You are what you owe

Now I had proof. I was not paranoid. Here it was, exposed in black and white, what every writer knew deep down but didn’t dare to think.

The article, in the newsletter of the National Writers Union, reported on an agent following up on a manuscript he’d sent an editor. The editor said that he liked the book well enough but asked, “What’s the author like?”

“She’s blonde, she’s thirty years-old and she’s adorable,” the agent said and the editor made an offer for the book.

Even famous writers, no matter how many books they’ve written or great reviews they’ve received, secretly feel like starter wives, fearful of being replaced in their publisher’s eyes by the next big talent, the new young thing. When I was thirty-five, my own first novel was published to wonderful attention. My publisher was ecstatic. “You’re hot!” But not for long. Like the freshman girl who did it under the bleachers with the captain of the football team, I couldn’t even get him to return my calls.

Sooner or later every writer I know decides he can do a better job than his publisher. I have a friend who was one of America’s best selling authors, an Oprah Book Club Choice. But when his books started selling thousands of copies instead of hundreds of thousands, he concluded his publisher was at fault. Reading a few how-to books written by former publishing industry publicists, he hired his own former publishing industry publicist to devise a marketing plan that his publishers might have come up with had they not been preoccupied by the new young thing on their list whose work was more ‘commercial’—a category of books that is anathema to serious writers unless it describes their own.

I too thought I could do it better than my publisher. This is largely why I became a publisher. I had a business plan and a mission statement and above all the determination to treat writers with respect. I prepared for two years, telling everyone I knew that I could do it better than my publisher, reading every book I could find by former publishing industry publicists, interviewing publishers large and small, those who worked out of swank Manhattan offices and those who used an old barn as a warehouse; some who had entered the business with a strong literary vision and others who simply published books they liked. The New York publishers were cynical about the future of the book business. They trotted out the usual suspects, the chains, the media conglomerates, the internet, and fondly reminisced about the years of six-figure advances and three-hour lunches. I asked one legendary editor how he saw himself in the changing milieu. “Once,” he said, “I felt like I was playing center field for the Yankees and now I’m Dilbert.” But I pressed on, pigeonholing anyone who had something to teach me and ten minutes to spare, searching for my own quiet corner of the book world and finding it in the midst of all-out madness.

Book Expo America is a bloated media carnival of high tech booths and hyperbolic lit buzz, the largest book trade show in the world, the NASCAR of belles-lettres, a writhing monkey barrel of marketing professionals climbing over each other for attention. Indoor skyscrapers of polyurethane tubing frame pavilions as long as football fields with turf of plush red carpet. Backlit blow-ups of book jackets and writers with palsied smiles line the aisles like posters in a freak show midway. Librarians, booksellers, critics, authors, bloggers, and bobbing throngs of bookbiz junketeers push folding carts full of posters, baseball caps, tote bags, beach balls, ball points, t-shirts, mouse pads, and every manner of promo crap ever shipped out of the People’s Republic of China. Bill Clinton signs books for a line of fans a quarter mile long. Richard Simmons in purple velvet running shorts does jumping jacks in the aisle. Strippers in pink satin garter belts hawk a celebrity madam tell-all in a mock nineteenth century brothel erected next to a fifty foot high Lego display. Three-hundred-pound Dixieland musicians wearing Hawaiian leis play the Muskrat Ramble while an Elvis imitator fumbles with the crotch of his rhinestone jump suit and poses for a snapshot with the assistant manager of a Barnes and Noble from Erie, Pennsylvania.

But far from the stacks of advance reading copies doled out by young publicity assistants in tight pinstripe pantsuits, beyond the sleek gray-carpeted booths of the academic presses and the garish hawkers of bookstore novelties, through the double-doors of the satellite convention hall, to the right of the rest rooms and the left of the five-dollar-pretzel vendor, are the aisles of the independent publishers. Foot traffic is slower here, the lighting subdued, the freebies modest, the visitors cautious. They are offering penny candy here, post cards, book marks, bound galleys with titles promising sex and revolution. Their covers show full frontal nudes, brown-skinned peoples carrying rifles, a gallant head shot of a young Noam Chomsky. A librarian from Little Rock making her way from the ladies’ room peers warily up the aisle. The owner of an Annie’s Book Swap in western Massachusetts who spent all morning filling his cart with give-away books to sell back at the store, furtively grabs a copy of Going Down: Perfecting the Art of a Good Blowjob.

While the New York publishers wore suits from Barney’s and Prada loafers, this was a dress down world of turtle necks and sneakers, peasant skirts and motorcycle boots, prideful independents who sneered at the conglomerate giants. Literature was paramount; money beside the point. I had finally found my people. Or so I imagined.

Obscured by my romantic delusions was the fact that while the most cynical of these crusading independents were indeed strapped for cash, others were backed by an invisible fortune. The frumpy ex-hippie in granny glasses was financed by a cosmetics heiress who pumped seed money into the presses that published her books. The overfed wunderkind dressed head to toe in black denim was the son of a world famous fashionista. A psychiatrist who left his practice after amassing a huge portfolio; the scion of a Brazilian industrial fortune (whom I had thought hearing impaired until I understood he had so much money there was nothing he needed pay attention to); a fundraising savant who played the foundations like a pinball wizard; the third son of the 14th Earl of Cricklade, simply had more to fall back on than book sales. I summoned the courage to ask the advice of an infamous counter-culture publisher whose company had survived for decades and introduced some of America’s best known authors—all of whom had gone on to publish with New York presses after making it big. A hulking bear of a man who wore an old flannel shirt and a leather sheath with a long hunting knife, he dropped a thick calloused hand on my shoulder and said, “Friend, you are what you owe.”

Having been inculcated by my forebears with a fear of debt in any form, mortgages, bank loans, car payments—when my grandfather took his extended family out once a year to Ratner’s, a dairy restaurant on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, he insisted on paying the bill before we ate—I continued my research with less enthusiasm. But by now my wife, Marge, had grown exasperated and committed us to a point of no return, writing a letter to twenty-five well known writer-friends asking them to recommend manuscripts. Once the post office box began to fill there was no turning back.

I was obsessed with appearing legitimate. Who was I to claim to be a publisher? Why would critics review our books? Why would bookstores carry them? Did it matter that the title page of our books located us in a tiny Massachusetts fishing village rather than a big city? What would happen if agents found out our office was a one-room winter rental with no heat? I invented an editorial staff and put their bios on the website, hip young Ivy League grads in their twenties with cool names. Elvis Kahn was my favorite. He rose from the ranks of editorial assistant to acquisitions editor and was the point man for many negotiations, an amusing situation until I was introduced to a book page editor with whom I had been talking via telephone, as Elvis, for over a year. But first and foremost was the mission to support writers.

When we first started Leapfrog we were so dedicated that we would read every submission that arrived—sometimes all the way through!—and write two-page letters full of editing suggestions. Soon word got out: Leapfrog Press was the best place in the country to get rejected. Even if they don’t publish your book, they critique it! The slush pile grew to the height of a refrigerator and if you caught sight of it in just the wrong light it seemed to have eyes and fangs and sneer at you like the Thurber cartoon of a house morphed into an angry woman’s face. It took me years to get Marge to stop reading every page of every book in the slush pile. I learned my own lesson after throwing a manuscript across the room.

It was late, I was tired, glossing over it in that kind of numb state in which you follow the credits of a movie when I realized it was not an erotic novel I was holding in my hands, but puerile, fetishistic, pornography about red welts on bare buttocks and little girls’ panties and pee, the infantile fantasy of an stunted child-man’s mind. Nor did I pick up the pages but swept them into a plastic garbage bag. As the address on the return envelope was from a nearby town and I imagined being stalked for a reply, I scribbled, “Sorry, we don’t publish this sort of thing,” taped it closed in lieu of licking it and washed my hands. Some days later I received an e-mail reply from the writer, “Thank you, Ira, for being so nice.”

Having been a writer before I was a publisher doomed me to be nice, like a former waiter compelled to over-tip. Only once in ten years do I remember losing it, doing something blatantly nasty to a writer we published. Here was a guy whose career we had saved, who, if not dead in the water when he approached us, had a lot of trouble placing his work.

He had had one groundbreaking book which won a major prize and many afterwards which sold in diminishing numbers. But he was a tireless self promoter. He blogged, he hosted a reading series, he collected favors, he schmoozed. He submitted a novel that was almost published by a prestigious New York press, almost, but was missing something that no editor was able to pinpoint. If little Leapfrog, stranded on outermost Cape Cod, having upgraded its corporate headquarters to a grain warehouse with no windows, had proved itself adept at anything it was the resurrection of near misses: diagnosing the need for a new beginning, a tighter plot, a selling title; a publicity hook or simply an understanding of the mood of the country. (One of our most successful titles, a west coast best-seller, was rejected in New York during the early Bush years because no editor there could imagine that a hilarious satire about a gay Jewish liberal trapped in a fundamentalist bible college could find a market.) The book by the self promoter enjoyed respectable advance sales. The author and I spent a year together on editing and promotion; we were texting every day.

OUTBOX: LAT revu sched for 12/1.

INBOX: ^5! U d’man!

But after awhile we began to spat like rock musicians cooped up together on a thirty-city tour, or more accurately, a married couple, each of whom feels their work is invisible to the other.

INBOX: ??? Did U call Union SQ B&N to gt me rdg there?

OUTBOX: Only 300 times.

Expectations are high in publishing. It’s difficult for an author to understand why he wasn’t reviewed in the New York Times, or why his recent books fizzle when his first did well. Or why a book about an unrepentant shop-aholic or an un-trainable dog gets a lot of attention while an insightful family character study is all but neglected. A writer can blame himself, of course, but what did he do except sacrifice four years of his life to hard work and research? Sooner or later most writers start to think they can do a better job than their publisher.

When I started to receive daily e-mails demanding that I re-submit his book to critics who had declined to review it, when he accused me of spending more time and money on another author’s book, I sent him a rotten Kirkus.

Kirkus is one of the most esteemed of the advance trade reviews, those magazines that critique books two to three months before they are made available for sale. A really good Kirkus can generate a rush of calls from movie producers; a bad one means surprisingly little. Except to an author. A bad Kirkus, with its razor sharp invective, can signal the arrival of Armageddon to an author who has been waiting years for the public’s response. Most publishers are disappointed by an unfavorable Kirkus and simply file it away. But I figured a little humility was in order here and I duly faxed it on. Our relations were noticeably more cordial after that and have been ever since.

Although publishers large and small delegate their slush piles to the lowliest dogsbodies in the organization, they’re usually too superstitious to disregard them entirely, and do read them, however slowly and partially, because they always have the nagging fear that they might be rejecting a work of genius. War and Peace, Remembrance of Things Past, To Kill a Mockingbird, were all rejected by publishers. Some nitwit even passed on the Joy of Cooking. We found one of our most successful books through the slush pile. It was brilliant, original and topical and scholarly; Marge had selected it out of hundreds of manuscripts and kept hounding me to read it. Once I did I called the author immediately but by that time he was dead. We had missed him by three weeks. We couldn’t tell the widow we weren’t going to publish her husband’s magnum opus but we weren’t real keen on the book’s chances. We had nobody to send on tour, nobody to do interviews, no future young talent for the media to discover. In despair I turned to the publicist of one of the country’s most successful literary publishers. “Oh, Ira, don’t be discouraged,” she said. “Dead authors can be great to work with.” Better, sad to say, than some live ones.

While the dead author’s book caught a huge break, hailed by the press as the second coming of A Confederacy of Dunces— the posthumous comic novel that won its author a Pulitzer Prize— I encountered a number of authors who promised to help promote their titles but, once the book was accepted, had no intention of following through.

It’s disheartening when a writer turns out to have stage fright and gives a terrible performance. We published a photogenic young woman who looked like sex itself in a black leather mini-skirt but who mumbled through her first chapter at a book store appearance as if listing a prescription drug’s side effects on a radio commercial. There’s no way of telling who can perform and who cannot. I conversed for a year via telephone with a memoirist from Los Angeles whom we arranged to have read at a book festival in Toronto. I knew him only from a twenty year-old publicity photo and didn’t recognize him at the airport. Far from the tanned blonde surfer with a lecherous twinkle in his eye, he stumbled into the baggage claim area like an elderly Walt Whitman and in fact read like Whitman himself, recorded in 1890 on an Edison wax cylinder. An author doesn’t have to be a great performer. She can develop a fan base in a newspaper column, a cable TV chat show. But some authors, many of whom are academics, view a new book as a bullet point in their resume and their publisher as something like the department secretary.

My least favorite author—the one who was less helpful than the dead one, and here I am going to take pains to conceal his identity, so let’s call him Errol Schmuck—not only refused to make author appearances without being paid, but to proofread his book. “Man, I’m a poet, I’m not into this proofreading jive and besides, I’ve got finals to grade.” Proofreading your manuscript, as every writer knows, is an important thing to do, perhaps especially so for poetry. Poets use so few words to say so much that each word carries more weight than that of a work of prose. Only the poet knows the precise rhythm and punctuation and break in the line; no copy editor can verify what is intended. So a poet, of all writers, needs to be the one to make the final judgment on the manuscript. But Errol Schmuck had finals to grade and did not catch the elimination of a page break which resulted in the fusing of two poems.

The reviews, I’m happy to say, were splendid. Apparently, nobody noticed. Except Errol Schmuck, who demanded a nationwide recall. We placed an errata sheet in the small first printing, offered to exchange all misprinted copies for a new one, and immediately ran a corrected second printing. End of story.

Not quite. The first telephone call came at midnight. Although I wasn’t in the office to answer, I was able to savor it and all those that followed on the answering machine, counting the many ways you can call someone a cheap Jew without actually saying it. I sort of enjoyed the subsequent series of blistering e-mails we exchanged but not the calls from booksellers who wanted to know what to do about the broad-shouldered, very angry man who planted himself at the check-out counter with an armful of books from their shelves, claiming that he was the author, that the books were ‘tainted’ and that he demanded they be returned to the publisher. Yes, of course, we accepted them. I then paid the distributor to comb through every last book in the warehouse. For years the notice on our website read: “You may be in possession of a book with a serious error. This is a rare book and may be of considerable value to collectors. We will gladly exchange it for a corrected copy from a subsequent printing.” We never had a taker; not one.

Before I began Leapfrog Press I imagined publishers who wore wide wale corduroys and French blue shirts with flamboyant bow ties, who worked late into the night blue-penciling manuscripts then went for martinis with starry-eyed young women editors to whom they were legends. I didn’t own a blue pencil, but I did wear corduroys, and a sweater and a muffler, and I did work late into the night reading manuscripts next to the space heater in my office, willing them to captivate me with the same plaintive longing with which I stared into the refrigerator at lunch time, as if simply looking long and hard enough would give rise to something I could actually eat, or in this case, sell.

Why, I wondered, had I ever wanted to sell books instead of write them? It wasn’t that people didn’t love books and want to read them, they just didn’t see why they should buy them retail. And why would they when books were free in libraries and selling for pennies on-line? Sometimes, as the wind battered the building and the clocked ticked to daybreak, as the reality of money and sales or, to be honest, the lack of both, kept me up at night, I imagined thousands of unsold books returning to our warehouse from bookstores all over America—on pallets, in boxes, on trucks, in trains, mounting in piles like the columns of debt in my monthly statements. In an effort to soothe myself to sleep I made lists, conjuring all the things that were easier to sell than books—pizza, tattoos, t-shirts. One night I imagined standing on a street corner hawking a pair of underpants. A ridiculous comparison but one that, in my increasingly addled frame of mind, deserved scrutiny. People needed underpants. Most people did not feel they needed a book. Nor were critics likely to write a sarcastic review of a pair of underpants. And who would ever give a pair of used underpants to a friend—“Have you worn this? I think you’ll enjoy it.” —or sell it to a used underwear dealer? But the most shameful thing was the way I began to view books, once a treasured source of knowledge and delight, now a symbol of failure and pain.

One day, however, I received a telephone call from a starry -eyed young woman editor to whom I was apparently a legend. Her voice was hesitant. “I’m so sorry to interrupt you but I . . . me and my backers, that is . . . are starting a small press.” Recalling my own timid questions at BEA and the publishers who took the time to answer them I invited her up to my office.

“We l-o-v-e Leapfrog Press,” she said upon driving two hours to get here and shyly admitted she was copying our website design, our mission statement, the ‘look’ of our books. “Leapfrog is so cool,” she said, “so cutting edge.”

She picked my brain for details I had forgotten years ago and I had to admit to an unexpected frisson, to the attentions of a young woman who saw in me everything I had wanted to become. But surrounded by stacks of titles we had published, giant posters of book covers, boxes of promotional rubber frogs, a six foot long calendar board that projected the deadline of every task for the next twelve months, she found herself in paradise while I was in a prison of my own making. At one time in my life a situation such as this, a bright and energetic woman who was asking for my guidance, might have led me to fantasize one scenario while I was already beginning to conjure another. After several more meetings I was ready to make my move.

I proposed a small café this time and found a table where we would not be overheard. When she entered, late and sweetly frazzled as always, she didn’t see me at first but glowed as soon as we locked eyes. When she sat down I told her I’d been thinking a lot about her. She blushed. “But,” I edged closer, “there’s something we need to talk about.”
She looked wary.

“Promise me you’ll think it over, that you won’t just say no.”

Now I was beginning to freak her out but before she could answer I came out with it: “I think you should buy Leapfrog.”

“What?”

“You promised me you’d think about it.”

“I did not.”

“That you wouldn’t just say no.”

“I don’t have that kind of money.”

“You have backers.”

“But we can’t afford to buy a publishing company.”

“How do you know? Do you have any idea how much you’ll need to start one? How many years it takes to develop a brand? How many books you’ll have to publish before you attract a distributor? Wouldn’t your backers rather take over a ten year-old company with a great national reputation than start from scratch?”

“But the financing.”

“Leave the financing to me. I’ll come up with something you can manage.”

“I doubt that.”

“Trust me. I can.”

There were lawyers involved, money to raise, a contract with endless terms. We went back and forth for almost a year. Some days it seemed a deal was likely to happen; others impossible. But we persevered, pestering people for advice, looking for likely models, studying endless options—much as I done years before—she for the dream of owning a publishing company and me to get out from under one.

And once again I found myself to be a writer, an anomaly in a visually oriented world, an artist whose medium is words on paper in a century whose medium is images on screen. But having crossed the line, having spent ten years acquiring, editing, designing, and selling books, I’ve attained insight into the secret desires of those who publish them. Far from wanting to replace their writers with new young talent, many publishers have a more personal agenda, a longing few writers ever imagine: If I didn’t have all this contractual, marketing, and publicity crap to take care of, Hell, I could write a book and do it better than my authors.