Editors on Editing: What Writers Need to Know About What Editors Do (40 page)

Depending on the type of book they have written, publishing in trade might give authors a greater window of opportunity. Because space in stores is crucial, the average shelf life for books gets shorter every day. The mass-market shelf life is three to six weeks. The trade paper shelf life is six to eight months, thus giving them more time to find an audience. If the book takes hold and gets established in the stores, booksellers reorder it year in and year out. We call this backlisting, and backlist publishing is the essence of trade paperback publishing. These books are like annuities. Each year they earn royalties for the author and add money to the bottom line of the publisher’s balance sheet. Many healthy publishing companies have been built on strong backlist titles.

The distinctions between mass-market and trade paperback are often blurred. Many an editorial meeting is spent discussing whether a book should be published in mass or trade. There is no easy answer. Let’s take a diet book. Will the diet appeal to a mass market (like
Fit for Life)?
Will this book be ordered in large enough quantities to justify a mass-market publication? Another way of asking that is, will it get out through the wholesalers into, say, supermarkets, which have very little space for books at all? At what price point are consumers no longer going to buy the book? Is the diet or author a household name? How much did we pay to acquire it? If we paid a lot, we have to put it into mass market. This is always an important consideration. Consider the example of Amy Tan’s first novel,
The Joy Luck Club
. The paperback rights were sold for $1.2 million to Vintage, a trade paperback imprint of Random House. Because it is a more
literary book, one would have assumed that Vintage would publish it in trade. But executives at Random House realized that in order to earn back the money more quickly, it might make more sense to release the book in mass market first, so it was published by Ballantine, the mass-market division of Random House.

Another enduringly popular misconception is that a trade paperback editor is just a reprinter, someone who reads bound galleys or finished books from a hardcover house and then acquires the paperback rights. WRONG! Buying reprints is just one way that an editor acquires a list. In fact, a trade paperback editor of the nineties finds it is becoming increasingly difficult to buy other companies’ hardcovers because the original publishers are now making in-house deals with their own corporate paperback imprints. As a result, the trade paperback editor looks to do more and more originals.

The original is the most creative and fun type of book to do but it is also the one that is most work intensive. As in hardcover publishing, you must begin with a good idea. And then you must be tenacious in following up, developing the idea, finding the best author, going after that writer, negotiating the contract, editing the book, and making sure your sales and marketing people know how the book should be published. Ideas come from many places: while reading magazines or newspapers, talking to a friend or a member of your family, sitting on a bus, or pursuing a hobby. (I once got one standing in the lobby of a theater during intermission.) But with trade paperbacks you must first understand the book’s market in order to decide if your idea is best suited for this format. There are no definite rules when you determine whether a book should be published first in hardcover, trade paper, or mass market. Rather, you find yourself asking a lot of questions. Let me give you an example.

We published a book called
Secrets of the Astonishing Executive
by Bill Herz, a businessman with an M.B.A. who also happens to be a magician. His book was an offbeat business manual that taught executives how to perform magic in the workplace using simple everyday objects you might find in any office. The goal of the book was to help you motivate staff and show you how to break the ice with clients. Ordinarily, business books are first published in hardcover because the audience for these books can afford the higher price and because you need to get the books reviewed in periodicals that don’t always review paperbacks. But this was a quirky book, practical but sort of humorous, that would appeal, perhaps, to younger middle managers and hip executives; this type of audience is used to buying books in paperback.

The author has speaking engagements all year long at Fortune 500 companies, and he has received many endorsements and was even written up in
the
Wall Street Journal
. So two more things became clear: we would have a lot of blurbs that could be put on the cover, and we would have a very large special sales audience who might buy the book in significant quantities at his speaking engagements if the price were right. As significant as we thought the sales might be, we knew that those numbers wouldn’t be achieved through wholesale outlets, so we rejected the idea of mass market. Clearly, the trade paperback was the way to go on this title.

Many books sell better right away in paper because that is where the main market is; examples are how-to manuals, parenting guides, volumes on alternative health and culture, and books of humor or about pop music. Sometimes it is merely a function of price. Avon published a big six-hundred-page volume called
The Whole Pop Catalog;
its twenty-dollar price was probably about as much as the market could bear. Its hip package and nostalgic content cried out to be published as a trade paperback original.

But what if the author and/or agent insists that their book come out in hardcover for prestige, for reviews, or for the library market? Or what if the market for this book will pay a hardcover retail price? You certainly don’t want to miss out on that opportunity. Or you may decide that the real market is in paperback but you need the hardcover to establish the market. What the editor can do is to find an interested editor at a hardcover house. Usually he turns first to an editor of an imprint within his own corporation, and then together they buy the book hard-soft. How the book is handled from here varies depending on many factors, including the working habits and style of each editor and the chemistry between them. The type of book it is and who has a particular strength with that book, or who has the relationship with the author or agent, are also important determinants. If the project started at Avon, as an example, the paperback editor would probably do the bulk of the editorial work (conceptual and line editing), or both editors might go through the manuscript, confer, and then respond to the author with one, unified letter. The hardcover editor at Morrow, our hardcover imprint, would then see it through the various stages of production, present it at sales conference, and push it though publicity, etc. I would do the same at our paperback sales conference the following year.

Let’s suppose an agent sends me a proposal for a history book on America during the Second World War and I think that this is a book that will become a classic in its field, with course adoption possibilities. I will send it up to an editor at Morrow who also understands this type of book and will recognize its hardcover market. Assuming this editor likes it, we will run profit and loss numbers within our companies and then “marry” those numbers so that we can determine how much we can afford to pay to buy it jointly. If we buy the book, the author writes his manuscript and submits it to the editor he feels more comfortable with, perhaps even to both. As a
common courtesy, the editor who received it usually informs the other that the manuscript is in and makes a copy for the other one. Then, depending on individual schedules, they set out to edit.

In a perfect world, both editors see eye to eye on the strengths and flaws of the work. Usually one editor picks up certain things and his counterpart picks up others. Sometimes they disagree on certain points and both points of view are presented to the author, who can then decide which opinion he wants to go with. I always insist on one letter going out to the author so that he isn’t confused. Some editors can get territorial about who should sign the letter, but usually a compromise can be worked out based on who “found” the book, who did the most work on it. If I’m dealing with an old-fashioned, traditionalist hardcover editor, I usually let him write the letter as long as my comments are passed along and my name is mentioned as the other editor. This is by no means a perfect method. It can sometimes irritate people’s feelings; overall, however, the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. I genuinely believe that having two pairs of trained editorial eyes looking at the work is a real plus for any author.

…

A hardcover editor approaches a paperback house for a partnership for various reasons. Often it is a simple monetary one. If the hardcover editor wants a book that an agent is selling but that will cost too much money to acquire, this editor knows that by joining forces with a paperback company there will be more money to work with and she may be able to beat out her competition.

Sometimes, though, the introductions go the other way. There are times when the paperback house has a previous history with an author who either has never been published in hardcover or is unhappy with his present hardcover publisher. If the trade paperback editor thinks it is worth it, he will introduce the author to the hardcover house within his own corporation.

Because the paperback publisher has put up at least half of the acquisition money, he will often have a big say in the way a hardcover house publishes the book, from title selection to jacket design to marketing plans. Again, this influence varies from company to company and from project to project. My experience has been that there really isn’t much of a difference between the way a hardcover editor and a paperback editor would shape the work, since both are really thinking of the same reader. However, there is usually a big difference in the way their respective companies would market the book—everything from title selection to jacket/cover designs to advertising and publicity campaigns.

For instance, when a hardcover editor I know bought a controversial
book on relationships by a well-respected sociologist, his company chose to go with a long, serious title that was authoritative, and they put nothing but type on the jacket. His trade paperback partner lobbied for a shorter, punchier title and some sort of illustration that would play up the controversial subject matter. The hardcover editor was going for reviews and prestige. The paperback publisher was going for something that would make people sit up and notice the book—and remember it years later, when the paperback would be the prevailing edition in the stores. Sometimes the two sides can come together. If they can’t come up with a solution both sides can live with, sometimes the paperback publisher will have an opportunity to change the title and cover approach one year later.

About the time that Thornton’s piece was being read in the early 1980s, something interesting was starting to happen with trade paperback fiction. Young men and women in their early twenties and thirties were writing dynamic, hip novels on the cutting edge, and a large audience responded to their hardcover editions with great enthusiasm. Trade paperback publishers, led by Vintage Books, bought them for reprint and packaged them with bold, modern covers that often looked like record album covers. Reviewers couldn’t stop writing about them, so publishers decided to publish some of these novels directly in trade paper, the most popular example of this being Jay Mclnerney’s
Bright Lights, Big City
.

But this turned out to be a relatively short-lived fad. Too many publishers jumped on the bandwagon, the market became glutted, and the audience for this type of “youth fiction” moved on to something else. Another problem is that the price of acquiring a good literary novel has gone up astronomically, which means that publishers need to sell a large quantity of books to earn back the advance paid to the author. When publishers try to publish them right into paperback, most newspapers and magazines don’t review them.

When we started up Avon Trade Paperbacks, we saw that many of our competitors were cutting back on all trade fiction titles, so we decided to limit the number of fiction titles to one per month. By doing this we can put a lot of effort into publishing that one title, with more advertising, promotion, and publicity money allocated. This, of course, means we have to be very selective about what we acquire. When we find we have had to pay a lot of money to acquire a trade fiction book, we make that book a lead title and publish it at the top of our list, giving it even more attention. We did this with a first novel called
The Music Room
by Dennis McFarland, and the book was a big success for us. But you can only do this every so often and only with the right book.

Although editors want to publish them, trade fiction titles are very difficult to do now. Unfortunately, there just isn’t enough of an audience to
support the number of books published in this area. With a few exceptions, most trade fiction reprints don’t sell more than what they sold in hardcover despite the lower cost. There seems to be a finite number of readers who can pay the hardcover price for good quality fiction, and then one year later there aren’t many left over for the paperback edition. Of course the hardcover benefits from getting the review attention at the time of publication, which gets readers into the stores. One year later and people just don’t seem to remember a book they read about in some review. So as a result, most paperback publishers have been cutting back their lists. The exception, in recent years, seems to be books that win the major literary awards like the National Book Award.

Now, in the early 1990s, the majority of hard-soft acquisitions in trade paperback are nonfiction.

Those of us in the industry who are fortunate enough to work on trade paperbacks have discovered ways of combining hardcover and mass-market publishing techniques, from the way we acquire books to the way we get them to the marketplace. A trade paperback editor’s life isn’t much different from a hardcover editor’s life except that he is more likely to be in more meetings during working hours. This is especially true if this editor works inside a mass-market house, where the pace is much quicker and the pressure is greater to keep things on schedule. As if there weren’t enough meetings in our company, we added another one just for trade paperbacks. We call it a “target marketing” meeting. Essentially what this does is call the sales and marketing departments’ attention to books on the list that warrant special attention because, given the book’s subject matter, there are some unusual avenues to explore. These meetings also train editors to think like publishers. Before the meeting the editor is asked to think about why she acquired the book, special markets that sales people might not usually solicit, other books on the subject and how they compare, specialized media where review copies and press releases can be sent, special interest magazines where it might make sense to advertise, and how the author can promote or help us exploit contacts in his/her field. The final question we ask is, who will read this book and how can we best get to that reader?