Book Blogger 'Mad Max' Unmasked

by Charlotte Abbott, PW Daily -- Publishers Weekly, 1/24/2006

When the literary blog BookAngst 101 emerged in fall 2004, it prompted a two-and-a-half-year guessing game about which self-described "senior publishing executive" was probing the nitty-gritty between editor and author, and rebelling against corporate policy when it ran afoul of good publishing. Then, on January 12, the anonymous Mad Max Perkins posted his first new entry in six months, with clues pointing to his real identity: Putnam executive editor Dan Conaway.

Though Conaway had plenty of opportunities to reveal himself, it was the question of how to draw attention to the noir novel Dope by Sarah Gran, coming in hardcover from Putnam on February 2, that finally made him do it. "If I had any purchase among the readers who frequent the literary blog world, it was as Mad Max—so I thought I would just see if doing this might help move the needle for her," he said. "Yes, I'm selling my soul for Sarah Gran."

In a neat bit of symmetry, one of Conaway's most popular blog entries had been about the exhilaration of working closely with a gifted writer on detail and craft (http://bookangst.blogspot.com/2005/03/what-makes-it-all-worthwhile.html). When Mad Max declared that the author was Gran (http://bookangst.blogspot.com/), the publishing blog Galley Cat put two and two together, since Gran had moved with Conaway from HarperCollins to Putnam last summer.

"I'm stunned that anybody at a senior editorial level—let alone someone with [nine year-old] triplets—had the time to do anything like write a blog," said Doubleday/Broadway's Gerry Howard. Several editors who've worked closely with Conaway at Harper and Putnam said they'd had no idea about his alter ego; some had even suspected Howard of being Mad Max.

Though Conaway started the blog as a way to encourage editors to share expertise on what was working in the market—an aim he now calls "naïve"—he found it gradually made him an "ambassador to the world of writers from publishing." Simon Lipskar, Gran's agent, puts it a little more bluntly: "Mad Max's blog put a lie to the widely-held belief out there that publishers are filled with number-crunching technocrats who couldn't give a damn about books."

Responses to Mad Max's posts from others in the literary community also helped show that, despite the pressures that divide publishers, agents and authors, "there's a lot of good will," Conaway said. "We want this stuff to work and it often doesn't. But what the blog showed is, there's this community of writers and readers that really cares."