You're Married to Her? (19 page)

OUTBOX: LAT revu sched for 12/1.

INBOX: ^5! U d'man!

But after awhile we began to spat like rock musicians cooped up together on a thirty-city tour, or more accurately, like a married couple, each member of which feels his or her work is invisible to the other.

INBOX: ??? Did U call Union SQ B&N to gt me rdg there?

OUTBOX: Only 300 times.

Expectations are high in publishing. It's difficult for an author to understand why he wasn't reviewed in the
New York Times
, or why his recent books fizzle when his first did well. Or why a book about an unrepentant shop-aholic or an un-trainable dog gets a lot of attention while an insightful family character study is all but neglected. A writer can blame himself, of course, but what did he do except sacrifice four years of his life to hard work and research? Sooner or later most writers start to think they can do a better job than their publisher.

When I started to receive daily e-mails demanding that I resubmit his book to critics who had declined to review it, when he accused me of spending more time and money on another author's book, I sent him a rotten
Kirkus
.

Kirkus
was one of the most esteemed of the advance trade reviews, those magazines that critique books two to three months before they are made available for sale. A really good
Kirkus
can generate a rush of calls from movie producers; a bad one means surprisingly little. Except to an author. A bad
Kirkus
, with its razor sharp invective, can signal the arrival of Armageddon to an author who has been waiting years for the public's response. Most publishers are disappointed by an unfavorable
Kirkus
and simply file it away. But I figured a little humility was in order here and I duly faxed it on. Our relations were noticeably more cordial after that and have been ever since.

Although publishers large and small delegate their slush piles to the lowliest dogsbodies in the organization, they're usually too superstitious to disregard them entirely, and do read them, however slowly and partially, because they always have the nagging fear that they might be rejecting a work of genius.
War and Peace
,
Remembrance of Things Past
,
To Kill a Mockingbird
, were all rejected by publishers. Some nitwit even passed on the
Joy of Cooking
. We found one of our most successful books through the slush pile. It was brilliant, original, topical and scholarly; Marge had selected it out of hundreds of manuscripts and kept hounding me to read it. Once I did I called the author immediately but by that time he was dead. We had missed him by three weeks. We couldn't tell the widow we weren't going to publish her husband's magnum opus but we weren't keen on the book's chances. We had nobody to send on tour, nobody to do interviews, no future young talent for the media to discover. In despair I turned to the publicist of one of the country's most successful literary publishers. “Oh, Ira, don't be discouraged,” she said. “Dead authors can be great to work with.” Better, sad to say, than some live ones.

While the dead author's book caught a huge break, hailed by the press as the second coming of
A Confederacy of Dunces
—the posthumous comic novel that won its author a Pulitzer Prize—I encountered a number of authors who promised to help promote their titles but, once the book was accepted, had no intention of following through.

It's disheartening when a writer turns out to have stage fright and gives a terrible performance. We published a photogenic young woman who looked like sex itself in a black leather mini-skirt but who mumbled through her first chapter at a bookstore appearance as if listing a prescription drug's side effects on a radio commercial. There's no way of telling who can perform and who cannot. I conversed for a year via telephone with an articulate novelist whom we arranged to have read at a book festival. I knew him only from his publicity headshot and didn't recognize him at the airport. Far from the dashing outdoorsman with a salt-and-pepper beard and a lecherous twinkle in his eye, he stumbled into the baggage claim area like an elderly Walt Whitman and in fact read like Whitman himself, recorded in 1890 on an Edison wax cylinder. An author doesn't have to be a great performer. She can develop a fan base in a blog, review books on the radio. But some authors, many of whom are academics, view a new book as a bullet point in their resume and their publisher as something like the department secretary.

My least favorite author—the one who was less helpful than the dead one, and here I am going to take pains to conceal his identity, so let's call him Errol Schmuck—refused not only to make author appearances without being paid, but also to proofread his book. “Man, I'm a poet, I'm not into this proofreading jive and besides, I've got finals to grade.” Proofreading your manuscript, as every writer knows, is an important thing to do, perhaps
especially so for poetry. Poets use so few words to say so much that each word carries more weight than that of a work of prose. Only the poet knows the precise rhythm and punctuation and break in the line; no copy editor can verify what is intended. So a poet, of all writers, needs to be the one to make the final judgment on the manuscript. But Errol Schmuck had finals to grade and did not catch the elimination of a page break that resulted in the fusing of two poems.

The reviews, I'm happy to say, were splendid. Apparently, nobody noticed. Except Errol Schmuck, who demanded a nationwide recall. We placed an errata sheet in the small first printing, offered to exchange all misprinted copies for a new one, and immediately ran a corrected second printing. End of story.

Not quite. The first telephone call came at midnight. Although I wasn't in the office to answer, I was able to savor it and all those that followed on the answering machine, counting the many ways you can call someone a cheap Jew without actually saying it. I sort of enjoyed the subsequent series of blistering e-mails we exchanged but not the calls from booksellers who wanted to know what to do about the broad-shouldered, very angry man who planted himself at the check-out counter with an armful of books from their shelves, claiming that he was the author, that the books were “tainted” and that he demanded they be returned to the publisher. Yes, of course, we accepted them. I then paid the distributor to comb through every last book in the warehouse. For
years the notice on our website read: “You may be in possession of a book with a serious error. This is a rare book and may be of considerable value to collectors. We will gladly exchange it for a corrected copy from a subsequent printing.” We never had a taker, not one.

Before I began the press I imagined publishers who wore wide wale corduroys and French blue shirts with flamboyant bow ties, who worked late into the night blue-penciling manuscripts, then went for martinis with starry-eyed young women editors to whom they were legends. I didn't own a blue pencil, but I did wear corduroys, and a sweater and a muffler, and I did work late into the night reading manuscripts next to the space heater in my office, willing them to captivate me with the same plaintive longing with which I stared into the refrigerator at lunch time, as if simply looking long and hard enough would give rise to something I could actually eat, or in this case, sell.

Why, I wondered, had I ever wanted to sell books instead of write them? It wasn't that people didn't love books and want to read them, they just didn't see why they should buy them retail. And why would they when new books were free in libraries and used ones selling for pennies online? Sometimes, as the wind shook the old wooden building and the clock ticked to daybreak, as the reality of money and sales or, to be honest, the lack of both, kept me up at night, my catastrophic mind set loose, I imagined thousands of unsold books returning to our warehouse from bookstores all over America—on pallets,
in boxes, on trucks, in trains, mounting in piles like the columns of debt in my monthly statements. In an effort to soothe myself to sleep I made lists, conjuring all the things that were easier to sell than books—pizza, tattoos, t-shirts. One night I imagined standing on a street corner hawking underpants, a ridiculous comparison but one that in my increasingly battered frame of mind deserved scrutiny. People
needed
underpants. Most people did not feel they
needed
a book. Nor were critics likely to write a sarcastic review of a pair of underpants. And who would ever pass a pair of old underpants to a friend—“Have you worn this? I think you'll enjoy it.”—or sell it to a used underwear dealer? But most shameful was the way I began to feel about books, once a treasured source of knowledge and delight, now a symbol of failure and pain.

One day, however, I received a telephone call from a starry-eyed young woman editor to whom I was apparently a legend. Her voice was hesitant. “I'm so sorry to interrupt you but I . . . me and my backers, that is . . . are starting a small press.” Recalling my own timid questions at BEA and the publishers who took the time to answer them I invited her to my office.

“We l-o-v-e your press,” she said upon driving two hours to get here and shyly admitted she was copying our website design, our mission statement, the “look” of our books. “You're so cool,” she said, “so cutting edge.”

She picked my brain for details I had forgotten years ago and I had to admit to an unexpected
frisson
, the attentions of a cute young woman who saw in me everything
I had wanted to become. But surrounded by stacks of titles we had published, giant blow-ups of book covers, boxes of promotional rubber toys, a six-foot-long calendar board that projected the deadline of every task for the next twelve months, she found herself in paradise while I was in a prison of my own making. At one time in my life a situation such as this, a bright and energetic young woman who was asking for my guidance might have led me to fantasize one scenario while I was already beginning to conjure another. After several more meetings I was ready to make my move.

I proposed a small café this time, unhurried and intimate, and found a table where we would not be overheard. When she entered, late and sweetly frazzled as always, she didn't see me at first but glowed as soon as we locked eyes. When she sat down I admitted I'd been thinking a lot about her. She blushed. “But,” I edged closer and said in a hesitant whisper, “there's something we need to talk about.”

She looked wary.

“Promise me you'll think it over, that you won't just say no.”

Now I was beginning to freak her out but before she could answer, I came out with it: “I think you should buy the company.”

“What?”

“You promised me you'd think about it.”

“I did not.”

“That you wouldn't just say no.”

“I don't have that kind of money.”

“You have backers.”

“But we can't afford to buy a publishing company.”

“How do you know? Do you have any idea how much you'll need to start one? How many years it takes to develop a brand? How many books you'll have to publish before you attract a distributor? Wouldn't your backers rather take over a ten-year-old company with a great national reputation than start from scratch?”

“But the financing.”

“Leave the financing to me. I'll come up with something you can manage.”

“I doubt that.”

“Trust me. I can.”

There were lawyers involved, money to raise, a contract with endless terms. We went back and forth for almost a year. Some days it seemed a deal was likely to happen; others it appeared impossible. But we persevered, pestering people for advice, looking for likely models, studying endless options—much as I had done years before—she for the dream of owning a publishing company and me to get out from under one.

When the deal was actually done I was in uncertain territory. I no longer quite knew how to define or what to do with myself. Having made lists of all the projects I couldn't wait to begin I was positively featherbrained and unable to focus for months. A famous episode from the Oprah show kept running through my mind, the one in which she dragged a red wagon full of suet on
stage to symbolize the weight she'd lost. For the first time in ten years I felt free, free of debt and deadlines and the slush pile; free to read once again for pleasure. The book business and all the expectations I carried around had been my red wagon full of fat. I didn't know if I wanted to write again and if I did I would never quite look at editors the same way. For having spent a decade acquiring, editing, designing, and selling books, I attained a certain insight into the secret desires of those who publish them. Far from wanting to replace their writers with new young talent, many publishers have a more personal agenda, a longing few writers imagine: If I didn't have all this contractual, marketing, and publicity crap to take care of, Hell, I could write a book and do it
better
than my authors.

M
y father once stared at me for a few long moments before expressing something that he seemed to have just figured out. “You know, you can talk to anyone in the world for half an hour.”

It might have been when I was visiting the family in Lynchburg, Virginia, or Savannah, Georgia, or Miami Beach, any one of the cities to which they moved and kept moving as the clothing trade moved south. There was always a pool at the apartment complexes where they lived and around the pool, strangers; all their old friends and relatives left behind. Since on these visits I usually passed a lot of time talking with whoever was around, this is where I remember the conversation happening. When I understood that he had actually taken notice of this practice of mine, I would engage absolutely anyone in his presence: neighbors, deliverymen, his colleagues from work. It didn't matter. It was something that my dad admired.