Publishing Conglomerated: When Profits Become Censor

...Traditionally the good trade houses have made quality the basis of their economy-the slow accretion of books of enduring value which rarely enjoy meteoric successes but which are permanent assets...

...Segal said he needed five years, and he was given a huge budget...

...The fine independent houses look to make real value the backbone of their company-they publish 10 first novelists in a year, not because they are quixotic devotees of literature, but because they are betting that two of them will be the Saul Bellows of 1985...

...All editors have their antennae out for new issues...

...I remember the executives and editors walking around asking what the problem was, why the feeling of malaise...

...Now publishers are scornful of authors and editors...

...But this sort of consuming effort to hit the jackpot, to ride the next wave, the tendency to think a book is less important if it sells badly and immensely worthwhile if it is popular, regardless of one’s own standards, is a habit of mind which seems to be in the ascendency in houses dominated by corporations...

...Publishers for Peace took out several ads in The New York Times stating their sentiments...

...Roger Straus is more optimistic...

...Their first novels tend to be along the lines of The Strawberry Statement, a tasty little frito at the time but hardly worth binding in leather...

...A constellation of four executivcs, three of whom knew little about trade publishing, bumped each other from position to position in a power struggle that was exceptionally chaotic because there was no clear hierarchy of command...

...And no one really knew where the directives were coming from and who was trying to please whom-the only clear issue was that Harper wasn’t doing well and somebody was going to get it...

...Upstairs in the president’s office there is no sign of angst...

...Quite simply, if you are a successful editor, the profits you might make publishing excellent, conscientious books can serve to grease another part of the organization in an activity you abhor...

...A Tasty Frito The urgent pursuit of profit, the quest for the instant hit, inevitably erodes the desire to find the slower book of lasting quality...

...To the suggestion that there is a conflict between the corporate ethic of maximum profits and publishing’s traditionally more flexible approach to profit versus quality, the stock response is “We’re in business first to make money like any other concern and always have been...

...Jane Seitz, formerly an assistant editor there, recalls the time she was called upstairs and warned that she took the author’s side too much, that her main allegiance should be to Random House, and that whatever romantic notions people on the outside might have about publishing, “we’re in business to make money...

...Floating on Fiction At Random House pressures from above are muffled and indistinct...

...The only problem with the Random House list is you just feel the editors aren’t working as hard as they should be,” says John Leonard, editor of The New York Times Book Review...

...The American people are perfectly capable of rejecting it...

...For people receiving the message, the origins are almost always obscurethere is no clean delineation of authority-which makes it difficult to confront...

...While acquisition by a conglomerate guarantees encroachment by the corporate ethic, it is not the only route...

...On these grounds, the whole issue of interference is dismissed by the people in corporation-owned houses...

...The imposition of decorum is simply the last outcropping of an intricate and debilitating system...

...Profit becomes the censor...

...One thing is letting them make mistakes...

...They don’t want to work for a big company...

...Andre Schiffrin, editorinchief, says he thinks he is able to publish as he does because Pantheon is such a small cell in the conglomerate that RCA probably doesn’t know it exists...

...We don’t have a single list without at least two first novels...

...Doubleday, whether one agrees with the judgment or not, had exercised the option to make less...

...Publishing a novel is incautious...

...During the conference the division between editorial and management was absolutely clear...

...Coincidentally, to illustrate the liberal policy of his CBS bosses, Aaron Asher, editorinchief at Holt, Rinehart and Winston, told me of the time a CBS executive remarked on the success of Do It and suggested that he would have been pleased if Holt had published it...

...A common rejoinder is that with the money earned by a popular book one can carry the less profitable “serious” works...

...Most of the good editors I know are not in publishing any more because they couldn’t take it,” a Harpcr editor said...

...Editorial meetings were turned into studies of graphs...

...A Slow Lobotomy In arriving at the conclusion that an identifiable syndrome was at work, I was very much influenced by the contrast provided by houses which have remained independent...

...but there are differences, as, for instance, between seeing publishing as a vehicle for making money, or seeing the rules and forces of the business world as a viable context in which to publish books...

...There are two things wrong with this...

...I know it does,” says Don Fine of Arbor House...

...Upper management, where executives often hold contracts directly with the corporation, is extremely sensitive to the super-ganglia...

...All publishers do a little of both out of necessity, but a businessman would see it as fundamental policy to make profit alone the basis of selection...

...A high percentage of Publishing’s Finest turned out...

...Don’t Do It During the period when everyone was worried about censorship, Doubleday, which is independent, arbitrarily turned down Jerry Rubin’sDo It, because Nelson Doubleday was offended by it...

...The accepted explanation was that Wall Street saw a pot of gold in “communications” and Midas-magic in the mixture of hardware and books (software...

...You just get a sense that a lot of these books need to be worked on...

...This speculation was spurred by the feeling that something has gone sour in at least a few houses...

...Then, when the books he bought lost money in the first year, he was abruptly fired...

...Once again, Random House, universally set up as an example of the successful merger, provides the most telling feedback...

...Because publishing has always had a limited financial potential, editors tend to be attracted to the field for the latter reason-otherwise they would go elsewhere...

...Booklets were distributed making it clear that a strict decorum was to be maintained in the new building and that a crackdown in areas such as time cards would take place...

...Raytheon, a prospective buyer, assured him that they would never interfere: “You know your own business...

...Raytheon had a defense volume of $379.6 million last year...

...Like Bob Gottlieb, most people in corporationowned houses probably don’t know what the mother company is up to, so one could hardly argue that those unknown activities affect them in any way at all...

...I think it was David Segal who stood up and said just that-the reception was flat, the subject was changed...

...Most publishers want to find a Love Story, but not every one bases its enterprise on that kind of jackpot...

...One refugee left because she was spending all her time filling out questionnaires on how the “traffic” was moving...

...And worse, even if the whole Random House complex bucked the structure, took responsibility, and stood up as one to denounce RCA’s defense work, what weight would they, representing a piddling $16-million contribution, hold against the huge defense volume...

...Such constrictions are a very serious matter to those affected and extremely detrimental to a sense of identification with the company and willingness to do good work...

...Their role in the electronics battlefield was described in the May issue of this magazine...

...But Macrae says, “It’s absurd to think we would work harmoniously with a big company like that, particularly one so deeply involved in military work...

...But that’s the seed of the trouble, right there...

...You can tell by the manuscripts,” says literary agent Knox Burger...

...First, if the economy of a publishing house is based on immediate but fleeting hits, the bulk of the money which comes in from one bestseller will have to be turned into buying and promoting the next one...

...As no action was deemed possible, it was also clear that management unequivocally held the reins and any discussion by the editorial element as to how to mobilize their strength against the war was purely academic...

...Perhaps this is the reason that the most demonstrable sign of the corporate presence in publishing is the growing distinction between editorial and upper “management” and a seepage of power to the latter...

...The politics surrounding the episode remain hopelessly tangled, the only clear effect being an uncomfortable atmosphere in at least some corners of the cditorial department...

...CBS bought Holt, Rinehart and Winston...

...Where, oh where, would the sellers be...

...Such demurrals are suspect because, while the Vietnam war has affected everyone’s morale, people in independent publishing houses, particularly small ones, do not extend the immobilizing burden of world problems into discussions of their work...

...I suspect this frame of mind grows in response to the corporate daemon which is only interested in the stakes...

...Jane Seitz describes, “I remember two senior editors pacing the floor asking us all what we thought would be the real issues of the seventies...

...Random House still publishes good books, but they tend to be the obvious ones on subjects of intense current interest or by already established authors, the sort of “book of the year” project like Portnoy ’s Complaint, In Cold Blood, or The Confessions of Nat Turner, to name a few of Random House’s recent coups, all by old Random House authors...

...The inchoate instinct which keeps the creature from flying apart in different directions, which identifies it as one, is profit...

...Jack Macrae of E. P. Dutton is being forced to consider a buyer, and though the large corporations offer the best prices, he is firmly resisting those offers and seeking a smaller, more compatible company...

...Whether all this has actually affected the books is hard to tell...

...Look what we’re doing in Laos...

...Defenders of corporate ownership always steer the conversation towards censorship...

...A few years ago, Harper’s trade department wasn’t doing well and the mess which ensued in the effort to right this reveals a lot about the nature of the corporate structure and its inappropriateness in publishing...

...When he asked whether management was really interested in publishing the kind of books he wanted, the reply was that they only wanted to build a good trade department...

...Quality pays off...

...The nervous system is not built to distinguish how the profit is made-it knows and responds only to the figures, rejects cells which are a drag on the general profit, and carries signals to all parts communicating the desire to reach for higher figures...

...Secondly, the notion that publishing quality is a question of charity is bogus...

...Certainly rock was dead, radical politics were passe, women’s lib was for the birds...

...Once you are cautious in intellectual affairs you are licked...

...A general editorial strike was proposed to express disapproval of those companies and put industry-wide pressure on them to reinstate their ex-employees...

...The incident was interpreted as an indication that private ownership is more likely to censor than corporate ownership...

...The situation is a common American predicament, but publishing provides an especially telling example of how the corporate syndrome works...

...nor are the editors of those books disdained...

...That may sound fanciful, but the absorption of trade houses by big business, while perhaps not as drastic in its effects, in the long run threatens the same erasure...

...That’s where we make our money,” says Roger Straus of Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, whose imprint is known as a mark of quality...

...Publishing is boring,” says Jason Epstein, also an editor at Random House, who has had a singularly unboring career...

...As in most categories of American business, smallness and independence are threatened...

...He publishes some of the best books in the country...

...An editor has a way of going where the issues are...

...Although RCA had been on the scene for some time, the move into the brand new Random House Building was generally recognized as the clincher in the relationship, and as that move approached the corporate presence definitely became more pronounced, at least among the peons...

...The main fear generated by these acquisitions was of censorship: would these grandees of the establishment impose their conservativism on editorial policy...

...The way things are set up, you would tend not to make the connection...

...Would the CBS official have been pleased to hear that Aaron Asher had done the same...

...The guys on top are corporation executives...

...About those political books to which the people downstairs were so dedicated: “My main job is creating an atmosphere in which editors feel comfortable...

...It’s a black day when it is no longer realistic for you to feel responsible for the organization to which you are contributing...

...The effect is that uneasiness, a feeling of floating...

...AS far as I’m concerned, we get nothing but healthy emanations from RCA,” he said...

...All these people express tremendous involvement in their work, respect for their editors, and the critical importance of the option to make less of a profit if that’s the price of publishing excellence or not publishing trash...

...As with Jane Seitz, her kind of bitterness tends to break out into the open on subordinate levels where objections are not forestalled by large salaries and the trappings of importance, and where editors tend to be women, who generally get a bad deal throughout the industry...

...To keep the peace, editors would make exceptions for their staff, but with the air of a pact between a student proctor and some mischievous boys...

...The vague relationship with Cowlcs may have been a factor since no one seems to have ever had a clear upper hand...

...Though publishing usually represents a very modest financial contribution within the larger company, the scandal created by the suppression of a political book would be extremely damaging to the corporate image-sounder indeed to dump the little company which contributes such a miniscule percentage of overall profits...

...and Cowles Communications gained control of Harper & Row...

...There is a selfimposed repression within the industry due to the way it operates-the result of accident, not malice,” said John Simon, an editor at Random House...

...They understand different businesses and respect them...

...ITT bought Bobbs-Merrill...

...effect on publishing and the people in it...

...Senior editors have described the situation a little differently...

...Still, this dissociation of a person from the ultimate use of his energies is the matrix from which more immediately affecting circumstances evolve...

...Macrae does not present himself as a man nobly resisting the lure of money, but simply as one who knows where his best interests lie...

...Random House, owner of Knopf and Pantheon, sold to RCA...

...Time-Life bought Little, Brown...

...But the small houses are vanishing, and while smallness itself isn’t a virtue, it seems to provide a context in which the sustained intention to publish the best flourishes...

...The corporation has neither a conscience nor a self-consciousness...

...Excellcnt editors were senselessly snubbed...

...Absentee ownership which only looks at the bottom line is dangerous to literature,’’ says Arthur Wang, of Hill and Wang...

...Another much simpler suggestion was made...

...This psychology produces impressive balance sheets, but over time it is bound to erode the overall standard...

...The construct which has turned publishing into a business-ethic dominated business is ‘What do those jerks out there want?’ ” says Dick Grossman...

...The new architecture made the outlines of the hierarchy clearer...

...And the question is not whether he is a good selector, but on what basis he makes his judgment...

...But some people who should know feel it has already happened...

...What he was asking for was an exercise of choice which would not invite ruin but simply involve a squeeze...

...The secretaries’ furniture was actually bolted into place (the move was delayed because the first shipment of furniture didn’t fit into the prescribed niches), each would have her Random House cup, coffee was not to be ordered from the outside, desks were to be kept clear, strict dress codes were to be enforced, etc...

...Publishing Conglomerated: When Profit Becomes Censor by Suzannah Lessard In the last decade, a number of publishing houses were absorbed by large corporations...

...The Los Angeles Times-Mirror bought New American Library, Inc...

...Random House, owned by the largest, RCA, led the field in publishing politically iconoclastic books during a period of violent antagonism between the left and the right...

...Bob Gottlieb is editor-in-chief of Knopf, a subsidiary of Random House, and therefore of RCA...

...You have to believe him...

...Looking back on my association with people in publishing, I don’t recall an eagerness to identify either with ordinary businessmen or the rest of the world, so this, at least, can be considered bona fide change...

...Ownership by a corporation affects a house...

...Harper & Row provides a glorious example of the corporate structure gone haywire and the urgency of the quest for profits disrupting all semblance of a peaceful pursuit of editorial work...

...Harper is not corporateowned, but it has a full-blown upper managerncnt, and the stock is controlled by Cowles Communications (which recently interfered directly in the affairs of their subsidiary, Harper’s magazine...

...You’re doing a great job...

...Because of the character of the people in the field and the nature of the work they do, it is one of the last areas one would expect to be invaded...

...Profit is the daemon of the corporation, the one integrating factor...

...The area that’s most likely to be affected is the actual editing which is very personal, demanding work, but a decline in the quality of editing would be almost impossible to document...

...I have a hunch that the corporate presence is more directly felt on lower levels than by editorial superiors, through such trivial restrictions as dress codes...

...All businessmen are sensitive to the balance sheet...

...Bob Bernstein talks about the benefits of RCA’s sophisticated guidance in “systems management” and, by way of illustrating their impeccable behavior with regard to editorial decisions, tells of the time he sent galleys of a book he particularly liked over to the RCA board, which returned it unopened, with the explanation that such a preview might fuel rumors of censorship...

...Management did not attend and management represented the main obstacle to any action...

...In this context, non-sellers are not long-sufferingly tolerated as “dogs,” “rabbits,” or even “prestige...

...But he denies that RCA has had anything to do with this development...

...Quite understandably acting in their own interests, they want to please...

...If it weren’t for this fact, if small houses were springing up and thriving regularly, as they were after World War I, then perhaps one wouldn’t be so disturbed when others are absorbed by the corporate establisment...

...Speaking of RCA’s beneficent influence, Anthony Conrad, RCA board member and liaison between the board and Random House, says, “Of course from a business standpoint they do receive guidance...

...One associate editor at Harper is bitter about the way things are going there...

...And, while far more vulnerable to the pressures of profit and loss, they do not express consonance with those pressuresrather the opposite...

...When a business organism gets large enough, the response is to the organism, not to the individual himself...

...RCA does not make napalm, but they did $262.8-million worth of work for the Defense Department last year and are currently working on the Aegis missile, a contract which may have an ultimate value of $1 billion...

...Authors used to be the most important, then editors...

...I asked him if he would mind if one of the “different” businesses were making napalm...

...There’s nothing to talk about...

...Sometimes they intuit that will, sometimes it comes expressly from above...

...As publishing is full of people who are antipathetic to what the large corporation represents in our society, and since publishing quality books does seem rather too esoteric and unworldly to interest the financial establishment (the hardware/software recipe did not live up to expectations), I wondered whether the corporate presence had had a negative Suzannah Lessard is an assistant editor of The Washington Monthly...

...The root problem is not Southeast Asia or any other particular area of work but the relationship between structure and the individual...

...The Greedy Ganglia Like a primitive marine creature, the conglomerate is made up of selfsufficient cells with only a rudimentary ganglia coordinating the otherwise unrelated parts...

...At Random House the list has certainly maintained quality and no doubt the good books will continue to gravitate to them for some time...

...That is a rather tenuous lease...

...One of their main functions is to transmit the impersonal will to the editorial level without unseemly friction...

...The hall responded with an unreceptive hush...

...Remarks from corporation-owned houses curiously match these criticisms...

...I think there is an internal change in the acquired houses and that the cause, far more immediate than national policy and the exigencies of the market, is intimately connected with the growing dominance of the corporate structure in certain houses and the ability of that structure to neutralize people and to depersonalize work...

...Everybody is full of marvelous editorial ideas...

...Again, without any discussion of practicality or effectiveness, the measure fell by the wayside...

...Everything’s lousy...

...He said he would mind very much, but that RCA was mostly involved in making tape recorders and TVs...

...All is not peaches and cream in every independent quality house, but there is an underlying quiet of engagement standing out vividly against the jibber of distraction which seems to lie at the core of houses dominated by the corporate mystique...

...The implementation of policies like dress codes is a valid indication of the extent of control by the corporation...

...The merits, demerits, and politics of Do It are completely irrelevant here-it is a question of the process of selection...

...And later, “I think our quest for profit is just as great as the conglomerates...

...Independent publishers are keenly aware of structural distinctions, jealous of their freedom, and emphatically critical, sometimes exaggeratedly, of corporate ownership as it has developed...

...he thinks the corporations will start vomiting up their difficult acquisitions and publishing will once again return to the domain of the individual enterprise...

...The Random House complex provides an especially good example because it is owned by a fullblown conglomerate, and an especially sticky example because it has remained a top quality publisher...

...The atmosphere downstairs, in her words: “Everyone was discontent, everyone frustrated...

...They have basically no interest in books, they are interested in money...

...Upper management is geared to transmit the signals which unbuffered might prove offensive to the editorial cells...

...Editors are becoming totally unimportant...

...He adds, “The relationship between an author and an editor is where the action is,” and suggests that it’s a relationship which is apt to become depersonalized by the corporate bureaucracy...

...At the time a number of people in different houses had been fired apparently for antiwar activity...

...I don’t think those pacers were driven by a fear that their jobs depended on making a good profit for RCA...

...Publishing houses don’t publish authors now, they want to publish the big, one-shot book...

...It might be unrealistic to suggest that Bob Gottlieb and his colleagues abandon Knopf, Pantheon, and Random House, where they have been able to publish such good lists, just because of what RCA is making...

...Even Pantheon, a Random House subsidiary, which is an extremely discriminating house, is not likely to survive this psychology...

...Taking a book simply because it will make a lot of money is the same as not taking a book because it will not make a lot of money...

...This is the most abstract tier of the corporate syndrome...

...Boards tend to be cautious...

...There is nothing wrong with publishing an outrageously controversial book...

...While it’s undoubtedly thrilling to have a book one has chosen and worked on take off, choosing books primarily on their salability would very soon become boring indeed to anyone with an interest in publishing beyond the level of the horse race...

...From the outside, at least, thc relationship between Cowles and Harper & Row seems vague...

...Even more discouraging is the sense of not knowing where the directives are really coming from and that everyone is a mouthpiece for someone else...

...People were erratically promoted, demoted, and fired...

...In the vast paneled room all is sweetness and light...

...While the management knows better than to impose such strictures on editors-they can dress in jeans and work shirts and mess up their glassedin carpeted offices as much as possible if that’s their whim-it’s reasonable to deduce that control does not skip over that level but simply operates in subtler forms...

...You get a feeling of not really working, of being filtered,” says Dick Grossman of Viking...

...They now have a very fine business management as well as creative talent...

...If he is right, and at this point it seems improbable, it’s not likely to be because of resistance, or even recognition, by those who have been sucked into the corporate syndrome...

...It’s a matter of responding more to the money-making potential and less to one’s own personal judgment...

...Whole Less Than Parts Taking the question at its broadest, the first principle of the corporate structure is to diffuse responsibility so that no one person feels directly implicated by the whole, while the sum of individual energies perpetuates the institution in all its endeavors...

...We’re not attracting thc young talcnt anymore,” says Jason Epstein...

...If that intention were suddenly erased, if The New York Times Book Review announced that publishers had agreed that henceforth books would be printed only if they met a certain popularity standard, it would be as though a major lobotomy had been performed on the culture...

...As it turned out, that fear was largely unfounded...

...Their nonfiction line is studded with ephemera like Future Shock and The Greening of America...

...Power is in upper management,” she says...

...About a year ago Publishers for Peace, an antiwar group consisting mostly of upper-level editors, held a conference to discuss how they could mobilize their influence against the war...

...One of the speakers suggested that life had been cushy in the field for quite some time, but given the seriousness of the situation, perhaps it was time to take a drop in profits and make a policy of seeking out and publishing effective antiwar literature without regard to profit or loss...

...The same people acknowledge a less definable ill-a pervasive malaise, disassociation from their work-but point beyond their immediate situations to the cause: “You can’t separate publishing from the rest of the world...

...This lies at the very core of an editor’s work...

...When the late David Segal, who had a reputation as one of the best editors in New York, announced he was leaving Harper & Row for another job, he was offered the position of editor-in-chicf...

...Putting things that way made it all too clear that the people present had no such control over their own “influence,” that whether or not they were willing to do so, or thought such action might be useful, they had no power to carry it out...