Editors on Editing: What Writers Need to Know About What Editors Do (11 page)

Something had to be done. He made up a list of demands and phoned Martha. She began to commiserate with him about the “shopping-guide state of book reviewing” but he was through with ironic detachment. He wanted some action. “Have you called the
Times Book Review?”

“The book has been out only a little more than a month. Let’s give it another week or two.”

“How about
Time?
You said you had a friend there?”

“It’d be too late for them to review it now.”

“What about Washington, Chicago, Los Angeles?”

“I’ll ask the publicity director what she knows.”

“You sure your friend at
Time
saw the book? You thought we had a good chance there. That it was his kind of book.”

“David, I sent him one myself.”

“How about calling him, then?”

“I’ve just told you it’s too late now.”

“One place it’s too soon, the other it’s too late, the others you don’t know about.”

“I’m doing what I can, David. I know it’s disappointing but it can still turn around.”

But David now had the bit of frustration between his teeth and he continued to grind away. In the ensuing weeks he wanted to know why they weren’t pushing his book in Detroit, where he had grown up, and in Ann Arbor, where he had gone to the university, or elsewhere in the state. He wanted to know why the one ad scheduled hadn’t even appeared yet. He arranged for the local campus bookstore to do a window display, but the books didn’t arrive for three weeks.

…

Around this time two major reviews finally appeared. The one in the
Chicago Tribune
concluded: “With this book he moves into the front rank of midwestern novelists,” and the
Village Voice Literary Supplement
sang its praises as “a high-class class novel that will stay in your mind’s eye like a piece of grit.” Two days later David was on the phone. What were they doing to get more books in the Chicago and New York stores? Could he finally get a decent ad? “Give me just a small fraction of the money and attention you’re throwing after the Rogers book.”

“That’s not my decision, kiddo,” Martha said, trying to keep her cool. “I happen to agree with you.”

“That’s not doing me much good, is it?”

Though aggrieved by David’s words, Martha went to Lance to make a case for an ad that could draw on the two impressive reviews as well as the authors’ quotes to make a formidable presentation. Lance looked up the
marketing figures. “Forty-two hundred copies,” he said. He held up empty hands. “Besides, we’re cutting our ad budget by 20 percent.”

“You mean that he’s not even getting that lousy group ad?”

“What can I tell you? I don’t make these decisions. Go talk to Dot.”

Her gorge rising and her heart sinking, Martha asked to see Dot. Only a few minutes later she was called to her office. Dot was beaming. “Next week,
Limelight
goes to No. 6 and we’re going back for another twenty-five thousand copies.”

“That’s great.” Martha let the good news calm her and also permeate the atmosphere with good will. Then she said, “I’ve got a problem,” and laid it out.

Dot’s expression went from jovial to impassive to impatient. “So you’ll lose this author. What have you lost? Someone whose books sell five thousand copies!”

“He asked me why we published his book if we’re not going to support it. I didn’t have an answer for him.”

“We’re not meeting our profit targets, so we have to cut overhead. It’s as simple as that.”

“Not to an author, it isn’t.”

“What’s this author?” Dot snapped, her dark, pretty face hardening, her words moving toward the side of her mouth. “I’ll tell you what this author is. He’s a chip in a roulette game, like most authors. Most literary fiction is going to lose money, right? It’s a fact of life. But we go on publishing it because you never know. Now and then one of them comes up a winner. If it doesn’t we’re not going to throw good money after bad. How long have you been in this business?”

“I’ve been in it long enough to remember when a book got ten percent of the cover price to advertise and promote it. Okay, I’m not asking for that. I’m just asking that we don’t abandon David completely.”

“Do you know how many editors are going to tell me that if we cut the ad budget this or that author is going to leave?”

“If this was your typical first novel, with little enough to put in an ad, I could live with it. But we’ve published four of David’s books, one of them has made money, and this one has gotten fabulous quotes and is starting to get some major attention. We’ve got a stake in him.” She paused, weighed her next words, and decided to use them. “Also a responsibility. We’re building reputations, careers, not only publishing books. Even a small ad with the right quotes in the
New York Review of Books
puts this book on the literary map and maybe helps him to get a better teaching job. I’m asking for fifteen hundred, two thousand tops.”

“I’m already five minutes late for a meeting. I’ll think it over. But, there’s other editors to consider.”

Martha stood up. “I think the house owes me one. And this is the one I want.”

“Put it in a memo. I’ll see what I can do.”

Two days later a copy of a memo came to her authorizing the group ad that included David’s book. She called advertising and learned there would be room for one quote. Then she called David. As she explained the situation, in the teeth of his silence, she felt like a Soviet bureaucrat talking to a Lithuanian.

When she was finished, he said, “What are the publicity people doing? Any action there?”

“There’s not much they can do yet.”

“You said they were waiting for reviews. Now they’ve got them, right?”

“Come on, David. You know that a review in the
Voice
doesn’t get you on
Letterman”

“It should get me on something. The one in the
Chicago Tribune
could get me on the
Studs Terkel
show. I’m only asking for a little effort from you.”

“From me? I’m the one who’s neglecting you and your … book?”

“Go ahead. Say it. My damn book? My lousy book? Which one?”

“I think we both need to cool off and see things in perspective.”

“Which perspective? From Old Bottom-line Moneybags’s perspective, I’m a nothing who’s being a pain in the ass. From my perspective, I’m an author fighting for his book, maybe his career. And I’m not getting what other authors in my position are getting. I see what Knopf does for Jane Smiley or Harpers for James Wilcox or Seymour Lawrence for Jayne Anne Phillips.”

“Seymour Lawrence has his own imprint. And I’m sure that there are authors at Knopf and Harpers who are in your position and are just as unhappy. It’s not any one house. It’s the way publishing is now.”

“What am I supposed to do? Everyone tells me you have to hustle for your book these days, but I can’t get to first base with you guys or even get to bat. I’m looking at a major failure.”

Martha took a deep breath and interrupted him. “David, listen to me. You remember when you said that getting Victor’s words made it all worthwhile, even if nothing else happens. That’s what matters finally. The judgment of your peers, of the real critics and writers you’ve been hearing from. All the rest is just fashion, hype, and luck.”

…

After he hung up, David sat at his desk, his mind still churning with anger and resentment. He tried to shift his thinking, to find consolation in Martha’s words, which were ones he had often told himself. Why had he
stopped believing them? It was as though the premise of the literary vocation had shifted from exploring your imagination to marketing it. It was in the air: the big money, the publicity hunting, the careerism. The brightest of the young writers he taught or met took it for granted and acted accordingly. He remembered a remark of Louis Kronenberger’s some years ago: “It used to be writers sold out at forty. Today they sign on at twenty-five.” But it had affected him too. Like other writers of the middle generation, he saw through the higher commercialism, its wanton conversion of fame (still the “Spur,” as Milton called it) into stupid celebrity; and yet felt left out of the action. He had had his chance after his first book and hadn’t exploited it, and now he was condemned to this third-rate job in Nowheresville and to struggle for nominal advances, a lousy ad, scraps of recognition. He felt like a fool.

A week later Martha sent him a copy of the ad, two clips of short reviews that were six weeks old, and the news that the
Times Book Review
had killed the review of his book. Several fruitless conversations followed with his agent and Martha. The fact that his book had still only netted some 4,300 copies and that returns were already coming in to reduce that figure loomed like a wall that bounced back any suggestions or requests that cost money. Finally, David wrote a long letter to the publisher that wired all of his complaints and grievances to set off the explosive conclusion: “Being published by Concord has proved to be the worst form of rejection: another publisher who had as little interest in the book as you would merely have turned it down; instead you took it on and then through your indifference and incompetence killed it.”

Enraged, Dot summoned Martha and handed her the letter. “Who does this bastard think he is?”

Martha read it through, her own anger, frustration, and sense of betrayal rising finally to match David’s. “He’s a difficult author whose book will sell less than four thousand copies,” she said. “Forget him.”

Publishing Today

Gerald Howard

G
ERALD
H
OWARD
has worked as an assistant editor in the educational department of New American Library and as a Viking hardcover and Penguin paperback editor at Penguin USA, where he eventually became an executive editor. He is currently an editor in the trade department of W. W. Norton
.

Much admired since its appearance in the
American Scholar
in the summer of 1989, and reprinted here with a “Postscript” especially written for this edition of
Editors on Editing,
Mr. Howard’s incisive overview of the state of contemporary editing, writing, and publishing, “Mistah Perkins—He Dead: Publishing Today,” is still discussed and debated with undiminished interest among editors, writers, and publishers
.

Exploring “the forces that are reshaping the landscape of American publishing, particularly as they affect the function of the book editor, be he the accomplice or victim (or both) of these forces…, and matters of taste and judgment in writing that aspires to the status of literature,” Mr. Howard ruminates on how the patron saint of American editors, Maxwell Perkins, would fare in today’s publishing world
.

After a vividly detailed examination of how the pressures of the marketplace, the media, and publishing tend to tempt writer and editor a way from dedication to the highest ideals of their callings, Mr. Howard decides that “it is impossible to imagine that august figure Max Perkins working happily or even successfully in this world, for
his
values—loyalty, honesty, taste, proportion, Olympian standards—are not always negotiable currency
these days…. The heart of darkness at the center of today’s publishing world is not a jungle. Rather, it is a flashy, disorienting environment, a combination hall of mirrors, MTV video, commodities pit, cocktail party, soap opera, circus, fun house, and three-card monte game. The message one emerges with, stunned and shaken by what one has witnessed, is: ‘Mistah Perkins—he dead.’”

Publishing Today

Each year our institutions of higher learning churn out thousands of liberal arts graduates who would just about kill to have my job: book editor for an established trade publisher. I know just how they feel, for in the early seventies I was one of their yearning number, and as pathetically ill-formed and ill-informed as my aspirations were, I can’t say that in any essential respect the profession has let me and my dreams down. I am paid a good dollar to read manuscripts and proposals that represent a nice slice of the best that is currently being thought and said, to select and then often help shape some of them for publication, and to engage the various publishing mechanisms so that those manuscripts make their way successfully into book form, into the bookstores, and finally into the hands of readers. The authors and colleagues with whom I work are about as pleasant and cultured and sharp and dedicated a group of folks as this civilization produces, and it is a joy to be associated with them. As a commissioned officer in the forward march of culture, I have something like a universal passport to pursue my personal enthusiasms, be they literary or intellectual or pop cultural. My daily work puts me in possession of the sort of inside skinny on events of the day that makes for interesting conversation at cocktail parties. As for those editorial lunches, well—they’re everything you think they are.

So what’s the beef? Why do book editors often end the workday with the white-collar equivalent of the thousand-yard stare? Why do so many of us adopt the armor of cynicism as protection against … against
what?
Well, each editor will have his own set of gripes, but for me it’s a faster, huger, rougher,
dumber
publishing world than I could have anticipated.

The American publishing business today is in a tremendous state of confusion between its two classic functions: the higher-minded and more vocally trumpeted
mission civilisatrice
to instruct and edify and uplift the reading public and the less loudly advertised but, in the nature of things,
more consistently compelling
mission commerciale
to separate the consumer from his cash. Happy the publisher (and happy the author) who can manage to make a single book fulfill both functions! The real art of publishing consists not in reconciling what are, in a capitalist system, quite simply irreconcilable imperatives but in orchestrating the built-in tensions in a harmonious fashion. However, the two-way road in publishing from the bottom line to Mount Olympus travels right across a fault line, and that is where the serious editor lives and plies his trade. To put it bluntly, the tectonic plates are shifting, there’s an earthquake going on, and all that moving and shaking you’ve read about is making it hard to attend to business—or even to be certain, from day to day, just what our business is. The delicate task of orchestrating tensions becomes more difficult still when the walls threaten to collapse about you.