Manifesto of the Week

I'm clearing out a lot of stuff from earlier in the week today, aren't I?

An anonymous Editorial Assistant blogs as Editorial Ass. Said assistant -- and would I be justified by using the feminine pronoun for this nameless person from here on? well, I'll do it anyway -- went to a recent speech by Jonathan Karp, impresario of the Hachette imprint Twelve, and she came away mightily impressed.

Let me be blunt: if you work for a big publishing company, particularly if you are young, you have a certain image of what you'd like your career to be. You want to work on "big" books that are also important, you want to have time to make them all perfect gems, and you want everyone to appreciate you. (As we used to say at the clubs, every new editorial assistant secretly thinks she wants to work at Knopf.)

Twelve is about the closest to that paradigm as you can get in modern publishing, though a lot of person-driven imprints are close. Twelve publishes one book a month, period. That means that one book gets a lot of attention: editorial, marketing, publicity, the whole ball of wax. But it also means that the EBITA for that month entirely depends on the sales of that one book. And anyone who's worked in publishing for more than a couple of years knows that the book world is not fair. Bad books succeed; good books fail. All of the promotion and marketing and publicity in the world can make a sow's ear of a book into a silk purse of a bestseller...but not consistently. And silk purse books turn into sow's ears of remainders with distressing regularity. Book publishing is vaguely consistent, but only vaguely, and the discontinuities can give you whiplash.

Twelve is very successful so far, and it should be successful indefinitely: it's staffed by smart people who are good at their jobs, it's backed by one of the major publishing houses in the US, and its list is packed with strong books on provocative topics. (Mostly nonfiction, I note, though Editorial Ass's post has the usual I-love-publishing slant towards fiction.)

I said "should be." Publishing is often a world of "should be," and regularly that turns into "should have been." Book publishing is not Hollywood -- it's not true that no one knows anything -- but what we do all know every so often turns out to be completely wrong.

As Editorial Ass said, seven of the first ten books from Twelve have been bestsellers. But there will come a time when all four of the books in one of Twelve's seasons underperform. It may be this fall; it may not be for five years. But by the law of averages, it'll happen eventually. And when that happens, some money person at Hachette is going to look at a flood of red ink and be sorely tempted to declare the Twelve experiment over.

Now, I'm a cynic and a pessimist. And I work for a company whose publishing strategies are about as far from Twelve's as possible -- Wiley publishes widely and distributes even more widely, with major scientific and higher-education arms. (Even our trade division is actually called "Professional/Trade," and it's as much the former as the latter.) We publish lots of books for lots of different people each month, while Twelve tries to publish one book that vast numbers of people will all want. So feel free to ignore my opinion as utterly biased. (I won't even drag out that trendy "long tail" concept to pretty up my arguments.)

On a slightly different topic, Editorial Ass also talks about "the gap that is going to occur between the titles you love and the titles you took on that you less than love." Again, I'm a cynic, etc. -- but it needs to be said that this is what a fiction editor talks about. (Maybe some nonfiction editors acquiring in very trade-y areas, too.)

It buys into the old myth that "love" has anything to do with a book's acquisition or sales. Books that are loved may get acquired, but editors are professionals, not gushing schoolgirls. They acquire books that fit their programs, that are good works of their kind, that come from the writers who can best present the material (which may mean the best at writing or may mean the best "platform"), that are available when they're acquiring. Nobody is sitting in a cafe on the Left Bank reading manuscripts and making conversation with Hemingway. Most of the books published simply aren't lovable -- but they're still very useful, and even necessary. The publishing world needs far less talk about "love" -- there's far too much hype and puffy speech already.

A second, subtler point is that Editorial Ass is assuming that Twelve is devoted to publishing books that Karp and his team love. I would instead say that it's for books that they think they can sell. That may include books that they also feel passionately about -- and maybe everything so far has been in both categories. (It's not as hard when you only have a book a month.) But when it comes to one or the other, a smart publisher will always choose the book he can sell over the book he loves. Publishing is a business.

What she's saying has been the mantra at big corporate publishers for the past decade: publish fewer books, give them more attention, get bestsellers. But there's still that undercurrent of "love" and the myths of "great books." Twelve, to my eye, looks more hard-headed and serious than driven by love, as Editorial Ass thinks it is.

But the company that best epitomizes the plan to publish a few books smartly is Workman, a publisher that relentlessly researches and develops all aspects of every new title. They don't have many bestsellers, since they don't focus entirely on the big book-sales outlets, but pick projects that will sell through many outlets. They also hardly ever publish fiction, and I doubt that's unrelated.

If I could have one publishing wish -- unrelated to myself -- it would be to silence all talk of "love" in the business. Luckily for the perennially gushing, that will never happen.