Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [227]
ONE REFLECTION of this growing attitude was the idea that people from outside the publishing world could do a better job of running it than those who were already infected with a taste for reading, a sympathy for writers, and the desire to have a regular table at “21” or the Italian Pavilion. This seemingly culminated in Dick Snyder’s decision to hire the former president of a Fortune 500 medical-supply company to run what was now called the consumer division of S&S, on the grounds that his management skills and his knowledge of consumer sales would be invaluable assets. This was not as strange a hiring choice as it seemed—Dick was under some pressure from Gulf + Western to run S&S in a more “businesslike” way and therefore picked a man who, on paper, would surely seem about as businesslike as it gets and at least wouldn’t go about trying to come up with ideas for new books or asking why we published so many first novels.
“He’s going to run this like a business,” Dick promised, though no sooner was the poor man onboard than Dick began to make fun of his ignorance about book publishing, and he was soon excluded from any of the meetings at which major decisions were made and relegated to a large, luxurious office many floors away from Dick’s, where he had nothing to do. Once, when Dick and I were sitting in his office discussing the acquisition of a major author on whom we had our hearts set, I suggested it might be a good idea (or at least polite) for me to tell the man who was ostensibly the head of consumer publishing about what we were doing before he read about it in the papers. “Fuck him,” Dick said cheerfully. Not every publishing house was so lucky—in many, the outside businessmen brought in were actually placed in charge, with calamitous results.
At every level, management people scrutinized what publishers, editors, art directors, and the manufacturing staff actually did and began to establish controls over the way it was done. The amiable chaos and anarchy in which books had hitherto been created gave way to a more orderly process, and accountability (another new buzzword) began to be established in the publishing process. Where people were lucky, as at Random House and S&S, the movement toward efficiency was blunted by the fact that those at the top still preferred books to balance sheets. All the same, the Random House or the S&S of the mid-seventies was almost unrecognizable to those who had worked there ten or twenty years earlier, and classic editors were fast being replaced by people for whom books were “units” and “titles” were interchangeable. The tail was beginning to wag the dog.
Some of these changes were skin-deep. It had always been normal at every publishing house to prepare a financial estimate (known at S&S and elsewhere as a P&L) on each book that was being considered for publication, but this was usually prepared after the fact—that is, the decision to publish was made before the numbers were done, so the whole thing was more of a sop to good business procedure than a useful management tool. Now the P&Ls throughout the industry grew more complicated, requiring estimates that by their very nature were likely to be problematic. On the surface, the numbers were being worked out in enough detail to satisfy the financial people, but in fact, however impressive in appearance, they still represented guesswork.
What’s more, when the book was considered really important, everybody ignored the whole process. If Dick wanted to make a two-book offer for a major best-selling author, he told the editor to go ahead—the numbers would be done later, to justify whatever the outcome was. “You can’t make any money out of a book you haven’t bought,” Snyder used to say. If you wanted to be competitive, you had to go out into the marketplace and buy the