Another Life (64 page)

In the meantime, the direction of the major houses fell into the hands of people who “understood business” as opposed to books and who in general despised, or were at least deeply suspicious of, those who read books and dealt directly with authors. Authors were perceived, like actors and writers in the old Hollywood of the studio moguls, to be overpaid troublemakers, spoiled children. The word
creative
, always spoken with a certain sense of resentment by those in power, came to be a synonym for
unbusinesslike, improvident, irresponsible
, and
self-indulgent
. “The creative side” of the business was where the problems arose—books that lost money, books that were late, books that shouldn’t have been bought in the first place, books that made trouble or the wrong kind of headlines, often infuriating the parent company. “The creative people” were writers—notoriously a sullen, difficult, and demanding lot, “navel gazers” who usually had an unrealistic and inflated view of what their work was worth—or editors who wanted to indulge their personal taste at the expense of the company, lived off their expense accounts, and often took the writer’s side against the company. (Of course, writers complained in turn that most editors never stood up for their authors and yearned for the editors of some mythical golden age, who went to bat for their authors even at the risk of losing their jobs, something which was never really the case, as any reading of the Hemingway/Perkins correspondence will demonstrate.) It was always a common joke among publishing people that “this would be a
great business if it weren’t for writers,” but by the mid-seventies publishing was beginning to be run by people who at heart believed that and included editors as well.

O
NE REFLECTION
of this growing attitude was the idea that people from outside the publishing world could do a better job of running it than those who were already infected with a taste for reading, a sympathy for writers, and the desire to have a regular table at “21” or the Italian Pavilion. This seemingly culminated in Dick Snyder’s decision to hire the former president of a Fortune 500 medical-supply company to run what was now called the consumer division of S&S, on the grounds that his management skills and his knowledge of consumer sales would be invaluable assets. This was not as strange a hiring choice as it seemed—Dick was under some pressure from Gulf + Western to run S&S in a more “businesslike” way and therefore picked a man who, on paper, would surely seem about as businesslike as it gets and at least wouldn’t go about trying to come up with ideas for new books or asking why we published so many first novels.

“He’s going to run this like a
business
,” Dick promised, though no sooner was the poor man onboard than Dick began to make fun of his ignorance about book publishing, and he was soon excluded from any of the meetings at which major decisions were made and relegated to a large, luxurious office many floors away from Dick’s, where he had nothing to do. Once, when Dick and I were sitting in his office discussing the acquisition of a major author on whom we had our hearts set, I suggested it might be a good idea (or at least polite) for me to tell the man who was ostensibly the head of consumer publishing about what we were doing before he read about it in the papers. “Fuck him,” Dick said cheerfully. Not every publishing house was so lucky—in many, the outside businessmen brought in were actually placed in charge, with calamitous results.

At every level, management people scrutinized what publishers, editors, art directors, and the manufacturing staff actually did and began to establish controls over the way it was done. The amiable chaos and anarchy in which books had hitherto been created gave way to a more orderly process, and accountability (another new buzzword) began to be established in the publishing process. Where people were lucky, as at
Random House and S&S, the movement toward efficiency was blunted by the fact that those at the top still preferred books to balance sheets. All the same, the Random House or the S&S of the mid-seventies was almost unrecognizable to those who had worked there ten or twenty years earlier, and classic editors were fast being replaced by people for whom books were “units” and “titles” were interchangeable. The tail was beginning to wag the dog.

Some of these changes were skin-deep. It had always been normal at every publishing house to prepare a financial estimate (known at S&S and elsewhere as a P&L) on each book that was being considered for publication, but this was usually prepared after the fact—that is, the decision to publish was made
before
the numbers were done, so the whole thing was more of a sop to good business procedure than a useful management tool. Now the P&Ls throughout the industry grew more complicated, requiring estimates that by their very nature were likely to be problematic. On the surface, the numbers were being worked out in enough detail to satisfy the financial people, but in fact, however impressive in appearance, they still represented guesswork.

What’s more, when the book was considered really important, everybody ignored the whole process. If Dick wanted to make a two-book offer for a major best-selling author, he told the editor to go ahead—the numbers would be done later, to justify whatever the outcome was. “You can’t make any money out of a book you haven’t bought,” Snyder used to say. If you wanted to be competitive, you had to go out into the marketplace and buy the hot books and the big-name authors and you could buy them only at the market price. It was one of his favorite sayings, the other being “If we own it, we love it”—once we had bought a book, we had to be committed to it heart and soul, no matter how awful it was. It didn’t get you anywhere to complain (let alone admit) that Harold Robbins had been plagiarizing himself for years, or that most of Irving Wallace’s novels could be cut by 25 percent without losing a thing.

This was partly an answer to Dan Green, the brilliant head of S&S’s publicity department who was to one day succeed Snyder as publisher. Green was one of the few people whose publishing instincts were as sharp as Snyder’s, though he lacked Snyder’s pit-bull capacity to get things done. Green, like Snyder, could read the auguries, almost three-dimensionally. He looked at the daily sales reports from the major bookstores, skimmed the key reviews, went over the publicity schedule and
compared the author’s appearances with the sales (Was there a blip the day after he or she did the
Today
show?), closed his eyes thoughtfully for a few seconds, then decided to run an ad in
The New York Times
or the
Chicago Tribune
, go back to press for another ten thousand copies, and print jackets for a further ten beyond that. Conversely, he might say, despite enthusiastic reports from the reps in the field and lots of publicity, “It’s all over—don’t print any more, they’re all going to come back.” Somehow, he could weigh the intangibles—a drop in sales at Higbee’s, in Cleveland, a reluctance to order more copies from a buyer in Pasadena—and tell that the book had peaked, even though it might still be number one on the best-seller lists and selling like crazy.

It was an art, developed in part by having traveled around the country and met the key players at the jobbers and in the stores, however small their jobs might appear to be, in part by the sheer ability to read the numbers and figure out what they
really
meant, and whether the tide was going in or going out. Long before computers made their appearance on people’s desks, those who really knew their way around book publishing could figure out when to start the presses rolling on overtime and when to stop them dead, despite cries from all over the country (as well as from the author and his or her agent) for more books—a skill which is life and death in publishing terms and which the computer has done very little to improve upon, given the enormously high rate of returns today. Then and now, the bookstores were their own worst enemies—since they could return whatever stock remained unsold to the publishers, they had no vested interest in caution, or even realism, and were, then as now, inclined to take few copies of books they didn’t understand and far too many of those they did.

Green, a man for whom worry was a permanent state, chewed the end of his pencil (sometimes the business end of his ballpoint pen, if he wasn’t careful), wriggled around in his chair until his shirttail was hanging out, gnawed on the end of his tie, and came up with the right decision, time after time. It was a joy to see him do it. With Snyder, the physical contortions were missing, and the process was more inquisitorial, but the result was the same. The difference was that whereas Green had to argue for his conclusions with Snyder, Snyder didn’t have himself to argue with. One way or another, however, the publishing industry remained a business in which the key decisions were made by the equivalent of spitting on one’s forefinger and holding it up to the wind, a fact that was never fully understood by the conglomerates and big corporations
that bought into the book business, nor by the outside businessmen who came in to make sense of it, perhaps in part because it was kept carefully concealed from them.

Outsiders, particularly from the West Coast, used to say how nice it must be to work in a business where people weren’t crazy and where greed and ego were at least kept to rational levels, but by the 1970s they were wrong. The only major difference between the movie business and the book business by then was that in the book business the money was smaller.

*
More than sixty years after the Depression, unsold books are still returnable by bookstores to the publishers for full credit, an emergency measure that was intended to save booksellers from bankruptcy as the economy collapsed and remains in effect even though the big bookstore chains have long since become profitable giants, dwarfing all but the largest publishers, and have driven out of business just those small, independent bookstores that the returns policy was meant to protect.

CHAPTER 27

T
he mid-seventies brought about changes in my life that had nothing to do with publishing, as well as some that did. In 1974, Dick Snyder brought Joni Evans over from Morrow to run the S&S rights department. Joni had been a star at Morrow—she was sharp, bright, aggressive, and smart, in addition to which she was tireless, fiercely ambitious, and boiling over with enthusiasm. It came as no surprise to learn that she had been a cheerleader at Mamaroneck High, along with her sister, Joyce. The two sisters had between them enough energy to keep a whole football team going, and no sooner had Joni arrived at S&S than her enthusiasm was quickly noticed.

This was hardly surprising—the mid-seventies was the period in which the rights directors of the major publishing houses suddenly became stars. What had hitherto been a fairly low-profile job suddenly became glamorous as the prices paid for mass-market paperback rights escalated into the millions. In buying a book, it became essential to know what the paperback rights might go for. Rights directors were also in constant touch with their “customers”—any rights director worth his or her salt was on the phone all the time—and provided, among other things, a kind of industrywide hot line of news and gossip. If the book clubs thought a big novel needed a better title or if the major paperback editors said they might buy a book if certain changes were made, such opinions could no longer be ignored. Rights directors, if they were any good, began to play a role in the editorial process. They even became involved in publicity, advertising, and promotion, since the paperback publishers, having paid a lot of money for the rights to a book, were not
unnaturally determined to have some say in how it was promoted or at least to make sure that the hardcover publisher didn’t simply take their money and run. As foreign rights came under the control of rights directors, they soon learned more about what was going on among foreign publishers than any editor could and became just as familiar with the publishing gossip in Bologna, Paris, or Stockholm as with that of New York. They knew what was happening at the movie companies and among the magazines that competed for serial rights—they were, in fact, fountains of knowledge in an industry where knowledge is power. Finally, a company’s income from rights very often made the difference between profit or loss at the end of the year, so rights directors usually had the ear of the publisher, to the consternation of older and more conservative editors.

Most of the rights directors were women, as were many of the editors at the book clubs and most of the major mass-market paperback editors and nearly all of the movie “scouts.” Women such as Mildred Marmur, the rights director of Random House (who had been a secretary at S&S when I first came there and worked her way up to become rights director), or Joni Evans played major roles in opening up major executive jobs to women throughout the book industry, but, just as important, they also played a part in making editors and authors more conscious of the need to think about the markets for a book.