Corrections from the Assisterati

Oh, dear...this, again?

The New York Observer has published an article on assistants in the publishing world. That's assistants to editors, agents, scouts, and publicists (never mind those assistants in design, production, and on the financial side), the group of which the article’s author, Kat Stoeffel, has deigned to call "The Assisterati." Judging from the industry responses--and the responses of the assistants around me--Stoeffel has gotten quite a few things wrong in this article. So let's take them to task:

1) Where they come from: Of a gathering of the Assisterati, Stoeffel says, "most of the guests were already connected through a network of private colleges on the East Coast . . . Some were on intimate terms, having attended the same summer camp, the Columbia Publishing Course." Certainly yes, a handful of publishing assistants emerge from excellent colleges and universities on the East coast. And some of them attended intensive summer programs like the NYU Publishing Institute, the Columbia Publishing Course, and other such immersive workshops that cram a lifetime of publishing experience (and an extraordinary series of panels headed by industry leaders) into a brief six weeks. (It's not much of a summer camp, more like a graduate-school-level boot camp.) But Stoeffel makes this all seem serendipitous, a product of privilege rather than deliberate planning for a deeply desired career. First, the geographic and economic spread among entry-level publishing employees is fairly large: I've worked with assistants who studied on the West Coast, the Midwest, the Deep South, the EU, in India, and in South Africa, and all of them had widely varying levels of economic support by way of hard-earned loans and scholarships. Secondly, the choice to attend summer publishing programs is hardly made just to gain cultural cache. While these programs carry a price tag (about $7000 for CPC, $5000 for NYU), they represent a fraction of the price and time that a person would need to commit for a master's degree in English or Journalism (usually upwards of $25,000). And because they are focused on the questions and concerns surrounding the publishing industry, they provide a unique advantage for people that are deeply committed to having a long career learning its nuances of the industry. (Remember that phrase, "deeply committed" in mind.)

2) Who do they think they are? Stoeffel starts to go into the character and attitudes of the Assisterati: "They are the caretakers, soon to be inheritors, of a sublime patrimony. Their proximity to literary creation . . . suggests they possess a cultural credibility they couldn't acquire in, say, Chicago, or on Wall Street. Underpaid but brimming with hope, they, like the people they assist, will one day run this town and steer the course of American literature." If you care about what you do, if you believe what you're doing has worth, you will take a great deal of pride in it. I freely confess that, because I work in an industry that values intelligent voices and finds ways to promote them in the public cultural sphere, I think what I do has an intrinsic value and it gives me cultural credibility. People who work in publishing are part of a tradition (which is vastly different than a patrimony) of finding ways to disseminate great thoughts by great writers, and if that's what Stoeffel wants to call arrogant, then fine, we're arrogant. (And so are all the folks in the denigrated Chicago or Wall Street communities she mentions, since I'm sure they often take as much pride in their work as we do in ours.) And as far as her pithy remarks regarding the attitudes of assistants across different departments, it seems the antipathy she perceives comes from the pettiest of interviewees. When the assistants in our office gather every Friday for a glass of wine and an hour of laughs, it doesn’t matter whether their author is a Twitter phenomenon or a poet of critical acclaim, or if they wear the elegant heels of a publicist or the papercuts of an editor. They all earned the right to be there for a drink, to celebrate the tremendous work and dedication they do every day.

3) Why they ended up getting hired, and what they actually do: Stoeffel says that, while the Assisterati may have lofty dreams of controlling the literary world, their cultural cache is rarely put to work. “Once they settle into their cubicles, these traits are about as valuable as perfect punctuation in the cover letter of a slush submission.” She goes on to quote assistants who are daunted by administrative tasks and secretarial work such as arranging travel plans, mailing packages, and Xeroxing manuscripts. Most egregiously, she suggests that many assistants continue to do these tasks as the only method of harmoniously bonding with their bosses, who serve as “gatekeepers to the kind of meaningful work—acquiring or editing books—that they must master in order to move up the ladder.” Yes, any entry-level assistant will have some level of administrative work to do, and unless they’ve worked in an office setting before, some of it will be new to them. (I’ve often wished that colleges would create seminars for graduating seniors called “Office Etiquette and Paperwork 101,” just so you could learn the multitudes of UPS and FedEx mailing options before your first interviews.) But every office environment requires this. Until publishing becomes an all-electronic industry (god forbid), someone has to mail galleys and xerox manuscripts, circulate jackets and turn over the foul copy. These are all steps in how a house functions from day to day, and demonstrate what it means to be entry-level: to see the work from the ground-floor up. And the bond with the boss is not just about sucking up or playing a “shell game,” it’s also sometimes about having a true mentor-protégée relationship that can benefit both participants. I can show my boss how I learn about breaking media news by way of Facebook, Twitter, and my Google Reader; she can fill me in on meetings regarding developments in the e-book world and new acquisitions. The difference between the Mad-Men-esque secretarial role that Stoeffel imagines, and the reality of the symbiotic relationship between established editor and aspiring assistant, couldn’t be more stark. Stoeffel is writing from a perspective that says apprenticeship and grunt work doesn’t matter—strange, given that she seems to have skipped into her Observer position by way of three internships (the majority of which are unpaid and entirely made of grunt work). Curiouser and curiouser…

4) The ones that stick around: Stoeffel notes that many assistants harbor other dreams—of writing, of traveling, of becoming pastry chefs—and some eventually leave to pursue those dreams. This is hardly news—every profession experiences some turnover. But who Stoeffel forgets to address—the population she leaves out entirely—are the many, many assistants whose dreams are to become champions of great writers through deliberate scouting around the world, dedicated representation of an author’s potential, nuanced editing of an important text, and spirited publicity of a great finished product. Those who figure out that this business isn’t for them will often leave early, and we wish them well. But for those of us who are deeply committed to this business, to this process—the making of books—it’s deeply offensive to see our dedication branded as naiveté. For those of us that threw ourselves into high school and college English courses, edited our local papers and magazines, took on unpaid internships while waiting tables, and now spend nights and weekends reading manuscripts and magazines and attending literary events, this was anything but a light, romanticized career choice. And when a reporter writes a glib, poorly researched, and intentionally inflammatory article just to get the media community talking about how offended they are, it’s more than just a raspberry being blown our way. The Observer is not meant to be Stoeffel’s personal LiveJournal on which to snark and speculate and insinuate that other people are wasting their time. If anything, her article was a profound waste of our time. We, after all, have real work to do.

It's The Most Wonderful Time of the Year

Whee! The countdown to the holiday break has begun and, in the offices of publishing houses and agents all over town, normal routine is slowly sliding by the wayside. These final weeks of the working year bring with them a feeling of excitement and anticipation that, despite its annual recurrence, never ceases to take me pleasantly by surprise.

Some of the first signs of the season appear overnight in our office lobby: two giant wreaths, two menorahs, a gaggle of poinsettias, and four life-size Nutcracker soldiers. Some might say it's childish to admit that their presence gives my step a little extra spring in the morning, but that's the truth. And I think that I'm not alone--the front desk folks and the elevator attendants seem to smile more brightly, and it feels natural to exchange a grin with a coworker as we wait for the elevators below a garland shimmering with gold.

Sadly, our floor doesn't go in much for collective holiday decoration. With my string of lights and single card, I'm probably the most outlandish celebrant here. But as I walk down the halls, I can detect the sound of Wham! singing "Last Christmas" through more than one person's headphones. I rock out to holiday music all day on Pandora, too--it's much more fun to do all the end-of-the-year catch-up work while internally crooning along to Bing Crosby.

Even though we lack tinsel and giant baubles, you can still tell what season it is by the number of gift packages and bags that start arriving. Most of them collect along the publicity corridor, which for this month becomes a regular diversion on my route around the office. You would not believe what they collect: chocolates, cookie plates, cakes, cheeses, and all kinds of fancy candy. Right now there's even a box of gift bags containing half-bottles of Moet et Chandon, which I unfortunately don't think is for the collective taking. Production gets a fair amount of love too from all the printing companies and photo agencies, but I have slightly less of a pretext to be wandering around their hallway, so I haven't had a chance to assess their haul this year. Disappointingly, Editorial tends to be the most barren of all unless a good-natured author happens to see the light and send something along; usually, a few cards from agencies constitute our seasonal gifts.

I think the personalities of different literary agencies emerge most clearly around the holidays. Just as it's revealing to see what cards your friends and acquaintances choose to send, so it is to examine how each agency chooses to acknowledge (or not acknowledge) the holidays. Some don't send anything, whereas others mail elaborate cards, signed by the entire office, that turn into calendars. A lot of agencies choose to throw parties around this time, too, which is even more interesting from an anthropological perspective. Some of the bigger boutique operations hold formal bashes for the big editors: they send official invitations, hire a bartender, and have the food catered. Others pride themselves on their informal get-togethers, where assistants are welcome and everyone pours their own wine and helps themselves to a Trader Joe's cookie assortment.

The other ubiquitous gathering of the season is the hosted party. Young editors or agents who work together will often pool their resources and industry contact lists to jointly host a shindig in the reserved back room of a reasonably trendy bar. These are a bit less nerve-wracking than agency parties, as there's less of a professional agenda; the crowd is usually comprised of people climbing through the various ranks of assistanthood, and although you are there to "network" the guise of the holidays and the neutral location make things feel more socially genuine. With the prospect of the break ahead, everyone is usually feeling quite jolly and ready to have a drink (or three), and an authentic sense of fraternity often sets in as you begin comparing stories of servitude with other party goers.

These numerous side events notwithstanding, the November/December party carousel is always centered around some kind of official bash. It seems that the improved fiscal outlook of 2010 has spurred publishing houses to be more extravagant than last year; there are reports of one company-wide blow-out at Gotham Hall, a house that decorated each floor of their building with a different theme to host a grown-up version of "Around the World," and more than one dinner-drinks event at a rented restaurant. Individual imprints and groups also celebrate informally with happy hours and lunches. And, despite the essence of forced festivity that always lingers at the fringes of these mandated office celebrations, I think I might enjoy them most of all. And here's why.

It takes a village to make a book--editors, production managers and editors, designers, publicists, marketers, and salespeople. During the stress and chaos of the year's span cycle, it's all to easy to lose track of the big picture, of the real scope of achievement. However, there's something about December that brings everything back into focus. Our slowed schedule, the release of cumulative "best of" lists, and a collective holiday spirit unite all the separate departments together in a community celebration of accomplishment. Looking back at what I, my imprint, and the house I work for have done this year makes my little heart swell with pride. Sure, there has been sweat (try hauling boxes of books and manuscripts around), blood (oh, the paper cuts), and more than a few tears, but at this time of year--particularly when slightly inebriated on the company dollar and surrounded by my closest co-workers, many of whom have become friends--it all seems more than worth it.

As you may have discerned by now, I'm kind of an emotional lush at Christmas. It gets to me, all this baby Jesus-ing and "Joy to the World" caroling. If I go on, I'll just get worse. So let me just say, "God bless ye merry publishing people," and more importantly, "God bless ye merry readers." Happy Holidays to all, and to all a good and safe break.

XO, Hannah

A Publishing State of Mind

Every year round December time, our company's employees gather in an upstairs hallway, Dixie cups of wine all around, and take stock in the year just past, hoping that the year to come will be less precarious and more profitable. Our editor-in-chief then takes a few minutes to acknowledge the milestones that employees have reached--those who have been with the company 5, 10, 15 years, calling each one up to thunderous applause to receive recognition and a warm handshake. It's a big to-do, and it's more than a little bit aspirational--especially when the long-timers get up. 25 years, 30 years, 45 years, and once even 55 years . . . whole lives dedicated to one company, a lifetime of work. What can you call that except a legacy?

It's an often-repeated fact that people today may change careers--not jobs, careers--two to three times in their lives. People shift around, their thoughts on what they want change, and their lives bring new challenges that may take them to new locations. The number of unforeseeable factors that may force a change in career are endless, and so it absolutely amazes me that I know people who have spent their entire years--twice my time on earth--at the same company, in the same function, and never tired of it. And despite advancing age and changing times, they are intellectually as sharp as they ever were, with energy to spare and continued optimism about the future of book publishing.

There's a lot of debate right now about whether certain artistic inclinations can be taught--can an MFA ever truly teach someone how to become a novelist? Can you buy the instincts of a bestselling writer? Does honing your craft in graduate school mean limiting yourself commercially in the future? These are all valuable questions, and worth asking given the boom in literature, self-published and non, and the steady depletion of the reading community. But an additional question begs asking: can you, and how can you, teach people to be publishing-minded?

Obviously working for a commercial publisher requires a different set of skills than writing a novel--you're not marketing books in solitude, you're not designing a book jacket solely for yourself, and you're not seeking out paper vendors and overseas printers by way of your local Staples. But nevertheless, the skills of someone who works in publishing--a mind for both high art and low commerce--doesn't always come naturally. There are a handful of certificate programs, as well as some graduate degrees, that are meant to provide you with a "Master in Publishing." Programs like The Columbia Publishing Course (of which myself and another TKers are alumni) often provide access to industry leaders, giving participants the opportunity to ask unlimited questions and engage in exercises designed to teach you the mindset of the trade publishing world. (At CPC, we were split into teams to run our own imaginary publishing houses over the course of two weeks. I was serving as my team's CEO, and nearly had a breakdown because my editors couldn't get their shit together, having their ideas shot down over and over by real-life publishing insiders. After the exercise was over, however, I felt much more informed about the different elements of making a book imprint function.)

Clearly programs like these, where 6 weeks of participation (and a chunk of tuition) give you an enormous amount of information, qualifying as a kind of publishing boot-camp. But are they more valuable than real-life experience? Will you get more out of 6 weeks of seminars than you would out of a 3-month internship at a publishing house? It's hard to say, as everyone's experience is different. But either path will show you a few aspects of what ultimately become a lifelong calling, a 45-year commitment to making literature. I've only been in this industry about 4 years, but I have to wonder if I'll make it to my 45th, to that handshake and that applause, to the knowledge that I've built a life for myself inside this profession.

Lost in a Sea of Words

This is my first blog post in well over a month, and I feel more than a little unsteady in my hands. Every Saturday for the last five weeks, I've set down at my computer to type something--desperately, anything--to no avail. I have been at a loss for words, part of a much larger malady: I've fallen out of love with reading and with writing, and I have no idea what to do with myself. For a woman who's spent her whole conscious life buried in books, and whose character has been shaped by that engagement with the written word, losing my love has had a jarring effect. It's as if I've become a broken glass, unable to hold what was so dear before.

There's a lot of reasons for this loss, both personal and professional. A divorce and three successive moves have overwhelmed me in certain ways, but equally true are the consequences of a decade spent in publishing. Something that once was a joy has become a burden--watching books come in, be published, fade away or find new life, but in either case constantly shadowed by the limitlessness number of titles marching up behind them. I look up at the shelves above my desk and instead of being thrilled by the variety of unread books, I can only think of how many months it would take to digest even one row--and that's without turning around and facing the three double-stacked bookcases behind me, or thinking of the extensive shelves at home.

This is not all bad, realizing my own reading mortality. There's a Wordsworth poem that I think of often, which begins: "The world is too much with us; late and soon / Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers." Like a lot of people, as evidenced by the slow food and minimalist movements, I'm taking stock of my own situation in the world and trying to learn to live with "enough." For my last move, I gave away 1/3 of my books, and am trying to prune even more now. I may, as Whitman says, contain multitudes, and perhaps part of my despair is a simple mental cry for clarity and slowness, a different way of dealing with this enormous world.

But it's the lack of desire, of passion at all, that saddens me. Reading now is like taking medicine, something done believing that it will make me better, not through any joy in the act itself. It's like making my bed, which always seemed incredibly pointless to me, until I realized that there was something--a great deal--to be said for making a place tidy each day, instead of climbing into and out disorder. There are acts we do to keep ourselves whole, even when that feeling of calm completeness seems so elusive.

It will come as no surprise to you, I imagine, as it surprised me not a twit to land recently on a book that described this all to me, my feeling of being at a loss in the world and so far from the beloved home that books had always created for me. Kathleen Norris's Acedia and Me delves into her own and others' experiences with acedia, a deep apathy and indifference to the world, a kind of soul-weariness. I'm halfway done, and while it hasn't brought me out of this particular place in myself, it's a comfort to have a companion along the way, and a voice that encourages faith in the midst of confusion.

I'm relying on friends as well, trying to draw their passions to replenish my own. I posted on Facebook on Friday, looking for suggestions and was heartened by the responses from friends, relatives, coworkers, and publishing acquaintances. People who understood both _why_ it mattered to lose my way with words, and also had advice for places to look for a balm for my broken heart. And what a cornucopia! Neil Gaiman, Kay Ryan, Anna Karenina, Jennifer Egan, What is the What, P.D. Wodehouse and Waugh and Alice Munro and a host of other authors and titles.

Typing that list now, I feel the flickerings of interest and the tendrils of desire unfurling a little. I'm not entirely ungrateful for this time of dispassion in my life, as it's required me to reflect on what I want and to make my way through these questions and confusions. I am finding that path slowly, but with determination: scrubbling through the underbrush, leaning on the love of others and their own abiding love of books, and depending finally on the words themselves to save me, as they have so many times before and for so many people besides myself.

Publishing Beyond the Big Apple: San Francisco

A minor character in a great musical (prizes for the person who knows it) once insisted, “New York is the center of everything.” The lead character, and increasingly myself, has to respond, "New York is the center of New York!”

It's easy to believe that, if you want a job in book publishing, you must submit yourself to the will of New York City. You may pay high rents and endure long crowded commutes, but the trade-off is that you will be at the epicenter of the publishing business. The bulk of the major houses--and some increasingly spectacular independent publishers--have their offices based in Manhattan and Brooklyn. But with the proliferation of online media, and the changing landscape of contemporary publishing, other cities are quickly becoming literary meccas in their own right.

As the first of what I hope will be a series of installments looking at the fruits of publishing outside the Big Apple, here's a quick glimpse of our first literary city: San Francisco.
San Francisco has lots of things to recommend it: long storied history, beautiful architecture, fantastic food, brilliant professors at great universities, and a culture entirely distinct from the rest of California. The crispness of the air and the lovely citizens of the city already made it a welcome destination for me over the past weekend. But what I really fell in love with was the literary scene.
The locus of San Fran's literary history sits between North Beach and Chinatown, a neighborhood that houses the former Montgomery Street residence of Allen Ginsberg (whose New York apartment just went on the market), the site of the Golden Era, the city's first literary journal (which had Mark Twain and Bret Harte as regular writers), the Black Cat Cafe, the bohemian cafe where John Steinbeck, Truman Capote and William Saroyan hung out, and Vesuvio Cafe, the bar where both Gregory Corso and Jack Kerouac were kicked out (and where Dylan Thomas once inadvertently spent the night in a booth). These locations are literally around the corner from one of the best bookstores in the city, the famed City Lights.
A sign above the door to the main fiction shelves reads "Abandon All Despair, Ye Who Enter Here." And it couldn't be more correct--City Lights is the mother of all independent bookstores, with a huge selection of fiction and non-fiction, and, in its third floor annex, a room dedicated to the Beat writers and poets who made the city their home. Photographs of Ginsberg, Kerouac, Saroyan, and Hunter S. Thompson cover the walls, and every major author who has spent time in the city appears on these shelves.
But San Francisco isn't a literary city whose reputation is based solely on its history; remarkably, the city can boast about the plethora of contemporary critics and writers reside there. In a terrific map made available by the organization 826 Valencia (founded by Dave Eggers and N'nive Calegari in 2002), you can find a list of over 70 independent, used, and rare bookstores, as well as over 26 publishers (which includes Artemis Press, Chronicle Books, McSweeney's, and Ten Speed Press) and 36 journals and magazines (including The Believer, Mother Jones, Threepenny Review, and Zoetrope). Recent additions to this esteemed roster of literary attractions include Stephen Elliot's cultural site TheRumpus.net, and events like LitQuake and Alternative Press Expo keep the city moving into the online media era.

With five major and utterly distinct literary communities--North Beach, Chinatown, The Mission, The Fillmore, and the Haight--and with hundreds of writers and artists throughout the city, it's no wonder that people would come to the city by the bay to appreciate literature. As 826 Valencia's map notes, "Today, maybe, it's sunny. The next draft of your manuscript can wait until the fog rolls in at 4:00pm. So go out, see something inspiring, then come home and start on chapter two. San Francisco literary history is a work in progress."

Publisher's Question Time, Vol. II

So, you may remember that last week we began to lift the veil from the face of publishing to reveal the beauty – and the monstrosity – beneath. In an effort to probe those murky depths, I solicited from my co-workers the most common questions that they get about their job, and their replies included queries covering everything from what editorial folks do all day to the correct pronunciation of Knopf. However, I saved the most common, and the most difficult, question for this week.

I have a manuscript—will you be my editor?
My [mother’s brother’s best friend’s daughter’s childhood crush’s dog] has a manuscript, will you take a look at it?
My dad, friend, grandpa, hairdresser etc is writing a book - can you help them get it published?

To someone who works in publishing, these words are akin to ragged nails screeching down a chalkboard. Not that this behavior is confined solely to aspiring writers: people who work in music, film, fashion, modeling, and sports get bombarded too. And it’s supremely awkward. You want to be nice; you want to help people and spread good karma. And you never know when someone might be proffering a hidden gem, the next best-seller that just needs one person to take a chance and believe in it. But the likelihood of that being the case is very small.

The issue here is the personal nature of the request, and the obligation it immediately creates. If a close friend who is serious about writing asks me to read something, I will do so because I genuinely want to help where I can. Hopefully, she will understand enough about my job to know that it’s not a question of me waving a magic wand to produce a book (I really have little power at all), and be comfortable with a respectful and honest exchange of ideas and suggestions. Most importantly, I can be sure that she’s approaching me as a friend and peer without any expectation of professional results.

However, the situation becomes very different if someone I don’t know well (or at all) asks for feedback. What do I say? They don’t know me well enough to value my opinion in and of itself or really care about what I have to say; they only want the possible connections I might have because of my job. It’s one thing to ask for neutral industry advice – for example, how best to select an agent or prepare a query, or even how to go about finding a job – and I’m always happy to provide that because it indicates that the person is professional and has a grip on the realities of publishing. There’s no inherent expectation of results, or the potential for an awkward dilemma about whether or not to be honest, and well-within the socially appropriate norms of networking and general goodwill. But it’s another thing to be cornered at a party by an acquaintance and asked point-blank if I can help her publish her boyfriend’s short story collection. Once, during a short-lived attempt to find a roommate through Craigslist, I went to see someone’s apartment; we were chatting about ourselves, and I mentioned what I do for a living. “Oh!” she said, eyes alight. “My mother writes romance novels! Can I put her in touch with you?”

You can call me grumpy and selfish and ungrateful if you want, but I think it’s rude for people to abuse social goodwill and demand an uncompensated investment of time and effort. For example, say you hurt your knee in an accident. You might ask your friend to talk to their mother who’s a doctor and see if she has any advice or recommendations, and maybe she’d suggest you see her colleague the orthopedic surgeon or visit a chiropractor. Perhaps she might even offer to look at it herself. But you wouldn’t, after meeting someone at a party and discovering he was a doctor, immediately whip off your trousers and ask him to examine your leg, would you? Or even entertain an expectation of free treatment from your friend’s mother? No, you would not. And that principle applies to all situations, whether you have a novel you want published or parking tickets you want voided. Please don’t send me your pastor’s self-published paranormal thriller unsolicited with a heavy-handed, hint-filled note; please don’t give my e-mail to your casual acquaintance without asking for my permission first; and please, whatever you do, DO NOT MESSAGE ME ON FACEBOOK just because you saw a comment I made on someone’s post that in some way casually referred to work (yes, that’s happened).

Phew! I feel so much better now.

Publishers’ Question Time, vol. I

You may have noticed that, although we identify ourselves as “publishing professionals” on our biography page, we don’t go into any specifics: where we work, what we do. There are many reasons for this decision, and they are good ones—namely, we don’t want to get into trouble. But I think that conspicuous absence also serves to separate us, as founders of this project and active [tk] reviewers, from our work identities. Such separation between work and play is healthy (or so we’ve been told), and there’s a lot to be said for shedding your “office” skin at the end of the day when you slither out of the door.

However, the reality is not always that simple. To a certain extent, our work and private “selves” are inextricable because a love of books and reading is so fundamental to both. If you want to work in publishing and be happy, you have to feel passion for what you do incredibly deeply, in your heart and brain and bones, because it is what will sustain you through the long hours, low entry-level salaries, and the constant demands of a creative environment.

This inability to separate church and state, as it were, is probably why I find myself want to write a bit about my job. I’ll come out of the closet right now: I’m an editorial assistant. It’s an interesting job but a somewhat ambiguous one, because although most people understand what an editor does, very few understand the full scope and responsibilities of the role. I sure as hell didn’t when I first started. On the subject of jobs, most of my conversations with new acquaintances go something like this:

PERSON: “What do you do?”
ME: “I’m an editorial assistant.”
PERSON: “Huh. Does that mean you get to read all day?”

If only. If only. So, in a very unscientific social experiment, I polled some of my crew, including fellow [tk]ers, for the a) most common; b) weirdest; and c) funniest questions they get asked about their job.

The responses (thanks, guys!) were revelatory. Many of the most common questions speak to a fundamental lack of knowledge about publishing and how it works – no wonder the industry is viewed as some kind of elitist, lumbering dinosaur. So, for this two-part post, I have chosen my favorite (representative/interesting/funny) questions and done my best to answer them in my own words. Please share your own responses (as mine are hardly definitive), and look out next Friday for the second installment, which will deal with the biggest, baddest, most awkward question of them all.

What do you do on a day-to-day basis?
Well, I can speak only as an editorial assistant, but let me tell you – a lot. Here is a random morning from last week. By 9.30 am I already had a list of tasks from my boss that was mutating like a fast-growing vine: pull sales figures, proof-read a title information sheet for the upcoming season launch, track down an out-of-print biography of Bach, read a manuscript. First, though, I had to prepare a contract, so I was doing long division on a Post-it in order to figure out how an advance of $135,000 breaks down into fourths and the scale of earnout advances. Suddenly, the phone rang, reminding me of a packaging meeting; I went and took notes as my boss and the art director and the publicist and the editor-in-chief debated the merits of various cover designs. When I got back, there was a finished manuscript in my boss’s in-box that I had to prepare for production. It’s the editorial assistants who package the whole manuscript with the front and back “matter” – the title and copyright pages, the dedication and epigraph, all the end notes and footnotes. Freaking footnotes. I HATE FOOTNOTES!

Take a moment to experience how your brain feels after reading this paragraph. Because that is how my brain feels 99.9% of the time.

So your job is to, like, insert commas?
Well, I suppose that if I saw one missing I would put it in. But editors vary in their approach – some are meticulous line editors, whereas others leave the nuts and bolts to copyeditors. A lot of the work editors do is developmental and conceptual; most of the grammatical stuff is left for the copyeditor. And don’t forget that sometimes commas are left out on purpose. Think of James Joyce.

In your best guess, how fast do you read on average?
I’ve never thought about this before… On a quiet day I could probably finish an entire manuscript and still take a lunch hour. So that’s, say, 400 pages over about six or seven hours, which is roughly 60 pages an hour. And that, weirdly enough, works out to about a page per minute. Huh.

Have you developed really strong fingers from writing and editing all the time?
I have calluses from holding pens and pencils. They’re kind of gross. And don’t even let me start on the paper cuts. We should be reimbursed for Band-Aids.

If you were Douglas Adams’s editor, would you have made him change the answer for the secret to life, the universe, and everything from “42”?
No. I think that, especially when it comes to fiction, asking authors to alter things is a delicate art. How much content can you change before you end up with a different book – and if you want a different book, why did you buy this one in the first place?

Is your name going to be on the book jacket?
Sadly, no. In my opinion, this is one of the greatest injustices of the industry. It takes a village to produce a book, and unless authors include acknowledgments (which, fortunately, they often do) a lot of hard work goes unrecognized. Remember that next time you’re in Borders.

Is it “Noff” or “Kuh-nopf”?
The second. And yes, I definitely enjoy “Kuh-nopf, Kuh-nopf” jokes.

While we’re on that topic, is it Scribner or Scribner’s (or Scribners, or Scribners’)?
Technically the imprint is Charles Scribner’s Sons, so it’s singular. I do think it sounds better in plural, though. But what do I know?

Is publishing a dying industry?
Oh God. It is a changing industry. Publishers will have to adapt, and I’m confident that they will. Radio had to accommodate television, and television had to accommodate the internet – and 26 million people still listen to NPR, and 99% of American households own a TV.

On that rather somber note, I’m going to shuffle off and fix myself a gin & tonic and dream about Maxwell Perkins. Until next week…

Lessons from Launch: How a Book Gets Debuted

Caution: This is going to be one of those how-the-book-business-works posts, so it will probably be a bit too nerdy for some of you who just prefer to read about books themselves. If you’re the latter type, enjoy this lovely post from McSweeneys.

Every few months, I get to sit in on a really cool meeting called “launch”, which heralds the debut of a new season of titles to produce and promote. In a room of about 70 people (all of the publicity and art departments, a smattering of people from sales, production, marketing, and a handful of lucky assistants), each editor gets 10-15 minutes to present their list of books for an upcoming season. (This meeting usually goes 3-4 hours, but there are snacks and coffee to keep you going.) For a non-fiction title, the editor presents the basic premise of the book, comparable titles that have done reasonable well, the expertise/profile of the author, and why they think it’s going to have a fantastic life. For fiction titles, we learn a bit about the basic story, the style of the author’s writing, how their previous books have done, and who its potential audience might be.

This meeting is, without a doubt, the highlight of my job. Why? Because it is the one point in the book publishing process (apart from the acquisition process, which often happens behind closed doors) where you get to see the editor be unabashedly optimistic about a book’s future. Literally launching a book into its future life, the editor becomes a cheerleader for the book. As of launch, a book has everything possible, and as the editor explains why they bought the book and why they fell in love with it, it is hard not to fall in love with the book as well. There is nothing to kill the dream of the book’s promising future just yet: we haven’t seen any rejected jackets, no less-than-optimistic sales force, no bored or apathetic readers. We only see the good, the possible, and the promise.

This meeting is where you get to see why so many people want to become editors: speaking with clarity, humor, and confidence about their upcoming projects, the editors act like storytellers. They are deeply passionate about why they acquired a book, yet thorough and sincere in explaining the book’s strengths, challenges, and potentialities. (It is a tremendous test for a young editor, who has to adjust their presentation style to get just the right balance of extemporaneous enthusiasm and polished sobriety. The editor must also be well-read in the book’s context, especially when presenting works of non-fiction. The editor has to convince us that this book gives us something new to talk about, or that the author’s voice is fresh enough to bring blood to a supposedly dead subject. What does this book reveal that has never been revealed before? What reward does a book on ancient Egypt or the Revolutionary War provide to contemporary society? These are all important questions that the editor attempts to answer in their launch presentation.

“OK…so what’s the story?” This is ultimately the most important question the editor has to answer in their presentation. They have to tell you what the book is about, how they experienced the subject the way the author tells it, and how other people will appreciate, connect to, and benefit from this book. There is, of course, always some degree of concern about a book’s commercial viability, but this is not the meeting to confront the reality of the marketplace, or to even express doubts about the size of a book’s potential audience. An editor gets to discuss a book’s merits without denigrating other books, consumer tastes, or even the economy, ultimately making an argument about how the book can and should stand on its own strengths.”

Most importantly, in the middle of conveying all of their optimism for a book’s future, the editor has to also persuade the other launch attendees that they have to put aside their own skepticism. Even if the room is already predisposed to hate a given premise (i.e. yet another paranormal romance that rips off Wuthering Heights), the editor has to tell the story of how, by reading the book and speaking with the author and their agent, their own hesitations dissipated, and how they formed a solid admiration for and confidence in their new acquisition. Nothing kills a book’s future like doubt, and in launch, the editor has to dispel any hesitations and fill you with conviction.

My first week working in book publishing, I got to sit in on a launch meeting. The reaction this meeting produced in me may have been the product of my impressionable youth, or it may have been that it was my first meeting of this kind. Yet even 10+ launch meetings later, I can still see what so inspired me on that day: getting to see exceptionally brilliant and talented editors discuss their upcoming projects with an uninhibited degree of energy, hope, and possibility. They talk about each new title as if it were a newborn child, portending only good things and having tremendous impact on the world into which it will debut. Even in a publishing climate filled with anxiety, there's nothing like occasionally relaxing with the promise of a great new project.

Alexander Grothendieck and the Question of Intellectual Property

Today I’m going to talk about a subject that, I believe, will rarely be broached on our blog: math.

Or at least a mathematician. A couple of months ago, when I was brainstorming ideas for my week of blogging, my boyfriend suggested that I write about a famous mathematician. I laughed.

“No,” he said. “Hear me out.” And then he told me the story of Alexander Grothendieck.

Grothendieck was born in 1928, the son of radical parents who went to Spain for the Civil War and fled Germany in the advent of the Nazis. He himself stayed in Germany with a foster family until the situation grew too dangerous for the Jewish Grothendieck. So in 1939 he joined his parents in France. With such a restless childhood, it’s no surprise that Grothendieck’s formal education was scattershot, but he eventually earned a Ph.D. working on topological vector spaces.

It was in 1954 that Grothendieck turned to the field in which he would make his name: algebraic geometry. Over the next decade, he reshaped the field and published two fundamental works: the Séminaire de Géométrie Algébrique du Bois Marie (based on Grothendieck’s seminar notes) and Éléments de géométrie algébrique. Algebraic geometry today relies on these texts, and, according to this article, this “systematic rebuilding permitted the solution of deep number-theoretic problems, among them the final step in the proof of the Weil Conjectures by Deligne, the proof of the Mordell Conjecture by Faltings, and the solution of Fermat’s Last Problem by Wiles.” In 1968, he received the Fields Medal.

But by 1970, Grothendieck “had done mathematics twelve hours a day, seven days a week, and twelve months a year for twenty years.” This focus on math at the exclusion of all else led to a sudden reversal: he quit his job, embraced political activism, and began, gradually, to extract himself from the mathematical community. He lived in a commune. He left Paris for the small towns of France. He adopted Buddhism, but eventually discarded that for Christian mysticism. He officially retired in 1988, and has been living as hermit for some time.

Earlier this year, Grothendieck wrote a letter withdrawing his permission to print or otherwise disseminate his work, and condemning those that had done so since his retirement. He asked that publishers remove those books from circulation, and librarians to remove them from their shelves. The result, as you can see in the comments on this page, was a flurry of discussion among mathematicians. Some questioned his motives, his intent, and the underlying principles of the issue:

“Awesome, Grothendieck still has contact to other people. It’s funny that he really cares about illegal publications and stuff. Anyways, what is he going to do if people still publish and copy his work. Really suit [sic] somebody? That would be awesome (only if he appears in court of course! I would be so happy to see him.)”

“i don’t recognize the existence of ‘intellectual property’ at all, especially not in science and mathematics . . . G stands to gain nothing from this. He doesn’t want money, etc., he merely wants to suppress his own work. We wouldn’t accept results being suppressed by another mathematician. Indeed, G in the past and the current G are completely different people.”

“While I find this news as disturbing as most of you seem to, bear in mind that copyright protects words, not ideas. If someone were to write a fresh exposition of the insights in SGA, they would still be able to publish it. Indeed, most of us learn this material primarily from more modern paraphrases already. And, of course, there are enough copies already in libraries that there is no reason to worry about losing the text for decades to come.”

Others hastily made plans to salvage what they could:

“In any case, I will grab everything from the grothendieck circle and so on before it’s too late…”

“Don’t worry . . . It will eventually appear in one of the pirate book sites anyway, even Groth. circle is taken down and you miss it now. The only difference will be that instead of pdf you will get djvu format.”

So why bring all this up? As the third comment above suggests, Grothendieck’s ideas are integral to the field of algebraic geometry—present in those “modern paraphrases” as well as in the original texts. So integral, in fact, that many of the mathematicians on this board absolutely refuse to respect Grothendieck’s request, arguing instead for the invalidity of intellectual property in science and math, for the disjunct between the Grothendieck of 40 years ago (dedicated to math, happy to contribute to the mathematical community, and with the greater claim to the work done) and the Grothendieck of today, and consoling themselves with the inevitable piracy of the two books.

What do you think? Is there a difference between intellectual property among the disciplines, or between fiction and nonfiction? When do ideas become public domain—in spirit if not in law, when the public fights an author for access? Is it ever right to dismiss an author’s wishes for their work? Is it ever right to pirate?

"Must-Read" Books Left by the Wayside

The sad, often unacknowledged truth of getting a job in publishing is that you start to loathe reading. Not all material, mind you—I read more magazines and blogs than I ever have before, and usually on totally new subject matter. But when it comes to picking up a massive tome of great literature or great literary non-fiction, every day I fall three steps behind what I should be reading...

Reading Sonya Chung's post on The Millions on "Breaking Up with Books", I was glad to see I wasn’t the only person with this problem. Chung fesses up to quitting books mid-read, though she does it with a great amount of remorse: “Reading a book was not unlike a monogamous human relationship in that sense; it involved conscious commitment, and fidelity: Book, I’m going to read you.” But she finds herself often veering away from the Canonical Path, picking and choosing according to the ever-changing tastes. “Fifteen hours—the average it takes to read a book—is an increasingly precious chunk of time.” Amen, sister. And when you come home from a long day at work, a big meaty tome looks overwhelming compared to the light fare of the Web and TV.

Like Chung, I fall off the bandwagon too quickly on long-delayed reads, especially when it comes to what I like to call All-Bran Books: those titles that often serve as the literary equivalent of fish-oil or bread made from spelt and wheat germ. When you admit that you haven’t read them, people tend to gasp and wear expressions of great shock and disappointment on their faces:

“What? You’ve never read 1984?”
“How have you never read A Confederacy of Dunces?”
“What, no one in school ever made you read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn?”
(Note: that last one was me—I assumed ATGIB was mandatory, much like those great word middle-school reads like My Brother Sam is Dead and Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry.)

This list doesn’t even cover the titles supposedly require by those folks who want to call themselves “well-read”, namely, the great classics of dead white men that made all subsequent literature possible. I realize that my reading has some structural problems when, attempting to read Ulysses for the seventeenth time, I track its plot progression not according to The Odyssey, but rather to O Brother, Where Art Thou? When people meet me and find that there are big gaping holes in my reading experience, I can always see them doing a double-take.

These books have always seemed much more nutritious than delicious to me—confronted with an ever-changing roster of new and buzz-filled novels out there, I’ll almost always forget that I have Fahrenheit 451, Catch-22, and all seven volumes of In Search of Lost Time waiting for me. I’ve never read any Philip Roth or Evelyn Waugh. I have never jousted with Dumas and The Three Musketeers, and I have never fallen for Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice. (I was always much more partial to Sense and Sensibility’s Colonel Brandon, but how I escaped adolescence without reading P&P, I’ve still no idea.) I’ve tried reading Infinite Jest about 20 times, and am starting to consider buying the iPhone app for it, just to make things a bit less painful.

But do I really think reading these books would be painful? Why haven’t I set aside time to fill these gaps? Looking over at my nightstand, I can see where I’m getting myself into trouble. At the beginning of this week, I had only two titles: Muriel Barbery’s Gourmet Rhapsody and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s The Thing Around Your Neck. Perfectly manageable reading for the week. But now those two books are at the bottom of a pile that contains the Spanish mystery novel I picked up at Bluestockings, Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse, Paul Harding’s Tinkers, The Ugly American. All these books were referenced in articles I'd read over the week, and so when I next entered a bookstore, they were immediately added to my basket. They are my new must-reads.

When people ask me about how to break into publishing, the advice I tend to repeat to them over and over is this: “If someone asks you what your favorite book is, it is not Pride and Prejudice. Make sure your favorite book is something new.” They always tend to look a bit crestfallen, and sometimes I apologize for it—it does matter that your reading experience taught you to love and appreciate the classics. We certainly wouldn’t have any great books today without the great books of yesterday. But I never enjoy my work so much as when I get to participate in a conversation about the world we live in today—when authors engage in contemporary issues, when novelists tap into emotions and events that we didn’t know were there. When the bestselling book in the country is about a bisexual semi-autistic Swedish hacker who fights like hell against the oppressive and violent society around her, I can see the debt she owes to Jane Eyre . . . but I’d sooner pick up the book that started the conversation, not the supplementary reading. In chasing down the most relevant and topical books I can get, I inevitably leave their dusty predecessors . . . still in the dust.

Musings on (What's Been) Lost

Maybe that subject will drive some traffic this way!

A few weeks ago, when I was starting to think about my week of blogging, I had very definite plans for today. I had hoped to live-blog this conference, the first hosted by C19, a new society for nineteenth-century Americanist scholars. Some people whose work I really admire will be speaking today, including Patricia Crain (author of The Story of A, which I read as an undergraduate), Samuel Otter (whose new book, Philadelphia Stories, I’ll be reviewing for July), and Brenda Wineapple (who wrote White Heat, a very good book about Emily Dickinson, and a biography of Hawthorne that I hear is also a fine read). Not to mention a host of other scholars and writers over the course of the weekend—again including, but not limited to, Thomas Augst, John Bryant, John Stauffer, Wyn Kelley, Wai Chee Dimock, Meredith McGill, Hester Blum, Laura Wexler, and Bryan Waterman (that’s in chronological order). Suffice it to say that it sounds like a very fun conference, and I’d love to be there.

Unfortunately, because I’m not from the East Coast, I didn’t realize that Penn State—which is hosting the conference—isn’t in Philadelphia. I had planned to make at least a day trip, but on Tuesday night I found out that the school is actually in central Pennsylvania, a five-hour drive from New York. So this post will not in fact be a live-blogged literary conference, but that is a theme I plan to return to in the future. Be on the lookout in coming months for a post about another, probably less exciting conference.

Luckily, I still have something to write about on what I’m deciding to call Academic Thursdays. (All right, it will probably just be this one Academic Thursday.) This morning on the train I read Lawrence Biemiller’s recent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, “Should Your New Buildings Look Old?” In it, he discusses the phenomenon of univerities commissioning buildings in the predominant campus style. Sometimes it works. More often it doesn’t, as at the University of Virginia: “a 366,000-square-foot basketball arena with a 1,500-space parking garage has no business whatsoever pretending to look like Monticello.”

I responded to the article because I, while not trained in architecture, love the unique place-ness of university campuses. I’m always alert to their differences when I visit. And some of those differences aren’t architectural, as Biemiller notes: “What is it about the design of my campus that I like? It might be the architecture of the buildings, but chances are that it's actually something that's harder to put a finger on—the interplay of buildings, trees, open spaces, views, and other elements . . . On the best campuses, the specific architectural vocabulary is often secondary—what matters is how the elements come together.” When I visited the University of Mississippi two years ago, I discovered in wandering the campus a confederate cemetery. Stanford boasts a mausoleum, home to Leland Stanford, Jr., and his family, and in the middle of some of the Main Quad's Richardsonian arches are little hearts. Both of those campuses are large and spread out; Columbia, in contrast, feels like the singularity at the moment of the Big Bang. All the materials of any Ivy League campus are there—the library, the various neoclassical buildings—but there’s so much less space between them. These are the elements, and they’re the strange things that make any campus stand out.

You can see one of the Stanford hearts on the third column from the left:



Ultimately, Biemiller argues against maintaining—or attempting to maintain—one architectural aesthetic on a university campus. It’s intellectually dishonest, he writes, when one architect is asked to reproduce not merely a style but the work of one other, specific architect or group of architects. (At, for example, Yale, with its elaborate and extravagant residential colleges designed by James Gamble Rogers.) It’s expensive. (Those buildings at Yale cost $2 million to build in the 1920s, Biemiller reports, and in 2007 Princeton paid $136 million to build a Collegiate Gothic residential college.) And it fails to keep the buildings in dialogue with one another, something at which Bowdoin College has apparently been very successful.

You might ask what all this has to do with books. Well, I’ve been thinking about tradition and design in publishing as well. Yesterday I attended a memorial service for Nina Bourne, a much-admired and long-established (she worked in publishing for seventy years) copywriter and advertiser, first at Simon & Schuster and then at Knopf. At the door we were given folders that contained a survey of Nina’s finest ad work, including pieces from the campaigns for Eloise and Catch-22. They were breathtaking. They were funny, they were sharp, they were irreverent—but best of all, they were just so full of text. In Nina’s time at Knopf, she perfected a style that The New York Times characterized thus: “large, clean, heavily bordered ads in black and white, with minimal copy used to create maximum impact.” Knopf still uses that style. It’s effective, it’s straightforward, and it’s smart. But I was filled with some longing. There was a real writerly flair in these ads. You could see Nina flexing her muscle behind them, and you could see wit.

Nina's ad for Catch-22:



To create such an ad now might reflect Biemiller’s argument about intellectual honesty and maintaining a contemporary aesthetic. Does anyone today want to read an ad that is mostly text, one that forms its own story and its own narrative? Would it look hopelessly dated, as much so as that UVA basketball arena, next to the minimalist, sparser ads that you find in papers today? Would it fail to read on its own terms, for its own virtues, instead seeming as much like a move of nostalgia as, say, publishing a book now with a jacket like this one?



(This might interest, by the way: comic books as mid-century paperbacks.)

Our company’s lobby is lined with such books as the above, and again, every time I see them, I’m filled with a wistfulness. There are many, many beautiful jackets designed every year, of course. But there’s something about the stark graphics, the purposeful lettering, and the more roughly hewn paper on jackets like the above that speaks to me. And I’m not sure it’s something we could return to, or really dabble in, today.

In his article, Biemiller warns against hewing too closely to an outdated aesthetic, and against the rigidity it brings with it. But the question I’d like to leave you with is the opposite: what if dedication to a contemporary aesthetic has brought with it an equal amount of rigidity? How do you reclaim what’s been lost?

Concord of Interest

It’s now my week to blog. I’m going to begin by discussing one of the basic tenets of this website, well-established among us reviewers, but not yet explicitly stated here. Namely, I’m going to talk about conflict of interest, and what it’s like to produce a site of book reviews when you work in publishing.

I think I speak for all of us at [tk] when I say that we love our jobs, we love books, and that working with the printed (and digital) word is an essential part of our lives. But an attachment to the literary can also make working in publishing genuinely draining. We here at [tk] spend our days in publicity, editorial, managing editorial, and academic marketing, but we spend our nights and our weekends attempting to maintain other identities. We’re fiction writers, critics, bloggers, and budding journalists who also often work late, and who always have a manuscript or a proposal tucked under our arms. We’re people who love words so much that our jobs—jobs that allow us to do some of the things we enjoy most—aren’t quite enough of an outlet. We need creative expression for that passion too.

And as I say above, maintaining these two identities as publisher and creator can be difficult. Maybe that’s why you see considerable turnover among assistants in publishing. Maybe they decide that other identity—the writer, the scholar—is their true, central one. But I’ve found that sustaining my creative self is difficult for another, more pragmatic reason: conflict of interest.

Working in editorial has given me an entirely new perspective on books, an invaluable one. Maybe books have lost a little of their mystery, a little of their miraculousness—but they’re so much richer now that I’m aware of how many people and conversations lie behind each one. And being one of those people has been great. But I’m not finished relating to books in another way. Three years after graduating from college, I’m not done thinking and learning about literature critically, and I’m not done writing about it in that context either. There are few outlets for me, however. I’m fortunate enough to work for a company that reimburses its employees for tuition, and in my time here I’ve been able to return to the classroom. I’ve written a couple of papers, presented at a few small conferences. I’ve kept my hand in the game. But reviews seem like the best way of producing critical writing frequently and consistently, and conflict of interest—due to my job—has prevented me from reviewing for the few publications at which I’ve inquired.

That was my personal reason for wanting this website to exist, and I think my fellow reviewers had similar compulsions. And it meant that when we first discussed the possibility of [tk] reviews, we were keenly aware of conflict of interest. We decided at that first meeting that we would review only books not published by our house—not just our imprint, but by our entire company. It was a decision that caused some agony. What, some asked, about our imprint’s books, books that we very much want to succeed? And our house is large—wouldn’t avoiding their books drastically limit what we could review?

Well, yes, I respond to the latter question. This policy does limit what we can review. But thanks to other large trade publishers, the academic presses, and the many fantastic small independent presses, no one can say there aren’t enough books available. And in fact, this policy has proven a luxury and a boon. In our first month we were able to review several books that perhaps wouldn’t get as much press coverage as those published by other, larger companies—and in upcoming months, we’ll also be reviewing books that might not be reviewed outside academic journals. Because we’re each writing only one review a month, we also have the luxury of choosing longer books, or books that are more difficult to find, or books whose rewards require a little more digging.

And, we decided, although we felt that we shouldn’t review our imprint’s books, this blog might be an appropriate venue to mention them in the future. Because we here at [tk] are genuinely excited about the books we publish. We want to share them with you—we want you to know about events, we want you to eagerly anticipate what we’ve been working on for months or even years.

Ultimately, though, the website is [tk] reviews: it’s the reviews that are our focus. And I think that by reviewing—whether our own books or not—we can do only good. If we positively review a book and someone buys it, it’s not a win for that publisher—whether Penguin or Oxford University Press or Archipelago—and a loss for us. Even as large houses struggle and small ones vanish, book publishing can’t afford to be a zero-sum game. A book bought rewards everyone—because hopefully behind that book lies a happy reader, a new ally to every publisher, who will return repeatedly to the bookstore.

As an editorial assistant by day and a critic by night, I’m grateful to have the opportunity to write for [tk]—to know that my creative work might do some good for my industry. We’ll write the reviews, you buy the books, and maybe, together, we’ll save publishing.

Diary of A Dream-Crusher

Sorry for the interregnum, folks -- yesterday was a brief trip to publishing hell. The only (very welcome!) respite was a Bouchon Bakery expedition to celebrate the birthday of another [tk]er, Jess Freeman-Slade. But apart from that delicious hour, this pretty much sums up how I felt:





I was in an especially foul mood because, along with everything else, I had three rejection letters on my "to-do" list. Along with photocopying and formatting manuscripts, this is an aspect of my job that I really, really dislike.

It took me almost an hour to write my first rejection letter to an author. I was an intern, and my supervisor came into my office, dropped a proposal down onto my desk, and said "I want you to read this. And if you don't like it, I want you to draft a rejection."

In retrospect, I can't believe I agonized so long over it. It was an unsolicited proposal from a someone who wanted to write an annotated Little Women; if I remember correctly, her entire pitch was predicated on the fact that she'd developed a successful side gig as an educational Jo March impersonator. But although the entire thing was achingly amateurish, the effort she'd devoted to the materials was palpable. This project was the culmination of a lifetime's devotion, and in one paragraph I was going to tell her that it simply wasn't good enough.

I remember going over and over the wording, flipping back through the proposal and my report, wondering if I was making the right decision. On one level I knew I was -- there was no question -- but I still could not wrap my head around the fact that I had the ability to so drastically affect someone's life. Like everyone else, I've experienced rejection before, and I know what it feels like. You can rationalize a "no" as much as you want, in love or in life or somewhere in between, and tell yourself that it's not personal/just not the right match/them and not you -- but it still really, really sucks. And unless you're Eckhart freaking Tolle, you carry it around with you for a while. It's not easy to move on from that.

Someone once told me that writing rejection letters gets easier with practice, and to a certain extent they were right. With each one I've become more adept at delivering the sentiment, at tempering my "no" with the right amount of praise. As I learn more and more about how much time and money and effort are devoted to each book we publish, it becomes a less emotional and more economic decision -- sometimes the sides of the cost vs. gain equation don't balance, however much you wish they would. And I'm slowly understanding that my taste does not always reflect commercial appeal: declining a plainly sell-able proposal from a "hot shot" agent no longer disturbs me so much because I know it's going to end up somewhere. If anything, the quandary there is acknowledging that the very nature of the game means you will often end up passing on something that turns out to be a runaway success. Every editor has a few of those stories, but every good editor will counter them with what I call Miracles on Ice -- occasions on which they took a risk that risk paid off against all the odds.

However, signing the letter or pressing the e-mail SEND button still makes me feel like a shit. I wonder how the author will feel, if mine is the first or the seventh rejection, if it will be the final defeat that makes them put down their pen. Even the worst submissions, the unsolicited ones that clearly come from a not-quite-rational mind -- the Florence Foster Jenkinses of the literary world -- convey a touching hope, misguided as it may be. Unless these people are made of Teflon, it's got to hurt.

To ameliorate this rather depressing conclusion, here are two somewhat positive things that I've learned from my crash-course in rejection. Though obviously this isn't always the case, the first is that "no" can often be fairly arbitrary. An editor might think a manuscript or proposal is really, really good, but they have to say no because it's about dogs and there are already three dog books coming up in the next 18 months. It might be because a recently published title about dogs absolutely tanked, and other departments like sales and publicity are reluctant to go back out there so soon with a book on the same subject. You know that excuse you heard about why X University rejected you -- that they already had a surfeit of oboists from Florida and so they couldn't justify admitting another when they desperately needed Midwestern tuba players? There's actually some truth in there.

The second is that whatever you do, you need to do it first and foremost for yourself. If you enjoy the experience of writing, not just the end product, then you can still salvage some happiness from the ruins of rejection. Think of Florence Foster Jenkins -- at least, I always do. She may have sung like a bat on helium, but she had a hell of a good time shattering the windows in Carnegie Hall. Life's just too short to do it any other way.

Smut As Our Savior

Now that we’ve broken the champagne bottle over the bow of [tk] reviews (so to speak), I have the distinct honor of steering this blog through its first week of existence. The search for a worthy subject with which to kick things off was a little anxiety-inducing, but as so often happens when you least expect it, Lady Luck threw me a crumb in the form of this article from the MSNBC.com website: “Erotica Gives Book Publishing a Surprising Boost.” When Gawker.com later picked it up under the headline “Erotica May Save Publishing,” I knew we were in business.

I am actually not entirely unfamiliar with the topic, as back in a desperate moment of job searching I actually had two interviews with the editor of several romance and erotica imprints (she, they, and the publishing company will go unnamed). I knew something about romance novels – my special talent in high school was being able to open them straight to the sex scenes – but after my first meeting with this woman I realized I was in waaayyy over my head. Those Harlequin novels of my teen years were primarily old ones donated by aging alumnae, and at their titillating peak they at most threw out a couple of awkward euphemisms (“manroot,” anyone?) and possibly a nipple. The characters were nearly always white-bread Americans, maybe with a dark and mysterious European to mix things up every now again, and the heroine always married her man in the end.

Things now, however, are very different. As is par for the course with editorial interviews, I was given a manuscript to read and report upon: the story began with a woman discovering a naked but very tanned-and-chiseled demon unconscious in her garden. After about twenty pages, I knew that drastic measures were required – I put on some very large sunglasses and hoofed it down to my local Barnes & Noble for a red-faced afternoon of research.

The sheer acreage of shelves devoted to “paranomal romance” made it clear that the naked demon of my sample manuscript was in no way new or shocking; in fact, he was boringly mainstream. Vampires have been sexualized since forever, but werewolves, warlocks, and witches clearly have needs too – and people like to read about them being filled. However, some time spent surfing the web this weekend suggests that the hottest things now are actually “shapeshifters,” adult re-imaginings of the animaguses (animagii?) of Harry Potter fame. I also recently heard the editor of the Sookie Stackhouse series speak at a (work-sponsored, no less!) panel about the difficulties of breaking out zombie erotica. It’s obviously quite difficult to make necrotic body parts sexy, but I have faith that some gifted scribe out there will manage it.

The MSNBC article about erotica “saving” publishing highlights the sub-genre of “urban” erotica, although that’s hardly a new phenomenon either. Specialist small presses have been churning out this stuff for years, a sort of “streets to the sheets” school that reads like sexed-up novelizations of Grand Theft Auto. However, its mainstream explosion is clearly recent: suddenly, all the major houses (including mine) are boasting profitable imprints. I actually found a galley of one not too long ago on the give-away shelf here and gave it to a colleague as a gag gift, a decision I quickly came to regret. These books make no apologies for their content – and rightly so – but further exploration corroborates my field discovery that they are very intense in their depictions of sex and violence, and the way the women in them are treated. If you are not prepared for it, or willing/able to handle the distinction between fantasy and more nuanced reality, some of this stuff can be quite shocking. But I admit I’m kind of curious to see one of the books that Noire (the writer specifically mentioned) has written in collaboration with 50 Cent.

It’s not strictly erotica, so indulge me as I throw in a nod to the emerging marketplace trend of Amish romance. There was an explosion of coverage last year that seems to have only stoked the fire of demand: strongly wedded to a central theme of chastity and abstinence before marriage, this genre seem to have tapped America’s “Twilight” nerve, the one that responds far more to titillation than to actual tongues entwining. Some digging around on Amazon.com does reveal a few, Kindle-only, Amish erotica titles – maybe this will be my inducement to finally fork over $299.99 and get one?

Werewolves, gangstas, and buggy-driving babes were not the only characters I encountered during that fateful afternoon: I spent a good forty-five minutes just browsing the aisles, trying to take it all on board. The truth was (and still is) that, although I like to giggle about it as much as the next person, this sort of stuff isn't really my cup of tea -- if I want to get my literary rocks off I prefer D. H. Lawrence or Anaïs Nin -- but once I got over myself I actually had quite a good time. I even took off my sunglasses, deciding that I didn't give a damn who saw me paging my way through Candy Licker.

My report got written, but despite my graduate-level research skills I didn't get the job. Don’t shed any tears, though -- this rejection was in the end a good thing, for many reasons, and the experience still resonates positively with me. I gained insight into a genre that's often misunderstood, and (I like to think) a new perspective on the American psyche. New York City publishing circles might snicker at these books, but the sales figures tell a different truth: people love this stuff wholeheartedly, and consistently demonstrate it with their wallets.

There is obviously a special alchemy at work here, a magic enacted by very intelligent and interesting people -- just like the editor with whom I interviewed -- and if it is helping publishing over its rough patch, I couldn’t be happier. Like any community facing hard times, we've all got to pitch in and concentrate what unites us rather than on what separates us from each other. We can't afford to ignore the strengths and achievements of our peers, even if they are not the ones for which we ourselves particularly yearn. And, speaking of yearning, don’t forget to keep an eye out for this tasty treat (culled fresh from Publisher’s Lunch), which foretells of a whole new interspecies collaboration:

Leanna Ellis's FORSAKEN, first in the Plain Fear series in which a young Amish woman mourning the mysterious “death” of her beloved, now a vampire, must choose between two brothers, between good and evil, between a lasting love and the damnation of her soul.