Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [238]
For my part, I sympathized with them and liked them. I had been out “on the road” briefly myself, as a very junior editor, when I was taken from store to store and jobber to jobber throughout Georgia by J. Felton Covington, Jr., one of our most senior sales reps, a Southern gentleman of the old school, whose laid-back manner, slow drawl, and deep courtesy were so appreciated by booksellers of his region that he was able to place some of Bob Gottlieb’s most difficult first novels in stores that normally only carried Bibles. Cov’s patience, his ability to sit for hours swapping stories with some small-town bookseller in order to get him or her to take half a dozen more copies of some book that Dick wanted pushed, or, not infrequently, some book that Cov himself fervently believed in, for like most sales reps, Cov was a big reader—there was not much else to do in the evenings, when you were on the road—his genuine interest in the lives of his customers, right down to the names and health of their dogs and cats, his inexhaustible good humor and bottomless stomach for coffee—no matter how many cups he had been offered and drunk during the course of a day, he always accepted another at the next or the last bookstore as if he hadn’t had a cup since breakfast—all this was the part of the book business that editors and the people at the top tended to overlook, or simply accept as normal.
Dick knew better. He drove the reps mercilessly, but he understood how important their job was, and on the whole was more at ease with them than with the editors, most of whom expected all their books to be taken at face value. Most editors lacked the reps’ fine, bracing cynicism and their hearty masculine hedonism. In those days, reps tended to be men’s men who ate well, drank a lot (after hours), played poker, enjoyed a game of golf, and were happy enough to relax by the pool at break times, trading publishing gossip and watching the girls go by.
All the same, being a sales rep was just about the toughest job in book publishing—the hours were punishing, the demands imposed on them were often unreasonable, and they were routinely bullied, prodded, and threatened at the end of every sales meeting, after days of having had to sit for hours on end in stuffy conference rooms, glassy-eyed with boredom, feigning interest as best they could. It was little wonder that they cut loose after dinner in the hospitality suite. The truth was that the reps truly loved books—cynical they might be, but in the end the people who really believed in the list in any publishing house were the reps themselves, not the editors. There wasn’t one of them who couldn’t have made more money selling almost anything else, but season after season they went out with their sample cases full of galley proofs and catalogs, convinced that this was the best list ever and determined to convince the even more skeptical booksellers and book buyers of the same.
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IN ANY event, the reps had to be convinced that Shardik was going to work. At Dick’s suggestion, I sent each of them a bound galley with a personal letter, asking them to read the book before the sales conference and giving them my considered opinion that what we had here was a work of genius and a huge best-seller.
The presentation itself was considered by Dick to be so crucial that he sent me to bed early the night before, shooing me out of the hospitality suite by 10 P.M. “Tomorrow is the big one,” he said, like a football coach. “Don’t blow it! Take my advice—get some sleep. Tomorrow morning I want to see you knock their socks off!”
Somewhat resentful at being sent to bed early like a child (just as things in the hospitality suite were getting interesting—somebody had pushed the poker players into the bedroom and set up a tape player in the living room for dancing), I brooded on what I would tell the troops. There was no question about it, this would have to be the presentation