an eternal English major who has landed her dream job of talking about books all day. A native of St. Louis, she retains a slight Midwestern reserve, but one senses that behind this outward modesty there burns an abiding ambition, a quiet relentlessness that she channels into her work on behalf of her authors.

The brief meeting with Saudejaud illustrates a crucial point about the life of a New York book editor, which is how intensely social the job is. Bleeke, like most editors, does little editing or reading of manuscripts in the office. Nearly all that work—and there is a staggering amount of it—gets done at night and on weekends. “A lot of the day is responding to e-mails,” she says. “It’s going to meetings. It’s talking to colleagues about various projects. It’s usually not reading unless I have a submission in that sounds exciting and that I want to read right away.”

This is borne out even on a day when Bleeke and her colleagues are bending their schedules to accommodate a reporter in her office asking questions. After the meeting with the French rights editor, we troop over to the conference area to sit in on a marketing meeting for one of Bleeke’s titles, British author Anne Youngson’s debut novel, Meet Me at the Museum, due out in August, before heading upstairs to a larger conference room for a get-to-know-you lunch with agents from the DeFiore and Company literary agency. Even late in the afternoon, with her office door shut, Bleeke has to pause frequently to answer knocking and check the caller ID on her ringing phone. 

When I leave, she says, she’ll be heading to an industry cocktail party. The following evening, she has two events, a cocktail party and then a dinner for an editor visiting from Britain. The next week, when the annual Book Expo America takes over the Jacob Javits Center on the far west side of Manhattan, Bleeke will attend work-related events every night of the week.

“That’s pretty standard,” she says. “There are a lot of evening events related to publishing, whether it’s a reading by one of my authors or a friend’s author or various parties and fundraisers.”

This ceaseless stream of e-mails and telephone calls and cocktail parties is not idle socializing, though. It’s how business gets done in mainstream publishing, which despite its location amid the skyscrapers of Manhattan remains very much a small-town enterprise in which people know one another and relationships are everything.

Take one of the most central tasks of an editor’s working life: reading submissions. Each week, Bleeke estimates, she receives between five and ten manuscripts from agents. (Flatiron doesn’t accept submissions from writers without literary agents). That works out to between 260 and 520 manuscripts a year, from which Bleeke will publish just a half dozen books.

Each submission arrives with a pitch, a brief description of the book and its author, typically delivered first in a phone call from the author’s agent and later followed up with a longer pitch e-mail appended to the manuscript. But if Bleeke is doing her job right, the manuscript also arrives with an invaluable trove of social information, built up through years of lunches and phone calls, about the agent’s reputation for finding talented authors and the depth of the agent’s understanding of the books Bleeke is seeking.

With Youngson’s Meet Me at the Museum, for instance, the initial pitch came from Sally Wofford-Girand, also an agent at Union Literary, whom Bleeke knows from her apprentice years in publishing. In addition, Youngson is represented in England by an agent at the prestigious London literary agency of Greene & Heaton, and the British edition of the novel was acquired by an editor Bleeke admires at Doubleday U.K.

None of this ensured that Bleeke would love Youngson’s novel, but the imprimatur of these publishing professionals she knows and admires no doubt shaped how she approached the book. “These are people who have a proven track record, who I know, whose taste I trust, so yeah, it helps,” she says. “I’m definitely more likely to read a submission quickly from an agent I know, who I’ve had a lot of conversations with, and who knows my taste, than from someone who I haven’t worked with in the past or is relatively unknown to me.”

Of course Bleeke, who has been at Flatiron since only 2014 and an editor focusing solely on her own list for less than a year, can’t possibly have deep professional relationships with every agent who sends her a manuscript, so nearly every element of her interactions with agents, including the rejection letter itself, is aimed at strengthening those relationships.

In roughly half the submissions she reads, Bleeke says she knows within the first five pages that a book isn’t for her. “But I don’t just read those five pages,” she says. “I would then read more because I want to be able to explain why this isn’t right for me. Every rejection is a way for the agent to get to know more about my taste. It’s an opportunity for me to explain what I’m looking for, and what I’m not looking for, so I want to have read enough to be able to articulate even if it’s in a very general way why this isn’t right for me.”

Caroline Bleeke

(Credit: Michel Leroy)

Occasionally, when Bleeke thinks a writer is uncommonly talented or she wants to signal that she would be open to a revised draft, she’ll offer the writer constructive criticism, but most of the time rejection letters are principally communications between herself and the agent, written with an eye toward making their next interaction more productive.

Conversely, when Bleeke likes a book, she knows that very quickly too. “I know probably within the first few pages if I’m reading something amazing,” she says. “As I continue reading, I’m thinking about things like, ‘How original is this story?’ ‘How fresh are these characters?’ ‘Is this author leaning too hard on tropes, or does this feel authentic and real and different?’ I’m thinking about how it would fit on our list.”

For Bleeke a novel’s freshness encompasses more than just its plot and characters. Who the author is matters to her too. Starting with her first acquisition at Flatiron, Anuk Arudpragasam’s The Story of a Brief Marriage (2016), set in war-ravaged Sri Lanka, Bleeke has championed the work of writers of color. This is in part a matter of political conviction. Bleeke is acutely aware of the glaring lack of diversity in the publishing industry—a 2016 Publishers Weekly survey found 87 percent of employees were white—and is passionate in her belief that editors need to actively seek out underrepresented voices.

But, she says, she is also naturally drawn to characters and authors from backgrounds different from her own. “The books that I love, the books that move me, are books that expand my world in some way, that make me more empathetic, that introduce me to worlds and characters that I don’t know but that still have this deep emotional resonance for me,” she says. “In a lot of cases, some of the most exciting, fresh fiction is coming from these writers because they just hadn’t been published before.”

When she comes across a manuscript she thinks she might want to take on, Bleeke passes it around to her colleagues at Flatiron, both to check her own first impression and to gauge the institutional enthusiasm for the author’s work. At the most practical level, she has to get the approval of Amy Einhorn, Flatiron’s executive vice president and publisher, who must sign off on any contract Bleeke offers to an author. But Bleeke will also pass along manuscripts to colleagues like publicity manager Amelia Possanza to get Possanza’s answers, “from a publicity standpoint,” to questions like “Do you think this could get review attention?” and “Do you think this author would be interesting for profiles?”

If a submission survives this round of second reads, Bleeke will call up the author, in part to discuss the book and any major changes that might need to be made, but also just to get a feel for who the author is and how well they might work together.

“I think I have a tendency to fall in love with my authors on the phone,” Bleeke says. “Amy always teases me about it. I’ll run into her office after a phone call and I’ll be sort of grinning from ear to ear, and she’ll say, ‘You fell in love again, didn’t you?’”

If Bleeke and the author do indeed click, she’ll draw up a profit-and-loss statement, or P&L, to make a case for the book’s commercial viability. A P&L typically lists a number of recently published books similar to the one an editor wants to buy and uses the sales records of these “comp titles” to predict how well the unpublished book might do. A well-crafted P&L can be useful for books in predictable categories like cookbooks or for an author with a lengthy sales record, but because Bleeke is still a young editor and is therefore publishing mostly debut novels by unknown writers, the P&Ls she creates are, by her own admission, far less predictive.

“It’s guesswork,” she says. “Sometimes it’s very optimistic guesswork, but you really, really believe in the book, you really want it, so you’re going to take a flier, and who knows, maybe you’ll get the golden ticket and the book will work beyond anyone’s expectation.”

Then, too, by signing young, unheralded authors writing their debut novels, Bleeke is hoping to get in on the ground floor with a future best-selling writer who might bring profit and prestige to Flatiron two or three books down the line.

If Bleeke can convince Einhorn that the acquisition makes sense and best any offers the writer may have from other editors, she’ll sign up the author for Flatiron. But while the writer is busy trading party-popper emojis with her agent and posting photos of her book contract on Instagram, Bleeke’s real work as an editor is only getting started.

It’s rare, she says, for her to take on a book she sees as seriously flawed, but she has no compunction about suggesting changes when they’re needed. With If You See Me, Don’t Say Hi, for instance, Bleeke urged Patel to cut one of the original stories and edited the drafts of two new stories he wrote to replace it. These two stories now close out the collection and are among its most assured and ambitious, a fact Patel credits to Bleeke’s editorial acumen. “The difference between writing on my own and writing with an editor now, it’s incredible,” he says. “I was like, where was she my whole life when I was trying to write stories and it would take me a year to write something?”

Even as she’s editing the manuscript and working with Flatiron’s art director, Keith Hayes, to design an eye-catching cover (see “The Aha! Moment,” on page 80) Bleeke is riding herd on Flatiron’s marketing and sales campaign, pitching the book to Macmillan’s internal sales force, and hunting down blurbs from authors, librarians, and other literary tastemakers. As an editor, she explains, “You’re the main supporter of this book. You’re the book’s person. There are a lot of people involved, but the first job of the editor is to make your own enthusiasm contagious. You want to get everybody just as excited as you are.”

The closer a book comes to publication, the more Bleeke relies on publicity staffers like Possanza. Meet Me at the Museum, the subject of the morning marketing meeting, would seem at first a daunting publicity task. For one thing, the novel’s author, Anne Youngson, who is seventy and started writing seriously after taking early retirement from a career in the British auto business, is an unknown quantity to American readers. Then there’s the book itself, a deft but slow-building epistolary novel chronicling a chaste love affair between a British farm wife and a Danish museum curator.

As Bleeke and Possanza speak, it’s clear they plan to put these very elements at the center of their publicity push. They seem genuinely charmed by Youngson’s unconventional path to publication and have set up a series of private events to give the author a chance to introduce herself and offer insights about her transition from business executive to published novelist to a select audience of journalists and booksellers.

Possanza, meanwhile, has been scouring the web for readers who might be drawn to the novel’s stylistic elements to help drum up prepublication buzz. “Some people are really obsessed with epistolary novels, and we can go on the Internet and see that, ‘Oh my God, this person has reviewed three epistolary novels,’ so maybe they want another one,” Possanza says. “Some people are really obsessed with Seamus Heaney, whose poem plays a role in the book.”

To augment this publicity and marketing push, Bleeke has sent, by her estimation, fifty handwritten notes to librarians and booksellers touting Meet Me at the Museum. (She did the same for Neel Patel’s story collection, which came out in July, a month before Meet Me at the Museum.) This is a tremendous amount of work, with uncertain returns, but Bleeke sees these notes as a way to talk up her titles while building yet another web of social connection, this time to the people who are ultimately responsible for putting the books she edits into the hands of readers.

“There is so much I do where I have no idea whether this is making any kind of difference, but this is a very concrete thing I can do,” she says. “I can reach out to this person. I can open a line of communication. I can introduce them to this book, and in the case of Meet Me at the Museum, people really responded to it and loved it.”

Bleeke declines to discuss the subject of her annual pay, but the website Glassdoor estimates that Macmillan pays editors at her level an average of about $56,000 a year. Given Bleeke’s Ivy League degree, the hours she puts in at the office and on nights and weekends, and the fact that she lives in one of the world’s most expensive cities, it’s fair to say she isn’t in it for the money.

“To survive in this industry you have to be an eternal optimist,” she says. “You have to still feel the same rush from discovering a great new voice that you felt when you were a twenty-three-year-old assistant. You need to somehow maintain that passion for what you’re doing and be willing to make it a huge part of your life and realize that you’re probably going to struggle with work-life balance your entire career, but you’re doing what you love.” 

 

Michael Bourne is a contributing editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.

Caroline Bleeke

(Credit: Michel Leroy)

The Business of Relationships: How Authors, Agents, Editors, Booksellers, and Publicists Work Together to Reach Readers
A Thing Meant to Be: The Work of a Book Editor

Agents & Editors: Dawn Davis

by

Michael Szczerban

September/October 2015
8.19.15
In Print and Online

The business of books is full of puzzles, and this is one of them: How do you reduce an entire lifetime of interests into a single sound bite? Editors are often asked what kind of books we are looking for by writers we meet at conferences, agents we’re seeing for lunch, distant relatives over the holidays. It’s a simple question that deserves a straightforward response, but I always have trouble answering in a quick sentence or two. As far as I can tell, the books I love best might have only one thing in common: me.

Some editors readily commit to a single genre, such as business or crime fiction or food, but I am most curious about those who hopscotch across the world of books to find readers of all kinds.

Editor and publisher Dawn Davis has that kind of roving interest and range. After attending Stanford University, she worked at an investment bank and won a scholarship to study in Nigeria. A chance meeting at a party upon her return led to a job assisting André Schiffrin at the New Press, followed by stints at Vintage Books and HarperCollins, where she became the publisher of Amistad. While at HarperCollins, Davis edited Edward P. Jones’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Known World; Steve Harvey’s best-selling Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man; Chris Gardner’s The Pursuit of Happyness; and Southern Cross the Dog by Bill Cheng, as well as a wide variety of other books.

In 2013, when Davis started a new imprint at Atria, a division of Simon & Schuster, she had to decide what to call it. In other words, she had to reduce her entire lifetime of interests into just one name. She settled on 37 INK, drawing inspiration from the line of latitude that connects California, Italy, and Africa.

Before our interview began in earnest, our small talk meandered to a shared interest in food and cooking, and Davis showed me a copy of a book she had written for Penguin fifteen years ago: If You Can Stand the Heat: Tales From Chefs and Restaurateurs.

I was going to ask you about this book!
There’s a story. While I was researching it, my friend Webb Stone said, “If you’re going to write about food, you have to meet this guy named Anthony Bourdain.” This was pre-Kitchen Confidential, so he was not yet famous. I interviewed him, and he said, “You can’t just write about it. You have to do it.” So I worked in his kitchen. Friday nights I would leave work around five o’clock. I’d work with him from five-thirty to ten, and hang out with his crew of crazy people afterward, and I had the time of my life.

I read somewhere that you once thought about becoming a chef. I once thought about it too. How serious were you?
At the time, I had left Wall Street, where I had worked for two years, and gone to work at the New Press, which was a nonprofit. I was making no money, and I couldn’t afford the things I used to be able to afford on an expense account. I had to figure out a lot on my own. I was always interested in food, and had friends who were too. After work we would talk about it, but it was a fleeting notion. The idea of turning a hobby into a career—I was already doing that with publishing.

I thought we might be romanticizing the notion of opening a restaurant—that it had to be a lot harder than we thought. So I talked to people to see what was really involved, and those conversations turned into a book.

Tell me about the name of your imprint, 37 INK.
I’m from Southern California, and I went to school in Northern California, so I claim the whole state from the desert to the wine country. My maternal grandmother is from Italy, and I’ve been many times and I love it—as of course most people do. And I’m African American, so I have Africa in my family heritage as well. The 37th parallel of latitude connects all three of these places that are near and dear to my heart, and mapped who I was without using my name.

Why not call your imprint Dawn Davis Books?
I’ll always want it to be about the authors, and I just wasn’t comfortable with that. But I understand why other people use their names; it’s easier. Once the lawyer tells you for the fifth time, “No, that name is taken,” you think, “Okay, I’ll use my own name.” I initially thought of Studio 37, but that was taken. It’s hard to come up with something original.

Where in southern California did you grow up, and what was it like?
I grew up in Los Angeles. Not Malibu, not the ’hood, not the Valley. Just real Los Angeles. It was a great place to grow up. I have friends now who say they’d never raise children there, because of the pressure to look or act a certain way. But I had a fantastic, almost idyllic childhood. I went to an all-girl high school and loved it.

What did your parents do?
My mom was a hospital administrator and my father managed a store. They were working class parents, but I didn’t know that. I just knew I had great friends and a great family, and went on lots of trips to the library every week with my mother. It was a normal American childhood. But I didn’t have a lot of exposure to people who were in publishing.

What were your aspirations growing up, and how did you make your way to Stanford?
When you’re from California, you’re told to apply to one Cal State school and one UC school, and depending on your GPA, to apply elsewhere. I didn’t want to stay in Los Angeles. I’m an only child, and my mom would’ve loved nothing better, but I was ready to spread my wings. Junior year of high school, I came to New York with three friends. We got rained on at a Diana Ross concert in Central Park, we were pickpocketed, and I left saying, “I can’t wait to move here!” I loved it.

I got into Stanford and UC Berkeley, but also Columbia. I wanted to come to New York, but my mom said, “Do me a favor. Stay in California. If you still love New York it’ll be waiting for you when you finish college.” And I did. I say I graduated on Saturday and had an apartment in New York by Tuesday.

My aspiration was about place, not profession. I didn’t know in college what I wanted to do. I studied international relations; Condoleezza Rice became a bigwig in the department. But to satisfy the requirements, I would take courses like The Russian Novel, because they dealt with something outside of America. I’d take economics, and then Literature of the Caribbean. Later, on Wall Street, I worked in the international division.

This was at Credit Suisse?
It was actually Credit Suisse First Boston—and just First Boston when I started, before they merged. During my two-year program there, I met someone who encouraged me to apply for a Rotary scholarship to study abroad. I wanted to study in Nigeria, where Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, and so many of the greats had lived. Three years after college I was living in Nigeria. It was extraordinary, but it wasn’t easy.

What was hard about that time?
I had romanticized Africa. In many ways Nigeria is fantastic. They’ve created some of the most beautiful art, theater, literature. But to be twenty-two or twenty-three there, having arrived without knowing a soul? It was tough. My mom said the most freeing thing: “If you come back, it doesn’t mean you’re a failure.” With that, I could take each day as it came and started enjoying myself.

Were you able to make excursions, or were you just studying all the time?
It was a lot of independent study. I would go to the library and assign myself books, and read them. There were often strikes, which is very much part of the African way of protest. There were strikes because the teachers weren’t making enough money, because there was no paper or books. Oftentimes there weren’t even classes. The real education was self-imposed, and being with the friends I made, seeing how they lived, how they often made something out of nothing. I met Soyinka’s brother, which was fascinating.

Not to be grandiose, but did you go to Nigeria and find yourself?
I think that’s right. And I met a publisher on the plane there, who published the African Writers Series with Heinemann. I said, “You get paid to read?” I could not believe it. That meeting triggered the notion that I could aspire to this profession.

When I got back from Africa, I was invited to a party where I met someone who knew André Schiffrin—who had just left Random House to start the New Press. I kept talking and talking to this person about publishing until I was introduced to André. I interviewed with him, and he hired me on the spot. Two editors had come with him from Pantheon: Diane Wachtell and David Sternbach. I was the first non-Pantheon hire, and I was to be his assistant.

What was it like?
It was fantastic, because he would create books on the fly. He would walk through Central Park dictating letters to people like Noam Chomsky, saying, “I know that you want to do X and Y, but I was thinking that we should also think about this other idea.” I would transcribe it all using that old machine, the Dictaphone with the foot pedal. I worked there for about five years. For two to three of those years I was his assistant. He let me acquire early on, so I received a 360-degree education.

What was one of those first books?
The first book I acquired was right after the Korean riots in Los Angeles, when there was tension in the Korean American community and the black community. I went to a discussion about it, and everybody was given exactly six minutes to talk before being cut off by the moderator. But there was one woman who was so spectacularly interesting that if the moderator had cut her off I think he would’ve been attacked. I told André about her, and he said, “You’ll find that there are very few people who can command a room like that, and who have something to say. You should reach out to her.”

That’s the best advice a young editor could have received.
The absolute best. Her name was Elaine Kim, and she was a professor and dean at Berkeley. I went out there, and she picked me up from the airport. She threw a Bob Marley box set into the backseat as I jumped in, and I thought, “I’m going to like her!” Her book was called East to America: Korean American Life Stories, and it was a book of oral histories about the immigration experiences of Korean Americans. They had been portrayed in a uniform way in the media but in fact their stories are very complex, nuanced, and different.

At the New Press I also worked with our freelance production person, so I got to know about that side of the business: paper weight and photos and the cost of adding various bells and whistles to a book. I was also the liaison with our freelance publicist, and learned a little bit about putting a press release together. It was an education that is hard to get in a big publishing house, working in just one department.

Why did you leave the New Press?
Ultimately, I was doing a lot of things. When I became an editor I also started selling our subsidiary rights. I had a lot on my plate, but I was young, and it was fun. I was working with a small, committed group of intellectuals. It felt a little bit like graduate school crossed with a start-up: Every day brought something different and interesting.

I got to know some of the other editors who were buying our paperback rights. One of them was Robin Desser, who suggested that I meet Marty Asher at Vintage when she was promoted to Knopf. One thing led to another, and I got an offer from Vintage. Marty took a chance on me and became a mentor.

What did you learn at Vintage?
I learned reprint publishing. There is less of that now because of e-books, but back in the day I watched Cold Mountain go from a well-reviewed, successful hardcover to a blowout paperback success, and learned how it was done. I learned to trust my instincts, because we read so broadly, and also because we would read things in submission and watch them go from submission to hardcover to paperback. Sometimes there were lots of oohs and aahs, with people saying a book was going to be the next best thing, and you could watch, as you planned the paperback publication, what did or didn’t happen. I learned how many books are published each year, versus how many of them have the tools for a successful paperback launch. I learned how to recognize good writing and good publication.

Tell me about that time in publishing, when books that sold decently in hardcover could explode in paperback. How did that work?
Back when I was a paperback editor, and we’re talking in 1996 or ’97, there was a certain number that the hardcover had to sell before we could do anything with it. We couldn’t make a huge success out of 10,000 hardcover sales. But if a book had sold 40,000 to 50,000 copies, and it had great reviews and bookseller enthusiasm, we could work with it. You work from that base of readers in hardcover; they are like foot soldiers spreading the word. We could rejacket it, make great use of the quotes, maybe even solicit new quotes. You could just act as if the hardcover publication was one thing, and that you were going to go in a new direction.

Publishing a book in paperback reveals a lot about what every editor does—which is not just laboring over sentences, but figuring out how to make people pay attention to them.
Right. It all starts with the book. The book does have to deliver. Then, with Vintage, the track record was such that if we said, “This is our next Cold Mountain,” the machine was primed to listen. You have to do that selectively, but with a book where there is demonstrable interest already, with a nice base of readers and great review attention, you can get people to feel that they’re hearing about the book everywhere. Some prize attention always helps, but it wasn’t necessary. The big ones at the time were The Perfect Storm, A Civil Action, Cold Mountain.

You learned the mechanics of publishing at the New Press, and how to make a book a big commercial success at Vintage.
I also learned from André how to be entrepreneurial about creating books. I have to give him credit for that, because he did so much of that himself. From East to America and others, I learned how not to just sit and wait. With a small budget, we weren’t going to have all the agents calling, and I learned how to come up with book ideas of my own. That serves me well now—being entrepreneurial with my books, such as Steve Harvey or The Butler.

Another example is that when I had a sense that Obama was going to win the 2008 campaign, before it was obvious, I thought it was going to be historic for a community. Maybe for all Americans, but certainly for black Americans. I wanted to do a book called The Historic Campaign in Photographs. Initially the sales department said, “No, we don’t think so.” But the minute it became obvious that he was going to win, they suddenly wanted to. I learned that from André—to come up with your own books and not always wait for them to arrive in your inbox.

Ideas have to come from somewhere, so why not from you?
Right. The truth is, we spend so much of our time advocating internally for our books, making sure we have the right cover, the right subtitle, filling out forms and so forth, that we often don’t have time to be entrepreneurial. But when a moment of clarity comes, it’s fun to pursue it or to brainstorm with an agent about a client whose writing you really like.

Were you able to do that at Vintage?
I was primarily doing reprints and a few hardcovers at Pantheon, which were fun, but I didn’t come up with my own books there.

Was there a moment when you knew that you had found the right profession?
I’ve never really looked back since typing André’s letters. We get to do what we love, we get paid to do it, we get to champion works that we believe in, and even our worst days are, I’m sure, better than 95 percent of the working world’s.

Someone asked me the other day, “Do you still love it?” We were away for a weekend and I was working. I do. There are days when you want to pull your hair out. But I’ve always known how lucky I am to have this as a profession, and it’s something I don’t take for granted.

Would you tell me more about the challenging parts of your job? I ask on behalf of young people getting into the business. It’s not always easy.
Well, I hate to say it, but I’ve been riding a magic carpet. But sure, there are hard parts. Relative to peers who take jobs in tech or finance or law, you don’t make that much money. That’s romantic in the beginning, but it’s harder as you get older. It’s also hard if you want an outside life, because this work does encroach on your weekends, and on your vacations. And then working on books you’ve inherited and aren’t passionate about is really tough. Passion is what makes fighting for a book worthwhile, and frankly what makes it seem less like a fight.

You can feel caught in the weeds when you have to let people know you can read and advocate outside of your own background. To have people only think of you for African American projects—or, if you’re Latino, to only be thought of for Latino culture–based projects—that can be disappointing and exhausting. I feel that’s something I’ll always have to navigate. Some agents get it right away and have always gotten it, and others—well, maybe they do, maybe they don’t.

Then there are the books that you’re convinced are worthy of more attention than they received—and other books that have not been written with a golden pen, but do go on to be huge successes. You think, “Why didn’t my book get a fraction of that? It’s just as beautiful and just as moving, and the author is just as worthy!” We all go through that.

Having been the editorial director and publisher of Amistad for twelve years, I can say it’s tough watching where some books get shelved, or how a universal story can be bought only for African American accounts. When I published The Pursuit of Happyness, I begged for the Harper sales team—which was very receptive—to see it as a rags-to-riches story that is at the cornerstone of what Americans want to believe about ourselves, that you can pull yourself up by your own bootstraps. I wanted to publish it like that, and not like some book that you have to go to the basement to find in a dusty corner in the African American section. That’s been a constant challenge.

How did you land at Amistad?
I got the call when I was an executive editor at Vintage, and at first I said no. I was working on all kinds of books and didn’t want to be pigeonholed into doing exclusively African American content. I always advocated for it, I always published it, but I didn’t want to be limited to it. And they said, “Well, you can also be executive editor at HarperCollins, and you can do whatever you want to do there.” And I said, “But I really like paperback publishing, too.” They said, “You can also be our reprint manager.” I was so happy and so comfortable at Vintage, and I liked my colleagues and loved my authors. But I had run out of excuses. I thought, “They’re giving you everything you say you want, so you should say yes.”

It sounds like you accepted three jobs at once. How did that sort out?
At Amistad I inherited a bit of a mess and I had a lot of work to do. By the end of the first two years, I’d let the reprint piece go. I hung on to the executive editor piece, which was great, because I got to see all kinds of proposals and to work with my colleagues at Harper, but I spent most of my energy making Amistad a destination for authors and their books.

How did you set about achieving that goal?
I tried to take everything I learned from watching the people at Knopf and Vintage publish, and apply it to books about the black diaspora. I had authors from the Caribbean, black Americans, white authors writing about the black experience. I wanted to publish quality literature in a fine and, if applicable, commercial way. I wanted to bring prestige to the list.

People kept telling me, “You’re going to do street fiction, because it’s so commercial,” and I thought, “Nope.” Harper gave me freedom to publish books that I loved and that interested me. It helped that the first couple books that I signed up had some success. One of them, Austin Clarke’s The Polished Hoe, won the Giller Prize in Canada and became a Pennie’s Pick, which was strange but lovely.

You’re referring to Pennie Clark Ianniciello, the book buyer at Costco?
Yes. And then I published this young writer named William Henry Lewis, whose book I Got Somebody in Staunton was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway award. Early on we had books that people were paying attention to. I wanted review attention. I wanted agents to see us as a destination. And we were able to do that. Then, of course, there was The Known World. I got there in late 2001 and then we published that book in 2003.

What was it like working with Edward P. Jones?
It was a dream. The manuscript came in and it was nearly fully formed. He’s a beautiful writer and he knows his craft. He’s receptive to discussion around small points, but he’s very much in command of what he does. It was a privilege.

I remember when I first read The Known World. I was at a friend’s weekend house sitting outside, and I knew within the first five sentences that I was in the hands of a master. I thought it was my responsibility to take care of it, and that it would be an honor to be able to take care of it. And that’s basically what I did.

It’s inspiring when the quality of a book begins to pave its own way.
Yes, it is. It’s the vision of publishing that we all stay in the business for—that the work will speak for itself, and all you have to do is put it in as many hands as possible, so that it can go as far as it’s meant to go. Even the copyeditor said to me, “Thank you for letting us work with this material. I know this will be here long after I’m gone.” How often do you get a note of thanks from the copyeditors, who are overworked and underappreciated? I had support early on, and I had support all the way through.

I didn’t know that I wasn’t supposed to do this, so I went to booksellers I had been friends with for a long time and asked them to give me an early quote about the book. Then I went into a sales conference with those quotes, and told the reps, “This is what your own community has said about this book. I don’t want to hear that it’s a black book. This is a book of the world, for the world. Let’s publish it that way.” That was a real aha moment.

Did you often find it necessary to have that kind of conversation?
My associate publisher and I felt it was important to help the sales reps frame the discussion for their customers—to talk to them about what was more universal and what was more specific to the community. Some books were for a black audience, like one called The Mocha Manual to a Fabulous Pregnancy, for black women who have different health risks in pregnancy. But my sweet spot was publishing black stories that were also universal stories.

I saw a Pew study about reading habits, from 2013, that touched on race. Sixty-seven percent of the Hispanic people surveyed had read a book in the past year, as compared to 76 percent of the white people and 81 percent of the African Americans surveyed. Do you have an opinion about why that diversity of readers isn’t reflected inside publishing houses?
Why are there not more people like me on the other side?

Right: Why might there be a dozen bearded white editors named Michael, and only one black editor named Dawn?
I cannot for the life of me figure that out. I don’t really know what else to say.

There is limited economic and geographic diversity in the industry as well, of course, and there are people who feel alienated just because they didn’t grow up in New York or come from wealth. But racial diversity? There’s even less.
I agree, and of course I might’ve felt some of that isolation you’re describing—even solely in terms of cultural references. If everyone else comes to the table reading the New Yorker, and you’re from L.A. skateboard culture, went to school in Hollywood, and didn’t grow up reading the New Yorker—there can be moments of “Do I belong at the table?” that may keep some people away.

Why aren’t there more people who look like me? Many black women have left and are no longer at a mainstream house. I can think of half a dozen in the past six years. Yes, I felt isolation, but just kind of powered through it. I’ve also had amazing mentors like André, who went out of his way because he thought my perspective would add value, and Marty, and I pay homage to them.

At Amistad I took great pride in knowing that the publisher, the associate publisher, and the publicist were three black women empowering our authors. We loved that.

I’m embarrassed to say it, but I don’t think I know any African American literary agents.
There are not many. Marie Brown has been doing it for a long time. She used to be an editor and she knows both sides. Faith Childs is a former attorney who’s been doing it for decades; she’s outstanding. There’s a young woman named Regina Brooks, who has her own agency called Serendipity. And the late Manie Barron went from sales to editorial to working as an agent. So there have been some, but it’s pathetic.

Sometimes I’ll go out to lunch with an agent and talk about, I don’t know, skiing in Italy. And then the agent will go out with some World War II story where a guy saves the day by skiing across Italy, and say, “Oh, I didn’t think of you.” But that agent will send me a black thing that has nothing to do with anything, except that it’s black. I find that frustrating.

We all get stereotyped, of course. I’m probably more generous about it than not, because otherwise you can let it define you.

What else happened at Amistad?
I was having my two children. I had the affiliation with HarperCollins, but didn’t buy that much for them; the Amistad list and my kids were my full-time thing. Later I moved to Ecco when there was some restructuring at Harper, and I wanted to be aligned with a smaller imprint. I think that with smaller imprints, you have more flexibility to support your authors. If one of the books is a mega-success, you can use that to get other authors in the door, whether it’s co-op spending with bookstores, or publicity or marketing dollars. I felt that it was easier to have those conversations within the context of a smaller imprint. That was in effect for almost two years.

How did you come to start 37 INK?
I’ve always had these great mentors. I started with André, then it was Marty, and then the early team at HarperCollins, where Jane Friedman and Cathy Hemming were very empowering. At Amistad they told me, “This is your ship now. What are you going to do with it?”

Then an opportunity came to work with Judith Curr at Atria. I felt that there were so many changes in the marketplace that I could stay and continue doing what I was doing, or I could go work with someone like Judith, who’s fearless and willing to innovate. I could ride her coattails into this brave new world where people are discovering books through Twitter and other things we don’t know about yet. I could stay put and become rooted in doing things the old way, or I could get excited about new ways to reach readers.

Take Twelve Years a Slave, for instance. I had read that Brad Pitt had wrapped that movie. I’d read about it two years before it finally came out, and I tried to get the official cover for our edition, but they had gone with Penguin. I said to Judith, “We’re not going to get the official one, but I can’t help but feel that this film is going to establish this book as the classic that it should be. I’ve read the book, it’s beautiful, it’s fantastic, it’s eye-opening.” Without blinking an eye, Judith said, “Do an e-book. Don’t charge anything for it, and have a note that says, ‘Learn more about 37 Ink’ in the back.”

We ended up charging 99 cents; if people really want it, they’ll pay, and maybe there’s even a psychological effect that you value things more if you pay for them. We put a beautiful cover on it and got an introduction from one of my Amistad authors, Dolen Perkins-Valdez—and we sold over 200,000 copies. We spread the word about the book—it sheds light on slavery in America, which I find to be important—but it was Judith who said, “Let’s do this.” Even if it were a failure, in Judith’s eye it would still have some value. That’s why I moved.

What else are you excited about?
I published Dear Leader, which points to the breadth I hope to establish for the list. It’s about a North Korean spy who, once he found out the truth about what was happening there, fled to South Korea via China. It’s a story about the North Korean regime, but also a daring escape story and a great way into this puzzling country.

In the pipeline I am particularly excited about Gathering Blossoms Under Fire, the edited journals of Alice Walker. I was thrilled to be able to work with Jan-Philipp Sendker, who wrote a book called The Art of Racing Heartbeats. I’m publishing his new books, which are set in the new China and explore the hidden costs, psychological and otherwise, of all the progress there. 

And I love the author updates I get from the journalist Josh Levin, who is working on a book called The Queen. It’s about a divisive, mythic political figure: the “welfare queen” who dominated so much of the discussion around race and class in the politics of the ’80s.

She was mythic, but not in the way one might predict. She’s proof that truth is stranger than fiction and is one of the most singular and strangely compelling female figures I’ve read about in ages. It’s very dramatic. The author sends me updates from whatever archive he’s buried in and I love it. Did you see it when it was on submission? 

I did.
It’s fantastic. I’m so interested by that particular story, because it reads like Devil in the White City meets Destiny of the Republic. It’s true crime with a pulsating narrative—there’s a serial killer in it—as well as a meditation on race and how it’s all a construct.

Another book I am excited about is Never Caught. It’s the story of Ona Judge, a slave in the household of George Washington. When she ran away from the Washingtons, she chose freedom over an elevated kind of servitude, and though the president knew where she was, and even petitioned the governor of New Hampshire to return her, he was never able to recapture her. People are fascinated by the founding fathers. This doesn’t disappoint. 

What are you doing at 37 INK that’s different from what you did at Amistad?
What I’m doing as an editor and publisher is the same. I am trying to buy stories that I am drawn to and passionate about, because I have to advocate for them from the moment they’re acquired until a year after they’re on the bookshelf. The only thing that has changed is how I interface with the people who are more on the marketing side, being open to their ideas about social media and how we find our readers. But most of my work is the same: editing and making a book the best it can be, and then advocating for it.

What have you learned over the last couple years of running this imprint that you wish you knew earlier? About yourself, your authors, the role of being an editor or publisher?
I’ve learned that despite all the new bells and whistles, there’s no substitute for giving the bookselling community time enough to read a book and get behind it. I was lucky the first book out, with The Butler. I arrived here in April. By July, Wil Haygood and I had a bestseller. It helped that the book was short—under 100 pages of text. People could read it. But for a novel or a grand work of narrative nonfiction, people still need time.

Is there a set of traits common to the most successful people you’ve worked with?
Edward P. Jones is just a beautiful writer, and his success is all about the quality of the writing. Steve Harvey’s one of the hardest-working authors I have ever met, very shrewd, and surrounds himself with shrewd people. He was willing to travel far and work hard to make his books a success. Dolen Perkins-Valdez is very hardworking. She communicated with her audience; no book club was too small. She went to writing programs, conferences, met aspiring writers. She put herself out there and did what we ask authors to do, which is find an audience, communicate with them directly, make them feel like they’re part of your team, and then they help spread the word for you.

Despite all the things that we tell authors to do, there has to be a book that you want to recommend to five other people after you put it down. It starts with the book no matter what. Without that it doesn’t matter how much you tweet. You’ll get one wave of publicity and then it’s over.

The first successes at 37 Ink had a film component to them. Is that something you think about explicitly?
I just got lucky. I had read 12 Years a Slave years before the film came out, so I knew the story. A friend in the film industry saw an early cut and said, “I’s going to win everything.” It was in the public domain and the timing was right. I acted on my instincts.

The Butler was a little bit more of a risk because I signed it up before I’d seen the movie, though I had read the script. I thought the cast was great, and also I saw it as a small metaphorical story about a bigger kind of American journey. One thing that Judith has taught me is that it’s okay to take risks. I’ve really been kind of cautious, and that’s a piece of my education that was missing. Particularly in this environment, you have to try new things.

I used to take everything so personally. If something didn’t work I would be so upset on behalf of my author and on behalf of the imprint. But the old ways will not work anymore.

When you started out, did you ever envision doing diet or self-help books?
Never. But I’ve done the Steve Harvey self-help book, and J. J. Smith’s diet books came to me through him.

I met J. J. last year and thought she was impressive. I wonder what authors of any kind can learn from her success, first as a self-published author and then working with you.
Her story’s interesting. Steve brought her to my attention years ago. She was sick, and traditional medicine wasn’t healing her, so she got credentialed in nutrition. She also trained herself in media—she spent money on herself—which is a good example of an author investing in and believing in herself. I liked her hustle.

I’d had a conversation three or four years ago about her coming in, when she was self-publishing, and she said, “I’m having so much fun on my own. It’s working for me. Why would I give a publisher a share?” And then she got so big that she realized there’s so much that a publisher can do for her, and that she didn’t want to do it all on her own. We could get her into new outlets, and give her the kind of publicity she couldn’t get on her own.

That story reminds me of something else. Every once in awhile I’ll get a letter from someone who will have photocopied a letter that I sent to them, saying, “You reached out to me after I wrote this short story and said, ‘If you ever have something, please be in touch.’ Well, here I am!” Seeing your own letter is like being introduced to your former self. It does pay to be entrepreneurial. Sometimes as editors we are so overwhelmed that we want to reach out to the person who’s written a short story, or want to send a note to someone at a reading we were moved by, but we just never have the time, or we think, “Oh, I could do that, but I’ll never hear from them again.” It’s nice when it comes full circle.

Let’s talk about editing the books you publish, because you’ve done such a range. How do you conceive of your role?
My job as an editor is to help you fully express yourself as you intend to express yourself—to have your work be its full expression. Sometimes you, a writer, can get in your own way, and I can gently nudge you one way or the other, and say, “I think you intended to say this,” or “I don’t know if you know your character is coming across in this way.”

I remember a novel I worked on in which the lead character became less sympathetic with each chapter. It’s okay not to like the character always, but ultimately the main character has to be sympathetic for readers to stay with the book. Sometimes it’s pointing out those things to a writer. Sometimes it’s helping writers clear a path, or helping them find their way back to the voice they have 80 percent of the time when they have gone astray. Making suggestions, and being truthful—particularly so with memoir. To say, “This will be of interest only to you,” or “There’s something universal here—expand.” Or “I like this riff. It takes us out of the central story, so let’s stay with it for a couple more pages, and when we come back, we’ll feel gratitude toward the central story,” or “We want to be reimmersed in the central story.”

I have to channel the author. That is always the same, whether it’s narrative nonfiction, even a piece of journalism—though the work there is often more organizational—or fiction. What would you say we do?

One thing is that we help writers see what individual decisions mean in terms of their overall ambitions for the work. That process has value not because I’m a better writer, but because I’m a different human being. Receiving a book and then repeating its message back to the author usually clarifies what they send out into the world.
Absolutely.

I love a true collaboration, when the writer invites you to help make the book with him or her. That’s when the job stops feeling like a job to me. To go in that deep can be dangerous, though, because you need some distance to be effective. You’re a therapist, you’re a parent, you’re an employee, you’re an employer—and you’re all of these things at once.
You’re sounding like Anthony Bourdain talking about being a chef! Yes. There is that dance where a writer has to let you in and trust you. They all say they do, but they really have to mean it. But I do find that most writers are waiting for that feedback. They know when something’s not working, but it’s almost like they want to be told. They need someone to gently nudge them out of their own way. Ultimately, a writer might say, “I took 97 percent of your suggestions. There was this one part where I disagreed.” Great. It’s your book, and that’s absolutely your choice. I did get an affirmation the other day that was so nice. We all need it, whatever your industry is.

Where a writer said, “Thank you for spending three weekends in a row working on my book?”
Right. I had one memoir where the author took about 80 percent of my comments, and then there was the remaining 20 percent she wasn’t going to budge on. I said, “This is your story. I can’t make you. I feel very strongly about this, but I can’t make you.” And she was great. She said, “Wait a minute. I didn’t decide to work with you to not listen to you, and you didn’t get where you are by not listening to your own instincts. So let me sit with this.” That was a great moment, because we were both following our instincts, and it worked out. Still, there’s no right answer. It’s not like you get to flip to the end of the magazine and check if you’re right. But we do get to see if readers respond, and that is the key.

How connected are you to the marketing and promotion of a book?
I do find myself crafting pitches. I find myself organizing events for my authors. I find myself reaching out to people at magazines, in conjunction with the publicists I work with. We are increasingly called upon as editors to help with the pitch, to follow the author’s social media so we can come up with ideas of how we can use their platform to sell their book. Sometimes the only thing we’re not doing is taking the author photograph.

I was on the road with Dolen Perkins-Valdez after her novel Wench. I was going to all-white book clubs—you know, eighty people strong in suburban Connecticut. And then I watched her on academic panels related to African-American studies, and saw her Skype into African-American book clubs. I thought, “This book is really crossing cultures, and playing to different kinds of households. There’s a story to that.” And we pitched it. We got far with the New York Times, who kept saying they were interested, then nothing—and then tried the Post, which did a similar story.

Let’s put it this way: Nobody’s ever going to stop an editor from wearing an additional hat. No one’s going to tell you not to come up with an event where you can sell two hundred copies. So I do an event on Martha’s Vineyard called the 37 INK Literary Brunch.

Tell me about it.
I found a sponsor, and we bring three authors to the Vineyard, and we work with the independent Bunch of Grapes bookstore—it’s an opportunity to put books in front of readers. With bookstores closing, it’s harder and harder to get on their calendar unless you have a big blockbuster. That’s something I’m really proud of, because it was kind of scrappy—it was almost a challenge from an author, like, “Why don’t you do an event here?”

I always have one of my authors, but we now reach out to other authors as I’m building my list. We’ve had Junot Díaz, Nikki Giovanni, and Bill Cheng, who I worked with when I at Amistad.

What was it like to work with Bill Cheng on Southern Cross the Dog? I loved that book.
Bill is a very talented and confident writer, and the book was sprawling. He came in, and I remember saying, “You’ve got a little magical realism, you’re writing across gender, you’re writing across race, you’re writing across geography. You have a non-linear layout to the book. But just because you can do everything doesn’t mean you have to. Our job is to figure where to pull back. Ultimately, it’s your book, and I believe in your voice, I love these characters, I love this story—the bigness, the richness of it—but it needs some pruning.” I think that when Bill went around to see editors, everyone told him how much they loved the book. I felt a compulsion to be a little bit honest, and to find out how open he was to editing. He said, “I don’t want my ego stroked, I want real feedback.” I loved working with him. He is great; so young, so naturally gifted. I loved seeing what he could do with his craft.

He aimed high, and wrote outside of his experiences. He would say that the book is an homage to a type of music, the blues, that at some point in his life was significant to him. I don’t know that he would say that the blues “saved him,” but he wanted to pay homage to it with this story that came out of his imagination. I love it like I love The Known World. I love these books with these big acts of imagination. I wish there were more books like them. If that were the case I’d publish more fiction.

Who in the book business do you most admire?
I think the world of Robin Desser at Knopf. Fantastic instincts, great on the page, beautiful person. Anne Messitte at Vintage, supersmart. Reagan Arthur, working mom extraordinaire, great list, great instincts. I could go on with others.

Reagan is amazing. I’m sure you know that already, since you’re at Little, Brown, but I’ve known her for a long time and I will add this to what we said about diversity: There are very few working moms at her level. It is a job that demands that you are always available, always working, and, if you’re on a baseball field from eight to eleven every Saturday and Sunday, that’s a big chunk of your time. I admire her for that.

I love hearing about who knew whom before I got into the business.
Jonathan Karp, Edward Kastenmeier, Amy Einhorn, Molly Stern, Judy Clain, and I used to be part of something called the Young Editors Group. We would meet once a quarter at a restaurant on the East Side in a back room. I’m sure there were others there; these are the ones I remember. It’s interesting to see where we’ve landed, those of us who are still standing.

How did you remain standing?
One of the things I tried to do at Amistad was to always have something working commercially so I could publish my “smaller” books. I published a lot of story collections when I was at Amistad, but I would always buy them when something was working in a big way. I think that would be what my publishing model is—to have something big enough that allows you to take more risks on books you publish because of the review potential, or because you believe the author’s going to have a big or important book one day, or is saying something from a perspective that no one else is coming from. But you have to bring the publishing house something. Great reviews, great numbers, new audiences.

Michael Szczerban is an executive editor at Little, Brown.

 

Agents & Editors: Jeff Shotts

by

Michael Szczerban

November/December 2014
10.15.14
In Print and Online

These days, it’s tough for an editor to take a chance on writing that is risky, experimental, or hard to define. That’s why writers everywhere should be heartened by the success of Graywolf Press, an independent publisher in Minneapolis that has been taking chances on new work often overlooked by editors in New York—and reaping big rewards.

Graywolf was founded in 1974 by Scott Walker in Port Townsend, Washington (home to another outstanding indie, Copper Canyon Press). Its headquarters moved to the Twin Cities a decade later. This year the nonprofit publisher celebrates its fortieth anniversary, as well as recent critical and commercial triumphs.

At the heart of Graywolf’s outsize success is executive editor Jeff Shotts, whose poets and essayists rank among the finest writers in the United States. They have also been racking up the accolades: In the past three years, books of poetry by some of his authors—Vijay Seshadri, Tracy K. Smith, Mary Szybist, and D. A. Powell—have collected two Pulitzer Prizes, a National Book Award, and a National Book Critics Circle Award. This past spring, his author Leslie Jamison debuted on the New York Times best-seller list, where her collection of essays, The Empathy Exams, remained for four weeks.

That kind of national commercial response is rare for Graywolf, but is the product of years of patience and the relentless pursuit of interesting writing. Shotts’s roster of essayists and poets also includes Elizabeth Alexander, Mary Jo Bang, Eula Biss, Matthea Harvey, Tony Hoagland, Claudia Rankine, Tomas Tranströmer, and Kevin Young, among others.

We spoke this past spring at the Graywolf offices in Minneapolis, a day after I saw Shotts introduce Tracy K. Smith at an event benefiting a local library system.

Let’s start with a little about Graywolf. Do you think this press could exist outside of Minnesota?
It could, in the way that other nonprofit independent presses exist elsewhere, but the Twin Cities is a coveted place because of its support for the arts. The philanthropic support in Minnesota is unparalleled—not just for literature but also visual arts, theater, and music.

Our nonprofit, independent structure creates a culture. We’re absolutely a mission-driven organization. That allows us to make editorial decisions that are often deemed risky, because we have a safety net of support underneath those decisions in a way that other presses don’t.

How does Graywolf’s mission affect what you do?
We bring our mission to every editorial meeting. It’s how we talk about all the decisions we make. We take risks on books that aren’t obvious—in the proposal, the content, the profile of the author. We publish poetry and essays. Our nonfiction prize is defining a new kind of writing that is positioned to the side of most popular notions of what nonfiction is. We publish challenging novels and short stories. Some of those books really do succeed commercially. But we absolutely support the challenging but nonetheless great books that don’t, on their surface, seem likely to hit the best-seller list or win a big award.

We’re a nonprofit so we can take on these books, but we’re also a nonprofit because of the kinds of books we take on. We build our list in ways that would strike neither the publishing industry nor the culture at large as the methods of a commercial enterprise. It’s been extraordinary to see the success we’ve had with books that get passed up, frankly, by larger houses.

If I were to say one word about my role in how our mission operates, it’s patience.

That’s a rare virtue.
Exactly. And it’s the thing that distinguishes us from any other publisher. Leslie Jamison is a case in point. The success of The Empathy Exams began when we started the Graywolf nonfiction prize ten years ago. That prize attracted a number of great writers. Ander Monson’s book Neck Deep and Other Predicaments is a marvelous work that challenges our notion of what nonfiction and personal essay writing is. Not too long after his book, we published Eula Biss’s Notes From No Man’s Land, which has been one of our most successful nonfiction titles. That book won the National Books Critics Circle Award, was adopted in classrooms, and established Eula as one of the foremost essay writers in the country. And Eula’s book, Leslie has been saying, is the reason she sent The Empathy Exams to Graywolf.

We couldn’t have known when we started this prize that we’d have a New York Times best-seller or a National Books Critics Circle Award winner. But the success of the series has been in supporting each of those books so that other writers read them, see them, and want to create books like them. Only a press like Graywolf can be that patient.

How did Graywolf come to select The Empathy Exams for the nonfiction prize?
It was a fast and furious and unanimous choice. Leslie had sent us about a hundred pages—a lot of which is no longer in the book—and a cover letter and proposal for what the book would become. Those pages did contain an earlier version of that title essay, and it’s a remarkable, life-changing kind of essay. It blew us away from the beginning.

Watching that project build was extraordinary. Being the editor as Leslie turned in these new pieces, seeing Harper’s or the Believer pick them up, and building the conversation in the book around that central concept of empathy—it’s been one of the most extraordinary editorial relationships I’ve had.

Something similar to the nonfiction program is happening with the poetry list. Some writers have stayed with us over the course of three books now, and in the case of someone like Vijay Seshadri, he puts a decade between each book. We have not only the ability to patiently develop each individual book that we take on, but also the patience to develop an author’s career over a course of several books or, in some cases, several decades. Publishing as a whole has lost its patience with that kind of development. The commercial presses have ceded that ground to us, and we’re glad to take it.

They’ve ceded other ground too. Poetry is a great, fertile genre for us; it’s at the heart of what we do, and it’s territory that we get to inhabit. This new nonfiction writing is really fertile ground. Translations have also been ceded to independent publishing, by and large. With support from the Lannan Foundation, we’ve had extraordinary success with our translation list—fiction and poetry—and that’s yielded us Nobel Prize winners and Per Peterson, who is one of our absolute star international writers. His book Out Stealing Horses—that was work that had been passed over time and again.

We’re trying to move into these territories where we can be exciting. It’s author-driven territory, not commercial-driven territory. Authors are defining this new nonfiction. Poets are defining what poetry is for us. The way we attune our ears to them, the more that we can listen to them and what they’re writing, even if at first it unsettles us—that is what Graywolf is to me.

But don’t many of the pressures on a commercial publisher act on you, too?
I’ve been in independent publishing a long time now, and there is a Kool-Aid that you can drink. Even though I’m talking about this ground that’s ceded to independent publishing, I don’t want to make it sound like a shortfall of commercial publishing. They’re dealing with a reality that we’re in too. Of course we want to hit the Times bestseller list. Our mission is also to reach readers. These scrappy, odd Graywolf books sit at Barnes & Noble and everywhere else right alongside books from Simon & Schuster and Knopf and Random House and Farrar, Straus and Norton and so on. We have to exist in that world, and that’s a real challenge.

I want to go back to that sense of patience. It’s a huge part of what we’re able to give a writer. We take on individual books, absolutely, but we really are taking on a writer. We look for writers who give us the sense that their work is the beginning of something that we want to support over a long term. It can’t always happen, of course. But that’s the ideal: to get in with an author on the ground floor and build them up to where the third, fourth, fifth, tenth book gets the front-page review or the big interview, and breaks out.

I think you’re underselling yourself with the word “patience.” You’re not just waiting around, are you? You’re identifying writers with talent, and then nurturing it—knowing that it will take time to reach their full power.
No, you’re right. It’s active patience. 

Is it more challenging for you to identify young talent and nurture it today than it was ten years ago? You’re more established as an editor, for one, and you now have a list of continuing authors—take Matthea Harvey, for example.
Sure.

I remember first encountering her at the Dodge Poetry Festival when I was in college, and thinking that her voice was so fresh, so smart, so funny. She was totally new. But nearly a decade later, she’s part of the establishment.
[Laughs.] She would never accept that designation—but yes.

On the one hand that’s fantastic. And on the other hand, every book she publishes with you takes up a slot that you might use to break out a new poet. How do you find the equivalent of Matthea today, when your list is already populated?
There’s truly no equivalent to Matthea. Let’s talk for a moment about her because I delight in her in so many ways. She is both a marvelous person and truly one of the geniuses of her generation. There’s no one who has the vision and imagination that she brings to the page. Her new book, If the Tabloids Are True What Are You?, is a hybrid book that is half her visual artwork and half her text, and there’s nothing like it. Some of what we’re talking about is supporting authors who can challenge themselves like that. You know what I mean: There are many authors who stop challenging themselves.

I could not have anticipated this new book when we took on Matthea’s second book, Sad Little Breathing Machine. Now I see the connection: Of course there is this giant leap to the visual, a bigger scope that is even more political and more emotional. I had read her first book, Pity the Bathtub Its Forced Embrace of the Human Form, published by Alice James, and I was blown away. I remember being introduced to that book by Mary Jo Bang, who was then my teacher and is now one of Graywolf’s award-winning poets.

I saw Matthea’s new poems come out in magazines, and I e-mailed her and just said, “I’m coming to New York. Do you want to meet up?” We did, and had a couple of gimlets. I was fascinated by what she was doing and what she was writing, and so thrilled she was willing to meet with me. It wasn’t a big pitch. Of course she knew Graywolf, and there was an understanding of what this meeting meant. Relatively soon after that, she sent what became the second book, Sad Little Breathing Machine, which we’ve done incredibly well with, and then we did Modern Life, which won the Kingsley Tufts Award and was a finalist for the NBCC. And now we have this big, bold, ambitious work.

We don’t publish a lot of work with high-end artwork included in it—it’s an expensive book for us. But being able to support a major force in contemporary poetry—that feels essential to me. It does mean we have to be nimble, but I love that we can take a leap alongside her.

How did you come to work with Eula Biss?
I’ve lived my life alongside her, and I adore her as a writer and as a person. In the summer of 2002, I had finished my MFA at Washington University, and was reading an issue of Harper’s. There was this amazing piece called “The Pain Scale” by a writer I didn’t know. I hadn’t seen anything like Eula’s writing before, and I checked out her first book, The Balloonists, a wonderful book about the dissolution of her parents’ marriage. I wrote her to say that I had noticed these amazing things she had been writing and asked what she was working on. At that point she was just going into the University of Iowa nonfiction program. I was twenty-eight and she must have been twenty-four or twenty-five. We started a conversation, and every few months she’d send me some new pieces, and I tried to get her to start cohering some of these pieces around… something. I wasn’t quite sure what. But you can’t read a piece like “The Pain Scale” and not see the greatness and the potential in someone writing like that. I held onto that, even when she sent me pieces that were not up to that standard.  

I kept trying to push her: “These are great individual pieces, but what are you writing about?” You know, I’m the guy who has to write the catalog copy for these books. [Laughs.] I have to stand in a room with our sales reps and say what a book is about. Sometimes that’s hard for poetry and essays.

Several times we got to a point where Eula could have ended the conversation, which would have been the saddest thing. Then, at some point, probably in 2006, she sent me a piece called “Time and Distance Overcome.” It is one of the single most essential pieces of writing I’ve seen.

She started writing about Alexander Graham Bell, when communication from sea to sea by telephone was a new concept in this country. The piece continues through the history of how the government started putting telephone poles up across the towns and highways of America. Then, in the middle of the piece, she goes to the New York Times database and types in “telephone poles.” And almost every entry that comes up is about lynching. This is not where the essay was going. It takes a turn, and becomes a remarkable piece about racial violence just at the moment when we think we’re in this great moment of connection. It is an amazing, chilling piece.

That was the moment we put our finger on what she was writing about. What then cascaded was this frank book about race, about whiteness and American culture. At some point, as the editor, it’s fascinating to get out of the way. These pieces started cascading together and making coherence out of what had previously been a kaleidoscope. No longer in that book is there the original spark, “The Pain Scale,” and it still hasn’t been put into a book.

That’s the nurturing patience. I hope some of what comes through to writers from our conversation is that it’s one thing for the publishing industry and editors to be impatient. There’s an economic drive around that. But writers can be the most impatient ones of all. That’s understandable, especially if you’re trying to get a teaching job, or we’re talking about poets or essayists who aren’t making life-changing advances, but are finding means to write through teaching. But if Eula had done that kind of kaleidoscopic book earlier on, I don’t think she’d be anywhere close to what she ended up accomplishing with Notes From No-Man’s Land. Similarly, in Leslie Jamison’s case, there was a throughline all along, but a lot of her hundred-page sample didn’t make it into the final book. And as these individual pieces started to cohere, there was also a fascinating cascade. I keep coming back to that word.

You’re talking about that moment in the creative process when the work takes on its own momentum.
It’s the greatest moment. A good editor needs to recognize that moment as they’re editing on the page, but also when they’re in that nurturing conversation with their author. When do you shut up and get out of the way?

The line editing has to come at some point, but it’s that larger conversation where you as an editor gain the trust—and hopefully friendship—of your author.

I’ve yet to meet an author who sees a document filled with an editor’s comments and doesn’t think, at least for just a second, “Who the hell do you think you are?” [Laughs.]
Especially poets! [Laughs.] But if you’ve developed that trust and friendship, by the time you’re really doing the line-edit type stuff, you can spill ink as necessary. Editors can over-edit, of course, but developing that trust and friendship is so important.

How do you know when to shut up?
By listening to the author. When I send an editorial letter, it unnerves me when an author replies with, “You’re right. We should change that.” This happens very rarely, but when an author comes back and just says, “Yes, yes, yes,” it makes me concerned about their confidence in their voice.

My job is to get that author into a conversation about the work. I want that poet or essayist to draw a line for me, to say, “Yes, I’ll take this suggestion, but not this one—I don’t sound like myself anymore.” I’m willing to look a little stupid, or maybe a little pushy in some cases, but I love it when an author pushes back. That’s when I feel that the author is ready, confident in the work and in her own style and voice. That can be true for an author’s tenth book, but more often for the earlier books in a career.

An author needs to learn how to be an author.
Yes. And as an editor, you want your author to be able to present what their voice is. So I listen for that moment when an author pushes back. Sometimes that confidence is there from the beginning, and other times you do have to search for it. Finding that moment is the spark that keeps me coming back and makes me feel like a contributor to the conversation.

That moment of pushback is an inflection point. It’s when you can begin to work together and say, “Okay, your aim is this. This is how I’m not following you there. How are we going to make this better together?”
Exactly. That’s one reason I often phrase my suggestions as questions—because I see myself as on the same team, not an adversary saying, “This is how it should be.” I don’t think writers are interested in that.

It seems to me that there are basically two ways to get someone to buy your book. The easier way is to write about something that people have an active interest in. The other way, which is perhaps one challenge in selling poetry, is to conjure a new interest in a reader.
That’s interesting, and it brings up what poetry can do. I’m hearing myself automatically talking about subject matter and essays—the nonfiction part of myself. In terms of poetry, I hope that there’s something about poetry where the reader not only has to be nudged toward the interest of the poet, but the reader is also asked to perform a great feat of empathy: inhabiting that poet’s voice.

In a poem, “I” might be the poet who wrote that statement, or maybe not—regardless, it’s the reader. I don’t think that intimacy is achieved in any other art form. Part of the interest in reading poetry, and part of what is gained by reading it, is this leap into another identity. The poet creates the space for this to happen.

I’m interested in poetry that does collide with our culture. Vijay Seshadri is writing about an immigrant culture, and I think that’s something the Pulitzer committee probably responded to in some way. What does that amalgamation of voices and languages sound like on the streets of Brooklyn? You can open any of Vijay’s three books, but particularly 3 Sections, and overhear that street-level conversation he’s attuned to. I love books that get under the language in that way. There is a moment of familiarity, but the way the poet has transformed that is unfamiliar to us. That’s the unsettling area where poetry lives. But the poet does have to beckon us over there through some kind of subject matter, or through some kind of voice.

Tony Hoagland comes to mind. He’s a controversial writer for this very reason: He takes on voices that are sometimes very affable and sometimes very funny, but he is also willing to give voice to voices that are disturbingly ugly. In the process, he raises questions about American culture, about what poetry should or shouldn’t be talking about. We don’t always have to agree with Tony. And yet I’m excited by that risk, to inhabit these characters, these voices that we have to admit are part of American culture.

I love that he tramples on the idea that there’s a limited domain of interest that poets should engage with. He, along with a poet like Matthea Harvey, engages with questions I actually have, rather than ascending into a rarefied aesthetic landscape.
Poetry as a democratic act. That Whitmanesque impulse is something I aspire to. The Dickinsonian impulse very much alive in Matthea Harvey’s or Mary Jo Bang’s work. But it’s the collision of those impulses that I think makes poetry great.

That reminds me of the poems Tracy K. Smith was reading last night—those postcards by the victims of horrible acts of murder writing back to their vanquishers. But they do it with this voice of beauty, this acceptance of their fate. I remember first reading them, and it was shocking—most people would assume you should take those stories and witness them in a very particular way. But for Tracy, it’s really only an act of empathy if you include everyone in the story—that includes the person that we don’t like to look at. Tony would say that sometimes the person you don’t want to look at is yourself.

That’s poetry. What a powerful little thing a poem is.

I want to talk about audience. Is poetry read only by other poets?
A lot of people say that.

What’s your take?
No. Everybody is reading poetry. Robert Pinsky talks about poetry being the thing that exists from the breath. He says we walk around all day saying poetry to each other, and there is some truth to that. We’re helpless in the way that our language is cadenced. If you think widely, in the way Pinsky encourages us to, we’re speaking poetry all the time.

Of course there is something about the act of codifying and distilling the language into a piece of art that’s different from the way we’re talking now. Our culture gives that heightened moment to the poem. Even when a writer like Tony is doing something very conversational, there is still something ceremonial and ritualistic about the poem that can be the place where readers and audiences get lost. That heightened place gives poetry its great power in our culture, and maybe that’s why we turn to it for inaugurations and weddings and funerals. Poetry moves us in a different, powerful way. Those are other ways everybody is engaged in poetry.

But is everyone engaged in the purchase of poetry?
Right, right, right. Well, in that way, no, poetry still tends to be niche. [Laughs.]

How have you seen the audience for books of poetry change?
I’ve been engaged in the publishing side of that question since the mid-1990s, and also as an MFA student. MFA programs have continued to increase in numbers. There’s a lot to be made of the effects of that rise—what the workshop model means for poetry, aesthetically, and I’m engaged in that question too. But in terms of audience, those MFA programs are talking about poetry in their classrooms and in their auditoriums, and that has only increased the audience. When authors do appearances, even if the book isn’t part of that transaction, the poem is—and that is incredibly valuable, even if it doesn’t contribute to the bottom line of a publishing house.

I tend to be pretty optimistic about the audience for poetry. Writing programs and reading series, book groups, National Poetry Month, Billy Collins on the radio—there are more ways to access poetry than there ever have been before. It is an exciting time to be a poet, and to be a poetry editor trying to keep your ear to the ground in terms of where poetry is being experienced. It’s a much wider response than one might initially assume. Many of our poetry books have been our best-selling titles in these last few years. Some of those sales are propelled by the Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize and the National Book Award, and so on. Some are propelled by the excitement about what a particular voice has to offer.

Tony Hoagland is an incredibly populist and popular poet. Tony is not hitting the New York Times best-seller list, but he has hit a cultural nerve. Claudia Rankine, a poet who’s also doing very slippery nonfiction poetry stuff, is also hitting a nerve with her fearless way of talking about America. We’re in multiple printings. Any publisher would kill to have numbers like we have on those books.

Is every first book of poems going to perform that way? Of course not. But it’s wonderful when poets do tip their work toward a wider audience, because that allows us to publish more so-called new and emerging voices.

I have only seen poetry become more popular, more read, more taught and discussed. It’s part of our mission to find that audience. Absolutely we market our books toward those writing programs. We go to AWP and make sure those books are front and center, trying to get those books on syllabi that get taught time and again. We’re out trying to make all kinds of things happen for these books. But also finding those—it goes back to the subject matter, and the way those authors sort of talk about their subject matter—how can you reach those audiences for that book?

This fall we’re publishing a book by Katie Ford, a marvelous younger poet. It’ll be her third book, Blood Lyrics. There’s a section in it about experiencing an extremely premature birth, at twenty-four weeks. And it’s a story of survival, it’s a story of a hospital, it’s a story of a marriage, it’s a story of a childhood, it’s all these things. I haven’t seen poetry hit that subject so head on, and with such an urgent voice. We want to reach people outside of the usual poetry audience for whom that’s personally urgent. We think that way about each of our books: How do we reach an audience that might not be sitting around and waiting for a poem? But when the right poem does reach them, it changes their worldview.

Do believe that there is no segment of America that cannot be reached by a poem?
Absolutely. It’s naïve, perhaps. [Laughs.]

No! If you don’t believe that, it’s probably time to fold up.
You do see Random House taking on Billy Collins in a particular way. There is a commercial opportunity with poetry too.

Oh, that reminds me: I brought you a copy of one of my books. It’s an anthology titled Poems That Make Grown Men Cry, edited by Anthony and Ben Holden.
Oh, good! I’ve been so curious about this, because it’s for the masculine audience that Tony Hoagland, for one, is reaching. Men do read books. I’m not only talking about poetry. The publishing industry seems to ask itself whether that’s true, but very clearly, men do.

You and I have done it!
Here we are! [Laughs.] You and me, we might be it. But do men read poetry? Maybe that is an interesting question. At Tracy K. Smith’s reading last night, there were significantly more women than men, so that audience provides some anecdotal evidence about who’s reading literature. But every editor, and every publishing house, must maintain the hope that what they’re doing has the power and the potential to reach anyone. Even the most experimental, innovative, destabilized voice—if that author is able to clutch the culture by the collar, I think any reader can go there.

The academic audience is an important one, because it’s often the place you have to start with challenging books. At a writing program or in an English department, there’s an engagement with the question of what it means to challenge a reader. Can you get that conversation to start there and gain enough traction to move further out in the culture? Sometimes yes, and often no. But it does happen. There’s still what used to be called the avant-garde. I love that there is still a mechanism through publishing houses and magazines and online and self-publishing for the new James Joyces and Samuel Becketts and Gertrude Steins. The writers who are pushing the language in such a powerful way that our first encounters with it scare us.

New Directions is a national treasure. That they’re still committed to that kind of innovation is a testament. New Directions was the model that Scott Walker founded Graywolf on. Every small independent press that’s still active in this country is founded on what that press stands for. That’s very moving to me as a reader and as an editor.

Well, now that we’ve covered everything, let’s start at the beginning. [Laughs.] How did you become an editor of poetry books? I’ve read that you grew up in the Midwest in a very Scandinavian household.
I’m from the middle of Kansas, from a very small, rural town named McPherson. Deep Scandinavian roots.: 1880s immigrants from Sweden, many of whom came to central Kansas, some of whom didn’t like it and got scared and went back. Church steeples, oil wells. It was a beautiful place to grow up, and I was fortunate to have a lot of people lifting me up. It’s one of the most conservative places in the country. But my family had a tried-and-true-blue quality that I was completely oblivious to at the time, but which certainly seeped in. Even my grandfather, who’s gone now, was canvassing up to his last year or two for John Kerry against George W. Bush. My mom is a deep thinker and a reader.

We had these red faux-leather books in a series called the Book of Knowledge. And I remember us buying the encyclopedia letter by letter as the volumes came to our grocery store. I read a lot in the encyclopedia, and I remember my mom reading from the Book of Knowledge. [Laughs.] They’re absurd in terms of their impossible breadth. But it provided me with an imaginative world as a young person. I was lucky that those books were among the many ways that I was lifted up intellectually. I grew up believing I had to think my way out of there.

What do you mean?
Every teenager grapples with central questions of identity. Who am I, and what do I love, and is it supported here? All of those things.

I’ll back up a notch. My mom was a really big figure, but my grandfather gave me a worn copy of Tennyson that I still have. It was an odd gift, because he was not a readerly person. He went to the agricultural school at Kansas State University on the GI Bill, very proudly, and was a county extension agent. I used to walk wheat fields with him. He had these ritualistic practices and would walk a field in a certain way, seeing things that of course to my eye were invisible, and then he would chew the grain and deduce something. My dad had a master’s degree in theater, though he was a real estate agent and broker for most of my youth.

I’m sure this joke isn’t new to you, but: Did you hear about the Scandinavian man who loved his wife so much he almost told her?
[Laughs.] That’s the world I’m from. You keep it secret, that part of you.

But you noticed that part of you, and saw it in other people in your family.
My parents are very aware people. They were invested in making sure that my two sisters and I did things like go to art museums in Kansas City, which was this big three-hour drive from home. We took trips outside of Kansas, and that felt important. I mean, now that sounds pretty average, but Kansas is a land of settlers. That austere thing you’re talking about is deeply ingrained.

How did you come to realize the role creative expression could play in your life?
Mostly by reading. Then I tried writing poetry. Middle school is where it sparked. And then I had a remarkable high school English teacher named Carole Ferguson. We read Shakespeare and William Blake and the Romantics and Emily Dickinson and T. S. Eliot. She was a remarkable teacher in how she introduced that writing without killing it—in a way that allowed you to think deeply about it but also enjoy it.

We had another high school English teacher named John Hudson, but everyone called him Hud. He was also the track coach, and he was all about Hemingway, Faulkner, Melville. Those writers in the deep masculine American vein. He taught literature the way he coached the track team, which was to inspire. He would stand in front of the class—he had this comical hairpiece—and take off his glasses and read us passages he loved. It was alive for him. I didn’t learn a thing about the critical appreciation of literature, but I loved it. Having those two very different English translators opened up a path.

Mrs. Ferguson recognized something in some of us. She gave me a poem called “Traveling Through the Dark” by William Stafford and said I should read it. Stafford was still alive at the time, and he was from Hutchinson, Kansas—what we called Hutch—about thirty miles away. That was very powerful: to have a teacher take that interest in me, and to be shown that poetry didn’t end with Frost. She showed me that poetry was still alive, and in fact that there was a guy from right nearby who won the National Book Award. That was eye-opening.

Graywolf publishes William Stafford now; that’s not an accident. His new and selected collection was one of the first books I published. I remember it came in a big black box—this was after Stafford was gone—and I thought, everything has led me to this moment.

Were you the lone reader of poetry among your peers?
I have to mention the Hollow Men. Growing up in central Kansas, as I mentioned, there could be a sense of silence, and a sense of a narrow path forward surrounded by immense horizons that seemed to lead everywhere and nowhere.

The Hollow Men was a group of us in high school who stole away in secret up to Coronado Heights, the highest point in McPherson County, the legendary northern point Coronado reached on his search for the Seven Cities of Gold. He reached that point, saw what he assumed was nothingness, and turned back. But that’s where we turned, a bunch of guys who went there at night to read poems out loud and try to eke some meaning out of that nothingness. T. S. Eliot’s poem provided us with our name.

We were pretentious and hopeless, embarrassed and beautiful, and around those fires in the humid Kansas nights, we introduced ourselves to Blake, Whitman, Dickinson, Eliot, and we uttered poems by living poets whose names we might not have been hearing in our classroom. Seamus Heaney, Tomas Tranströmer, Robert Bly, Galway Kinnell, William Stafford, Gwendolyn Brooks, Louise Glück, Sylvia Plath, Langston Hughes, E. E. Cummings, Philip Levine, Jack Gilbert, Allen Ginsberg, many more.

It’s amazing to me now that we Hollow Men found one another. We’re still all marvelous friends, now trying to be fathers and artists and teachers and editors. I suppose we never stopped being Hollow Men. I think we’d all say poetry saved us from ourselves and provided us a space where we felt in control of our lives. That’s one way to answer how I came to poetry. Another way to answer: listening deeply to what others brought to light for me.

Why did you move from Kansas to the Twin Cities?
I made the great decision to go to Macalaster College in St. Paul. I was an English and classics double major, studying a lot of Greek and Latin language and history, seventeenth-century literature, Chaucer, Beowulf. Charles Baxter had been the editor of Macalaster’s art and literary magazine, so there was a kind of literary history at Macalaster. Tim O’Brien went there, Mary Karr.

What decade would this have been?
I graduated high school in 1992, and then graduated Macalaster in 1996. During my senior year at Macalaster I did an internship at Hungry Mind Review, which used to be a magazine for independent and university publishing that was distributed for free in independent bookstores. I did everything from pitch books for review to sell ads. It was there, while I pored over independent publishers’ catalogues, that I realized the Twin Cities has an amazing literary scene. Graywolf Press, Coffee House Press, Milkweed Editions, the Loft Literary Center, the University of Minnesota Press, and so on.

I wanted to get some more experience in publishing after I graduated, so I started an internship at Graywolf. The second day I was there, the guy who hired me said he was leaving and asked if I would consider applying for his job. It was shortly after Fiona McCrae had taken over the press, and I was in the right place at the right time. I owe Fiona everything. She was very patient not only in developing books and authors and a list, but also in developing her staff. I learned like you, like everyone, by really doing it.

Fiona deserves all credit for moving the press from, at the time, a potentially disastrous financial moment. Scott Walker left in 1994 and there was a board of directors in place that then hired Fiona. Slowly but surely Fiona saved the press from that precipice, and we’ve been thriving since then.

What did you accomplish those first few years?
In the first year, I was able to put my finger on some poetry books that excelled for us. One of them was William Stafford’s The Way It Is: New and Selected Poems. I knew the power and potential in that manuscript, and it continues to be one of our best-selling titles, period. I’m very proud of that, both for mythic personal reasons and because it was a good publishing decision. Another one around that time was Tony Hoagland’s Donkey Gospel. His books are among our best-selling titles as well.

You were all of twenty-two or twenty-three at the time?
Yes. Not all of them went on to the same success, of course, but I was given freedom to march into the publisher’s office or to be at an editorial meeting and say, “This is big. This is important,” and put some enthusiasm—if not acumen—behind those books. The community here was willing to lift me up. It means everything to me now, that there were people who listened to that young jabber-mouth wannabe.

I got promoted and took over more of the poetry. I worked at Graywolf as an editorial assistant, and then assistant editor, and I think I was just editor by the end of those first four years. By then I knew I wanted to go to graduate school for an MFA in poetry.

I imagine you had some pretty nice recommendation letters by then.
[Laughs.] I did, and that probably helped my application. I hope I had a decent writing sample, too, but please don’t try to find it!

What was your motivation to go back to school?
I needed to figure out if I was an editor or if I was a writer. I studied with Carl Phillips and Mary Jo Bang, who are both absolutely terrific teachers, at Washington University in Saint Louis. I learned a great deal about the history of prosody and craft from Carl, and from Mary Jo I learned how to read new and innovative kinds of writing. I realized later that I became an editor through my MFA program. In those workshops I learned how to read and line edit and respond to a writer. I really took that very seriously and earnestly—as I tended to take everything. [Laughs.]

Were you publishing any of your own work?
I did a little, and I did some reviewing. But I recognized by the end of that experience that my path was back to Graywolf. I had been freelance editing during those two years, and Fiona asked me to come back. In 2002 I took over the poetry list. Then we started to make more commitments to our series of books on the craft of writing—that’s when we launched the “Art of” series with Charles Baxter—and started the nonfiction prize soon after that. It was a marvelous moment of upward movement and growth.

Fiona put extraordinary faith in me. We took on D. A. Powell, Matthea Harvey, Katie Ford, Claudia Rankine, and many others, and continued longtime support for Dana Gioia, Linda Gregg, Jane Kenyon, William Stafford, Eamon Grennan. I was given amazing autonomy to bring in the kinds of work that expanded our list.

Tell me about a couple books you got behind.
I really got behind Don’t Let Me Be Lonely by Claudia Rankine, which we published in 2004 and have reprinted many times. It was not the kind of book that Graywolf was known for, but we succeeded with it.

I was building a diverse list, because that’s what I saw in contemporary poetry: fragmentation. The historical idea of schools of poetry had been upended, and we wanted Graywolf’s list to reflect what writers were writing. We published Thomas Sayers Ellis’s first two books, and started relationships with Cave Canem, the African American poets group. We published Natasha Trethewey’s first couple of collections.

Mary Jo Bang’s first book that we took on, Elegy, won the National Book Critics Circle Award. It’s a marvelous and moving book, and it meant a lot that it was by my teacher. We’d been a finalist so many times and we finally had broken through in one of the big three awards. We got up to around thirty books a year maybe four years ago. We’re roughly equal thirds: fiction, nonfiction, poetry. I love that in the same season we might have a book like 3 Sections by Vijay Seshadri, which uses a lot of traditional craftmaking and rhyme, and it might be next to something like Mary Szybist’s Incarnadine, this remarkable lyric voice, next to Tony Hoagland’s cultural conversation about identity. We are deliberate about trying to have some new and emerging voices, some midcareer voices, and then some established voices on each list. That’s a way to avoid competition within the list itself.

How do you schedule a book of poetry for publication?
Everyone asks if we only publish poetry in April. When I first started at Graywolf, the Academy of American Poets was just starting National Poetry Month, and the larger houses didn’t catch on for the first few years. Early on it was really driven by independent publishers, and they really promoted our books well. Later, Knopf and others started publishing their big poets in April.  What do you do with that promotional machine? It’s positive for poetry, but now it means that April might not be the best month to publish a poet’s first book—something that might get lost alongside Philip Levine or Billy Collins.

We operate in three seasons because of our distribution through Macmillan/FSG, with three to four books of poetry each season. We have lead poetry titles, which is to say established poets like Tracy K. Smith, Tony Hoagland, Fanny Howe, Matthea Harvey, Claudia Rankine, and so on. And then we might have a translation, and a first book we selected for a prize or from an organization we have a collaboration with. Those books aren’t really competing in the same conversation.

The main thing is to support the roster of poets that we’ve built, to space their books out in a meaningful way. It does mean making some of those poets wait, and that is a difficulty. Most poets are willing to work with us, and we try to make use of that time as an incubator to make the book as ready as it can be by the time it comes out.

How do you use that time?
We’re able to do more editorial work, place more poems in magazines. Frequently that extra time ends up yielding some of the best work around that manuscript.

Take Nick Flynn. We’re working on his new poetry book, and the conversation about its title, My Feelings, has led to him working on a title poem to insert into the book. For a book of poems, that’s a major edit. He’s also on the cover of American Poetry Review, and that helps create some anticipation. And it’s never too early to gather blurbs. People think it’s funny to talk about promoting poetry in the same way you might promote a book of stories. But it’s the same.

How else do you conceive of promoting poetry?
Some poets want to do, and are very good at doing, a lot themselves. Doing readings, placing poems, all of that. There are marvelous places that want to know about our books and talk about them and support them. We are always sending them our galleys, getting them early copies. The AWP conference is a really powerful tool: You get thirteen thousand people. But a lot of this goes back to what we were talking about before: What is it about this poet or this book that might reach other special audiences? 

You’re trying to increase the poet’s profile in the world of poetry while you try to find readers outside of it.
Absolutely, and that’s not unlike how one would promote a nonfiction book. We treat poetry as a genre that is up to the sales potential of our fiction and nonfiction. Are there specialty catalogs that this book might fit into? Are there particular magazines that this particular poetry book might enter into?

In March we published a book, How to Dance as the Roof Caves In, the third book by a poet named Nick Lantz. It’s a great book, imaginative, smart, and it’s very much about the collapse of the housing market and the downturn of the economy. NPR has picked up on this book and has done a couple pieces on it that I’m not sure the book would have gotten without talking about this subject in such a candid and imaginative way.

It’s that assumption that poetry is its own circular beautiful self. It can be, but what else is it? We’ve been able to get that book in the hands of good reviewers who might not otherwise review a poetry book, so that’s one example where subject matter can drive the way we promote a book. Nearly every book has an angle that gives it appeal to varying audiences.

Would you walk me through acquiring a book of poetry? You publish ten or so poetry books a year, but must receive some vast multiple of that.
Technically, if you go to our website right now, you’ll see we are not accepting unsolicited manuscripts. That said, I still am inundated.

More than a thousand a year?
Oh, easily more than twice that. I’ve checked e-mail once this morning, and there were at least three by 11 AM.

Some of it is stuff that I’ve solicited: people I’ve met at Bread Loaf, AWP, authors who live in the Twin Cities, people who one of our authors have recommended. I’m seeing more and more agents sending poetry, often because their client does something else. I wouldn’t say that’s a huge percentage, but they are there, and I take those submissions seriously.

How do you triage that volume of reading?
Those poets whose work I’ve solicited or who have been recommended by one of our poets, or who I’ve met at a conference or read in a magazine—I take those pretty seriously right out of the gate, more than something that just comes in cold. It’s human nature, I suppose. But we do look at what comes in.

Do you have readers who do a first pass?
We do have some readers in-house who we kick some stuff to. Because our list is technically closed, most of the submissions we get are from people who are trying to go around the door. I look at them as I can—I’m far slower than I want to be, but that’s just a reality of time and commitment to the books that we have taken on.

We have such a roster that of those ten to twelve books we publish a year, eight might be filled by returning poets. Balance becomes a huge question. It is part of our mission to keep the list fresh. So far we’ve done a pretty good job, but there are harder decisions ahead. That’s the worst day: turning down somebody you’ve worked with before. 

What happens when you read a submission and love it?
I take that manuscript to our editorial meeting, where I present the book and say why I’m excited about it. Often, I will send out a sample ahead of the meeting. We talk about where this poet has published work, if it is his or her first book, whether the poet is a good reader of his or her own work. There’s absolutely nothing like a great poetry reading, and there’s nothing like a really bad poetry reading.

What makes a great poetry reading?
It surprises people when the poet is able to move out of the expected territory, that slow, elegiac, incantatory tone that doesn’t add much value.

I love hearing those poets who really allow for their own voice. I love when poets are risking something during the reading, whether that is what they are reading or how they are reading. What they are risking at that microphone is something people are moved by and interested in. Not all poets can be great presenters of their work, but it’s a huge help for any author to present work in a unique and exciting way. It adds to the experience of the book.

Is the poetry reading one of your most important promotional tools?
It’s huge. It is poetry. The page is one significant method of transferring the art of poetry, but part of its deep tradition is oral. That is part of the alchemy for a successful poetry book. People take note of the really great readers. Having a big reading at AWP, or a breakout reading at Bread Loaf at that famous theater where Robert Frost read years ago can make a difference. I’ve started dialogues with poets because I sat up at their poetry reading. I think those things even can influence the academic job market for a writer.

I’m curious about the unexpected places you find terrific writing.
One way to answer that question is social media. I’m a clicker, and I love it when someone tweets out a poem or posts it on Facebook. It might be a poem from Rattle magazine or a publisher’s website or the Paris Review, but getting it funneled through someone else’s enthusiasm is one of the ways the tool of social media can be interesting for an editor. It can also be incredibly deceptive and a waste. But I love books and poetry that ignite conversation.

Word of mouth is for poetry is huge. Tony Hoagland’s early success was due to word of mouth: “Can you believe how beautiful this poem is, how audacious this guy is, how this person is pissing me off by saying this in a poem?” That conversation is exciting. That’s what we’re in it for: people who are not only appreciating literature but are passing it on and saying it is important. I want all of our books, whatever genre, to do that.

I try to look outside my own aesthetic value. The conversation is as important to me, and maybe more so, than what I think is “good.” As an editor, reading outside yourself is everything. You can’t possibly put yourself in the shoes of every audience member. That is another reason why I take notice of word of mouth, even when the material isn’t my cup of tea.

You want to understand why people are responding to it and you are not?
Right. My assumption from that Scandinavian background is, “What’s wrong with me?” [Laughs.] “Why don’t I see this?” The deficiency is mine. That interests me, because it’s a place from which I can expand and learn. I learn a lot from the books that on first read I was startled by or assumed that I didn’t like.

At the editorial meeting, you come to the conclusion that you’d like to publish a particular piece of work. Then what happens?
We do a P&L for all of our books. We’ll talk about format, season, advance, and then I’ll contact the poet and make the offer. That is the great day, the best day in publishing, when you get to make that phone call, especially with someone who is new to the list. For a first or second book of poems, the advance might be a thousand or fifteen hundred dollars, so it’s not a life-changing amount of money.

But it is a life-changing event.
I hope so. That’s a lovely phone call to make.

Okay, now on to a big question. How do you edit poetry?
Very carefully. [Laughs.] And with a green pen.

Never red?
God, no! I haven’t really had writers flip out, but green is a psychologically friendly color. That’s tip number one: Green is helpful.

You edit poetry by listening deeply and taking on the voice of the poet. For me, it is an act of empathy. It is an act of taking on that poet’s voice and plight and subject matter such that I can make intelligible suggestions that are within the conventions and voice of that writer. I go through everything that I think needs to be gone through. That can start with the title of the book. A title often suggests what the central set of concerns is in this book, so it is a way in. You want to make sure you put your best foot forward.

What are some of your favorite titles?
Tony Hoagland’s What Narcissism Means to Me has probably received as much or more attention than any title—purely as a title—on the poetry list. In a much more subtle way, Mary Joe Bang’s next title is The Last Two Seconds, which is so unusual and fascinating to me, and it’s not a usual poetry title. And I do think Nick Flynn’s new book, My Feelings, has a great title because it flies in the face of every poetry workshop and thesis advising committee in this country. He’s managed to challenge himself and risk something with that title. It’s risky for being the most clichéd title imaginable, and yet readers will see the title change in a really meaningful way when they come to the moments where that phrasing occurs. I had to come around to that title, I admit.

One of the things I work on the most with poets is this: How does the poet earn our trust and get us into that voice? The first movement of the book is so important, and that starts with the title. Is there an epigraph? What is that epigraph saying, what is it doing, how does it relate to the title? I’m intrigued by the way that a reader starts to accrue meaning. Maybe there’s not an epigraph, maybe there’s a dedication. Sometimes a dedication can totally change the way you read a book.

page_5: 

Why is that first poem first? It’s the first impression and is going to define what we expect from the second poem. Does that second poem subvert those expectations or does it delight in continuing what we’ve seen, either by subject matter or voice or form on the page? In that first movement, the poet can bring you into the collection, or keep you out. I want to interrogate those things.

You’re talking a lot about organization and flow.
I don’t want to make it sound like we read a poetry book the same way we read a novel. But I do think that it’s valuable for the poet and editor to get on the same page about the vessel of the poetry collection. Is there a sequence that is meant to take us through a particular kind of experience? I want the work of art, that vessel of the book, to be respected by the reader, so that the reader doesn’t just want to flip around. In a new and selected collection, sure, go ahead and flip. But for a single volume in which the poet has thought very carefully about that sequencing, I want to make sure that experience is there for the reader. How do the poems accrue? Does this collection take us somewhere?

What about the individual poems? Are you working on them, too?
It’s the same thing.

What if a poem has been previously published in a magazine?
It really depends on the poem, and also where that poem fits in that manuscript. It’s a really different thing when the poem is by itself in the New Yorker as opposed to when it is in the middle of a poetry book, or if it’s the first or final poem. That might mean changing some lines or a title to fit the sequencing.

Some poets say, “Oh no, that poem appeared in Poetry magazine, that’s got to be just how it is!” Sometimes it does work that way. But something really different happens when a poem moves into the pages of a single poetry volume. The overall book needs to operate the way a single poem does. That first poem operates as the first line of a great poem across the book. That fifth poem is the fifth line.

One thing I think about is the sequence for each poem, where it fits and why it fits there. Is that the right title? Is this the right way into the poem? We call it throat-clearing when there’s a first stanza or a first paragraph that can be removed or trimmed down. Of course, you have to make changes by understanding that if it is a sonnet, it needs to remain fourteen lines!

If there’s a very particular style, lineation, use of capitalization, punctuation, all those—I help find the right conventions for that individual poem as well as the conventions that fit the entire book. If something seems off from the poet’s own conventions, I’ll point it out. Very small things like a change in capitalization can potentially get in the way for a reader.

And then I edit for meaning. Does the poem really start here, does the poem really end here, should this penultimate line really be the last line? It is making those kinds of suggestions without, I hope, being interruptive. If nothing else, I hope making suggestions like these allows the poet to get back into the poem. Writers can get stuck. Sometimes it’s just helping them to get back in.

Some poets like early involvement, some do not. Every poet is different, and every poet’s process is different. It keeps my job interesting, and it’s one of the things I love.

Does your editorial process with poets differ from the prose writers?
I’m surprised how similar it is. The reason I say that is I think you’re dealing with pieces, and any time you have two poems or essays or chapters rubbing up against each other, do you want the heat and energy of friction, or a subtler bridge between those two things?

The nonfiction I tend to work on is often by writers who also identify on some level as poets. On Immunity by Eula Biss has a deeply poetic way of sentence-making and argumentation that feels very natural to me, as someone who works with a lot of poetry. There is a lyric insistence in the writing and metaphor-making in that book. I’d say something similar about The Empathy Exams. At the end of that book there’s a cadence towards a revelatory end of the final essay that feels to me poetic.

You do move from the line to the sentence, and yet there is something about unit-making that feels akin. I hope editing one makes me good at editing the other. It may not be for me to say. I hope it gives me an attention to language. That’s at the heart of Graywolf: that the information being offered with a book of nonfiction is being offered in a very artful way, and the same might be true for a line of poetry. 

Have you ever edited a novel?
I never have.

Do you have any inclination to?
I’d love to. We have so many other good editors that it’s probably for the best in terms of workload, but I love reading short stories and novels and fiction in translation.

Who are your favorite novelists?
Per Peterson is a remarkable, amazing novelist to me. It goes back to that Scandinavian silence: No one creates that quiet landscape better than Per Peterson. Another Graywolf writer, Kevin Barry, is an Irish phenom. I love Marilynne Robinson; Housekeeping and Gilead are remarkable. I’m a huge reader of Paul Auster. Louise Erdrich. Charles Baxter. Toni Morrison. Denis Johnson.

Is there something that unites those writers? Is it their use of language?
Now that you say it, I think it is the use of language, but for very particular ends. The silence of Per Peterson is in direct opposition to Denis Johnson’s high-energy voice and dark humor in Jesus’ Son. An attention to and a delicacy of language is probably it, but with a real conceptual edge. Auster is such a conceptual writer. The pure language and sentence-making of Marilynne Robinson is remarkable stuff. And with Marylinne Robinson or Per Peterson, there are these quintessential images of those books that appear when I think about those books. I think about Housekeeping and that moment when the character falls down into the river where that train had fallen and the foot touches something metallic in the water, and it’s so visceral—a haunting image of the train that went down in that water.

It’s funny that when I start talking about fiction, I turn to the language of poetry, not just the language of sentence and unit-making, but the making of images. I suppose when I’m reading fiction I’m still looking for poetry.

Why do you think that is?
I’m helpless—and a really slow reader of fiction. I’m used to the density and intensity of a poem, and you do train yourself in certain ways.

You’ve never turned to a Lee Child novel?
[Laughs.] No, I haven’t. Not yet. I’ll get there.

Do you feel competitive with other poetry editors?
Yes, there is a competitive level, even for poetry. I look at other lists and say, “I wish we could have gotten that one!” And sometimes we lose a poet, or something you passed on ends up winning a prize or getting the review. And yet I choose to look at it more like: Thank goodness for all of this. I make a lot of mistakes, so it’s great to know that others are there to make sure that great work will find a home. It might take a year or three years or ten years, but more poetry is being published than ever before, and there are outlets for many kinds of poets.

Who is the editor who most inspires you to do your best work?
Fiona is first and foremost. Watching her work on particular books—she edits Percival Everett, who is a genius, and seeing her editorial work with Salvatore Scibona’s The End, which was a National Book Award finalist in fiction: Wow.

Has self-publishing had an impact on the world of poetry publishing?
Sure, it’s had an impact. Walt Whitman self-published, William Blake self-published. [Laughs.]

True! But what about digital self-publishing today? Do you see that as kin to the chapbook, something the poet could create himself and disseminate?
Perhaps now a poet’s website operates not unlike that, but maybe not quite. I almost wish self-publishing had more of an effect. Not surprisingly, I tend to think that going through a traditional publisher will always be a writer’s—including a poet’s—best option. It’s very hard for a poet to produce and design—let alone write—the work, and then market, distribute, and promote it. I’m glad the mechanism is there, but it could probably be a more vibrant area. Not everything needs to go through a traditional publishing house. Not everything needs to sell x number of copies. Not everything needs to be reviewed in the New York Times—nor is it!

I don’t see self-publishing as competing with what Graywolf is doing, or what FSG or Norton or Copper Canyon are doing. A lot of poets have first books they must get out of their systems. That’s not a knock against them. I get sent their self-published books, some of them beautifully done. Unfortunately, there are also a lot of self-publishing mechanisms that lean toward a vanity type of publishing that take advantage of poets in particular.

Your authors have won so many awards that I’m not sure if there are any left.
[Laughs.] We’ve had a good run, yes.

Do you have a white whale? One thing you won’t rest until you catch?
It’s remarkable to sit next to your poet when her name is called from the National Book Award podium. I won’t pretend otherwise. It was remarkable to open up the New York Times and see that Tomas Tranströmer won the Nobel Prize. But that’s not why you’re in the game. We stand behind all of our books, firmly and enthusiastically. But there can only be one book a year that wins the Pulitzer, so it’s extraordinary when that happens.

We would publish those books anyway. We didn’t publish them with an assumption tied to them; we published them because they’re great. The authors are great and those individual books are great. A lot of books deserve that attention, and one or a handful of them get it. As far as a white whale, I want every success for all of our authors that they can possibly have. Whatever it is that keeps Graywolf strong, vibrant, and interesting, and whatever keeps our writers writing.

We talk a lot here about “again.” Can we get the next book by some of these authors? What can we do again with these authors that succeed, and what new authors can we bring on because of that success? It’s exciting having a New York Times bestseller that’s a fascinating and challenging collection of essays. That doesn’t happen very often, for sure. That felt a little like a white whale. The only previous time we’d been on the list was with Out Stealing Horses, and that felt like a huge confirmation.

What have been some of the hardest moments of your career?
The hardest moments have been turning down authors that I’ve worked with before. That’s incredibly painful. So is losing out on an author’s next book. That’s common enough, but we try to work with an author’s career whenever we can. You build relationships, professional and sometimes personal friendships with these authors whose work you continue to admire. But that just wasn’t the right book, or we didn’t do well on the previous one, and it might even be better for that author to go somewhere else. Those haunt me. It is hard to see another publisher take something that slipped through your fingers.

Have you ever had a crisis of confidence in what you’re doing? When you’ve stopped and had to ask: Can I keep doing this? Do I want to keep doing this?
Sure, there are day-to-day moments where things don’t seem to be going well, or sales aren’t what you would like them to be, or you didn’t land that author you hoped to work with. That’s been the minor key for me. My story is one of exuberant fortune and good luck. I am all the time reminding myself how fortunate I am to get to do this work. Everybody gets down, and you look into the abyss from time to time, but most of the time here has been stable. I love working with the people on the staff here, and I learn from them. We all do this together, and I love our authors.

An ongoing challenge for Graywolf, of course, is funding, and keeping our culture aware that it can’t take these kinds of risky books for granted. And then there are the challenges of being an editor and having two little kids and a family. But what a marvelous challenge that part of life is!

Part of my great fortune is trying to show those two boys you can still make a go of it in this cruel world. You can still do something you love, and it’s worth the sacrifice to do something you love even if it means you have to turn and face the wind of the culture. It’s a lovely and marvelous thing to bring something beautiful and meaningful and challenging into the world, and I hope that they’ll see that. I live for that.

How do you make a life that allows for artful thinking to be at the center of your existence? I think that makes me a better person, hopefully a better editor and, God willing, a better father and husband. I take this all incredibly personally. Certain parts of a meaningful life are sometimes at risk, too.

Who else inspires you?
One poet who has inspired me and changed me is Tomas Tranströmer. His lines strike me as inspiring for their vision, for their profundity, for making sense of darkness and conflict, and his life seems emblematic now for the very efforts of speech and meaning. I have tried to remember to live—and to edit—by these lines by Tranströmer, from his poem “The Half-Finished Heaven,” a sort of lifeline: “Every person is a half-open door / leading to a room for everyone.” I would offer these lines to anyone as inspiration. We are all capable of reaching each other.

What advice would you give a poet who is trying to place those first poems or that first book?
Read as much as you can. Understand that every part of this enterprise, whether it’s the poet’s part of it, the writer’s part of it, the editor’s part of it, the agent’s part of it, the publisher’s part of it, the magazine’s part of it—it’s a conversation. That conversation has to go two ways, and often more than two ways. Writers can sometimes get trapped in one-dimensionality, and I understand that, because it’s hard to place that first book, and at certain points in your career you look into the abyss and wonder how your work makes a difference. Reading other writers, reviewing other writers, and being involved in as many possible ways as you can with the art is incredibly valuable.

Don’t get caught in the trap of doing one kind of thing. Poetry might be just one aspect of your existence, but make sure that you are also x, y, and z—fill in as many blanks in your life as you can. It will make you a better writer, a more empathetic person. It will give you access to more experiences that will enhance your life. Nobody’s ever one thing.

Whitman: “I contain multitudes.”
Right. And Montaigne wrote something like, “It is very difficult not to be more than one person.” We are not singular entities, and we are all interconnected. What do you do with that as an artist? What do you do with that as someone who’s trying to be a conduit for other artists? That’s the editor’s question.

I want to get over any sense a writer might have that an editor is your adversary. There are hurdles and obstacles, but no one is your adversary. It’s easy to get down when you feel like any time you try to risk something—which is what the poet does, risk everything on the page—there’s somebody there to put a lid on it. I find that so anti-intellectual and problematic, and I see it frequently and try to ignore it as much as possible. But I love seeing all the ways that poets get past it.

I learned a lot by editing Leslie Jamison. Her book has made me think about things in a shifted way. Maybe another piece of advice is: Let yourself be changed.

Michael Szczerban is a senior editor at Regan Arts.

A Thing Meant to Be: The Work of a Book Editor

by

Rebecca Saletan

4.11.18
Online Only

The following essay was adapted from remarks given at Poets & Writers’ annual dinner, In Celebration of Writers, on March 28, 2018, in New York City.

In my senior year of college, having discovered that I generally liked working on other people’s prose a great deal more than my own, I confided to a professor that I was thinking of trying to become an editor. “Pretty thankless job,” she said. The truth is, despite its moments of frustration and overwhelm and failure, I have never found the job thankless.

More than anything, there is this: the sublime moment—and it never stops being sublime—when you get to attend, as beautiful, meaningful, and original work emerges in the world. When I gave birth to my daughters, one of my sisters-in-law said, “It is one of the rare experiences for which ‘miracle’ is not an overstatement.” It’s not an overstatement for the birth of art, either. What’s most miraculous is the “let there be” of it—the way a new and unique something yet again emerges from the wordless deep.

The sense is that the book is trying to communicate what it wants to become, how it wants to incarnate itself. Masha Gessen recently spoke of this process in an interview: “I know what my objectives are and I know what the topic is, and then I’m just reporting. I walk around for a bit, literally, bike and walk, and then suddenly, I get an idea of what it should be, what the structure is. I can’t tell you how I came up with this.” Peter Matthiessen thanked John Irving for his comments on the sprawling early draft of what would become his monumental Shadow Country back in “the book’s cretaceous days, when the whole was still inchoate, crude, and formless.” And when Matthiessen died, just before we at Riverhead had the precious honor of publishing his final book, Irving mourned the loss of “a friend I dared to show what I was up to, when I was still unsure of what it was.”

At its best—and it is often this good—editing means getting to be such a friend, and entering into that strange and almost primal process of divining the shape the work is trying to assume. It was Matthiessen himself who gave me my first experience of being taken seriously as an editor, back when I was an assistant to the formidable Jason Epstein, and Peter was working on a collection of stories. One day he asked if I would look at one he’d been laboring over. Something was hampering it, but he didn’t know what. I read it and instantly saw—or rather, felt—what was off: The story was constructed on a hinge, and the hinge was stuck, much as an actual hinge might be.

It’s as if writer and editor have their eyes not on each other but on the shape of the emergent work, and this angle of approach is wonderfully liberating, breaking down barriers and kindling an immediate intimacy that may be my favorite thing about my job. This past fall, I was invited to give a talk at a conference on Ivan Doig, the great memoirist and novelist of the West. I puzzled over what to say. Writers and editors don’t talk about what a work means, I realized, we talk about how it’s made. Ivan and I began with Bucking the Sun, a novel that opens with a couple found drowned in a truck at the bottom of the Missouri River. Revisiting our correspondence of twenty years ago in the online archive, I was struck by how unceremoniously we got down to business: The mystery of who these characters were was a thread that needed to be pulled more firmly through the entire book.

When I think about the writers and books I have worked with, it’s the dialogue about shape that I most remember. A draft of a story in which a kind of sonic boom goes off at the beginning demands an answering boom at the end. Or: Rather than trying to launch six complicated characters at the outset, how about introducing them one by one, like a juggler putting balls into the air? Perhaps not surprisingly, all my career I have been drawn to writing and writers who are structurally inventive and do not fit into easy categories: fiction/nonfiction, narrative/essay, poets and writers. I love that the very name of this organization allows for the reading that they are one and the same.

What took me much longer to recognize—and is I think less recognized generally—is that the boundary between the “creative” enterprise and the “business” of publishing is worth challenging too. If we keep our focus on the work itself, keep taking our inspiration from it rather than imposing a grid of conventional approaches and expectations on it—the publishing process becomes an extension of the creative moment that gave rise to the book itself. My mentors in this have been my colleagues. The art director, looking to create a jacket that will become the outward expression of a book’s inmost explosive self, runs around for weeks exploding her hands until she finds a photographer willing to let her throw colored dust all over his studio and photograph it. The production editor nerds out on finding the mot that does justice to a magnificent sentence. The publicity director dreams up a campaign that involves pet treats or murals. The shape of a powerful pitch for a book comes to an editor while commuting on her bike. The publisher keeps the whole enterprise aloft, sometimes tugging us back into orbit but also challenging us to boldly go where we haven’t before. When we are doing it right, the work we are trying to put into the world focuses and fuels us, and we recapitulate its Big Bang in a series of detonations all the way through the process.

When work like this goes out into the world—when it goes out into the world like this—I think it is not audacious to say that it becomes, as the phrase goes, an instance of the change we wish to see in the world. This is not only because of the impact it may have, as its fullest and most coherent self, shown in the brightest possible light, presented like nothing we have seen before but a thing necessary, meant to be. It is also because, in putting it into the world this way, we, with our writers, become a community functioning as we would have the world function.

 

Rebecca Saletan is vice president and editorial director of Riverhead Books, a Penguin Random House imprint. Over her thirty-five-year career in publishing, Saletan has worked with a wide range of authors including internationally best-selling novelist and essayist Mohsin Hamid; National Book Award-winning journalist and social critic Masha Gessen; and National Book Award-winning writer and environmentalist Peter Matthiessen. She received the 2018 Editor’s Award from Poets & Writers, Inc.

Rebecca Saletan (front left, seated) at Poets & Writers’ annual dinner with authors (clockwise from upper left) Garnette Cadogan, Mandy Aftel, Danzy Senna, Pitchaya Sudbanthad, Francisco Cantú, Casey Gerald, Yelena Akhtiorskaya, Lesley Nneka Arimah, Claire Vaye Watkins, and Anna Badkhen.

(Credit: Margarita Corporan)

Agents & Editors: A Q&A With Editor Janet Silver
Agents & Editors: A Q&A With Editor Pat Strachan
Agents & Editors: A Q&A With Editor Jonathan Karp

We Mean Business: Twelve Agents Who Want to Read Your Work

by

Kevin Larimer

July/August 2017
6.14.17
In Print and Online

To say there are a lot of literary agents out there is an understatement—almost like saying there are a lot of writers looking for an agent (but not quite). The Association of Authors’ Representatives (AAR), a nonprofit membership organization founded in 1991, currently lists more than four hundred agents as members, all of whom meet certain experience requirements and abide by an established code of ethics. Another, more general, online database claims to offer details for nearly a thousand agents of varying levels of expertise and areas of emphasis. The carefully curated and focused database of literary agents at pw.org lists more than a hundred, including contact information, submission guidelines, and client lists.

No, the challenge for writers is not a dearth of agents, but rather picking the right one out of the crowd. (Of course, the same could be said about the challenge for agents.) To help narrow the field, I contacted some hungry agents who I know are eager to receive an e-mail from an as-yet-unknown writer and asked each of them for some basic information about what kind of work they want to read and how to reach them, as well as some not-so-basic information that will help you get to know them a little better. Remember, publishing is a business of relationships. You don’t want to simply fire off an e-mail to any agent you happen to come across. Read carefully. In the following profiles, a dozen agents are dropping some subtle (and not so subtle) hints for you. Have you written a piece of narrative nonfiction that gets to the heart of what it means to live in a specific geographical region? Duvall Osteen might be a great fit. Do you have a novel set in North Carolina? Adam Eaglin could be your man. Are you from Detroit and love music? You may need to look no further than Carrie Howland. Are you a writer of smart horror fiction and just can’t get enough of the work of Joe Hill and Nathan Ballingrud? You should take the time to get to know Renée Zuckerbrot.

These twelve agents all have distinct personalities, aesthetics, work habits, backgrounds, proclivities, and peeves—and so do you. So take your time, do the research, read books by their clients, and listen to what these professionals are saying. One of them might be speaking directly to you.

 

Danielle Svetcov, Levine Greenberg Rostan Literary Agency

Who she represents: Bridget Quinn (Broad Strokes), Bonnie Tsui (Why We Swim), Nicole Perlroth (This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends), Stephanie Wilbur Ash (The Annie Year), Meg Elison (The Book of the Unnamed Midwife), James Nestor (Deep), Shalane Flanagan and Elyse Kopecky (Run Fast Eat Slow), Eben Weiss (The Ultimate Bicycle Owner’s Manual)

What she wants to read: Biographies and histories in which I can smell the breath and walk in the footsteps of the characters profiled; memoirs and reported narratives braced by vivid scenes and a sense of urgency; humor that can revive a marriage when read before bed; fiction that reads easy but isn’t.

When you should contact her: If your manuscript is the only piece of writing you’ve got to share (you’re not a working journalist, say, or a published author), then your manuscript (if it’s fiction) should be complete before you query. If you are a professional writer with clips galore to share, I still recommend you query when you’ve got a finished manuscript (if fiction), because it leaves no mystery (but it’s up to you). If you’re submitting nonfiction—all writers—then you should have a full proposal to share when you query. Coda: An agent should not be the first person (besides you) to read your manuscript or proposal.

Where she can be reached: e-mail dsvetcov@lgrliterary.com

Why you should want her as your agent: To quote my clients: “relentless,” “wolfish,” “and she always calls you back.”

How she wants to be contacted: Send query letter with attached proposal or sample of fiction (say, twenty-five pages).

 

Renée Zuckerbrot, Massie & McQuilkin Literary Agents

Who she represents: Dan Chaon (Ill Will), Shannon Leone Fowler (Traveling With Ghosts), Kelly Link (Get in Trouble), Deborah Lutz (The Bronte Cabinet: Three Lives in Nine Objects), Andrew Malan Milward (I Was a Revolutionary), Keith Lee Morris (Travelers Rest), Shawn Vestal (Godforsaken Idaho), M. O. Walsh (My Sunshine Away), Daniel Wallace (Extraordinary Adventures)

What she wants to read: I tend to be seduced by voice, so voice-driven fiction and nonfiction are high on my wish list. I love getting lost in a world that is strikingly different from mine. I have a deep appreciation for storytelling that allows me to see the world anew, or introduces me to a culture or worldview outside my own. I read to be entertained and educated. Writers who approach current events and historical topics with original, provocative ideas will always find readers. I’m also looking for smart horror writers along the lines of Joe Hill and my client Nathan Ballingrud (North American Lake Monsters). There will always be room on my list for popular science—Eric Sanderson’s Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City is a good example—and pop-culture books like my client Theron Humphrey’s Maddie on Things.

When you should contact her: Please query me when you have a complete manuscript or proposal with a sample chapter. I am also willing to look at a complete short story collection and partial novel, or a complete novel and a partial story collection. For memoirs, I will consider a proposal with a sample chapter or the complete manuscript.

Where she can be reached: e-mail renee@mmqlit.com

Why you should want her as your agent: I am a careful reader who reads on both a micro and macro level. My first job was in editorial—I’m a former Doubleday editor—so it’s all about the writing. I work with my clients on getting their work in the best shape possible before submitting it. That said, my job is not to edit a manuscript so that it conforms to my idea of perfection; rather, it is to edit a work so that editors reading it will be able to envision the book as the writer intends. I need to leave enough room for editors to work with my clients to shape their manuscripts to their shared vision and the publisher’s vision. I’m proud of the fact that the manuscripts I sell never require major editorial overhauls. Also, I value fostering long-term relationships with my writers. Last but not least, I’m enthusiastic about collaborating with my writers and their publishers during the publication of their work. I love helping to generate buzz for my clients by talking up their work to anyone who will listen.

How she wants to be contacted: Please include a description of your work, your writing credentials, a brief bio in the body of an e-mail, along with the first three chapters/stories from your manuscript as a Word document. For nonfiction, you can also send a proposal and sample chapter.

 

Duvall Osteen, Aragi Inc.

Who she represents: Bethany Ball (What to Do About the Solomons), Elizabeth Poliner (As Close to Us as Breathing), Marjorie Liu (Monstress), Lauren Holmes (Barbara the Slut and Other People), Brooke Barker (Sad Animal Facts), Brad Watson (Miss Jane), Bryce Andrews (Badluck Way: A Year on the Ragged Edge of the West), Wil S. Hylton (Vanished: The Sixty-Year Search for the Missing Men of World War II), Pablo Medina (The Island Kingdom)

What she wants to read: Fiction and narrative nonfiction with a big voice and/or a strong sense of place.

When you should contact her: For fiction I request completed novels or story collections. For narrative nonfiction I’m happy to read a proposal, which should include an overview and at least two finished chapters.

Where she can be reached: e-mail queries@aragi.net; attn: Duvall Osteen

Why you should want her as your agent: We’re a small, selective agency. We keep it that way for a reason. Our authors are never going to be handed off; they can always reach us, no matter how big or small the question, no matter what stage of their career. Every single author at Aragi is of equal importance.

How she wants to be contacted: Please send your query via e-mail, which should include a synopsis of the book and your bio.

 

Jeff Kleinman, Folio Literary Management

Who he represents: Garth Stein (The Art of Racing in the Rain), Elizabeth Letts (The Eighty-Dollar Champion), Eowyn Ivey (The Snow Child), Jacquelyn Mitchard (Two If by Sea), Charles J.  Shields (Mockingbird), Karen Dionne (The Marsh King’s Daughter), Benjamin Ludwig (Ginny Moon), Val Emmich (The Reminders), Kathy McKeon (Jackie’s Girl)

What he wants to read: I focus on book-club/literary fiction and narrative nonfiction—especially those projects that I feel can make a difference either to me personally or to the world. I love unique voices, magnificently strong characters, unusual premises, and books that offer some new perspective on something I thought I already knew something about or never even dreamed existed. I’m always interested in learning and love when someone can teach me something organically so it doesn’t feel like I’m even learning. I’m particularly looking for voice-driven fiction as well as very well-written thrillers and psychological suspense novels; or novels with a great, quirky, fun voice. I love narrative nonfiction and memoir and have sold projects in a wide variety of subjects, including art, history, animals, military, and many other genres.

When you should contact him: Fiction writers, when you’ve finished your entire novel, had it read by several readers, edited and reedited it, and feel like it’s now absolutely as strong as you can possibly make it, write me a letter and tell me about it. Nonfiction writers, when you’ve written a book proposal, paying particular attention to the sample chapter(s)/excerpts and marketing materials, write me a letter.

Where he can be reached: E-mail jeff@foliolit.com, but please consult the Folio website (foliolit.com) before you fire off an e-mail. No phone calls or hard copies, please.

Why you should want him as your agent: I’m very hands-on and love the editing-collaborating process—brainstorming plots, rejiggering motivations, tweaking backstory. It’s really satisfying and invigorating to be part of the creative process. I also love being part of the publication process, too—coming up with marketing ideas, discussing PR strategies, revising flap copy, reading/editing short promotional materials, and so forth. I do best working with authors who see their agent as a partner in the book publishing process: I’m not a guy who rubber-stamps a manuscript and just forwards it to the editor; and I don’t just disappear once the book has been sold. As one author told me recently, “I was just saying that what you do for me is not normal. I don’t know of a single other agent who works so hard to make sure his clients look good—and I know a lot of agents!”

How he wants to be contacted: For fiction, a query letter plus the first page of your manuscript; for nonfiction, a query letter plus a proposal overview and/or first page of a sample excerpt.

 

Eleanor Jackson, Dunow, Carlson & Lerner

Who she represents: David Wroblewski (The Story of Edgar Sawtelle), Susie Steiner (Missing, Presumed), T. Geronimo Johnson (Welcome to Braggsville), Aline Ohanesian (Orhan’s Inheritance), Susan Straight (Between Heaven and Here), Michael Lemonick (The Perpetual Now)

What she wants to read: I believe a good book should wake you up by taking you out of your life and immersing you in someone else’s. So I want to read books with deeply imagined worlds, by writers who are not afraid to take risks with their work.

When you should contact her: Fiction writers, I want you to contact me when you have a full draft of your novel. I sell a lot of nonfiction on proposal, so I’m happy to look at those projects a bit earlier. If I’m considering nonfiction on proposal, I’d like to see one or two sample chapters. In general, I think the best moment for writers to contact an agent is when they have done everything they possibly can on their own.

Where she can be reached: Dunow, Carlson & Lerner Literary Agency; 27 West 20th Street, Suite 1107; New York, NY 10011; e-mail eleanor@dclagency.com

Why you should want her as your agent: I consider my clients my friends. They all have my cell-phone number and are free to use it. My list is intentionally small, so I can give every project the attention it deserves. I also like to think long-term, about how to build a career as well as sell individual books.

How she wants to be contacted: Please send me a one- to two-page query letter with a summary of your work and an author bio. If you have a proposal, please attach it to your query. If you are working on a novel, please attach the first ten to twenty pages to give me a sense of your writing.

 

Allison Hunter, Janklow & Nesbit Associates

Who she represents: Katie Heaney (Never Have I Ever), Arianna Rebolini (Public Relations), Swan Huntley (We Could Be Beautiful), Anna Pitoniak (The Futures), Anne Helen Petersen (Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud), Christina Kelly (Good Karma), Victoria James (Drink Pink), Kelsey Miller (Big Girl), Jen Chaney (As If!), Emilie Wapnick (How to Be Everything), Dvora Meyers (The End of the Perfect 10), Eliot Nelson (The Beltway Bible), Megan Mulry (A Royal Pain)

What she wants to read: Literary and commercial fiction, especially upmarket and women’s fiction, as well as select memoir, narrative nonfiction, cultural studies, and pop culture. I’m especially looking for funny female writers, great love stories, campus novels, beach reads, family epics, and nonfiction projects that speak to the current cultural climate.

When you should contact her: Fiction writers, please wait until you have a complete, polished manuscript. Nonfiction writers, you should have a fully fleshed out idea and ideally a full book proposal.

Where she can be reached: e-mail ahunter@janklow.com

Why you should want her as your agent: I like to think that I offer my authors the best of both worlds—the resources of a large, world-class agency but with a great deal of personal attention. I am a fast and voracious reader and feel that it is my duty to read widely in the genres I’m representing, to fully understand the market. I pride myself on my close working and personal relationships with editors at every publishing house, as well as my connections with the greater literary community in New York City.

How she wants to be contacted: Please send me a query and approximately ten to fifteen pages of your manuscript or proposal.

 

Carrie Howland, Empire Literary

Who she represents: Kaitlyn Greenidge (We Love You, Charlie Freeman), Carmiel Banasky (The Suicide of Claire Bishop), Melissa Gorzelanczyk (Arrows), Sarah Prager (Queer, There, and Everywhere), Jason Tougaw (The One You Get)

What she wants to read: I’m actively seeking adult-fiction writers, both literary and upmarket. My background is in poetry and literary fiction, so beautiful language is one of the first things I look for in any project. Equally important are a strong voice and great story, which I’m looking for across genres. I would love to see a literary thriller, whether adult or young adult, come across my desk. For children’s books, I love voice-driven, contemporary fiction that isn’t afraid to tackle tough issues. I adore a middle-grade adventure story but am also taken by one that might deal with the loss of a sibling, for example, or a serious issue at school or with a friend. For nonfiction, I’m a music fanatic, and as such I’m always looking for great books on movements, culture, musicians themselves, or simply how we as a society respond to, and are affected by, the music around us. I’m a Detroit-area native, so I’d also love submissions for books that deal with the city itself, or cities like it, the politics surrounding them, and stories of people who live there. In addition to poetry, I have a strong background in public policy, so I’m incredibly interested in books that deal with politics, education, or other societal issues. Finally, I love all things pop culture, so I will never say no to a proposal about anything from “why we’re a Bachelor-obsessed nation” to “why we can’t ever seem to get enough of Gilmore Girls.”

When you should contact her: For fiction, a project should truly be finished before I see it. I recommend you have a not only complete but also well-edited manuscript before sending to me, or any agent. For nonfiction, a proposal is perfect.

Where she can be reached: e-mail carrie@empireliterary.com

Why you should want her as your agent: After nearly twelve years as an agent, representing award-winning authors, I’ve developed a hands-on approach to launching the careers of debut novelists. I’m a very editorial agent and love collaborating with my clients. Whether that’s idea development, manuscript feedback, assisting with publicity, social media, or marketing, I really do consider myself a full-service partner for my authors. I absolutely love what I do; I live and breathe for my clients and work tirelessly to promote their work and careers. Beyond that, while I’ve been a New Yorker for over a decade, I’m a Midwestern girl at heart, so you’ll find not only an advocate, but a friend in me as your agent. This can be a tough business, and I like to remind my clients why we all chose this profession in the first place: because we’re passionate about the written word.

How she wants to be contacted: Please send your query letter and first twenty pages (for fiction) or proposal (for nonfiction) as a Word document to carrie@empireliterary.com.

 

Ross Harris, Stuart Krichevsky Literary Agency

Who he represents: Isaac Oliver (Intimacy Idiot), Charlyne Yi (Oh the Moon: Stories From the Tortured Mind of Charlyne Yi), Rachel Lindsay, Manoush Zomorodi (Bored and Brilliant: How Spacing Out Can Unlock Your Most Productive and Creative Self), A. Brad Schwartz (Broadcast Hysteria: Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds and the Art of Fake News), Rebekah Frumkin (The Comedown), Ruth Joffre (Night Beast and Other Stories)

What he wants to read: My taste tends to lean toward the literary, but as long as the plot surprises and entertains, I’ll be won over. I love to find new, unpredictable stories—I think every agent will tell you that—but I particularly enjoy the feeling, the unease, the excitement that creeps in when I honestly don’t know what’ll happen next. When I finish a book (or proposal), the lasting feeling of wonderment is what I’m after.

When you should contact him: You should write to me (and, yes, please do!) when you feel comfortable sharing your work. I tell writers that the right time to share your work with an agent is when you feel confident that it’ll speak for itself—without you having to be in the room. If you’re going to want to be over my shoulder saying, “Well, this part will be fixed…” or “I intend to make this part a little clearer…,” you aren’t ready to share the work, which is completely fine. Many writers make the mistake of looking for an agent too soon. An agent’s primary job is to sell your work, so if you don’t have anything yet to sell…wait until you do. You get one first impression. Make it count.

Where he can be reached: My inbox is always open to new and prospective clients: rh@skagency.com.

Why you should want him as your agent: I’m fun, I mean business, I care deeply about seeing each and every client succeed in her or his own way. When I work with any writer, regardless of genre or style, it’s a very personalized relationship.

How he wants to be contacted: A partial manuscript, a proposal, or full manuscript. The work doesn’t have to be 100 percent polished, but remember that I’m going to be considering its salability, not potential salability. Just make sure you’re ready (and feel confident) to send. If you’re excited to share your work with me, I’ll be excited to read it.

 

Caroline Eisenmann, Frances Goldin Literary Agency

Who she represents: Meghan Flaherty (Tango Lessons), Brandon Hobson (Where the Dead Sit Talking)

What she wants to read: In almost any genre, I’m attracted to great prose and a strong sense of emotional intelligence on the page. For upmarket and literary fiction, I tend to be particularly drawn to relationship-driven novels, stories about obsession, and work that grapples with intimacy and its discontents. With nonfiction, I’m very interested in deeply reported narratives and stories that take the reader into the heart of a subculture as well as idea books with a surprising or unusual central argument.

When you should contact her: I’d like to see your work when you feel you’ve taken it as far as you can by yourself. With a novel, this will almost always mean an edited full manuscript; in nonfiction, I’d generally want to read at least the fundamental elements of a proposal (outline, sample pages, etc.).

Where she can be reached: It’s best to get in touch by e-mail at ce@goldinlit.com

Why you should want her as your agent: I do a lot of editorial work with my clients, generally from the ground level of a project. That can mean brainstorming about the concept behind nonfiction or coming up with plot solutions in fiction, but my goal is always to help authors reach the best possible version of their book before submission. I’m also a clear communicator who’s constantly thinking about what my clients want and need, and I will do everything possible to make those goals happen. I worked in marketing and digital publishing before coming to agenting, which gives me extra insight into how to position my clients in an evolving landscape.

How she wants to be contacted: Please send a query. If the work is fiction or completed nonfiction, include the first ten pages in the body of the e-mail.

 

Adam Eaglin, Cheney Associates, LLC

Who he represents: Lawrence Osborne (Hunters in the Dark), Jennine Capó Crucet (Make Your Home Among Strangers), Ron Rash (The Risen), Lisa Servon (The Unbanking of America: How the Middle Class Survives), David Treuer (Prudence), Devin Leonard (Neither Snow nor Rain: A History of the United States Postal Service), Leah Vincent (Cut Me Loose: Sin and Salvation After My Ultra-Orthodox Girlhood), Diksha Basu (The Windfall)

What he wants to read: Debut literary and upmarket fiction; narrative nonfiction and memoir; journalists and academics writing new takes on culture, politics, and current events. Regardless of genre, I’m always interested in diverse voices and underrepresented perspectives, and as a native North Carolinian I am partial to great fiction set in the South.

When you should contact him: For fiction, it’s usually best to be in touch when you have a finished manuscript to share. For nonfiction, a draft of a proposal.

Where he can be reached: e-mail adam@cheneyliterary.com

Why you should want him as your agent: I try to keep a small, selective list and only take on projects I really believe in, which enables me to be a hands-on and passionate advocate for each of my writers. This includes in-depth editorial work, working strategically to find the best publishing deals, and shepherding an author through all aspects of the publication process, including publicity and marketing. My goal is always to help each of my author’s books make as big an impact as possible and to build careers over time.

How he wants to be contacted: A query by e-mail with a full manuscript (for fiction) or a proposal (nonfiction).

 

Amelia Atlas, ICM Partners

Who she represents: Caite Dolan-Leach (Dead Letters), Mark O’Connell (To Be a Machine), Matt Gallagher (Youngblood), Joy Williams (Ninety-Nine Stories of God)

What she wants to read: I’m looking for books—whether fiction or nonfiction—that feel engaged with the larger world. That can mean having a big new idea, taking me to a place or a part of history that I haven’t seen, or simply having a kind of inquisitive spirit. I’m looking for writing that comes from a place of urgency.

When you should contact her: Ideally I’d like to hear from writers who have a finished manuscript or proposal ready for review. At the very least it should feel like you’ve really pushed the project as far as you can without outside eyes and feedback.

Where she can be reached: e-mail aatlas@icmpartners.com

Why you should want her as your agent: The projects I look for are the kind of things I know I’m going to want to be in the trenches fighting for in the years to come (publishing is a slow business), and I think that shows in how I work with my clients—whether it’s reading multiple drafts, batting ideas around, or shepherding them through the publishing process. I like to be pretty hands-on, especially in the early, developmental stages: It’s exciting to watch something become the book we know it should be.

How she wants to be contacted: A query letter plus the first ten pages pasted into the body of an e-mail.

 

Julie Barer, The Book Group

Who she represents: Joshua Ferris (To Rise Again at a Decent Hour), Bret Anthony Johnston (Remember Me Like This), Lily King (Euphoria), Celeste Ng (Everything I Never Told You), Cristina Henriquez (The Book of Unknown Americans), Helen Simonson (Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand), Mia Alvar (In the Country), Madeline Miller (The Song of Achilles), Alice Sebold (Lucky), Kathleen Kent (The Heretic’s Daughter), Nicole Dennis-Benn (Here Comes the Sun), Megan Mayhew Bergman (Almost Famous Women), Paula McLain (The Paris Wife), Kevin Wilson (The Family Fang), Charles Yu (How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe)

What she wants to read: My list is predominantly fiction, and I am particularly interested in representing diverse voices and perspectives from around the world. I’m always looking to learn something new from the fiction I read and to be taken somewhere I’ve never been before. I’m drawn to original voices, or retellings of stories we’ve heard before in new and innovative ways. I need to feel emotionally connected to the characters, and as obvious as it sounds, I need a real plot. More than anything, though, I just want to fall in love. I want to miss my subway stop because I can’t stop reading. I want to completely disappear into the world of the novel. I want to turn the last page and immediately feel the need to tell everyone I know about it.  

When you should contact her: In general I think it’s best, when writing fiction, if you have a complete and polished manuscript. That means you’ve taken the time to self-edit and even stepped away from the project for some time so you know that you’ve really put everything into it that you can. If it’s nonfiction, then a proposal with forty to fifty pages of material is usually enough. 

Where she can be reached: The Book Group, c/o Julie Barer; 20 West 20th Street, Suite 601; New York, NY 10011; thebookgroup.com; e-mail submissions@thebookgroup.com

Why you should want her as your agent: At the Book Group we believe in a very hands-on approach at every stage of the publication process. I love to edit, and I bring a strong editorial eye and passionate commitment to each project, making sure I’ve done all I can do to help authors realize their vision and address any issues before we submit to publishers. I’m extremely selective in taking on new projects, which ensures that I’m able to give my clients the time and attention they need. I’m also committed to helping my clients establish and navigate their careers across many years and many books, so I like to be involved in everything from helping write jacket copy to developing a social media presence, pitching magazine ideas, and submitting short stories to brainstorming for the book’s marketing campaign and beyond. We are right there with you every step of the way, and in addition to the U.S. market, we’re thinking about international sales, film, television and audio, and also what your next project should be. This long-term, big-picture perspective and involvement is one of the most interesting parts of my job. 

How she wants to be contacted: Please submit a query letter along with ten sample pages with “Julie Barer” in the subject line to submissions@thebookgroup.com. Please do not include any attachments.

Kevin Larimer is the editor in chief of Poets & Writers, Inc. 

Agents & Editors: The Complete Series
Agent Advice: The Complete Series
Seventy-Eight Agents to Follow on Twitter

Agent Advice: The Complete Series

by

Staff

12.15.21
In Print and Online

The industry’s best and brightest agents respond directly to readers’ questions in this regular column dating back to 2010. To submit a question for the next featured agent, e-mail editor@pw.org.

Monica Odom of Odom Media Management
12.15.2021
The agent answers questions about attracting agents using self-published books and whether to use a summary or a writing sample to pitch a memoir.
 

Larissa Melo Pienkowski of Jill Grinberg Literary Management
10.13.21
The agent who represents writers TJ Alexander and K. Tempest Bradford, among others, answers questions about being ghosted by agents and how to query for nonfiction books.

Jade Wong-Baxter of Frances Goldin Literary Agency
8.18.21
The agent representing Chris Belcher, Kate Broad, Delia Cai, Duy Doan, and others offers advice about working with a coauthor, changing a memoir to fiction, why agents don’t consider previously published work, and how to become an agent.

Amy Elizabeth Bishop of Dystel, Goderich & Bourret
 6.16.21
The literary agent answers questions about how to seek representation as a self-published author, break into the agenting business, and more. 

 Iwalani Kim of Sanford J. Greenberger Associates
 4.14.21
The literary agent answers questions about submitting story collections, getting an agent’s attention, and querying two agents at the same agency.
 

Jody Kahn of Brandt and Hochman
4.10.19
A literary agent answers questions from writers about genre, age, costs, and client lists.

Find a Literary Agent

The Literary Agents database contains details about more than 170 agents who are looking for new clients. Search the listings to find contact information, submission guidelines, client lists, tips from the agents, and more. 

find an agent

Priya Doraswamy of Lotus Lane Literary
10.10.18
An agent answers questions on obtaining the copyright of a self-published novel and seeking a U.S. publisher from abroad.
 

Regina Brooks of Serendipity Literary Agency
8.15.18
An agent answers questions on referrals, pitching a self-published book, and what to do if you’re dropped by an agency.
 

Annie Hwang of Folio Literary Management
12.13.17
A literary agent answers readers’ questions—from how seriously agents consider a writer’s previous sales to how to responsibly seek new representation.

Kirby Kim of Janklow & Nesbit Associates
4.12.17
A seasoned literary agent offers valuable counsel on when to query, how to keep revising, and whether horror fiction is a genre worth pursuing.

Anna Ghosh of Ghosh Literary
12.14.16
Anna Ghosh answers readers’ questions—from why poetry agents are seemingly nonexistent to whether or not it is possible to be “too young to write.”

Betsy Amster of Betsy Amster Literary Enterprises
10.14.15
The agent of authors such as María Amparo Escandón and Joy Nicholson offers advice on query letters, editing, and what not to do when submitting a manuscript.

Agents & Editors Recommend

A dependable source of professional and creative advice, Agents & Editors Recommend features anecdotes, insights, tips, recommended reading and viewing for writers, and more from leading agents and editors.

Explore the series

Danielle Svetcov of Levine Greenberg Rostan
4.15.15
Should you pay to have a manuscript edited beforehand? Are there benefits to querying via snail mail versus e-mail? Danielle Svetcov of Levine Greenberg Rostan answers readers’ questions about what (and what not) to do when trying to find an agent.

Meredith Kaffel Simonoff of DeFiore and Company
8.20.14
An agent representing authors such as CJ Hauser and Cecily Wong answers questions about writing in multiple genres, agents’ fees, and publishing work in online journals.

Amy Rennert of the Amy Rennert Agency
3.01.14
The agent of authors such as Diana Nyad and Herman Wouk answers questions about self-publishing, age restrictions, and working with an agent remotely.

Chris Parris-Lamb of the Gernert Company
10.06.13
Chris Parris-Lamb of the Gernert Company offers advice on submitting query letters and manuscripts, and when to embrace or eschew self-promotion.

Lucy Carson of the Friedrich Agency
9.01.13
Lucy Carson of the Friedrich Agency discusses e-book publishing, when to send a sample to an agent, and more.

Matt McGowan of Frances Goldin Literary Agency
5.01.13
Literary agent Matt McGowan, who represents Eula Biss, John D’Agata, Brian Evenson, and many others, answers writers’ most commonly asked questions.

Rebecca Gradinger of Fletcher & Company
10.17.12
Literary agent Rebecca Gradinger explains why writers need agents and offers tips about best practices for finding one.

Douglas Stewart of Sterling Lord Literistic
4.12.12
The agent of Jami Attenberg, David Mitchell, Carolyn Parkhurst, Matthew Quick, and others offers guidance about publishing credits, MFA programs, and unagented submissions.

Jenni Ferrari-Adler of Brick House Literary Agents
3.01.11
Does your book need to be finished before you seek representation? Do agents really read synopses? Agent Jenni Ferrari-Adler, whose clients include Lauren Shockey and Emma Straub, answers these questions and more.

Terra Chalberg of the Susan Golomb Literary Agency
10.15.10
When is the best time in your career to look for representation, and when should you call off an author-agent relationship? Terra Chalberg, whose clients include Lori Ostlund and Glenn Taylor, tackles these questions and more.

Jennifer Carlson of Dunow, Carlson & Lerner
8.11.10
The agent of authors such as Kevin Brockmeier and Marisa de los Santos offers her thoughts on self-publishing and what she looks for in the first five pages of a writing sample.

PJ Mark of Janklow & Nesbit Associates
5.01.10
The agent of authors such as Samantha Hunt, Dinaw Mengestu, and Josh Weil offers advice on shaping a query letter and when to follow up after pitching your book.

Katherine Fausset of Curtis Brown, Ltd.
3.01.10
Agent Katherine Fausset answers questions from readers about the agent’s role in submitting work to literary magazines and how writers can choose agents based on their client lists.
 

Agents & Editors: The Complete Series

Agents & Editors: The Complete Series

by

Jofie Ferrari-Adler, Michael Szczerban, and M. Allen Cunningham

2.10.21
In Print and Online

Launched in 2008, this series of in-depth interviews with book editors, publishers, and agents offers a unique look at the past, present, and future of the book industry and what writers can do to thrive in today’s publishing world.  

 

Agents

 

The Book Group
by Michael Szczerban
6.14.16
Four veteran agents—Julie Barer, Faye Bender, Brettne Bloom, and Elisabeth Weed—talk about the business of books, the secret to a good pitch, and what authors should do in the lead-up to publication.

Claudia Ballard, Seth Fishman, Melissa Flashman, and Alia Hanna Habib
by Michael Szczerban
6.17.15
Four young literary agents meet for an evening of food, drink, and conversation about how they find new authors, what they need to see in a query letter, and the common mistakes writers should avoid.

Jennifer Joel
by Michael Szczerban
2.10.15
Jennifer Joel, whose clients include Chris Cleave, Joe McGinniss Jr., Evan Osnos, and Shonda Rhimes, talks about the difference between selling fiction and nonfiction, what inspires her to go the extra mile for her authors, and what writers should really want out of publishing.

PJ Mark
by Michael Szczerban
6.18.14
PJ Mark, whose clients include Samantha Hunt, Wayne Koestenbaum, Dinaw Mengestu, Maggie Nelson, Ed Park, and Josh Weil, talks about what writers can do to improve their chances of success, why fiction is harder to sell than nonfiction, and the importance of trusting your heart.

Susan Golomb
by Michael Szczerban
5.1.14
Susan Golomb, whose clients include Jonathan Franzen, Rachel Kushner, and William T. Vollmann, talks about the ebb and flow of submission season, the art of the preemptive offer, and the gems she finds in her slush pile.

David Gernert
by Michael Szczerban
1.1.14
Literary agent David Gernert discusses the bookstore as a key to our culture, what it’s like to work with John Grisham, and how big changes in the industry are affecting authors’ incomes.

Eric Simonoff
by Michael Szczerban
7.1.13
A heavy-hitting agent who for twenty-two years has represented some of the biggest literary writers in the country, Eric Simonoff discusses recent changes in the publishing industry, the pitfalls of self-publishing, and what he’s learned about staying creative.

Georges Borchardt
by Jofie Ferrari-Adler
9.1.09
Georges Borchardt has been an agent for more than fifty years. He’s seen authors, editors, and other agents come and go, but two things have never changed: his belief that good writing is a gift and his ability to get it published.

Maria Massie, Jim Rutman, Anna Stein, and Peter Steinberg
by Jofie Ferrari-Adler
5.1.09
Four agents discuss how the economy is affecting their jobs, where they’re finding new writers, and what totally freaks them out about MFA students.

Julie Barer, Jeff Kleinman, Daniel Lazar, and Renee Zuckerbrot
by Jofie Ferrari-Adler
1.1.09
Four young literary agents meet for an evening of food, wine, and conversation about the writing they’re looking for, how they’re finding it, what they love, what they hate, and ten things writers should never ever do.

Molly Friedrich
by Jofie Ferrari-Adler
9.1.08
Known as a heavy-hitting agent willing to go to bat for her clients, Molly Friedrich discusses how an author should choose an agent, what she looks for in a manuscript, and what separates great agents from merely good ones.

Nat Sobel
by Jofie Ferrari-Adler
5.1.08
Agent Nat Sobel, one of the most forward-thinking and outspoken agents in the business, voices his opinions on what authors should do for themselves, the dangers of MFA programs, and what he finds in literary magazines.

Lynn Nesbit
by Jofie Ferrari-Adler
1.1.08
With more than forty years of experience in the business, agent Lynn Nesbit discusses how she signed some of her biggest clients, how a writer can get an agent’s attention, and what’s wrong with the publishing industry.

 

Editors

 

Sarah McGrath
by M. Allen Cunningham
2.10.21
The editor in chief of Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House, talks about her start in publishing, acquiring books, editing as a creative process, and more.

Ben George
by M. Allen Cunningham
8.14.19
Ben George, a senior editor at Little, Brown who works with some of the biggest names in literary fiction and nonfiction, talks about the author-editor relationship, the plight of the midlist writer, and the art of revision. 

Rob Spillman
by Michael Szczerban
10.12.16
Editor Rob Spillman talks Tin House—the magazine, the books, the summer workshop—and the pleasures, perils, and surprises of independent publishing.

Michael Wiegers
by Michael Szczerban
10.14.15
Michael Wiegers, the editor in chief of Copper Canyon Press, talks about how he decides which books to publish (from the two thousand manuscripts the press receives each year) and what it’s like to edit the likes of Pablo Neruda, W. S. Merwin, and C. D. Wright.

Dawn Davis
by Michael Szczerban
8.19.15
Dawn Davis—vice president and publisher of 37 INK, an imprint of Simon & Schuster’s Atria Publishing Group—talks about editing Edward P. Jones, the lack of diversity in publishing, and what some of the most successful authors have in common.

Jeff Shotts
by Michael Szczerban
10.15.14
Graywolf Press executive editor Jeff Shotts discusses the power of patience in publishing, editing as an act of empathy, and why it’s an exciting time to be a poet.

Amy Einhorn
by Michael Szczerban
2.12.14
The publisher of her eponymous imprint at Penguin Random House, Amy Einhorn discusses her early days as an assistant at FSG, the importance of titles, and how she pushes her authors to make their books the best they can be.

Jordan Pavlin
by Michael Szczerban
9.1.13
A vice president and executive editor at Knopf, Jordan Pavlin discusses her terror of launch meetings, the particular genius of Sonny Mehta, and her job as a writer’s ideal reader.

Jonathan Karp
by Jofie Ferrari-Adler
11.1.09
As the editor in chief of Twelve, Jonathan Karp is always looking for good writing. Considering that half of all the books he’s published there have become best-sellers, that should make a lot of writers very, very excited.

Jonathan Galassi
by Jofie Ferrari-Adler
7.1.09
Some publishers may have lost sight of what’s important, but the head of FSG shows his allegiance as he discusses the fallacy of the blockbuster mentality, what writers should look for in agents, and his close bond with authors.

Lee Boudreaux, Eric Chinski, Alexis Gargagliano, and Richard Nash
by Jofie Ferrari-Adler
3.1.09
Four young editors, from big houses and small, take some time off to discuss what makes a good manuscript, what they’ve come to expect from their authors, and how much of their work needs to be done at night and on weekends.

Chuck Adams
by Jofie Ferrari-Adler
11.1.08
A veteran editor who has worked at publishing houses both large and small, Chuck Adams of Algonquin Books talks about what beginning writers tend to forget, the secret to selling two million copies, and the problem with MFA writing.

Janet Silver
by Jofie Ferrari-Adler
7.1.08
Having settled into her new role at Nan Talese’s imprint following her ouster from Houghton Mifflin, editor Janet Silver discusses what she looks for in a new writer and what every author should know about agents.

Pat Strachan
by Jofie Ferrari-Adler
3.1.08
With nearly four decades of editing experience, publishing veteran Pat Strachan reveals the qualities she looks for in fiction, her approach to editing, and how writers can help themselves navigate the industry.

Agent Advice: The Complete Series
We Mean Business: Twelve Agents Who Want to Read Your Work

Q&A: A Merger of Literary, Legal Minds

by

Jonathan Vatner

July/August 2018
6.13.18
In Print and Online

Having run her eponymous literary agency since 2005, in February Gillian MacKenzie joined forces with Kirsten Wolf, a publishing lawyer and the president of Wolf Literary Services, an agency providing legal consultation to other agencies, publishers, and independent artists. The merger resulted in MacKenzie Wolf, which offers all the services of a traditional literary agency plus legal and strategic advising that can be uniquely important for authors, who often face questions ranging from copyright disputes to television and film rights. MacKenzie Wolf, which is currently open to queries, boasts clients such as novelists Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi and Patty Yumi Cottrell, as well as nonfiction writers Michael J. Casey, Virginia Morell, and Henry Fountain. Shortly after the merger was complete, MacKenzie discussed the partnership, the state of the publishing industry, and the challenges of reaching readers today.

Why did you decide to team up with Kirsten Wolf in this new venture? 
Kirsten and I worked in the same office while I was working in film development and production at Jane Startz Productions, before I founded Gillian MacKenzie Agency. Since she started Wolf Literary Services ten years ago, a literary agency and consultancy for other agencies, she and I have shared an office and assistant, with whom I’d sometimes coagent projects. Our merging officially into MacKenzie Wolf was a natural extension of how we’ve always worked, and it has allowed us to more officially and effectively grow the agency arm of the company.


Why pair an agent with a lawyer? 
It is surprising how often an attorney’s perspective is useful beyond negotiating the contract. Questions come up about writing partnerships, disputes with publishers, the legal implications of including particular content in a book, various subsidiary rights and how they can be exploited in new ways, and so on. While Kirsten isn’t representing any of our clients—in intricate legal matters, an author should have his or her own attorney—her expertise helps guide decision-making greatly.

How is an agent’s job changing?
The consolidation of publishing houses has reduced submission opportunities. And on the publishing side, it is harder to get a reader’s attention. With fewer physical bookstores, how does a reader come across a book? There is so much noise out there, and what once might have compelled a person to purchase a book—a stellar review, an interesting op-ed by the author—doesn’t necessarily lead to that outcome anymore. The sort of quirky, fascinating midlist books I love seem more challenging to get published these days as well.

So how do readers discover and read books now?
That is the million-dollar question, isn’t it? Of course, big traditional media coverage still helps. Stellar review attention and awards still can help. And to state the obvious, social media seems to matter much more. Today publishers hope to have “influencers”—prominent names with large and active social media followings—push the book; even better, for the authors themselves to have those sorts of followings. However, it is still not entirely clear to me what sort of mention of what kind of book and by whom and where actually pushes someone to go out and make a purchase. I think it is important we all keep thinking of creative ways to help people discover books and authors.

What are some ways you help your writers reach more readers?
We explore avenues that our authors and illustrators may not have originally considered. We are starting to pitch more of our illustration clients for animated commercial work. More and more we encourage our adult-nonfiction writers with suitable material to think about adapting their work for a younger audience. Our agency is also handling more of our clients’ speaking engagements, because not all clients garner fees large enough to attract traditional speaking bureaus, and yet their talks help sell books and generate word of mouth.

Who are you trying to reach with these tactics?
People find themselves so busy and so distracted these days, and even those who were once avid readers have trouble finding the time and bandwidth to read full-length books. I am convinced that if we can compel lapsed readers to take the time to be still for a spell and to read a book from cover to cover, they will be reminded of the addictive and transformative power of books. Yes, there will be other modes of “content delivery” that cater to one’s scattered attention span, but nothing will be able to replace that inimitably rich experience one gets from reading a book. In this way, good books are perhaps the best promotion for other good books.

Have you seen any bright spots?
I am heartened that quality books on not-overtly-commercial topics that matter still do find their way to the shelves. For example, in April my client Alisa Roth had her book Insane: America’s Criminal Treatment of Mental Illness come out—a book about not one but two difficult themes that Basic Books smartly saw important enough to publish. And one of the biggest titles on my list, The Path by Harvard professor Michael Puett and journalist Christine Gross-Loh, is a book about ancient Chinese philosophy and how it informs our lives today—again a book on a serious topic one might not immediately expect to be best-selling and yet has been translated into more than twenty-five different languages and counting. 

What kinds of work are you looking to represent?
I am fairly catholic in my tastes: By nature I can find myself excited by stale toast if it’s presented in a certain way. I guess I gravitate toward things that surprise me by coming at an idea through a new perspective, a multi-disciplinary prism, a surprising voice, an unusual format, etc. I want to work on material that I think matters, that might make the world a better place, or at the very least, that will offer readers an entertaining diversion. I’m always interested in seeing book ideas about intriguing discoveries or ways of seeing the world backed by science, journalistic exploration, or personal experience, coupled with the right person behind them. I also have a soft spot for illustrated works and think there are opportunities out there for unusual and winning visual books. Recent projects range widely, from humorous illustrated middle-grade books to books about the blockchain to mountain climbing to dog intelligence to loose nukes. I also gravitate towards strong narrative nonfiction, business, sports, current affairs, and memoir.
 


What do you love to see in a query from a writer?

I have a full slate; fairly or unfairly, many of my clients of late have come through referrals. But I do read the queries that come in to me, and occasionally one will grab me. One of my favorite slush pile discoveries, for instance, is the talented Cat Warren, whose cover letter started, “My name is Cat, and this is a book about my dog.” As I kept reading, it was immediately clear that her story and talent backed up her compelling letter. Her book, What the Dog Knows: Scent, Science, and the Amazing Ways Dogs Perceive the World, ended up being longlisted for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award and is a best-seller for Touchstone, under the guidance of editor extraordinaire Michelle Howry. Cat is now working on a middle-grade adaptation of the book, which we recently sold to Krista Vitola at Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers. My colleague Kate Johnson, who primarily represents fiction, recently discovered Patty Yumi Cottrell from the slush pile. Patty’s stunning debut novel, Sorry to Disrupt the Peace—everyone must read it!—went on to win a 2018 Whiting Award in fiction and the 2017 Barnes & Noble Discover Award in fiction. 

What advice do you have for writers?
My advice is to do your research on who might be a good fit for your kind of writing, and when you make contact, let that person know why you have chosen specifically to reach out. And don’t give up!          
 

Jonathan Vatner is a fiction writer in Yonkers, New York. His debut novel, Carnegie Hill, is forthcoming from Thomas Dunne Books in 2019.

Q&A: Kulka Curates America’s Library

by

Adrienne Raphel

May/June 2018
4.11.18
In Print and Online

In November the Library of America (LOA), the nonprofit publisher of classic American literature, named John Kulka its new editorial director. Succeeding longtime editor in chief Geoffrey O’Brien, who retired at the end of 2017, Kulka previously worked at Yale University Press, Harvard University Press, and Basic Books. In his new role at the LOA, Kulka oversees all of the publisher’s titles, including the Library of America standard series, which comprises more than three hundred volumes of classic and historical literature and scholarship and has been called the “de facto canon of American literature” by the New York Times. A few months into his new position, Kulka discussed editing the series and what’s ahead for LOA’s editorial program.

What are your responsibilities at the LOA?
The LOA has always been a special publisher with a special mission. Our broader, nonprofit mission is to reconnect readers through education programs and community outreach. I’m responsible for guiding the editorial program: the Library of America standard series, which issues essential American writing in authoritative editions, and our special non-series books, like David Foster Wallace’s tennis essays, String Theory. The LOA publishes reliable editions. They are uncluttered. The mission is to build the national library of American writings—canonical, neglected literature, historical writings. It’s one of the most important undertakings in the history of American publishing.

How do you choose what to publish?
How we publish any given author is always a tricky calculus. Looking at a writer with a voluminous body of work, are we better off being selective or comprehensive? It varies from author to author. Sometimes it’s not an issue. Flannery O’Connor, for example: The stories, novels, and all the nonfiction—if we exclude the letters—fit neatly into a single volume. But I’m thinking now about publishing an edition of Constance Fenimore Woolson, wrongly neglected, whom Henry James saw as a significant nineteenth-century writer. Woolson is a revelation to me: I had always known who she was because of James, but do yourself a favor and look at her short fiction. Is the LOA better off publishing one volume, two volumes, or everything we have of hers? That’s a question I’m faced with. Though a larger selection might be of interest to scholars, I’m not entirely sure that it’s the right thing to do in presenting her work to a general audience.

How does the LOA remain relevant today?
This is a weird time we’re living in. The proliferation of fake news, inequality, a presentist disregard for the past—in such times, we need the LOA more than ever. Our history and literature still have much to teach us. We ignore it only at our peril. As Faulkner put it, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” I believe that. Here’s an example: When Lin-Manuel Miranda was writing Hamilton, it was the LOA’s edition of Hamilton’s writings that Miranda used as a resource. The musical in turn brought readers back to Hamilton. We published a brief paperback, The Essential Hamilton, in 2017 that we then put gratis into the hands of educators around the country.

What has been the most unexpected thing you’ve learned about LOA since you arrived?
I’ve been repeatedly impressed by the amount of research and scholarship that sometimes goes into these volumes. Literally at my feet right now are three or four oversized cardboard boxes that represent the outtakes from the American Poetry Anthology—and just the two volumes devoted to the twentieth century. There’s so much research and scholarship that goes into production. It’s kind of a humbling thing. 

 

Adrienne Raphel is the author of What Was It For (Rescue Press, 2017) and But What Will We Do (Seattle Review, 2016). Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, the Paris Review Daily, Lana Turner, Prelude, and elsewhere.

  

(Credit: Murray Greenfield )

Q&A: Sarah Browning Splits This Rock

by

Nadia Q. Ahmad

March/April 2018
2.14.18
In Print and Online

Ten years ago, Sarah Browning and a group of fellow poets founded Split This Rock, a literary nonprofit that works at the intersection of poetry and political activism and hosts the biennial Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness in Washington, D.C. Browning recently announced that she will step down from her role as executive director of the organization at the end of the year, and that the search for her replacement will begin after this year’s festival, which will be held from April 19 to April 21. With her final year at the organization underway, Browning discussed her past decade at Split This Rock, the continued need to consider poetry a form of social engagement, and the upcoming festival. 

What changes have you seen in the literary world since starting Split This Rock?
When we started this organization, there were very few literary organizations engaging in activism. I went to the Association of Writers & Writing Programs Conference in 2003, three weeks before the United States invaded Iraq, and I could find only two sessions that engaged political questions at all. We were actively being told not to write political work fifteen years ago. That’s why we started D.C. Poets Against the War [a movement in 2003 to protest the war in Iraq] and then Split This Rock, which emerged from that movement. Split This Rock brought the activism piece into the picture. Now, of course, everybody is focused on making change with their poetry and doing so more explicitly. But I’m telling you, ten years ago, there was no home for it. And that’s why we built it.

The name “Split This Rock” comes from a poem, doesn’t it?
It does, from a Langston Hughes poem called “Big Buddy.” It ends with, “When I split this rock, / Stand by my side.” So it’s about splitting the rock of injustice but also the solidarity that’s needed—that need for community.

How does Split This Rock make poetry and activism accessible?
We try to bring poetry into as many spaces as possible and encourage everyone to write. We host community writing workshops twice a month in D.C. They’re free, drop-in; all you have to do is show up. The room is physically accessible, with transcription service for people with disabilities. You don’t have to have an MFA or any educational experience or introduction to poetry. We believe that, as Roque Dalton wrote in a poem, “poetry, like bread, is for everyone.” And our programs prove it. People are hungry for the imaginative language of poetry and for the authentic voice of one another, the heart-language, because so much of our experience is mediated now by propaganda, by commerce, by social media. We’re being sold to all the time. So we’re hungry for more authentic experience, and that’s what poetry is: It’s idiosyncratic language; it’s weirdness and wildness.

What would you say to those who might suggest that poetry and activism are incompatible?
Writers have always engaged the world around them. And as a writer you have to write what’s pounding up inside you. And if what’s pounding up inside you is injustice—if there’s a mother who has to work two jobs just to get food on the table, or if you are that mother, and you’re writing late at night and hoping there’ll be enough food to get you through the end of the week to the next paycheck—then that’s what you’re writing. That’s the poem. That’s what’s going to have power: What is the fire in your belly?

Nobody should tell anybody else what to write. I’m not telling anybody what to write. These poems were always being written; they just weren’t finding a wide audience because journals weren’t publishing them. The guidelines were saying, “No causes.” The contests weren’t awarding these poets the awards. The universities weren’t giving these poets the jobs. Because of racism, and because of conservatism. And homophobia and sexism. Split This Rock was founded to help these poets, like myself, feel less lonely and be more effective as poet-citizens, so that we could join together when we wanted to do activism—but also to amplify our voices and to create our own platforms.

Split This Rock cites Federico García Lorca’s concept of duende as one of its core values, which is described on your website as “recognizing the potential imaginative power of fear and embracing poets and activists who grapple with difficult issues and take risks in their writing and public work.” Why are fear and risk both necessary to move things forward?
It ain’t easy. None of it. We’re not going to make change if we stick to platitudes and simplicity, either in our poetry or in our social justice work. So we have to go to dark places, difficult places, in ourselves and in our relationships with one another and in our society. And that’s hard. I think it certainly helps us to sometimes be patient with one another. Split This Rock is one of the few places in the literary world, but really anywhere, where folks who are twenty-one and folks who are seventy-six are hanging out in the same room, having conversations. And maybe they have radically different cultural references and life experiences. So duende informs that because it’s scary to say, “You know, I don’t actually know anything about what you’ve just said.”

I’ve never studied poetry formally, so even when I’m with a bunch of academics and they use terms that I don’t know, I have to say to them, “Guess what, I don’t know what you’re saying!” [Laughs.] Which is a scary thing for me to say. I try to face my fear. But it’s at all levels, and we have to do it at all levels: personal, creative, collective, national. I’m the descendant of slave owners. I write about that in my work and I’m trying to push that, hard. I don’t know how my extended family’s going to feel about it, let alone other white people from the South. I wasn’t raised in the South, only half my family is from the South, so I’m going to be treated as an outsider, but that’s an issue where I feel like we have to face our fears as white Americans.

What guests and panels are you excited to feature in this year’s Split This Rock Poetry Festival?
Sharon Olds has been added to the lineup, which is really great news. She was supposed to feature at our very first festival in 2008 but was unable to come. Likewise, Sonia Sanchez kicked off our first festival and she will be back to mark this tenth anniversary. But also we have young poets like Paul Tran and Terisa Siagatonu. We always try to honor voices of all ages and in all places in their writing lives.

This being the first festival under the new political regime, we are particularly interested in how poetry is being used in resistance and in how poets are taking care of themselves and one another. We’re all feeling a lot of despair, I think, and we heard that in the proposals we received. There are a lot of sessions about using sadness, about using rage—in our poetry, but also in our community building—and acknowledging these things as real. Crying. Holding one another in celebration and in support.

What’s next for you—writing?
Yes. I don’t do well without structure, even this late in my life. I’m thinking about grad school. But at the very least, I would like to have more time for my own poetry and creative nonfiction. My second book just came out, but it was ten years between books. It would be nice not to have ten years till the next one.

 

Nadia Q. Ahmad is the Diana & Simon Raab Editorial Fellow at Poets & Writers Magazine.  

Sarah Browning

(Credit: Kristin Adair)

Q&A: Sokolowski’s Inspiring Word Work

by

Adrienne Raphel

January/February 2018
12.12.17
In Print and Online

As the editor-at-large of Merriam-Webster, Peter Sokolowski contributes to the dictionary’s print and online content, which, in addition to word definitions, includes podcasts, videos, and blogs. In August Sokolowski and his fellow editors rolled out Time Traveler, a tool that organizes words according to when they were first used in English. He recently discussed Merriam-Webster’s newest features, the changing ways in which people use the dictionary, and the Word of the Year, feminism, which the editors announced today. 

How does Time Traveler work? How does it affect the way we think about language?
With Time Traveler, by organizing [words] a different way—that is, rather than alphabetically, chronologically—you get a three-dimensional experience with the dictionary. I do think it’s profound to think of language chronologically. Alphabetically, the ordering is arbitrary. Chronologically, it’s not. Time Traveler shows layers of cultures as they are expressed in the language when they come into the language. English is such a peculiar language in this way. French, for example, is almost entirely derived from Latin. The French Academy founded the language with an ethos of contraction. But English is a mongrel language, with an ethos of expansion. This ethos of expansion has a political component, too. England is establishing colonies all over the world. So, due to exploration, India is a very rich source of words. We first put dates into the dictionary in 1983, with the release of the Collegiate ninth edition. Dictionary entries have always been organized in chronological order: The first sense was always the oldest sense, and the last definition was, chronologically, the most recent. The thing is, that’s a little counterintuitive. By adding dates to entries, we felt we were giving more specific info about when each word entered the language. And now, collectively, because of organizing principles of the Internet, we can connect these words by date. Time Traveler allows imagination to combine with history. It gives a poetic sense of what the dictionary really is—a new and different kind of way of organizing our language.

How might people use Time Traveler?
Here’s one banal example: There’s a wonderful linguist, Ben Schmidt, who rates the language of Downton Abbey, illustrating how many of the words [used on the show are] anachronistic. Contact, for example, was not a verb in 1912. Another example is when Lord Grantham says “You’ll have to step on it” in 1912. You just have to think: This guy had probably never driven a car, so why would he use this very slangy idiom? The idea of speeding didn’t even exist yet.

What does the online version of the dictionary do that print can’t, and vice versa?
When Samuel Johnson, in 1755, wrote his dictionary, a woman came up to him and said, “I’m so pleased that you have omitted the naughty words.” “Madam,” Johnson replied, “I find that you have been looking them up.” Before the dictionary went online, the people who wrote dictionaries never knew which words were looked up. We’re learning enormous amounts about what drives people to a dictionary and what people are looking for from a dictionary. The dictionary is not just used for novel and arcane words—it’s mostly used for words that are a little abstract. There are cyclical things: Love is always at the top of the list in February. There are back-to-school terms: cultures, diversity, plagiarism. And there are the evergreens: integrity, ubiquitous, affect versus effect. Whatever sends us to the dictionary is a private moment. Looking up a word in the dictionary is an intimate act, something between ourselves and our language. The dictionary is this little intermediary—it orchestrates and organizes that relationship. That’s what it’s for. When people are looking up love in February, they’re not looking for spelling—they’re looking for philosophy.

In 1996 we started offering the dictionary online for free, and in 1997 we started following word trends. What had become a static list became dynamic, and we could see what people were looking up in real time. So, for example, in 1997, Princess Di dies; paparazzi is a very natural word to look up. During 9/11, first there were concrete words—rubber, triage—then more philosophical words, such as surreal, succumb, spontaneous. Surreal is always looked up after tragedies. In 2009 I started putting these things on Twitter. We’re often criticized for being political, but we’re responding to the data. We’re good at reading data—we’re not good at reading minds.

Why keep the print edition around at all?
The dictionary we search online is a different experience than the book. The print dictionary is a great piece of technology: It’s really fast, and it really works. And the print way of organizing information means that you always see certain things together. That’s no longer really the case online. The big thing online is, there’s space. Almost every decision for print dictionaries had to be made by the tyranny of space. We are no longer bound by that. What had been tyranny of lack of space is now tyranny of too much space. I always tell people, keep your old dictionaries. The old ones have different information that might be interesting. There is no spreadsheet for when definitions change. You just have to take the book down and look it up and see. For the first time last week, I looked up the word dictionary in Webster’s unabridged second edition, from 1934. I was fascinated. It’s an article on the history of the dictionary. That’s the kind of material that would be dropped in print today, but that’s some of the reason you go to a dictionary. We’re trying to answer those questions that might be asked when you’re looking up a word in the dictionary: Does a Cobb salad have chicken or turkey? The online dictionary is a contemporary magazine of language—let’s be the one-stop word website.

How do you choose the Word of the Year?
The Word of the Year goes back to 2003, and it was always based on the data. However, there’s an asterisk. If we went by raw tonnage, we would have boring words, abstract words that adults feel responsible for. We’re looking for what words spiked this year, not last year. That tells us something about the language today. We also look at what words were looked up in far greater numbers this year than last year, which we call year-over-year numbers. We look at that figure, and then we see a list of words that are typically much more apposite to the year we just experienced. In other words, it tells us something about this year that we’ve lived through, as opposed to words that tell us something about the general curiosity about the English language.

What do you think 2017’s Word of the Year tells us about the world in this moment?
The word of the year is feminism, which is pretty striking given the news. On the one hand, you might say that this is a fairly common word, one that is not really the subject of the news. In point of fact, this is a word that has been rising for the past several years to the point that it’s almost in our top twenty of overall lookups in the history of our website. We saw a 70 percent increase in lookups in 2017, and then we saw these spikes throughout this year. In January we saw a spike after the Women’s March on Washington and the other marches all over the country and the world, which got a huge amount of attention and were historic in various ways. The word feminism was used in particular regarding questions of whether or not the March was feminist or what kind of feminism the organizers and the attendees represented.

In February we saw another huge spike—and this one is in some ways more pointed and more dictionary-oriented—when Kellyanne Conway gave an onstage interview at the Conservative Political Action Conference and said she didn’t consider herself a feminist in the “classic sense.” She explained that she thinks being feminist, in her words, seems to be very “anti-male” and very “pro-abortion.” She was using the word in a very specific way, and that kind of specific use sends people to the dictionary for the definition, because the definition of the word itself was put into question, was itself the subject of the news story. Which is also true with the word fact, when Kellyanne Conway, also in the earlier part of the year, used that term “alternative facts.”

Later in the year we saw two entertainment reasons for the word’s popularity: The Handmaid’s Tale, the Hulu TV adaptation of the Margaret Atwood novel, which got not only a huge amount of positive reviews, but also a huge amount of think pieces using that series as a point of departure and a contemporaneous cultural critique; and the film Wonder Woman, starring Gal Gadot in the title role, who was viewed as a feminist character in a feminist film with a female director, Patty Jenkins.

And recently of course, subsequent to the accusations made against Harvey Weinstein and a long list of others, the word feminist has been in the news a lot. Just today I happened to click on the New York Times story about Lena Dunham and her warnings to the Clinton campaign about being too close to Harvey Weinstein. The word feminist was not only used several times in the article, but there’s also a quote from Dunham where she says she wears underwear that has the word feminist on it. That’s not necessarily the kind of use that will send people to the dictionary, but it shows you that this word is part of the national conversation—to the extent that there is such a thing as a national conversation. I think it’s sometimes too facile to say that there’s a national conversation; I sometimes think that’s shorthand for people who don’t want to be very specific about context. However, if there is such a thing as a national conversation—and there surely is right now regarding, for example, sexual harassment in the workplace and presidential politics—Merriam-Webster has a front-row seat because we see the words that are being looked up as the stories progress. That’s a fascinating thing that I’ve been watching for years and that we present on our home page and on Twitter, in a feature we call Trend Watch, which is simply the words that are most looked up at a given moment. And that word right now is feminism.

Have you recently changed or tweaked the definition of feminism, or has it been consistent for the past several years?
The first English language dictionary to ever include this word was Noah Webster’s dictionary in 1841, which was the last time Webster revised the dictionary before he died. He added the word feminism with the definition, “the qualities of females.” Clearly what he meant was femininity or femaleness; there was no political connotation to the word. This was a word that appeared to him somewhere, but we can’t actually find what he was looking at; we don’t know where he got it. In the 1864 edition, after Webster died and the Merriams had taken over, they dropped the word entirely because it was not used very frequently. It was not included in the next edition, published in 1890. And then in 1909 it was added with two definitions—one, “feminine character or characteristics,” and two, the medical definition, “female characteristics present in males.” So this medical definition precedes the political one. Finally, in the famous unabridged second edition of Webster’s from 1934, the political sense was added: “the theory of those who advocate such legal and social changes as will establish political, economic, and social equality of the sexes.” That’s pretty much the way we define it today. The important word here is equality—equality of the sexes could almost stand as the definition. It’s interesting that we’ve dropped both the medical sense and the femininity sense, which is archaic at this point. The political sense we associate with the word basically begins around 1895, and that’s exactly when the suffragette movement was beginning. So the term feminism is more closely associated in political terms to the fight to get the vote, which makes perfect sense.

Also notable is that it’s a very modern word for English—we have a lot of words that are over a thousand years old, and this one is just over a hundred. That’s a very short time in the history of the English language. It seems to me that feminism is a word that has shifted over time. I think it was taken to be more aggressive in the past and is maybe taken much more positively today. Just like a lot of ideas, it’s a word that has shifted in meaning as the times have changed. That’s as it should be.

What were the runners-up for Word of the Year?
The nine runners-up tend to represent individual spikes that were very striking. The first one is complicit. That came from Ivanka Trump who said in an interview with Gayle King, “I don’t know what it means to be complicit.” When you are a newsmaker and you say “I don’t know what x means” on live television, you better believe it sends people to the dictionary. What sends people to the dictionary even more is when people are having a lot of fun with it, and Saturday Night Live made a skit based on that interview, which kept it going. So that word really had a lot of hits, and it’s a fascinating word. The word is two parts, com and plicare or plek—the com means “together” or “with” in Latin, and the plek means “fold,” so it means “folded together.” It’s the same etymon of two other words that are much more common, complicated and complex.

The next one is the word recuse. Those lookups are all attached to Jeff Sessions. There was a recusal to look into Hillary Clinton; there was a recusal to look into the Trump campaign; there was a recusal involving the Russians. The word recused kept bobbing up and it was always connected to Jeff Sessions. Recused is a classic legal term, and he’s the attorney general, so it makes perfect sense that a legal term would be associated with him.

The next word is one that we don’t associate with a particular story; it just simply went way up in lookups, and we’re not really sure why. It’s the word empathy. Part of it was attached to the #MeToo campaign, with people talking about empathy towards women. And of course there was a lot of criticism of the Republican Party, Trump in particular, for lacking empathy. So this word is being used in both positive and negative ways. It was also in the news January when Asghar Farhadi, the Iranian film director who won two Oscars for Best Foreign Language Film, said he wouldn’t come to the Oscars because of Trump’s proposed travel ban, and that he was making a call for empathy between us and others, “an empathy which we need today more than ever.” And then in July at the Republican National Convention, Paul Ryan was highly quoted using the word when he said, “Real social progress is always a widening circle of concern and protection. It’s respect and empathy overtaking blindness and indifference.” When newsmakers utter the word, it does tend to send people to the dictionary. But we can’t say any one of those stories is the simple reason it makes our list.

Here’s the one that’s interesting from a percentage point of view: dotard. It’s a very unusual word. It was the word used by the Korean Central News Agency as a translation of Kim Jong Un’s statement where he referred to Donald Trump as a “mentally deranged U.S. dotard.” Because it’s such an unusual word—it’s essentially an obsolete word—we saw a 35,000 percent increase in lookups from 2016. We have 250,000 pages of words in the dictionary and some of those pages are looked up a thousand times an hour, others only a few times a year. Dotard was a word that was probably never looked up last year. It comes from the same word as dotage, which means a state or period of senile decay. So dotard originally meant imbecile, or stupid person, but now it just means an older person who is losing mental acuity. And this is a great thing about what the dictionary does—it gives a vocabulary lesson to the country when words like this are in the news. It’s also notable that this word is in the news probably because the Korean translators must be using very old bilingual dictionaries, because no contemporary speaker of English would use this word.

The next word is a science word from the solar eclipse, syzygy, which means the nearly straight-line configuration of three celestial bodies such as the sun, moon, and earth during a solar or lunar eclipse. The solar eclipse was an international story, and it cut straight through the United States and was a big teaching moment for a lot of people.

The next word is one that is looked up for pronunciation. We know that some words are looked up for their phonetics; typically they’re foreign words like schadenfreude or niche. This year the word was gyro. This was because of one simple event—Jimmy Fallon did a sketch on The Tonight Show with Luke Bryan, the country singer, and it showed them out on the streets of New York City getting a gyro. They ask each other, “How do you pronounce this?” and they turned it into this big musical number. It turns out there are three pronunciations for the word.

Federalism spiked because of the Congressional debate about the Affordable Care Act. Lindsey Graham said, “Here’s the choice for America: socialism or federalism when it comes to your health care.” What’s interesting to me about this is that socialism, as well as fascism and capitalism, are some of the most looked-up words in the dictionary. The problem with federalism, is that in America, we very unusually call our national government the federal government; however, the word federalism refers very explicitly to state rights. So the word itself is very confusing. You can see why it would send people to the dictionary.

The next two words are very simple, news-related words: hurricane—we had Harvey, Irma, José, and Maria—all these hurricanes that affected the Caribbean and the southeastern United States. Storm words always looked up when there’s a big storm, and we’ll usually see an echo—if hurricane is looked up, we’ll also see spikes in cyclone and tornado, because people are comparing them like recipes, the definitions all specify wind speed and geography. These are words where you can really learn something about the world, not just the language.

Finally, the last of the runner-up words goes all the way back to the Oscars in February—the word gaffe, which of course refers to the mistake of the wrong envelope that was opened for the Best Picture announcement. All the crew and cast of La La Land came up on stage, and while they were thanking their mothers, it was revealed that in fact Moonlight was the winner for Best Picture. Gaffe is an interesting word because it’s one of these journalistic words, it’s a word that’s used much more in headlines than in conversation. It’s a word that sends people to the dictionary quite regularly, since I’m sure when people see a headline that uses the word gaffe, they wonder if there’s something very specific about this kind of mistake, as opposed to just the word mistake. But of course headline writers like it because it’s short. And English has that kind of flexibility.  

 

Adrienne Raphel is the author of What Was It For (Rescue Press, 2017) and But What Will We Do (Seattle Review, 2016). Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, the Paris Review Daily, Poetry, Lana Turner Journal, Prelude, and elsewhere. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a doctoral candidate at Harvard University.

Peter Sokolowski, Merriam-Webster editor-at-large.

(Credit: Joanne Watson, Merriam-Webster)

Q&A: Wilson Leads the Feminist Press

by

Jennifer Baker

November/December 2017
10.11.17
In Print and Online

In July writer, activist, and media commentator Jamia Wilson was named the new executive director and publisher of the Feminist Press (FP), a forty-seven-year-old nonprofit known for highlighting feminist perspectives and prose. Located at the City University of New York, the press has published books by writers such as Shahrnush Parsipur and Ama Ata Aidoo and public figures such as Anita Hill and Justin Vivian Bond. Wilson previously worked as the executive director of Women, Action, and the Media, and her writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, Elle, Bust, and many other publications. As she becomes the youngest person and first woman of color to direct the Feminist Press, Wilson discusses her aims to advance the press’s mission.

How has your experience helped you prepare for this new role, and what do you hope to bring to the Feminist Press? 
I grew up reading FP books that I borrowed from my mother’s shelf, like I Love Myself When I Am Laughing: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader and But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies. These books taught me about my literary and activist lineage and helped provide a road map for the present and the future. I’m honored to work with FP’s intergenerational team to both enliven and deepen our intersectional vision of publishing unapologetic, accessible texts and multiplatform content that inspire action, teach empathy, build community, and shift culture. FP will continue to deepen our engagement with communities of color, indigenous folks, the LGBTQ community, and the disability community. Representation matters, but it must be coupled with systemic change. We will elevate and amplify the voices of the most marginalized members of our community because we know that none of us are free unless we all are.

How do you plan to apply your knowledge and experience in the social justice field to the job of executive director and publisher?
My engagement as a movement maker and media commentator brings FP closer to our community. It helps us connect with new readers because we’re involved in conversations out in the world and contributing to the cultural narrative via social media; TV; at conferences, panels, and marches; and in movement spaces. Until more gatekeepers do the work to disrupt habits and practices of patriarchy, economic injustice, and white supremacy in the publishing industry, we won’t transform our cultural narrative. My goal is to help contribute to the movement to put these values into active practice at all levels of our organization and work overall.

In this political and social climate, what kinds of books are pushing this conversation forward and promoting action?
This has been a consistent part of FP’s mission, and that’s why we’re prepared to speak truth to power through our books and voices in the midst of attacks on free expression and the rise of authoritarianism, misogyny, and racial violence. We publish books other publishers deem “too risky,” “controversial,” or “radical.” We’ve made efforts to lift up queer voices with our Amethyst Editions imprint and women and nonbinary folks of color with our Louise Meriwether Prize. Our nonfiction books are mainly activist-based. We resist the reinforcement of respectability politics, as well as the promotion of narratives that appear to promote social progress but only in a way that’s palatable or validating to oppressive power structures—and only at the price of continuing to marginalize communities that are often silenced, invisible, or undermined. Some of our recent titles include Brontez Purnell’s Since I Laid My Burden Down, a novel about growing up gay in 1980s Alabama, and Juniper Fitzgerald and Elise Peterson’s forthcoming How Mamas Love Their Babies, a picture book that shows how diverse mothers work in different ways to take care of their children, from domestic labor to sex work.

What kinds of books have been most influential to you personally?
The books I’m most enamored with have moved my heart in both personal and political ways. As my feminist foremothers taught us, “The personal is political.” I’m both an activist and a writer, and these identities have affixed themselves upon my soul. I love fiction, especially dystopian fiction, but I’m mostly a reader of nonfiction, historical fiction, legal history, and memoir. Although I tend to lean towards writing grounded in “truth,” I’m finding I’m even more drawn to this genre in the “post-truth” era.

There has been an increase in online-only feminist publications. Do you foresee potential partnerships to bring further visibility to FP’s work?
We reach out to writers or artists who have gotten their start online if we’re interested in creating a book with them, like with Makeda Lewis’s Avie’s Dreams: An Afro-Feminist Coloring Book and The Crunk Feminist Collection. Many of the feminist writers and artists we work with have robust online communities and serve as natural ambassadors for their labor and wisdom. We have other upcoming collaborations with the Well-Read Black Girl Festival, Soul Camp, the Together Live tour, the SisterSong conference, Howard University, and the March for Black Women. We want to be a part of feminist conversations on- and offline and to lift up remarkable and stunning storytelling.   

 

Jennifer Baker  is a publishing professional, the creator and host of the Minorities in Publishing podcast, a contributing editor at Electric Literature, and the social media director and a writing instructor for the Sackett Street Writers’ Workshop. She is the editor of the forthcoming short story anthology Everyday People: The Color of Life (Atria Books, 2018).

Q&A: Thomas’s App for Young Readers

by

Jennifer Baker

July/August 2017
6.14.17
In Print and Online

In the summer of 2014, eighteen-year-old Kaya Thomas launched We Read Too, an app that offers a comprehensive database of multicultural books for young readers. Thomas had been frustrated with the difficulty of finding books by and about people of color in libraries and bookstores, so she designed and wrote the code for the app (she recently graduated from Dartmouth College with a degree in computer science), which now has information on hundreds of books and more than fifteen thousand users. “I knew that if my app had even helped one person feel represented and showed them that their stories are being told too,” wrote Thomas in a piece at Medium about starting the app, “I had done my job.” Word spread further about We Read Too in March after Thomas launched an Indiegogo campaign to expand the app and raised $15,000. In the next several months, Thomas plans to launch a website for We Read Too and expand its catalog to more than a thousand books. As work on the app progresses, Thomas spoke about her larger mission and hopes for We Read Too. 

How has the We Read Too app evolved over the years?
When I first released We Read Too, it had a directory that included 300 children’s and young adult titles. Each title had a detail page where you could view the book cover, title, author, and description. There was also a suggestion feature where users could send me titles they thought should be included. Since then the directory has expanded to more than 630 titles, and you can search by author or title. You can now share any of the books via text message, e-mail, or social media, and you can view the book on Safari to purchase it. There’s also a discovery feature now that allows you to see one random book at a time so you don’t have to search through the entire directory.

Was it a purposeful decision to include both self-published and traditionally published books in this list? 
I wanted to include self-published works because it can be hard for those authors to get readers to discover their work. A lot of authors who are self-published have reached out to me in hopes that We Read Too can be a place for them to get more reader discovery for their work. I know that for authors of color it can be hard to get into the publishing world, so I want to support those who haven’t gone through the traditional routes. I want all authors of color to have their work highlighted in We Read Too, regardless of how they got their work out there.

Do you have plans to include adult fiction in the app?
I eventually do want to include adult fiction in the app, but it would be a larger undertaking because there are so many different genres within that category. I want to make sure I have a significant number of titles in each genre before I add them to the app. 

We Read Too is free. Do you think you will ever charge for it so you can continue updates and expansion? 
We Read Too will always be free for individual users. I never want to charge users to access the directory of titles because that would be counterintuitive toward the mission. I want titles written by people of color to be easier to discover and all in one place, not blocked by a paywall. I want users to discover titles they can share with the young people in their lives and community. I want users to know that these titles exist and, more specifically, for users who are people of color, I want them to see that there are authors who share their background and are creating work that reflects their culture in some way.    

Jennifer Baker is a publishing professional, the creator and host of the Minorities in Publishing podcast, the panel organizer for the nonprofit We Need Diverse Books, and the social medial director and a writing instructor for Sackett Street Writers’ Workshop. She is the editor of the forthcoming short story anthology Everyday People: The Color of Life (Atria Books, 2018).

Kaya Thomas

(Credit: Faith Rotich)

Q&A: Nicole Sealey Leads Cave Canem

by

Tayari Jones

May/June 2017
4.12.17
In Print and Online

Cave Canem was established by Cornelius Eady and Toi Derricotte in 1996 to nurture black poets both on the page and in the publishing marketplace. The Brooklyn, New York–based organization’s many programs include writing workshops, master classes, a reading series, publication prizes, and an annual retreat, which brings together more than fifty poets, or “fellows,” each year. In January Nicole Sealey, previously Cave Canem’s programs director, became the organization’s new executive director. A veteran arts administrator (including a previous role as the assistant director of Poets & Writers’ Readings & Workshops program), Sealey is also a poet; her first full-length collection, Ordinary Beast, will be published by Ecco in September. A couple of months into her new position, Sealey spoke about the future of Cave Canem.

Can you tell me a little bit about your relationship to Cave Canem?
Almost ten years ago I participated in Cave Canem’s eight-week fall workshop in New York City, facilitated by Marilyn Nelson. I was a very young writer and it ended up being a formative experience in my life. We got serious about craft and made lifelong connections in the process. I’ve met many of my closest friends through Cave Canem, the closest of all being my husband, John Murillo. The very least I can do for an organization that has served me well for the last decade is to return the gesture. 

How does being a writer influence the way you will lead the organization?
Cave Canem has always had a “poets first” philosophy, which has served the organization well for the last twenty-plus years. Remember, the organization was founded by rock-star poets and directed for the past decade by Alison Meyers, also a poet. In that tradition, I plan to lead with both head and heart, which are the qualities I value most in poetry. 

What’s ahead for Cave Canem and for you as the new executive director?
In May we’ll be capping off our twentieth-anniversary year with Cave Canem 20/20: A Panoramic Vision of Black Poetry, a two-and-a-half day poetry forum at Weeksville Heritage Center in Brooklyn. The forum will offer readings, skill-building panels, artist conversations, and more. I’m also looking forward to my first retreat as executive director. The retreat takes place in June at the University of Pittsburgh in Greensburg, Pennsylvania. It’s our flagship program, and where, as Harryette Mullen says, “black poets, individually and collectively, can inspire and be inspired by others, relieved of any obligation to explain or defend their blackness.”

So much has changed since Cave Canem faculty member Elizabeth Alexander recited “Praise Song for the Day,” the inaugural poem for Barack Obama in 2009. What do you see as the role of Cave Canem, and poetry more broadly, in the new political climate?
“So much has changed” is a very gracious way to describe the political climate in which we now find ourselves. In “Praise Song for the Day,” the speaker asks, “What if the mightiest word is love?” I have no doubt that it is love, but the new administration would have me believe that the mightiest word is fear or, worse yet, the president’s name. It is neither. It is love. And what is love if not a society based on justice and equality? With this in mind, the role of Cave Canem in particular, and poetry in general, is and will be to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. With love. Bigly. 

Are there any outreach programs on tap to connect poetry with readers?
Cave Canem’s Poets Tour, a nonprofit speakers bureau, connects national audiences with Cave Canem fellows through readings and workshops. This year we hope to increase the number of participating fellows and reach out to presenting institutions, including high schools, universities, museums, libraries, and prisons. We want to bring black poets to diverse communities.  

Tayari Jones is a contributing editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.         

Nicole Sealey

(Credit: Murray Greenfield )

Q&A: Yang Inspires Young Readers

Q&A: Lena Dunham’s Lenny Imprint

by

Kevin Larimer

September/October 2017
8.16.17
In Print and Online

In 2015, Lena Dunham, along with her producing partner, Jenni Konner, created an online newsletter that would provide “a platform for young female voices to discuss feminist issues.” In its first six months Lenny Letter, also known as Lenny, attracted an impressive 400,000 subscribers. Building on that success, last year Random House, publisher of Dunham’s 2014 memoir, Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She’s “Learned,” announced that Lenny would be the basis of a new imprint, overseen by vice president and editor in chief Andy Ward. The imprint’s first title, Sour Heart, the debut story collection by poet Jenny Zhang, is out now. In the months leading up to its publication, Dunham spoke about her vision for Lenny Books.

There can never be too many platforms for new and emerging literary voices, but still: Why Lenny Books and why now?
It was essential to Jenni and me that we use the gift of our platform to give voice to a diverse group of women who need to be heard. It has never been more important that we hear from every kind of woman and understand the specificities of her experience—and that happens to be the goal of Lenny.

Will the imprint be fueled by the same ethos as the newsletter?
We want the imprint’s logo to be a symbol that lets you know you’re about to read something that plays with the feminine in a fascinating new way. We want you to see the spine and think, “Oh, thank the Lord, I know what will thrill me tonight.” We want our readers to trust that our imprint is selecting books that will enrich them and make them laugh. Books allow for a deeper, more sustained exploration that the newsletter doesn’t—and that, too, is thrilling.

You and Jenni are already successfully publishing new voices in your newsletter, so what is it about print books in general, and Random House in particular, that led you to this new project?
We are book nerds. We read to learn. We read to relax. We read to get inspired. It’s honestly selfish: We want a hand in helping produce the kinds of books we want to read, and we want to get first crack at reading fantastic authors and groundbreaking feminist works. So far, it’s been wildly fun. It’s interesting and inspiring that our partner in crime is Andy Ward, a man who understands our mission. So we aren’t for girls only, even if we are always thinking of our reader as a busy woman who needs to be able to trust that a Lenny book means her precious time is not being wasted.

What made Jenny Zhang’s Sour Heart a good choice for the first title from Lenny?
Jenny is a writer of uncompromising honesty, complete originality, massive wit, and real skill. Her stories show us a part of the world, a part of the human experience, which most of us have never encountered. She’s enigmatic and compelling as a person—there is no one who more clearly represents our mission.

How will you and Jenni work together to make decisions about whose books to publish?
It’s all instinct. Along with Andy, we try to fill our slate slowly but enthusiastically with writers we admire. Ultimately, we want the Lenny list to be an exciting kind of “collect ‘em all” where our books as a whole tell a story about what it feels like to be female now.

How closely will you work with Random House? Do you have autonomy in terms of editorial decisions?
Andy was my editor on my first book, and we are currently at work on my second. He is my creative collaborator on a deep and abiding level. So we don’t just accept his thoughts, we demand them. And we wouldn’t be doing this if we didn’t have such a special relationship with Random House. My literary agent Kim Witherspoon is also a remarkable force who has helped authors like Anthony Bourdain build their own imprints, and her business instincts are impeccable. It really takes a village, and Jenni and I are happy to admit what we don’t know.

Will you be editing the books yourself?
We know that editing is a specific and challenging job and one that people work their whole lives to get great at. So we read everything and give our notes but we really trust that editors should edit.

You’ve published poetry issues of Lenny. Any chance you and Random House have a poetry imprint in the works?
We would love to publish poetry and not relegate it to some musty back room. We just need to find the right poet who we think will spark with readers who may be new to the pleasures of poetry. Jenni and I are both liberal arts grad poetry nerds who find the form completely enthralling. We’d love to add that element to our list.

You’ve written a book, Not That Kind of Girl, so do you have any advice for writers who are working on their own?
Work. Work. Work. There’s no substitute for actually rolling up your sleeves and getting it done.
 

Kevin Larimer is the editor in chief of Poets & Writers, Inc.

(Photo: Stephanie Keenan.)
Q&A: Thomas’s App for Young Readers

Q&A: Sherrod Celebrates Amistad Press

by

Dana Isokawa

September/October 2016
8.17.16
In Print and Online

Founded in 1986 by Charles F. Harris, Amistad Press is one of the country’s leading publishers of multicultural voices. Originally established to publish anthologies of African American writing, Amistad has since grown into a prominent literary fiction and nonfiction imprint of HarperCollins, having published novels by Edward P. Jones, Yvvette Edwards, and Jacqueline Woodson, as well as books of nonfiction by cultural icons such as Steve Harvey and Venus Williams. As Amistad celebrates its thirtieth anniversary, Tracy Sherrod, who has served as the editorial director since 2013, talks about the press’s history and the challenges it faces today.

How has Amistad changed or grown in the past thirty years?
It’s grown in the number of titles, it’s grown in prominence, it’s grown in respectability, it’s grown in creativity. The foundation is the same, which is to publish multicultural voices and to let them express themselves freely. At the time when Charles F. Harris started Amistad, you didn’t feel that the publishing industry could fully see black culture. When Susan L. Taylor’s essay collection In the Spirit came—Taylor was the editor in chief of Essence—people in the publishing industry didn’t recognize how popular she was, so she was rejected all over town. But Malaika Adero, who came to Amistad as its first official editor outside of Charles Harris, acquired that book and it sold in best-seller numbers. And then they followed it up a few years later with a book by John Johnson, who founded Ebony and Jet. These people were praised in our community and celebrated—we all knew their names, we all wanted to know their stories—and Amistad published them. That’s how Amistad has impacted publishing: by helping the industry recognize how important and profitable these voices are.

What are the challenges for Amistad now?
Nowadays, people in the industry recognize how important African American voices are in contributing to literature. The authors can be published by any imprint they choose, so that makes it more competitive on my part. It’s always been competitive, but not this competitive. I’m glad to see it. There should be huge demand for those voices.

Do you find authors are reluctant to join Amistad as opposed to an imprint that doesn’t have a multicultural focus?
I find both. I find authors who prefer the focus, who have been published elsewhere and have maybe felt “culturally assaulted” by their editors—that’s one way a writer described what happened to her in the editorial process. And there are authors who are perfectly happy where they are and are published brilliantly where they are. Some writers are reluctant and ask me to publish their book on the broader Harper list. But we have the same marketing and publicity team, so I don’t think the logo on the book makes much of a difference.   

Do you think publishers run the risk of pigeonholing or sequestering writers by creating multicultural imprints?
No, I don’t think there’s a risk of doing that. It’s been proved that when Random House closed down One World/Ballantine and Harlem Moon, the company as a whole published less work by multicultural voices. So I don’t think that they’re sequestered—it’s an opportunity. Some people see it as ghettoized. But that’s not the case at all—these books are published with great care, they’re given the same marketing and publicity opportunities, we offer the same competitive advances.

Amistad publishes both literary and commercial titles—how do you balance the two?
I go with my taste. I think every editor acquires to her personality, and I have a broad range of interest. I’m really trying to do books that address the community’s needs—depression and emotional issues are heavy on people’s minds these days with the economy. We published Darryl McDaniel’s book, Ten Ways Not To Commit Suicide. Since it’s by someone who’s rich and obviously successful—but who also suffers with depression from time to time—it might make the layperson feel more comfortable coming forth and talking about these issues. We also published this book The Mother by Yvvette Edwards and it’s delicious, let me tell you, but delicious in the sense that it’s rich in the pain the mother feels after her son is killed by another child. And I think that’s an issue in our community. That’s what I mean by publishing to the issues—things that are very particular to us. Not too particular to us, but something we’re dealing with in overabundance.

Can you speak more to what issues are important now?
Financial issues, the economy. I’ve published several books that allow people to inspire their creativity to become entrepreneurs. Like Miko Branch’s Miss Jessie’s: Creating a Successful Business From Scratch—Naturally. And some of our memoirs have practical elements that you can take away, like The Book of Luke: My Fight for Truth, Justice, and Liberty City by Luther Campbell. In his book, he writes about how he made a financially successful life for himself, ran all the way to the Supreme Court to fight injustice against the first amendment, and won. I think that’s pretty incredible. He shares with people that you need to stand for something and you need to work hard. And a lot of the memoirs we publish have that theme running through them: entrepreneurship, hard work, and the use of your God-given talents.

What as an editor do you find most challenging?
There comes moments in one’s publishing career—or in one’s publishing day, week, month—where a book will come along and you’ll feel like you need to acquire it, because it’s going to be extremely popular and sell really well. It’s only once in a while that you’re going to say, “This one is the one. This one is going to work.” And a lot of times if the people around you don’t know that person’s name in the same way that they didn’t know Susan Taylor’s name, the same way they didn’t know Zane’s name, they’ll say, “Oh no, we can’t do that book. We’re not going to invest much of an advance in that book.” Those moments are painful, because I know—sometimes you know—you’re not guessing, you’re not estimating. Once in a while you know. And I need to work better at conveying when I know, so that those books don’t end up with another publisher.

How do you know when a title is one of those books?
For nonfiction, it’s straight-up practical reasons—the community has been waiting for a book from this person forever, so things are all lined up. There are so many people behind it that it doesn’t really matter what it is that they do, but chances are that they’re doing something smart and it will work. For fiction, it feels like a warmth that overwhelms you—it’s a sensation. When there are so many elements to a story that embrace where you come from that you know it’s going to work. Like Edwards’s The Mother and Jacqueline Woodson’s Another Brooklyn.

Are there more specific challenges you encounter as an editor of color?
The number one thing is that I think most of the publishing industry looks at African American editors as one and the same. They believe that our tastes are going to be the same, that we’re going to want the same books, that we’re building identical publishing programs—but that’s not really true. We all have very different tastes. Some are more literary than others; some are more interested in books that have historical relevance; some only want to do books that will make a difference. And it goes across the board. Everybody has different tastes. And we’re friends—even though we sometimes compete against one another, we’re friends and support one another and recognize more than anything that if one book fails, it could jeopardize all the books. We face more pressure because we can only acquire a few books. So if you pay a lot for one and it tanks hugely, there’s no telling what might happen. So we’re all very careful and very smart and think of publishing multicultural books as a whole, not about our careers. It has nothing to do with our individual careers. And I think this was shown when Chris Jackson was given the opportunity to start his own imprint, and he decided to resurrect One World [at Random House] instead, which shows that he was concerned about the multicultural publishing community.

Do you sense that the publishing industry has adopted the view that black readers have diverse interests and read across racial and cultural lines?
I don’t think it’s adopted by the industry as a whole. Someone once said to me, “Are all of your books about race?” And I said, “No!” Multicultural writers write about various aspects of their lives. Even though racism has shaped all of us, unfortunately, and I’m not sure it has shaped us to be our best selves. I do believe that something special is going on right now, where all of us are questioning our biases and racism in a more serious way. I also believe there’s another segment of the population that is embracing their hostility towards other races, and they are really speaking loudly. So those of us who are trying to do better and [create] a more beloved society need to speak louder. And perhaps show some love to the other people who are really having a challenging time, and maybe then we can make America great again.

It’s a scary time, right?
It is, it is. But I think it’s going to be a productive time. I remember back in 2008 and 2009, there was a drought in multicultural literature. There were great books, but there were very few in terms of the number of books that were coming out. I remember telling a friend in publishing, “Believe it or not, this is a really good time, because I know that people are in their homes writing and creating and in the next few years, it’s going to be an explosion of just amazing, amazing literature.” And I think that is happening now.

What are your plans for Amistad’s future, and how do you hope to grow the list?
We plan to grow the staff, to find someone who specializes in marketing and publicity. As for the list, I’ve learned from the success of Edward P. Jones winning the Pulitzer Prize for The Known World, the reception of Another Brooklyn, the reception of The Mother, that literary fiction is the route for Amistad. As for nonfiction, [we’ll be looking to publish fewer] celebrities and more serious narrative nonfiction. That’s how we’ll grow the list. We have some really great books coming that reflect that. We’re doing Black Detroit: A People’s History of Self-Determination by Herb Boyd, and Making Rent in Bed-Stuy, which is a memoir by a young man, Brandon Harris, about gentrification. And we have a book called The Original Black Elite by Elizabeth Dowling Taylor that’s a history from the Emancipation Proclamation to the Jim Crow era of the really wealthy class of black people and their philosophies and ways of life.

Does Amistad have a target audience?
I definitely want our books to reach people of color in addition to everyone else. I think it’s the same hope that we have for every book: We want our books to reach everyone. So my goal is that I’m publishing for people of color, but I hope that everyone is interested.

What would you like to see in the industry in terms of increasing diversity?
I would like for the industry to see that it’s wonderful when all the cultures come together and do things together. There’s so much joy, there’s so much pleasure, there’s so much excitement to be found there. And I think that we should try to achieve that more often—because it’s a beautiful experience, and we all learn so much, and what we learn provides joy.

In what way would we be brought together?
In making books! And not thinking that books are for a particular audience, or that when we go to market that only women or only whatever the “only” is buys books. Don’t think of it that way. Because we’re sharing a story that we’re all a part of. This is supposed to be some melting pot, so let’s see what’s in the pot! I’d like for us to see that bringing things together is joyful and not work. Inclusion is not work. I think living in isolation is work.

Dana Isokawa is the associate editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.

 

Q&A: Yang Inspires Young Readers

Q&A: Thomas’s App for Young Readers

by

Jennifer Baker

July/August 2017
6.14.17
In Print and Online

In the summer of 2014, eighteen-year-old Kaya Thomas launched We Read Too, an app that offers a comprehensive database of multicultural books for young readers. Thomas had been frustrated with the difficulty of finding books by and about people of color in libraries and bookstores, so she designed and wrote the code for the app (she recently graduated from Dartmouth College with a degree in computer science), which now has information on hundreds of books and more than fifteen thousand users. “I knew that if my app had even helped one person feel represented and showed them that their stories are being told too,” wrote Thomas in a piece at Medium about starting the app, “I had done my job.” Word spread further about We Read Too in March after Thomas launched an Indiegogo campaign to expand the app and raised $15,000. In the next several months, Thomas plans to launch a website for We Read Too and expand its catalog to more than a thousand books. As work on the app progresses, Thomas spoke about her larger mission and hopes for We Read Too. 

How has the We Read Too app evolved over the years?
When I first released We Read Too, it had a directory that included 300 children’s and young adult titles. Each title had a detail page where you could view the book cover, title, author, and description. There was also a suggestion feature where users could send me titles they thought should be included. Since then the directory has expanded to more than 630 titles, and you can search by author or title. You can now share any of the books via text message, e-mail, or social media, and you can view the book on Safari to purchase it. There’s also a discovery feature now that allows you to see one random book at a time so you don’t have to search through the entire directory.

Was it a purposeful decision to include both self-published and traditionally published books in this list? 
I wanted to include self-published works because it can be hard for those authors to get readers to discover their work. A lot of authors who are self-published have reached out to me in hopes that We Read Too can be a place for them to get more reader discovery for their work. I know that for authors of color it can be hard to get into the publishing world, so I want to support those who haven’t gone through the traditional routes. I want all authors of color to have their work highlighted in We Read Too, regardless of how they got their work out there.

Do you have plans to include adult fiction in the app?
I eventually do want to include adult fiction in the app, but it would be a larger undertaking because there are so many different genres within that category. I want to make sure I have a significant number of titles in each genre before I add them to the app. 

We Read Too is free. Do you think you will ever charge for it so you can continue updates and expansion? 
We Read Too will always be free for individual users. I never want to charge users to access the directory of titles because that would be counterintuitive toward the mission. I want titles written by people of color to be easier to discover and all in one place, not blocked by a paywall. I want users to discover titles they can share with the young people in their lives and community. I want users to know that these titles exist and, more specifically, for users who are people of color, I want them to see that there are authors who share their background and are creating work that reflects their culture in some way.    

Jennifer Baker is a publishing professional, the creator and host of the Minorities in Publishing podcast, the panel organizer for the nonprofit We Need Diverse Books, and the social medial director and a writing instructor for Sackett Street Writers’ Workshop. She is the editor of the forthcoming short story anthology Everyday People: The Color of Life (Atria Books, 2018).

Kaya Thomas

(Credit: Faith Rotich)

Q&A: Nicole Sealey Leads Cave Canem
Q&A: Yang Inspires Young Readers

Q&A: Lena Dunham’s Lenny Imprint

by

Kevin Larimer

September/October 2017
8.16.17
In Print and Online

In 2015, Lena Dunham, along with her producing partner, Jenni Konner, created an online newsletter that would provide “a platform for young female voices to discuss feminist issues.” In its first six months Lenny Letter, also known as Lenny, attracted an impressive 400,000 subscribers. Building on that success, last year Random House, publisher of Dunham’s 2014 memoir, Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She’s “Learned,” announced that Lenny would be the basis of a new imprint, overseen by vice president and editor in chief Andy Ward. The imprint’s first title, Sour Heart, the debut story collection by poet Jenny Zhang, is out now. In the months leading up to its publication, Dunham spoke about her vision for Lenny Books.

There can never be too many platforms for new and emerging literary voices, but still: Why Lenny Books and why now?
It was essential to Jenni and me that we use the gift of our platform to give voice to a diverse group of women who need to be heard. It has never been more important that we hear from every kind of woman and understand the specificities of her experience—and that happens to be the goal of Lenny.

Will the imprint be fueled by the same ethos as the newsletter?
We want the imprint’s logo to be a symbol that lets you know you’re about to read something that plays with the feminine in a fascinating new way. We want you to see the spine and think, “Oh, thank the Lord, I know what will thrill me tonight.” We want our readers to trust that our imprint is selecting books that will enrich them and make them laugh. Books allow for a deeper, more sustained exploration that the newsletter doesn’t—and that, too, is thrilling.

You and Jenni are already successfully publishing new voices in your newsletter, so what is it about print books in general, and Random House in particular, that led you to this new project?
We are book nerds. We read to learn. We read to relax. We read to get inspired. It’s honestly selfish: We want a hand in helping produce the kinds of books we want to read, and we want to get first crack at reading fantastic authors and groundbreaking feminist works. So far, it’s been wildly fun. It’s interesting and inspiring that our partner in crime is Andy Ward, a man who understands our mission. So we aren’t for girls only, even if we are always thinking of our reader as a busy woman who needs to be able to trust that a Lenny book means her precious time is not being wasted.

What made Jenny Zhang’s Sour Heart a good choice for the first title from Lenny?
Jenny is a writer of uncompromising honesty, complete originality, massive wit, and real skill. Her stories show us a part of the world, a part of the human experience, which most of us have never encountered. She’s enigmatic and compelling as a person—there is no one who more clearly represents our mission.

How will you and Jenni work together to make decisions about whose books to publish?
It’s all instinct. Along with Andy, we try to fill our slate slowly but enthusiastically with writers we admire. Ultimately, we want the Lenny list to be an exciting kind of “collect ‘em all” where our books as a whole tell a story about what it feels like to be female now.

How closely will you work with Random House? Do you have autonomy in terms of editorial decisions?
Andy was my editor on my first book, and we are currently at work on my second. He is my creative collaborator on a deep and abiding level. So we don’t just accept his thoughts, we demand them. And we wouldn’t be doing this if we didn’t have such a special relationship with Random House. My literary agent Kim Witherspoon is also a remarkable force who has helped authors like Anthony Bourdain build their own imprints, and her business instincts are impeccable. It really takes a village, and Jenni and I are happy to admit what we don’t know.

Will you be editing the books yourself?
We know that editing is a specific and challenging job and one that people work their whole lives to get great at. So we read everything and give our notes but we really trust that editors should edit.

You’ve published poetry issues of Lenny. Any chance you and Random House have a poetry imprint in the works?
We would love to publish poetry and not relegate it to some musty back room. We just need to find the right poet who we think will spark with readers who may be new to the pleasures of poetry. Jenni and I are both liberal arts grad poetry nerds who find the form completely enthralling. We’d love to add that element to our list.

You’ve written a book, Not That Kind of Girl, so do you have any advice for writers who are working on their own?
Work. Work. Work. There’s no substitute for actually rolling up your sleeves and getting it done.
 

Kevin Larimer is the editor in chief of Poets & Writers, Inc.

(Photo: Stephanie Keenan.)
Q&A: Thomas’s App for Young Readers
Q&A: Sherrod Celebrates Amistad Press
Q&A: Yang Inspires Young Readers

Q&A: Wilson Leads the Feminist Press

by

Jennifer Baker

November/December 2017
10.11.17
In Print and Online

In July writer, activist, and media commentator Jamia Wilson was named the new executive director and publisher of the Feminist Press (FP), a forty-seven-year-old nonprofit known for highlighting feminist perspectives and prose. Located at the City University of New York, the press has published books by writers such as Shahrnush Parsipur and Ama Ata Aidoo and public figures such as Anita Hill and Justin Vivian Bond. Wilson previously worked as the executive director of Women, Action, and the Media, and her writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, Elle, Bust, and many other publications. As she becomes the youngest person and first woman of color to direct the Feminist Press, Wilson discusses her aims to advance the press’s mission.

How has your experience helped you prepare for this new role, and what do you hope to bring to the Feminist Press? 
I grew up reading FP books that I borrowed from my mother’s shelf, like I Love Myself When I Am Laughing: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader and But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies. These books taught me about my literary and activist lineage and helped provide a road map for the present and the future. I’m honored to work with FP’s intergenerational team to both enliven and deepen our intersectional vision of publishing unapologetic, accessible texts and multiplatform content that inspire action, teach empathy, build community, and shift culture. FP will continue to deepen our engagement with communities of color, indigenous folks, the LGBTQ community, and the disability community. Representation matters, but it must be coupled with systemic change. We will elevate and amplify the voices of the most marginalized members of our community because we know that none of us are free unless we all are.

How do you plan to apply your knowledge and experience in the social justice field to the job of executive director and publisher?
My engagement as a movement maker and media commentator brings FP closer to our community. It helps us connect with new readers because we’re involved in conversations out in the world and contributing to the cultural narrative via social media; TV; at conferences, panels, and marches; and in movement spaces. Until more gatekeepers do the work to disrupt habits and practices of patriarchy, economic injustice, and white supremacy in the publishing industry, we won’t transform our cultural narrative. My goal is to help contribute to the movement to put these values into active practice at all levels of our organization and work overall.

In this political and social climate, what kinds of books are pushing this conversation forward and promoting action?
This has been a consistent part of FP’s mission, and that’s why we’re prepared to speak truth to power through our books and voices in the midst of attacks on free expression and the rise of authoritarianism, misogyny, and racial violence. We publish books other publishers deem “too risky,” “controversial,” or “radical.” We’ve made efforts to lift up queer voices with our Amethyst Editions imprint and women and nonbinary folks of color with our Louise Meriwether Prize. Our nonfiction books are mainly activist-based. We resist the reinforcement of respectability politics, as well as the promotion of narratives that appear to promote social progress but only in a way that’s palatable or validating to oppressive power structures—and only at the price of continuing to marginalize communities that are often silenced, invisible, or undermined. Some of our recent titles include Brontez Purnell’s Since I Laid My Burden Down, a novel about growing up gay in 1980s Alabama, and Juniper Fitzgerald and Elise Peterson’s forthcoming How Mamas Love Their Babies, a picture book that shows how diverse mothers work in different ways to take care of their children, from domestic labor to sex work.

What kinds of books have been most influential to you personally?
The books I’m most enamored with have moved my heart in both personal and political ways. As my feminist foremothers taught us, “The personal is political.” I’m both an activist and a writer, and these identities have affixed themselves upon my soul. I love fiction, especially dystopian fiction, but I’m mostly a reader of nonfiction, historical fiction, legal history, and memoir. Although I tend to lean towards writing grounded in “truth,” I’m finding I’m even more drawn to this genre in the “post-truth” era.

There has been an increase in online-only feminist publications. Do you foresee potential partnerships to bring further visibility to FP’s work?
We reach out to writers or artists who have gotten their start online if we’re interested in creating a book with them, like with Makeda Lewis’s Avie’s Dreams: An Afro-Feminist Coloring Book and The Crunk Feminist Collection. Many of the feminist writers and artists we work with have robust online communities and serve as natural ambassadors for their labor and wisdom. We have other upcoming collaborations with the Well-Read Black Girl Festival, Soul Camp, the Together Live tour, the SisterSong conference, Howard University, and the March for Black Women. We want to be a part of feminist conversations on- and offline and to lift up remarkable and stunning storytelling.   

 

Jennifer Baker  is a publishing professional, the creator and host of the Minorities in Publishing podcast, a contributing editor at Electric Literature, and the social media director and a writing instructor for the Sackett Street Writers’ Workshop. She is the editor of the forthcoming short story anthology Everyday People: The Color of Life (Atria Books, 2018).

Q&A: Thomas’s App for Young Readers
Q&A: Lena Dunham’s Lenny Imprint

Q&A: Nicole Sealey Leads Cave Canem

by

Tayari Jones

May/June 2017
4.12.17
In Print and Online

Cave Canem was established by Cornelius Eady and Toi Derricotte in 1996 to nurture black poets both on the page and in the publishing marketplace. The Brooklyn, New York–based organization’s many programs include writing workshops, master classes, a reading series, publication prizes, and an annual retreat, which brings together more than fifty poets, or “fellows,” each year. In January Nicole Sealey, previously Cave Canem’s programs director, became the organization’s new executive director. A veteran arts administrator (including a previous role as the assistant director of Poets & Writers’ Readings & Workshops program), Sealey is also a poet; her first full-length collection, Ordinary Beast, will be published by Ecco in September. A couple of months into her new position, Sealey spoke about the future of Cave Canem.

Can you tell me a little bit about your relationship to Cave Canem?
Almost ten years ago I participated in Cave Canem’s eight-week fall workshop in New York City, facilitated by Marilyn Nelson. I was a very young writer and it ended up being a formative experience in my life. We got serious about craft and made lifelong connections in the process. I’ve met many of my closest friends through Cave Canem, the closest of all being my husband, John Murillo. The very least I can do for an organization that has served me well for the last decade is to return the gesture. 

How does being a writer influence the way you will lead the organization?
Cave Canem has always had a “poets first” philosophy, which has served the organization well for the last twenty-plus years. Remember, the organization was founded by rock-star poets and directed for the past decade by Alison Meyers, also a poet. In that tradition, I plan to lead with both head and heart, which are the qualities I value most in poetry. 

What’s ahead for Cave Canem and for you as the new executive director?
In May we’ll be capping off our twentieth-anniversary year with Cave Canem 20/20: A Panoramic Vision of Black Poetry, a two-and-a-half day poetry forum at Weeksville Heritage Center in Brooklyn. The forum will offer readings, skill-building panels, artist conversations, and more. I’m also looking forward to my first retreat as executive director. The retreat takes place in June at the University of Pittsburgh in Greensburg, Pennsylvania. It’s our flagship program, and where, as Harryette Mullen says, “black poets, individually and collectively, can inspire and be inspired by others, relieved of any obligation to explain or defend their blackness.”

So much has changed since Cave Canem faculty member Elizabeth Alexander recited “Praise Song for the Day,” the inaugural poem for Barack Obama in 2009. What do you see as the role of Cave Canem, and poetry more broadly, in the new political climate?
“So much has changed” is a very gracious way to describe the political climate in which we now find ourselves. In “Praise Song for the Day,” the speaker asks, “What if the mightiest word is love?” I have no doubt that it is love, but the new administration would have me believe that the mightiest word is fear or, worse yet, the president’s name. It is neither. It is love. And what is love if not a society based on justice and equality? With this in mind, the role of Cave Canem in particular, and poetry in general, is and will be to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. With love. Bigly. 

Are there any outreach programs on tap to connect poetry with readers?
Cave Canem’s Poets Tour, a nonprofit speakers bureau, connects national audiences with Cave Canem fellows through readings and workshops. This year we hope to increase the number of participating fellows and reach out to presenting institutions, including high schools, universities, museums, libraries, and prisons. We want to bring black poets to diverse communities.  

Tayari Jones is a contributing editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.         

Nicole Sealey

(Credit: Murray Greenfield )

Q&A: Sokolowski’s Inspiring Word Work

by

Adrienne Raphel

January/February 2018
12.12.17
In Print and Online

As the editor-at-large of Merriam-Webster, Peter Sokolowski contributes to the dictionary’s print and online content, which, in addition to word definitions, includes podcasts, videos, and blogs. In August Sokolowski and his fellow editors rolled out Time Traveler, a tool that organizes words according to when they were first used in English. He recently discussed Merriam-Webster’s newest features, the changing ways in which people use the dictionary, and the Word of the Year, feminism, which the editors announced today. 

How does Time Traveler work? How does it affect the way we think about language?
With Time Traveler, by organizing [words] a different way—that is, rather than alphabetically, chronologically—you get a three-dimensional experience with the dictionary. I do think it’s profound to think of language chronologically. Alphabetically, the ordering is arbitrary. Chronologically, it’s not. Time Traveler shows layers of cultures as they are expressed in the language when they come into the language. English is such a peculiar language in this way. French, for example, is almost entirely derived from Latin. The French Academy founded the language with an ethos of contraction. But English is a mongrel language, with an ethos of expansion. This ethos of expansion has a political component, too. England is establishing colonies all over the world. So, due to exploration, India is a very rich source of words. We first put dates into the dictionary in 1983, with the release of the Collegiate ninth edition. Dictionary entries have always been organized in chronological order: The first sense was always the oldest sense, and the last definition was, chronologically, the most recent. The thing is, that’s a little counterintuitive. By adding dates to entries, we felt we were giving more specific info about when each word entered the language. And now, collectively, because of organizing principles of the Internet, we can connect these words by date. Time Traveler allows imagination to combine with history. It gives a poetic sense of what the dictionary really is—a new and different kind of way of organizing our language.

How might people use Time Traveler?
Here’s one banal example: There’s a wonderful linguist, Ben Schmidt, who rates the language of Downton Abbey, illustrating how many of the words [used on the show are] anachronistic. Contact, for example, was not a verb in 1912. Another example is when Lord Grantham says “You’ll have to step on it” in 1912. You just have to think: This guy had probably never driven a car, so why would he use this very slangy idiom? The idea of speeding didn’t even exist yet.

What does the online version of the dictionary do that print can’t, and vice versa?
When Samuel Johnson, in 1755, wrote his dictionary, a woman came up to him and said, “I’m so pleased that you have omitted the naughty words.” “Madam,” Johnson replied, “I find that you have been looking them up.” Before the dictionary went online, the people who wrote dictionaries never knew which words were looked up. We’re learning enormous amounts about what drives people to a dictionary and what people are looking for from a dictionary. The dictionary is not just used for novel and arcane words—it’s mostly used for words that are a little abstract. There are cyclical things: Love is always at the top of the list in February. There are back-to-school terms: cultures, diversity, plagiarism. And there are the evergreens: integrity, ubiquitous, affect versus effect. Whatever sends us to the dictionary is a private moment. Looking up a word in the dictionary is an intimate act, something between ourselves and our language. The dictionary is this little intermediary—it orchestrates and organizes that relationship. That’s what it’s for. When people are looking up love in February, they’re not looking for spelling—they’re looking for philosophy.

In 1996 we started offering the dictionary online for free, and in 1997 we started following word trends. What had become a static list became dynamic, and we could see what people were looking up in real time. So, for example, in 1997, Princess Di dies; paparazzi is a very natural word to look up. During 9/11, first there were concrete words—rubber, triage—then more philosophical words, such as surreal, succumb, spontaneous. Surreal is always looked up after tragedies. In 2009 I started putting these things on Twitter. We’re often criticized for being political, but we’re responding to the data. We’re good at reading data—we’re not good at reading minds.

Why keep the print edition around at all?
The dictionary we search online is a different experience than the book. The print dictionary is a great piece of technology: It’s really fast, and it really works. And the print way of organizing information means that you always see certain things together. That’s no longer really the case online. The big thing online is, there’s space. Almost every decision for print dictionaries had to be made by the tyranny of space. We are no longer bound by that. What had been tyranny of lack of space is now tyranny of too much space. I always tell people, keep your old dictionaries. The old ones have different information that might be interesting. There is no spreadsheet for when definitions change. You just have to take the book down and look it up and see. For the first time last week, I looked up the word dictionary in Webster’s unabridged second edition, from 1934. I was fascinated. It’s an article on the history of the dictionary. That’s the kind of material that would be dropped in print today, but that’s some of the reason you go to a dictionary. We’re trying to answer those questions that might be asked when you’re looking up a word in the dictionary: Does a Cobb salad have chicken or turkey? The online dictionary is a contemporary magazine of language—let’s be the one-stop word website.

How do you choose the Word of the Year?
The Word of the Year goes back to 2003, and it was always based on the data. However, there’s an asterisk. If we went by raw tonnage, we would have boring words, abstract words that adults feel responsible for. We’re looking for what words spiked this year, not last year. That tells us something about the language today. We also look at what words were looked up in far greater numbers this year than last year, which we call year-over-year numbers. We look at that figure, and then we see a list of words that are typically much more apposite to the year we just experienced. In other words, it tells us something about this year that we’ve lived through, as opposed to words that tell us something about the general curiosity about the English language.

What do you think 2017’s Word of the Year tells us about the world in this moment?
The word of the year is feminism, which is pretty striking given the news. On the one hand, you might say that this is a fairly common word, one that is not really the subject of the news. In point of fact, this is a word that has been rising for the past several years to the point that it’s almost in our top twenty of overall lookups in the history of our website. We saw a 70 percent increase in lookups in 2017, and then we saw these spikes throughout this year. In January we saw a spike after the Women’s March on Washington and the other marches all over the country and the world, which got a huge amount of attention and were historic in various ways. The word feminism was used in particular regarding questions of whether or not the March was feminist or what kind of feminism the organizers and the attendees represented.

In February we saw another huge spike—and this one is in some ways more pointed and more dictionary-oriented—when Kellyanne Conway gave an onstage interview at the Conservative Political Action Conference and said she didn’t consider herself a feminist in the “classic sense.” She explained that she thinks being feminist, in her words, seems to be very “anti-male” and very “pro-abortion.” She was using the word in a very specific way, and that kind of specific use sends people to the dictionary for the definition, because the definition of the word itself was put into question, was itself the subject of the news story. Which is also true with the word fact, when Kellyanne Conway, also in the earlier part of the year, used that term “alternative facts.”

Later in the year we saw two entertainment reasons for the word’s popularity: The Handmaid’s Tale, the Hulu TV adaptation of the Margaret Atwood novel, which got not only a huge amount of positive reviews, but also a huge amount of think pieces using that series as a point of departure and a contemporaneous cultural critique; and the film Wonder Woman, starring Gal Gadot in the title role, who was viewed as a feminist character in a feminist film with a female director, Patty Jenkins.

And recently of course, subsequent to the accusations made against Harvey Weinstein and a long list of others, the word feminist has been in the news a lot. Just today I happened to click on the New York Times story about Lena Dunham and her warnings to the Clinton campaign about being too close to Harvey Weinstein. The word feminist was not only used several times in the article, but there’s also a quote from Dunham where she says she wears underwear that has the word feminist on it. That’s not necessarily the kind of use that will send people to the dictionary, but it shows you that this word is part of the national conversation—to the extent that there is such a thing as a national conversation. I think it’s sometimes too facile to say that there’s a national conversation; I sometimes think that’s shorthand for people who don’t want to be very specific about context. However, if there is such a thing as a national conversation—and there surely is right now regarding, for example, sexual harassment in the workplace and presidential politics—Merriam-Webster has a front-row seat because we see the words that are being looked up as the stories progress. That’s a fascinating thing that I’ve been watching for years and that we present on our home page and on Twitter, in a feature we call Trend Watch, which is simply the words that are most looked up at a given moment. And that word right now is feminism.

Have you recently changed or tweaked the definition of feminism, or has it been consistent for the past several years?
The first English language dictionary to ever include this word was Noah Webster’s dictionary in 1841, which was the last time Webster revised the dictionary before he died. He added the word feminism with the definition, “the qualities of females.” Clearly what he meant was femininity or femaleness; there was no political connotation to the word. This was a word that appeared to him somewhere, but we can’t actually find what he was looking at; we don’t know where he got it. In the 1864 edition, after Webster died and the Merriams had taken over, they dropped the word entirely because it was not used very frequently. It was not included in the next edition, published in 1890. And then in 1909 it was added with two definitions—one, “feminine character or characteristics,” and two, the medical definition, “female characteristics present in males.” So this medical definition precedes the political one. Finally, in the famous unabridged second edition of Webster’s from 1934, the political sense was added: “the theory of those who advocate such legal and social changes as will establish political, economic, and social equality of the sexes.” That’s pretty much the way we define it today. The important word here is equality—equality of the sexes could almost stand as the definition. It’s interesting that we’ve dropped both the medical sense and the femininity sense, which is archaic at this point. The political sense we associate with the word basically begins around 1895, and that’s exactly when the suffragette movement was beginning. So the term feminism is more closely associated in political terms to the fight to get the vote, which makes perfect sense.

Also notable is that it’s a very modern word for English—we have a lot of words that are over a thousand years old, and this one is just over a hundred. That’s a very short time in the history of the English language. It seems to me that feminism is a word that has shifted over time. I think it was taken to be more aggressive in the past and is maybe taken much more positively today. Just like a lot of ideas, it’s a word that has shifted in meaning as the times have changed. That’s as it should be.

What were the runners-up for Word of the Year?
The nine runners-up tend to represent individual spikes that were very striking. The first one is complicit. That came from Ivanka Trump who said in an interview with Gayle King, “I don’t know what it means to be complicit.” When you are a newsmaker and you say “I don’t know what x means” on live television, you better believe it sends people to the dictionary. What sends people to the dictionary even more is when people are having a lot of fun with it, and Saturday Night Live made a skit based on that interview, which kept it going. So that word really had a lot of hits, and it’s a fascinating word. The word is two parts, com and plicare or plek—the com means “together” or “with” in Latin, and the plek means “fold,” so it means “folded together.” It’s the same etymon of two other words that are much more common, complicated and complex.

The next one is the word recuse. Those lookups are all attached to Jeff Sessions. There was a recusal to look into Hillary Clinton; there was a recusal to look into the Trump campaign; there was a recusal involving the Russians. The word recused kept bobbing up and it was always connected to Jeff Sessions. Recused is a classic legal term, and he’s the attorney general, so it makes perfect sense that a legal term would be associated with him.

The next word is one that we don’t associate with a particular story; it just simply went way up in lookups, and we’re not really sure why. It’s the word empathy. Part of it was attached to the #MeToo campaign, with people talking about empathy towards women. And of course there was a lot of criticism of the Republican Party, Trump in particular, for lacking empathy. So this word is being used in both positive and negative ways. It was also in the news January when Asghar Farhadi, the Iranian film director who won two Oscars for Best Foreign Language Film, said he wouldn’t come to the Oscars because of Trump’s proposed travel ban, and that he was making a call for empathy between us and others, “an empathy which we need today more than ever.” And then in July at the Republican National Convention, Paul Ryan was highly quoted using the word when he said, “Real social progress is always a widening circle of concern and protection. It’s respect and empathy overtaking blindness and indifference.” When newsmakers utter the word, it does tend to send people to the dictionary. But we can’t say any one of those stories is the simple reason it makes our list.

Here’s the one that’s interesting from a percentage point of view: dotard. It’s a very unusual word. It was the word used by the Korean Central News Agency as a translation of Kim Jong Un’s statement where he referred to Donald Trump as a “mentally deranged U.S. dotard.” Because it’s such an unusual word—it’s essentially an obsolete word—we saw a 35,000 percent increase in lookups from 2016. We have 250,000 pages of words in the dictionary and some of those pages are looked up a thousand times an hour, others only a few times a year. Dotard was a word that was probably never looked up last year. It comes from the same word as dotage, which means a state or period of senile decay. So dotard originally meant imbecile, or stupid person, but now it just means an older person who is losing mental acuity. And this is a great thing about what the dictionary does—it gives a vocabulary lesson to the country when words like this are in the news. It’s also notable that this word is in the news probably because the Korean translators must be using very old bilingual dictionaries, because no contemporary speaker of English would use this word.

The next word is a science word from the solar eclipse, syzygy, which means the nearly straight-line configuration of three celestial bodies such as the sun, moon, and earth during a solar or lunar eclipse. The solar eclipse was an international story, and it cut straight through the United States and was a big teaching moment for a lot of people.

The next word is one that is looked up for pronunciation. We know that some words are looked up for their phonetics; typically they’re foreign words like schadenfreude or niche. This year the word was gyro. This was because of one simple event—Jimmy Fallon did a sketch on The Tonight Show with Luke Bryan, the country singer, and it showed them out on the streets of New York City getting a gyro. They ask each other, “How do you pronounce this?” and they turned it into this big musical number. It turns out there are three pronunciations for the word.

Federalism spiked because of the Congressional debate about the Affordable Care Act. Lindsey Graham said, “Here’s the choice for America: socialism or federalism when it comes to your health care.” What’s interesting to me about this is that socialism, as well as fascism and capitalism, are some of the most looked-up words in the dictionary. The problem with federalism, is that in America, we very unusually call our national government the federal government; however, the word federalism refers very explicitly to state rights. So the word itself is very confusing. You can see why it would send people to the dictionary.

The next two words are very simple, news-related words: hurricane—we had Harvey, Irma, José, and Maria—all these hurricanes that affected the Caribbean and the southeastern United States. Storm words always looked up when there’s a big storm, and we’ll usually see an echo—if hurricane is looked up, we’ll also see spikes in cyclone and tornado, because people are comparing them like recipes, the definitions all specify wind speed and geography. These are words where you can really learn something about the world, not just the language.

Finally, the last of the runner-up words goes all the way back to the Oscars in February—the word gaffe, which of course refers to the mistake of the wrong envelope that was opened for the Best Picture announcement. All the crew and cast of La La Land came up on stage, and while they were thanking their mothers, it was revealed that in fact Moonlight was the winner for Best Picture. Gaffe is an interesting word because it’s one of these journalistic words, it’s a word that’s used much more in headlines than in conversation. It’s a word that sends people to the dictionary quite regularly, since I’m sure when people see a headline that uses the word gaffe, they wonder if there’s something very specific about this kind of mistake, as opposed to just the word mistake. But of course headline writers like it because it’s short. And English has that kind of flexibility.  

 

Adrienne Raphel is the author of What Was It For (Rescue Press, 2017) and But What Will We Do (Seattle Review, 2016). Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, the Paris Review Daily, Poetry, Lana Turner Journal, Prelude, and elsewhere. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a doctoral candidate at Harvard University.

Peter Sokolowski, Merriam-Webster editor-at-large.

(Credit: Joanne Watson, Merriam-Webster)

Q&A: Wilson Leads the Feminist Press
Q&A: Thomas’s App for Young Readers
Q&A: Lena Dunham’s Lenny Imprint

Q&A: Wilson Leads the Feminist Press

by

Jennifer Baker

November/December 2017
10.11.17
In Print and Online

In July writer, activist, and media commentator Jamia Wilson was named the new executive director and publisher of the Feminist Press (FP), a forty-seven-year-old nonprofit known for highlighting feminist perspectives and prose. Located at the City University of New York, the press has published books by writers such as Shahrnush Parsipur and Ama Ata Aidoo and public figures such as Anita Hill and Justin Vivian Bond. Wilson previously worked as the executive director of Women, Action, and the Media, and her writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, Elle, Bust, and many other publications. As she becomes the youngest person and first woman of color to direct the Feminist Press, Wilson discusses her aims to advance the press’s mission.

How has your experience helped you prepare for this new role, and what do you hope to bring to the Feminist Press? 
I grew up reading FP books that I borrowed from my mother’s shelf, like I Love Myself When I Am Laughing: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader and But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies. These books taught me about my literary and activist lineage and helped provide a road map for the present and the future. I’m honored to work with FP’s intergenerational team to both enliven and deepen our intersectional vision of publishing unapologetic, accessible texts and multiplatform content that inspire action, teach empathy, build community, and shift culture. FP will continue to deepen our engagement with communities of color, indigenous folks, the LGBTQ community, and the disability community. Representation matters, but it must be coupled with systemic change. We will elevate and amplify the voices of the most marginalized members of our community because we know that none of us are free unless we all are.

How do you plan to apply your knowledge and experience in the social justice field to the job of executive director and publisher?
My engagement as a movement maker and media commentator brings FP closer to our community. It helps us connect with new readers because we’re involved in conversations out in the world and contributing to the cultural narrative via social media; TV; at conferences, panels, and marches; and in movement spaces. Until more gatekeepers do the work to disrupt habits and practices of patriarchy, economic injustice, and white supremacy in the publishing industry, we won’t transform our cultural narrative. My goal is to help contribute to the movement to put these values into active practice at all levels of our organization and work overall.

In this political and social climate, what kinds of books are pushing this conversation forward and promoting action?
This has been a consistent part of FP’s mission, and that’s why we’re prepared to speak truth to power through our books and voices in the midst of attacks on free expression and the rise of authoritarianism, misogyny, and racial violence. We publish books other publishers deem “too risky,” “controversial,” or “radical.” We’ve made efforts to lift up queer voices with our Amethyst Editions imprint and women and nonbinary folks of color with our Louise Meriwether Prize. Our nonfiction books are mainly activist-based. We resist the reinforcement of respectability politics, as well as the promotion of narratives that appear to promote social progress but only in a way that’s palatable or validating to oppressive power structures—and only at the price of continuing to marginalize communities that are often silenced, invisible, or undermined. Some of our recent titles include Brontez Purnell’s Since I Laid My Burden Down, a novel about growing up gay in 1980s Alabama, and Juniper Fitzgerald and Elise Peterson’s forthcoming How Mamas Love Their Babies, a picture book that shows how diverse mothers work in different ways to take care of their children, from domestic labor to sex work.

What kinds of books have been most influential to you personally?
The books I’m most enamored with have moved my heart in both personal and political ways. As my feminist foremothers taught us, “The personal is political.” I’m both an activist and a writer, and these identities have affixed themselves upon my soul. I love fiction, especially dystopian fiction, but I’m mostly a reader of nonfiction, historical fiction, legal history, and memoir. Although I tend to lean towards writing grounded in “truth,” I’m finding I’m even more drawn to this genre in the “post-truth” era.

There has been an increase in online-only feminist publications. Do you foresee potential partnerships to bring further visibility to FP’s work?
We reach out to writers or artists who have gotten their start online if we’re interested in creating a book with them, like with Makeda Lewis’s Avie’s Dreams: An Afro-Feminist Coloring Book and The Crunk Feminist Collection. Many of the feminist writers and artists we work with have robust online communities and serve as natural ambassadors for their labor and wisdom. We have other upcoming collaborations with the Well-Read Black Girl Festival, Soul Camp, the Together Live tour, the SisterSong conference, Howard University, and the March for Black Women. We want to be a part of feminist conversations on- and offline and to lift up remarkable and stunning storytelling.   

 

Jennifer Baker  is a publishing professional, the creator and host of the Minorities in Publishing podcast, a contributing editor at Electric Literature, and the social media director and a writing instructor for the Sackett Street Writers’ Workshop. She is the editor of the forthcoming short story anthology Everyday People: The Color of Life (Atria Books, 2018).

Q&A: Thomas’s App for Young Readers
Q&A: Lena Dunham’s Lenny Imprint

Q&A: Sarah Browning Splits This Rock

by

Nadia Q. Ahmad

March/April 2018
2.14.18
In Print and Online

Ten years ago, Sarah Browning and a group of fellow poets founded Split This Rock, a literary nonprofit that works at the intersection of poetry and political activism and hosts the biennial Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness in Washington, D.C. Browning recently announced that she will step down from her role as executive director of the organization at the end of the year, and that the search for her replacement will begin after this year’s festival, which will be held from April 19 to April 21. With her final year at the organization underway, Browning discussed her past decade at Split This Rock, the continued need to consider poetry a form of social engagement, and the upcoming festival. 

What changes have you seen in the literary world since starting Split This Rock?
When we started this organization, there were very few literary organizations engaging in activism. I went to the Association of Writers & Writing Programs Conference in 2003, three weeks before the United States invaded Iraq, and I could find only two sessions that engaged political questions at all. We were actively being told not to write political work fifteen years ago. That’s why we started D.C. Poets Against the War [a movement in 2003 to protest the war in Iraq] and then Split This Rock, which emerged from that movement. Split This Rock brought the activism piece into the picture. Now, of course, everybody is focused on making change with their poetry and doing so more explicitly. But I’m telling you, ten years ago, there was no home for it. And that’s why we built it.

The name “Split This Rock” comes from a poem, doesn’t it?
It does, from a Langston Hughes poem called “Big Buddy.” It ends with, “When I split this rock, / Stand by my side.” So it’s about splitting the rock of injustice but also the solidarity that’s needed—that need for community.

How does Split This Rock make poetry and activism accessible?
We try to bring poetry into as many spaces as possible and encourage everyone to write. We host community writing workshops twice a month in D.C. They’re free, drop-in; all you have to do is show up. The room is physically accessible, with transcription service for people with disabilities. You don’t have to have an MFA or any educational experience or introduction to poetry. We believe that, as Roque Dalton wrote in a poem, “poetry, like bread, is for everyone.” And our programs prove it. People are hungry for the imaginative language of poetry and for the authentic voice of one another, the heart-language, because so much of our experience is mediated now by propaganda, by commerce, by social media. We’re being sold to all the time. So we’re hungry for more authentic experience, and that’s what poetry is: It’s idiosyncratic language; it’s weirdness and wildness.

What would you say to those who might suggest that poetry and activism are incompatible?
Writers have always engaged the world around them. And as a writer you have to write what’s pounding up inside you. And if what’s pounding up inside you is injustice—if there’s a mother who has to work two jobs just to get food on the table, or if you are that mother, and you’re writing late at night and hoping there’ll be enough food to get you through the end of the week to the next paycheck—then that’s what you’re writing. That’s the poem. That’s what’s going to have power: What is the fire in your belly?

Nobody should tell anybody else what to write. I’m not telling anybody what to write. These poems were always being written; they just weren’t finding a wide audience because journals weren’t publishing them. The guidelines were saying, “No causes.” The contests weren’t awarding these poets the awards. The universities weren’t giving these poets the jobs. Because of racism, and because of conservatism. And homophobia and sexism. Split This Rock was founded to help these poets, like myself, feel less lonely and be more effective as poet-citizens, so that we could join together when we wanted to do activism—but also to amplify our voices and to create our own platforms.

Split This Rock cites Federico García Lorca’s concept of duende as one of its core values, which is described on your website as “recognizing the potential imaginative power of fear and embracing poets and activists who grapple with difficult issues and take risks in their writing and public work.” Why are fear and risk both necessary to move things forward?
It ain’t easy. None of it. We’re not going to make change if we stick to platitudes and simplicity, either in our poetry or in our social justice work. So we have to go to dark places, difficult places, in ourselves and in our relationships with one another and in our society. And that’s hard. I think it certainly helps us to sometimes be patient with one another. Split This Rock is one of the few places in the literary world, but really anywhere, where folks who are twenty-one and folks who are seventy-six are hanging out in the same room, having conversations. And maybe they have radically different cultural references and life experiences. So duende informs that because it’s scary to say, “You know, I don’t actually know anything about what you’ve just said.”

I’ve never studied poetry formally, so even when I’m with a bunch of academics and they use terms that I don’t know, I have to say to them, “Guess what, I don’t know what you’re saying!” [Laughs.] Which is a scary thing for me to say. I try to face my fear. But it’s at all levels, and we have to do it at all levels: personal, creative, collective, national. I’m the descendant of slave owners. I write about that in my work and I’m trying to push that, hard. I don’t know how my extended family’s going to feel about it, let alone other white people from the South. I wasn’t raised in the South, only half my family is from the South, so I’m going to be treated as an outsider, but that’s an issue where I feel like we have to face our fears as white Americans.

What guests and panels are you excited to feature in this year’s Split This Rock Poetry Festival?
Sharon Olds has been added to the lineup, which is really great news. She was supposed to feature at our very first festival in 2008 but was unable to come. Likewise, Sonia Sanchez kicked off our first festival and she will be back to mark this tenth anniversary. But also we have young poets like Paul Tran and Terisa Siagatonu. We always try to honor voices of all ages and in all places in their writing lives.

This being the first festival under the new political regime, we are particularly interested in how poetry is being used in resistance and in how poets are taking care of themselves and one another. We’re all feeling a lot of despair, I think, and we heard that in the proposals we received. There are a lot of sessions about using sadness, about using rage—in our poetry, but also in our community building—and acknowledging these things as real. Crying. Holding one another in celebration and in support.

What’s next for you—writing?
Yes. I don’t do well without structure, even this late in my life. I’m thinking about grad school. But at the very least, I would like to have more time for my own poetry and creative nonfiction. My second book just came out, but it was ten years between books. It would be nice not to have ten years till the next one.

 

Nadia Q. Ahmad is the Diana & Simon Raab Editorial Fellow at Poets & Writers Magazine.  

Sarah Browning

(Credit: Kristin Adair)

Q&A: Sokolowski’s Inspiring Word Work
Q&A: Wilson Leads the Feminist Press
Q&A: Nicole Sealey Leads Cave Canem

Q&A: Sokolowski’s Inspiring Word Work

by

Adrienne Raphel

January/February 2018
12.12.17
In Print and Online

As the editor-at-large of Merriam-Webster, Peter Sokolowski contributes to the dictionary’s print and online content, which, in addition to word definitions, includes podcasts, videos, and blogs. In August Sokolowski and his fellow editors rolled out Time Traveler, a tool that organizes words according to when they were first used in English. He recently discussed Merriam-Webster’s newest features, the changing ways in which people use the dictionary, and the Word of the Year, feminism, which the editors announced today. 

How does Time Traveler work? How does it affect the way we think about language?
With Time Traveler, by organizing [words] a different way—that is, rather than alphabetically, chronologically—you get a three-dimensional experience with the dictionary. I do think it’s profound to think of language chronologically. Alphabetically, the ordering is arbitrary. Chronologically, it’s not. Time Traveler shows layers of cultures as they are expressed in the language when they come into the language. English is such a peculiar language in this way. French, for example, is almost entirely derived from Latin. The French Academy founded the language with an ethos of contraction. But English is a mongrel language, with an ethos of expansion. This ethos of expansion has a political component, too. England is establishing colonies all over the world. So, due to exploration, India is a very rich source of words. We first put dates into the dictionary in 1983, with the release of the Collegiate ninth edition. Dictionary entries have always been organized in chronological order: The first sense was always the oldest sense, and the last definition was, chronologically, the most recent. The thing is, that’s a little counterintuitive. By adding dates to entries, we felt we were giving more specific info about when each word entered the language. And now, collectively, because of organizing principles of the Internet, we can connect these words by date. Time Traveler allows imagination to combine with history. It gives a poetic sense of what the dictionary really is—a new and different kind of way of organizing our language.

How might people use Time Traveler?
Here’s one banal example: There’s a wonderful linguist, Ben Schmidt, who rates the language of Downton Abbey, illustrating how many of the words [used on the show are] anachronistic. Contact, for example, was not a verb in 1912. Another example is when Lord Grantham says “You’ll have to step on it” in 1912. You just have to think: This guy had probably never driven a car, so why would he use this very slangy idiom? The idea of speeding didn’t even exist yet.

What does the online version of the dictionary do that print can’t, and vice versa?
When Samuel Johnson, in 1755, wrote his dictionary, a woman came up to him and said, “I’m so pleased that you have omitted the naughty words.” “Madam,” Johnson replied, “I find that you have been looking them up.” Before the dictionary went online, the people who wrote dictionaries never knew which words were looked up. We’re learning enormous amounts about what drives people to a dictionary and what people are looking for from a dictionary. The dictionary is not just used for novel and arcane words—it’s mostly used for words that are a little abstract. There are cyclical things: Love is always at the top of the list in February. There are back-to-school terms: cultures, diversity, plagiarism. And there are the evergreens: integrity, ubiquitous, affect versus effect. Whatever sends us to the dictionary is a private moment. Looking up a word in the dictionary is an intimate act, something between ourselves and our language. The dictionary is this little intermediary—it orchestrates and organizes that relationship. That’s what it’s for. When people are looking up love in February, they’re not looking for spelling—they’re looking for philosophy.

In 1996 we started offering the dictionary online for free, and in 1997 we started following word trends. What had become a static list became dynamic, and we could see what people were looking up in real time. So, for example, in 1997, Princess Di dies; paparazzi is a very natural word to look up. During 9/11, first there were concrete words—rubber, triage—then more philosophical words, such as surreal, succumb, spontaneous. Surreal is always looked up after tragedies. In 2009 I started putting these things on Twitter. We’re often criticized for being political, but we’re responding to the data. We’re good at reading data—we’re not good at reading minds.

Why keep the print edition around at all?
The dictionary we search online is a different experience than the book. The print dictionary is a great piece of technology: It’s really fast, and it really works. And the print way of organizing information means that you always see certain things together. That’s no longer really the case online. The big thing online is, there’s space. Almost every decision for print dictionaries had to be made by the tyranny of space. We are no longer bound by that. What had been tyranny of lack of space is now tyranny of too much space. I always tell people, keep your old dictionaries. The old ones have different information that might be interesting. There is no spreadsheet for when definitions change. You just have to take the book down and look it up and see. For the first time last week, I looked up the word dictionary in Webster’s unabridged second edition, from 1934. I was fascinated. It’s an article on the history of the dictionary. That’s the kind of material that would be dropped in print today, but that’s some of the reason you go to a dictionary. We’re trying to answer those questions that might be asked when you’re looking up a word in the dictionary: Does a Cobb salad have chicken or turkey? The online dictionary is a contemporary magazine of language—let’s be the one-stop word website.

How do you choose the Word of the Year?
The Word of the Year goes back to 2003, and it was always based on the data. However, there’s an asterisk. If we went by raw tonnage, we would have boring words, abstract words that adults feel responsible for. We’re looking for what words spiked this year, not last year. That tells us something about the language today. We also look at what words were looked up in far greater numbers this year than last year, which we call year-over-year numbers. We look at that figure, and then we see a list of words that are typically much more apposite to the year we just experienced. In other words, it tells us something about this year that we’ve lived through, as opposed to words that tell us something about the general curiosity about the English language.

What do you think 2017’s Word of the Year tells us about the world in this moment?
The word of the year is feminism, which is pretty striking given the news. On the one hand, you might say that this is a fairly common word, one that is not really the subject of the news. In point of fact, this is a word that has been rising for the past several years to the point that it’s almost in our top twenty of overall lookups in the history of our website. We saw a 70 percent increase in lookups in 2017, and then we saw these spikes throughout this year. In January we saw a spike after the Women’s March on Washington and the other marches all over the country and the world, which got a huge amount of attention and were historic in various ways. The word feminism was used in particular regarding questions of whether or not the March was feminist or what kind of feminism the organizers and the attendees represented.

In February we saw another huge spike—and this one is in some ways more pointed and more dictionary-oriented—when Kellyanne Conway gave an onstage interview at the Conservative Political Action Conference and said she didn’t consider herself a feminist in the “classic sense.” She explained that she thinks being feminist, in her words, seems to be very “anti-male” and very “pro-abortion.” She was using the word in a very specific way, and that kind of specific use sends people to the dictionary for the definition, because the definition of the word itself was put into question, was itself the subject of the news story. Which is also true with the word fact, when Kellyanne Conway, also in the earlier part of the year, used that term “alternative facts.”

Later in the year we saw two entertainment reasons for the word’s popularity: The Handmaid’s Tale, the Hulu TV adaptation of the Margaret Atwood novel, which got not only a huge amount of positive reviews, but also a huge amount of think pieces using that series as a point of departure and a contemporaneous cultural critique; and the film Wonder Woman, starring Gal Gadot in the title role, who was viewed as a feminist character in a feminist film with a female director, Patty Jenkins.

And recently of course, subsequent to the accusations made against Harvey Weinstein and a long list of others, the word feminist has been in the news a lot. Just today I happened to click on the New York Times story about Lena Dunham and her warnings to the Clinton campaign about being too close to Harvey Weinstein. The word feminist was not only used several times in the article, but there’s also a quote from Dunham where she says she wears underwear that has the word feminist on it. That’s not necessarily the kind of use that will send people to the dictionary, but it shows you that this word is part of the national conversation—to the extent that there is such a thing as a national conversation. I think it’s sometimes too facile to say that there’s a national conversation; I sometimes think that’s shorthand for people who don’t want to be very specific about context. However, if there is such a thing as a national conversation—and there surely is right now regarding, for example, sexual harassment in the workplace and presidential politics—Merriam-Webster has a front-row seat because we see the words that are being looked up as the stories progress. That’s a fascinating thing that I’ve been watching for years and that we present on our home page and on Twitter, in a feature we call Trend Watch, which is simply the words that are most looked up at a given moment. And that word right now is feminism.

Have you recently changed or tweaked the definition of feminism, or has it been consistent for the past several years?
The first English language dictionary to ever include this word was Noah Webster’s dictionary in 1841, which was the last time Webster revised the dictionary before he died. He added the word feminism with the definition, “the qualities of females.” Clearly what he meant was femininity or femaleness; there was no political connotation to the word. This was a word that appeared to him somewhere, but we can’t actually find what he was looking at; we don’t know where he got it. In the 1864 edition, after Webster died and the Merriams had taken over, they dropped the word entirely because it was not used very frequently. It was not included in the next edition, published in 1890. And then in 1909 it was added with two definitions—one, “feminine character or characteristics,” and two, the medical definition, “female characteristics present in males.” So this medical definition precedes the political one. Finally, in the famous unabridged second edition of Webster’s from 1934, the political sense was added: “the theory of those who advocate such legal and social changes as will establish political, economic, and social equality of the sexes.” That’s pretty much the way we define it today. The important word here is equality—equality of the sexes could almost stand as the definition. It’s interesting that we’ve dropped both the medical sense and the femininity sense, which is archaic at this point. The political sense we associate with the word basically begins around 1895, and that’s exactly when the suffragette movement was beginning. So the term feminism is more closely associated in political terms to the fight to get the vote, which makes perfect sense.

Also notable is that it’s a very modern word for English—we have a lot of words that are over a thousand years old, and this one is just over a hundred. That’s a very short time in the history of the English language. It seems to me that feminism is a word that has shifted over time. I think it was taken to be more aggressive in the past and is maybe taken much more positively today. Just like a lot of ideas, it’s a word that has shifted in meaning as the times have changed. That’s as it should be.

What were the runners-up for Word of the Year?
The nine runners-up tend to represent individual spikes that were very striking. The first one is complicit. That came from Ivanka Trump who said in an interview with Gayle King, “I don’t know what it means to be complicit.” When you are a newsmaker and you say “I don’t know what x means” on live television, you better believe it sends people to the dictionary. What sends people to the dictionary even more is when people are having a lot of fun with it, and Saturday Night Live made a skit based on that interview, which kept it going. So that word really had a lot of hits, and it’s a fascinating word. The word is two parts, com and plicare or plek—the com means “together” or “with” in Latin, and the plek means “fold,” so it means “folded together.” It’s the same etymon of two other words that are much more common, complicated and complex.

The next one is the word recuse. Those lookups are all attached to Jeff Sessions. There was a recusal to look into Hillary Clinton; there was a recusal to look into the Trump campaign; there was a recusal involving the Russians. The word recused kept bobbing up and it was always connected to Jeff Sessions. Recused is a classic legal term, and he’s the attorney general, so it makes perfect sense that a legal term would be associated with him.

The next word is one that we don’t associate with a particular story; it just simply went way up in lookups, and we’re not really sure why. It’s the word empathy. Part of it was attached to the #MeToo campaign, with people talking about empathy towards women. And of course there was a lot of criticism of the Republican Party, Trump in particular, for lacking empathy. So this word is being used in both positive and negative ways. It was also in the news January when Asghar Farhadi, the Iranian film director who won two Oscars for Best Foreign Language Film, said he wouldn’t come to the Oscars because of Trump’s proposed travel ban, and that he was making a call for empathy between us and others, “an empathy which we need today more than ever.” And then in July at the Republican National Convention, Paul Ryan was highly quoted using the word when he said, “Real social progress is always a widening circle of concern and protection. It’s respect and empathy overtaking blindness and indifference.” When newsmakers utter the word, it does tend to send people to the dictionary. But we can’t say any one of those stories is the simple reason it makes our list.

Here’s the one that’s interesting from a percentage point of view: dotard. It’s a very unusual word. It was the word used by the Korean Central News Agency as a translation of Kim Jong Un’s statement where he referred to Donald Trump as a “mentally deranged U.S. dotard.” Because it’s such an unusual word—it’s essentially an obsolete word—we saw a 35,000 percent increase in lookups from 2016. We have 250,000 pages of words in the dictionary and some of those pages are looked up a thousand times an hour, others only a few times a year. Dotard was a word that was probably never looked up last year. It comes from the same word as dotage, which means a state or period of senile decay. So dotard originally meant imbecile, or stupid person, but now it just means an older person who is losing mental acuity. And this is a great thing about what the dictionary does—it gives a vocabulary lesson to the country when words like this are in the news. It’s also notable that this word is in the news probably because the Korean translators must be using very old bilingual dictionaries, because no contemporary speaker of English would use this word.

The next word is a science word from the solar eclipse, syzygy, which means the nearly straight-line configuration of three celestial bodies such as the sun, moon, and earth during a solar or lunar eclipse. The solar eclipse was an international story, and it cut straight through the United States and was a big teaching moment for a lot of people.

The next word is one that is looked up for pronunciation. We know that some words are looked up for their phonetics; typically they’re foreign words like schadenfreude or niche. This year the word was gyro. This was because of one simple event—Jimmy Fallon did a sketch on The Tonight Show with Luke Bryan, the country singer, and it showed them out on the streets of New York City getting a gyro. They ask each other, “How do you pronounce this?” and they turned it into this big musical number. It turns out there are three pronunciations for the word.

Federalism spiked because of the Congressional debate about the Affordable Care Act. Lindsey Graham said, “Here’s the choice for America: socialism or federalism when it comes to your health care.” What’s interesting to me about this is that socialism, as well as fascism and capitalism, are some of the most looked-up words in the dictionary. The problem with federalism, is that in America, we very unusually call our national government the federal government; however, the word federalism refers very explicitly to state rights. So the word itself is very confusing. You can see why it would send people to the dictionary.

The next two words are very simple, news-related words: hurricane—we had Harvey, Irma, José, and Maria—all these hurricanes that affected the Caribbean and the southeastern United States. Storm words always looked up when there’s a big storm, and we’ll usually see an echo—if hurricane is looked up, we’ll also see spikes in cyclone and tornado, because people are comparing them like recipes, the definitions all specify wind speed and geography. These are words where you can really learn something about the world, not just the language.

Finally, the last of the runner-up words goes all the way back to the Oscars in February—the word gaffe, which of course refers to the mistake of the wrong envelope that was opened for the Best Picture announcement. All the crew and cast of La La Land came up on stage, and while they were thanking their mothers, it was revealed that in fact Moonlight was the winner for Best Picture. Gaffe is an interesting word because it’s one of these journalistic words, it’s a word that’s used much more in headlines than in conversation. It’s a word that sends people to the dictionary quite regularly, since I’m sure when people see a headline that uses the word gaffe, they wonder if there’s something very specific about this kind of mistake, as opposed to just the word mistake. But of course headline writers like it because it’s short. And English has that kind of flexibility.  

 

Adrienne Raphel is the author of What Was It For (Rescue Press, 2017) and But What Will We Do (Seattle Review, 2016). Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, the Paris Review Daily, Poetry, Lana Turner Journal, Prelude, and elsewhere. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a doctoral candidate at Harvard University.

Peter Sokolowski, Merriam-Webster editor-at-large.

(Credit: Joanne Watson, Merriam-Webster)

Q&A: Wilson Leads the Feminist Press
Q&A: Thomas’s App for Young Readers
Q&A: Lena Dunham’s Lenny Imprint

Agent Advice: The Complete Series

by

Staff

12.15.21
In Print and Online

The industry’s best and brightest agents respond directly to readers’ questions in this regular column dating back to 2010. To submit a question for the next featured agent, e-mail editor@pw.org.

Monica Odom of Odom Media Management
12.15.2021
The agent answers questions about attracting agents using self-published books and whether to use a summary or a writing sample to pitch a memoir.
 

Larissa Melo Pienkowski of Jill Grinberg Literary Management
10.13.21
The agent who represents writers TJ Alexander and K. Tempest Bradford, among others, answers questions about being ghosted by agents and how to query for nonfiction books.

Jade Wong-Baxter of Frances Goldin Literary Agency
8.18.21
The agent representing Chris Belcher, Kate Broad, Delia Cai, Duy Doan, and others offers advice about working with a coauthor, changing a memoir to fiction, why agents don’t consider previously published work, and how to become an agent.

Amy Elizabeth Bishop of Dystel, Goderich & Bourret
 6.16.21
The literary agent answers questions about how to seek representation as a self-published author, break into the agenting business, and more. 

 Iwalani Kim of Sanford J. Greenberger Associates
 4.14.21
The literary agent answers questions about submitting story collections, getting an agent’s attention, and querying two agents at the same agency.
 

Jody Kahn of Brandt and Hochman
4.10.19
A literary agent answers questions from writers about genre, age, costs, and client lists.

Find a Literary Agent

The Literary Agents database contains details about more than 170 agents who are looking for new clients. Search the listings to find contact information, submission guidelines, client lists, tips from the agents, and more. 

find an agent

Priya Doraswamy of Lotus Lane Literary
10.10.18
An agent answers questions on obtaining the copyright of a self-published novel and seeking a U.S. publisher from abroad.
 

Regina Brooks of Serendipity Literary Agency
8.15.18
An agent answers questions on referrals, pitching a self-published book, and what to do if you’re dropped by an agency.
 

Annie Hwang of Folio Literary Management
12.13.17
A literary agent answers readers’ questions—from how seriously agents consider a writer’s previous sales to how to responsibly seek new representation.

Kirby Kim of Janklow & Nesbit Associates
4.12.17
A seasoned literary agent offers valuable counsel on when to query, how to keep revising, and whether horror fiction is a genre worth pursuing.

Anna Ghosh of Ghosh Literary
12.14.16
Anna Ghosh answers readers’ questions—from why poetry agents are seemingly nonexistent to whether or not it is possible to be “too young to write.”

Betsy Amster of Betsy Amster Literary Enterprises
10.14.15
The agent of authors such as María Amparo Escandón and Joy Nicholson offers advice on query letters, editing, and what not to do when submitting a manuscript.

Agents & Editors Recommend

A dependable source of professional and creative advice, Agents & Editors Recommend features anecdotes, insights, tips, recommended reading and viewing for writers, and more from leading agents and editors.

Explore the series

Danielle Svetcov of Levine Greenberg Rostan
4.15.15
Should you pay to have a manuscript edited beforehand? Are there benefits to querying via snail mail versus e-mail? Danielle Svetcov of Levine Greenberg Rostan answers readers’ questions about what (and what not) to do when trying to find an agent.

Meredith Kaffel Simonoff of DeFiore and Company
8.20.14
An agent representing authors such as CJ Hauser and Cecily Wong answers questions about writing in multiple genres, agents’ fees, and publishing work in online journals.

Amy Rennert of the Amy Rennert Agency
3.01.14
The agent of authors such as Diana Nyad and Herman Wouk answers questions about self-publishing, age restrictions, and working with an agent remotely.

Chris Parris-Lamb of the Gernert Company
10.06.13
Chris Parris-Lamb of the Gernert Company offers advice on submitting query letters and manuscripts, and when to embrace or eschew self-promotion.

Lucy Carson of the Friedrich Agency
9.01.13
Lucy Carson of the Friedrich Agency discusses e-book publishing, when to send a sample to an agent, and more.

Matt McGowan of Frances Goldin Literary Agency
5.01.13
Literary agent Matt McGowan, who represents Eula Biss, John D’Agata, Brian Evenson, and many others, answers writers’ most commonly asked questions.

Rebecca Gradinger of Fletcher & Company
10.17.12
Literary agent Rebecca Gradinger explains why writers need agents and offers tips about best practices for finding one.

Douglas Stewart of Sterling Lord Literistic
4.12.12
The agent of Jami Attenberg, David Mitchell, Carolyn Parkhurst, Matthew Quick, and others offers guidance about publishing credits, MFA programs, and unagented submissions.

Jenni Ferrari-Adler of Brick House Literary Agents
3.01.11
Does your book need to be finished before you seek representation? Do agents really read synopses? Agent Jenni Ferrari-Adler, whose clients include Lauren Shockey and Emma Straub, answers these questions and more.

Terra Chalberg of the Susan Golomb Literary Agency
10.15.10
When is the best time in your career to look for representation, and when should you call off an author-agent relationship? Terra Chalberg, whose clients include Lori Ostlund and Glenn Taylor, tackles these questions and more.

Jennifer Carlson of Dunow, Carlson & Lerner
8.11.10
The agent of authors such as Kevin Brockmeier and Marisa de los Santos offers her thoughts on self-publishing and what she looks for in the first five pages of a writing sample.

PJ Mark of Janklow & Nesbit Associates
5.01.10
The agent of authors such as Samantha Hunt, Dinaw Mengestu, and Josh Weil offers advice on shaping a query letter and when to follow up after pitching your book.

Katherine Fausset of Curtis Brown, Ltd.
3.01.10
Agent Katherine Fausset answers questions from readers about the agent’s role in submitting work to literary magazines and how writers can choose agents based on their client lists.
 

Agents & Editors: The Complete Series

Agents & Editors: The Complete Series

by

Jofie Ferrari-Adler, Michael Szczerban, and M. Allen Cunningham

2.10.21
In Print and Online

Launched in 2008, this series of in-depth interviews with book editors, publishers, and agents offers a unique look at the past, present, and future of the book industry and what writers can do to thrive in today’s publishing world.  

 

Agents

 

The Book Group
by Michael Szczerban
6.14.16
Four veteran agents—Julie Barer, Faye Bender, Brettne Bloom, and Elisabeth Weed—talk about the business of books, the secret to a good pitch, and what authors should do in the lead-up to publication.

Claudia Ballard, Seth Fishman, Melissa Flashman, and Alia Hanna Habib
by Michael Szczerban
6.17.15
Four young literary agents meet for an evening of food, drink, and conversation about how they find new authors, what they need to see in a query letter, and the common mistakes writers should avoid.

Jennifer Joel
by Michael Szczerban
2.10.15
Jennifer Joel, whose clients include Chris Cleave, Joe McGinniss Jr., Evan Osnos, and Shonda Rhimes, talks about the difference between selling fiction and nonfiction, what inspires her to go the extra mile for her authors, and what writers should really want out of publishing.

PJ Mark
by Michael Szczerban
6.18.14
PJ Mark, whose clients include Samantha Hunt, Wayne Koestenbaum, Dinaw Mengestu, Maggie Nelson, Ed Park, and Josh Weil, talks about what writers can do to improve their chances of success, why fiction is harder to sell than nonfiction, and the importance of trusting your heart.

Susan Golomb
by Michael Szczerban
5.1.14
Susan Golomb, whose clients include Jonathan Franzen, Rachel Kushner, and William T. Vollmann, talks about the ebb and flow of submission season, the art of the preemptive offer, and the gems she finds in her slush pile.

David Gernert
by Michael Szczerban
1.1.14
Literary agent David Gernert discusses the bookstore as a key to our culture, what it’s like to work with John Grisham, and how big changes in the industry are affecting authors’ incomes.

Eric Simonoff
by Michael Szczerban
7.1.13
A heavy-hitting agent who for twenty-two years has represented some of the biggest literary writers in the country, Eric Simonoff discusses recent changes in the publishing industry, the pitfalls of self-publishing, and what he’s learned about staying creative.

Georges Borchardt
by Jofie Ferrari-Adler
9.1.09
Georges Borchardt has been an agent for more than fifty years. He’s seen authors, editors, and other agents come and go, but two things have never changed: his belief that good writing is a gift and his ability to get it published.

Maria Massie, Jim Rutman, Anna Stein, and Peter Steinberg
by Jofie Ferrari-Adler
5.1.09
Four agents discuss how the economy is affecting their jobs, where they’re finding new writers, and what totally freaks them out about MFA students.

Julie Barer, Jeff Kleinman, Daniel Lazar, and Renee Zuckerbrot
by Jofie Ferrari-Adler
1.1.09
Four young literary agents meet for an evening of food, wine, and conversation about the writing they’re looking for, how they’re finding it, what they love, what they hate, and ten things writers should never ever do.

Molly Friedrich
by Jofie Ferrari-Adler
9.1.08
Known as a heavy-hitting agent willing to go to bat for her clients, Molly Friedrich discusses how an author should choose an agent, what she looks for in a manuscript, and what separates great agents from merely good ones.

Nat Sobel
by Jofie Ferrari-Adler
5.1.08
Agent Nat Sobel, one of the most forward-thinking and outspoken agents in the business, voices his opinions on what authors should do for themselves, the dangers of MFA programs, and what he finds in literary magazines.

Lynn Nesbit
by Jofie Ferrari-Adler
1.1.08
With more than forty years of experience in the business, agent Lynn Nesbit discusses how she signed some of her biggest clients, how a writer can get an agent’s attention, and what’s wrong with the publishing industry.

 

Editors

 

Sarah McGrath
by M. Allen Cunningham
2.10.21
The editor in chief of Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House, talks about her start in publishing, acquiring books, editing as a creative process, and more.

Ben George
by M. Allen Cunningham
8.14.19
Ben George, a senior editor at Little, Brown who works with some of the biggest names in literary fiction and nonfiction, talks about the author-editor relationship, the plight of the midlist writer, and the art of revision. 

Rob Spillman
by Michael Szczerban
10.12.16
Editor Rob Spillman talks Tin House—the magazine, the books, the summer workshop—and the pleasures, perils, and surprises of independent publishing.

Michael Wiegers
by Michael Szczerban
10.14.15
Michael Wiegers, the editor in chief of Copper Canyon Press, talks about how he decides which books to publish (from the two thousand manuscripts the press receives each year) and what it’s like to edit the likes of Pablo Neruda, W. S. Merwin, and C. D. Wright.

Dawn Davis
by Michael Szczerban
8.19.15
Dawn Davis—vice president and publisher of 37 INK, an imprint of Simon & Schuster’s Atria Publishing Group—talks about editing Edward P. Jones, the lack of diversity in publishing, and what some of the most successful authors have in common.

Jeff Shotts
by Michael Szczerban
10.15.14
Graywolf Press executive editor Jeff Shotts discusses the power of patience in publishing, editing as an act of empathy, and why it’s an exciting time to be a poet.

Amy Einhorn
by Michael Szczerban
2.12.14
The publisher of her eponymous imprint at Penguin Random House, Amy Einhorn discusses her early days as an assistant at FSG, the importance of titles, and how she pushes her authors to make their books the best they can be.

Jordan Pavlin
by Michael Szczerban
9.1.13
A vice president and executive editor at Knopf, Jordan Pavlin discusses her terror of launch meetings, the particular genius of Sonny Mehta, and her job as a writer’s ideal reader.

Jonathan Karp
by Jofie Ferrari-Adler
11.1.09
As the editor in chief of Twelve, Jonathan Karp is always looking for good writing. Considering that half of all the books he’s published there have become best-sellers, that should make a lot of writers very, very excited.

Jonathan Galassi
by Jofie Ferrari-Adler
7.1.09
Some publishers may have lost sight of what’s important, but the head of FSG shows his allegiance as he discusses the fallacy of the blockbuster mentality, what writers should look for in agents, and his close bond with authors.

Lee Boudreaux, Eric Chinski, Alexis Gargagliano, and Richard Nash
by Jofie Ferrari-Adler
3.1.09
Four young editors, from big houses and small, take some time off to discuss what makes a good manuscript, what they’ve come to expect from their authors, and how much of their work needs to be done at night and on weekends.

Chuck Adams
by Jofie Ferrari-Adler
11.1.08
A veteran editor who has worked at publishing houses both large and small, Chuck Adams of Algonquin Books talks about what beginning writers tend to forget, the secret to selling two million copies, and the problem with MFA writing.

Janet Silver
by Jofie Ferrari-Adler
7.1.08
Having settled into her new role at Nan Talese’s imprint following her ouster from Houghton Mifflin, editor Janet Silver discusses what she looks for in a new writer and what every author should know about agents.

Pat Strachan
by Jofie Ferrari-Adler
3.1.08
With nearly four decades of editing experience, publishing veteran Pat Strachan reveals the qualities she looks for in fiction, her approach to editing, and how writers can help themselves navigate the industry.

Agent Advice: The Complete Series
We Mean Business: Twelve Agents Who Want to Read Your Work

The Business of Relationships: How Authors, Agents, Editors, Booksellers, and Publicists Work Together to Reach Readers

by

Kevin Larimer

July/August 2018
6.13.18
In Print and Online

It is often said that book publishing is a business of relationships. Behind every successful title there is a small crowd of people who, over the course of many months and even years, worked together—via e-mail and in person, on the phone and over lunch—to turn an idea into a vision, edits into finished pages, a manuscript into a book. A work of art conceived and created in solitude is carried forth by a team, passing through many hands before it reaches the marketplace. I asked five debut authors to describe their first steps toward establishing the initial relationship, the one that starts the whole process rolling: finding an agent. I then asked those five agents to explain how the relationships with their clients grew and how they introduced their clients to the ideal editors who would shepherd their books into print. Next, I contacted those editors and invited them to walk us through the acquisition and editorial process that turns the raw material into finished products. And finally I spoke with five indie booksellers who convey the enthusiasm, the passion, and the purpose of author, agent, and editor in their efforts to place the books in the hands of their intended readers. Along the way I was introduced to marketing directors, publicity managers, events directors, sales reps, and other agents, editors, and authors who aided in forging connections that proved crucial in the process. The result is a series of illustrations offering a glimpse at how the book business operates on the strength of personal and professional bonds among dedicated people working toward the twin goals of creative expression and smart business.

 

Jordy Rosenberg author of the novel Confessions of the Fox, published in June by One World, an imprint of Random House

According to my e-mail records, it was seventeen days from when I first e-mailed Susan Golomb to our initial phone call. However, this does not take into account the seventeen years that I spent writing and throwing away manuscripts. During that time I had been fortunate to discuss my different projects with several agents with varying specializations: noir/mystery, creative nonfiction, popular fiction. These conversations ultimately became a part of Confessions, which interweaves all these genres—speculative fiction, thriller, metafiction, autotheory—into a single novel. With such a formal composite, I needed and wanted to work with an agent who specialized in high-concept literary fiction. I knew Susan had worked on this kind of thing with a number of her other clients, so I had hoped Confessions would attract her attention, and to my great fortune it did. But I could not have predicted the storm of activity that would ensue once she took me on. Susan was tireless with her edits. It was a little sublime and terrifying, actually, and I don’t know how she did it. We went through three full rounds of line edits—as well as larger structural edits—in the space of three weeks. This mania was surely responsible for the fact that Susan was struck with pneumonia midway through the process. Which still didn’t stop her: She was calling me from the hospital about edits. I believe she was still on antibiotics, in fact, when she made the connection between me and Chris Jackson and Victory Matsui at One World. I’m very much in her debt for the clarity of her vision, not only about the book’s bones, but also for intuiting that the horizon of the book’s potential lay with Chris and Victory and the deep working relationship we would go on to establish.

 

 

 

 

Susan Golomb of Writers House

When Michael Szczerban interviewed me in your pages in 2014, I made reference to my “shaggy dogs.” Jordy’s novel was one such animal. It came bounding into my slush pile with a mention of my client Rachel Kushner as a referral, wagging its tail with charming yet acerbic wit and playful language that included the actual lexicon of the demimonde, which put me in mind immediately of A Clockwork Orange, but with a bursting heart. There were probably fifty words for sexual intercourse, each more delicious and descriptive than the next, and a thriller frame with extremely topical, political subtext dripping with atmosphere. Like all shaggy dogs, however, its ambition exceeded its reach, so we set to work, and in a hurry, to have it on submission for the Frankfurt Book Fair. I worked with Jordy to trim the plot and imbue it with more suspense, to deepen the characters and raise the stakes of their desires. And I felt the title, while quite apt and intriguing, could be off-putting. So we came up with an interim one—and the final was by way of brainstorming with Writers House colleagues at a party and back and forth with Jordy and the One World team. While racing to meet the Frankfurt deadline, I came down with pneumonia, and Jordy plied me with bone broth, which came by messenger from Brodo and endeared him to me even more than his spectacular talent and, yes, I’ll say it, dogged willingness to make the manuscript as brilliant as it could be.

 

 

 

 

 

Victory Matsui editor at One World

When Susan Golomb sent the novel to me and Chris Jackson on submission, I had just joined One World a month earlier. I was searching for fiction that fulfilled the One World mission—books that “challenged the status quo and subverted dominant modes of thinking.” I was especially looking for a novel that celebrated the political resistance and joyful weirdness of queer and trans communities. Can you imagine how I felt when I first read Confessions? Jordy had merged a radical sensibility with the pleasures of great storytelling to write an epic queer love story through the histories of capitalism, imperialism, and imprisonment. Chris and I quickly set up a call with Susan and Jordy, and we immediately fell in love with his electric mind, his sense of humor, and his ambition to make this book both intellectually engaging and richly entertaining. We set down the phone and agreed we had to publish this book. So we offered a preempt—an offer that takes the book off the table before other editors have the chance to offer—and were overjoyed when Jordy and Susan accepted. Of course that was just the beginning: Our work together would take us from nights of e-mailing back and forth about character backstory to long phone calls about narrative structure to a tearful meeting at Le Pain Quotidien about footnotes—ultimately resulting in one of the most fulfilling editor-author relationships of my life.

 

 

 

 

Alex Schaffner at Brookline Booksmith in Brookline, Massachusetts

First an advance reader’s copy (ARC) arrived addressed to our backlist buyer, Shuchi Saraswat, who keeps an eye out for booksellers’ interests as ARCs come in. She and my co–events director, Lydia McOscar, heard more about the book directly when they visited Penguin Random House’s New York offices. The publisher’s contagious enthusiasm spurred me to dig in. LGBT literature is one of my key interests, and I wrote a thesis on eighteenth-century literature, so this was a natural path from publisher excitement to store to just the right bookseller. Fans of Sarah Waters and Jeanette Winterson will love it, and with hand-selling and shelf-talkers [printed cards or other signs attached to a store shelf to call buyers’ attention to a particular title], I expect the book to be a success at the store.

 

 

 

 
 
 

 

“Rosenberg’s masterful debut is, at once, a work of speculative historical fiction, a soaring love story, a puzzling mystery, an electrifying tale of adventure and suspense, and an unabashed celebration of sex and sexuality.” 
—Christine Mykityshyn, publicity manager, Penguin Random House

 

 

Nafissa Thompson-Spires author of the story collection Heads of the Colored People, published in April by 37 INK, an imprint of Atria Publishing Group

In 2015 I started querying agents with a novel I’d written as my MFA thesis at the University of Illinois. No one was sure about its genre—YA or adult literary fiction. After a lot of partial requests and a dozen full requests, lots of rejections, and lots of agents ignoring me—I queried about a hundred—an agent asked me to revise and resubmit. I grew bored with trying to write to his suggestions; to distract myself I wrote several short stories. One of them, “Heads of the Colored People,” gave me the idea for a full manuscript. In early 2016 I ran into an old colleague, Jensen Beach, who recommended that I submit my completed collection to some contests and mentioned that he could refer me to his agent, Anna Stein. Two weeks later the collection won a small-press contest that came with publication, but I wasn’t sure if that was the best route. I contacted Anna and the three or four other agents I’d submitted to, strategically this time. Anna responded enthusiastically that I should talk to her instead of giving the book to the small press. We clicked on the phone, and the rest is a blessed history.

arrow_right_2.png

 

 

 

 

Anna Stein of ICM Partners

Nafissa’s collection came to me thanks to my client Jensen Beach, who had recommended us to each other. I remember my assistant at the time, Mary Marge Locker, started reading before I did and said, “You’d better take this home with you.” At the time I was living in a one-bedroom apartment with my husband and two young daughters, so I headed off to a café to read. I was immediately immersed and engaged. The collection was just so surprising, so refreshingly unexpected. There was a kind of cool intellectual perspective that made the stories feel like they were operating at different registers simultaneously. I didn’t have to think twice; we started working together the very next week.

arrow_left.png

 

 

 

 

 

Dawn Davis vice president and publisher of 37 INK

The submission came in via Anna Stein of ICM, a literary agent who has represented two of my favorite contemporary novels, A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara and Where’d You Go, Bernadette? by Maria Semple. I jumped right in and was struck by how fresh the stories were but also by Nafissa’s mordant use of humor to talk about race and isolation. It was dark at times, which I was used to; novels about black life are often dark. But the irony and wry wit was strikingly original—and at times bold. I ate it up. When Nafissa and I spoke on the phone, I expressed my enthusiasm for what I loved about Heads of the Colored People—the title story and “Wash Clean the Bones” broke my heart, while “Belles Lettres” had me laughing with glee—and I was candid about what I thought was missing. She was respectful, curious, and open.

arrow_right_2.png

 

 

 

 

Rick Simonson at Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle

Dawn Davis and I have kept in touch for more than twenty years—for however long wherever she’s worked—including wide-ranging talks on books and publishing, above and beyond any particular title. But there have been particular books over which we make a special connection. Maybe most memorable was The Known World by Edward P. Jones. She sent early manuscripts of that book out to a few of us, and so, too, with Heads of the Colored People, which she told me about some time ago. Then I’ll get a galley with a note: “Finally, this.” It is, without fail, extraordinary when she makes these connections. She has that eye. Also playing a part, in her own way, is our Simon & Schuster sales rep, Christine Foye, who is attuned to editors’ books, Dawn’s among them. Heads of the Colored People is very much of the present time, and it is finding readers here at Elliott Bay from the get-go.

arrow_left.png

 

 

 

 

 

“Her stories are exquisitely rendered, satirical, and captivating in turn, engaging in the ongoing conversations about race and identity politics, as well as the vulnerability of the black body.”
—Stephanie Mendoza, senior publicist, Simon & Schuster

 

 

Rachel Z. Arndt author of the essay collection Beyond Measure, published in April by Sarabande Books

I was lucky to have met some great agents when I was in grad school at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the University of Iowa’s nonfiction writing program. The most substantive conversations with these agents took place during my third year, when I had an idea of the book I wanted to make. I honed my pitch as I met with more and more people and as I learned to describe my essay collection in terms of what I was working toward, not necessarily what I had then. One of those people was Samantha Shea. I gave her some essays when I was still in school, and after I graduated, I sent her my thesis—which would eventually become a good chunk of my book. The summer after graduating, Samantha took me on, immediately offering invaluable guidance and feedback.

arrow_right_2.png

 

 

 

 

Samantha Shea of Georges Borchardt, Inc.

Rachel and I first met when I visited the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in early 2016. She reached out a few months later to say that she had a complete essay collection and an offer from Sarabande. I quickly read the work she sent me and was so impressed with the thoughtfulness of her writing—its searching quality, its currents of existential frustration, fear, and longing. We began working together right away—first negotiating the deal with Sarabande and, later, placing other work of hers, including some of the essays in the collection, with journals and magazines like Woolly, the Believer, Literary Hub, and Longreads.

arrow_left.png

 

 

 

 

 

Sarah Gorham president and editor in chief of Sarabande Books

I first came to know Rachel Z. Arndt on a scouting trip to the University of Iowa. I was taken by the elegance and clarity of her writing, not to mention the originality of her project. Rachel recognized how measurement—in pounds, “likes,” temperature, train schedules, and so on—is running our lives, not necessarily the other way around. We wrote up a contract. I suggested she give us three new essays. Then, after a preliminary line edit, I passed the manuscript on to our marketing director at the time, Ariel Lewiton, for another look. We mailed off a detailed editorial letter, encouraging Rachel to flesh out her scenes a little and add more reflection to the essays. Turns out she’s an excellent reviser. One or two more passes later, we had a ready-for-prime-time collection.

arrow_right_2.png

 

 

 

 

Jan Weissmiller at Prairie Lights in Iowa City

The buyers at Prairie Lights were made aware of this new book last season when the extraordinary John Mesjak of Consortium Book Sales & Distribution alerted us to its forthcoming publication. His job, selling us Rachel’s essay collection, was certainly made easier by her relationship to the University of Iowa and, therefore, to Prairie Lights. Her book was acclaimed in catalogue copy by poet Robyn Schiff and essayist John D’Agata, both on faculty at the university, as well as Vivian Gornick—one of the preeminent memoirists of our time. With that in mind we knew we would be able to feature and sell this book, and we assumed that Rachel would come to read at Prairie Lights. All that has since come to pass. The book is front and center in our New Nonfiction section, and we are glad to recommend it—particularly at this moment, when it resonates so strongly with women of Rachel’s generation. Sarabande has been publishing exceptional work since its inception in 1994. Its cofounder Sarah Gorham has discovered just the right book for Prairie Lights. Independent bookstores rely on publishers like Sarabande and sales teams like that of Consortium to publish and publicize the kinds of books that discerning readers find in our stores. We are grateful and fortunate to have this timely collection gracing our shelves.

arrow_left.png

 

 

 

 

 

“With poignantly obsessive and imaginative detail, Arndt carries us from sleep study labs to judo competitions, from Nine Inch Nails concerts to the repetitive drone of first dates, and from wacky Airbnb reviews to the oppressive limitations of kitchen design. Never to be confused for a mathematical word problem, Arndt’s writing is witty and deftly humorous as she probes the patterns and structures that permeate our every action.” 
—Joanna Englert, director of marketing and publicity, Sarabande Books

 

Aja Gabel author of the novel The Ensemble, published in May by Riverhead Books

I was a baby writer when my first agent signed me on the promise of a short story. We worked well together for a bit, placing stories, but parted ways when I was close to finishing the novel. I think she and I always had different working styles, but it took a big project, and some maturing on my part, to realize that. I decided then to look for an agent who made me excited about my work instead of nervous about it, who believed exactly what I believed about myself, without convincing. So I dug up a nice e-mail Andrea Morrison at Writers House had sent me and wrote her back. I remember it was a sunny day in March when she called, and I was sitting on the floor of my living room, unemployed, feeling like if I didn’t sell this novel I would suffocate. And immediately I knew. Andrea just got what I was trying to do. She was young and hungry and smart. She was like me. 

arrow_right_2.png

 

 

 

 

 

Andrea Morrison at Writers House

I didn’t know Laura Perciasepe at Riverhead before I submitted Aja’s novel to her. But I did of course do some online sleuthing to get a sense of her taste and the titles she’d worked on previously. It seemed like she would really connect with Aja’s prose. And when we did submit the novel, Laura read the manuscript immediately and was so incredibly passionate in all the right ways. Aja and Laura meshed editorially and on a personal level from the start. 

arrow_left.png

 

 

 

 

 

Laura Perciasepe editor at Riverhead Books

When Andrea Morrison called and pitched me The Ensemble, it sounded like a story I hadn’t read before, which always intrigues me. When I opened the manuscript that night to start reading, I couldn’t stop. I was fully immersed in these characters and in their creative, competitive world—which Aja writes about in such an authentic way, pulled from her own experience. I came into the office the next day, all riled up, pushing the book into everyone’s hands, and we ended up preempting the novel. It had to be mine!

arrow_right_2.png

 

 

 

 

Annie B. Jones of the Bookshelf in Thomasville, Georgia

In a problem my younger self would have only dreamed of having, I am bombarded with books, and it often takes a persistent sales rep to convince me that a new title is worth trying. The Ensemble had a few things working in its favor: an intriguing premise, in-depth character development, well-conducted research, even a striking cover, all “sold” to me by a team of agents, editors, and reps whom I trust and who know what I like to read. This novel by Aja Gabel quickly moved to the top of my pile. The Ensemble is poetic and memorable, one of the best books I’ve read all year, and I can’t wait to put it on my store’s shelves and into readers’ hands.

arrow_left.png

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Aja Gabel masterfully conveys the all-consuming flame of youthful ambition, the tension between raw talent and hard work, and the intense love shared between members of a family brought together not by blood, but by choice.” 
—Elizabeth Hohenadel, senior publicity manager, Riverhead Books

 

 

page_5: 

Ruth Joffre author of the story collection Night Beast, published in May by Black Cat, an imprint of Grove Atlantic

When I began researching agents, I focused my attention on those who represented story collections and/or queer writers I admired. In the process of putting together a list, I spoke to a friend of mine—Rebekah Frumkin, author of The Comedown—who suggested querying Ross Harris, who had just sold her novel. He was interested in books with queer characters, so it seemed like a perfect fit. I queried him and I think eight other agents right after Thanksgiving—a difficult time, I soon learned, as most of the agents who requested the full manuscript were about to go on vacation. In the end the timing worked out in my favor, because it served as a kind of litmus test gauging who was going to be the most dedicated advocate of my work. I signed with Ross in January, and he sold my book in April.

arrow_right_2.png

 

 

 

 

Ross Harris of Stuart Krichevsky Literary Agency

I offered Ruth Joffre representation based on the sheer strength of her collection and on several fruitful conversations we’d had regarding her works-in-progress. It also didn’t hurt that she came highly recommended by a cherished client. But it was Ruth’s confidence on the page that made me fall for her; she wasn’t afraid to go there and get weird. Ruth knew her comp titles, she knew her space, she knew the boundaries she wanted to push, and she knew where she fit—which is sometimes a tricky thing to own and celebrate if you’re writing about queer people and the underrepresented. I loved Night Beast a great deal, but I loved Ruth even more. It signified the promise of many exciting things to come.

arrow_left.png

 

 

 

 

 

Nicole Nyhan former assistant editor at Black Cat, now managing editor of Conjunctions

The acquisition of Night Beast was serendipitous, if not a worldly miracle. Just as I began writing Ross Harris to follow up on a client he’d mentioned, the phone rang; it was Ross, pitching Night Beast. I’d been searching for provocative, imaginative new fiction—work with a strong ethical impetus and composed with poetic precision—and suddenly there was Ruth Joffre, a fierce, uncompromising author of tremendous talent, offering deeply empathic stories about women who felt so familiar but somehow, in 2017, I had still yet to encounter on the page. The book would be a challenge to publish, I knew—publishers usually lose money on debut collections—but this was clearly an initial step in a long, important writing career. Thanks to the generous good faith of everyone at Grove, we were able to take on the book.

arrow_right_2.png

 

 

 

 

Lauren Banka of Elliott Bay in Seattle

As a young bookseller I’m still building my relationships with publishers and with our local reps, who are our main points of contact with the publishers. I do this mainly by reaching out about books I’ve already discovered, usually advance review copies that the publishers sent to the store. I also benefit from the rich bookselling community at Elliott Bay—for Night Beast in particular, Karen Maeda Allman and Rick Simonson spoke with our Grove rep, Cindy Heidemann, and brought the book to my attention because I’ve been actively promoting experimental and diverse science fiction at the store. As a buyer I balance my trust for my colleagues and reps with my sense of our customers. Night Beast is exciting because there’s real enthusiasm on the publisher side, and I know that our customers are so hungry for more queer, literary SF collections.

arrow_left.png

 

 

 

 

 

“With exquisite prose and transfixing imagery, Joffre explores worlds both strange and familiar, homing in on the darker side of humanity. Powerful, unsettling, and wildly imaginative, Night Beast is a mind-bending, genre-hopping debut, a provocative and uncommonly raw examination of relationships and sexuality, trauma and redemption, the meaning of family, and coming-of-age—and growing old—as an outsider.” 
—John Mark Boling, senior publicity manager, Grove Atlantic  

 

 

Kevin Larimer is the editor in chief of Poets & Writers, Inc. 

 

We Mean Business: Twelve Agents Who Want to Read Your Work
A Thing Meant to Be: The Work of a Book Editor
The Art of Publicity: How Indie Publicists Work With Writers

We Mean Business: Twelve Agents Who Want to Read Your Work

by

Kevin Larimer

July/August 2017
6.14.17
In Print and Online

To say there are a lot of literary agents out there is an understatement—almost like saying there are a lot of writers looking for an agent (but not quite). The Association of Authors’ Representatives (AAR), a nonprofit membership organization founded in 1991, currently lists more than four hundred agents as members, all of whom meet certain experience requirements and abide by an established code of ethics. Another, more general, online database claims to offer details for nearly a thousand agents of varying levels of expertise and areas of emphasis. The carefully curated and focused database of literary agents at pw.org lists more than a hundred, including contact information, submission guidelines, and client lists.

No, the challenge for writers is not a dearth of agents, but rather picking the right one out of the crowd. (Of course, the same could be said about the challenge for agents.) To help narrow the field, I contacted some hungry agents who I know are eager to receive an e-mail from an as-yet-unknown writer and asked each of them for some basic information about what kind of work they want to read and how to reach them, as well as some not-so-basic information that will help you get to know them a little better. Remember, publishing is a business of relationships. You don’t want to simply fire off an e-mail to any agent you happen to come across. Read carefully. In the following profiles, a dozen agents are dropping some subtle (and not so subtle) hints for you. Have you written a piece of narrative nonfiction that gets to the heart of what it means to live in a specific geographical region? Duvall Osteen might be a great fit. Do you have a novel set in North Carolina? Adam Eaglin could be your man. Are you from Detroit and love music? You may need to look no further than Carrie Howland. Are you a writer of smart horror fiction and just can’t get enough of the work of Joe Hill and Nathan Ballingrud? You should take the time to get to know Renée Zuckerbrot.

These twelve agents all have distinct personalities, aesthetics, work habits, backgrounds, proclivities, and peeves—and so do you. So take your time, do the research, read books by their clients, and listen to what these professionals are saying. One of them might be speaking directly to you.

 

Danielle Svetcov, Levine Greenberg Rostan Literary Agency

Who she represents: Bridget Quinn (Broad Strokes), Bonnie Tsui (Why We Swim), Nicole Perlroth (This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends), Stephanie Wilbur Ash (The Annie Year), Meg Elison (The Book of the Unnamed Midwife), James Nestor (Deep), Shalane Flanagan and Elyse Kopecky (Run Fast Eat Slow), Eben Weiss (The Ultimate Bicycle Owner’s Manual)

What she wants to read: Biographies and histories in which I can smell the breath and walk in the footsteps of the characters profiled; memoirs and reported narratives braced by vivid scenes and a sense of urgency; humor that can revive a marriage when read before bed; fiction that reads easy but isn’t.

When you should contact her: If your manuscript is the only piece of writing you’ve got to share (you’re not a working journalist, say, or a published author), then your manuscript (if it’s fiction) should be complete before you query. If you are a professional writer with clips galore to share, I still recommend you query when you’ve got a finished manuscript (if fiction), because it leaves no mystery (but it’s up to you). If you’re submitting nonfiction—all writers—then you should have a full proposal to share when you query. Coda: An agent should not be the first person (besides you) to read your manuscript or proposal.

Where she can be reached: e-mail dsvetcov@lgrliterary.com

Why you should want her as your agent: To quote my clients: “relentless,” “wolfish,” “and she always calls you back.”

How she wants to be contacted: Send query letter with attached proposal or sample of fiction (say, twenty-five pages).

 

Renée Zuckerbrot, Massie & McQuilkin Literary Agents

Who she represents: Dan Chaon (Ill Will), Shannon Leone Fowler (Traveling With Ghosts), Kelly Link (Get in Trouble), Deborah Lutz (The Bronte Cabinet: Three Lives in Nine Objects), Andrew Malan Milward (I Was a Revolutionary), Keith Lee Morris (Travelers Rest), Shawn Vestal (Godforsaken Idaho), M. O. Walsh (My Sunshine Away), Daniel Wallace (Extraordinary Adventures)

What she wants to read: I tend to be seduced by voice, so voice-driven fiction and nonfiction are high on my wish list. I love getting lost in a world that is strikingly different from mine. I have a deep appreciation for storytelling that allows me to see the world anew, or introduces me to a culture or worldview outside my own. I read to be entertained and educated. Writers who approach current events and historical topics with original, provocative ideas will always find readers. I’m also looking for smart horror writers along the lines of Joe Hill and my client Nathan Ballingrud (North American Lake Monsters). There will always be room on my list for popular science—Eric Sanderson’s Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City is a good example—and pop-culture books like my client Theron Humphrey’s Maddie on Things.

When you should contact her: Please query me when you have a complete manuscript or proposal with a sample chapter. I am also willing to look at a complete short story collection and partial novel, or a complete novel and a partial story collection. For memoirs, I will consider a proposal with a sample chapter or the complete manuscript.

Where she can be reached: e-mail renee@mmqlit.com

Why you should want her as your agent: I am a careful reader who reads on both a micro and macro level. My first job was in editorial—I’m a former Doubleday editor—so it’s all about the writing. I work with my clients on getting their work in the best shape possible before submitting it. That said, my job is not to edit a manuscript so that it conforms to my idea of perfection; rather, it is to edit a work so that editors reading it will be able to envision the book as the writer intends. I need to leave enough room for editors to work with my clients to shape their manuscripts to their shared vision and the publisher’s vision. I’m proud of the fact that the manuscripts I sell never require major editorial overhauls. Also, I value fostering long-term relationships with my writers. Last but not least, I’m enthusiastic about collaborating with my writers and their publishers during the publication of their work. I love helping to generate buzz for my clients by talking up their work to anyone who will listen.

How she wants to be contacted: Please include a description of your work, your writing credentials, a brief bio in the body of an e-mail, along with the first three chapters/stories from your manuscript as a Word document. For nonfiction, you can also send a proposal and sample chapter.

 

Duvall Osteen, Aragi Inc.

Who she represents: Bethany Ball (What to Do About the Solomons), Elizabeth Poliner (As Close to Us as Breathing), Marjorie Liu (Monstress), Lauren Holmes (Barbara the Slut and Other People), Brooke Barker (Sad Animal Facts), Brad Watson (Miss Jane), Bryce Andrews (Badluck Way: A Year on the Ragged Edge of the West), Wil S. Hylton (Vanished: The Sixty-Year Search for the Missing Men of World War II), Pablo Medina (The Island Kingdom)

What she wants to read: Fiction and narrative nonfiction with a big voice and/or a strong sense of place.

When you should contact her: For fiction I request completed novels or story collections. For narrative nonfiction I’m happy to read a proposal, which should include an overview and at least two finished chapters.

Where she can be reached: e-mail queries@aragi.net; attn: Duvall Osteen

Why you should want her as your agent: We’re a small, selective agency. We keep it that way for a reason. Our authors are never going to be handed off; they can always reach us, no matter how big or small the question, no matter what stage of their career. Every single author at Aragi is of equal importance.

How she wants to be contacted: Please send your query via e-mail, which should include a synopsis of the book and your bio.

 

Jeff Kleinman, Folio Literary Management

Who he represents: Garth Stein (The Art of Racing in the Rain), Elizabeth Letts (The Eighty-Dollar Champion), Eowyn Ivey (The Snow Child), Jacquelyn Mitchard (Two If by Sea), Charles J.  Shields (Mockingbird), Karen Dionne (The Marsh King’s Daughter), Benjamin Ludwig (Ginny Moon), Val Emmich (The Reminders), Kathy McKeon (Jackie’s Girl)

What he wants to read: I focus on book-club/literary fiction and narrative nonfiction—especially those projects that I feel can make a difference either to me personally or to the world. I love unique voices, magnificently strong characters, unusual premises, and books that offer some new perspective on something I thought I already knew something about or never even dreamed existed. I’m always interested in learning and love when someone can teach me something organically so it doesn’t feel like I’m even learning. I’m particularly looking for voice-driven fiction as well as very well-written thrillers and psychological suspense novels; or novels with a great, quirky, fun voice. I love narrative nonfiction and memoir and have sold projects in a wide variety of subjects, including art, history, animals, military, and many other genres.

When you should contact him: Fiction writers, when you’ve finished your entire novel, had it read by several readers, edited and reedited it, and feel like it’s now absolutely as strong as you can possibly make it, write me a letter and tell me about it. Nonfiction writers, when you’ve written a book proposal, paying particular attention to the sample chapter(s)/excerpts and marketing materials, write me a letter.

Where he can be reached: E-mail jeff@foliolit.com, but please consult the Folio website (foliolit.com) before you fire off an e-mail. No phone calls or hard copies, please.

Why you should want him as your agent: I’m very hands-on and love the editing-collaborating process—brainstorming plots, rejiggering motivations, tweaking backstory. It’s really satisfying and invigorating to be part of the creative process. I also love being part of the publication process, too—coming up with marketing ideas, discussing PR strategies, revising flap copy, reading/editing short promotional materials, and so forth. I do best working with authors who see their agent as a partner in the book publishing process: I’m not a guy who rubber-stamps a manuscript and just forwards it to the editor; and I don’t just disappear once the book has been sold. As one author told me recently, “I was just saying that what you do for me is not normal. I don’t know of a single other agent who works so hard to make sure his clients look good—and I know a lot of agents!”

How he wants to be contacted: For fiction, a query letter plus the first page of your manuscript; for nonfiction, a query letter plus a proposal overview and/or first page of a sample excerpt.

 

Eleanor Jackson, Dunow, Carlson & Lerner

Who she represents: David Wroblewski (The Story of Edgar Sawtelle), Susie Steiner (Missing, Presumed), T. Geronimo Johnson (Welcome to Braggsville), Aline Ohanesian (Orhan’s Inheritance), Susan Straight (Between Heaven and Here), Michael Lemonick (The Perpetual Now)

What she wants to read: I believe a good book should wake you up by taking you out of your life and immersing you in someone else’s. So I want to read books with deeply imagined worlds, by writers who are not afraid to take risks with their work.

When you should contact her: Fiction writers, I want you to contact me when you have a full draft of your novel. I sell a lot of nonfiction on proposal, so I’m happy to look at those projects a bit earlier. If I’m considering nonfiction on proposal, I’d like to see one or two sample chapters. In general, I think the best moment for writers to contact an agent is when they have done everything they possibly can on their own.

Where she can be reached: Dunow, Carlson & Lerner Literary Agency; 27 West 20th Street, Suite 1107; New York, NY 10011; e-mail eleanor@dclagency.com

Why you should want her as your agent: I consider my clients my friends. They all have my cell-phone number and are free to use it. My list is intentionally small, so I can give every project the attention it deserves. I also like to think long-term, about how to build a career as well as sell individual books.

How she wants to be contacted: Please send me a one- to two-page query letter with a summary of your work and an author bio. If you have a proposal, please attach it to your query. If you are working on a novel, please attach the first ten to twenty pages to give me a sense of your writing.

 

Allison Hunter, Janklow & Nesbit Associates

Who she represents: Katie Heaney (Never Have I Ever), Arianna Rebolini (Public Relations), Swan Huntley (We Could Be Beautiful), Anna Pitoniak (The Futures), Anne Helen Petersen (Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud), Christina Kelly (Good Karma), Victoria James (Drink Pink), Kelsey Miller (Big Girl), Jen Chaney (As If!), Emilie Wapnick (How to Be Everything), Dvora Meyers (The End of the Perfect 10), Eliot Nelson (The Beltway Bible), Megan Mulry (A Royal Pain)

What she wants to read: Literary and commercial fiction, especially upmarket and women’s fiction, as well as select memoir, narrative nonfiction, cultural studies, and pop culture. I’m especially looking for funny female writers, great love stories, campus novels, beach reads, family epics, and nonfiction projects that speak to the current cultural climate.

When you should contact her: Fiction writers, please wait until you have a complete, polished manuscript. Nonfiction writers, you should have a fully fleshed out idea and ideally a full book proposal.

Where she can be reached: e-mail ahunter@janklow.com

Why you should want her as your agent: I like to think that I offer my authors the best of both worlds—the resources of a large, world-class agency but with a great deal of personal attention. I am a fast and voracious reader and feel that it is my duty to read widely in the genres I’m representing, to fully understand the market. I pride myself on my close working and personal relationships with editors at every publishing house, as well as my connections with the greater literary community in New York City.

How she wants to be contacted: Please send me a query and approximately ten to fifteen pages of your manuscript or proposal.

 

Carrie Howland, Empire Literary

Who she represents: Kaitlyn Greenidge (We Love You, Charlie Freeman), Carmiel Banasky (The Suicide of Claire Bishop), Melissa Gorzelanczyk (Arrows), Sarah Prager (Queer, There, and Everywhere), Jason Tougaw (The One You Get)

What she wants to read: I’m actively seeking adult-fiction writers, both literary and upmarket. My background is in poetry and literary fiction, so beautiful language is one of the first things I look for in any project. Equally important are a strong voice and great story, which I’m looking for across genres. I would love to see a literary thriller, whether adult or young adult, come across my desk. For children’s books, I love voice-driven, contemporary fiction that isn’t afraid to tackle tough issues. I adore a middle-grade adventure story but am also taken by one that might deal with the loss of a sibling, for example, or a serious issue at school or with a friend. For nonfiction, I’m a music fanatic, and as such I’m always looking for great books on movements, culture, musicians themselves, or simply how we as a society respond to, and are affected by, the music around us. I’m a Detroit-area native, so I’d also love submissions for books that deal with the city itself, or cities like it, the politics surrounding them, and stories of people who live there. In addition to poetry, I have a strong background in public policy, so I’m incredibly interested in books that deal with politics, education, or other societal issues. Finally, I love all things pop culture, so I will never say no to a proposal about anything from “why we’re a Bachelor-obsessed nation” to “why we can’t ever seem to get enough of Gilmore Girls.”

When you should contact her: For fiction, a project should truly be finished before I see it. I recommend you have a not only complete but also well-edited manuscript before sending to me, or any agent. For nonfiction, a proposal is perfect.

Where she can be reached: e-mail carrie@empireliterary.com

Why you should want her as your agent: After nearly twelve years as an agent, representing award-winning authors, I’ve developed a hands-on approach to launching the careers of debut novelists. I’m a very editorial agent and love collaborating with my clients. Whether that’s idea development, manuscript feedback, assisting with publicity, social media, or marketing, I really do consider myself a full-service partner for my authors. I absolutely love what I do; I live and breathe for my clients and work tirelessly to promote their work and careers. Beyond that, while I’ve been a New Yorker for over a decade, I’m a Midwestern girl at heart, so you’ll find not only an advocate, but a friend in me as your agent. This can be a tough business, and I like to remind my clients why we all chose this profession in the first place: because we’re passionate about the written word.

How she wants to be contacted: Please send your query letter and first twenty pages (for fiction) or proposal (for nonfiction) as a Word document to carrie@empireliterary.com.

 

Ross Harris, Stuart Krichevsky Literary Agency

Who he represents: Isaac Oliver (Intimacy Idiot), Charlyne Yi (Oh the Moon: Stories From the Tortured Mind of Charlyne Yi), Rachel Lindsay, Manoush Zomorodi (Bored and Brilliant: How Spacing Out Can Unlock Your Most Productive and Creative Self), A. Brad Schwartz (Broadcast Hysteria: Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds and the Art of Fake News), Rebekah Frumkin (The Comedown), Ruth Joffre (Night Beast and Other Stories)

What he wants to read: My taste tends to lean toward the literary, but as long as the plot surprises and entertains, I’ll be won over. I love to find new, unpredictable stories—I think every agent will tell you that—but I particularly enjoy the feeling, the unease, the excitement that creeps in when I honestly don’t know what’ll happen next. When I finish a book (or proposal), the lasting feeling of wonderment is what I’m after.

When you should contact him: You should write to me (and, yes, please do!) when you feel comfortable sharing your work. I tell writers that the right time to share your work with an agent is when you feel confident that it’ll speak for itself—without you having to be in the room. If you’re going to want to be over my shoulder saying, “Well, this part will be fixed…” or “I intend to make this part a little clearer…,” you aren’t ready to share the work, which is completely fine. Many writers make the mistake of looking for an agent too soon. An agent’s primary job is to sell your work, so if you don’t have anything yet to sell…wait until you do. You get one first impression. Make it count.

Where he can be reached: My inbox is always open to new and prospective clients: rh@skagency.com.

Why you should want him as your agent: I’m fun, I mean business, I care deeply about seeing each and every client succeed in her or his own way. When I work with any writer, regardless of genre or style, it’s a very personalized relationship.

How he wants to be contacted: A partial manuscript, a proposal, or full manuscript. The work doesn’t have to be 100 percent polished, but remember that I’m going to be considering its salability, not potential salability. Just make sure you’re ready (and feel confident) to send. If you’re excited to share your work with me, I’ll be excited to read it.

 

Caroline Eisenmann, Frances Goldin Literary Agency

Who she represents: Meghan Flaherty (Tango Lessons), Brandon Hobson (Where the Dead Sit Talking)

What she wants to read: In almost any genre, I’m attracted to great prose and a strong sense of emotional intelligence on the page. For upmarket and literary fiction, I tend to be particularly drawn to relationship-driven novels, stories about obsession, and work that grapples with intimacy and its discontents. With nonfiction, I’m very interested in deeply reported narratives and stories that take the reader into the heart of a subculture as well as idea books with a surprising or unusual central argument.

When you should contact her: I’d like to see your work when you feel you’ve taken it as far as you can by yourself. With a novel, this will almost always mean an edited full manuscript; in nonfiction, I’d generally want to read at least the fundamental elements of a proposal (outline, sample pages, etc.).

Where she can be reached: It’s best to get in touch by e-mail at ce@goldinlit.com

Why you should want her as your agent: I do a lot of editorial work with my clients, generally from the ground level of a project. That can mean brainstorming about the concept behind nonfiction or coming up with plot solutions in fiction, but my goal is always to help authors reach the best possible version of their book before submission. I’m also a clear communicator who’s constantly thinking about what my clients want and need, and I will do everything possible to make those goals happen. I worked in marketing and digital publishing before coming to agenting, which gives me extra insight into how to position my clients in an evolving landscape.

How she wants to be contacted: Please send a query. If the work is fiction or completed nonfiction, include the first ten pages in the body of the e-mail.

 

Adam Eaglin, Cheney Associates, LLC

Who he represents: Lawrence Osborne (Hunters in the Dark), Jennine Capó Crucet (Make Your Home Among Strangers), Ron Rash (The Risen), Lisa Servon (The Unbanking of America: How the Middle Class Survives), David Treuer (Prudence), Devin Leonard (Neither Snow nor Rain: A History of the United States Postal Service), Leah Vincent (Cut Me Loose: Sin and Salvation After My Ultra-Orthodox Girlhood), Diksha Basu (The Windfall)

What he wants to read: Debut literary and upmarket fiction; narrative nonfiction and memoir; journalists and academics writing new takes on culture, politics, and current events. Regardless of genre, I’m always interested in diverse voices and underrepresented perspectives, and as a native North Carolinian I am partial to great fiction set in the South.

When you should contact him: For fiction, it’s usually best to be in touch when you have a finished manuscript to share. For nonfiction, a draft of a proposal.

Where he can be reached: e-mail adam@cheneyliterary.com

Why you should want him as your agent: I try to keep a small, selective list and only take on projects I really believe in, which enables me to be a hands-on and passionate advocate for each of my writers. This includes in-depth editorial work, working strategically to find the best publishing deals, and shepherding an author through all aspects of the publication process, including publicity and marketing. My goal is always to help each of my author’s books make as big an impact as possible and to build careers over time.

How he wants to be contacted: A query by e-mail with a full manuscript (for fiction) or a proposal (nonfiction).

 

Amelia Atlas, ICM Partners

Who she represents: Caite Dolan-Leach (Dead Letters), Mark O’Connell (To Be a Machine), Matt Gallagher (Youngblood), Joy Williams (Ninety-Nine Stories of God)

What she wants to read: I’m looking for books—whether fiction or nonfiction—that feel engaged with the larger world. That can mean having a big new idea, taking me to a place or a part of history that I haven’t seen, or simply having a kind of inquisitive spirit. I’m looking for writing that comes from a place of urgency.

When you should contact her: Ideally I’d like to hear from writers who have a finished manuscript or proposal ready for review. At the very least it should feel like you’ve really pushed the project as far as you can without outside eyes and feedback.

Where she can be reached: e-mail aatlas@icmpartners.com

Why you should want her as your agent: The projects I look for are the kind of things I know I’m going to want to be in the trenches fighting for in the years to come (publishing is a slow business), and I think that shows in how I work with my clients—whether it’s reading multiple drafts, batting ideas around, or shepherding them through the publishing process. I like to be pretty hands-on, especially in the early, developmental stages: It’s exciting to watch something become the book we know it should be.

How she wants to be contacted: A query letter plus the first ten pages pasted into the body of an e-mail.

 

Julie Barer, The Book Group

Who she represents: Joshua Ferris (To Rise Again at a Decent Hour), Bret Anthony Johnston (Remember Me Like This), Lily King (Euphoria), Celeste Ng (Everything I Never Told You), Cristina Henriquez (The Book of Unknown Americans), Helen Simonson (Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand), Mia Alvar (In the Country), Madeline Miller (The Song of Achilles), Alice Sebold (Lucky), Kathleen Kent (The Heretic’s Daughter), Nicole Dennis-Benn (Here Comes the Sun), Megan Mayhew Bergman (Almost Famous Women), Paula McLain (The Paris Wife), Kevin Wilson (The Family Fang), Charles Yu (How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe)

What she wants to read: My list is predominantly fiction, and I am particularly interested in representing diverse voices and perspectives from around the world. I’m always looking to learn something new from the fiction I read and to be taken somewhere I’ve never been before. I’m drawn to original voices, or retellings of stories we’ve heard before in new and innovative ways. I need to feel emotionally connected to the characters, and as obvious as it sounds, I need a real plot. More than anything, though, I just want to fall in love. I want to miss my subway stop because I can’t stop reading. I want to completely disappear into the world of the novel. I want to turn the last page and immediately feel the need to tell everyone I know about it.  

When you should contact her: In general I think it’s best, when writing fiction, if you have a complete and polished manuscript. That means you’ve taken the time to self-edit and even stepped away from the project for some time so you know that you’ve really put everything into it that you can. If it’s nonfiction, then a proposal with forty to fifty pages of material is usually enough. 

Where she can be reached: The Book Group, c/o Julie Barer; 20 West 20th Street, Suite 601; New York, NY 10011; thebookgroup.com; e-mail submissions@thebookgroup.com

Why you should want her as your agent: At the Book Group we believe in a very hands-on approach at every stage of the publication process. I love to edit, and I bring a strong editorial eye and passionate commitment to each project, making sure I’ve done all I can do to help authors realize their vision and address any issues before we submit to publishers. I’m extremely selective in taking on new projects, which ensures that I’m able to give my clients the time and attention they need. I’m also committed to helping my clients establish and navigate their careers across many years and many books, so I like to be involved in everything from helping write jacket copy to developing a social media presence, pitching magazine ideas, and submitting short stories to brainstorming for the book’s marketing campaign and beyond. We are right there with you every step of the way, and in addition to the U.S. market, we’re thinking about international sales, film, television and audio, and also what your next project should be. This long-term, big-picture perspective and involvement is one of the most interesting parts of my job. 

How she wants to be contacted: Please submit a query letter along with ten sample pages with “Julie Barer” in the subject line to submissions@thebookgroup.com. Please do not include any attachments.

Kevin Larimer is the editor in chief of Poets & Writers, Inc. 

Agents & Editors: The Complete Series
Agent Advice: The Complete Series
Seventy-Eight Agents to Follow on Twitter

Agent Advice: The Complete Series

by

Staff

12.15.21
In Print and Online

The industry’s best and brightest agents respond directly to readers’ questions in this regular column dating back to 2010. To submit a question for the next featured agent, e-mail editor@pw.org.

Monica Odom of Odom Media Management
12.15.2021
The agent answers questions about attracting agents using self-published books and whether to use a summary or a writing sample to pitch a memoir.
 

Larissa Melo Pienkowski of Jill Grinberg Literary Management
10.13.21
The agent who represents writers TJ Alexander and K. Tempest Bradford, among others, answers questions about being ghosted by agents and how to query for nonfiction books.

Jade Wong-Baxter of Frances Goldin Literary Agency
8.18.21
The agent representing Chris Belcher, Kate Broad, Delia Cai, Duy Doan, and others offers advice about working with a coauthor, changing a memoir to fiction, why agents don’t consider previously published work, and how to become an agent.

Amy Elizabeth Bishop of Dystel, Goderich & Bourret
 6.16.21
The literary agent answers questions about how to seek representation as a self-published author, break into the agenting business, and more. 

 Iwalani Kim of Sanford J. Greenberger Associates
 4.14.21
The literary agent answers questions about submitting story collections, getting an agent’s attention, and querying two agents at the same agency.
 

Jody Kahn of Brandt and Hochman
4.10.19
A literary agent answers questions from writers about genre, age, costs, and client lists.

Find a Literary Agent

The Literary Agents database contains details about more than 170 agents who are looking for new clients. Search the listings to find contact information, submission guidelines, client lists, tips from the agents, and more. 

find an agent

Priya Doraswamy of Lotus Lane Literary
10.10.18
An agent answers questions on obtaining the copyright of a self-published novel and seeking a U.S. publisher from abroad.
 

Regina Brooks of Serendipity Literary Agency
8.15.18
An agent answers questions on referrals, pitching a self-published book, and what to do if you’re dropped by an agency.
 

Annie Hwang of Folio Literary Management
12.13.17
A literary agent answers readers’ questions—from how seriously agents consider a writer’s previous sales to how to responsibly seek new representation.

Kirby Kim of Janklow & Nesbit Associates
4.12.17
A seasoned literary agent offers valuable counsel on when to query, how to keep revising, and whether horror fiction is a genre worth pursuing.

Anna Ghosh of Ghosh Literary
12.14.16
Anna Ghosh answers readers’ questions—from why poetry agents are seemingly nonexistent to whether or not it is possible to be “too young to write.”

Betsy Amster of Betsy Amster Literary Enterprises
10.14.15
The agent of authors such as María Amparo Escandón and Joy Nicholson offers advice on query letters, editing, and what not to do when submitting a manuscript.

Agents & Editors Recommend

A dependable source of professional and creative advice, Agents & Editors Recommend features anecdotes, insights, tips, recommended reading and viewing for writers, and more from leading agents and editors.

Explore the series

Danielle Svetcov of Levine Greenberg Rostan
4.15.15
Should you pay to have a manuscript edited beforehand? Are there benefits to querying via snail mail versus e-mail? Danielle Svetcov of Levine Greenberg Rostan answers readers’ questions about what (and what not) to do when trying to find an agent.

Meredith Kaffel Simonoff of DeFiore and Company
8.20.14
An agent representing authors such as CJ Hauser and Cecily Wong answers questions about writing in multiple genres, agents’ fees, and publishing work in online journals.

Amy Rennert of the Amy Rennert Agency
3.01.14
The agent of authors such as Diana Nyad and Herman Wouk answers questions about self-publishing, age restrictions, and working with an agent remotely.

Chris Parris-Lamb of the Gernert Company
10.06.13
Chris Parris-Lamb of the Gernert Company offers advice on submitting query letters and manuscripts, and when to embrace or eschew self-promotion.

Lucy Carson of the Friedrich Agency
9.01.13
Lucy Carson of the Friedrich Agency discusses e-book publishing, when to send a sample to an agent, and more.

Matt McGowan of Frances Goldin Literary Agency
5.01.13
Literary agent Matt McGowan, who represents Eula Biss, John D’Agata, Brian Evenson, and many others, answers writers’ most commonly asked questions.

Rebecca Gradinger of Fletcher & Company
10.17.12
Literary agent Rebecca Gradinger explains why writers need agents and offers tips about best practices for finding one.

Douglas Stewart of Sterling Lord Literistic
4.12.12
The agent of Jami Attenberg, David Mitchell, Carolyn Parkhurst, Matthew Quick, and others offers guidance about publishing credits, MFA programs, and unagented submissions.

Jenni Ferrari-Adler of Brick House Literary Agents
3.01.11
Does your book need to be finished before you seek representation? Do agents really read synopses? Agent Jenni Ferrari-Adler, whose clients include Lauren Shockey and Emma Straub, answers these questions and more.

Terra Chalberg of the Susan Golomb Literary Agency
10.15.10
When is the best time in your career to look for representation, and when should you call off an author-agent relationship? Terra Chalberg, whose clients include Lori Ostlund and Glenn Taylor, tackles these questions and more.

Jennifer Carlson of Dunow, Carlson & Lerner
8.11.10
The agent of authors such as Kevin Brockmeier and Marisa de los Santos offers her thoughts on self-publishing and what she looks for in the first five pages of a writing sample.

PJ Mark of Janklow & Nesbit Associates
5.01.10
The agent of authors such as Samantha Hunt, Dinaw Mengestu, and Josh Weil offers advice on shaping a query letter and when to follow up after pitching your book.

Katherine Fausset of Curtis Brown, Ltd.
3.01.10
Agent Katherine Fausset answers questions from readers about the agent’s role in submitting work to literary magazines and how writers can choose agents based on their client lists.
 

Agents & Editors: The Complete Series

The Pop-Up Literary Agency

by

Jessica Kashiwabara

July/August 2021
6.16.21
In Print and Online

Before teaching under-graduate courses in children’s and young adult literature in the English department at the University of Arizona, Stephanie Pearmain was a reader for the Andrea Brown Literary Agency. “I have an MFA in creative writing,” says Pearmain, “but my real, crash-course education in writing, editing, and the world of publishing came from the work I did as a reader for a literary agent.”

With this experience in mind, Pearmain helped develop a semester-long course at the university in 2016, English 389: Introduction to Publishing in the Children’s Literature Market. Her hope was to give students a better idea of the many facets of the publishing industry with a hands-on approach, preparing them with practical skills and tools so they could see how a degree in English might open doors for their future careers. Initially the course began with students running an online literary magazine, but in the fall of 2020, Pearmain launched an even more ambitious class project, a pop-up literary agency for children’s picture books called 389 Literary. “With 389 Literary, I set out to create a win-win-win situation,” she says. “Students would get to work with real manuscripts and professionals in the field; writers would get feedback on query letters and picture book manuscripts, plus the possibility of an above-the-slush-pile read from top agents and editors—and agents and editors might even get a new client.”

Pearmain figured if she could get at least one agent to agree to the project, it would be a success. To her delight six literary agents—including reps from two top juvenile literary agencies, Jennifer March Soloway of Andrea Brown Literary Agency and Miranda Paul of Erin Murphy Literary Agency—and one editor, Cheryl Klein, editorial director of Lee & Low Books, agreed to participate.

In the fall of 2020, 389 Literary was open for submissions, welcoming authors with children’s picture-book manuscripts. By the end of the month, the pop-up agency received around three hundred manuscripts from around the world. True to their word, 389 Literary offered feedback to each of the authors, an enormous feat accomplished by the hardworking students of the course, led by honor students Hannah Miller and Wendy Waltrip, who assisted Pearmain in setting up the website and social media accounts for the agency, among other tasks. “I didn’t realize how exhausting it could be to read through so many manuscripts,” says Waltrip. “I definitely have a huge amount of respect for literary agents now.” 

Because of the enthusiastic response to the project, reviewing manuscripts took longer than expected, so Pearmain decided to extend the course with a seven-week spring session. To prepare for the process of evaluating the manuscripts, Pearmain set up what she calls Collaboration Modules, which offered lessons on dealing with group dynamics and differing opinions, useful not only for the purposes of the project, but perhaps also for future workplaces. “My goal is always to open up the world of publishing so students can see the many hands and departments that participate in getting a book into the world,” she says. Pearmain also teaches students about the Diversity Baseline Survey (DBS) created in 2015 by Lee & Low Books, an independent publisher focused on multicultural children’s books. The goal of the DBS is to report concrete statistics about the diversity of the publishing workforce, focusing on gender, race, sexual orientation, and ability, in order to track progress. Pearmain hopes to impress on the students that although there is much work to be done in terms of increasing diversity in the industry, her students can be a part of that change. 

For their mock acquisition meetings, students presented over Zoom and pitched the manuscripts they thought met the mark, having considered whether the work matched the manuscript wish list of a participating agent or editor, sounded fresh, had a good plot and narrative arc, and would be considered an “Own Voices” book, a term denoting a work by an author from a marginalized or underrepresented group writing about their own perspective. Recognizing that decision-making is subjective was also part of the process, as agents passed on some of the favorite manuscripts of the class and made offers for representation to authors whose manuscripts didn’t connect with the students. “The submission process definitely taught me that every person who reads a manuscript will have a different experience with it,” says Waltrip. 

Overall the project was well received by everyone involved, especially the students. “This experience has given me so much professional confidence,” says Miller. “I’ve had the opportunity to network with industry professionals, strengthen my feedback skills, and read a ton of amazing stories.”

For Pearmain the best outcome of 389 Literary has been the growth of her students. “I hope to demystify the world of publishing a little,” she says. “I want to give students tools that will serve them as writers, future publishing professionals, and future business professionals.” As for her classes, Pearmain has some plans, including getting even younger students involved. “My bigger goal is to find ways to reach more BIPOC students and create paths to publishing,” she says. “I would love to partner with an agency or publishing house to help make that happen. Honestly I believe that will take outreach aimed at high school students. Maybe that will be my next project.”  

 

Jessica Kashiwabara is the digital director of Poets & Writers, Inc.

Students at the University of Arizona attending the Introduction to Publishing in the Childrens Literature Market class via Zoom.

Publishing, Empowering Teen Writers
Inside Publishing: The Literary Agent Assistant
Agent Advice: The Complete Series

Narrative Medicine for Doctors

by

Emma Komlos-Hrobsky

November/December 2019
10.9.19
In Print and Online

Toby Campbell understands that storytelling is good medicine. As an oncologist and associate professor in the Hospice and Palliative Medicine Fellowship Program at UW Health—the academic medical center and health system at the University of Wisconsin in Madison—he teaches fellows that communication with patients is not about delivering statistics but rather helping them to imagine possible outcomes for their care. In Campbell and his fellows’ specialty, these outcomes are often inherently grim. New doctors assume a significant emotional burden as they lead patients through end-of-life care; seasoned clinicians must resist becoming jaded to their work while finding ways to replenish their own emotional resources. This is where Campbell sees another, perhaps more surprising place for storytelling: in helping doctors to process and sustain their most demanding work.

Since 2017 Campbell has partnered with novelist Michelle Wildgen to offer writing classes to the fellows in his program, as well as other interested doctors in the UW hospital system. While the field of narrative medicine—the practice of using personal storytelling as an element of clinical care—has grown in recent years, traditionally its application has focused on patients. Campbell, who previously directed the fellowship program, believes it may be among the first in the United States to flip this script and develop a writing class that applies narrative medicine to hospice fellows’ self-care. The idea was born of Campbell’s own experiences in college writing workshops and, later, journaling and publishing articles about his work. He found that the practice of constructing narrative “aligned well with the way I like to process things.” Initially Campbell himself led short writing exercises during biweekly self-care workshops for fellows, before deciding to call upon Wildgen’s expertise to expand the program. 

Wildgen, whose books include Bread and Butter (Doubleday, 2014) and who founded and codirects the Madison Writers’ Studio, was eager to take on the challenge. She believed the opportunity to develop a concrete skill might appeal to the driven personality of her new students, in addition to offering respite and space for self-care. To better understand the demands of doctors’ jobs and how the workshop would fit into fellows’ routines, Wildgen spent a day shadowing Campbell in his clinical rounds. “I’d only been there until lunchtime, but I felt exhausted—all I had done was sit and stand, but it was emotionally really heavy,” she says. “I had never experienced that before, where the emotional experience you had felt physical.” 

The classes consist of seven or eight students and convene one morning a month in a meeting space on the hospital campus, before scrubs are donned and the day’s pressures set in. Wildgen organizes each class around adding a new skill to the doctors’ toolkit as writers, with the season’s final meeting focused on revision. The class centered on sensory detail is a favorite: “They’re doctors, so they’ve got some really gnarly stuff if they want to call upon it,” says Wildgen. While many doctors use the class as an opportunity to write directly about their work, the choice of topic is theirs. At first Wildgen considered making medical writing the explicit focus of their assignments, but she soon realized that this undercut what she hoped to offer to the doctors: “They are people beyond just being physicians, and part of self-care is allowing for that.” Similarly class readings include classics of medical narrative, like the work of Oliver Sacks, alongside that of literary vanguards such as Seamus Heaney and Alice Munro. At the end of the semester, a public reading at a local independent bookstore showcases the doctors’ work as well as the skills and community they’ve built.

The doctors’ writings offer a window into the complexities of the pressures they face. Death and illness are themes, but so are the subtler interpersonal challenges that come with their work. Many female doctors write about giving birth, their familiar role reversed during a crucible moment. Others reckon with the newly conferred—but still limited—power their position affords. “There was one doctor who wrote really beautifully about treating someone who turned out to be the parent of one of his colleagues,” says Wildgen, “and that feeling of becoming more comfortable as his palliative care skills came in—and watching his colleague become less and less comfortable as his parent was dying.” Another fellow wrote through the experience of helping a terminally ill patient pick the day they would take him off oxygen support and end his life.

For some physicians, being open about the emotions that accompany their clinical experiences can feel uncomfortable, even inappropriate. Campbell hopes the class grants fellows necessary permission to acknowledge these feelings: “I think many times you feel guilty—that this is the patient’s experience—but we’re trying to help them understand that they have an experience too, and it’s fair to experience something that’s uniquely and distinctly their own.” Doctors also find that the writing requires new vulnerability on their part. Pediatrician Jessica Babal came to Wildgen’s class with an interest in narrative medicine and had previously taken workshops in the subject at Columbia University. “Some clinical experiences are a little harder to reach because you’re so in the practice of not processing them,” Babal says, but she finds that engaging with that discomfort begets self-compassion and, in turn, compassion for others.

As a result of the classes, at least two doctors have been spurred to pursue narrative medicine as an academic specialty; for many more the impact is more personal but equally profound. Winny Hung, a former attending physician and medical director at a hospice care center where fellows train, took Wildgen’s first classes in 2017. “Michelle created such an accepting, nonjudgmental space for us, encouraging us to write without censor,” says Hung. “In this safe place I clumsily tried out every literary tool she introduced. In nearly twenty years in emergency, then hospice, medicine, I had accrued so many ghosts. All of the patients and families I had known, diagnosed, helped, healed, failed—all of them had affected me. The roulette of scenarios that doctors experience over a career leave remnants, no matter how seemingly stringent our compartmentalization, because we are human.” 

It is this humanity that the writing classes promise to protect and consequently allow to enrich the doctors’ work. Wildgen can see applications of the classes for other professions but for now is focused on her work at UW Health, where there are plenty more stories to tell. As Hung reflects on the experience: “In the world of the dying, much time is spent doing legacy work. I was indulging in a similar sacred story work, only with the glorious luxury of not having to be dying to do it.” 

 

Emma Komlos-Hrobsky is the associate editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.

Michelle Wildgen and Dr. Toby Campbell.

(Credit: Wildgen: Nick Wilkes; Campbell: John Maniaci)

The Second Shelf

by

Lynn Rosen

November/December 2019
10.9.19
In Print and Online

The exterior of the Second Shelf bookstore in London resembles a K2 kiosk, the iconic red telephone booth that dots the city’s streets. The shop, which stocks modern first editions, manuscripts, and other rare and rediscovered books by women, is all about standing out. American writer A. N. Devers opened the Second Shelf in London’s Soho neighborhood in November 2018 because she refused to let women’s literary work be overlooked or erased. Her mission: to encourage collectors to acquire work by women and “help redress the literary canon and imbalance on bookshelves.”

Devers was motivated to open the Second Shelf after observing that the rare-book trade was dominated by men. As a contributor to the rare-book collectors’ magazine Fine Books & Collections and a frequent visitor to book fairs at which a rare-book dealer friend had a table, Devers noticed that not only were most dealers men, but also those dealers were selling mostly books by men. “The books by women I was interested in weren’t necessarily at the fair, or they had lower price tags on them than books by their male contemporaries, which honestly offended me,” she says. Beyond the personal reaction, Devers realized this asymmetry had far-reaching implications. “I understood how the market of rare books had a direct impact on the legacy of writers and was a part of the imbalance and sexism women writers have faced in their lives—and in their afterlives.” 

Eventually Devers, who had been living in New York City, was prompted by her interest in rare books to move to London, which she calls “a great rare-books town.” After hosting a successful Kickstarter campaign that raised £32,000 (approximately $39,448) for the project, Devers opened her shop, which measures only about 300 square feet but is packed floor to ceiling with approximately six thousand books. And while she may not be able to predict what might sell, Devers stocks books that reflect her own taste as well as those she knows to be celebrated and beloved by other readers. Devers has also sold authors’ personal items, such as a red wallet and notepad owned by Sylvia Plath, and will offer one of the poet’s skirts for sale at an upcoming fair in Brooklyn, New York. 

As for that bright store exterior, Devers had to fight her landlord to get approval for the color. The inside of the store, along with the store’s logo, is designed in vivid hues of pink and purple. “I wanted to buck the trend and absolutely embrace pink and purple and hues atypical for the world of rare books, which can be very dark green, red, and blue,” Devers says. 

The Second Shelf celebrates its first anniversary on November 20, the same birthday as its owner. In one year the shop has built a loyal customer base and a lively environment, with customers who are eager to support her mission. “I’m proudest, to be honest, of having made it through this first year and managed to get people in the door and shopping for books that cost more than what they would find at a new bookstore—and enthusiastically,” Devers says. Future goals include launching an online store and continuing publication of the store’s print literary magazine, The Second Shelf: Rare Books and Words by Women, which showcases photographs of rare books, in addition to essays, poems, interviews, and profiles by women. Lauren Groff, Elizabeth McCracken, Cheryl Strayed, Rachel Syme, and Jesmyn Ward are among the women writers on the magazine’s advisory board. 

Not that everything is rosy (or pink or purple). Challenges abound, and practical matters such as paying the rent—it recently went up significantly—dominate Devers’s to-do list, as well as getting a handle on her new managerial role and the major task of sourcing every book on the shelves. Nonetheless Devers is optimistic. “We talk about women writers who we love and learn about ones we don’t know every single day in the shop,” she says. “I hope we’re in a new phase of feminism that is here to stay. In the meantime I’m glad we are inspiring readers and collectors.”   

 

Lynn Rosen is a book-publishing industry professional who is currently a bookseller and a bookstore owner outside of Philadelphia. She is the author of Elements of the Table: A Simple Guide for Hosts and Guests (Clarkson Potter, 2007).

  

A chromolithograph cutout of Joan of Arc, made in the year of her beatification, presides over the interior of the Second Shelf.  (Credit: Sarah K. Marr)

Inside Indie Bookstores: The Complete Series

Where Poetry Meets Journalism

by

Dana Isokawa

November/December 2019
10.9.19
In Print and Online

For nearly two weeks in 2018, poet Doug Van Gundy and photographer Matt Eich interviewed residents of Webster County, West Virginia. They talked with gravediggers and teachers and diner cooks. They had coffee with an ex-military man who sold sawmill equipment; they visited the county clerk’s office, filled with boxes of election materials; they watched an elementary school Christmas play and concert. All along the way they asked those they met: What is it like to live here? What do you wish others knew about your life? With permission Van Gundy would record each conversation or take notes, and Eich would make photographs.

The pair weren’t there to report on the area for a traditional newspaper article but rather to create a portfolio of poetry and photographs that documents life in the county, which is home to fewer than ten thousand people and is one of the state’s poorest areas. The piece, which was published in the Guardian in May 2019 with an introduction by writer Elizabeth Catte, is the first in a series of similar portfolios commissioned by Alissa Quart, the executive director of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project (EHRP). Founded by writer and activist Barbara Ehrenreich, EHRP is a journalism organization that commissions projects covering poverty and economic inequality in creative and unconventional ways. EHRP then copublishes the pieces in media outlets such as the New York Times, the Guardian, and Vice.

The poetry of the EHRP portfolios reflects contemporary poets’ burgeoning engagement with the genre of documentary poetics. Quart describes the genre as a kind of socially engaged poetry that often uses nonliterary texts—news reports, legal documents, and transcribed oral histories, for example—and sometimes incorporates original reporting. Also called docupoetry, the genre historically tends to focus on relating the experiences of people whose stories might have been misrepresented or overlooked; documentary poets often cite Charles Reznikoff’s 1934 book Testimony and Muriel Rukeyser’s 1938 long poem “The Book of the Dead” as early, defining examples of the genre. This summer Quart began developing two new portfolios of documentary poetry and photographs that seek to do this kind of reported, civic-minded work: She commissioned poet and political scientist Celina Su and photographer Annie Ling to portray the experience of floating immigrant communities in New York City, and is in talks with poet Erika Meitner to create a piece about gun ownership. Quart, who is herself a poet, has also written an essay on documentary poetry, published in the November issue of Poetry, and included a documentary poem about abortion clinics in her recent collection, Thoughts and Prayers (OR Books, 2019). 

With the EHRP portfolios Quart hopes to bring fresh perspective and humane language to people’s hardships. “We have this potential for empathy fatigue—so how do you cut across that when you’re trying to represent pain or other kinds of struggle?” she says. “One of the ways I think we can do so is formal. I think hybrid forms like docupoetics do informational and emotive work that a lot of traditional journalism might be unable to do.” She argues that many formal poetic devices, such as white space, different registers, lineation, and refrain, can help “liberate us from some of the poverty narratives just a little bit—let some light into them.”

Van Gundy and Eich aimed to do this with their work in West Virginia, which is also Van Gundy’s home state and which he says is used as “a shorthand for poverty, for rural, for conservative, for ignorant, for fill-in-the-blank.” He and Eich tried to let a range of voices and stories of West Virginians come through; Van Gundy’s poems set the words of those he interviewed alongside specifics like the names of old coal camps and the image of a white-haired woman crossing the street. “The combination of photography that documents the landscape and the physical trappings of a person’s life with poetry that documents the interior and emotional trappings of someone’s life in the small, specific details is about a kind of seeing,” Van Gundy says. “It’s about trying to bring an honest eye to the seeing of people and letting them be who they are.”

Although many documentary poets hope to bring this honest vision to their subjects, the work raises ethical questions about who is being depicted, and by whom and how. Quart so far has only asked people to document issues or communities they have experience with, noting that to do otherwise could result in touristic work. Van Gundy, who teaches at West Virginia Wesleyan College, believes many people were willing to talk with him and Eich, a resident of Charlottesville, only because they were local. “I know that West Virginia is not always represented accurately or favorably in movies and books and newspaper articles and whatnot,” Van Gundy says. “So I said to people, ‘That’s not what we’re going to do here. We’re going to let you talk, and then we’re going to tell your story.’” The pair also took pains to not portray West Virginia in a single light—simplification of one’s subject being another possible peril of any documentary work. Quart says their portfolio is in no way “miserablist,” and Van Gundy says he strove to avoid being nostalgic or playing into a certain stoicism he believes West Virginians sometimes uphold. “I think that romanticization—taking struggle, poverty, and lack and clothing it in nobility—does people a great disservice and keeps them from the dignity and the resources they deserve,” he says. 

Going forward Quart plans to continue publishing poetry portfolios; she is open to pitches, and EHRP will pay for the project and some of the reporting costs. Quart is excited to bring her journalistic expertise to poetry; when she began writing poems, she found the poetry world very “heady” and sect-like, with “language poetry on one side and MFA poetry on the other.” She turned to journalism because she wanted to be focused externally and reach a larger audience. Now with her work at EHRP, she can merge the two interests. “This is my lifelong journey…to bring politically minded and broadly intended impulses back to poetry,” she says. “It’s a personal desire of mine to read that and enable others to make that kind of poetry.”   

 

Dana Isokawa is the senior editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.

An excerpt of Doug Van Gundy and Matt Eich’s docupoetry project about Webster County, West Virginia. 

(Credit: Matt Eich)

The Second Shelf
Narrative Medicine for Doctors

Q&A: A Century of Yale Younger Poets

by

Maya C. Popa

November/December 2019
10.9.19
In Print and Online

This year marks the centennial of the Yale Series of Younger Poets, the oldest annual literary award in the United States. The prize, which offers publication of a debut collection by Yale University Press, has heralded the arrival of luminaries such as John Ashbery, Robert Hass, and Adrienne Rich, and launched the careers of many more. The award was initially open only to poets under the age of forty—hence the name—but in 2015 the age requirement was lifted. To celebrate the century mark, in October Yale University Press released Firsts: 100 Years of Yale Younger Poets edited by Carl Phillips, who has served as the prize judge since 2010, succeeding Louise Glück. A professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis and the author of numerous poetry collections, including Pale Colors in a Tall Field, forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux next year, Phillips recently spoke about curating the anthology, the evolution of the prize, and his experience as a judge. (The 2020 prize is open for submissions until November 15.) 

How has the prize evolved since 1919? 
It has become much more inclusive, not just in terms of subject matter, but also in terms of diversity, race in particular. In this sense the prize has evolved side by side with the landscape of American poetry itself. This is also true when it comes to poetic styles and strategies, which have moved from being very conservative to increasingly more innovative.

Have you noticed any discernible changes among the submissions since you began your tenure as judge?
There is no doubt that there has been more racial diversity. I’m convinced this has more than a little to do with my being the first person of color to serve as judge. This also has to do with the screeners. I’m only the second judge to have poet screeners at all, and I made a point of selecting a diverse group; they are African American, Native American, Asian American, white, queer, straight, male, female, and gender-fluid. Another clear shift has occurred as a result of removing the age limit for entrants. We’ve since had two winners over forty—so that’s a welcome strike against ageism.

What were some of the challenges of putting together an anthology spanning 1919 to 2018?
One was how to represent everyone fairly. In the earlier iteration of this anthology, some poets were represented by more poems than others—this made sense, since not all poets are equally good; but who’s to say what’s “good”? So I decided to include three poems by each poet. The other challenge was that I knew people would be expecting to see certain well-known poems by certain poets—Rich and Ashbery, for example. But I decided to take advantage of being the sole editor and simply pick the poems I liked the most—hardly a shocking thing to do, but it does mean accepting that not every reader will be happy.

What greater role do you see the series playing in the world of poetry?
Because it is one of the oldest prizes in this country, it is at least one useful map of how American poetry has evolved over time. Other than that, I think the main role is what it’s always been, to bring to light a new voice—something that plenty of other prizes also do, of course, but again, because of the long history of the prize, it brings a certain gravitas that is unique.

What has most surprised you in your years serving as judge?
I’ve been surprised at how the majority of the manuscripts I see resist giving any kind of offense—they’re well-behaved, polite, in terms of content and style. But I don’t go to poetry for good manners. I want to be shaken out of my usual assumptions about what poems can do, what they can say, how they can say it. I can usually tell I’m getting close to a winning manuscript when I find myself asking aloud, “What the hell is going on here?” That doesn’t mean anything radical has to be happening. There can be risk and wilderness in clarity of thought and expression. A strange sensibility that can’t help its own strangeness—that’s what I’m after.

You mention the growing diversity of voices represented in poetry and its connection to the cultural conversations of the moment. In Firsts, you cite the establishment of Cave Canem in 1996 as a pivotal moment. What do you see as the current challenges and future goals prizes should be striving for to ensure a rich and inclusive landscape of voices?
Part of the answer is right there in your question: The long-term goal should be to ensure a rich and inclusive landscape of voices. That means the more immediate goal is to have an array of winners who reflect the range of voices out there. And that means doing whatever you can to ensure that you will get submissions from across that range of voices. I don’t believe it’s a coincidence that the greatest amount of diversity has occurred under a judge who is openly queer and of color. The announcement of my appointment was a real confidence builder for a lot of younger poets of color in particular—or so I’ve been told. It’s pretty much like anything, but I’ll use literary journals as an example. If you want to show that you’re committed to diversity, you better have a masthead that shows diversity—not only will it confirm your commitment, but it’s going to encourage diverse submissions. 

What do you see as the ultimate role of prizes and accolades in poetry? Do you see them as working alongside or as separate from poetic practice?
The only real role I can think of is to showcase work and thereby make potential readers more aware of it—which in turn can then broaden the conversation that poems ideally provoke and engage in. An effect of prizes—but I wouldn’t call this any part of their role—is to, usually very briefly, give a boost to the poet, in terms of morale. We’re all pretty insecure, and we all want to be loved, and a prize or accolade feels like confirmation that we did well. But then there’s the next day and the reality of the blank page. 

 

Maya C. Popa is the author of American Faith (Sarabande, November 2019). She is the poetry reviews editor at Publishers Weekly and the director of creative writing at the Nightingale-Bramford School.

Carl Phillips

(Credit: Mark Katzman)

Q&A: Manuel Muñoz Directs Arizona MFA

by

Jessica Kashiwabara

September/October 2019
8.14.19
In Print and Online

This fall Manuel Muñoz will become the new director of the creative writing program at the University of Arizona in Tucson, succeeding writer Ander Monson. Established in 1972, the fully funded program recently switched to a three-year model and offers degrees in poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction, as well as opportunities to work with small presses, literary journals, and arts organizations. With more than ten years of experience on the faculty, Muñoz has a clear vision of how to create a collaborative and inclusive community at the program, which counts Francisco Cantú, Jos Charles, Antonya Nelson, Alberto Ríos, Agha Shahid Ali, Richard Siken, and David Foster Wallace among its graduates. Muñoz received an MFA in creative writing from Cornell University and has published a novel, What You See in the Dark (Algonquin Books, 2011), and two story collections. A few months before the start of his position, Muñoz discussed his new role and offered advice for prospective students.

What is an overlooked benefit of attending an MFA program?
Community connections—both within a supportive program and in the larger region in which it is situated—are crucial to how we shape ourselves as artists. Solitude at the desk is necessary, but collaboration is just as essential.

MFA programs have been criticized as spaces that are not safe or helpful for writers of color. How can programs create spaces that honor diversity of race and background?
In the past few years we’ve made strides in speaking about these issues as a program, rather than leaving it to the autonomy of the individual workshop. That’s the major difference between my MFA experience twenty years ago and the expectations now. As someone who is both queer and brown, I don’t know if safe is a word I will ever be comfortable using, but inclusivity, empathetic responsiveness, and deep engagement are all goals that we aim for. Every year a new cohort comes in, and it is our responsibility to set the expectations for the community we hope to create. This is hard work. Yet creating—and maintaining—spaces for all writers can’t always fall on faculty of color or queer professors or women. When it does, the resources need to be there. This year the directorship stipend was cut in half, which puts a damper on the pride of being one of the few writers of color to lead an MFA program. As more underrepresented groups enter the academy and assume administrative duties, university leadership will have to honor their stated goals in diversity hiring and retention efforts and commit the resources. Budgetary restrictions are real and dire at many universities, that’s true. But so is the importance of visibility when underrepresented writers see themselves reflected in leadership roles and that those faculty are respected by the institutions that ask them to do this work.

Why is full funding so important?
It alleviates some of the competitiveness or feelings of favoritism that can distract from the work. More important, it sends a strong message about a university’s values regarding literary activity and the place of writing, reading, and thinking in our larger culture. We need to find ways to ensure that students are not crushed by the staggering debt that is affecting this generation. 

The University of Arizona program must be a big part of the Tucson literary community. Do you want the program to focus on nurturing writers from the region or do you want to bring in students from all over?
Both! Writers from the Southwest certainly see how important it is to delve into history, current events, and environmental studies, but curiosity leads all of us to explore. We see undergraduates go to the coasts, and we get applicants from all over the country who are drawn to the special nature of the desert. We’ve also seen a strong interest from international students, who see Arizona as a unique window into U.S. culture and life.

How does the program’s location impact the focus or social awareness of your students? Does the city of Tucson influence your students’ work?
It’s been important for the University of Arizona to acknowledge that it is located on the original homelands of the Indigenous peoples of this area. It dispels the notion that the university or even the city itself is the center—we’re not. For some writers, that appreciation does change the dynamic of their work. Whether it’s an interest in border politics or queer archives, they soon discover that they are stepping midstream into work already in progress. The awareness that one is a contributor, not an originator, is humbling and important.

There are a number of journals and presses affiliated with the university, as well as the Poetry Center and the Institute of the Environment and more. Why is it important to make these kinds of publications and spaces available to graduate students?
Our students learn a lot from seeing how writing is shepherded into the world: how journals are produced, how editorial work relies on curiosity and networking, and how creative projects can by “read” by the university as important engines for grant writing and research activity. The Poetry Center provides students with direct access to understanding how a national treasure promotes literary access and outreach. The fantastic panoply of literary journals—from Ander Monson’s superbly designed DIAGRAM to Kate Bernheimer’s deeply rich Fairy Tale Review—inspires not only editorial participation but an opportunity for students to benefit from the curatorial expertise of these faculty. The students are eager to act on their knowledge for their own projects and the results are inspiring: witness the online literary project Territory, which program alums Nick Greer and Thomas Mira y Lopez started a few years ago.  

Any advice for MFA applicants?
In their artistic statements, many applicants comment on the time they need to write. That is certainly valuable, but our best writers have been the ones who can articulate how they are ready to transform and grow once they get here, rather than stick rigidly to their initial understandings. Can you take measure of all the resources available and find which will inspire a spirit of imagination and collaboration? Does a program provide a supportive atmosphere for you to experiment and try new things? One recent grad, Raquel Gutiérrez, came in with the poetry cohort, but has exited with “Brown Neon,” a nonfiction manuscript that has just been acquired by Coffee House Press. The project was informed by this terrain, by ongoing questions of artistic engagement, and by the urgent politics of the day. It’s a wonderful example of a writer who continues to work in one genre, but is inspired to read, explore, and create deeply in another.

What is a frequent mistake you see applicants making? 
I see two missteps frequently. The first is assuming that you can only work with someone who is in close aesthetic alignment.  I might be a “fuddy-duddy realist,” as I often call myself, but I read widely and with curiosity and engagement. I’ve worked with all manner of aesthetic approaches, and it’s fun to learn along with my students. All good faculty members are like this. They’re ready to help you in your development. They’re not seeking mirrors of themselves. Second, it’s easy to spot a statement that is written as what the applicant thinks we “might want to hear.” Authenticity comes from a writer’s genuine excitement in thinking about how they might proceed once they’ve considered place, resources, and faculty: They’ve got a plan and are not afraid to dream a little bit in their statements about why this particular program can make it come true.

Is there an element of the job of director of a creative writing program that gets overlooked? 
Though I am new to the position, I can see the ongoing need to communicate how vital the creative arts are to the health and integrity of a university. There is always dialogue about how we create and keep space open for creative endeavor to be an integral part in what the university calls “research.” Creativity and the arts must always be part of a shared mission, especially as a land-grant university and a Hispanic-Serving Institution. 

What are you excited about? What keeps you interested in the future of creative writing programs? 
I get most excited when I can speak about how our creative writing program has always been part of innovative campus and community dialogues, from medical humanities to ecological awareness. Our students keep showing us new ways in which creative writing is a natural foundation to innovative thinking, advocacy, and leadership.

 

Jessica Kashiwabara is the senior web editor of Poets & Writers, Inc.

Manuel Muñoz 

(Credit: Patri Hadad)

Tucson, Arizona

by

Ander Monson

6.28.16
Online Only

Ander Monson is the author of a number of paraphernalia including a website, a decoder wheel, several chapbooks, as well as six books, most recently Letter to a Future Lover (Graywolf Press, 2015). He lives in Tucson where he directs the MFA program at the University of Arizona and is the editor of the journal DIAGRAM, Essay Daily, and the New Michigan Press.

Hailing from the far northern part of Michigan (four hours farther north than so-called Northern Michigan), I was initially skeptical about Tucson and the flat, dry desert Southwest. Wasn’t it, you know, pretty much Phoenix—lawns and pools and Ikeas? The answer, as you’ll quickly see, is a resounding no. I moved here in 2008 for a job at the University of Arizona (UA), sight unseen except for a two-day whirlwind interview and tour, abbreviated due to yet another blizzard and series of canceled flights in my home state and the hell hub of Chicago’s O’Hare Airport. I’d lived with my family in Saudi Arabia for a couple years just before the first Iraq War and the desert there is a very different sort of desert than the Sonoran Desert that surrounds Tucson and extends into northern Sonora, Mexico. As Tucsonans will tell you, the area around Tucson isn’t technically desert at all: It’s semiarid. It gets about twelve inches of rain a year, is bordered on all sides by mountains, and is surprisingly green. Spend a week here and you’ll learn to love the ocotillo, the iconic saguaro, and the palo verde, Arizona’s alien-skinned state tree.

I found—and you’ll find—that Tucson is a lovely, and in many ways, still-undiscovered city, particularly spectacular at night, since the International Dark-Sky Association recommends limiting the number of streetlights to prevent light pollution in order to allow the astronomers at nearby observatories to do their work. And whether you’re here for the University of Arizona, one of the major hubs of literary culture in this city, or not, Tucson offers rich soil (metaphorically speaking, obviously; though there’s enough agriculture in the county—think Pima cotton, which is harvested from Tucson’s Pima County and other nearby counties—to make it a literal reference) for readers and writers of all sorts.

Public Habitats for Books
Despite the closing of independent bookstores, the digitizing of all media, and the ritual bemoaning of this by writers and readers, I’ve found reassurance by reading and writing in many of Tucson’s diverse libraries that physical books still serve a purpose. I often scour old books for odd and lovely schematics to reprint in the online magazine I run, DIAGRAM—which features reprinted and original diagrams along with original prose, poetry, and images. In doing so, I’ve also stumbled upon books I would have never discovered otherwise, and found objects and marginalia and images tucked into books that remind me books have histories; they’re made objects. From my time spent in libraries, I’ve finished a collection of essays written in response to these objects and texts, which I’ve tucked back where I found them as notes to future readers.

While the University of Arizona Main Library (1510 East University Boulevard) is certainly the best place to run across odd marginalia and old books—it houses a peculiar collection of so-called scientific texts on metaphysics, telekinesis, mediums, and the spirit world, and you can watch part of UA football games from the back side of the fifth floor that overlooks the stadium—there are more specialized branches on campus I’d encourage you to seek out. Special Collections (1510 East University Boulevard) houses the Art of the Book, one of the largest collections of artists books in the country, and includes limited editions by small presses, miniature books, special volumes created by notable binders, and pop-up books. For the possibility of discovering treasures such as books like the collected London and Edinburgh Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science, I’m most partial to the Science-Engineering Library (744 North Highland Avenue) for its Spartan grandeur, the old engineering texts, and, amusingly, the intensely text-messaging students dutifully ignoring most of the books. The Center for Creative Photography (1030 North Olive Road), cofounded in 1975 by Ansel Adams and former university president John P. Schaefer, has world-class research archives and exhibitions and is the “largest institution in the world devoted to documenting the history of North American photography.” Here one can survey the complete archives of Adams, Edward Weston, Harry Callahan, Aaron Siskind, Frederick Sommer, W. Eugene Smith, Louise Dahl-Wolfe, and Garry Winogrand. It’s all housed in a fantastic building with enough space to get your head into the space for words.

A more esoteric experience can be had at the Peggy J. Slusser Memorial Philatelic Library. At 920 North First Avenue just north of University Boulevard, is a still-operating post office that houses Civil War memorabilia and western, particularly Arizona-related, postal history. Libraries like this are notable for their oddity and specificity. Their archives are far from digitized, so you’ll have to come in to browse. This is a good thing, particularly for the essayist (or any writer looking for interesting material), as you’re more likely to stumble on the thing you really need on the shelf or in the box next to the thing you thought you wanted. Googling is fine in a pinch, but it lacks the pleasure of peripheral discovery. While you’re there ask librarian Lisa Hodgkins about the history of camel mail in the Southwest, started by Jefferson Davis in 1855, and discontinued shortly after.

The Pima County Public Library system operates twenty branches in the metro area, but the one to go to, in Tucson’s increasingly happening downtown, is the Joel D. Valdez Mail Library (101 North Stone Avenue), particularly for its unique offering: a Seed Library that contains many varieties of vegetable plant seeds available for check out (and presumably to plant). Librarians ask you to donate seeds from the plants you grow, returning the book, so to speak. Because of its downtown location, this branch also collects the best weirdos—perfect for observation. It’s energizing to write in spaces like this, filled with live readers reading.

Commercial Habitats
When it comes to independent bookstores that carry new books, Antigone Books (411 North Fourth Avenue) is one of the few in town. A fairly small but busy store, the solar-powered, self-described “zany bookstore with a feminist slant” Antigone once hosted the Other Voices Women’s Reading Series, where I saw Alison Hawthorne Deming, Kathe Lison, Cybele Knowles, Fenton Johnson, Chris Cokinos, and many more read. Antigone also hosts book groups, and readings and author signings by touring and local authors, who usually but not exclusively have some local connection.

Across the street and two blocks south is the Book Stop (214 North Fourth Avenue), a used and antiquarian bookstore with a knowledgeable staff and an esoteric selection. It’s worth a visit for books containing strange and amusing marginalia. For instance, I found a copy of Gary Snyder’s Turtle Island with an epic inscription from one ex-lover to another. It stretched pages, detailing the drugs they took, the “friend with the nocturnal monkey-like animal,” and the spectacular metaphysical, metatextual sex they had, only to end in a sad but knowing acknowledgment that they would never see each other again. This, dear reader, is the sort of history that you won’t get buying e-books on your Kindle Fire.

The king of used books (and vinyl, CDs, video games, musical equipment, and really anything else that’s used and related to media) in Tucson is the most excellent Bookmans Entertainment Exchange, with three locations (6230 East Speedway Boulevard, 3733 West Ina Road, 1930 East Grant Road). Each has its own flavor. The Grant location is popular with students and features unusual wares, for instance rock collections; the Ina location is more upscale, since it’s closer to the Catalina Foothills, a ritzy area on the north side of Tucson; the Speedway location has the best selection of vinyl and board games, plus you can stop in next door to the local gem Beyond Bread and sandwich your day away. Though none of the locations host readings or signings, they do serve up coffee, a huge selection of books, and Wi-Fi—as do all the bigger bookstores, but this local chain is making book buying, selling, and browsing an experience again. The crowd knows this, which is why the parking lot is always mobbed. When was the last time you saw that at a bookstore?

Breeding Grounds for Books
Tucson is the home to a number of nationally known literary journals and presses that form the backbone of Tucson’s literary culture, including the increasingly influential Letter Machine Editions, a nonprofit publisher of prose and poetry founded in 2007 by Noah Eli Gordon and Joshua Marie Wilkinson the Volta­, an online poetry, poetics, and epic interview emporium; the Destroyer, edited by Drew Krewer and Maureen McHugh; and Fairy Tale Review and its accompanying press, edited by Kate Bernheimer.

My own magazine of lit, oddness, and esoterica, DIAGRAM, published by New Michigan Press, is in its sixteenth year and continues to publish six issues a year. Though primarily online, one might find us in print at times too. New Michigan also publishes a chapbook series and DIAGRAM anthologies, and, with other local presses and magazines like Spork and Kore, participates in readings and events such as the Lit Press Fest for Teens that takes place at the University of Arizona Poetry Center each spring, featuring readings and workshops for teens and adults on DIY publishing, book binding, and letterpress printing.

Terrain.org, the oldest literary magazine online, founded in 1997 and edited by Simmons Buntin, is a “journal of the built and natural environments” that publishes great work (particularly nonfiction), both lyric and technical, loosely organized around the ways in which we live in and with our environments, with an emphasis on the desert Southwest. Terrain hosts readings and conversations, typically at the UA Poetry Center, and workshops.

The flagship literary journal of Tucson, Sonora Review, is one of the oldest student-edited journals in America. Founded in 1980 as a biannual print journal, it’s still produced twice a year by students in UA’s MFA Program. A well-known special issue paid tribute to Arizona alum and former Sonora Review editor David Foster Wallace, and covers feature work from the extensive local art scene. Sonora Review curates a reading series with established authors such as Sean Lovelace and Mark Neely and upcoming talents at bars like Club Congress, sponsors literary events that raise awareness about border issues, and facilitates workshops in area schools.

Spork, a now-legendary literary magazine and press, run by Drew Burk, Andrew Shuta, Richard Siken, and a rotating cast of other editors who include poet Jake Levine and fiction writer Joel Smith, sponsors one-off readings at Club Congress and elsewhere that have featured authors such as fiction writers Colin Winnette and Amelia Gray. Their new storefront (2229 East Broadway Boulevard) carries Spork Press books and titles from other small presses, doubles as their production facility, and hosts readings and live music.

Trickhouse.org is an awesomely messy art/writing/performance project founded by Noah Saterstrom that hosts an occasional reading/performance series, usually held at Casa Libre en La Solana, almost always pairing artists or performers with writers.

Unfairly, I always forget about the University of Arizona Press (1510 East University Boulevard), housed in the Main Library, when thinking of all the great literature being made and published in this city. Because the press primarily publishes academic and regional books, it’s easy to overlook their Southwest-themed poetry and prose series. It too hosts readings in the city and nationally. In fact, the press hosted poet Julie Paegle at a killer reading at the Small Press Lit Fest in 2011. I’ve since devoured her poetry collection torch song tango choir—a revelation and a reminder that UA Press deserves more of my attention.

If one of Tucson’s literary hearts is located at the University of Arizona (particularly in the UA Poetry Center—more to come on that later), the other might be POG, “a collective of poets, literary critics, and practitioners of other art forms” that runs many of the non-University poetry readings in Tucson. Recent events featured Bernadette Mayer, Eileen Myles, Julie Carr, and Fred at the Conrad Wilde Gallery (101 West Sixth Street #121), a performance space where many of the readings are held, or at Club Congress (311 East Congress Street), arguably the best bar in Tucson (and one of the classic American bars, as many national publications will remind you), where I saw poet Lisa Robertson a couple years ago. Club Congress is a rock club located in Hotel Congress, built in 1919 and largely unchanged since then, it’s a reminder of the history of Tucson’s Wild West. (If you’re interested in this stuff, check out Old Tucson Studios west of the city, where many classic westerns were filmed.) Congress also hosts the best list of smaller indie rock shows in the city: Okkervil River, the Pains of Being Pure at Heart, the Kills, just to name a few who’ve performed over the last few years. 

I like to drink at Congress (the bartenders there make most excellent cocktails and know their beer) and watch a show or a reading, but recently I’ve started attending the hypercompetitive Geeks Who Drink trivia nights there, and in spite of assembling a dream team of knowledgeable literati including Cybele Knowles, Jamison Crabtree, and Joshua Marie Wilkinson, we’ve only managed to win one so far, won in an impressive lightning round performance by Laura Owen.

Kore Press (240 North Court Avenue), led by Lisa Bowden, is another contender for Tucson’s literary heart, or at least one powerful ventricle. Devoted to publishing the work of women since 1993, Kore holds readings and performances throughout the city, including the Big Read project, supported by the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, which presented the work of Emily Dickinson in readings and performances at the UA Poetry Center, Pima Community College Center for the Arts, Tucson High Magnet School auditorium, Club Congress, and elsewhere. They also head up Grrrls Literary Activism Project, which encourages community involvement “through art activism, editorials, video and radio broadcasts, public readings, city council meetings, interviewing officials, journalists, artists, and more” through a series of workshops, internships, and much more. Did I mention they also publish some kickass writing? They do.

An Interlude
Before I get to the UA Poetry Center, which deserves and will receive its own paragraph, how about a break? With all the literary action—and I haven’t even touched on the mountains and the spectacular bike trails; Tucson has the most miles of bike trails, paths, and lanes per capita in the nation—you need to take breaks in Tucson. I recommend the chopped salad with a cup of Mexican organic blend, which inexplicably I cannot replicate at home, at Ike’s Place (100 North Stone Avenue #111), the local coffee chain. Coffee is essential for my process, maybe too for yours, as is the anonymity offered by such public spaces.

Given that we all start with the blank white page, I find myself craving input, like the conversations I overhear at the Cartel Coffee Lab (2516 North Campbell Avenue and downtown at 210 East Broadway), full-on hipstered up with a limited menu of varietals, Wi-Fi, indie rock, and dialogue straight out of the television show Portlandia. It’s worth noting that many of my writer-friends, however, write in the more mellow atmosphere at Raging Sage Coffee Roasters (2458 North Campbell Avenue). They always recommend the scones, which though I have historically scoffed at because a scone is a terrible pastry, I finally tried last year and was blown away. So I also now recommend the scones.

Edward Abbey, Joseph Wood Krutch, and many of the authors associated with this sunburnt, unpretentious patch of Southwest would surely recommend you skip the coffee and head out of the city for a hike or a ramble. I say have the coffee and take on a trail run (hiking in less than half the time!), maybe to Seven Falls up in Sabino Canyon (technically Bear Canyon, but the easiest entrance point is through Sabino; it’s about a seven to eight mile round-trip from the entrance). Mountains are in every direction, so you can have your pick depending on how wuss or butch you imagine yourself to be. Mountains and desert lead to silence, self-reckoning, and sometimes to self-erasure, all of which are crucial for writing. Drink a lot of water and bring plenty more. Wear a hat and sunblock. This place will drain you if you’re not careful.

Fauna
Many writers live in Tucson all or part of the year. Lydia Millet, author of Sweet Lamb of Heaven (Norton, 2016), haunts coffee shops and racquet clubs, but is not picky where she writes. You might find Kate Bernheimer, founder and editor of the Fairy Tale Review and author of How a Mother Weaned Her Girl From Fairy Tales (Coffee House Press, 2014) at the Red Garter Bar & Grill (3143 East Speedway Boulevard) or at Time Market (444 East University Boulevard). Joy Williams, author of The Visiting Privilege (Knopf, 2015), lives here part of the year in the foothills but would not appreciate your pilgrimage or intrusion to her property. Nature writer Gary Paul Nabhan and poets Luci Tapahonso and Jane Miller reside here too. You might well find my colleagues Beth Alvarado, Susan Briante, Chris Cokinos, Barbara Cully, Alison Hawthorne Deming, Elizabeth Evans, Julie Iromuanya, Fenton Johnson, Farid Matuk, Manuel Muñoz, Boyer Rickel, Aurelie Sheehan, and Joshua Marie Wilkinson haunting the Modern Languages building on the UA campus at night. I keep crossing paths with Sherwin Bitsui, author of Flood Song (Copper Canyon Press, 2009), in airports coming to or going away from Tucson. Also in the area are recent Yale Younger Poets Katherine Larson and Eduardo C. Corral (well, Corral hails from not far away in Casa Grande, but we would like to claim him as our own) and past Yale Younger Poet Richard Siken. Half the bars here are stocked with Yale Youngers, who would be happy to regale you with tales of squalor and glory. Leslie Marmon Silko, author of Garden in the Dunes (Simon & Schuster, 2000) and winner of the 1991 MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, lives close too, as does the journalist Charles Bowden, at least part-time. I’ve run into Rick Moody a couple times at El Charro Café (311 North Court Avenue) and Casa Libre en La Solana, though he’s only an occasional visitor, not a resident. This is to say nothing of the younger phalanx of perhaps less-well known writers whose names, by the time you read this, may spark your interest more quickly than this laundry list.

The Big Yearly Rituals
The Tucson Poetry Festival, directed by Teré Fowler-Chapman, is a thirty-five-year-old celebration that has kept performance at the forefront of the art form by combining top-notch, cutting-edge writers (recent festivals included Eduardo C. Corral, Karyna McGlynn, Patricia Smith, Claudia Rankine, Xavier Cavazos, and your correspondent) with themes that encourage the poets to engage with the moment and create as they celebrate. The organizers have always included events that enact poetry in real-time, from improvisational concerts to theatrical collaborations. The festival is also the scene of Tucson’s annual Team Selection slam, which determines the group of slam poets who will represent Tucson at the national competition, and an effort is made every year to include at least one voice from this recent development in American poetry.

For those more interested in performance/slam work, you might try Words on the Avenue, also directed by Teré Fowler-Chapman, which runs a reading series on the last Sunday of every month at Caffé Passé (415 North Fourth Avenue), which has a devoted following. Their plan is “simple: to unify the writing world by creating a space where all genres can coexist. We have freestyles, slam poets, nonfiction/fiction writers, storytellers, and more.” It’s worth your time. 

For the seriously bookish visitor (which you, reader, doubtlessly are), the Tucson Festival of Books, held in March, is probably the ideal time for a literary visit to the city to experience workshops, readings, and panels of every sort held on the UA’s campus during students’ spring break. Though the festival is only three years old, it’s among the largest literary festivals in the country, with over a hundred thousand attendees and over four hundred fifty participating authors. Notable authors participating in recent years include Jim Harrison and J. A. Jance and many, many others. It’s the fourth-biggest book festival in the country. Hundreds of exhibitors, including many of the presses and journals mentioned above, have booths selling publications and books, lead workshops for adults and children, and sell local, delicious food. I go to see the names that I love, particularly poets and smaller press authors with lower profiles. You can wait in line to see the big names, too, but my strategy is to lay low and try to catch up to one or more of them at bars or restaurants after the events.

Feeding and Watering
In trying to catch up with those authors, I’d start with Club Congress, or perhaps Pasco (820 East University Boulevard), within walking distance from the campus, which serves sustainable, locally grown and ranched food and offers homemade herbal-infused cocktails. Being an Upper Michigan boy at heart, I prefer the less-esoteric, but still upscale and delicious, Wilko (943 East University Boulevard), just west of the university’s main drag, which has its own small library, if you’re looking for reading material while you people watch (I also set up shop here sometimes to write). It has good beer on tap and a craft-cocktail menu established by the same knowledgeable hipsters who did up the great 47 Scott (47 North Scott Avenue), which serves comfort food. I can speak for the BLT + T & A (the T and A being turkey and avocado) and the Sonoran Bratwurst, a play on local delicacy the Sonoran Hot Dog (featured on national food and cooking shows many times over), which is a hot dog typically wrapped in bacon, deep-fried, covered in beans, tomatoes, crema, and god knows what else. They are really, really good. But if you’d like to try a Sonoran Hot Dog, you’d best head down to one of the El Guero Canelo locations (2480 North Oracle Road, 5802 East 22nd Street, or 5201 South Twelfth Street), or just buy them at the taco carts that dot the Tucson streets, particularly in summer evenings. While eating, wipe your hands, and then take some notes on Tucson’s own cultural mix: We’re so close to the border that I think a lot about what it means to be right up against the margin of a country, and against the margin of another, in a sort of intermediary state. Like my homeland in Upper Michigan up against the Canadian border, the writer visiting the city would be well advised to allow herself to seep in the different languages heard here, particularly on Tucson’s south side, and the different sorts of conversational rhythms, and think for a moment about the upsides of immigration reform: More cultural input equals more interesting thinking equals more interesting writing. Perhaps this mix of influences has led to the upswell of all these interesting poetry and prose writers that live in or pass through Tucson—after all it’s a lot easier to write from the margin.

The tragedy of the January 8, 2011, shootings are still alive in the minds of Tucsonans, particularly true of the patrons of local favorite bar the Shanty (401 East Ninth Street), where Gabrielle Giffords was and is a regular, just a block south of the Book Stop. Mentioned in the Economist as the site of meetings for the Baja Arizona separatist movement (some left-leaning and libertarian southern Arizonans want to secede from the state), it’s also the oldest continually licensed bar in Arizona. The Daily Show once filmed an unaired segment in the excellent and overgrown patio—a New Orleans–style space, hidden away, conducive to reflection and observation, or perhaps a quiet, slightly drunken revision. Writers pool here, too, perhaps because it was a regular haunt of Tucson’s dear poet Steve Orlen, who died in 2010. Drink a toast to him. Owner and bartender Bill Nugent runs a great bar with an extensive international bottled beer list—I’d recommend any of the St. Bernardus Trappist brews from Belgium (amazingly, the Shanty usually serves at least three varieties)—but he only has six or so on tap at any given time, and doesn’t serve food. So don’t drink too hard while revising. Or maybe: Do.

A margarita and a book by the pool is a good decision in the summer months. Or stop in at my favorite bar in Tucson, 1702 (1702 East Speedway Boulevard). While it doesn’t perhaps have a lot of official literary merit (aside from being a watering hole for quite a few writers), the beer selection (just shy of fifty) on tap is easily the best in the city, and the best I’ve seen in the state. It specializes in Belgians and big American microbrews, and 1702 has started brewing and pouring its own beers, too, which is a very welcome addition to the still young brewing scene in Arizona. You will likely find me there sampling one of their many Belgians and increasingly aggressive American IPAs.

Everything Revolves Around the Poetry Center
A visit to Tucson must include the University of Arizona Poetry Center (1508 East Helen Street), one of the largest poetry centers in the country. Directed by Tyler Meier, it is certainly the center of the literary culture in the city, and though associated with the university, it has a lively schedule of programs, ranging from workshops and classes and discussion groups to poetry programs for children, open to everyone. Founded in 1960, the institution features a research archive of over seventy thousand items, including forty-seven thousand volumes of poetry and twenty-eight thousand issues of journals and periodicals. The reading series is robust, to say the least, with several readings a month, usually drawing audiences of more than two hundred. I could name names, but you can just think of your own list of best-known poets in the world, and you can bet that many, if not most, of them have appeared in the Poetry Center’s reading series. The center also maintains an impressive audiovisual library. Trying to lay hands on Charles Baxter’s very rare early poetry collections Chameleon and The South Dakota Guidebook for an essay I was working on, I was pleased to find them in the Poetry Center library. I should not have been surprised, since the collection is epic and renowned, and open to anyone interested. These convergences happen all the time and make me happy to be a writer in Tucson.

The Poetry Center also offers a residency each summer to a poet. And, as Joseph Wood Krutch wrote, Tucson is most itself in the summer, when the snowbirds are gone and the students have departed. You’re left to negotiate with the sheer blistering fact of the sun (and thankfully of Tucson’s fifth season, the rainy, volatile monsoon, which provides a break from the heat and also offers arguably the best lightning in the country in July and August each year).

Aiding and Abetting Writers and Writing
Casa Libre en La Solana (228 North Fourth Avenue), offers a semiannual writing residency—past writers-in-residence include Camille Dungy, Jena Osman, Rick Moody, Frederic Tuten—and fiction and poetry workshops, and also prides itself as being Tucson’s event base, hosting some of the best readings in town, including the UA’s MFA student reading series on many Friday nights, the Fair Weather Reading Series (for emerging visiting or local writers), and Trickhouse Live, “an art and performance series that brings together people working with words, images, sounds, videos and a variety of performances” curated by editors at the journal Trickhouse.org.

I left the Pima Community College Writers’ Workshop (in May each year) off the previous edition of this guide, and regretted it, since it’s the best weekend workshop in town, and featured essayists Nicole Walker and Nancy Mairs and Tiphanie Yanique last time around, and we’re sorry we missed it. Check with the director, Meg Files, for this year’s lineup. It’s a great feature of the city that there is so much happening in any given month that I’m sure to have left something off, or something new sprang up without our noticing. Let me know and I’ll add it in for the next time around.

One could wander Tucson’s streets forever finding more great lit-related sites, groups, journals, and events, but I’ll end by wandering into the Book Art Collective and the Letterpress Lab (1035 North Mabel Street) to witness the printing and making of books. Though located at the University of Arizona, the lab has public access and offers five Vandercooks (Universal 1, Universal 1AB, SP-15, No. 2, and 219), a Pilot Press, and a Chandler Price 8 x 12 OS onsite along with a mass of type. If you know what those presses are, you’re probably salivating. If not, you should come by to experience literature literally in the making. You haven’t appreciated what it is to print a poem until you’ve had to painstakingly handset your own type and decide, “Oh, well, do I really need prognosticate when I could use foretell or augur’s shorter glory? Maybe I do, actually, for the line, but maybe not.” The collective also brings in notable makers of artist books, printers, and binders to lecture and hold workshops. In the age of the digitizing, e-booking, and Twitterization of everything, getting your hands dirty with the making of words, poems, stories, essays, and books feels suddenly very important, very timely, and very Tucson.

Degrees of Diversity: Talking Race and the MFA

by

Sonya Larson

September/October 2015
8.19.15
In Print and Online

It is no secret that MFA programs across the country have a way to go to ensure that their workshops are filled with racially and ethnically diverse faculty and students. Junot Díaz’s account of being a lone writer of color in his MFA program at Cornell University, “MFA vs. POC,” which appeared on the New Yorker’s Page-Turner blog in April 2014, drew a flood of stories from writers who face similar frustration. The recent deaths of unarmed African Americans in Charleston, South Carolina; Ferguson, Missouri; New York City; Sanford, Florida; and in communities throughout the United States have stirred in many writers an urgent desire to examine the ways in which a racialized culture informs our art—in the way we write, read, and respond to racial complexities observed in the world. 

MFA programs are uniquely positioned to address such topics. But for many the path forward—if pursued at all—remains murky, contested, and fraught. In “The Student of Color in the Typical MFA Program,” published this past April in Gulf Coast, David Mura writes, “The divide between the way whites and people of color see the social reality around them is always there in our society…. Creative writing involves the very description of that reality, and so the gulf between the vision of whites and people of color is very present right there on the page. And so, conflict ensues.”

One program currently exploring these questions is the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, near Asheville, North Carolina. Founded in 1971 by poet Ellen Bryant Voigt, the country’s first low-residency program is known for its rigorous standards of textual examination and artistic integrity. Its pedagogical model, by now well refined, is nonetheless exercising its flexibility to welcome a more direct conversation among faculty and students about the intersection of culture and craft.

“The MFA landscape has altered considerably over the forty years of our existence,” says director Debra Allbery. “Our strategies must necessarily shift too—as literature changes, and as the culture changes.”

Voigt agrees. “We’ve certainly seen an increased urgency among individual student writers to locate themselves and their work within the evolving culture,” she says. For some, that urgency comes from self-identification with a particular ethnic or racial heritage. Others want to explore race as a means, as Voigt says, “to expand imaginative empathy without encroachment or appropriation.”

The program seeks to explore these questions the way it explores nearly all questions that arise for the writer: through rigorous study of craft. “Craft provides the language and tools through which we identify, articulate, and address all challenges we face in our poetry and fiction,” says Allbery. “As our program becomes more diverse, we’ve also been addressing these questions, during the residency when the community gathers, in multiple formats.”

During the program’s residency this past July, Warren Wilson MFA faculty members Lan Samantha Chang, David Haynes, A. Van Jordan, Monica Youn, and C. Dale Young presented “Shadowboxing: A Faculty Panel on the Intersections of Culture and Craft.” Chang, who is also the director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop; Haynes, the director of the creating writing program at Southern Methodist University in Dallas; Jordan, who teaches at Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey; Youn, who teaches at Princeton University; and Young, who currently administers his own medical practice and practices medicine full-time, discussed their personal struggles regarding writing and identity, as well as the role of literary institutions in addressing (or perpetuating) these problems.

For many students, the mere occasion of the faculty panel sends a powerful message. “Knowing that we have the institutional support to engage with these thorny questions makes me feel that there is more possibility for dialogue, vulnerability, risk, and learning,” says poet and Warren Wilson student Sarah Pemberton Strong.

Fiction student Chantal Aida Gordon agrees. “The lack of diversity we see in MFA programs and in what gets published—and the often flat, cliché treatment of characters of color in contemporary literature—are truly scandalizing,” she says. “Student and faculty panels like the ones at Warren Wilson are a step in the right direction. But we have a long way to go.”

In a separate discussion led by students, writers were asked to speak frankly about their concerns, anxiety, or guilt. “I worry that my ignorance will get in the way of my intent to do no harm,” wrote one student in an anonymous prompt. Another wrote, “I worry that I don’t know how to write about my own people.” The message was clear. No one—faculty or students, white writers or writers of color—is immune to these struggles.

Meanwhile, recruiting more faculty and students of color to the program remains “a high priority,” says Allbery, who admits that that reality has been slow in coming. A reception sponsored by the Warren Wilson MFA program at the 2015 Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference in Minneapolis specifically sought prospective students of color (a reception it plans to repeat at the 2016 conference in Los Angeles), and the program’s Holden Fund for Diversity has recently expanded to offer more grants for admitted students of color who demonstrate financial need.

What advice does Allbery have for other programs wanting to address these questions? “Listen,” she says. “An MFA program is a living thing, and a constantly adaptive organism. We invite feedback from our students. We respond. Mutual respect and aligned aims fuel every conversation. An MFA program dedicated to its students’ development has to keep channels of communication open.”

With practice, many in the program hope that these conversations will become easier—both to engage in as a community and to apply to one’s own work. In the meantime, many welcome the necessary difficulty. “I want more conversations like this,” one student wrote following the panel. “I want discussions to be honest and truthful and hard.”

Shadowboxing: A Faculty Panel on the Intersections of Culture and Craft

What follows is a curated selection of the most salient topics of the discussion, organized by the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, which took place on the campus near Asheville, North Carolina, on Friday, July 3, 2015.

POC in the MFA: Responding to Junot Díaz’s post

C. Dale Young: Nothing that Junot says in his post is remotely new to a writer of color—it is not, sadly, revolutionary; it is not shocking. For me, reading it, one thing that struck very close to home was how many things he brought up to which I could so easily say, “Well, yeah, of course.” And yet I had so many white friends who seemed completely shocked and flabbergasted by the article. I never read a writer of color in graduate school. And even now, when I open an anthology, I rarely ever find a Latino writer or an Asian American writer or an African American writer.

[The article] reinforced for a lot of writers of color this sensation that we live in two worlds: a world that we know, and a world where people have no concept of the actual things that we see all the time. It became very clear to me that the world writers of color live in is unseen.

Lan Samantha Chang: I think Junot and I are in almost the exact same generation. When we were kids, there weren’t many people of color in MFA programs. When I asked about it in my own program, someone said to me, “Oh, I don’t count these things.” But I counted.

A. Van Jordan: [As] you’re reading as a student you’re constantly trying to identify yourself…in terms of race, or just simply through experience…. If you don’t see yourself in the literature, you think, “Why am I here? Why am I trying to do this?” If you don’t see someone who’s had the same experience—whether it’s being an affluent African American, or from a poor rural Appalachian white community—you still want to see yourself.

Grappling With Craft and Culture

David Haynes: For me, it’s moments like Ferguson. People are being shot down in the street. I would describe what I do—for a long, long time—is write these comedies of manners that expose the foibles of daily lives of ordinary African Americans. Do I continue doing that when people are being shot down in the street?

Monica Youn: There’s this sense that if I mention kimchi in my poem, all of a sudden, I’m an ethnic writer. I myself have been trying to resist the impulse to “whitewash” my work. Do I take kimchi off the table? It’s hard for me to divorce form from subject matter, or at least image. The idea that there’s a refuge from politics in the poem is strange.

I’ve been thinking lately about what it means to “write Asian American.” If I don’t include markers, does it mean that I’m “writing white”? How do I write about Asian characters without specific markers? If I don’t do that, am I “writing white”?

Young: I get shoved into lots of boxes. I come from a very not-odd background if you’re from Latin America or the Caribbean: I’m part Indian (South Asian), part Chinese, and I’m also Hispanic. My mother’s English—as white as you can get. It’s hard for me to be against white people or reactive to anything, because then I’d feel reactive to some part of myself. There can be a sense that I’m not Asian enough, I’m not Latino enough.

This doesn’t come up much when I’m in the process of writing, when I’m actually drafting, but where it comes back up is in the revising. Do I want to highlight that, do I want to revise that?

Haynes: For me, it’s the “black enough” question. For the very first story I published, the editor…called me up on the phone and said, “I really like this story…but before I accept it I need to ask about your culture.” It was pretty clear in the conversation that if I gave the wrong answer, he wasn’t going to publish it. Because the characters in the story were African American, I think that if it [had been] written by a white writer, he wouldn’t have published it.

Everybody has an identity—we all have to think about it. But there’s this imposed voice up here, outside of me, that I have no control over, that’s doing this additional defining. How do I interact with it? Do I ignore it? Do I engage it? How do you do that and still get the work done?

Historical Origins of the “Identity vs. Text” Debate

Haynes: The whole idea of being cautious and careful about who you speak for, and not trespassing on other people’s cultural territories, comes out of [historical] changes in cultural anthropology. Simultaneously there were the influences of Marxist analysis in terms of capital and control of cultural products, in terms of who owns what story, and also the profits and cultural capital, and the idea that “since that belongs to that community, I can’t have a part of it. That’s their cultural capital, and it’s hands-off.”

These ideas became very deeply entrenched in literary studies. [Over] here we have writers who say it’s all about text and what’s on the page only. And writers over here saying that it’s all about identity and experience. That conversation has never been reconciled. So we see that tension present in how work is reviewed and discussed—“This isn’t poetry, it’s identity politics.” Or, “If I’m going to be taken seriously as a poet or a fiction writer, I’ve got to abandon identity and focus on other things.”

The “Closed Loop” of Publishing, Hiring, and Teaching

Young: In order to get a book published, you either have to embrace your diversity aspect or you have to go the complete opposite and write white. And then, once you publish, you must continue to publish the same kinds of books, over and over. So you can see how this ties in to the academic world. You need books to get hired, but if the same kinds of books are being published, then there can form a kind of closed loop.

Haynes: The issue for African American fiction writers is not the first book—it’s the second book. Because the first book, often, even if it’s well received, it rarely becomes a big best-seller. And that’s probably true of a lot of writers—it’s an impediment for literary fiction and, in particular, writers of color.

Writers of color often publish into a critical vacuum, meaning that the reviewers and the scholars have not been responding to the work. And in academia…you do not get promoted in African American Studies by writing about contemporary literature. And actually, you don’t get promoted in literary studies at all by writing about contemporary literature of any kind.

That’s a problem in terms of the ongoing development of the writer, because there’s no conversation being had about the aesthetic, about where the work is going. When that conversation becomes closed inside a community…it can be successful, but it can also become insular.

Navigating Identity In the Workshop

Young: There’s a word that I absolutely despise: universal. That almost invariably means “the majority culture.” It doesn’t mean “universal,” as in everyone. What it means is, “make it more like this, in order to be universal.” 

It’s a setup for students of color, who are also told to be authentic…you’re being told to be authentic, but if the detail you include is too specific, it’s not “universal.” So that sets up a weird binary that’s not useful.  If for me to be universal I have to be white, I can never be universal.

Haynes: [Let’s say] I’m the workshop leader, and I have a student who’s bringing very specific cultural material to the table. And the conversation comes up: “Well, I don’t understand what that means, so there needs to be a sentence in this story to explain it or to translate that.” Is it the institution’s job to have instructors in place who can help that student of color navigate that, or is that a personal problem?

The “given” response is, “Well, you’ve got to make that ‘accessible’ to ‘everybody.’” But should the institution be prepared to instead say, “Let’s talk about these broader issues of translation”? And if you do it, how to do it?

If the institution isn’t prepared to help that student navigate these questions of translation, the institution has not only failed that student but also all the other students in the program who they are supposedly preparing to go out and teach other students.

Jordan: I would want the institution to create a safe space for students to talk about whatever their subject is in their poem or story, and for them to be able to express their identity. Lorraine Hansberry talks about “the universality of specificity.” She’s saying that you don’t have to be poor, black, and on the South Side of Chicago in 1959 to experience what’s happening in Raisin in the Sun. When I read Chekhov, Joyce, Faulkner—people who have a very specific cultural identity in their work—that’s “the other” to me. [I’m] reading it through this lens of “the other,” but we’re considering it from the standpoint that it’s valid. That’s what’s important—that when [a student] brings work to the workshop, and it has that cultural identity within it, it still has to be seen as valid.  

Rage and Fear in Challenging Institutions

Haynes: One of the striking things about Junot’s post was the level of rage. The rage is about the difficulty of institutional change. Institutions—and particularly academic institutions—are by their nature conservative entities.

Youn: I think there is a space for rage in the wider culture that doesn’t necessarily translate into the academic culture. No one wants to be the “angry ethnic person.” It’s not going to help you get jobs and it’s not going to help you make friends. It takes writers with international stature or tenure in order to have the privilege to exert rage.

Haynes: My inner response to last summer’s student meeting was, “Be careful. Don’t get yourselves in trouble.”

Chang: Which is interesting, because there’s a huge emphasis on collegiality in academia. It’s a mentoring instinct. I’ve always felt that MFA programs are the opportunity to make representation more diverse. It’s a time in the life and artistic development of writers when these ideas are especially important. [The students] are sort of “fighting against the father,” and they’re going to “kill the father.” So it’s a great time to start these conversations. If it’s going to change, it’s going to change here.

Sonya Larson is a writer whose short fiction has appeared most recently in West Branch, Del Sol Review, the Red Mountain Review, and the Hub. She is at work on a novel about Chinese families living in the swamps of 1930s Mississippi. She is assistant director of the Muse and the Marketplace conference and is studying fiction at Warren Wilson College.

 

 

 

The Boat We Are Building: A New MFA Program Makes Diversity Its Mission

by

Rigoberto González

September/October 2018
9.12.18
In Print and Online

Two years ago, Gary Dop was about to enter his tenure year as a professor of English at Randolph College in Lynchburg, Virginia. His debut poetry collection, Father, Child, Water, had recently been published by Red Hen Press and would help him secure a comfortable future as an academic. Dop grew up in a conservative military family, bouncing from Tennessee to Germany to Texas, and his goal to provide a different kind of upbringing and stability for his three daughters was now close to reality. It helped that he enjoyed teaching and had fallen in love with the natural landscape of the region—the college sits along the James River, in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. And yet he felt incomplete. If he was going to stay in this location for years to come, he realized he needed to continue to enrich it by inviting an entire writing community to join him. So he decided to build a low-residency MFA program. 

The product of a low-residency graduate writing program himself (he received his MFA at the University of Nebraska in Omaha), Dop appreciated the flexibility that the low-residency model allowed—a community that came together in the spirit of mentorship but then dispersed, the writers pursuing their own individual, independent  journeys. Dop joined forces with Laura-Gray Street, the English department chair at Randolph, who  holds a degree from Warren Wilson College’s low-residency MFA program near Asheville, North Carolina. Street and Dop held initial conversations with Randolph president Bradley W. Bateman to get the new program off the ground.  

“We’re at a small college, so we were able to have all those conversations within a few days,” Dop says. “At every turn the idea was met with enthusiasm and support.” 

In many ways it made sense that Randolph College should spearhead Virginia’s first and only low-residency MFA program. Founded in 1891 as Randolph-Macon Woman’s College, the institution, with its hundred-acre campus, boasts Nobel laureate Pearl S. Buck as a notable alumna. In 1906 it became the first women’s college to be admitted to the Association of Colleges and Preparatory Schools of the Southern States, and in 1916 it became the first women’s college south of the Potomac River to receive a Phi Beta Kappa chapter. The college became coeducational in 2006 and was renamed a year later, though it has sustained its commitment to women and has been home to a strong undergraduate creative writing curriculum since the 1980s.

The Randolph MFA in Creative Writing—which held its first residency in July—is yet another watershed moment for the college, which has nearly doubled its graduate student population with the inauguration of the new program. But simply creating yet another low-residency MFA program (there are sixty-four included in this year’s MFA Index on page 94) was not enough for its creators. This one had to be different. 

“We wanted to put together a program that educates students for the current landscape of literature,” Dop says. “This begins with faculty who are shaping literary culture and challenging us to be a program willing to take risks and remain relevant to the social and political climates.” 

“We had an extraordinary opportunity with this new program, at this college, in this city,” Street adds, “to bring together an energetic and diverse faculty in a way never seen before.” 

To begin recruiting faculty, Dop sought the advice of a distinguished advisory board, which includes Jeff Shotts, the executive editor of Graywolf Press, as well as writers Julie Schumacher, Eduardo C. Corral, Erika Meitner, Stephanie Burt, and Gregory Pardlo, who was the Emerging Writer in Residence at Randolph-Macon Woman’s College in 2003. The advisory board made informed recommendations according to Dop’s wish list. In addition to faculty members who represented significant social diversity and literary excellence, he asked his advisers to consider one other stipulation: “Is this person kind?”

“This might seem like an odd question,” Dop says, “but when faculty spend ten days, twice a year, with students and you’re asking them to help shape the environment of a new program, you really want people who have a generous spirit.” So Dop and his colleagues did more than read each candidate’s work and assess résumés; they also scoured interviews, online and in print, and spoke to people who could provide meaningful insights into each candidate’s character. The reputation of the new program would be buoyed by the reputations of its faculty. 

And indeed the inaugural faculty is composed of early-career writers who are already reshaping the literary landscape. The impressive list includes poets Kaveh Akbar, Layli Long Soldier, and Phillip B. Williams; novelists and nonfiction writers Kaitlyn Greenidge, Mira Jacob, and Wayétu Moore; poet and novelist Erika L. Sánchez; and nonfiction writer Aviya Kushner. Street credits Camille T. Dungy, who held various faculty and administrative positions at Randolph College from 1999 to 2006, for demonstrating the level of creative energy that writers still early in their career were capable of bringing to a program. While she worked at Randolph, Dungy—who is now the author of four books of poetry and an essay collection, Guidebook to Relative Strangers (Norton, 2017)—was a Cave Canem fellow and had yet to release her first book. But through her planning of literary events and programming, she invited then-emerging writers such as Terrance Hayes, Tyehimba Jess, Tayari Jones, and A. Van Jordan to the college, impressing upon the department the benefits of a varied and inclusive literary education. 

“Camille brought a range of outstanding up-and-coming writers to the college,” Street says. “I feel this new MFA is Camille’s legacy or certainly a tribute to her presence and ongoing influence.”

That legacy can be clearly seen in the MFA program’s faculty—whose faces, when gathered together, make for a powerful image, providing an immediate understanding of Randolph College’s dedication to diversity. Williams, who is on the poetry faculty, is unequivocal about the new program’s mission. 

“We will be diverse in race, gender, sexuality, religion, and aesthetic interests,” he says, “and that diversity will be the foundational stone from which we build each other up in letters and in camaraderie.”

Randolph College in Lynchburg, Virginia.

(Credit: Randolph College)

Other faculty members duly note the strategic selection of young, notable  literary figures. “The opportunity to get in on the ground floor of a singular new program, to be among this faculty, to help build something truly original with students who are as excited as I am—it’s a profound honor, a major occasion for gratitude,” says Akbar, who is also on the poetry faculty.  

“I’m so lucky to work with so many writers that I admire,” adds Sánchez, who will be teaching both fiction and poetry. “I expect that together we will foster a dynamic, compassionate, and rigorous writing community.” 

For Kushner, who is teaching fiction and nonfiction, joining the Randolph College faculty is also a bit personal. “I grew up in a Hebrew-speaking home in a Yiddish-speaking town in New York,” she says. “I often write about the experience of living between languages and crossing borders of faith, language, and culture. Low-residency programs offer essential access to writers who might otherwise not be able to earn an MFA, and increasing access is a key element of increasing diversity.” 

Dop understands that the culture and energy of a community has to take place organically, but he is also committed to guiding the tone of the program. He hopes to accomplish this through a series of talks, readings, and conversations about the complicated and troubling social and political climates that artists currently inhabit. “One of our panel discussions will be about the mental health of the artist,” he says. LuAnn Keener-Mikenas, a therapist and poet on staff at Randolph’s counseling center, will participate. 

“A writing program should not only invest in teaching students how to write better, but it must also provide guidance for the artist’s life, including and especially the mental and emotional health of artists,” Dop says. “It is a hollow reward to have a student who becomes an award-winning writer but feels alone and unable to find emotional and relational health. We can’t expect that we’ll be the source of a student’s holistic health, but we can expect that we’ll regularly create conversations within our community about belonging and psychological health and the way in which our program can do better to provide a safe space for all our students.”  

Dop doesn’t believe that creating a safe space means building a protective and insular bubble around the MFA community. On the contrary, it means coming to terms with one’s place in multiple environments, some of which are hostile. For such complexity of experience, Dop points out that the college’s location, in Lynchburg, might serve an asset. “Historically and presently, Virginia has been a space of conflict, embodying the worst and best of human choices,” he says. “Virginia knows democracy and genocide, slavery and freedom, racism and compassion, war and art. As we come together as writers, we won’t neglect what is still a very real part of life in the South. This is something our students can artfully engage with, if they so wish.”

Dop’s hope is that a diverse faculty will attract a diverse group of students and that a faculty of writers whose work is socially conscious will draw a particular type of student. “We want to welcome writers who are seeking to contribute meaningfully to our world,” Dop says. So far the applicant pool has yielded positive results, and the inaugural class of fourteen graduate students—among them poets, fiction writers, and nonfiction writers from throughout the United States—marks a promising beginning. Dop hopes the number of students will eventually grow to a robust community of forty-five to sixty writers across all three genres at each residency. “We can’t control all of the variables for who decides to attend Randolph,” Dop says. “But we can choose faculty who will signal the presence of a safe and productive environment for all writers—we want to be a community where all writers, including writers of color and LGBTQ writers, can thrive.”

Among the inaugural class is Jason Mendez, a nonfiction writer and interdisciplinary theater artist from the Bronx, New York. He was pleasantly surprised to find an MFA program with the kind of faculty he was looking for. “As a Puerto Rican writer, I need a community that I can fully trust with my work. I felt Randolph College’s faculty could resonate with my lived experiences and help me share my stories more creatively and effectively,” he says. 

For Amelia Harrington, a Georgia native raised in Virginia who is also a musician and a graduate of Randolph College’s undergraduate program, the new MFA program is exciting. “I want to be a part of its becoming,” she says. “I want to know and love and support the other writers who were chosen for this adventuresome undertaking.” As for Joseph Capehart, a Liberian American poet living in Brooklyn, New York, his interactions with both the faculty and administration have thus far been encouraging. “Their commitment to us promises to extend beyond the two-year program and into our futures as professionals and people,” he says. 

Apart from the obvious desire to mentor students who will go on to publish regularly and receive critical acclaim, Dop hopes this program will be known for nurturing literary citizenship. “I hope our faculty and students think of our program as belonging to them,” he says, “as one of the central communities of their lives.” 

Only time will tell whether the new program at Randolph College will live up to its creators’ hopes. If it succeeds it has the potential to offer a concrete solution to the perennial problem posed at institutions and academic conferences about achieving and sustaining diversity in the MFA classroom. What’s more, it could become a model for other programs—one that creates and sustains a community of writers that is truly representative of the myriad identities and voices of the United States. 

With the program’s inaugural year just under way, Dop is eager to assess the challenges and opportunities that present themselves and believes he can best serve the program by being its custodian. 

“I like that word,” he says. “It implies guardian, curator, caretaker of a vision to empower these talented, amazing writers to teach and write. I’ve learned enough now to know that belonging begins within and eventually grows to become a gift we give each other. I belong to this new community in as much as I care for myself and our students and faculty. What a joy this will be.” 

Part of that ongoing joy will be in selecting visiting writers to accompany the regular faculty during each residency (students attend five ten-day residencies, each held on the Lynchburg campus in the summer and winter throughout the two-year program, in addition to one-on-one faculty mentorship). Guest writers for upcoming residencies include advisory board members Stephanie Burt and Gregory Pardlo, as well as poet Tiana Clark, novelist and essayist Alexander Chee, novelist Nicole Dennis-Benn, and poet and essayist Hanif Abdurraqib. 

“It’s a thrilling time,” Dop says. “There’s a line at the end of Kaveh’s book that closes the last poem, and I’ve held on to it as it relates to our new program: ‘The boat [we are] building / will never be done.’ We’re just getting started!” 

 

Rigoberto González is a contributing editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.

Clockwise from far upper left: faculty members Kaitlyn Greenidge, Erika L. Sánchez, Kaveh Akbar, Mira Jacob, Layli Long Soldier, Philip B. Williams, and Wayétu Moore. (Credit: Sánchez: Robyn Lindemann; Williams: Rachel Eliza Griffiths; Akbar: Marlon James; Jacob: In Kim)

Q&A: Alice Quinn Bids Farewell to PSA

by

Dana Isokawa

July/August 2019
6.12.19
In Print and Online

This summer Alice Quinn will step down as the executive director of the Poetry Society of America (PSA), a position she has held for the past eighteen years. During her tenure, the PSA launched multiple new poetry prizes, organized hundreds of events across the United States, and expanded the Poetry in Motion program, which brings poetry into U.S. transit systems. Previously, Quinn was the poetry editor at the New Yorker for twenty years and an editor at Knopf for more than ten years. She also teaches at Columbia University and is the editor of a book of Elizabeth Bishop’s writings, Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006), as well as a forthcoming book of Bishop’s journals. A few months before departing the PSA, Quinn, accompanied by her dachshund, Daisy, talked about her work at the nonprofit organization.

What are you most proud of achieving at the PSA?
I’m proud of Poetry in Motion, which recently celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary in New York and its twentieth in Los Angeles. We have a new transit initiative in partnership with San Francisco Beautiful that is a wonderful variation on the program involving local artists and poets. I’m also thrilled with our PSA Chapbook Fellowship program, founded in 2003, which has launched the careers of sixty-four new poets selected and introduced by major figures. We also have two splendid new prizes to add to our distinguished roster of annual awards, the Four Quartets Prize for a unified sequence of poems…and the Anna Rabinowitz Prize for an interdisciplinary project involving poetry and any other art. 

And I’ve loved our innovative programming. We’ve presented more than seven hundred programs since I joined the PSA, many of them multi-arts events with actors, musicians, and great visuals. We’ve had vibrant tributes honoring twentieth-century Polish poetry, Black iconic poets of the twentieth century, classic poets and beloved contemporaries—Philip Larkin, Gwendolyn Brooks, Galway Kinnell, Seamus Heaney, Jean Valentine—and we’ve celebrated major anniversaries of institutions like our own; the PSA was founded in 1910. 

I’ve also been gratified by our more than forty partnerships with fellow cultural institutions allowing us to reach many new audiences with poetry—perhaps chief among them the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx, where we’re in our tenth year of presenting poetry with each new seasonal exhibit. That alliance is generating more and more collaborative opportunities, including an “Elizabeth Bishop in Brazil” day at the start of the garden’s Roberto Burle Marx exhibit this June.

Why did you choose to step down now?
I thought I might stay until I’d reached the twenty-year mark, but eighteen-plus seems just fine. And I’ve been working on the journals of Elizabeth Bishop for too long. I have a new home in the Hudson Valley not far from where Bishop’s papers are lodged at Vassar, and I’m so excited about that. The archive is closed during the week, so for years I’ve had to use my vacations and a day here and there to access the archive for Bishop projects. I’m sure there will be programming in my future because I have a talent for it, and knowing an audience has been swept up by poetry in a lasting way matters to me. But new leadership can be galvanizing, and I know the PSA will find someone great for this position. 

There are a number of organizations in New York City that support poetry, such as the Academy of American Poets and Poets House. What has distinguished the PSA?
I think the PSA has always had a special focus on enlightening people about the power of poetry and the special space it can have in your life—how if you encounter it alone or by surprise in a public place, you can be affected and reminded of actually how powerfully you are able to receive the wisdom and force of poetry. Our programs build on that and send a message that poetry is not too difficult or that it belongs to only one moment in college or to a fervid moment when you were a child.

PSA events also seem to be very interdisplinary, right?
We’ve emphasized a lot of multi-arts programming—we have to think of programs where we can partner. Is there a great show at the International Center of Photography [ICP] of Lewis Carroll’s photographs? Then I know just the person who can recite “Jabberwocky.” Or is ICP showing the work of the great environmental photographer Sebastião Salgado? Let’s bring down Jorie Graham and poets who really care about [the environment] to read. When we had a tribute to Philip Larkin to coincide with Farrar, Straus and Giroux’s publication of a new complete collection of his poems edited by Archie Burnett, I thought we should include jazz because Larkin loved jazz. So I called [PSA board president] Kimiko Hahn, who teaches at Queens College, and said, “Doesn’t Queens College have a jazz band?” And so they came, and we had young students playing jazz at the event. And that’s how you do it—that’s why programming is fun. You can bring people in from various other worlds, and it animates and it proves poetry is part of the cultural scene.

The PSA has allowed me to celebrate and hold aloft the poetry of the past that I love so much and at the same time welcome new work and configure multi-arts programs that are relaxing and illuminating and not tendentious or rote in any way—just a fresh way of looking at poetry and integrating it into your life. And it’s meant a lot to me to pay tribute to the poets that I love—it makes me realize how long I’ve been living with the work of many of these people. I’ve been reading poetry for a long time. I used to go into the Gotham Book Mart [in New York City] and stand there at the little table, read for two or three hours, and walk out with two books. At the Grolier up in Boston—I was a waitress at the time and would go during my lunch break in my waitressing uniform—I would be leaving with my little stack of books, and the founder would say, “Alice, you know, it’s absolutely remarkable, but all these are on sale today for two dollars.” And that’s poetry! People who love poetry want to press it upon other people.

In a Q&A for this magazine in 2008, you said poetry had gotten “swervier.” Do you think it has continued to get swervier?
I think poetry has gotten more traditional as well as swervier. There’s a lot of white space. There are many more sequences that hearken back to traditional poetry. There’s a lot of going back and rediscovering and recontextualizing and learning from moments when the voice in literature sounded different and the use of argument was more profound. Argument matters in poetry. There’s also much more excitement and openness about the field, and it just keeps getting better and better.

We’re in a really interesting moment—Cave Canem has become so significant, as has CantoMundo, Kundiman, and the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. We’re way into a second and third generation of inclusivity in our world. And these poets are doing what T. S. Eliot said poets do in his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” The really true poets join the poetic and artistic tradition and alter it kind of chiropractically. They alter the spine of it; they alter the future of it.

What have you loved about your job?
I’ve loved the independence and the teamwork. If I meet someone at a dinner party or a lecture, and we start conversing and spontaneously come up with an idea for an event, I can just run with it, and wonderful Brett Fletcher Lauer, our deputy director, has been with me all these years. With Madeline Weinfield and Azzuré Alexander, we are a lean, very effective team, and that’s been exhilarating. 

 

Dana Isokawa is the senior editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.

Alice Quinn

(Credit: Tony Gale)

Q&A: Alice Quinn’s Poetic Providence

by

Jean Hartig

January/February 2008
1.23.08
In Print and Online

Last November Alice Quinn stepped down as poetry editor of the New Yorker after twenty years in the position. She was succeeded by Paul Muldoon. Quinn came to the magazine as a fiction editor in January 1987, and took on the role of poetry editor after Howard Moss passed away in September of that year. Over the past two decades, she has published the work of some of the country’s most celebrated poets.

In 2001, Quinn scaled back her work at the magazine in order to assume the directorship of the Poetry Society of America (PSA), a position previously held by Elise Paschen. In announcing her decision to leave the New Yorker, Quinn said she plans to devote more time to the nonprofit organization (which will celebrate its centennial in 2010), and to her job as an adjunct professor at Columbia University’s School of the Arts. She is also editing a collection of Elizabeth Bishop’s journals and notebooks, a project that follows Quinn’s collection of the late poet’s unpublished writings, Edgar Allan Poe and the Juke-Box (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006).

On one of her final days at the magazine, Quinn spoke about her job there and her prospects as a poetry editor.

How did you feel about the appointment of Paul Muldoon as poetry editor?
It was really my dream to have him succeed me. David [Remnick] asked, “What would you think about Paul Muldoon?” and honestly, I almost did a jig. You lay a foundation and then you see that somebody you adore and admire is going to come and shore it up and further it, and that’s great.

Who do you perceive to be the audience for the New Yorker‘s poems?
I feel that New Yorker readers are people who were profoundly connected to poetry in childhood, adolescence, or college, who want to touch base with it and want to feel that they still can read poetry. The New Yorker gives poets access to an international audience of literarily eager people who are sampling poetry.

What changes have you noticed in poetry?
Poetry’s a little swervier now. There are a lot of leaps being made, and an enjoyment of humor, playfulness, mystery—a certain ebullient spontaneity. I feel that in the work of the younger poets, and I love it. Of course, I’m still a great believer in Robert Frost’s dictum that a good poem should be like a piece of ice on a hot stove; it should ride on its own melting. I feel there’s more openness to the work that Jean Valentine and Rae Armantrout and Fanny Howe are doing, and some of that derives from the enjoyment that the poets in their twenties and thirties take in that work. They don’t enshrine it in a totally academic and fierce and somewhat defensive, even belligerent, way. They don’t feel they have to argue for it; they just enjoy it.

Where will poetry take you next?
First I would like to produce a very good book of Bishop’s journals. I will have time in which to go to the Houghton Library in Boston and to the archives at Vassar, and St. Louis, where they have the May Swenson–Elizabeth Bishop correspondence, and to really get in a little bit of that dreamy investigative time that you get when you’re at a rare-book library. Will I pursue other book projects or will I want to become an editor-at-large at a poetry house I admire? I’m not sure. For the time being, I really see PSA as an important focus of my devotion. But I can’t pretend that it is in any way easy to leave the New Yorker. There’s nothing that’s going to take the place of people in [my] apartment building and people in London saying, “I loved that poem in the New Yorker last week.” The New Yorker is a magical place.

Jean Hartig is the editorial assistant of Poets & Writers Magazine.

 

Poets House and PSA Branch Out

by

Daniel Nester

May/June 2005
5.1.05
In Print and Online

Aided by a $260,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Poets House and the Poetry Society of America (PSA), two nonprofit literary organizations based in New York City, recently partnered to establish Branching Out: Poetry in the Twentieth Century. The new initiative will bring distinguished poets to public libraries in Fresno, Houston, Milwaukee, New Orleans, and Kansas City, Missouri, over the next two years, to give informal talks on contemporary and classic poets.

Launched during April’s National Poetry Month, Branching Out continues this month with Eavan Boland, visiting Fresno on May 17 to talk about W.B. Yeats, followed by Eamon Grennan discussing Emily Dickinson in Kansas City on May 21. On June 1, former poet laureate Robert Pinsky will talk about Robert Frost and William Carlos Williams in New Orleans. Other participating poets include Paul Muldoon, Susan Stewart, Carl Phillips, Mary Jo Salter, and Adam Zagajewski.

Branching Out is an extension of Poets House’s Poetry in the Branches, a program that began in 1994 and offers resources, training, and consulting to librarians in order to integrate poetry into New York public libraries. PSA’s contribution to Branching Out has been to expand a program of its own: Poetry in Motion, which was launched in 1992 and places posters featuring poems in the spaces usually reserved for advertisements in subway cars and buses in over a dozen cities across the country. For Branching Out, PSA will install posters with poems by both the participating poet and the subject, along with information about the event, in the participating cities.

PSA also designed a Web site for Branching Out, while both organizations have contributed content. Visitors can find schedule information as well as biographical material about the poets involved. The result, says Lee Briccetti, executive director of Poets House, is a “much more integrated poetry experience” for the host cities.

“Much of our programming has a natural kinship,” says PSA executive director Alice Quinn of the partnership. “We just separately felt that both organizations are interested in education but don’t specialize in that, and so the avenues we had—libraries, buses—could be combined.”

So far the partnership has worked well for both organizations. “They seem to be working pretty seamlessly together,” says poet Vijay Seshadri, who kicked off the program on April 4 with a talk on Elizabeth Bishop in Fresno. “I don’t sense two organizations here, but one, probably because of the competence and unfussiness of everyone involved.” Like all of the presentations, Seshadri’s talk on Bishop was tailored for a general audience and focused on the poet’s “visionary quality,” using her biography and ambitions as starting points.

Edward Hirsh, who talked about Federico García Lorca in Houston on April 13 and will travel to Fresno for another presentation on the Spanish poet this summer, says the nonacademic format is an important element of the program. “My talk will have to be accurate in a scholarly way, but it is not for scholars. There’s a passionate immediacy that only a poet can bring,” he says.

Founded in 1985, Poets House is a literary center and poetry archive that sponsors various events in New York City. PSA is a 95-year-old membership organization that sponsors a series of national awards. For more information about Branching Out, visit the Web site at www.poetrybranchingout.org.

Daniel Nester is the author of God Save My Queen and God Save My Queen II, both published by Soft Skull Press. He also edits Unpleasant Event Schedule.

Q&A: Alice Quinn’s Poetic Providence

Q&A: Briccetti’s Big Move Downtown

by

Timothy Schaffert

January/February 2007
1.1.07
In Print and Online

By the time Poets House, the country’s largest library devoted to poetry, moves from SoHo—the New York City neighborhood where it has been located for the past sixteen years—to the planned community of Battery Park City in lower Manhattan, its ever-expanding archive of poetry books and literary journals will likely exceed fifty thousand volumes. (And that’s not counting its extensive collection of multimedia materials.) The relocation, scheduled to take place this summer, follows a successful $6.5 million fund-raising campaign led by the nonprofit literary organization’s board and staff, including executive director Lee Briccetti.

Some of that money will be used to design and build the new space—two floors in excess of ten thousand square feet—and fund the organization’s annual schedule of more than fifty public programs, including readings, seminars, and workshops. One thing the money will not be used for is rent: In October 2004, Battery Park City Authority, the state public corporation that oversees the ninety-two-acre neighborhood and seeks to ensure the diversity of its community, granted Poets House a free lease through the year 2069—a savings of about $60 million.

Poet Stanley Kunitz and arts administrator Elizabeth Kray founded Poets House in 1985 with the mission of nurturing poets and creating a space that would offer greater access to poetry, as well as build visibility for the genre. Kunitz, who published more than ten books, two of which won the Pulitzer Prize, and who twice served as the poet laureate of the United States, died last year just a few months short of his 101st birthday. According to Briccetti, Kunitz, an avid gardener, was moved when he heard that the new site for Poets House would include a garden. “Stanley was very excited and felt that he had lived to see the permanent home. He kept threatening to live to be 102 so he could see the final product.”

A little over half a year before its scheduled grand opening, Briccetti spoke about the expansion and relocation of Poets House.

How does the rent-free space affect the goals you’ve set for the organization?
It’s great because we’re going to be putting all of that money—I don’t even want to say how much we were paying [in SoHo] but it was a lot, a lot—into the library and into the programs.

How did this move come to be?
We were working together for almost five years, telling everyone our story and seeing if we could find a solution. We met with the head of the New York State Council on the Arts—we had already been considered one of their important groups—and he said, “I’m going to help you.” He started calling people for us. We made the right connection down at Battery Park City—not that we didn’t work for it; it was a long courtship—and they asked to see a business plan. We really hustled and put together a plan that they said was the best business plan they’d ever seen. We hired a consultant; we did this all very quickly.

What has Stanley Kunitz left behind with Poets House?
Stanley said at one of his last meetings with me that he felt that the community building he left stands with his oeuvre. He really lived a life as a builder of others and a builder of community. He said on more than one occasion that when he did not find the community he needed, he felt compelled to make it.

Timothy Schaffert is the author of three novels. His latest, Devils in the Sugar Shop, is forthcoming from Unbridled Books in June. He lives in Omaha, Nebraska, where he is the director of the Downtown Omaha Lit Fest.

Poets House and PSA Branch Out

Poetry Society Celebrates Centennial

by

Rebecca Keith

May/June 2010
5.1.10
In Print and Online

In the winter of
1910, at New York City’s Ansonia Hotel, a group of poets, editors, and
artists
gathered for the first planning meeting of the Poetry Society of America
(PSA), a fledgling organization that
would be “a public
forum for the advancement, enjoyment, and understanding of poetry.” On
that
evening a hundred years ago, the founders, including poet Edwin Markham,
painter Leon Dabo, and Current
Literature editor Edward J. Wheeler, argued, naturally, over
words—would
they be a society or a club?—but ultimately chose to follow the model
of the
Poetry Society of England, which had been founded a year earlier.

The PSA didn’t immediately gain respect from
the public—it
was even mocked by reporters as “the Poets’ Union.” As inaugural
secretary
Jessie Belle Rittenhouse recalled in her 1934 memoir, My
House of Life, “This
was still the period when one had to be
apologetic about poetry, when the poet was considered a variant from the
normal, while there was still a subconscious feeling in the public mind
that he
was a weakling.” Within the PSA’s
first few years, however, as more famous poets attended meetings (Amy
Lowell,
Ezra Pound, and W. B. Yeats among them) the organization began to win
more
respect, and more members—growing from forty poets in 1910 to more than
twelve
hundred today. Now thriving, it is the oldest poetry organization in the
country, with a popular awards series, a full schedule of forty to fifty
readings and other events each year, and other programming.

Under the direction of Alice Quinn, and with the
help of
staff members Rob Casper and Brett Fletcher Lauer, the PSA
is marking its centennial this year with a number of special events that
are
being held across the country. Among them are four regional
celebrations—Poets
of the American Midwest, in Minneapolis on May 14; Poets of New England,
in
Boston on September 23; Poets of the American South, in Atlanta on
October 7;
and Poets of the American West, in Los Angeles on November 30—that will
feature all-star lineups. For more information about the PSA’s
centennial events, visit the Web site at www.poetrysociety.org.

Rebecca Keith is a Brooklyn, New York–based writer and
the
cofounder of Mixer Reading and Music Series.

Poets House and PSA Branch Out
Q&A: Alice Quinn’s Poetic Providence

Q&A: O’Rourke to Edit the Yale Review

by

Dana Isokawa

May/June 2019
4.10.19
In Print and Online

In July poet and critic Meghan O’Rourke will take over as the editor of the Yale Review, Yale University’s quarterly of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and criticism. O’Rourke, who has been an editor at the New Yorker, the Paris Review, and Slate, succeeds acting editor Harold Augenbraum, who stepped in when the publication’s editor since 1991, the late poet J. D. McClatchy, retired in June 2017. A few months before her official start date, O’Rourke discussed her plans for the review and her approach to editing. In addition to numerous pieces of criticism, O’Rourke has published three poetry collections, most recently Sun in Days (Norton, 2017), and one memoir, The Long Goodbye (Riverhead Books, 2011).

When will your first issue come out?
October. It coincides with the two-hundredth anniversary of the review, which is a wonderful occasion for me to start as editor. It’s fun to begin with a beginning and celebrate a very long period of time at the same time.

Does a two-hundred-year legacy feel overwhelming?
It’s so overwhelming that it’s freeing. Seventy-five years might be more overwhelming, but two hundred years is so capacious and broad, it reminds you that a magazine is a made thing that reflects the passions and currents and ideas of its time and is shaped by the people who work there. There’s a kind of permission in that two hundred years. So the expectation I bring is not so much to maintain a particular identity but to make the journal be to its time what it has been to its time at some of its highest moments. Also, although the magazine is not oriented toward Yale, it is incubated at Yale; I want the magazine to be to its world what Yale is to its world, which is a place of rigorous, creative inquiry that holds itself to the highest standards.

What do you think is a journal’s ideal relationship to its time?
The answer is different for different journals. But the Yale Review is uniquely situated to be a space for the best creative and literary writing to be side by side with passionate, personal, and political criticism—the review has always had a robust back-of-the-book, where the critics’ section is housed. The relationship between the creative enterprise and the critical enterprise is exciting because they are two almost antithetical modes of inquiry. Poems and stories can offset the tendency of the polemicizing, op-ed culture we have around us—not that we’re going to be running op-eds. But there’s something wonderful about modes that coexist in the same journal as oil and water to each other; there’s something exciting about that tension between those modalities because it can add up to a larger world of exploration.

When you’re putting together an issue, will you take that literally? Will you, for example, publish a poem that addresses a topic and a review of a book about that same topic? Or how might the creative and the critical speak to one another in the review?
Less literal than that. We will have theme issues where we use a word—almost the way a poet might—to riff editorially in our thinking. For example, I’m thinking about an issue focused on documents and documentation. Right now, because of the news, we’re all thinking about what it means to be undocumented in America in a specific way. It’s led me to think about literature as document: What does literature document? What goes undocumented? What does it mean to try to document not only what we know about ourselves and our time, but what we can’t know about ourselves and our time? And how does a journal situate itself in that space? It’s also this moment where both fiction and poetry have this fascination with the claims of nonfiction—I’m thinking of Knausgård, Rachel Cusk, Sheila Heti, and the current of autofiction. Novelists are saying, “I’ve gotten tired of making things up.” We also have poets who are using found documents and exploring docupoetics, so it seems like a moment to think through the relationship between imaginative literature and literal documents.  

The great challenge of editing a literary journal—or a political and literary journal, which I hope the Yale Review will be—is to figure out how to publish an assortment of really good pieces that add up to something more than a slightly incidental aesthetic. That point to aspects of our cultural experience that we know but maybe haven’t named or aspects of the discourse that are hypocritical or unrigorously explored.

Having many different modes of considering that same question will hopefully lead to a richer understanding, yes?
Yes, and complicate an understanding we might have. As the culture editor at Slate in the early 2000s, where I essentially ran half a magazine and helped build that section and what it meant to be writing cultural criticism on the web, that was still a new question—what are the cultural phenomena we think we understand but don’t look at very closely or have only looked at a little? That’s also what interests me as a writer and led me to write about grief in The Long Goodbye. Grieving had radically changed in American culture, and while we had this idea of grieving, no one had fully unpacked it. Scholars had, but it hadn’t been fully looked at in cultural criticism. And suddenly there was a wave of us all saying, “Hey, this is really strange. Let’s look at how we grieve.” So I’m interested in the journal being a space where that looking a second time can happen. 

What other topics besides documentation do you want to cover in the journal?
I’m starting to figure that out. Another thing on my mind is the word antisocial—what does that even mean? We live in a moment where we are bombarded by the social. And there’s been a lot of discussion about Facebook’s role in the last election. So is antisocial an interesting word from which to begin thinking about modes of literature? And in my own work I’ve been writing about chronic illness, so I’m interested in intersections between the medical world and the world of literature, as well as medicine as a culture in itself. I expect that interest will find its way into the review somehow and not just because I’m interested in it—all these people are writing books about the experience of having a poorly understood illness, as well as the social context of medicine and what it means to be a woman and/or person of color searching for answers in a system that comes with a lot of unconscious bias. That narrative is emerging in the culture. 

One of the great pleasures of editing a journal like the Yale Review, which comes out four times a year, is that there’s not a pressure to be timely like at Slate where I was publishing daily. I have this wonderful opportunity to take the long view as an editor. But it’s important, as I was saying before, that we’re not merely collecting good pieces that come together in an incidental way, but finding a way to curate them so that there’s some sense of the urgency of the moment, but not in a way that feels merely timely. Hopefully it could also feel timeless. How do we collect the artifacts of our moment and also assign and encourage and facilitate the writing of pieces that will speak to us deeply about what’s happening right now in the world we live in? Sometimes pieces of poetry or fiction do that by not seeming to speak at all to the world we live in—so we’re not going to publish poems that have an expiration date of 2019 or 2020. I hope we’ll publish lasting poems and lasting fiction that somehow reflect something about us in our moment.

Are you planning other changes to the format or coverage of the print review?
I’m planning to revamp the back of the book. Right now it’s a wonderful group of reviews of poetry, music, books, and film, but I want to shake it up a little and publish an idea in review, where we’ll talk about something like the antisocial or culpability—there was a lot of discussion about culpability last fall around Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing: How do we think about culpability? Who is culpable and when? So maybe we’ll have a few different people write about this theme, and let those pieces not respond, but resonate with one another. And I want these pieces to touch down in actual lived cultural and political experiences. So there will be real texts under review, but it might be a text like the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings alongside a novel, alongside Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive, alongside Jericho Brown’s The Tradition. It is important that we put together the pieces of our experience that are often left separate.

What tone do you want the journal to strike?
I think of the journal as a house I’m building into which I’m inviting a very dynamic, creative, playful, whimsical, argumentative group of people who are all going to be having a conversation. And the journal has the tone of that party. A tone of voluble and passionate conversation.

What are you planning to do on the digital side of the review?
We are planning to launch a new website by early 2020, which will publish original content alongside work from the journal. More broadly we are rethinking how the Yale Review can use different platforms for the delivery of ideas, criticism, and dialogue. To that end we will be developing new columns and podcasts for the website, albeit in a highly curated way, since we’re a small staff. To me the digital review will be as important as the print journal, and it offers a fresh and exciting set of possibilities, precisely because it is a medium different from print. But it serves the same mission: A twentieth-century journal, if you think about it, was just a technology for the delivery and dissemination of passionate, excellent criticism and literature. The question is, What does the web allow us to do better and differently?

What writers or trends in writing are you excited about?
Now is a true moment of fertility in American literature, partly because the nature of gatekeeping has changed. That change allows for a much greater diversity of voices that desperately needs to be there and also brings a great diversity of style and stance and position from which to make formal aesthetic exploration. Sometimes the media can talk a little too reductively about diversity; one of the things that gets overlooked is that diversity of people brings diversity of aesthetics and diversity of approaches. What more could one want? Right now is a wonderful moment to be an editor.      

Do you think the editors of a journal should be backstage, or should they be out in front? How open and transparent do you want to be as an editor to your readers?
Because the Yale Review and its readers form a kind of imagined community, especially as we move ever more online, I’d like our readers to know the people behind this enterprise—to get to know our staff, who, I hope, will be doing interviews and editing and writing too. I will sometimes write an editor’s letter to frame issues and share our goals and the questions raised for us, say, in assembling a special issue. In terms of transparency, which I take to refer to questions of how we select what we select, or why we publish what we publish, I’d just say that, of course, there are certain issues where transparency is especially called for. In general, finding ways of representing different points of view is really important to me—far too many literary journals and general interest magazines still have lopsided representation, to put it mildly—and that includes being clear about our mission of engaged dialogue and our hope of discovering valuable new voices.

When you’re editing a piece—this is probably very different for a piece of criticism versus a poem or story—are there a certain set of questions you ask?
In criticism it’s important to have a certain muscularity and flexibility of thought. As a reader and writer of criticism, I want to know that even if one is writing in a passionate, argumentative way, everything has been considered. That I’m not writing or reading a piece that has been written only reflexively. I say that carefully because we live in a moment where we all feel a fair amount of outrage. We all see a certain amount of passionate engagement from all directions about the political moment, and the Internet is a place where we can indulge in that. I’m not saying that’s not important, but if we want to bring that level of passionate outrage to written criticism, there has to be a sense of consideration too. It’s the job of the editor to be an interlocutor for the critic and make sure the critic is saying what they mean as precisely as possible. When you edit criticism, you’re trying to make the argument as clear and sound as possible. There’s always a moment of arguing with yourself as a critic, which doesn’t necessarily need to be on the page but probably needs to happen to write the piece. 

When editing fiction and poetry, it’s more about trying to help the writer make a persuasive aesthetic object from nothing. As an editor, my role is not to be an interlocutor, but a mirror. To say, “This is a moment in the poem where I feel the poet making it instead of the object that has been made. The mystery disappears and the effort shows through.” Or, “The tone slips mysteriously,” or, “This section is actually unclear.”

When I started working as an editor at the New Yorker, I would always pretend like I understood everything. It took me a long time to realize as an editor it’s okay to be—in fact, you have to be—an honest reader. You have to say, “I really don’t understand this,” or, “I’m really bored on page four, and I kind of fell asleep there for a little bit.” You have to do it with the humility of your own personhood—it could just be you—but you’re trying to reflect back to the writer as honestly as possible something about your experience. You’re also trying to think as you read it, “Is this an experience others might have while reading this text? Am I identifying something that is getting in the way of it as a persuasive aesthetic object, or is this my own predilection?” Because those are two different things. We can never fully disentangle them, but we can try.

I’m curious about your use of the word “persuasive” in “persuasive aesthetic object”—persuasive of what?
Of its own madeness. I have this sort of spiritual relationship with poems and fiction—I think about Emily Dickinson saying, “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.” I don’t mean that a piece makes an argument that I agree with and I’ve been bullied into submission as a reader, but that it gives me that feeling. It’s that chill; it’s that sense of encountering a vision of the world that uncovers things you knew were there but never named before. I’m thinking of Taeko Kono’s Toddler Hunting and Other Stories, a fascinating book of short stories published in translation by New Directions. Many of the stories feature narrators that have deeply disturbing relationships with young children, and there’s something about the book and the way these women experience loneliness in the world that feels like it’s opening an aspect of experience that I knew was there, but I never had a name for. I don’t have the same sort of relationships that these characters do, but when I read it, I’m totally persuaded of its reality. That’s the kind of persuasion I mean. And that the poem or story has to be the way it is. Original literature is strange, and it often makes choices that another piece couldn’t make.

I love that as a description for how you feel when you read a great poem or story, but how do you feel when you read a really great piece of criticism?
There are different ways I feel. There’s the kind of criticism where you think, “Ah, I agree with every single thing here—thank you. You have named something and provided a structural framework for an intuition, a feeling, or argument I’ve been making but not as well.” Then there’s the piece that slightly changes your mind as you read it. Criticism is important because it gives us language for change, and it gives us language for reevaluation of long-held positions, which is crucial in the moment we’re living in. Especially as you get older, you have some reflexive positions, and good criticism can make you rethink something you’ve long believed, maybe without a lot of critical interrogation. Good criticism can be very uncomfortable to read. But you know it’s good if there’s a soundness to its own structure, its own architecture. And then there’s a kind of criticism that proceeds more associatively and is exciting in how it finds formal freedom in a genre that can be very conservative. There are some critics who can turn a piece of criticism almost into a work of literature. I love reading all these kinds of criticism—criticism that’s formally radical as well as criticism that’s not.

What do you find satisfying or exciting about editing?
As a writer and an editor, I’ve toggled between periods of more solitary writing and periods of more outward-oriented editing. There can be something very lonely and solipsistic and deranged about being a writer alone at your desk all day—the minute can become major, and the major can become minute. It’s like being a candle that burns itself up. So it’s satisfying to use my passion and knowledge and experience of having spent so much time with words on behalf of other people. 

A big thread in my nonfiction work is a resistance to a culture of individuality—I believe in a culture of care and community. It’s something we struggle with as Americans: how to figure out the relationship between individual ambition and the humanist mode of actually caring about one another. So I like the humanistic aspect of editing: being there for somebody and helping them because I have a knowledge base of thinking about this stuff for so long.

What kinds of editors inspire you?
Those who make a space for writers to be the best versions of themselves. I also learned a huge amount from Bill Buford, who was my boss at the New Yorker when I started. We’re very different temperamentally, but he cared so deeply about the pieces he worked on. Sometimes as an editor you’re tired, and it can be easy to read a piece and think, “This is great.” And sometimes that’s not the fidelity that the piece needs—sometimes it needs you to enter it and read it more deeply. And that can be exhausting. As a writer, my best editors have made me better but not changed me, which is a kind of magic. I aspire to that—not to impose my aesthetic, but to illuminate what’s there. Make you a better writer and thinker on the page. 

Is there anything from J. D. McClatchy’s approach or practice you hope to adopt yourself?
He was a wonderful champion to writers. I think Sandy published my first published piece, so I feel a wonderful sense of gratitude toward him. He believed in young writers and gave them a chance to write serious criticism and publish their poems and fiction. He believed passionately that the review needed to exist and continue existing, and he came on at a moment when there were some doubts about the review’s future. So every day I think about him in that sense—I don’t think it would be here without him. And I feel a similar passionate conviction already that the review should exist and continue existing for many years.

Do you think literary journals are in trouble? I’m thinking, for example, of Tin House announcing it will no longer publish a print quarterly. Is it getting harder for literary journals to sustain themselves?
I don’t know about “harder” or “in trouble,” but any literary journal in 2019 has to think deeply about what it is and what it is in relationship to the culture. The advent of the Internet as a technological change is probably similar to the printing press. We’re looking at a really massive, really fast, wide-scale change in communication. It has to affect literary journals. It would be foolish to say it didn’t. But it affects them in all kinds of ways. Publishing online is not the same thing as publishing in print; [both modes] have brought with them different kinds of conversation and communication. 

To give an example: When I starting working as an assistant at the New Yorker in 1997, if someone wanted to write a response to a piece, we chose whose words got published. We reflected back to the world what the world thought of a piece we ran. We reflected what the world thought of the New Yorker. That is not true anymore. Right now I could write a response to anything. Anyone could write anything in response to anything published. And though there’s not totally equal access because of things like search engine optimization, it is much easier for many voices to be heard. That’s a great thing, but the question then becomes: Now that so many voices can come into the conversation, how do we have that conversation in a way where we’re not all yelling at one another? We have to think about this as editors—what does it mean if we’re in a much more democratic space? What are the opportunities there? For the Yale Review, I’m thinking about how to build in a space for conversation and response. So are magazines in trouble? It’s hard in ways that it wasn’t before, and it’s important to think about what kind of editorial reckoning has to happen around this shift. It’s challenging but also exciting.

 

Dana Isokawa is the associate editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.

Meghan O’Rourke

(Credit: Tony Gale)

Q&A: The New Editor of the Paris Review

by

Dana Isokawa

November/December 2018
10.10.18
In Print and Online

In April, Emily Nemens, then the coeditor of the Southern Review in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, was named the new editor of the Paris Review. Nemens started the new position at the Paris Review’s New York City office in June and succeeds Lorin Stein, who resigned in December 2017 amid allegations of sexual misconduct toward female staffers and writers. Nemens takes over a storied publication that is much more than a print quarterly—the magazine regularly runs online content, produces videos and a podcast, hosts events, and publishes books through Paris Review Editions. A few weeks before the Fall 2018 issue, her first, came out, Nemens spoke about her plans for the Paris Review and her approach to editing.

Are there any new series or forms of coverage for the print quarterly in the works?
The guest poetry editor program is really exciting. The Winter Issue, which comes out in December, will be with Shane McCrae picking the poetry. I’m really excited to work with him. I think the magazine does so much really well, and I don’t want to close the door on that—I really just want to support it. So I think there will be incremental growth across all the sections of the magazine. I’d really like to reengage with the essay, which wasn’t always in the magazine, so making a point to reconnect with that form is a priority. I have a visual arts background, so I’d like to collaborate with the arts community to not just figure out striking covers, but to really engage with what’s going on in the art world. For fiction, I’m trying to broaden the kinds of stories that are featured and the emotional motivation and narrative arcs of the stories. There’s a lot going on in fiction now, and the magazine of course reflects my taste and my staff’s taste, but it’s exciting to broaden the kinds of stories told.

How do you want to broaden the review’s fiction? 
I think there are different kinds of motivations for stories. Reading the archive, I felt like we hit on the same notes too often in terms of what motivated characters to set out on their journeys. I want to think more about different emotional needs and motivations. There is definitely a theme of loneliness in some of the stories [in the Fall 2018 issue], which I think might be the cultural moment. I read a lot of stories about social media and isolation—to the point where I actually had two really good stories that revolved around the same thing, so one will be in [the Winter 2018 issue]—but I want to think about different inspirations and aspirations for characters in different forms. My personal taste is towards a very long and complicated short story—something in the lines of a Deborah Eisenberg or Adam Johnson story where there’s an entire world—but the Fall issue also features an eight-hundred-word story and a four-hundred-word story. So I’m really thinking about the mechanics of the form and how they can be stretched or compressed and what happens when you do that. 

What notes do you think were hit too often in the fiction archive?
There are so many good stories in the archive, and I don’t want to discount that. I do think that there were a lot of New York stories, and there were a lot of romantic attainment stories about finding a partner. That pursuit is a huge part of life, but it’s not the only part of life. There’s also family, there’s also career, there’s also travel, there’s also adventure, there’s also physical attainment in terms of mountain climbing, or whatever it is. There are a lot more things than winding up in the sack, to put it a little too crassly. So I was just reading with that in mind. 

How many stories did you read for the Fall 2018 issue? 
A few hundred, I’d say. Which is pretty normal. When I was at the Southern Review, I put eyes on every story. And it was about 1 or 2 percent acceptance, so right along those lines. 

The Southern Review and the Paris Review publish writers from all over the country and the world, but both seem like journals very tied to a region—the Southern Review to the South and the Paris Review to New York City.
The Paris Review is a real New York institution and that’s really exciting, but I don’t think it needs to be exclusively that. I think it can maintain its ties and relationships to the engine of New York but also bring more people into the fold. 

From working at both these journals, do you think the region where a journal’s office is located affects the aesthetic of the journal?
I don’t think it has to. I think it’s really in the perspective of the editors. In certain times of the Southern Review’s history, it was run by Southern scholars who every five years—more often that that—would edit special issues that were just on the state of literature in the South. And that was great and important for the magazine at the time and did a lot to establish it as a powerhouse in regional literature. But when I was there, for the five years I was editing the magazine, my focus was really more on the short story and finding the best short stories and featuring them and celebrating the form. So I wasn’t distancing myself from the legacy, but I wasn’t emphasizing it. So I think the same can happen here, where I don’t want to distance myself from the city and the literature here and everything that’s happening culturally in the city—but know that we can do something else too. And we’ll still exist in this universe. We’ll still be doing programming in the city, but I think we’ll bring the magazine to other events. I’m going to be at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference in Portland and doing some public programming in Philadelphia and out in California. I don’t want to turn my back in New York and all the wonderful things happening here, but I think having lived and worked in a place where there aren’t as many cultural opportunities makes me want to spread the wealth.

When you were at the Southern Review, you were coeditor with Jessica Faust, and it seemed like the two of you had a really great collaborative process from start to finish. What is it like adjusting to being more on your own?
I’m at the top of the masthead, but I’m still working with a really talented group of colleagues. The buck stops with me, and the editorial selection stops with me, but my editorial assistant, for example, shared a story that ended up in the Fall issue, and my associate editor did, as well. It’s different. It’s definitely reorienting. I love the coeditor structure just in terms of my personal approach to hierarchy—so I’m bringing some of that collaborative spirit and collegiality to the magazine, which feels really good, and I think is refreshing here. 

After Lorin Stein resigned in December, the journal’s board members released a statement saying that they had “revised [the Paris Review’s] code of conduct and anti-harassment policies.” How do you hope to build on that?
The board did a lot of good and important work before I ever got here. I was brought up to speed on all of those new policies, and there was great workplace sensitivity training and a lot of other resources brought in this spring. So I feel like a lot of the hard work was done before I arrived. But understanding really what it means to be in a safe and collaborative and collegial work environment and emphasizing that every day—that’s where I come in.

How do you think you can achieve that?
It starts and ends with respecting everyone in the office no matter what their role is or how long they’ve been here. I think it’s being sensitive and empathetic to people’s work, but also to their lives outside of work without prying. And understanding that we’re all colleagues, but we’re also people, and just having that be my baseline as a boss. I’ve been trying to systematically work my way around the office and figure out with people what they’re working on, what they want to be working on, and what their short- and long-term goals are. I think starting with that and making sure we’re having regular check-ins sets a precedent for this as a dynamic and caring place.

Emily Nemens

(Credit: Murray Greenfield )

What does a good relationship between a writer and an editor look like to you? 
I approach relationships with my writers with a lot of enthusiasm and curiosity. I’m a pretty—I’m not going to say tough—but I’m a pretty engaged editor, and I do a lot of edits. I think the only way for those to go over well is if you deliver them with kindness. And usually that works—it doesn’t always work—but usually that works. I also bring that sort of relationship on the page to conversations and relationships [in person]. And even if I don’t connect with a writer on a particular piece, I try to support the work and the person making the work. I spend a lot of time saying, “No, but please keep in touch,” and, “No, I’m not going to publish this, but I care about your work, and I’m excited about it, so let me keep reading it.”

What do you think is the most helpful thing you can give a writer?
The platform of the magazine is huge, and I know that, and I’m so excited about that. We just lost Philip Roth, and we published him at twenty-five, which really made his career or started it. So I’ll acknowledge that. But on a personal level, I really love taking a story that is amazing and that I love and spending some time with it and making it just a smidge better. And showing the writer ways they can grow and improve. I was recently at the Sewanee conference, and a writer I’d published five or six years ago said, “You know, the way you line-edited made me think about the way I write, and I’ve written differently ever since that interaction.” And that melted this editor’s heart. But giving people a new platform or encouraging people to keep going even if they’re not quite there—that’s an easy grab for me, to just be honest and enthusiastic about people’s work. And I don’t know that the writing community always has that generosity.

How would you describe your editing style? It sounds like you’re a really close line-editor.
I am. If I see a really big structural issue I’ll generally ask about it and send more general notes. I always want to test the water if I want to do an overhaul—someone might feel that their story is perfect the way it is, and that’s fine—but if they’re up for it, I’ll send notes broadly. I don’t have time to do that with every story, of course, so I have to be kind of judicious about developmental edits. Usually it’s just one story an issue, or if I see two or three things that [have] developmental issues, I might space them out across a few issues. And then when a story feels close, that’s when I get in there and really think about each line and the pacing of every scene. I learned how to edit from Jessica Faust, a poet and a poetry editor. She was my mentor when I was in graduate school, and we then became colleagues. When you’re editing poetry you’re really considering every piece of punctuation, so I brought that over to editing fiction and interviews and everything else. It’s tedious, but I love it. 

It’s hard to think about the Paris Review and not think about George Plimpton. Is there anything from his vision or editing style that you hope to adopt or carry on?
He looms so large. This is Sarah Dudley Plimpton’s rug [points to rug beneath her desk]. This was at the Plimpton home. I feel like I have a strong feeling of his work, but I’m still really learning the details of his legacy. One of my favorite things about this past Spring, and after my appointment, was hearing all the Plimpton stories from all the writers who had encountered him and whose careers he’d helped. That was so much fun to get these stories. I feel like I’m still gathering those and talking with other editors who worked closely with him and getting to know more of his leadership style. That’s an ongoing project. I read his book Paper Lion years ago, and as a person who likes literature but is writing about sports, he was a guiding light for me before the Paris Review was on the radar as a place I could work. So I feel really fortunate to be carrying on that tradition of writing. But that’s secondary to learning how he ran this magazine and how he built this magazine from a really ambitious place. I feel like the journal has been able to carry that ambition and thrive.

Speaking of yourself as a writer, you recently signed a deal with Farrar, Straus and Giroux for your book about spring training, The Cactus League. As an editor, writer, and visual artist, do you find that the roles complicate or complement one other?
I’m an editor first. I spend most of my time doing that, so when I have the opportunity to write or draw I’m sort of a snake and I just gobble—I have a really big meal and get a lot of work done. Because I’m not one of those writers who sits down and writes every morning. I wish I was, but I edit every morning! And that feels really good. But the thing is, working with language makes your language better. Working on other people’s stories—of course it takes away in terms of number of hours from my writing practice—but I feel like every time I do sit down to write I have a bigger tool kit. So I’m really grateful for that interplay. And the visual arts practice that I love—it will always be part of my life, but it’s sort of tertiary right now. And that’s fine.

At Poets & Writers we have a database of literary journals, and right now it lists almost 1,300 journals, which to me seems like a very daunting number to both writers and editors. Does that number surprise you or seem too high? 
That is a really big number, but I think it’s fine. Every journal is run by people who want to make a thing and put it out in the world, and I don’t think there’s any reason to stop that or hinder that progress. Obviously that’s more than I can read in a year. But I think with elbow grease, some strategy, and the right mix of editorial leadership and resources, those journals will find the right audiences—and if they can’t find those audiences, maybe there will be 1,250 next year. I don’t mean that in a glib way; I think that every experiment is worth it. Having seen a lot of great journals close for reasons of resources or lack thereof, I’m really excited that the Internet and other means have reinvigorated the form.

 

Dana Isokawa is the associate editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.

Q&A: Baker Seeks Multiplicity of Voices

by

Namrata Poddar

September/October 2018
8.15.18
In Print and Online

In August Atria Books will release Everyday People: The Color of Life, an anthology of short stories by emerging and established writers of color and indigenous people. Edited by Jennifer Baker, a writer and longtime advocate for minority representation in literature—she has worked for the nonprofit We Need Diverse Books and hosts the podcast Minorities in Publishing—the collection features work by more than a dozen writers, including Courttia Newland, Yiyun Li, Mitchell S. Jackson, and Nelly Rosario. Baker took on the project after Brook Stephenson, the writer and bookseller who conceived of the anthology, died in 2015. While Stephenson planned for the anthology to feature only Black voices, Baker expanded the project’s focus and began soliciting other people of color and indigenous writers for stories shortly after the 2016 presidential election. The result is a collection of stories that depict the modern lives of people of color as they struggle with contemporary social, political, familial, and personal issues. Just before the book’s release, Baker discussed her work on the anthology and her connection to its mission as a writer and editor of color.

Everyday People highlights the universality of human experience while also mostly adhering to contemporary social realism. When you were soliciting stories for the book, did you intend for this? 
It was difficult for me to ask writers of color and indigenous writers to contribute to Everyday People so soon after the presidential election. It was and is a bad time, especially for marginalized people. The contributors are writers I contacted because their work contains a multiplicity of voices and topics. The fact that, in an increasingly tumultuous moment in history, people who are directly affected can create a high level of work in a finite amount of time that continually reflects our humanity speaks to their talent and professionalism. I gave no firm parameters to the writers for their stories, which may have helped them in the end to write broadly or tap into subjects that really speak to them.

Do you think social realism will continue to dominate the future of the short story?
That depends on the author. In Everyday People, Courttia Newland’s and Allison Mills’s stories have speculative and fantastical elements rooted in culture and place that are political, personal, and real. To me those stories also encapsulate our society today by focusing on elections or sudden loss and how to get through loss. They may not be what publishing defines as “contemporary” or “true life,” yet they are identifiable, especially to a person of color or indigenous person.

The 2017 VIDA Count shows that in most of the U.S. literary magazines surveyed more than two-thirds of women and nonbinary contributors were white. Within this landscape, what do you see as the future of multiethnic American short fiction?
The lack of representation in the industry prevents more marginalized stories from being seen by a wider audience. It wouldn’t, I hope, curtail the fact that marginalized folks are constantly creating and finding new routes for this. That said, unless we see some paramount change from the top down and from the bottom up in all areas of the industry, we won’t see a real change. 

In the wake of #MeToo controversies within the literary community, Junot Díaz’s story was dropped from the book. How did you come to this decision? 
Editors have a responsibility, in any and all capacity, to do what’s morally right and also what is right for the work they’re editing. As editors we have a hand in the titles we publish, and I quite literally have my name on this product. This is also an anthology; I’m not acting out of self-interest but for all those whose work is tied to this book. Hearing other women of color speak out about assault is not something I take lightly or something anyone should readily dismiss. As I told Atria when I made my decision, “This isn’t a PR move. It’s a moral one.” A friend suggested I replace this story with a list of writers of color, namely women, which I expanded as much as I could with nonbinary and transgender writers of color. It seemed the best course of action to not remedy a problem but to make use of the space in a book to further highlight writers of color and indigenous writers. It serves as a resource that reflects as many people as I could find—and while I know I missed so many wonderful artists in my scramble to create this list in two weeks, I hope it’s at least an indicator of how we can further uplift those who don’t have the platform.

What were some of the biggest joys and challenges in compiling an anthology like Everyday People?
The biggest joy was finishing it. Once contributors’ stories were finalized, I mapped out where the stories would go. Seeing first-pass proofs was rewarding because then the final contributors saw the entirety of the book and how it came together. Receiving positive reviews for Everyday People has also been incredibly heartening. The challenges were constant problem solving and also feeling the weight placed on Black women both personally but also nationwide during this time. Yet another challenge was when I experienced misogyny or hesitation to recognize privilege or when I recognized I should’ve done things earlier like utilize sensitivity readers for stories because something felt off to me.

How does wearing the editorial hat impact your own creative writing?
That I’m a very precise person makes me a strong editor and a slow writer. The inner workings of the editorial mind can be [preoccupied with]: “What does it all mean?” And in the framework of a story that doesn’t mean a narrative gets tied together with a bow, but that it culminates in an experience that seems honest for the work. So, in a way, my work as an editor complements my writing because it means I come to the page with purpose and am aware of when things aren’t working. At times it can impede upon my process because I may continually wonder: “Well, is that good enough?”

 

Namrata Poddar is the interviews editor for Kweli, where she curates a series called “Race, Power and Storytelling.” Her fiction and nonfiction has appeared in Longreads, Literary Hub, Electric Literature, VIDA Review, the Progressive, and elsewhere. Her debut story collection, Ladies Special, Homebound, was a finalist for Feminist Press’s 2018 Louise Meriwether First Book Award and is forthcoming from Speaking Tiger Books.

Jennifer Baker

(Credit: Murray Greenfield )

Q&A: A Merger of Literary, Legal Minds
Q&A: Kulka Curates America’s Library
Q&A: Sarah Browning Splits This Rock

Q&A: A Merger of Literary, Legal Minds
Q&A: Sokolowski’s Inspiring Word Work

Q&A: MacDowell’s Young Set to Retire

by

Dana Isokawa

March/April 2019
2.13.19
In Print and Online
Update: February 20, 2019. The MacDowell Colony has announced that Philip Himberg, the former artistic director for the Sundance Institute’s Theatre Program, will succeed Cheryl A. Young as the organization’s executive director, effective June 1.
 

This spring, after twenty-two years as the executive director of the MacDowell Colony, one of the nation’s most prestigious residency programs for writers and artists, Cheryl A. Young will retire. Having joined the nonprofit arts colony in 1988 as its director of development, Young was named its leader in 1997 and oversaw MacDowell through a time of notable growth. During her time at the colony, the organization’s net assets increased from $5 million to $44 million, and the number of annual residencies at the colony, located in Peterborough, New Hampshire, rose by 35 percent. Last July the organization opened a new office and gallery space in New York City to showcase the work of past residents and expand its reach. With the search for her successor underway, Young spoke about her tenure at MacDowell and the future of the colony.

What are you most proud of achieving during your tenure at MacDowell?
I’m really pleased with the number of people we’ve been able to help. We expanded into other disciplines more robustly, so film and theater are now a much bigger part of the program. I’m also really proud of the journalism initiative [that funds residencies for journalists], since we started working on that before this era of, let’s say, less respect for journalists. That work will make a huge difference, because their work will reach millions of people—and that can change policy. We’ve also been able to increase our financial aid and the number of residencies—we are able to take people whose work is not as present in the art world as it should be. About a third of the fellowships are for artists of color.  

What is ahead for MacDowell? 
Most of the ideas that are floating around have to do with removing barriers so people can participate in the arts and with making sure that people understand what happens at residencies. Nationally, MacDowell would like to be more visible as a supporter of the arts and to make sure that people understand that they’re welcome. So there’s a lot of work to do with people who don’t know about residency programs because they either don’t have artists in the family or didn’t go to graduate school. When the colony was starting in 1907, schoolchildren knew who Edward MacDowell—who founded the colony with his wife, Marian MacDowell—was as a composer, because music was part of schools’ curriculums. There were children’s books about him. And then Mrs. MacDowell took over the colony and went across the country raising funds through women’s groups and music clubs, and it was a more grassroots effort. I think that grassroots aspect, which starts in the schools and goes up through the first dozen years of what kids learn about the arts, is kind of critical. So it’s a challenge now. People who are participating in the arts understand [the importance of residencies], but there are a lot of people who are not participating in the arts. There’s definitely a diversity gap in terms of who participates, which means that if your family didn’t have trips to the library or go to live performances of music or go to museums, it really is all a mystery as to why and how to become an artist. There’s a lot of work to do that way. Our mission is written very broadly, and there are some things we can do visibility-wise that have to do with just saying: Living artists need support. So we’ve always been out front with that. That’s how the colony was built. We didn’t have an endowment. Mrs. MacDowell just went out and raised funds. And did it by going basically door-to-door, saying, America needs a place for its artists.

Has the MacDowell residency model changed much since its inception? 
We try to support all different disciplines—that’s a core value, because artists have something to say to one another regardless of how they’re making—and we try to [maintain] the retreat aspect, which is: Remove all interruptions and let a person—without pressure from the marketplace—sit down and do something without anyone saying no. Not their agent, not their spouse or partner—just all yes. It’s all about yes. That hasn’t changed at all. The big difference that I see is that the residency field has grown enormously. When I started there were about eighteen programs and very few international ones, most of them run by American foundations. Now there are thousands all over the world. There are also more artists than ever before—in some ways it’s the best of times. But if you look at the U.S. census, there are around a million creative artists, and there are less than ten thousand residencies, so that means one out of a hundred is going to able to go to a residency. Artists are some of the most highly trained people, but the support for them is not commensurate with their skill level. You need residencies. There’s no way to support the arts economy without them. And everyone would be a lot worse off if we didn’t have residencies helping to support artists. Half the people who go to MacDowell make less than twenty thousand dollars a year; they’re right at the poverty line. 

What is your idea of a healthy arts culture?
In order for artists to thrive and an arts culture to thrive, you need a society that values art. That can only happen if art becomes part of people’s lives and value systems early on. And then you need leadership that reinforces it. The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) is incredibly important [in that respect]; when it was created the whole point was that the country deserves great art, and we should set an example by supporting it and directing people’s gaze toward art that’s new and wonderful and part of our history. And the third thing you need is the opportunity for everybody to participate and develop their talents and contribute—that comes from encouragement and scholarships, removing barriers, and making sure people value and respect artists, so that people will want to become artists.

Will people still want to become journalists if they think they’re all muckrakers? We’ve been through this before—if you study journalism history, there was a time when people were writing junk, and then we cleaned up the journalism that was out there and set standards and ethics. People really [started to] respect journalists. But because the leadership has changed, there’s a real danger that we’ll lose that. And I think that’s true of art, too. During the period when the NEA was told it was supporting blasphemous work and artists couldn’t possibly be contributing to society, we retreated from our education and arts funding. We survived it, the NEA survived it, but we’re definitely feeling the effects of it in how people view art. And now it’s starting to come back a little bit with this generation and the creative economy and all the conversations about what makes the quality of life better and how art plays into that. I think that opportunity is really important at this point because kids aren’t getting enough education about art in schools. So we’re going to have to figure out a way to retrofit that.

How do we encourage a respect for art in kids?
They need to have some happy memories—even if it isn’t from their parents. If you read about Baldwin, he didn’t have that much support at home, but he went into the library every day and read every book in the library. He did have some support, but it wasn’t like he had a role model specifically telling him he was going to be a great writer. And I think that can happen with so many people. I informally ask our artists in residency, “Were your parents artists?” Or “How did you decide to do this?” Because this is not an easy life. I get all different answers. Some say, “My uncle was a writer,” or “My grandfather was an architect.” Sometimes there’s a role model there. But sometimes there isn’t—in my family there was no role model whatsoever and my parents said, Are you kidding? How are you going to support yourself unless you marry someone? Nowadays that’s an unlikely answer—you wouldn’t expect someone to answer that they’re going to support themselves by getting married—but you still wouldn’t necessarily be able to give a better answer about [how you’ll make money]. That hasn’t changed. It’s still not good. In the sixties we posted a survey in the Saturday Evening Post about what it was like to be an artist, and we recently did the same survey, and it’s not changed. The number of hours artists spend on their art and their income—it’s not really changed, except maybe that student debt has increased.

What is next for you?
I am going to rest and truly retire for a few years—I have no burning desire to start a new career. What I’d like to do is volunteer my time to the same kinds of things I’ve been doing at MacDowell—work to help artists, work on equity—and do some traveling and other things one normally does when unfettered and alive. The parts I’ll miss are all the wonderful people here and the artists. I’m just hoping I can stay connected in other ways—being in the audience or writing notes to artists after I see something wonderful that they’ve done. I’ve always loved that part.

 

Dana Isokawa is the associate editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.

Cheryl A. Young

(Credit: Tony Gale)

Q&A: Mary Gannon Leads CLMP

by

Cat Richardson

January/February 2019
12.12.18
In Print and Online

In November, Mary Gannon, formerly the associate director and director of content for the Academy of American Poets, became the new executive director of the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP). She succeeds Jeffrey Lependorf as the head of the organization, which since its founding in 1967 has provided literary presses and magazines across the United States with direct technical assistance, guidance on everything from audience building to fund-raising, and a platform through which publishers can connect with readers, writers, and one another. Prior to her tenure at the Academy of American Poets, Gannon was the editorial director of Poets & Writers (she is also married to Poets & Writers’ editor in chief, Kevin Larimer). As she prepared to step into her new position, Gannon spoke about CLMP’s potential, its place in the literary landscape, and the impact of independent publishing.

What is CLMP’s most important role? 
Our main role is to help raise the organizational capacity of literary magazines and presses and to support them in whatever way that they need. But there is also a harder-to-define area of support that comes from creating the time and space for them to work together, have conversations, and discover the questions and problems that they, because they’re such a hardworking group, haven’t had time to think about. Intentional communication is a really valuable thing to help facilitate. We want to continue to make those spaces on a national level for members to collaborate, leverage one another’s strengths, and work toward this higher goal of making sure that literature thrives. 

What are the most significant needs of small presses and literary magazines right now? Distribution is a challenge, so figuring out how CLMP can help literary publishers get their work out is important. How can we make sure that their magazines and books are being sold in bookstores and seen in major online bookselling venues, so that all the good work they’re doing is actually getting out there and connecting with people? I think the other challenge will be the fund-raising aspect of it—trying to make sure that CLMP has the resources it needs to provide the resources for the network that it serves. 

Are there other challenges that you see on the horizon?
I think it is undeniable, especially with younger generations, that attention is shifting, and the way people learn and read is shifting, so making sure that publishers and producers of literary art are contending with that in a way that works for everybody is a challenge. I’m not really sure what that looks like yet, but it’s very interesting to me. Having said that, it’s also a really exciting time for independent and small publishing, because in the wake of the conglomeration of big publishers, it has created space for innovative, dedicated people to put together these projects that connect writers with audiences and make sure that literature is inclusive. Not to say that the big publishers aren’t also putting beautiful books and magazines into the world, but for a healthy ecosystem you need diversity. And I think that’s where the smaller publishers come into play. 

Do you have any big plans for CLMP?
I have a few ideas, but one of the things I need to do first is make sure I am totally up to speed on what members’ needs are. Running a small press or literary magazine is really hard work, and people are driven to it because they’re passionate about it, and they have a serious commitment to and love of the art form. Because of them we have access to all these stories that transform our lives, help us contend with what it means to be human, and make us better citizens. That’s a beautiful thing, and they deserve to be supported in every way they can. 

 

Cat Richardson is the editor in chief of Bodega. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, Narrative, Tin House, and elsewhere.

Mary Gannon

(Credit: Tony Gale)

Q&A: The New Editor of the Paris Review
Q&A: Baker Seeks Multiplicity of Voices
Q&A: A Merger of Literary, Legal Minds

Q&A: The New Editor of the Paris Review
Q&A: Baker Seeks Multiplicity of Voices

Q&A: Mary Gannon Leads CLMP

by

Cat Richardson

January/February 2019
12.12.18
In Print and Online

In November, Mary Gannon, formerly the associate director and director of content for the Academy of American Poets, became the new executive director of the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP). She succeeds Jeffrey Lependorf as the head of the organization, which since its founding in 1967 has provided literary presses and magazines across the United States with direct technical assistance, guidance on everything from audience building to fund-raising, and a platform through which publishers can connect with readers, writers, and one another. Prior to her tenure at the Academy of American Poets, Gannon was the editorial director of Poets & Writers (she is also married to Poets & Writers’ editor in chief, Kevin Larimer). As she prepared to step into her new position, Gannon spoke about CLMP’s potential, its place in the literary landscape, and the impact of independent publishing.

What is CLMP’s most important role? 
Our main role is to help raise the organizational capacity of literary magazines and presses and to support them in whatever way that they need. But there is also a harder-to-define area of support that comes from creating the time and space for them to work together, have conversations, and discover the questions and problems that they, because they’re such a hardworking group, haven’t had time to think about. Intentional communication is a really valuable thing to help facilitate. We want to continue to make those spaces on a national level for members to collaborate, leverage one another’s strengths, and work toward this higher goal of making sure that literature thrives. 

What are the most significant needs of small presses and literary magazines right now? Distribution is a challenge, so figuring out how CLMP can help literary publishers get their work out is important. How can we make sure that their magazines and books are being sold in bookstores and seen in major online bookselling venues, so that all the good work they’re doing is actually getting out there and connecting with people? I think the other challenge will be the fund-raising aspect of it—trying to make sure that CLMP has the resources it needs to provide the resources for the network that it serves. 

Are there other challenges that you see on the horizon?
I think it is undeniable, especially with younger generations, that attention is shifting, and the way people learn and read is shifting, so making sure that publishers and producers of literary art are contending with that in a way that works for everybody is a challenge. I’m not really sure what that looks like yet, but it’s very interesting to me. Having said that, it’s also a really exciting time for independent and small publishing, because in the wake of the conglomeration of big publishers, it has created space for innovative, dedicated people to put together these projects that connect writers with audiences and make sure that literature is inclusive. Not to say that the big publishers aren’t also putting beautiful books and magazines into the world, but for a healthy ecosystem you need diversity. And I think that’s where the smaller publishers come into play. 

Do you have any big plans for CLMP?
I have a few ideas, but one of the things I need to do first is make sure I am totally up to speed on what members’ needs are. Running a small press or literary magazine is really hard work, and people are driven to it because they’re passionate about it, and they have a serious commitment to and love of the art form. Because of them we have access to all these stories that transform our lives, help us contend with what it means to be human, and make us better citizens. That’s a beautiful thing, and they deserve to be supported in every way they can. 

 

Cat Richardson is the editor in chief of Bodega. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, Narrative, Tin House, and elsewhere.

Mary Gannon

(Credit: Tony Gale)

Q&A: The New Editor of the Paris Review
Q&A: Baker Seeks Multiplicity of Voices
Q&A: A Merger of Literary, Legal Minds

Q&A: MacDowell’s Young Set to Retire

by

Dana Isokawa

March/April 2019
2.13.19
In Print and Online
Update: February 20, 2019. The MacDowell Colony has announced that Philip Himberg, the former artistic director for the Sundance Institute’s Theatre Program, will succeed Cheryl A. Young as the organization’s executive director, effective June 1.
 

This spring, after twenty-two years as the executive director of the MacDowell Colony, one of the nation’s most prestigious residency programs for writers and artists, Cheryl A. Young will retire. Having joined the nonprofit arts colony in 1988 as its director of development, Young was named its leader in 1997 and oversaw MacDowell through a time of notable growth. During her time at the colony, the organization’s net assets increased from $5 million to $44 million, and the number of annual residencies at the colony, located in Peterborough, New Hampshire, rose by 35 percent. Last July the organization opened a new office and gallery space in New York City to showcase the work of past residents and expand its reach. With the search for her successor underway, Young spoke about her tenure at MacDowell and the future of the colony.

What are you most proud of achieving during your tenure at MacDowell?
I’m really pleased with the number of people we’ve been able to help. We expanded into other disciplines more robustly, so film and theater are now a much bigger part of the program. I’m also really proud of the journalism initiative [that funds residencies for journalists], since we started working on that before this era of, let’s say, less respect for journalists. That work will make a huge difference, because their work will reach millions of people—and that can change policy. We’ve also been able to increase our financial aid and the number of residencies—we are able to take people whose work is not as present in the art world as it should be. About a third of the fellowships are for artists of color.  

What is ahead for MacDowell? 
Most of the ideas that are floating around have to do with removing barriers so people can participate in the arts and with making sure that people understand what happens at residencies. Nationally, MacDowell would like to be more visible as a supporter of the arts and to make sure that people understand that they’re welcome. So there’s a lot of work to do with people who don’t know about residency programs because they either don’t have artists in the family or didn’t go to graduate school. When the colony was starting in 1907, schoolchildren knew who Edward MacDowell—who founded the colony with his wife, Marian MacDowell—was as a composer, because music was part of schools’ curriculums. There were children’s books about him. And then Mrs. MacDowell took over the colony and went across the country raising funds through women’s groups and music clubs, and it was a more grassroots effort. I think that grassroots aspect, which starts in the schools and goes up through the first dozen years of what kids learn about the arts, is kind of critical. So it’s a challenge now. People who are participating in the arts understand [the importance of residencies], but there are a lot of people who are not participating in the arts. There’s definitely a diversity gap in terms of who participates, which means that if your family didn’t have trips to the library or go to live performances of music or go to museums, it really is all a mystery as to why and how to become an artist. There’s a lot of work to do that way. Our mission is written very broadly, and there are some things we can do visibility-wise that have to do with just saying: Living artists need support. So we’ve always been out front with that. That’s how the colony was built. We didn’t have an endowment. Mrs. MacDowell just went out and raised funds. And did it by going basically door-to-door, saying, America needs a place for its artists.

Has the MacDowell residency model changed much since its inception? 
We try to support all different disciplines—that’s a core value, because artists have something to say to one another regardless of how they’re making—and we try to [maintain] the retreat aspect, which is: Remove all interruptions and let a person—without pressure from the marketplace—sit down and do something without anyone saying no. Not their agent, not their spouse or partner—just all yes. It’s all about yes. That hasn’t changed at all. The big difference that I see is that the residency field has grown enormously. When I started there were about eighteen programs and very few international ones, most of them run by American foundations. Now there are thousands all over the world. There are also more artists than ever before—in some ways it’s the best of times. But if you look at the U.S. census, there are around a million creative artists, and there are less than ten thousand residencies, so that means one out of a hundred is going to able to go to a residency. Artists are some of the most highly trained people, but the support for them is not commensurate with their skill level. You need residencies. There’s no way to support the arts economy without them. And everyone would be a lot worse off if we didn’t have residencies helping to support artists. Half the people who go to MacDowell make less than twenty thousand dollars a year; they’re right at the poverty line. 

What is your idea of a healthy arts culture?
In order for artists to thrive and an arts culture to thrive, you need a society that values art. That can only happen if art becomes part of people’s lives and value systems early on. And then you need leadership that reinforces it. The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) is incredibly important [in that respect]; when it was created the whole point was that the country deserves great art, and we should set an example by supporting it and directing people’s gaze toward art that’s new and wonderful and part of our history. And the third thing you need is the opportunity for everybody to participate and develop their talents and contribute—that comes from encouragement and scholarships, removing barriers, and making sure people value and respect artists, so that people will want to become artists.

Will people still want to become journalists if they think they’re all muckrakers? We’ve been through this before—if you study journalism history, there was a time when people were writing junk, and then we cleaned up the journalism that was out there and set standards and ethics. People really [started to] respect journalists. But because the leadership has changed, there’s a real danger that we’ll lose that. And I think that’s true of art, too. During the period when the NEA was told it was supporting blasphemous work and artists couldn’t possibly be contributing to society, we retreated from our education and arts funding. We survived it, the NEA survived it, but we’re definitely feeling the effects of it in how people view art. And now it’s starting to come back a little bit with this generation and the creative economy and all the conversations about what makes the quality of life better and how art plays into that. I think that opportunity is really important at this point because kids aren’t getting enough education about art in schools. So we’re going to have to figure out a way to retrofit that.

How do we encourage a respect for art in kids?
They need to have some happy memories—even if it isn’t from their parents. If you read about Baldwin, he didn’t have that much support at home, but he went into the library every day and read every book in the library. He did have some support, but it wasn’t like he had a role model specifically telling him he was going to be a great writer. And I think that can happen with so many people. I informally ask our artists in residency, “Were your parents artists?” Or “How did you decide to do this?” Because this is not an easy life. I get all different answers. Some say, “My uncle was a writer,” or “My grandfather was an architect.” Sometimes there’s a role model there. But sometimes there isn’t—in my family there was no role model whatsoever and my parents said, Are you kidding? How are you going to support yourself unless you marry someone? Nowadays that’s an unlikely answer—you wouldn’t expect someone to answer that they’re going to support themselves by getting married—but you still wouldn’t necessarily be able to give a better answer about [how you’ll make money]. That hasn’t changed. It’s still not good. In the sixties we posted a survey in the Saturday Evening Post about what it was like to be an artist, and we recently did the same survey, and it’s not changed. The number of hours artists spend on their art and their income—it’s not really changed, except maybe that student debt has increased.

What is next for you?
I am going to rest and truly retire for a few years—I have no burning desire to start a new career. What I’d like to do is volunteer my time to the same kinds of things I’ve been doing at MacDowell—work to help artists, work on equity—and do some traveling and other things one normally does when unfettered and alive. The parts I’ll miss are all the wonderful people here and the artists. I’m just hoping I can stay connected in other ways—being in the audience or writing notes to artists after I see something wonderful that they’ve done. I’ve always loved that part.

 

Dana Isokawa is the associate editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.

Cheryl A. Young

(Credit: Tony Gale)

Q&A: Mary Gannon Leads CLMP
Q&A: The New Editor of the Paris Review
Q&A: Baker Seeks Multiplicity of Voices

Q&A: O’Rourke to Edit the Yale Review

by

Dana Isokawa

May/June 2019
4.10.19
In Print and Online

In July poet and critic Meghan O’Rourke will take over as the editor of the Yale Review, Yale University’s quarterly of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and criticism. O’Rourke, who has been an editor at the New Yorker, the Paris Review, and Slate, succeeds acting editor Harold Augenbraum, who stepped in when the publication’s editor since 1991, the late poet J. D. McClatchy, retired in June 2017. A few months before her official start date, O’Rourke discussed her plans for the review and her approach to editing. In addition to numerous pieces of criticism, O’Rourke has published three poetry collections, most recently Sun in Days (Norton, 2017), and one memoir, The Long Goodbye (Riverhead Books, 2011).

When will your first issue come out?
October. It coincides with the two-hundredth anniversary of the review, which is a wonderful occasion for me to start as editor. It’s fun to begin with a beginning and celebrate a very long period of time at the same time.

Does a two-hundred-year legacy feel overwhelming?
It’s so overwhelming that it’s freeing. Seventy-five years might be more overwhelming, but two hundred years is so capacious and broad, it reminds you that a magazine is a made thing that reflects the passions and currents and ideas of its time and is shaped by the people who work there. There’s a kind of permission in that two hundred years. So the expectation I bring is not so much to maintain a particular identity but to make the journal be to its time what it has been to its time at some of its highest moments. Also, although the magazine is not oriented toward Yale, it is incubated at Yale; I want the magazine to be to its world what Yale is to its world, which is a place of rigorous, creative inquiry that holds itself to the highest standards.

What do you think is a journal’s ideal relationship to its time?
The answer is different for different journals. But the Yale Review is uniquely situated to be a space for the best creative and literary writing to be side by side with passionate, personal, and political criticism—the review has always had a robust back-of-the-book, where the critics’ section is housed. The relationship between the creative enterprise and the critical enterprise is exciting because they are two almost antithetical modes of inquiry. Poems and stories can offset the tendency of the polemicizing, op-ed culture we have around us—not that we’re going to be running op-eds. But there’s something wonderful about modes that coexist in the same journal as oil and water to each other; there’s something exciting about that tension between those modalities because it can add up to a larger world of exploration.

When you’re putting together an issue, will you take that literally? Will you, for example, publish a poem that addresses a topic and a review of a book about that same topic? Or how might the creative and the critical speak to one another in the review?
Less literal than that. We will have theme issues where we use a word—almost the way a poet might—to riff editorially in our thinking. For example, I’m thinking about an issue focused on documents and documentation. Right now, because of the news, we’re all thinking about what it means to be undocumented in America in a specific way. It’s led me to think about literature as document: What does literature document? What goes undocumented? What does it mean to try to document not only what we know about ourselves and our time, but what we can’t know about ourselves and our time? And how does a journal situate itself in that space? It’s also this moment where both fiction and poetry have this fascination with the claims of nonfiction—I’m thinking of Knausgård, Rachel Cusk, Sheila Heti, and the current of autofiction. Novelists are saying, “I’ve gotten tired of making things up.” We also have poets who are using found documents and exploring docupoetics, so it seems like a moment to think through the relationship between imaginative literature and literal documents.  

The great challenge of editing a literary journal—or a political and literary journal, which I hope the Yale Review will be—is to figure out how to publish an assortment of really good pieces that add up to something more than a slightly incidental aesthetic. That point to aspects of our cultural experience that we know but maybe haven’t named or aspects of the discourse that are hypocritical or unrigorously explored.

Having many different modes of considering that same question will hopefully lead to a richer understanding, yes?
Yes, and complicate an understanding we might have. As the culture editor at Slate in the early 2000s, where I essentially ran half a magazine and helped build that section and what it meant to be writing cultural criticism on the web, that was still a new question—what are the cultural phenomena we think we understand but don’t look at very closely or have only looked at a little? That’s also what interests me as a writer and led me to write about grief in The Long Goodbye. Grieving had radically changed in American culture, and while we had this idea of grieving, no one had fully unpacked it. Scholars had, but it hadn’t been fully looked at in cultural criticism. And suddenly there was a wave of us all saying, “Hey, this is really strange. Let’s look at how we grieve.” So I’m interested in the journal being a space where that looking a second time can happen. 

What other topics besides documentation do you want to cover in the journal?
I’m starting to figure that out. Another thing on my mind is the word antisocial—what does that even mean? We live in a moment where we are bombarded by the social. And there’s been a lot of discussion about Facebook’s role in the last election. So is antisocial an interesting word from which to begin thinking about modes of literature? And in my own work I’ve been writing about chronic illness, so I’m interested in intersections between the medical world and the world of literature, as well as medicine as a culture in itself. I expect that interest will find its way into the review somehow and not just because I’m interested in it—all these people are writing books about the experience of having a poorly understood illness, as well as the social context of medicine and what it means to be a woman and/or person of color searching for answers in a system that comes with a lot of unconscious bias. That narrative is emerging in the culture. 

One of the great pleasures of editing a journal like the Yale Review, which comes out four times a year, is that there’s not a pressure to be timely like at Slate where I was publishing daily. I have this wonderful opportunity to take the long view as an editor. But it’s important, as I was saying before, that we’re not merely collecting good pieces that come together in an incidental way, but finding a way to curate them so that there’s some sense of the urgency of the moment, but not in a way that feels merely timely. Hopefully it could also feel timeless. How do we collect the artifacts of our moment and also assign and encourage and facilitate the writing of pieces that will speak to us deeply about what’s happening right now in the world we live in? Sometimes pieces of poetry or fiction do that by not seeming to speak at all to the world we live in—so we’re not going to publish poems that have an expiration date of 2019 or 2020. I hope we’ll publish lasting poems and lasting fiction that somehow reflect something about us in our moment.

Are you planning other changes to the format or coverage of the print review?
I’m planning to revamp the back of the book. Right now it’s a wonderful group of reviews of poetry, music, books, and film, but I want to shake it up a little and publish an idea in review, where we’ll talk about something like the antisocial or culpability—there was a lot of discussion about culpability last fall around Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing: How do we think about culpability? Who is culpable and when? So maybe we’ll have a few different people write about this theme, and let those pieces not respond, but resonate with one another. And I want these pieces to touch down in actual lived cultural and political experiences. So there will be real texts under review, but it might be a text like the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings alongside a novel, alongside Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive, alongside Jericho Brown’s The Tradition. It is important that we put together the pieces of our experience that are often left separate.

What tone do you want the journal to strike?
I think of the journal as a house I’m building into which I’m inviting a very dynamic, creative, playful, whimsical, argumentative group of people who are all going to be having a conversation. And the journal has the tone of that party. A tone of voluble and passionate conversation.

What are you planning to do on the digital side of the review?
We are planning to launch a new website by early 2020, which will publish original content alongside work from the journal. More broadly we are rethinking how the Yale Review can use different platforms for the delivery of ideas, criticism, and dialogue. To that end we will be developing new columns and podcasts for the website, albeit in a highly curated way, since we’re a small staff. To me the digital review will be as important as the print journal, and it offers a fresh and exciting set of possibilities, precisely because it is a medium different from print. But it serves the same mission: A twentieth-century journal, if you think about it, was just a technology for the delivery and dissemination of passionate, excellent criticism and literature. The question is, What does the web allow us to do better and differently?

What writers or trends in writing are you excited about?
Now is a true moment of fertility in American literature, partly because the nature of gatekeeping has changed. That change allows for a much greater diversity of voices that desperately needs to be there and also brings a great diversity of style and stance and position from which to make formal aesthetic exploration. Sometimes the media can talk a little too reductively about diversity; one of the things that gets overlooked is that diversity of people brings diversity of aesthetics and diversity of approaches. What more could one want? Right now is a wonderful moment to be an editor.      

Do you think the editors of a journal should be backstage, or should they be out in front? How open and transparent do you want to be as an editor to your readers?
Because the Yale Review and its readers form a kind of imagined community, especially as we move ever more online, I’d like our readers to know the people behind this enterprise—to get to know our staff, who, I hope, will be doing interviews and editing and writing too. I will sometimes write an editor’s letter to frame issues and share our goals and the questions raised for us, say, in assembling a special issue. In terms of transparency, which I take to refer to questions of how we select what we select, or why we publish what we publish, I’d just say that, of course, there are certain issues where transparency is especially called for. In general, finding ways of representing different points of view is really important to me—far too many literary journals and general interest magazines still have lopsided representation, to put it mildly—and that includes being clear about our mission of engaged dialogue and our hope of discovering valuable new voices.

When you’re editing a piece—this is probably very different for a piece of criticism versus a poem or story—are there a certain set of questions you ask?
In criticism it’s important to have a certain muscularity and flexibility of thought. As a reader and writer of criticism, I want to know that even if one is writing in a passionate, argumentative way, everything has been considered. That I’m not writing or reading a piece that has been written only reflexively. I say that carefully because we live in a moment where we all feel a fair amount of outrage. We all see a certain amount of passionate engagement from all directions about the political moment, and the Internet is a place where we can indulge in that. I’m not saying that’s not important, but if we want to bring that level of passionate outrage to written criticism, there has to be a sense of consideration too. It’s the job of the editor to be an interlocutor for the critic and make sure the critic is saying what they mean as precisely as possible. When you edit criticism, you’re trying to make the argument as clear and sound as possible. There’s always a moment of arguing with yourself as a critic, which doesn’t necessarily need to be on the page but probably needs to happen to write the piece. 

When editing fiction and poetry, it’s more about trying to help the writer make a persuasive aesthetic object from nothing. As an editor, my role is not to be an interlocutor, but a mirror. To say, “This is a moment in the poem where I feel the poet making it instead of the object that has been made. The mystery disappears and the effort shows through.” Or, “The tone slips mysteriously,” or, “This section is actually unclear.”

When I started working as an editor at the New Yorker, I would always pretend like I understood everything. It took me a long time to realize as an editor it’s okay to be—in fact, you have to be—an honest reader. You have to say, “I really don’t understand this,” or, “I’m really bored on page four, and I kind of fell asleep there for a little bit.” You have to do it with the humility of your own personhood—it could just be you—but you’re trying to reflect back to the writer as honestly as possible something about your experience. You’re also trying to think as you read it, “Is this an experience others might have while reading this text? Am I identifying something that is getting in the way of it as a persuasive aesthetic object, or is this my own predilection?” Because those are two different things. We can never fully disentangle them, but we can try.

I’m curious about your use of the word “persuasive” in “persuasive aesthetic object”—persuasive of what?
Of its own madeness. I have this sort of spiritual relationship with poems and fiction—I think about Emily Dickinson saying, “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.” I don’t mean that a piece makes an argument that I agree with and I’ve been bullied into submission as a reader, but that it gives me that feeling. It’s that chill; it’s that sense of encountering a vision of the world that uncovers things you knew were there but never named before. I’m thinking of Taeko Kono’s Toddler Hunting and Other Stories, a fascinating book of short stories published in translation by New Directions. Many of the stories feature narrators that have deeply disturbing relationships with young children, and there’s something about the book and the way these women experience loneliness in the world that feels like it’s opening an aspect of experience that I knew was there, but I never had a name for. I don’t have the same sort of relationships that these characters do, but when I read it, I’m totally persuaded of its reality. That’s the kind of persuasion I mean. And that the poem or story has to be the way it is. Original literature is strange, and it often makes choices that another piece couldn’t make.

I love that as a description for how you feel when you read a great poem or story, but how do you feel when you read a really great piece of criticism?
There are different ways I feel. There’s the kind of criticism where you think, “Ah, I agree with every single thing here—thank you. You have named something and provided a structural framework for an intuition, a feeling, or argument I’ve been making but not as well.” Then there’s the piece that slightly changes your mind as you read it. Criticism is important because it gives us language for change, and it gives us language for reevaluation of long-held positions, which is crucial in the moment we’re living in. Especially as you get older, you have some reflexive positions, and good criticism can make you rethink something you’ve long believed, maybe without a lot of critical interrogation. Good criticism can be very uncomfortable to read. But you know it’s good if there’s a soundness to its own structure, its own architecture. And then there’s a kind of criticism that proceeds more associatively and is exciting in how it finds formal freedom in a genre that can be very conservative. There are some critics who can turn a piece of criticism almost into a work of literature. I love reading all these kinds of criticism—criticism that’s formally radical as well as criticism that’s not.

What do you find satisfying or exciting about editing?
As a writer and an editor, I’ve toggled between periods of more solitary writing and periods of more outward-oriented editing. There can be something very lonely and solipsistic and deranged about being a writer alone at your desk all day—the minute can become major, and the major can become minute. It’s like being a candle that burns itself up. So it’s satisfying to use my passion and knowledge and experience of having spent so much time with words on behalf of other people. 

A big thread in my nonfiction work is a resistance to a culture of individuality—I believe in a culture of care and community. It’s something we struggle with as Americans: how to figure out the relationship between individual ambition and the humanist mode of actually caring about one another. So I like the humanistic aspect of editing: being there for somebody and helping them because I have a knowledge base of thinking about this stuff for so long.

What kinds of editors inspire you?
Those who make a space for writers to be the best versions of themselves. I also learned a huge amount from Bill Buford, who was my boss at the New Yorker when I started. We’re very different temperamentally, but he cared so deeply about the pieces he worked on. Sometimes as an editor you’re tired, and it can be easy to read a piece and think, “This is great.” And sometimes that’s not the fidelity that the piece needs—sometimes it needs you to enter it and read it more deeply. And that can be exhausting. As a writer, my best editors have made me better but not changed me, which is a kind of magic. I aspire to that—not to impose my aesthetic, but to illuminate what’s there. Make you a better writer and thinker on the page. 

Is there anything from J. D. McClatchy’s approach or practice you hope to adopt yourself?
He was a wonderful champion to writers. I think Sandy published my first published piece, so I feel a wonderful sense of gratitude toward him. He believed in young writers and gave them a chance to write serious criticism and publish their poems and fiction. He believed passionately that the review needed to exist and continue existing, and he came on at a moment when there were some doubts about the review’s future. So every day I think about him in that sense—I don’t think it would be here without him. And I feel a similar passionate conviction already that the review should exist and continue existing for many years.

Do you think literary journals are in trouble? I’m thinking, for example, of Tin House announcing it will no longer publish a print quarterly. Is it getting harder for literary journals to sustain themselves?
I don’t know about “harder” or “in trouble,” but any literary journal in 2019 has to think deeply about what it is and what it is in relationship to the culture. The advent of the Internet as a technological change is probably similar to the printing press. We’re looking at a really massive, really fast, wide-scale change in communication. It has to affect literary journals. It would be foolish to say it didn’t. But it affects them in all kinds of ways. Publishing online is not the same thing as publishing in print; [both modes] have brought with them different kinds of conversation and communication. 

To give an example: When I starting working as an assistant at the New Yorker in 1997, if someone wanted to write a response to a piece, we chose whose words got published. We reflected back to the world what the world thought of a piece we ran. We reflected what the world thought of the New Yorker. That is not true anymore. Right now I could write a response to anything. Anyone could write anything in response to anything published. And though there’s not totally equal access because of things like search engine optimization, it is much easier for many voices to be heard. That’s a great thing, but the question then becomes: Now that so many voices can come into the conversation, how do we have that conversation in a way where we’re not all yelling at one another? We have to think about this as editors—what does it mean if we’re in a much more democratic space? What are the opportunities there? For the Yale Review, I’m thinking about how to build in a space for conversation and response. So are magazines in trouble? It’s hard in ways that it wasn’t before, and it’s important to think about what kind of editorial reckoning has to happen around this shift. It’s challenging but also exciting.

 

Dana Isokawa is the associate editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.

Meghan O’Rourke

(Credit: Tony Gale)

Q&A: The New Editor of the Paris Review
Q&A: MacDowell’s Young Set to Retire
Q&A: Mary Gannon Leads CLMP

Q&A: A Century of Yale Younger Poets

by

Maya C. Popa

November/December 2019
10.9.19
In Print and Online

This year marks the centennial of the Yale Series of Younger Poets, the oldest annual literary award in the United States. The prize, which offers publication of a debut collection by Yale University Press, has heralded the arrival of luminaries such as John Ashbery, Robert Hass, and Adrienne Rich, and launched the careers of many more. The award was initially open only to poets under the age of forty—hence the name—but in 2015 the age requirement was lifted. To celebrate the century mark, in October Yale University Press released Firsts: 100 Years of Yale Younger Poets edited by Carl Phillips, who has served as the prize judge since 2010, succeeding Louise Glück. A professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis and the author of numerous poetry collections, including Pale Colors in a Tall Field, forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux next year, Phillips recently spoke about curating the anthology, the evolution of the prize, and his experience as a judge. (The 2020 prize is open for submissions until November 15.) 

How has the prize evolved since 1919? 
It has become much more inclusive, not just in terms of subject matter, but also in terms of diversity, race in particular. In this sense the prize has evolved side by side with the landscape of American poetry itself. This is also true when it comes to poetic styles and strategies, which have moved from being very conservative to increasingly more innovative.

Have you noticed any discernible changes among the submissions since you began your tenure as judge?
There is no doubt that there has been more racial diversity. I’m convinced this has more than a little to do with my being the first person of color to serve as judge. This also has to do with the screeners. I’m only the second judge to have poet screeners at all, and I made a point of selecting a diverse group; they are African American, Native American, Asian American, white, queer, straight, male, female, and gender-fluid. Another clear shift has occurred as a result of removing the age limit for entrants. We’ve since had two winners over forty—so that’s a welcome strike against ageism.

What were some of the challenges of putting together an anthology spanning 1919 to 2018?
One was how to represent everyone fairly. In the earlier iteration of this anthology, some poets were represented by more poems than others—this made sense, since not all poets are equally good; but who’s to say what’s “good”? So I decided to include three poems by each poet. The other challenge was that I knew people would be expecting to see certain well-known poems by certain poets—Rich and Ashbery, for example. But I decided to take advantage of being the sole editor and simply pick the poems I liked the most—hardly a shocking thing to do, but it does mean accepting that not every reader will be happy.

What greater role do you see the series playing in the world of poetry?
Because it is one of the oldest prizes in this country, it is at least one useful map of how American poetry has evolved over time. Other than that, I think the main role is what it’s always been, to bring to light a new voice—something that plenty of other prizes also do, of course, but again, because of the long history of the prize, it brings a certain gravitas that is unique.

What has most surprised you in your years serving as judge?
I’ve been surprised at how the majority of the manuscripts I see resist giving any kind of offense—they’re well-behaved, polite, in terms of content and style. But I don’t go to poetry for good manners. I want to be shaken out of my usual assumptions about what poems can do, what they can say, how they can say it. I can usually tell I’m getting close to a winning manuscript when I find myself asking aloud, “What the hell is going on here?” That doesn’t mean anything radical has to be happening. There can be risk and wilderness in clarity of thought and expression. A strange sensibility that can’t help its own strangeness—that’s what I’m after.

You mention the growing diversity of voices represented in poetry and its connection to the cultural conversations of the moment. In Firsts, you cite the establishment of Cave Canem in 1996 as a pivotal moment. What do you see as the current challenges and future goals prizes should be striving for to ensure a rich and inclusive landscape of voices?
Part of the answer is right there in your question: The long-term goal should be to ensure a rich and inclusive landscape of voices. That means the more immediate goal is to have an array of winners who reflect the range of voices out there. And that means doing whatever you can to ensure that you will get submissions from across that range of voices. I don’t believe it’s a coincidence that the greatest amount of diversity has occurred under a judge who is openly queer and of color. The announcement of my appointment was a real confidence builder for a lot of younger poets of color in particular—or so I’ve been told. It’s pretty much like anything, but I’ll use literary journals as an example. If you want to show that you’re committed to diversity, you better have a masthead that shows diversity—not only will it confirm your commitment, but it’s going to encourage diverse submissions. 

What do you see as the ultimate role of prizes and accolades in poetry? Do you see them as working alongside or as separate from poetic practice?
The only real role I can think of is to showcase work and thereby make potential readers more aware of it—which in turn can then broaden the conversation that poems ideally provoke and engage in. An effect of prizes—but I wouldn’t call this any part of their role—is to, usually very briefly, give a boost to the poet, in terms of morale. We’re all pretty insecure, and we all want to be loved, and a prize or accolade feels like confirmation that we did well. But then there’s the next day and the reality of the blank page. 

 

Maya C. Popa is the author of American Faith (Sarabande, November 2019). She is the poetry reviews editor at Publishers Weekly and the director of creative writing at the Nightingale-Bramford School.

Carl Phillips

(Credit: Mark Katzman)

Q&A: Manuel Muñoz Directs Arizona MFA
Q&A: Alice Quinn Bids Farewell to PSA
Q&A: O’Rourke to Edit the Yale Review

The Narrative Approach to Science

by

Dalia Sofer

September/October 2003
9.1.03
In Print and Online

David Foster Wallace’s long-awaited sixth book will arrive in bookstores next month. But it’s not what some might expect from the author of Infinite Jest (Little, Brown & Co., 1996) and A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again (Little, Brown & Co., 1997).

Wallace is one of several literary writers contributing to a series of nonfiction books about scientific breakthroughs called Great Discoveries, published by W.W. Norton and Atlas Books. The first two books, to be published next month, are Everything and More by Wallace and The Doctors’ Plague by Sherwin Nuland, clinical professor of surgery at the Yale University School of Medicine in New Haven, Connecticut, and the author of the memoir Lost in America: A Journey With My Father (Knopf, 2003).

Wallace explores the concept of infinity and the 19th-century mathematician Georg Cantor’s definition of it, while Nuland tells the story of Ignac Semmelweis, a physician in 19th-century Vienna who introduced the notion that doctors must wash their hands before examining patients.

The idea behind the series is to present science through literary narrative, with a focus on the stories behind science’s greatest discoveries—and the intriguing personalities of the individuals who made them. Over half of the 10 authors of forthcoming books in the series are literary writers, including novelists Madison Smartt Bell, who will write about Antoine Lavoisier and the origins of modern chemistry; Rebecca Goldstein, who will write about the Czech-born mathematician Kurt Gödel; and David Leavitt, who will write about Alan Turing and computer science.

Nuland, who has been teaching medical history since the 1960s, says focusing on the narrative structure of scientific discoveries can make the complicated subjects—radioactivity, the theory of relativity, the atom—exciting. “It’s like putting raisins in cereal to make it sweeter,” he says. “It takes a lot of academic boringness to take out those raisins.”

According to Ed Barber, senior editor at Norton, Great Discoveries offers something sweet not only to readers who enjoy science books, but also to those who wouldn’t normally read a book on science but may do so because their favorite writer wrote it. “David Foster Wallace, for example, has a real following, so this book will be embraced by his fans,” he says. Wallace “can write compellingly about pretty much anything.”

While the list of fiction writers exploring scientific topics adds a level of distinction to the new series, writing about science for a general audience isn’t a new concept. Barber says that in the 1970s trade publishing opened up to science writing, with writers like Stephen Jay Gould and James Watson publishing widely popular books. Jesse Cohen, an editor at Atlas who conceived the idea of having literary writers contribute to the series, agrees. He cites Watson’s 1968 book Double Helix, which presented genetics to a general readership, as an important step in that transformation. “People read it and realized that scientists aren’t these soulless people in white lab coats,” he says. “Science suddenly became exciting.”

Cohen has also been the editor of the annual anthology The Best American Science Writing (Ecco Press) since 2000, and says that in recent years science writing has become increasingly popular—with literary as well as academic writers. “We’re at a point where literary writers aren’t only interested in appropriating science into their work—science itself has become their work,” he says. “Of course, science can’t tell us everything, but it can tell us a little about who we are and where we come from.”

Dalia Sofer is a freelance writer who lives in New York City.

In Search of David Foster Wallace

by

Joe Woodward

January/February 2006
1.1.06
In Print and Online

David Foster Wallace is a funny thinker, a library vaudevillian with an “amphetaminic eagerness” to please. Though best known for his two long, deeply complicated, and often funny novels, The Broom of the System (Penguin, 1987) and Infinite Jest (Little, Brown, 1996), Wallace is most popularly read as a writer of provocative short fiction, collected in three volumes—Girl With Curious Hair (W.W. Norton, 1989), Brief Interviews With Hideous Men (Little, Brown, 1999), and Oblivion (Little, Brown, 2004)—and as a profanely humorous essayist. Wallace’s second collection of essays, Consider the Lobster, published last month by Little, Brown, follows eight years after his first, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, also published by Little, Brown, in 1997.

Everything I know about DFW (even his wanton use of acronyms in place of proper nouns) I know secondhand—through his books, a few printed interviews, reviews, and critical studies. It’s not that I haven’t tried to pose some questions directly to the writer himself, to ferret out a few insights from the man Sven Birkerts—in a review of Infinite Jest for the Atlantic Monthly in 1996—called “a wild-card savant.” No, my search to find the real DFW has been impeded by agent and publicist alike: I’ve been stonewalled. Whether he is “publicity shy,” as his publicist contends, or whether he’s weaving a web of literary mystique about himself, I do not know. And, it seems more and more likely, I never will.

I do know that DFW lives up a canyon road in the easternmost foothills of Los Angeles. I know the road that leads to him often washes out when rains push over the San Gabriel Mountains. I know he lives among coyotes and suburban black bears, “trash bears” we call them—bears that must be careful, lest they end up with crimped collars around their necks, performing in a traveling circus. I know all this because I live where he lives—in Claremont, California.

My odyssey to interview DFW began with a series of telephones calls—first, to Pomona College, where he is Disney Professor of Creative Writing (an endowed chair funded by Walt Disney’s nephew, Roy). From Pomona College I was sent to DFW’s literary agency in San Francisco, Frederick Hill/Bonnie Nadell. San Francisco sent me back to Los Angeles, to Bonnie Nadell herself, DFW’s agent and the person to whom Consider the Lobster is dedicated.

While Bonnie Nadell was certainly nice, she was noncommittal. She was interested in taking down my phone numbers and e-mail addresses and “getting back to me.” She was interested in “talking things over with David,” and seeing if, together, they felt the interview was worth it. When I didn’t hear back from her, I contacted DFW’s publicist at Little, Brown in New York, but she offered little help. Each time I called her, she was seemingly in a hurry to do something else, and answered each of my questions before I finished asking:

Would it be possible to interview David Foster Wallace for Poets & Writers Magazine? “I spoke with David last night, and he’s not doing interviews for the book.” Could I send him a few questions by e-mail to respond to? “David doesn’t do e-mail.” Are you saying he’s not going to do any interviews at all for Consider the Lobster? “I may talk him into one or two major things.” Can I at least get an advance reading copy of the new book? “They’re all gone. They went like hotcakes.”

In a last-ditch, Woodward-and-Bernstein effort, I stalked DFW at work. I delivered a plea for an interview, in writing, to his office in Crookshank Hall (a name and place straight out of Harry Potter) at Pomona College. Silence.

So, it’s really true. The road that leads to DFW washes out.

Luckily, there is a precedent for this kind of journalistic profile sans interview, and it comes from the work of DFW himself. In the same way he never spoke directly with David Lynch, but wrote about him (in the essay “David Lynch Keeps His Head,” in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again) and never actually talked to Michael Murphy, John McCain’s senior campaign strategist (for his essay on the senator’s 2000 bid for the GOP nomination for president, in Consider the Lobster), I never actually spoke with DFW.

I’m forced back to his work, the words—and there are plenty of them. I’m forced back to the clues you can buy at the bookstore and read on the Internet and in the papers. And nearly everyone has an opinion, something to say, about DFW. Everyone, it turns out, except David Foster Wallace.

Born in Ithaca, New York, in 1962, DFW was raised in Illinois, in the middle of Tornado Alley, by two college professors interested in books and tennis—his father taught philosophy and his mother taught English. Clearly, DFW continues to work his family’s metaphorical farm; he puzzles and writes, writes and puzzles. It’s a plausible petri dish, certainly, for the writer he is still becoming. But who is DFW, really? What makes him tick?

Again, my guesswork turns forensic, archeological. I want to know things—I want the silence cracked. I have my own set of Questions for the Absent Author (QAA). Do you believe in God? Do you believe you “put the novel back on the map,” as Charlie Rose said you did, when he interviewed you back in 1997? (Charlie Rose must fall neatly into his publicist’s classification of “major things.”) Do you love the primary material of your work—the people, places, things—more than the work itself? Is Scientology the answer to any question at all? What pain lies behind your panoply of fun?

Fortunately, trace elements of DFW’s biography are threaded throughout his work. Just like the weird Beadsman clan in The Broom of the System, published when he was just twenty-five years old, DFW followed his father to Amherst College. He graduated from Amherst in 1986 with a degree in philosophy, while focusing his studies on mathematical logic and semantics (an interest that would later develop into a book about, of all things, infinity—Everything and More was published by Atlas Books in 2003). DFW received his MFA from the University of Arizona in 1987, and for most of the 1990s, he taught at Illinois State University before filling the Disney Chair at Pomona College in 2002. QAA: Why did you choose prose over proofs?

DFW’s academic background might explain his love of pulling together arguments using footnotes—nearly all of his books, whether fiction or nonfiction, include detailed footnotes—in discussing hegemonies, in opining on his intellectual cravings (what he calls his “jones”), in unpacking “complicated ironies” in front of readers in hopes of reaching a conclusion, which, it turns out, he rarely does. If anything, DFW enjoys the journey, enjoys allowing the reader, in nearly every case, to come to her own conclusions. His work is always difficult, though, layered with complicated sentences and underused words, and, depending on your own “jones,” worth the trouble—or not. Reading DFW isn’t for the weak. QAA: Why the compositional witchcraft? Do you think the form of your prose helps or hinders the content? Do you ever feel like simply telling your readers what and how to think? Should that ever be the point of writing in the first place?

While DFW’s theoretical thinking on fictions, on metafictions, on the modern and postmodern is thoroughly tangled and troubling—and at certain low biorhythmic times during the day, beyond my powers—his actual fiction and his actual essays are not, really. It can be said that DFW’s writing rarely strays from a singular expository axiom: Isn’t it interesting what I find interesting? Even Michiko Kakutani, the book critic for the New York Times, has agreed. His essays, in particular, are stuffed full of the offbeat and underexamined. In Consider the Lobster—which I was finally able to procure from my editor at Poets & Writers Magazine—DFW stretches to cover subjects as diverse as the annual Adult Video News (AVN) Awards, McCain’s presidential bid, the poor quality of Tracy Austin’s tennis memoir, ruminations on Kafka and Dostoevsky, and the morally quarrelsome method of preparing lobsters. QAA: Have you ever been in a fistfight? Do you think Ben Marcus was a big meanie in his October 2005 Harper’s essay, “Why Experimental Fiction Threatens to Destroy Publishing, Jonathan Franzen, and Life As We Know It,” or do you agree with him that “literary language can also make a more abstract but no less vital entertainment”? Does it bother you that you weren’t mentioned in that article—even as a footnote?

Consider the Lobster opens with “Big Red Son,” a long travelogue, first published in Premiere magazine in 1998, devoted to the AVN Awards in Las Vegas. The essay begins with a soliloquy on self-castration—with talk of “kitchen tools” and “wire cutters” and the male odyssey to find the “perfect release.” What follows, though, proves that his hyperbole has little point—he was, in fact, only joking. “Big Red Son” actually ends up tracing DFW’s rather routine journalistic junket through an adult video industry, which was, unfortunately, on its best behavior. His convention weekend coverage reveals no wild sex in stairwells, no drug vials casually left behind at a booth in the casino’s all-you-can-eat buffet—just bored starlets in hotel rooms watching reruns of Seinfeld and the like.

“Big Red Son,” like several other essays in Consider the Lobster, and some in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, wasn’t DFW’s idea in the first place. He was simply contacted, or “contracted,” by different magazines and asked to go somewhere, look around, and write about it. And so he does. QAA: Has there ever been a topic that you refused to write about? Have you ever considered covering the Rubik’s Cube World Championships in Orlando?

All of the pieces in the new essay collection are saturated with footnotes, and in DFW’s books, this is how readers learn more than they really need to know. For example, there were nearly eight thousand adult videos released in 1997; the AVN Awards cover 106 presentation categories; thirty thousand sex scenes were committed to tape over twelve months, and so on. Readers learn, too, that “The average professional lifespan of a female performer is two years. Males, though lower paid, tend to last much longer in the business—sometimes decades.” The details pile up. QAA: What did a minimalist ever do to you? Do you believe Joan Didion was right, that “we tell ourselves stories in order to live”?

While DFW is himself learned, he is keenly interested in making his readers so, too. Whether we are following him around a lobster festival, thinking about whether the crustaceans “feel pain” when boiled alive, or whether he’s busy mulling over Kafka’s kind of funny—DFW wants something from us. He wants a conceit, a confession that none of us knows as much as we thought we did about anything—even him. Every essay, complete with footnotes, is a quest for knowledge and a giggle. He goes wild for an academic yarn.

In Consider the Lobster DFW ponders U.S. lexicography and American usage and a Dostoevsky scholar’s four-volume masterpiece. In his earlier collection he rustled over the state of U.S. fiction. Though A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again has a similar balance of reporting and scholarly-like argument, it is much more autobiographical than the new collection. In essays like “Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley,” DFW unpacks his Midwestern background and love of tennis for readers, and in “David Lynch Keeps His Head,” he discusses his MFA-aged revelations on art and literature as inspired by his favorite filmmaker. Stylistically, both collections of essays are filled with blue-bookish, yet offbeat, pieces. QAA: How many televisions do you own? Who’s your favorite Brady? What did you mean when you wrote “metafiction’s real end has always been Armageddon”?

Arguably, DFW is more acrobatic with form and language in his short fiction than he is in his essays. His wildly popular early collections, Girl With Curious Hair and Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, were followed up, in 2004, with Oblivion. It is here, in the short story, that some would argue DFW’s extraordinary talents peak.

The collection’s title story is an odd tale of marital strife that centers on a central mystery—is the husband in the story snoring at night and awakening his wife, or is she, in fact, imagining the whole thing? Through a series of funny scenes and a number of trips to the Meredith R. Darling Sleep Clinic, the couple (and the reader) gets to the crux of the troubling scenario. “She’s claiming to know better than myself whether I’m even awake. It’s less unfair than seemingly almost totally insane.” Deliciously, both husband and wife turn out to be all wrong.

The first story in Oblivion, “Mister Squishy,” takes place in an Orwellian universe where brand icons rule the landscape, where marketing focus groups are either the cause of the strained social fabric of the metropolis, or are its outgrowth. The story opens with a group of subjects testing a “high-concept chocolate intensive Mister Squishy brand snack cake” called Felonies. The snack cakes are aptly named to “both connote and to parody the modern health-conscious consumer’s sense of vice/indulgence/transgression/sin vis-à-vis the consumption of a high-calorie corporate snack.” Finally, and somewhat abruptly, the story ends for the reader as it does for one of the characters, “his mind a great flat blank white screen.” Readers, sometimes like the characters in the story, don’t get the neat, bundled conclusions they seek. QAA: Why don’t you just tell your readers what you really mean once in a while, as you often do in your essays? Have you ever thought about beginning a story with “Once upon a time,” and ending it with “So the moral of this story is…”?

The most surprising story in Oblivion is the shortest, “Incarnations of Burned Children.” In remarkable and poetical prose, DFW unleashes a long, single-paragraph description of a scalded child, “the toddler in his baggy diaper standing rigid with steam coming off his hair and his chest and his shoulders scarlet and his eyes rolled up and mouth open very wide….” Here, the reader is swept along on a river of emotion to a haunting, terrible finish, “and the child had learned to leave himself and watch the whole rest unfold from a point overhead….” In an uncharacteristically moving passage, DFW writes, “If you’ve never wept, and want to, have a child.”

Oblivion’s accomplishments certainly echo DFW’s earlier success with the short story form, and clearly show the sophistication and inventiveness noted by those who praise his two novels, The Broom of the System and Infinite Jest. In 1997, Michiko Kakutani wrote, “Although Wallace has burned off the annoying Pynchonesque echoes of his…debut novel, The Broom of the System, and discovered an exuberant voice of his own, Infinite Jest does owe a decisive debt to that earlier book. Like Broom, it uses stories within stories to point up the tension between life and art. And like Broom, it concerns a character’s (well, many characters’) search for identity and meaning.” Mark Caro, in the Chicago Tribune, called Infinite Jest “a grandly conceived, dizzyingly executed, darkly comic vision of America’s not-so-distant future.” QAA: Mixed praise is the porridge of the critic, don’t you think? Do you read your own reviews? Do you read the newspaper?

Infinite Jest is certainly the most referred-to work in the DFW canon, though, my research tells me, it is, arguably, the least-read. While the thousand-plus-page novel has been heralded by some as a sign of genius (indeed, a year after it was published, DFW received a “genius grant” from the MacArthur Foundation), it has been lambasted by others as self-interested, self-conscious—egocentric. It is, nonetheless, the hub of the DFW literary universe. Marshall Boswell, literary scholar and established DFW critic, wrote this about Infinite Jest in his book-length Understanding David Foster Wallace (University of South Carolina Press, 2003):

[It is] set in a slightly cockeyed near future; also like its predecessor, the book yokes together a vast, heterogeneous collection of themes and concerns. Wallace continues to link issues of language, signification, solipsism, and objectification, as he did in The Broom of the System, while at the same time expanding Girl with Curious Hair’s preoccupation with pop-culture, irony, to self-reflexivity. To these abiding concerns he adds a number of new preoccupations, such as drug addiction, terrorism, politics, and tennis. The result is a book that functions as both the culmination of his earlier work and a remarkable expansion of his reach and ambition.

Infinite Jest culminates, too, in the most difficult of reads. While some agree the novel demonstrates DFW’s formidable gifts, the book also throws a spotlight on his self-admitted weaknesses as a writer. DFW, in an interview with Larry McCaffery for the Center for Book Culture—a nonprofit organization based at Illinois State University, where DFW used to teach, which, at least partly, explains why he granted the interview—revealed he has “a grossly sentimental affection for gags, for stuff that’s nothing but funny, and which I sometimes stick in for no other reason than funniness. Another’s that I have a problem with concision, communicating only what needs to be said in a brisk efficient way that doesn’t call attention to itself.”

This is also true in DFW’s creative nonfiction. Some readers like their head-scratching funnies, embrace Herculean challenges, reject the easy and passive. Others do not. Certainly, there are examples everywhere in DFW’s writing of his ability to concisely pierce a topic, an emotion, a grand idea. His story “Oblivion,” while complicated and recursive and funny, is strangely touching—and in a way it opens a window into the human condition like none other. That’s not bad, is it? And “Incarnations of Burned Children” is poetry. QAA: If you really want, as you often state in your essays, to “put it as simple as possible,” why don’t you do that in your fiction?

Salman Rushdie recently commented in the Paris Review on his growing ambition to tell a story simply and clearly: “I’ve gotten more interested in clarity as a virtue, less interested in the virtues of difficulty.… I don’t like books that play to the gallery, but I’ve become more concerned with telling a story as clearly and engagingly as I can.… A story doesn’t have to be simple, it doesn’t have to be one-dimensional but, especially if it’s multidimensional, you need to find the clearest, most engaging way of telling it.”

Perhaps, one day DFW will abandon the “virtues of difficulty” as well. But I doubt it. DFW, though hard to reach, while discursive and funny, is not as interested in reinventing literature as his critics give him credit for. He is, I believe, interested in welcoming us into his mind and heart. It is difficult to guess, but I don’t see DFW giving up the footnotes any time soon. There are certainly as many people hoping he will as there are people who hope he will not.

Perhaps, one day soon I’ll get to ask him—or his publicist or agent, rather—about his plans. In the meantime, I’ll just read DFW and try to make my own way up that road before it washes out again.

Joe Woodward is the author of Small Matters: A Year in Writing.

DFW, though hard to reach, while discursive and funny, is not as interested in reinventing literature as his critics give him credit for. He is, I believe, interested in welcoming us into his mind and heart.
The Narrative Approach to Science

Online Only

Go to Source

Author: klarimer

  • If you’re an artist, up to a creative challenge, and love this story, enter your email here. Click here for more info.

Date:
  • March 9, 2022
Share: