Still, even Bluhdorn was as remote as Zeus for most of the people who worked at S&S. One could not imagine him dropping by people’s offices to share a joke with them, like Bennett Cerf at Random House, nor could one walk into his office to read him a couple of pages from a hot new manuscript, as people had often done with Dick Simon.
Management in the recent past had been a meaningless term in most publishing houses. At S&S management consisted of hardly much more than the treasurer, Sy Turk, and his secretary, whose job under Shimkin had been to urge caution when ordering office supplies. At Random House, Viking, Knopf, and almost every other major publishing house, the situation had been roughly the same. Management was basically housekeeping. “The chain of command,” to use another term then unfamiliar in publishing, went straight from the owner(s) to the publisher (sometimes they were the same person) to the editors. The “business people” were on the sidelines, looking on in horror or, like Chicken Little, predicting disaster, but they were seldom brought into the meetings that really mattered. Their advice, if sought at all, tended to be sought after the fact, the usual question being some version of “This is what we’ve decided to do, now how do we pay for it?”
With publishing becoming a big business and the major houses increasingly owned by outsiders, the concept of management took on a whole new meaning and importance. The managers of RCA, which owned Random House, and Gulf + Western, though very different companies, both wanted their publishing asset run like a business, and at most levels were really at ease only when talking to businessmen like themselves. Dick realized this early on and began transforming himself from a successful publisher to a businessman/manager, though he never lost his publishing skills or altogether gave up his hold on the publishing process. Everywhere, though, however it was accomplished, management, hitherto despised, took on a new importance, with the effect that layers of management began to surround the editors and the publisher, who soon found themselves subordinated in the new pecking order. Instead of being at the top, those who actually published and edited the books found themselves gradually relegated to the bottom, reporting to managers who soon constituted a whole separate and more powerful element within the house. Rather than to books, these people were dedicated largely to proving to the owner that the publishing house was being run like a serious business and in compliance with the parent company’s demands, rules, and expectations.
Forecasts—always nebulous in a business where a single unexpected best-seller can turn a poor year into a good one and where sheer dumb luck operates almost as mysteriously as it does in the movie business—became enshrined as “business plans,” which were soon engraved in stone. Targets were set and had to be met, numbers had to be produced in huge quantity and ever-growing complexity to justify any decision. This soon required a large number of bureaucrats.
The one thing that had set book publishing apart from most American businesses was that the great majority of the people who worked at a publishing house were actively engaged in acquiring, editing, and producing the final product. There was no thick layer of management and bureaucracy, as there was in such supposedly “modern” businesses as car manufacturing or television, which is why a couple of really big best-sellers was all it took to produce a terrific year. The number of people involved in the process was small, and they were comparatively low paid, hence overhead was low and a sudden increase in profit instantly noticeable. Conversely, a bad year, one in which there were no surprise best-sellers, could be ridden out, often without letting anybody go, since the company was staffed leanly to begin with. Book publishing looked inefficient to the outside observer, but it in fact had all the advantages of a guerrilla army over a standing one: It could live off the land, change direction quickly, and needed no expensive and cumbersome general staff to guide it.
Now, however, without the actual business of buying and selling books having changed in any appreciable way,* publishing houses began to take on all the appurtenances of conventional big business. In short order, there were more people managing than there were actually publishing books, many of them basically managing the editors, who became, as it were, the smallest—or perhaps more accurately, the least powerful—cogs in the machine and certainly the most carefully scrutinized.
In the meantime, the direction of the major houses fell into the hands of people who “understood business” as opposed to books and who in general despised, or were at least deeply suspicious of, those who read books and dealt directly with authors. Authors were perceived, like actors and writers in the old Hollywood of the studio moguls, to be overpaid troublemakers, spoiled children. The word creative, always spoken with a certain sense of resentment by those in power, came to be a synonym for unbusinesslike, improvident, irresponsible, and self-indulgent. “The creative side” of the business was where the problems arose—books that lost money, books that were late, books that shouldn’t have been bought in the first place, books that made trouble or the wrong kind of headlines, often infuriating the parent company. “The creative people” were writers—notoriously a sullen, difficult, and demanding lot, “navel gazers” who usually had an unrealistic and inflated view of what their work was worth—or editors who wanted to indulge their personal taste at the expense of the company, lived off their expense accounts, and often took the writer’s side against the company. (Of course, writers complained in turn that most editors never stood up for their authors and yearned for the editors of some mythical golden age, who went to bat for their authors even at the risk of losing their jobs, something which was never really the case, as any reading of the Hemingway/Perkins correspondence will demonstrate.) It was always a common joke among publishing people that “this would be a great business if it weren’t for writers,” but by the mid-seventies publishing was beginning to be run by people who at heart believed that and included editors as well.
ONE REFLECTION of this growing attitude was the idea that people from outside the publishing world could do a better job of running it than those who were already infected with a taste for reading, a sympathy for writers, and the desire to have a regular table at “21” or the Italian Pavilion. This seemingly culminated in Dick Snyder’s decision to hire the former president of a Fortune 500 medical-supply company to run what was now called the consumer division of S&S, on the grounds that his management skills and his knowledge of consumer sales would be invaluable assets. This was not as strange a hiring choice as it seemed—Dick was under some pressure from Gulf + Western to run S&S in a more “businesslike” way and therefore picked a man who, on paper, would surely seem about as businesslike as it gets and at least wouldn’t go about trying to come up with ideas for new books or asking why we published so many first novels.
“He’s going to run this like a business,” Dick promised, though no sooner was the poor man onboard than Dick began to make fun of his ignorance about book publishing, and he was soon excluded from any of the meetings at which major decisions were made and relegated to a large, luxurious office many floors away from Dick’s, where he had nothing to do. Once, when Dick and I were sitting in his office discussing the acquisition of a major author on whom we had our hearts set, I suggested it might be a good idea (or at least polite) for me to tell the man who was ostensibly the head of consumer publishing about what we were doing before he read about it in the papers. “Fuck him,” Dick said cheerfully. Not every publishing house was so lucky—in many, the outside businessmen brought in were actually placed in charge, with calamitous results.
At every level, management people scrutinized what publishers, editors, art directors, and the manufacturing staff actually did and began to establish controls over the way it was done. The amiable chaos and anarchy in which books had hitherto been created gave way to a more orderly process, and accountability (another new buzzword) began to be established in the publishing process. Where people were lucky, as at Random House and S&S, the movement toward efficiency was blunted by the fact that those at the top
still preferred books to balance sheets. All the same, the Random House or the S&S of the mid-seventies was almost unrecognizable to those who had worked there ten or twenty years earlier, and classic editors were fast being replaced by people for whom books were “units” and “titles” were interchangeable. The tail was beginning to wag the dog.
Some of these changes were skin-deep. It had always been normal at every publishing house to prepare a financial estimate (known at S&S and elsewhere as a P&L) on each book that was being considered for publication, but this was usually prepared after the fact—that is, the decision to publish was made before the numbers were done, so the whole thing was more of a sop to good business procedure than a useful management tool. Now the P&Ls throughout the industry grew more complicated, requiring estimates that by their very nature were likely to be problematic. On the surface, the numbers were being worked out in enough detail to satisfy the financial people, but in fact, however impressive in appearance, they still represented guesswork.
What’s more, when the book was considered really important, everybody ignored the whole process. If Dick wanted to make a two-book offer for a major best-selling author, he told the editor to go ahead—the numbers would be done later, to justify whatever the outcome was. “You can’t make any money out of a book you haven’t bought,” Snyder used to say. If you wanted to be competitive, you had to go out into the marketplace and buy the hot books and the big-name authors and you could buy them only at the market price. It was one of his favorite sayings, the other being “If we own it, we love it”—once we had bought a book, we had to be committed to it heart and soul, no matter how awful it was. It didn’t get you anywhere to complain (let alone admit) that Harold Robbins had been plagiarizing himself for years, or that most of Irving Wallace’s novels could be cut by 25 percent without losing a thing.
This was partly an answer to Dan Green, the brilliant head of S&S’s publicity department who was to one day succeed Snyder as publisher. Green was one of the few people whose publishing instincts were as sharp as Snyder’s, though he lacked Snyder’s pit-bull capacity to get things done. Green, like Snyder, could read the auguries, almost three-dimensionally. He looked at the daily sales reports from the major bookstores, skimmed the key reviews, went over the publicity schedule and compared the author’s appearances with the sales (Was there a blip the day after he or she did the Today show?), closed his eyes thoughtfully for a few seconds, then decided to run an ad in The New York Times or the Chicago Tribune, go back to press for another ten thousand copies, and print jackets for a further ten beyond that. Conversely, he might say, despite enthusiastic reports from the reps in the field and lots of publicity, “It’s all over—don’t print any more, they’re all going to come back.” Somehow, he could weigh the intangibles—a drop in sales at Higbee’s, in Cleveland, a reluctance to order more copies from a buyer in Pasadena—and tell that the book had peaked, even though it might still be number one on the best-seller lists and selling like crazy.
It was an art, developed in part by having traveled around the country and met the key players at the jobbers and in the stores, however small their jobs might appear to be, in part by the sheer ability to read the numbers and figure out what they really meant, and whether the tide was going in or going out. Long before computers made their appearance on people’s desks, those who really knew their way around book publishing could figure out when to start the presses rolling on overtime and when to stop them dead, despite cries from all over the country (as well as from the author and his or her agent) for more books—a skill which is life and death in publishing terms and which the computer has done very little to improve upon, given the enormously high rate of returns today. Then and now, the bookstores were their own worst enemies—since they could return whatever stock remained unsold to the publishers, they had no vested interest in caution, or even realism, and were, then as now, inclined to take few copies of books they didn’t understand and far too many of those they did.
Green, a man for whom worry was a permanent state, chewed the end of his pencil (sometimes the business end of his ballpoint pen, if he wasn’t careful), wriggled around in his chair until his shirttail was hanging out, gnawed on the end of his tie, and came up with the right decision, time after time. It was a joy to see him do it. With Snyder, the physical contortions were missing, and the process was more inquisitorial, but the result was the same. The difference was that whereas Green had to argue for his conclusions with Snyder, Snyder didn’t have himself to argue with. One way or another, however, the publishing industry remained a business in which the key decisions were made by the equivalent of spitting on one’s forefinger and holding it up to the wind, a fact that was never fully understood by the conglomerates and big corporations that bought into the book business, nor by the outside businessmen who came in to make sense of it, perhaps in part because it was kept carefully concealed from them.
Outsiders, particularly from the West Coast, used to say how nice it must be to work in a business where people weren’t crazy and where greed and ego were at least kept to rational levels, but by the 1970s they were wrong. The only major difference between the movie business and the book business by then was that in the book business the money was smaller.
* More than sixty years after the Depression, unsold books are still returnable by bookstores to the publishers for full credit, an emergency measure that was intended to save booksellers from bankruptcy as the economy collapsed and remains in effect even though the big bookstore chains have long since become profitable giants, dwarfing all but the largest publishers, and have driven out of business just those small, independent bookstores that the returns policy was meant to protect.
CHAPTER 27
The mid-seventies brought about changes in my life that had nothing to do with publishing, as well as some that did. In 1974, Dick Snyder brought Joni Evans over from Morrow to run the S&S rights department. Joni had been a star at Morrow—she was sharp, bright, aggressive, and smart, in addition to which she was tireless, fiercely ambitious, and boiling over with enthusiasm. It came as no surprise to learn that she had been a cheerleader at Mamaroneck High, along with her sister, Joyce. The two sisters had between them enough energy to keep a whole football team going, and no sooner had Joni arrived at S&S than her enthusiasm was quickly noticed.
This was hardly surprising—the mid-seventies was the period in which the rights directors of the major publishing houses suddenly became stars. What had hitherto been a fairly low-profile job suddenly became glamorous as the prices paid for mass-market paperback rights escalated into the millions. In buying a book, it became essential to know what the paperback rights might go for. Rights directors were also in constant touch with their “customers”—any rights director worth his or her salt was on the phone all the time—and provided, among other things, a kind of industrywide hot line of news and gossip. If the book clubs thought a big novel needed a better title or if the major paperback editors said they might buy a book if certain changes were made, such opinions could no longer be ignored. Rights directors, if they were any good, began to play a role in the editorial process. They even became involved in publicity, advertising, and promotion, since the paperback publishers, having paid a lot of money for the rights to a book, were not unnaturally determined to have some say in how it was promoted or at least to make sure that the hardcover publisher didn’t simply take their money and run. As foreign rights came under the control of rights directors, they soon learned more about what was going on among foreign publishers than any editor could and became just as familiar with the publishing gossip in Bologna, Paris, or Stockholm as with that of New York. They knew what was happening at the movie companies and among the magazines that competed for serial rights—they were, in fact, fountains of knowledge in an industry where knowledge is power. Finally, a company’s income from rights very often made the difference between profit or loss at the end of the year, so rights directors usually had the ear
of the publisher, to the consternation of older and more conservative editors.
Most of the rights directors were women, as were many of the editors at the book clubs and most of the major mass-market paperback editors and nearly all of the movie “scouts.” Women such as Mildred Marmur, the rights director of Random House (who had been a secretary at S&S when I first came there and worked her way up to become rights director), or Joni Evans played major roles in opening up major executive jobs to women throughout the book industry, but, just as important, they also played a part in making editors and authors more conscious of the need to think about the markets for a book.
AFTER MY experience in Texas at the self-help convention, I had sworn to give up writing books that advised people to do anything. I had already signed a substantial contract for a book that was to be called “How to Be a Winner 100 Percent of the Time,” and contemplated with resignation having to pay the money back, but Lynn Nesbit urged me not to worry about it. If I had to pay it back, I would, but why not try and come up with something else? My new editor, Jason Epstein, who had replaced Jim Silberman, might be interested in a book about my family, she said. I had written the first chapter of such a book many years before, at the urging of Bob Gottlieb and Nina Bourne, so I sent it off to Epstein to see what he thought of it. He loved it and simply transferred the contract from the defunct self-help book to the new one, an act of faith and generosity that I have never forgotten (and that probably wouldn’t happen today). I wrote Charmed Lives quickly and with pleasure—here, at last, was a story I knew by heart—and to my delight, Epstein liked reading it as much as I liked writing it.
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