Gallows Humor (and Some Hope) from Young Bucks

by Marcela Valdes, PW Daily -- Publishers Weekly, 6/3/2005

Five young literary editors gathered before a crowd of more than 200 people, more than 50 of them standing, to talk about how they've managed to publish the books that they love while working within a system that seems rigged against them.

"What we have to do is find a way to publish books that we'll be proud to have published once we're old and fired," FSG's Lorin Stein remarked near the end of the hour, drawing sympathetic laughter from both the audience and his fellow panelists.

Among the obstacles they face: a declining readership, unworkably high book advances, and a winner-take-all marketplace that sends a few books up the bestseller list while remaindering most of the rest. "There doesn't seem to be enough space in people's consciousness for more than one or two books a season," Bloomsbury's Gillian Blake observed.

Thus a vicious circle is created in which "publishers are publishing more books because of the lottery system," PW's Steven Zeitchik, the panel's moderator, pointed out.

The solution, these editors suggested, is to think about marketing from the very beginning. "Everytime you buy a book you have to think about how you're going to find that target buyer," said Chris Jackson, a senior editor at Crown. And the editor's job, Little, Brown's Liz Nagle added, is to communicate that strategy to the rest of the house.

Gone are the days when an editor could fall in love with a manuscript, bind it between cloth covers and blithely send it out into the world. But did such days ever really exist? "I can't believe that there was ever a time when marketing was ever proportioned very differently than it is now," Stein said, pointing out that the previous generation of editors put in their share of buzz-creating phone calls and letters.

The difference for today's editors may be more structural. Operating within multi-imprint conglomerates, they're publishing more books each season--and as a result, they're jockeying against each other for the time and attention not only of readers but of their own marketing and publicity teams.

Such competition may explain Houghton's Kate Travers's idealistic, if vague, plea for more collaboration between industry segments. "There's a lot of animosity," she said. "If we want this industry to be successful--and all keep our jobs--we need to come together in alliance."