Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [226]
Forecasts—always nebulous in a business where a single unexpected best-seller can turn a poor year into a good one and where sheer dumb luck operates almost as mysteriously as it does in the movie business—became enshrined as “business plans,” which were soon engraved in stone. Targets were set and had to be met, numbers had to be produced in huge quantity and ever-growing complexity to justify any decision. This soon required a large number of bureaucrats.
The one thing that had set book publishing apart from most American businesses was that the great majority of the people who worked at a publishing house were actively engaged in acquiring, editing, and producing the final product. There was no thick layer of management and bureaucracy, as there was in such supposedly “modern” businesses as car manufacturing or television, which is why a couple of really big best-sellers was all it took to produce a terrific year. The number of people involved in the process was small, and they were comparatively low paid, hence overhead was low and a sudden increase in profit instantly noticeable. Conversely, a bad year, one in which there were no surprise best-sellers, could be ridden out, often without letting anybody go, since the company was staffed leanly to begin with. Book publishing looked inefficient to the outside observer, but it in fact had all the advantages of a guerrilla army over a standing one: It could live off the land, change direction quickly, and needed no expensive and cumbersome general staff to guide it.
Now, however, without the actual business of buying and selling books having changed in any appreciable way,* publishing houses began to take on all the appurtenances of conventional big business. In short order, there were more people managing than there were actually publishing books, many of them basically managing the editors, who became, as it were, the smallest—or perhaps more accurately, the least powerful—cogs in the machine and certainly the most carefully scrutinized.
In the meantime, the direction of the major houses fell into the hands of people who “understood business” as opposed to books and who in general despised, or were at least deeply suspicious of, those who read books and dealt directly with authors. Authors were perceived, like actors and writers in the old Hollywood of the studio moguls, to be overpaid troublemakers, spoiled children. The word creative, always spoken with a certain sense of resentment by those in power, came to be a synonym for unbusinesslike, improvident, irresponsible, and self-indulgent. “The creative side” of the business was where the problems arose—books that lost money, books that were late, books that shouldn’t have been bought in the first place, books that made trouble or the wrong kind of headlines, often infuriating the parent company. “The creative people” were writers—notoriously a sullen, difficult, and demanding lot, “navel gazers” who usually had an unrealistic and inflated view of what their work was worth—or editors who wanted to indulge their personal taste at the expense of the company, lived off their expense accounts, and often took the writer’s side against the company. (Of course, writers complained in turn that most editors never stood up for their authors and yearned for the editors of some mythical golden age, who went to bat for their authors even at the risk of losing their jobs, something which was never really the case, as any reading of the Hemingway/Perkins correspondence