Editors on Editing: What Writers Need to Know About What Editors Do (47 page)

Graywolf Press has published literary fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, for what is obviously a narrower-than-mass audience, for nearly twenty years. Graywolf authors are known for their adept use of language and their artful sense of the proper shape of a good piece of writing. Gray wolf books often use good literature to take on important cultural issues:
The Graywolf Annual Five: Multi-Cultural Literacy
is a seminal work in a much-debated field. We’ve also published anthologies of short fiction centered on the topics of aging, alcoholism, and the family. The books are beautifully designed. They are marketed not only to the bookstores but to places most publishers never think of: the aging anthology sells to state and county offices on aging and to doctors’ offices; the anthologies on the family are sold widely to therapists; we’ve sold novels and books of poetry to environmental organizations, who offer them as membership premiums.

Graywolf Press is cited here because I know it best, but it is similar to dozens of smaller, independent houses for whom the notion of “midlist” is meaningless. To a smaller house, all its books are
equally
important;
every
title must sell well. A smaller house is unlikely to divert its human and financial resources entirely to the aid of a potential best-seller, nor is it likely to concentrate only on one part (say, chain stores) of the book market—the small publisher will chase down every nook and cranny of a book’s potential audience, because it must.

Ten or even five years ago, the small press might have been the last resort for some authors; now it is often the first and best option.

…

Graywolf Press is one of many hundreds of smaller publishers who have in the past fifteen years emerged to publish books and genres abandoned by larger, aggressively commercial houses. As larger houses have been taken over by conglomerates, their management has become more oriented to the bottom line than to the finely wrought sentence, and other economic pressures have forced them to concentrate resources on “big” books. They have stopped publishing books that fail to offer quick return on investment—midlist fiction, poetry, essays, philosophy, natural history, how-to books in areas that have yet to become broadly established. In the 1990s, this process has accelerated.

At the same time, the smaller, independent presses have both greatly improved their ability to publish books of all types and seized the opportunity presented to them by changes in the publishing industry. Nowadays, the smaller house is likely to have national sales representation, good sales to chain stores, more varied publishing list, better design, and usually can offer all of the ancillary services—imaginative publicity efforts, author tours, foreign and domestic subsidiary rights sales, and accurate and on-time royalty reports and payments—that were once solely in the domain of the larger houses. As the larger houses, catering to the chain stores, began to cut their lists to concentrate on publishing best-sellers, the independent bookstores needed to find some way to distinguish themselves. The small houses began not only to publish better and higher-profile books, but simultaneously to supply the independent stores with just what they needed: a diverse stock.

There are still many good reasons to publish with one of the six or seven large, often foreign-owned companies responsible for the publication of 85 percent of the books we are likely to find in the local Waldenbooks. If your book is one of the few able to reach a large audience, an audience large enough to be called a “mass,” the bigger houses offer a big advance on royalties and the marketing muscle to
make
a best-seller. You can be taken to lunch at the Four Seasons, stay in the best hotels as you are flown from city to city on a promotion tour, and toast in the warm glow of a full-page advertisement in the
Times Book Review
.

There are for most authors and books some downsides to publishing with a larger house. Authors are often left with the following questions:

What happened to my editor?
Books are most often acquired rather than edited. (Enjoy that lunch—it may be the last time you see or hear from your editor.) At any gathering of writers you will hear about the musical-chairs world of big-time publishing, in which an author’s book is liable to have three or four editors as one after another leaves the company between the
times the book is accepted and published. Since the editor is a book’s main in-house advocate, and since received enthusiasm is diminished enthusiasm, the book seems abandoned even if it is finally published.

Where is everybody?
A Graywolf author had one of her books, published by Graywolf in hardcover, brought out in paperback by one of the largest mass-market houses. She heard absolutely nothing from anyone employed by the mass-market publisher from the time the contract was signed until she managed to corral the company’s head publicist at a PEN meeting. She was told that her book was one of eighty-five scheduled for publication that July, and that the company could afford to promote only two of them. Most books are published seemingly without thought, into an awful silence.

Where’s the book?
Most mass-market books have an average shelf life of ten days, after which their covers are ripped off and returned to the publisher for credit and their innards are “recycled.” Most books receive at tops three months of active promotion and then are either declared out of print or relegated to the deep backlist.

For some authors, the big check makes up for most of this misery, but many others have begun to regard smaller houses as a wonderful alternative, as publishing the way it used to be.

…

Editing for the small publisher is in some respects no different from editing for a large commercial house. Manuscripts are sought and acquired and prepared for publication. But for the author, the difference in attitude and commitment at a small press can turn publishing a book from an isolating to an involving and very pleasant experience.

Editors for smaller houses are much more likely to read and even to encourage “over the transom,” unagented submissions rather than rely on a select group of agents to provide prescreening. A small-press editor may not respond as quickly to submissions because he or she must read so many more manuscripts than do the editors at larger houses, but each manuscript is given a fair reading by a senior editor.

The author won’t receive an exorbitant advance from a smaller house (though a fair amount of money may change hands), but is more likely to receive substantial and ongoing praise and support. The publisher of only twenty books a year doesn’t have cracks for books to slip through: the publisher must care deeply about every book published, and is more likely to be thorough, attentive to details, and communicative with the book’s author. The small-press editor is in some respects more like the author, in that they both are, in the old sense, amateurs, engaged in an effort for the love of it rather than for the money. More than one small-press editor has likened the acceptance of a manuscript to the decision to get married; the
editor is not only taking on a book, but committing to an author’s work in the future. Authors are likely to be treated respectfully, with the extra care one takes in any long relationship. The editor can be relied on to be the author’s chief advocate, career counselor, and cheerleader—and to be there for the next book and the next.

Many authors and literary agents have realized that even though the small-press advance may be smaller, since small presses market midlist books longer, more carefully and energetically, and because they are more likely to keep the book in print, authors can often earn more in royalties over the long run. For the first three years after North Point Press published Beryl Markham’s
West with the Night
, total sales were about 5,000 copies; the next year North Point sold 29,000 copies; and for the next three years the book was on top of the paperback best-seller lists. Because North Point was committed to the book, able to keep it in print and continue to advocate for it, the audience finally discovered
West with the Night
. It is likely that at a larger house the book wouldn’t have stayed in print more than a year.

A small press has no bureaucratic superstructure in which books and authors can become entangled and lost. Most small-press editors not only acquire books but serve as line editor, managing editor (coordinating scheduling and the work of copy editors and proofreaders), legal department, receptionist, and administrative assistant—i.e., as the entire editor half of the old-fashioned author-editor relationship. The small-press editor’s acquisition won’t get shot down in an editorial or marketing committee meeting. To be sure, an editor must be able to position the book in such a way that other members of the publishing team will share in his or her enthusiasm, but in the more intimate surroundings of a smaller house the editor is more likely to succeed. The editor will be leading the charge when the book is published, on the phone with an author as the reviews come in, and leading the cheers as the author composes his or her next book.

The small-press editor also is intimately involved in the marketing and design of an author’s book, and the author is likely to be, to the extent desired, a full-fledged partner in the entire publishing process. Smaller houses are more likely to recognize how powerful an ally an interested author can be, and to encourage ideas and enthusiasm and involvement. An author is likely to be asked to contribute ideas for cover art, to participate in the writing of sympathetic jacket and advertising copy, to suggest stores receptive to hosting a signing, etc. You can be sure that a small-press publisher will take very seriously an author’s list of towns he or she has lived in—notices will go to libraries, stores, newspapers, and magazines in all the “hometowns” an author can think of.

Small presses market books in a manner that can be just as effective as,
though quieter than, the ways of the larger houses. Because they publish so many books, the large commercial publishers can, at best, throw books into the standard book pipeline (chain stores and the larger independent stores), take out a couple of ads, and rush on to the next season’s list. A smaller house, because it needs each book to produce more, is more likely to delve deeper and more imaginatively for a book’s audience.

Smaller houses focus their trade marketing efforts on actions that build enthusiasm among the community of reviewers and booksellers who care deeply for good books. Trade marketing efforts are likely to rest on advance galleys that are sent with personal letters from the editor to key booksellers nationally; on a marketing director who knows the reading interests of each store’s clerks and book buyers, and who can pique those interests with a well-timed letter or phone call; on carefully placing in-store promotions for individual titles and carefully touring the author. A good small-press publisher will make use of the many low-cost and very effective vehicles for obtaining publicity for a title, both in and outside normal book trade channels.

Most smaller publishers will market not only into traditional trade accounts, but will take the time (for the small house, time and imagination can replace the large publisher’s capital) to explore other markets for books. Globe Pequot Press does a fine job marketing to the book trade, but also sells books in many other imaginative ways: their bicycling books are sold through bike shops; their bed-and-breakfast inn books sell as many copies in the inns as in bookstores. Seal Press has a thriving nontrade business, selling their superb titles on women coming to terms with abusive relationships to women’s shelters nationally. Graywolf Press once published a book of Caribbean folk tales that was marketed as a short-story collection, as folklore, as “prose poetry,” as a children’s book, to Caribbean studies departments, and to storytelling guilds. That effort wasn’t terribly successful, but the effort was made. We were much more successful marketing anthologies of short stories on aging not only to the trade as good literary collections, but to doctors with an elderly clientele and to retirement centers.

…

As the market for authors’ works shrinks, with more of the larger houses swallowing portions of other, formerly large houses, authors would be well served to look outside of New York to one of the many fine, smaller, independent houses dedicated to publishing good books well.

Check the best-seller lists and the review sections of your newspaper: you are likely to find books there published by houses like Thunder’s Mouth Press, Algonquin Press, Workman Publishing, Chronicle Books, and the
more notable university presses. Even the more literary Graywolf Press has one title
(If You Want to Write
, by Brenda Ueland) that has to date sold over 120,000 copies. The smaller houses are marketers, not mass marketers; they care about the books they publish, and their readers and authors care about them. They all have to make a profit, but because of lower overhead, an unwillingness (and inability) to pay huge advances, and the tendency to solve marketing problems through the more effective means of using their hearts and minds rather than their checkbooks, they are able to turn a good midlist book into a profitable one.

This is publishing the way it used to be: good books published well. And it is yet another case of small being not just beautiful but more effective, too, for the right author with the right book.

Faith Sale

F
AITH
S
ALE
is vice-president and executive editor of G. P. Putnam’s Sons, where she has been since December 1979. Before that she was a senior editor at E. P. Dutton for two years, after more than a decade as a free-lance editor. She is a member of PEN American Center’s Executive Board and cochair of its Freedom-to-Write Committee
.

“
My devotion to fiction,” Ms. Sale writes, “is born more out of instinct than intellect, based more on emotional response than calculated judgment. The moment of connection is the moment I become a book’s (or an author’s) advocate—its nurturer, defender, supporter, mouthpiece, bodyguard
.”