Confessions of a Publisher

...As far as the average publisher is concerned, paperbacks have ceased being a boon and are fast becoming a bore...

...The most an editor in a publishing house can hope to do is make a good book into a better one...

...have an unsatisfactory first draft rewritten...

...So you lose him...

...Once a reader has lost the thread of the article, you have lost the reader...

...A paper binding saves not more than 30 cents a copy (and often less) in the production cost of a book...

...A good sales force, imaginative promotion, editorial enthusiasm can do something...

...I had...

...As I said at the outset, I still find book publishing a very mystifying enterprise...

...And the reason these printings are higher is, quite simply, because paperbacks are sold, not only in proper bookstores, but also in college co-ops, drugstores, variety stores, at newsstands, and everywhere else an aggressive salesman can push them...

...No, what one usually does is to try to find out beforehand what book a particular author might vaguely want to write, encourage him and flatter him in his ambition, and sign him to a contract over a few cocktails...

...Nevertheless, the revolution has demonstrated that Americans will buy good books—as long as they don't have to perform this indecent act in a bookstore, and as long as these books are presented as suitable objects for impulse buying...

...He can have the idea for the article...

...Books, in contrast, take a long time to write...

...Now, in both countries, the financiers and the hucksters are moving in...

...Every magazine has its audience, and every editor of modest competence knows when an article, on a certain subject, written in a certain way, will create a stir of reader interest...

...And it is quite true that a good editor can significantly improve a manuscript, by pruning, rearranging, pressing the author to expand here and contract there, etc., etc...

...Irving Kristol, a former editor at Commentary and the Reporter and the first American editor of Encounter, is currently senior editor of Basic Books...

...and good writers are even more short of time than they are of money...

...Most books sell themselves, by word of mouth primarily, by reviews secondarily...

...But not nearly so much as most people (especially most authors) think...

...Chances are the author will be offended anyhow...

...and then, pencil in hand, can if necessary drastically edit the manuscript so that it bears some resemblance to what he had in mind...

...In Britain, publishing was traditionally "an occupation for gentlemen," as Fred Warburg entitled his autobiography...

...In any case, there's no point in offending the author, whom one regards as a valuable addition to one's list...

...This is the true meaning of the so-called "paperback revolution," which has nothing whatsoever to do with paper bindings as against cloth...

...In America, it was traditionally an occupation for genteel men...

...The economics of the matter usually rule out such an approach...

...Practically all books are subsidized—if not directly by a foundation, then by the author himself holding down a job, or by his wife doing ditto...

...The reviews in the Times Book Review or the New Yorker or Time manage to convey the impression that the author, the reviewer, and the reader are all involved in an enterprise which is agreeable, diverting, perhaps instructive, but not really important...

...I myself suspect that it has much to do with the fact that, in the 19th century, "culture" in America acquired a feminine gender, so that bookshops became places where women bought novels, and where men bought nothing at all...

...I have omitted all reference to the editorial function proper, a subject on which publishers and their editors like to make solemn (not to say pompous) pronouncements...

...The dismal showing of these shares, over the past year, indicates that this effort at redefinition has been something less than wildly successful...

...he can do something about it...

...Indeed, the important books in economics, science, philosophy, literature, law, sociology and political theory are rarely even reviewed in these journals...

...Yet in the United States today, it is not a job he can do well...

...Reading a book is quite a different experience from reading a magazine...

...Picking up a book is a weightier symbolic action, an affirmation of more serious purpose, than picking up a magazine...

...In all candor, I must admit that my experience with books was not limited to that particular incident...

...fix a deadline that falls short of infinity...

...Books don't work that way—at least not the kinds of books I care about...

...The plain truth is that it is difficult (though not impossible) to stop a saleable book from selling, and just about equally difficult to move a non-seller...

...And yet this is the one thing, above all, that the publisher qua publisher is supposed to be able to do...

...The available outlets are so flooded with books that they are beginning to order titles in quantities of one, where they used to take 10 without question...

...Mainly, this is because it is possible to define what a good magazine article is, while a good book escapes such easy definition...

...Inevitably, the book was The Lonely Crowd...

...This revolution has, by now, just about run its course...

...And there were other occasions of a similar nature that I need not recount...

...On the other hand, for a would-be gentleman like myself who also happens to be in the American publishing business, it doesn't exactly clarify things, either...

...For a would-be gentleman like myself, this is not too displeasing...

...To be sure, magazine editing has its surprises too —but not so many of them...

...I have seen an editor make a poor magazine article into a good one...

...and it probably becomes a best-seller...

...Among themselves, they speak of little else...

...Not only does he know it...

...And the United States is not only short of proper bookstores (there aren't more than 800 in the whole nation that are worthy of the name), the American people seem never to have acquired the habit of going into bookstores even when they are available...

...An article generally has one point to make...

...I do not wish to suggest that the publishers are impotent in this matter...

...It's his job, after all, the primeval source from which bread and butter and all good expense-account luncheons flow...

...Having the book in hand, the reader will "go along" with it patiently unless and until he is positively put off...

...and this being so, it is very hard for an editor to say with persuasive confidence just what the form and structure of any particular book ought to be...

...Why this is so, some cultural historian should explore...

...At his suggestion, I borrowed the galleys for a weekend...

...Books are peculiarly recalcitrant things...

...Getting the book into a reader's hand is far more difficult than getting the author to write it, or the editor to rewrite it...

...Besides, it is rare that a publisher is in a position to offer a writer an advance that would represent a living wage while he is engaged on a book...

...he turns the pages to the next item...

...He takes a deep breath—and publishes...

...delivers a manuscript, five years later, on the revolution of 1905...

...Publishing, to my knowledge, is the first profession to have redefined itself as a business, and nothing but a business, by selling shares to a profit-hungry public...

...One of the things that will put him off is if the book is too closely reasoned, too precisely focussed on its specific subject...

...And, equally inevitably, 13 years and two magazines later, I find myself a book publisher...

...assign it to a writer (or, more likely, cajole the writer into doing it...

...Still, no matter how or why they sell, in order to be sold they have to be bought—there has to be a place where one goes to make the purchase...

...Nat was reading galleys of a forthcoming book, of which he was a part author...

...Books need longueurs, digressions, diversions, changes of pace...

...The major reason paperbacks are cheaper is that their initial printings are higher—10,000 or 20,000 copies, say, as against 4,000 for an average cloth edition—with the result that the economics of mass production (especially if several titles are "gang printed" on one press) are more fully utilized...

...and on Monday morning, I returned them with the peremptory verdict: "Lots of good things here—if it weren't so jargonridden, you might sell a few copies...

...Now, after two years at it, it still is...

...Instead of being about, let us say, The Fall of the Romanoffs, as the contract stipulated, it turns out to be a biography of Lenin's older brother...

...This makes initial large printings a drain on the publisher's capital...

...Almost anyone can find a few weeks, patched together out of spare time, to write an article, and the fee (a couple of hundred dollars, say) is benevolently regarded as found money...

...What is demanded in 10 pages of a magazine is intolerable in 300 pages of a book...

...For the only point I want to make is that the whole business of book publishing was for long a mystery to me...

...in addition, it makes it now almost as expensive to distribute a paperback as a cloth-bound book—which explains, in turn, why paperback prices are inexorably spiralling upwards...

...The book, more often than not, sells fewer copies than he believes its intrinsic merits justify...

...for instance, read the manuscript of Colin Wilson's The Outsider, and had told that young man he was mad to think he could get it published...

...I have said, "having the book in hand, the reader . . . etc...

...It also has something to do, I would suppose, with the absence of that class of journals of opinion which, in Britain and France, focus serious (i.e., masculine) attention on current books...

...And what does the publisher do...

...One doesn't go out and ask a writer to do a good book on a serious subject...

...Public ignorance of this aspect of publishing is vast, in part because publishers are naturally loath to broadcast the fact that the distribution of books in America is one unholy mess...

...What then happens is something like this: The book, which was due in 24 months, arrives after 56...

...In a periodical, every article competes with every other article...

...But what astonishes me, on the basis of my magazine experience, is the limited effects such editorial work achieves, relative to the energy and time expended...

...and, who knows, there may be more latent interest than one suspects in Lenin's older brother...

...As a matter of fact, they give every sign of being willing to buy books anywhere except a bookstore...

...The original commitment by the reader is much more substantial, and not only in dollars and cents...

...If he doesn't, some other publisher will...

...He reproaches you with not advertising sufficiently, and turns a deaf ear to your argument (valid, if self-serving) that, while advertising may accelerate a book's sales, it simply cannot cause a book to sell...

...what detracts from that point, what blurs it, what seems to have no direct relevance to it, are all expendable...

...Where it was supposed to be 200 pages long, it is 450...

...He signs up with another publisher, for a book on the Russian Orthodox Church...

...And there's the rub, and the real dilemma of publishing in this country...