The Business of the Book: An LWC}NYC Panel

 
In November 2006, five publishing powers-that-be gathered at The New School for LWC}NYC, a literary writers conference organized by the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses and conceived by literary agents Judith Weber and Nat Sobel. The conference, for MFA and post-MFA writers of literature, is aimed at journeymen and women, determined craftspeople who have finished their apprenticeships but who have yet achieved master status.

In November 2007, the conference will include writers, editors, agents, and publishers from Knopf, FSG, Publishers Weekly, Algonquin, Amistad, ICM, Doubleday, Scribner, The Paris Review, The New Yorker, among them Richard Russo, Susan Orlean, Ishmael Beah, Alice Quinn, David Rakoff, Thisbe Nissen, Mark Doty, and many more.

In 2006, the gala kick-off discussion featured Sara Nelson, editor-in-chief of Publishers Weekly, moderating a conversation about the state of American literature, featuring four esteemed publishers and lionized editors:

• Jonathan Burhnam, publisher of HarperCollins;
• Morgan Entrekin, president and publisher of Grove/Atlantic;
• Jonathan Galassi, president and publisher of Farrar, Straus and Giroux; and
• Sonny Mehta, president and editor-in-chief of Alfred A. Knopf.

What follows is a candid, informed, and occasionally distressing exchange about the ever-altering art and business of the book.

The media player below provides streaming audio of the panel. You can also download an MP3 file (10.7MB) to listen to it in an iPod or similar digital audio player.

[Note: with the permission of the the panel’s participants and through the efforts of CLMP; Judith Weber and Nat Sobel of Sobel Weber Associates, Inc.; and the Virginia Quarterly Review, the audio and written transcript of this discussion are offered here under a Creative Commons-Non Commercial-No Derivative Works License: anyone may copy, distribute, and display verbatim copies of this work, for noncommercial purposes only. Copyright 2007 CLMP.]

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Transcript of Panel Discussion

Jeffrey Lependorf

I’m Jeffrey Lependorf, the Executive Director of the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses. This is the first time we’re doing this. We’re thrilled to be doing this. The Council of Literary Magazines and Presses was founded back in 1967 to help independent literary publishers through the business of publishing, which is as you probably know already and will certainly find out, a rather labyrinthine and complicated process and when the literary agents Nat Sobel and Judith Weber came to us with this idea to do something specifically for writers, we knew that it was the perfect thing for us to be doing.

The fact is that the publishing process involves many, many partnerships. As I just said, we help small publishers maneuver this sort of crazy process and you writers need to know how that works as well so that you can be involved and not just leave it to your publisher. I think you’re all told that art is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration. What many of you know already and will find out soon is that the time to really start sweating is when your book is about to be published, not while writing it so we’re here to help dab away some of that perspiration, make it a little easier, a little friendlier and to empower you to maneuver that labyrinth a little easier.

So, without further ado, I want to introduce our first emcee, Sara Nelson of Publishers Weekly who will introduce our very, very esteemed panel and get this conference going. Thank you all for being here.

Sara Nelson

Hi. I’m glad you all came tonight. Thank you for coming and we have a really distinguished panel of publishers who I think you’ve probably all heard of and I know you’ve read their books. I’m going to read brief introductions of each panelist and then I will ask a couple of questions to get the ball rolling and then I really would like to turn this into as a much of a conversation as we can among the panelists, so please don’t, you guys don’t be polite to each other and just jump in, raise your hands, and we’ll ask some questions.

Immediately to my left is Sonny Mehta, who’s the Editor-in-Chief of Alfred A. Knopf, one of the world’s most distinguished book publishing houses. He’s also Chairman of the Knopf Publishing Group, which includes Knopf, Pantheon Books, Shocken Books and Vintage Anchor. Mr. Mehta began his publishing career in London at Rupert Hart-Davis, Ltd., and went on to found Paladin Books. He then became Editorial Director of Granada Paperbacks comprising the Panther, Mayflower and Paladin imprints. In 1972, he became Editorial Director and later Publishing Director of Pan Books, where he was instrumental in establishing the highly successfully Picador trade paperback imprint. Sonny moved to New York in 1987 to head Alfred A. Knopf. He’s since maintained and enhanced Knopf’s international reputation for literature and bookmaking of the highest quality. Long the publisher of such renown writers as Thomas Mann, Willa Cather, John Hersey, John Updike, Andre Gide, and Albert Camus, Knopf has in recent years also published—this is quite some list—Toni Morrison, V.S. Naipaul, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Richard Russo, Richard Ford, Orhan Pamuk, Dr. Andrew Weil, Anne Tyler, Anne Rice and Cormac McCarthy. Together, authors published by Knopf have won 24 Nobel Prizes and they’ve also been leading recipients of Pulitzer Prizes, National Book Awards and other honors.

Next up we have Jonathan Burnham, who was born in London and educated at Oxford where he read Italian and French and took an M.Lit. in Italian twentieth century poetry. He’s worked in publishing since 1986, first as Publishing Director of Chatto & Windus, one of the most distinguished literary lists in the U.K. Then he was President of Miramax Books here from 1999 to 2005, where his list included several bestselling authors including Michael Chabon, Secretary Madeleine Albright, Martin Amis, and Her Majesty Queen Noor, and published a number of bestselling children’s authors including Eoin Colfer, author of the Artemis Fowl series. He’s currently Senior Vice President and Publisher of HarperCollins and lives in New York.

Next we have Jonathan Galassi, who was born Seattle, Washington. He attended Phillips Exeter Academy and Harvard College and Cambridge University where he earned an M.A. in 1973. Jonathan Galassi became an editor in the Trade Division of Houghton Mifflin Company in 1973. He was a Senior Editor at Random House from 1981 to 1986 when he joined Farrar, Straus and Giroux as Vice President and Executive Editor. He was named President in 2002. Jonathan Galassi has published two books of poems and has translated several volumes of the work of the Italian poet Eugenio Montale. He is Honorary Chairman of the Academy of American Poets and a member of the Board of Overseers at the California Institute of the Arts.

And last but not least, Morgan Entrekin was born in 19— Why do we say that? We don’t say that about anybody else? Morgan Entrekin grew up in Nashville, Tennessee. After graduating from Stanford and the Radcliffe Publishing Course, he joined Delacorte Press in 1977 where he worked with such authors as Kurt Vonnegut, Jayne Anne Phillips, Craig Nova and Richard Brautigan. In 1982, he moved to Simon & Schuster where he acquired books by Richard Ford, Bret Easton Ellis and Dr. Michael DeBakey. In 1984, he left to start his own imprint at Atlantic Monthly Press. Over forty titles were published under the Morgan Entrekin Books/Atlantic Monthly Press imprint including books by P. J. O’Rourke, Rian Malan, Richard Preston, Ron Chernow, and Francisco Goldman. In 1991, Morgan acquired, with a group of investors, Atlantic Monthly Press. In 1993, he merged the company with Grove Press, publisher of Samuel Beckett, William Burroughs, and Harold Pinter among others. Morgan is currently the President and Publisher of Grove Atlantic, which published one hundred and twenty titles a year in North America and seventy-five books under the Atlantic Books imprint in London. Grove Atlantic authors include P. J. O’Rourke, Mark Bowden, Kiran Desai, Jim Harrison, Tim Flannery, Richard Flanagan, Sherman Alexie, Michael Tolkin, Faye Weldon, Kenzaburo Oe and Tom Stoppard.

The first question I thought I would just throw out to the panel and whoever wants to answer it can answer it is we’re here to talk about literary fiction and I was thinking about how there’s a famous quote from a Supreme Court Justice but of course I can’t remember which one it is, who said that he didn’t know what pornography was but he knew it when he saw it, so I think we all talk about literary fiction, we all publish literary fiction, we read literary fiction, but I would be interested in somebody trying to define literary fiction. Anybody?

Morgan Entrekin

I’ll start because I had a conversation at lunch on exactly that topic with a friend of mine from Nashville who’s here, Todd, wherever you are out there, but we drew a continuum. I said over here’s commercial and over here is literary, and it’s sort of there’s a line in between and the phrase that I used was that literary fiction is fiction that seeks to entertain and enlighten whereas commercial fiction is fiction that simply seeks to entertain, and that was the simple way for me to define it, but I think it’s a fungible concept, and somebody’s idea of what’s literary is not necessarily everybody else’s idea of what’s literary.

Jonathan Burnham

I agree actually, but I think the other thing—and Sara mentioned this before we came in. I was just thinking—with commercial fiction, you can usually see how it’s done. You can usually see what the intention is, what the author is trying to do. With literary fiction, it does more than it seems to on the page. In other words, you’re not quite clear what it is that the novelist is after and after you stop reading, you’re not quite sure what he is or she has done, so I think it comes into that category somehow.

Sonny Mehta

Well, I do think you recognize when you see it, rather like sort of the way you can tell good fish from bad fish, but ultimately, it basically makes—it sets out to try to sort of make sense of the world. At least, that’s how I react to it, and anything that makes sense of the world, I think we need it.

Jonathan Burnham

Here, here.

Jonathan Galassi

You could almost say that literary fiction is everything that isn’t some other genre. It’s not a straight historical novel. It’s not a mystery. It’s not a thriller. It’s sort of by subtraction you could say. It’s everything else, but I think it’s true that to me it’s more about the voice of the author—is really dominant over other conventions. That’s not enough, but I would say that’s the—

Sara Nelson

Is it less plot oriented? Plot-driven?

Jonathan Galassi

It can be.

Morgan Entrekin

But not necessarily.

Jonathan Burnham

No, no.

Jonathan Galassi

Any of those other genres could actually—a book could also be a literary book that was a thriller.

Jonathan Burnham

Yeah, like Dennis Lehane would be an example of that. Verges on literary—

Sara Nelson

Steven King for example?

Jonathan Burnham

Yeah, yes, I would say.

Sara Nelson

I write about this all the time and other people do, too, copying me, of course. I think—I mean, there is a perception, certainly in the journalist community of people covering the book business, but I think also in the consumer world, that literary fiction doesn’t sell, that you can’t have the expectations of huge sales. The Da Vinci Code is not literary fiction or—I mean, literary fiction does not sell the way The Da Vinci Code sells, in that you’re sort of crazy to expect that it would, should or could. I wondered if you could each talk about—and I think literary fiction is a little bit under siege in this environment, in this community, and I wonder if you could talk about why you’re all passionately committed to it. That’s what you all do and why you stick with it, why you don’t just throw in the towel and publish celebrity biographies.

Jonathan Galassi

Because they don’t sell as well.

Sonny Mehta

Well, Jonathan’s got a point. I mean—

Jonathan Burnham

It could also be biographies sell.

Sonny Mehta

He’s right about that.

Sara Nelson

But I mean I’m being slightly facetious—

Morgan Entrekin

Yeah, but I think—I don’t think that literary fiction is under siege. I think that it’s a healthier time for literary fiction than ever in my 30-year career. I think literary fiction sells better than it ever has in my career. Maybe there was a heyday in the ’90s where we hit a real high note. There was—

Sara Nelson

Spoken by somebody whose book just won the Booker Prize.

Morgan Entrekin

Well, but come on, everybody else up here has had literary successes in the last few years that dwarf some of ours, but there was a moment in 1998 where Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain, Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things and Arthur Golden’s Memoirs of a Geisha, all three literary novels, all three first novels, were on the New York Times Bestseller List at the same time and those books combined—I don’t know the numbers on Arundhati Roy or the Geisha but are north of eight or ten million, probably north of fifteen million worldwide, so I don’t—I mean, I just—Sonny, you’re looking at me skeptically. You don’t think literary fiction is somehow—

Sonny Mehta

No, I mean, I think you’re absolutely right about it. I think there’s always an occasion when there are books on the bestseller list that are literary fiction, but I’m not talking— The bestseller is only one index by which we can gauge success, but even going back to that, I mean, there were an awful lot of other novels and short story collections published in the period that you’ve just talked about that found not enough readers and I think that is part of what is a perpetual situation as far as fiction is concerned, that some books really do find an audience but there’s an awful lot that have very few takers and that’s, I think, the heartbreaking part of what we’re all involved in.

Jonathan Galassi

I think it’s getting more so. I mean, there’s more and more of winner-take-all situations.

Morgan Entrekin

Yes, I agree with that.

Jonathan Galassi

A few books get all the attention and they roll out and I think when Morgan says it’s the best time ever for literary fiction, I think that’s especially true in the trade paperback. I think it’s harder and harder in hard cover. You can make up for that with wonderful numbers in trade, but I’ve found that launching new literary writers in the last few years, since 9/11 in particular, has been harder and harder. I was really happy this fall to see The Emperor’s Children succeed so well. It’s the first time I’ve seen an author who’s published a number of books sort of succeed the old fashioned way. She sort of built up an audience and could finally— She got where she deserved to be.

Sara Nelson

Let me just say it’s Claire Messud’s novel that’s published by Knopf, right?

Jonathan Galassi

But I would say that’s very much the exception to what’s going on.

Jonathan Burnham

I think the other example would be Marisha Pessl. I think this was in the same season, which was a first novel. I mean, it wasn’t particularly—I mean, the campaign to build it up wasn’t particularly intense, but it broke through.

Jonathan Burnham

Briefly but brightly, I would say.

Jonathan Galassi

But I think it’s very—but, I mean, maybe I’m confessing too much, but I think that recently it’s been harder and harder to get people to care about something new, to get things to turn over and it’s very depressing to me.

Jonathan Burnham

I agree.

Sara Nelson

You mentioned 9/11, Jonathan.

Jonathan Burnham

Somebody has a question, yeah.

Audience question

There’s a feeling that it’s almost impossible to get a first novel published, and even harder to get a second, where it seems to me that most writers develop true grassroots through publishing multiple books and generating a fan base through attempting to get comfortable with readers being familiar with their work. How do you as publishers deal with the fact that it’s harder for a person to publish, and since a person doesn’t necessarily sell doesn’t mean they have any kind of body of books in the long run.

Morgan Entrekin

I think what is a bad thing that’s happened is that it’s easier to publish a first book than it is to publish a third or fourth book. That’s not the way it used to be for those of us who are old enough to remember twenty-five or thirty years ago. The model was that you published a few novels and you built an audience over time and then you broke through. Now, the model is you have to have a novel that does very, very well in a dramatic way as a launch or else it is very difficult for the second, third, fourth book, and I think that that’s unfortunate and part of that comes from the computerized inventory systems that the stores have so that they can—you ask the store to take, if it’s a national account—Barnes & Noble or Borders—to take 2,000 copies for all their stores, and they’ll usually support you but if they sell 400 of those 2,000, they’re going to have a hard time when you come back the next time taking 2,000, and so that is inevitable.

One of the things that I’ve done in the last two years is to relaunch an old Grove imprint called Black Cat and do trade paperback original fiction because what I found was happening was that the hard covers were taking 70 or 80% return rate. You then weren’t getting many orders for the paperbacks, and the author wasn’t having any continuing life in the marketplace. Their books weren’t in the stores, whereas what now happens is we get six- or eight-thousand-copy orders for the trade paperbacks and they sell and they stay in the stores, and then the next time you come with that second novel, the store is happy to see you. They say, oh, yeah, that one, well, we’ll take some more of that book. The author doesn’t make as much money and the publisher doesn’t make as much money, but it’s a positive experience for everyone.

Jonathan Burnham

But, Morgan, don’t you find that there’s a certain resistance?

Morgan Entrekin

Yes.

Jonathan Burnham

I mean, there’s disappointment from the author, from the agent?

Morgan Entrekin

Yes, they think that it’s somehow diminishes the book if it’s going to be a paperback.

Jonathan Burnham

Yes, exactly.

Sara Nelson

It’s not sitting at the grown-ups table to get published in paperback.

Morgan Entrekin

Yes.

Sonny Mehta

But having said all that, most of us try to find a way of publishing that second novel and it’s got to be pretty devastating if you don’t stick with a writer at least for a while. I think all of us think it’s part of our job to—

Jonathan Galassi

Yes, because we’re publishing authors, not just books.

Audience question

Do you think it’s easier though as a novelist, or wise, to establish with a small publisher and move to a large publisher?

Jonathan Galassi

No, I don’t think so. If you can start out with Harper or Knopf, I think that’s probably a better idea.

Jonathan Burnham

I was just going to say also there could be a cruel fate, too, if your first novel is over— Well, in other words, if you’re suddenly going to be lucky enough, you think, to get a huge advance, a huge embrace from a big publisher. That can be a curse, too. It might actually be better—it is better to start modestly whether it’s a paperback original or a reasonable print run and a reasonable set of expectations and grow from there.

Jonathan Galassi

But that’s not the way the market is working right now, is it, and I think it’s a sign of ill health that there’s an awful lot of pressure to acquire—there’s a lot pressure to—I don’t know who the pressure is applied to, but books are competed for at a very high level by publishers in a frenzied—

Jonathan Burnham

There’re so few of them and there’re so many—

Sara Nelson

Well, I mean, it’s sort of blockbuster mentality, this sort of movie business—

Jonathan Galassi

But it’s a sudden death for a lot of people.

Sara Nelson

You’ve got to open big and you’ve got to make a big splash and that’s sort of antithetical to the idea of publishing but I think—I mean, do you think that some of that has to do with the fact that publishers are now—many publishers are owned by large entertain conglomerates? Is that why? I mean, is that part of why?

Sonny Mehta

No.

Sara Nelson

No?

Jonathan Galassi

Well, the only reason that would be is that they have the money.

Morgan Entrekin

That’s true.

Jonathan Galassi

So the money is there.

Jonathan Burnham

Yes, exactly.

Jonathan Galassi

If we were all small independents, the money wouldn’t be there so that wouldn’t happen.

Morgan Entrekin

I can explain that as a small or mid-size independent is that when my competitors are evaluating a decision to pay X number of hundreds of thousands of dollars, their decision usually is about the risk/reward. How much am I risking versus what the potential reward is and down-side, they’re not having to worry about where the money is going to come from, and if they tie the money up in project A, they won’t have the money for projects B, C, and D. That’s not true for me. If I tie a lot of money up in A, I mean, somewhat—

Jonathan Galassi

Somebody in that company should be worried.

Morgan Entrekin

Yeah, but you have access to capital that I don’t, and publishers didn’t use to have that access to capital. It’s a very capital-intensive business and they didn’t used to have.

Sonny Mehta

On the other hand, if you screw up enough, they’re going to let to know.

Sara Nelson

Can we talk a little bit about—I mean, once the books are acquired, I mean, a big part of publishing obviously is marketing and distributing the books. It’s one thing to find them. I mean, that’s hard enough, but getting them out there into the stores, getting publicity for them, there’s less and less newspaper—fewer and fewer newspaper pages available. How do you go about marketing and promoting and selling a literary book, a book that doesn’t have an obvious pop-culture hook or a celebrity hook or something like that?

Jonathan Burnham

I think first of all it does help. It does help if there’s a story behind the book, and not a celebrity story, but just a story behind the creation of the book: where the author came from, how the book came to be published. That gives you something to hold onto. That gives you a starting point, getting that crucial thing which is coverage off the book page because the competition for space on the book page is ridiculously intense, and in a funny way, it’s easier to get a feature than it is to get a review in many cases these days.

Jonathan Galassi

And it sells more books.

Sonny Mehta

An outstanding example actually right now is that French novel that you just bought which has already gotten more ink than most established novelists.

Jonathan Burnham

This is a thousand-page-long novel which was published in France in September and is a best bestseller there, and HarperCollins, we just bought the rights, but it’s had an enormous amount in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, other newspapers have covered it as if it were—well, as a literary phenomenon which is rare—

Morgan Entrekin

And that’s self-filling so now when you publish eighteen months, twenty-four months from now, there’ll be more stories because it’s a big story.

Sonny Mehta

But that’s the same thing. Something similar happened with Suite Francaise, the Némirovsky book that was published about eight months ago, and the story behind that was that it was an uncompleted but quite extensive sequence of novels that were discovered in a suitcase left behind by the author before she was taken off to a concentration camp, where she subsequently died, and that was the story, and it’s a wonderful sequence of novels, but that story did help it get the attention about a year before we published it.

Sara Nelson

I think sometimes you run the risk that that’s going to backfire, though, too, that I mean a book—not, we hope for anybody sitting here, but a book gets a lot of attention a-year-and-a-half before it appears—(a) does the public—I mean, we know and we care and we remember, but does the public know, do they remember, and does it raise their expectations in a way that sometimes can disappoint? I mean, this is not a book that did disappoint, but that you over-sell it too early. Is that a fear or a possibility, or you’re just happy to sell it whenever you can?

Morgan Entrekin

I’m happy to—

Jonathan Burnham

The more attention you can get the better.

Jonathan Galassi

That’s exactly it, is the more attention you get the more attention you get.

Jonathan Burnham

Absolutely.

Sonny Mehta

It’s also good for books generally? I think to sort of—

Morgan Entrekin

That they’re part of a conversation, yes. But I think that, Sara, what you’ve raised, this idea of the difficulty of making people aware of literary fiction, and I think what’s a crisis that we’re all going to confront is that reviews don’t sell books the way that they used to, and I think we’re all—well, first of all, young people don’t read newspapers and they just don’t have the impact. The big reviews don’t have the impact that they used to, and I think that one of the things that I’m worried about and trying to figure out is what are we going to do, how’re we going to get people in the conversation about literary fiction, and I don’t know the answer.

The other thing that’s happened is as the retail side of the business has become more and more consolidated, with Barnes & Nobles and Borders more than independent stores, and there’s good and bad things to that. Barnes & Noble and Borders have wonderful selections of books, and they’re in communities that never used to have bookstores, but they don’t always have the same relationship with their customer that a local bookseller did, and what you used to be able to do with literary fiction was seed it within those local booksellers around the country, get them reading and talking about it, and now I think that Barnes & Noble and Borders do a very admirable job of supporting the literary fiction that we publish, anyway, and that they’ll let me take a chance and that they are incredibly conscientious for people who are so overloaded with responsibility in terms of making decisions about what’s bought in literary fiction, but the bottom line is they don’t quite have that same relationship, and so I don’t know what we’re doing to do. I don’t know how we’re going to do it.

The Internet is an obvious way to do it with community. One of the things that we’re trying to do is take our website and make it more not just a business-to-business but to bring people in and to bring people into the conversation, so that anybody who was interested in fiction, is reading my books or communicating with me in some way, I’m trying to bring into a conversation.

Jonathan Galassi

We’re all trying those things, but nobody has— It has yet to be shown that this really has—

Morgan Entrekin

You can use it for non-fiction easier.

Sara Nelson

You get bloggers on it. You get that whole Internet thing going for non-fiction.

Jonathan Burnham

And can I also raise something that I just discovered today which is that there’re two books, two novels which were short-listed for the National Book Awards, both published within the larger HarperCollins umbrella, neither of which have sold anything. I mean, the sales are in the low four figures still for both books, and it’s very striking to me. I mean, I’m only recently arrived in America, but the National Book Awards even at the short-list stage would have zero effect in terms of changing the sales picture for a book. Or maybe I might be naïve. Has that always been—

Jonathan Galassi

I think at the short-list phase, they don’t, but if one of those books is lucky enough to win, you’ll get—

Jonathan Burnham

There’s a definite—

Jonathan Galassi

Yes. And it depends on varying factors the degree of bump that you’ll get.

Sonny Mehta

I think Jonathan is reacting very much like I did when I came from England, where the whole idea of selecting a group of books, and like the Booker is an outstanding example, but it’s not the only one. There’s the Whitbread, there’s the Samuel Johnson, and my impression is that the only prize like that that has anything like that impact is the Pulitzer. That’s my impression.

Jonathan Galassi

Well, in Britain, there’s a lot of betting on the thing. There’s more of a sort of national conversation—

Morgan Entrekin

There’s a national media. We don’t have a national literary media.

Jonathan Burnham

That’s true.

Sonny Mehta

They have a national media.

Morgan Entrekin

And we don’t.

Jonathan Galassi

The Pulitzer Prize does have a big impact here in certain areas, but it’s a very journalistically canted prize and, I mean, there’s no discussion in advance of what nominees are, so that you don’t have those opportunities to kind of build interest. We piggyback off the Booker ourselves, I mean, because that noise comes across the ocean, but we’re not very good at making that noise ourselves.

Morgan Entrekin

Yes, but what you’re looking for is someone other than the publisher saying a book is a good book. That’s why we look for blurbs from other writers. That’s why, you know, and a prize does that. It helps a little bit and what it does, it might not sell the book—I don’t know—I’ve always—I remember when we were publishing Cold Mountain at the very last minute, we got a quote from John Berendt, the author of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, and I did it in a gold sticker on the cover and more than one person said to me when I would hand them a copy, Oh, it already won a prize and it was like, No, it hadn’t, but it made people think it might have, and it’s like I will do a sticker for almost any prize, you know, and because it’s something that helps in the story. Look, I go into the store and I’m overwhelmed by the selection of what to read, and something that’s got a good imprimatur on it, and I was—

You know, somebody was asking me the other day of what is all this stuff with the quotes and the blurbs, and I go, Look, yeah, there’s a little bit of it that’s kind of bullshit, but the fact is that some of it’s real, and when I’m picking up a book in the store, if there’s a smart critic who’s written a smart review that’s articulated the book in an interesting way to me, that will make me pick that book up, so I work very hard. I oversee almost every pull from the quotes of every paperback we publish because I want to phrase it right, and I try to teach my young people—go to this kernel of it and you’ve also got to obey certain rules. You can’t cheat and pull out, like, one phrase from a bad review—

Sara Nelson

There’re plenty of people who do.

Morgan Entrekin

Yes, and don’t you all agree those are rules? You can’t do that?

Sonny Mehta

But if it’s a bad enough review, it’s very tempting.

Sara Nelson

There’re some bad reviews that are selling reviews, right? And there’re some good reviews that don’t sell books, so—

Jonathan Galassi

I think that American readers, a lot of them, are waiting to be told by somebody that they ought to read this book, and it’s not by Nietzsche necessarily. It’s by their friend. It’s someone in their book club.

Morgan Entrekin

Oprah.

Jonathan Galassi

Or Oprah. Someone on television, but there’re a lot—I think there’re a lot of people who are very unsure about going into a bookstore and choosing something, and I think that’s a big problem for—and that’s more—readers are not loyal to authors anymore. They’ll read X by Y but they won’t read X+1 by Y. They’ll read the next book that was chosen by someone.

Sara Nelson

Yes. I remember that there were studies done. I mean, people looked at the numbers when Oprah was first starting her book club, and she would have these enormous sales for whatever book she picked, and then the backlist wouldn’t move at all because they weren’t making the connection between I like this author.

Jonathan Burnham

But albeit, that doesn’t apply in commercial fiction. It’s the opposite.

Sara Nelson

Yes, because that has a little more “series” kind of quality.

Jonathan Galassi

Well, they want the same experience to be repeated.

Jonathan Burnham

Exactly—with a slight variation.

Jonathan Galassi

That’s the difference between literary fiction.

Jonathan Burnham

Yeah, we’ve just discovered it.

Sara Nelson

Good. Say that again.

Morgan Entrekin

That’s one of the differences between literary and commercial fiction—is that you want a new experience from literary fiction.

Sara Nelson

Can we talk a little bit about backlists? I mean, so we all spend a lot of time publicizing and marketing the frontlist, but there’re many people who feel that the older books, paperback reprints, that the backlist is what is really sort of the heart and soul of the business. Do you believe that? How much of your business is backlist?

Morgan Entrekin

Fifty percent.

Sara Nelson

Fifty percent?

Morgan Entrekin

Which makes me very happy. It’s why I can relax.

Sonny Mehta

Between fifty and sixty.

Jonathan Burnham

Ours is, too.

Sonny Mehta

By that, we really do mean—we’re talking about the paperbacks?

Morgan Entrekin

Yes.

Sonny Mehta

Which is really essentially the permanent form of the backlists on any publisher’s catalog.

Morgan Entrekin

And everyone here understands the difference, right? The backlists are the older books that you’ve published. We use a definition that the book has to be in print for two years before we start calling it backlist and you can predict those sales. Like I can predict how many sales I’m going to have of Naked Lunch every year within 5%. If a movie happens on a book, of course, that’ll be a good experience, but rarely will you be disappointed, whereas the new books, which is the frontlist, you have no idea. You publish a novel and you ship ten thousand and you might sell forty or you might sell three, and you have to spend money on marketing, so the frontlist publishing is much, much more difficult, but one of the things that you play for, and the reason that you publish, in a financial analysis of it, for literary fiction is literary fiction is much more likely to backlist than something, the commercial stuff that’s going to disappear. I mean, it’s the core of the Grove backlist where many books are decades old, and the same with Knopf and Farrar, Straus and Harper.

Sonny Mehta

Which plays somewhat to your answer about how you can build a writer. I think most of us use the fact that we have a book on the backlist to sort of build an awareness, a growing awareness of a writer’s career and the continuity of it because actually most writers we’re very excited to publish, whether you did start off, whether it’s Richard Ford or Michael Ondaatje, selling extremely modestly. As a matter of fact, Richard published as a, was he at—

Morgan Entrekin

Houghton first. But no that’s—Piece of My Heart was Harper?

Jonathan Galassi

Yes.

Morgan Entrekin

And then wasn’t the second one, Ultimate Good Luck, was Houghton?

Jonathan Galassi

Yes.

Sonny Mehta

And then the third was—

Morgan Entrekin

The third was Sportswriter in Vintage Contemporaries. Gary did it, but an interesting exercise is when writers say to me we’re going to publish your first novel and all they’ve read about in the newspaper or Jonathan Safran Foer, or that Viking young woman—I can’t remember her name—you just mentioned, who have gotten hundreds of thousands of dollars in advance and sold X number of—hundreds of thousands of copies, and I think, and I say to my editors, one of the things is if you control people’s expectations and educate them about the experience, they can go through and have the exact same experience and either come out of it feeling good or come out of it feeling really disappointed and bad, and one of the exercises I do is name three or four of your favorite writers for me—Richard Ford, John Irving, Toni Morrison. None of those writers’ first novels sold ten thousand copies. None of them. And you put that into— And several of them, their first three books didn’t sell ten thousand copies combined.

Sonny Mehta

Cormac is an outstanding—

Morgan Entrekin

Cormac’s a great example. He never sold five thousand copies of a book until—

Sonny Mehta

Less. Two-and-a-half or three.

Morgan Entrekin

And so you put that in context and people understand. Well, you know, maybe it wasn’t so bad that I ended up selling six thousand copies of my book where everybody makes me feel like a failure because I’m not—

Jonathan Burnham

But we’re living in a culture, Morgan, where that’s increasingly difficult to sustain. That’s the truth. I mean, don’t you think?

Morgan Entrekin

I agree, but—

Jonathan Galassi

We don’t have enough information because the fact is all of us are saying that’s true, but our successful middle-aged writers now, all—we’ve built them over fifteen or twenty years, and that’s the old-fashioned way, but I’m not sure that the new way is really a way because—and we don’t know enough to know.

Jonathan Burnham

That’s true.

Jonathan Galassi

So we haven’t seen the repetition with these people and so—

Morgan Entrekin

But that comes back to my sort of thinking behind doing trade paperback original, is at least you keep the books in the marketplace whereas under that model where you’re taking 70% of hardcover returns and then you’re getting nothing out in the paperback and within two years, those writers’ books aren’t on the bookshelves.

Jonathan Galassi

Backlist, it’s wonderful, but it’s not—I mean, there’s the backlist that sells and there’s the rest, and the backlist that sells is a very small part of it. It needs to be worked all the time. It’s not like you can’t—you don’t have to market your backlist.

Sonny Mehta

And you have to renew it with new jackets or—

Morgan Entrekin

That’s true.

Jonathan Galassi

You have to refresh it. You have to publish it, so—

Audience question

It’s interesting, I’m hearing a voice about marketing, and then I’m hearing a little voice about authors, and I’m wondering when the author might need to start thinking about the marketing, or should he just remove himself from that at first? You’ve said that the voice is what literary fiction is all about, so then it seems to me that as a writer, the marketing is frustrating.

Morgan Entrekin

It depends on your personality and what your own needs are, I think.

Jonathan Galassi

I personally believe that writers should work on writing and not worry about canting their books toward the market, and they should try to develop confidence with their voice and then find professionals to help them with the other, but if you try and sort play the market, I think you’re putting the cart before the horse, myself.

Jonathan Burnham

I agree.

Audience question

Eventually that question does come up to the writer, and is it important for them to say, “What’s your market?” Should a writer strive to fit into a niche in order to sell his book, or should he say, This is literature, and that’s the market?

Sonny Mehta

No. No.

Jonathan Burnham

Literary fiction is hard to find the market like that. It doesn’t have a definition.

Jonathan Galassi

It creates its own market if it’s—

Morgan Entrekin

Well, there’s some exceptions. I once said to a writer that was very disappointed in the sales of his book—we seem to have a lot of them—but he had written that marvelous collection of interconnected stories. He was in his twenties, but they’re very dark. The setting was very dark. It was among sort of street people and edgy, and it was like—I said to him, You know, you’ve got to be realistic about your subject— Your choice of your subject matter is probably going to diminish somewhat the potential of reaching the audience, and also the style was challenging a bit and it was marvelous and he got marvelous reviews and, in my opinion, launched his career in a positive way, but he was very disappointed that the book didn’t sell forty, sixty thousand copies and I said That’s an unrealistic expectation, so I think a little bit—if your personal needs are that you want to sell forty to sixty thousand copies, you perhaps shouldn’t write about heroin addicts at some— I mean, just, I don’t know. I mean, maybe you can and maybe they will, but there is going to be some implication from your subject matter choices, wouldn’t you agree, a little bit, I mean?

Jonathan Galassi

Yes, but I think people need to write what they need to write.

Jonathan Burnham

I agree.

Jonathan Galassi

Make peace with what—with somehow—with the world.

Jonathan Burnham

I had lunch today with an author called Lionel Shriver who was talking about how she’d written, I think, eight novels, none of which had sold and then her ninth novel was a novel about a mother who turns violently against her own son. It’s about a school shooting. She said “It was the darkest, darkest novel I’ve written.” I thought it was one that wouldn’t sell and, of course, it won the Orange Prize. It sold 250,000 copies, so in a way you never know. You never know.

Jonathan Galassi

I published three or four books by a Lionel. She’s a great writer.

Jonathan Burnham

She’s terrific.

Jonathan Galassi

I had a hard time selling them.

Audience question

After marketing a book, say, three months after publication, do you have to have sold 10,000 or 20,000 copies? Is there a number of copies that, within a certain amount of time—a few months or a year—a novel has to have sold to be considered a success or a failure?

Sara Nelson

Well, I think—I mean, obviously I’m not the best to answer, but I think it depends on a lot of things. I think it depends on the expectations you brought to it. I think it depends on what you paid for it. If you pay a million dollars for a book and it sells 10,000 copies, you’re going to be—that’s not a good thing. If you pay—

Sonny Mehta

That’s a failure.

Sara Nelson

Thank you, Sonny. That’s a failure, but if you pay, you know, $100,000 or $20,000 for a book, and it sells 50,000 copies, that’s—

Morgan Entrekin

That’s a big success.

Sara Nelson

So I think it goes back to this sort of business side of what Morgan was talking about, which depends to some extent what you bring to—what expectations you bring and what you put out there.

Jonathan Galassi

But the first book that sold got tremendous reception and sold 5 or 6,000 copies could be a success, too.

Jonathan Burnham

I agree. I totally agree.

Jonathan Galassi

It could be the platform you need to go ahead.

Jonathan Burnham

Absolutely.

Morgan Entrekin

And the paperback could sell 30 or 40,000 copies the first two or three years and that, to me, would be—we would all agree that would be a pretty good level of success.

Audience question

What about a publisher like Soft Skull that has a loyal set of readers who buy their books because they know what they’re going to get? For each title that’s published, they put out several more titles that work well together. Why can’t certain types of books that appeal to a specific market be bundled together under one imprint? Then you could even sell a few similar books together at a certain fee. And then you know that each title works well for the customer base: it’s of interest because it comes from this certain imprint.

Sara Nelson

Isn’t that what the old book clubs were?

Morgan Entrekin

Yeah, it sounds like a book club.

Sara Nelson

You remember, you paid a fee to be a member of a book club and you got a certain number of books a year, but this is one publisher is doing this. I’m not familiar with this. This is Soft Skull is doing this?

Audience question

Yes, it’s Soft Skull that’s doing it.

Jonathan Burnham

But that’s a small imprint with a very sort of definite personality and focus, but with lists like Knopf or Harper, it would be difficult.

Sara Nelson

But it’s interesting. It’s an interesting—

Jonathan Galassi

I think it’s great if you can create the customer base that believes that every book that’s published by Atlantic is going to be potentially of interest, but creating that, that’s really not in a way how our business has been structured. Maybe we should be working towards that, you know, building brand awareness.

Morgan Entrekin

I would say the last thing that did that in general trade fiction in America was Vintage Contemporaries, that, wouldn’t you say, Sonny, in a way, that like, that was launched in the early ’80s and it included, the first year or maybe the first eighteen months anyway, was Bright Lights, Big City, Sportswriter by Richard Ford, reissues of books by Peter Matheson, Cormac McCarthy, Tom McGuane, and it sort of had a—the books had a serious look. Gary Fisketjon was the one that launched it and he hired a designer that had done some record albums and I think that they bought some real estate in a store and people went to that imprint to get a certain kind of book that they knew was a certain quality but, in fact, two things happened: many other publishers started to imitate them and it got too crowded and the list got too broad and lost a little bit of its identity and then you also did the internationals, the Vintage Internationals. Was that while you—just before you came?

Sonny Mehta

Yes.

Morgan Entrekin

And did an international publishing that way, but I think that it does, as someone said, have to be a very focused list because otherwise there’s too much variety and not everybody would like every book.

Jonathan Galassi

I mean, in England there’s more brand awareness, like Faber, for instance, is an imprint that has a specific identity and people will buy Faber books because the publisher—

Morgan Entrekin

Grove had in the ’60s a little bit.

Sonny Mehta

And Picador did it.

Morgan Entrekin

Yes, that’s true.

Sonny Mehta

Willow did something for a while.

Sara Nelson

In the UK?

Jonathan Burnham

Yes, yes.

Sara Nelson

The UK market is a very different market. It’s a much smaller, more—the country’s much smaller.

Sonny Mehta

And it’s also—I think the written word occupies a place over there that it doesn’t—a centrality that I don’t know whether it does over here.

Morgan Entrekin

But does anybody in here buy a book because of who publishes it? No. You do? Well, then you’re very knowledgeable.

Jonathan Galassi

They’re writers.

Jonathan Burnham

Yes, exactly.

Morgan Entrekin

I mean, I remember when I was in college in the ’70s and I was studying and starting informing myself about contemporary American fiction, and I would buy books by New Directions, Grove, and Fiction Collective because I knew they would be interesting and edgy and I could discover new writers that way, but—and I still—but I’m in the business. I can recognize a certain imprint certain places.

Sara Nelson

Right. But I think what worked with Vintage and with those that you’re talking about is that there was some cohesive—there was, you know, the books sort of looked similar and so you did have—and you were a real reader. You were not waiting for Oprah to tell you.

Jonathan Galassi

They reflected an editor’s taste.

Sara Nelson

Right. It was an editor’s collection and I think—but there doesn’t—there are not that many people like you. It goes back to the Oprah tells you what book but you don’t go to the bank with it.

Audience question

Then why don’t you go back to what you used to do: give your imprint an identity and offer a smaller but more concentrated pool of titles?

Jonathan Galassi

Because I want them to buy my book, not his book. We’re competitors. We’re competing for the—I mean, this is a facetious answer but we’re competing for the attention—we’re competing for the time and the attention of people but we’re actually—we have common interests, too.

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Attribution should read: “Copyright 2007 CLMP. Thanks to Judith Weber, Nat Sobel, CLMP, and the Virginia Quarterly Review.”