Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [228]
This was partly an answer to Dan Green, the brilliant head of S&S’s publicity department who was to one day succeed Snyder as publisher. Green was one of the few people whose publishing instincts were as sharp as Snyder’s, though he lacked Snyder’s pit-bull capacity to get things done. Green, like Snyder, could read the auguries, almost three-dimensionally. He looked at the daily sales reports from the major bookstores, skimmed the key reviews, went over the publicity schedule and compared the author’s appearances with the sales (Was there a blip the day after he or she did the Today show?), closed his eyes thoughtfully for a few seconds, then decided to run an ad in The New York Times or the Chicago Tribune, go back to press for another ten thousand copies, and print jackets for a further ten beyond that. Conversely, he might say, despite enthusiastic reports from the reps in the field and lots of publicity, “It’s all over—don’t print any more, they’re all going to come back.” Somehow, he could weigh the intangibles—a drop in sales at Higbee’s, in Cleveland, a reluctance to order more copies from a buyer in Pasadena—and tell that the book had peaked, even though it might still be number one on the best-seller lists and selling like crazy.
It was an art, developed in part by having traveled around the country and met the key players at the jobbers and in the stores, however small their jobs might appear to be, in part by the sheer ability to read the numbers and figure out what they really meant, and whether the tide was going in or going out. Long before computers made their appearance on people’s desks, those who really knew their way around book publishing could figure out when to start the presses rolling on overtime and when to stop them dead, despite cries from all over the country (as well as from the author and his or her agent) for more books—a skill which is life and death in publishing terms and which the computer has done very little to improve upon, given the enormously high rate of returns today. Then and now, the bookstores were their own worst enemies—since they could return whatever stock remained unsold to the publishers, they had no vested interest in caution, or even realism, and were, then as now, inclined to take few copies of books they didn’t understand and far too many of those they did.
Green, a man for whom worry was a permanent state, chewed the end of his pencil (sometimes the business end of his ballpoint pen, if he wasn’t careful), wriggled around in his chair until his shirttail was hanging out, gnawed on the end of his tie, and came up with the right decision, time after time. It was a joy to see him do it. With Snyder, the physical contortions were missing, and the process was more inquisitorial, but the result was the same. The difference was that whereas Green had to argue for his conclusions with Snyder, Snyder didn’t have himself to argue with. One way or another, however, the publishing industry remained a business in which the key decisions were made by the equivalent of spitting on one’s forefinger and holding it up to the wind, a fact that was never fully understood by the conglomerates and big corporations that bought into the book business, nor by the outside businessmen who came in to make sense of it, perhaps in part because it was kept carefully concealed from them.
Outsiders, particularly from the West Coast, used to say how nice it must be to work in a business where people weren’t crazy and where greed and ego were at least kept to rational levels, but by the 1970s they were wrong. The only major difference