A GOOD illustration of this—indeed, an object lesson—was the publication of Shirley Conran’s Savages. Something of a name to conjure with in the United Kingdom, Shirley Conran became an overnight success in the United States when S&S published her first novel, Lace, in 1982. The book succeeded partly because of its eye-catching tag line (“Which one of you bitches is my mother?”), partly because it was a shopping and brand-name-dropping novel in the tradition of Judith Krantz’s Scruples, and partly because it was brilliantly (and on Conran’s part ruthlessly) promoted. There is a certain market, always, for a novel that combines sex, romance, and the address of the right shoemaker in Paris, and Lace was written to capitalize on this market.
Joni Evans and I bought Lace, in fact, precisely because it seemed to us that S&S had been slipping in this market since the days of The Love Machine. Of course, we had Jackie Collins, which was a very good thing, but we hadn’t made Jackie Collins, since she had already been a very successful writer when she left Warner Books for S&S. We had built up her sales, but that isn’t at all the same thing as launching somebody from scratch, which was the challenge when we agreed to pay a major amount of money after reading the first draft of Lace.
Unfortunately, Lace was one of those novels that read better on the first read than on the second. I had been carried away by the bold first line, the sheer energy of the story, and all the extravagant descriptions of life in the world of haute couture. It was, as one woman reader said, “like eating M&M’s while masturbating,” and indeed there was something mildly sinful about the book, like overindulging in a good Swiss patisserie, a feeling of being unable to stop but slightly sick at the same time. A closer inspection of the manuscript once we owned it revealed certain flaws of logic, plotting, and even ordinary common sense. In addition, it was far too long and full of somewhat schoolgirlish passages, which work in the United Kingdom but read strangely to Americans. I girded my loins for battle and waded in, and pretty soon Shirley Conran herself was ensconced in an office next to mine, doggedly rewriting in a tiny hand, making out wall-size charts of the chronology and the interaction of the characters, in many different colors of ink, and driving a succession of typists mad. Early in the proceedings Shirley presented me with a sweatshirt that bore the legend SHOW, DON’T TELL! as a response to my constant advice to keep the book moving by writing scenes instead of narrative and description. On the whole, few writers have taken to criticism with more cheer and harder work than she did, and we soon became friends. Her determination was something of a force of nature and was, in its own way, infectious. The marketing plans for Lace became, for a time, the talk of the industry, for we were determined to make the book work, whatever it cost to promote it (and its author). No stone was left unturned. We had reading copies, contests, bookmarks, featured stories about Conran, giveaway lace garters embroidered with the title in gold thread, window displays—not just in bookstores but in the better shops on South Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills—product tie-ins, every imaginable tchotchke.
Unlike most novelists, Shirley was a known factor to talk-show hosts, because of her self-help book, Superwoman, so we planned a full-scale publicity tour, for which Shirley planned her wardrobe with the care of a general organizing an assault and prepared herself, in the meantime, by going on a strict diet and visiting a health spa. In short, we gave it the full Jacqueline Susann treatment, and—no surprise—it worked. Lace bounced onto best-seller lists all over the country (and soon the world) and sold a ton of copies in hardcover, in paperback, and for the Literary Guild. It even got made into a trashy miniseries, always a sign of success. Actually, it passed my personal test for women’s popular-fiction success, which is that substantial numbers of women could be observed reading it on the subway and on buses. (Airplanes were the place to test the success of men’s action novels and self-help books.) Jackie Susann had used this as one of her tests to determine if we were reaching the real heart of the market for her kind of fiction, so it had been one of my happiest moments to ride the D train one morning and count the number of women who were absorbed in reading Queenie. Lace worked on the D train, which meant we were home free.
Naturally, her second novel, Savages, was eagerly awaited, and when she delivered an incredibly detailed outline, it seemed like a sure thing—it was to be the story of a group of glamorous young women who become stranded on a tropical island during a vacation trip and are forced to survive by their wits and their meager survival skills. We bought the book and went through the long process of getting it written—a group activity involving Shirley, her assistant, two editors (me and Joni), a freelance line editor, a researcher, and a staff of people doing roughly the same tasks on the other side of the Atlantic. Once again, Shirley moved into S&S with her wall charts and a chronology that unrolled on the floor, with every event in the book neatly marked off and described. By this time, Shirley was a known quantity to fiction buyers, but we did not scale down in any way our promotion plans. A lavish press kit was prepared, reading copies were printed, and we arranged a full author’s tour; in short, everything was done to ensure that the book would sell like Lace.
Instead, it bombed, dismally, completely, absolutely, from the very first moment it hit the stores. The campaign was there, the ads were terrific, Shirley did her number on TV, the stores took huge numbers of the book, all the elements of success were present and accounted for. The one thing we hadn’t foreseen was that even Shirley Conran’s loyal fans hated the book.
It wasn’t the reviewers who killed the book. The problem was that Shirley’s readers evidently didn’t want to read about women eating raw fish or building a raft or learning to kill with their bare hands. They associated Shirley with luxury, glamour, sex, and wealth, and somehow, as if by magic, they sniffed out the fact that this wasn’t the mix that Shirley was selling in Savages. They walked right past the huge piles of it in the bookstores as if the expensive four-color jacket and the displays were invisible. It’s one of those mysteries of the book trade, the way readers know when an author has failed them and how quickly the word of mouth spreads. The public knows the book is dead long before the stores, let alone the publisher, have worked it out.
As one of the older sales reps said about Savages, “It’s Shardik all over again—you can spend all the money you want, you can’t make ’em read what they don’t want to read.”
PERHAPS THE greatest mistake a publisher can make is to think in categories in the first place. Categories are the hallmark of mass-market publishing, in which it is necessary to stock the shelves with so many mysteries or so many science-fiction novels every month and in which the important thing is that the books themselves (and their covers) fit into a given category—the twenty-first novel in a paperback science-fiction series had better be as much like the previous twenty as possible, or there will be trouble from readers, jobbers, and retailers. In hardcover publishing, almost the reverse holds true, which explains (with a few notable exceptions) why so few mass-market people become successful hardcover editors or publishers. What works in hardcover is generally what is different, unexpected, and new, and even when people seem to be writing the same kind of book over and over again—as many best-selling novelists do—they need to be reinvented from time to time, and they can’t be imitated or cloned. Danielle Steel and Mary Higgins Clark write books that sell in the millions, but anybody setting out to create a stable of writers to provide books in their styles or following their formats would likely fail.
Doubleday was perhaps the only major hardcover house that succumbed to the notion of cranking out hardcover books in ever larger quantity, as if they were paperbacks. This might have been because Nelson Doubleday was more interested in his baseball team than in books, or possibly because Doubleday owned the Literary Guild, an enormously successful book club, and category publishing is the lifeblood of book clubs, or even because Doubleday owned its own printing plant, which needed to be kept busy. Whatever the reason, Doubleday became an unwieldy giant a
nd for a time collapsed, until revived in a smaller form by a new owner—an object lesson, one would have thought, to everyone in the business.
But by the eighties, the prevailing opinion had changed. Big became better. What had limited the size of publishing houses was the sheer difficulty of obtaining information about thousands of different “products” and the amount of time it took for numbers from the field to work their way up to the desks of the people who made the decisions. Beyond a certain size, there was simply no way to keep track of things, and the publishing process either got out of control or had to be bound by so many rigid rules that it was unable to function, except when it came to the most obvious best-sellers.
The computer put an end to that concern. Information, such as it was—for the next step was to rationalize what people needed to know—was now almost instantly available, no matter how big the company was. The gray-haired old ladies with pencils in their hair gave way to casually dressed youngsters who knew how to run computers and get the numbers out of it in a form that a busy man could read and understand in an instant. As if by a magic wand, the gray-haired old ladies in accounting were fired and went home to Queens or Brooklyn or the suburbs of New Jersey, occasionally surfacing to write pathetic letters when something “their” company had done made news.
The computer changed everything, and the race for size—this time with management controls, s’il vous plaît—was on.
BY THE early eighties, Dick Snyder had hit his stride, and begun to move from the day-to-day grind of publishing books to the big time of corporate acquisition. In 1984, he acquired Esquire Corporation, buying everything except the magazine. He ended up with Allyn and Bacon, an educational publisher; a nontheatrical film company; a lighting company; a company that made storage cabinets; and what one of those involved in the purchase called “a few other dogs and cats.” Within a year all Esquire’s executives were history, and not long afterward so was everything Esquire had consisted of except Allyn and Bacon itself, which was to become the nucleus of S&S’s educational and informational business, which fifteen years later was to be sold for over four billion dollars.
Dick was on a roll. Gulf + Western (which had changed its name to Paramount, after its most famous asset) was no longer in the synergy business—that word had died along with Bluhdorn. The company was now firmly in the entertainment and educational business; the zinc, the valves, the replacement bumpers, the gloves, the mattresses, all the chazerei that Bluhdorn had acquired over the years on his demented shopping spree had been sold off, without sentimentality or regret, by Martin Davis, with the result that Paramount was awash in cash and looking for companies to buy. Needless to say, they had to be companies with some kind of coherence—Davis was not about to follow down Bluhdorn’s path. What Wall Street wanted now was companies that made sense (or appeared to make sense, anyway), with some kind of rational plan for the future. Books, education, and movies looked like a sensible enough combination on paper to satisfy investors.
There were two key factors involved, both of which worked to Dick’s benefit. The first was that education became a hot issue in the 1980s, partly spurred by the beginnings of the computer revolution, which seemed to demonstrate that if American kids were going to grow up and compete with Japanese, they would be better off learning mathematics and science than welding and home economics. The second was that book publishing as an industry was entering into the second stage of mergers and acquisitions that was to eventually lead to the creation of a small number of publishing behemoths, themselves eventually swallowed up by even larger corporations.
Once again, the pace was set by Random House, which had been acquired from RCA by S. I. Newhouse (together with Knopf, Vintage, and Pantheon)—a plus for all concerned, it seemed, since Newhouse, whose family-owned Advance Publications had a huge stake in the newspaper and magazine business, was at least interested in the book business. Newhouse, whose ambitious acquisition of magazines was to bring him, among many others, Vogue, Architectural Digest, Vanity Fair, and The New Yorker, set out to acquire publishing houses in much the same spirit. Random House was launched on a long period of growth by acquisition. Before the decade was out, it even became the dominant publisher in the United Kingdom, including among its imprints such old and respected houses as Jonathan Cape, Chatto and Windus, and the Bodley Head.
Snyder was not about to let S&S take a backseat to Random House. Much as Dick and Martin Davis disliked each other (a fact they scarcely even bothered to hide in public and in interviews), Davis was smart enough to rely on Dick’s shrewdness and acquisitive skills, so long as his ambitious and assertive subordinate stayed within the area of educational publishing. They might quarrel, Dick might brood and curse about Davis, but Dick still managed to bring off deal after successful deal, as if he was determined to extract a word of praise from Davis, who was grimly determined not to give him one. Dick first sold Silhouette (a paperback romance publisher) to Harlequin, its chief competitor, taking home a lucrative twenty-seven-year distribution agreement, then bought the moribund Stratemeyer Syndicate (which included Nancy Drew, Tom Swift, and the Hardy Boys), and acquired Prentice-Hall for $700 million, thus turning S&S overnight into a major educational, informational, and reference publisher and something of an industry giant.
If Random House had moved decisively in an attempt to dominate the trade book business throughout the English-speaking world, S&S had set out to become the world’s largest publisher of educational books and material. The rest of publishing jogged behind, in a protracted spasm of smaller-scale mergers and acquisitions that were mirrored in the book-selling business: Chains forced the independent stores out of business by deep discounting, then proceeded to gobble each other up and open new stores throughout the country at a dizzying rate, mostly in the shopping malls that were coming to dominate the retail world. In short, a new world was forming in which sheer size was the key to survival—or so it was believed at the time.
Dick moved ever higher into the stratosphere of corporate management but was still determined to call the shots when it came to trade publishing, which soon gave S&S the reputation of being a hot seat for publishers. This hardly mattered to those of us who were close to Dick, however, since he was always happy to plunge back into acquiring books rather than companies and never stopped thinking of himself as the publisher of S&S even when he had given that job to somebody else—Joni Evans, briefly, Dan Green, and eventually Charles Hayward. Nobody lasted long or enjoyed the experience.
IT WAS Dick’s continuing interest in the S&S list that explains how we became involved with Jesse Jackson—that and the overbearing salesmanship of Irving Lazar. Lazar had called me one day to suggest that I should buy Jackson’s autobiography before somebody else grabbed it. “He’s hot, kiddo. Just do me a favor and give me a quick yes or a no, because I’ve got a lot of interest on this one,” he said urgently.
Further conversation made it clear that Lazar had nothing to show—“You can read all about Jackson in the newspapers, for chrissake, why the fuck would you need an outline?” he said—and that it was very possible he hadn’t bothered to tell Jackson that he was selling his book.
All the same, the idea seemed like an attractive one to me. Jackson was a national figure, highly visible and controversial without being too controversial, like Louis Farrakhan, for instance. Jackson was a gadfly, sure, but he was an establishment gadfly, who knew exactly how to play the black card in the white world. Besides, he was, in his own way, a genuine hero, whose childhood in the South and whose years in the Movement as the protégé (whether self-proclaimed or not) of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., were of genuine interest. There was a story to be told in Jesse Jackson’s life, and only Jackson could tell it, if he was willing to. Finally, if there was one area in which S&S —and the book business in general—was weak, it was in the area of books by and about blacks. There seemed to me everything to be said for publishing Jackson, and I immediately called Dick to tell him so,
only to find him less than enthusiastic. Jackson’s star, he felt, had faded; besides, he was a troublemaker. Random House had burned their fingers badly by publishing Muhammad Ali’s autobiography, and if you couldn’t sell Muhammad Ali to white book buyers, you sure couldn’t sell Jesse Jackson.
I could tell that Dick was not about to be budged by argument, so I called Lazar back to say no, but Lazar wasn’t about to take no for an answer—a sure sign that the other interested publishers didn’t exist. Dick was dead wrong, Lazar said, he just hadn’t been exposed to Jackson’s charisma. Five minutes with Jackson, and Dick would be singing a different tune, I could bet on that.
I wasn’t about to bet on it, but after a flurry of telephone calls I was able to tell Lazar that Dick and I would be happy to join the Reverend Jackson for the lunch at Lazar’s New York pied-à-terre at Sixty-sixth Street and Fifth Avenue the next time Lazar came east. Dick thought it would be a waste of time, but he had a genuine affection for Lazar, who was just the kind of larger-than-life character Dick himself was intent on becoming, and some degree of curiosity about Jackson.
On the appointed day, we settled into Dick’s limo for the drive to Lazar’s apartment. I detected a certain amount of restlessness on Dick’s part. He liked to be well briefed before any meeting, but he knew only about Jackson what he had read in the papers. He wasn’t mollified when I told him that was all anybody knew about Jackson. What was he going to talk to Jackson about, Dick complained, although since I assumed that Jackson was going to be doing most of the talking—he was a preacher, after all—I didn’t see that as a problem. Dick picked up a copy of Time from the pocket in the back of the driver’s seat and leafed through it. “There it is!” he said, stabbing a page with his finger. What he had found was a story about teenage pregnancy in the ghetto, in which children of thirteen, twelve, even eleven were having babies. Here was a subject with which to break the ice in talking to Jackson, he said.
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