Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [286]
So did prestige. Even as late as the 1970s, a publishing house was basically an organization built around its editors, and the connection between ownership and the editors was strong, personal, and direct. The rest of the company consisted of service departments that were in most ways subordinated to the needs of the editors. To the extent that there was any glamour to publishing, it was provided by the editors.
With the appearance of big, merged publishing houses, the picture changed. The glamour, such as it was, was at the top, where houses were bought, sold, and merged, new imprints created, and multimillion-dollar deals made. Slowly but surely, the editors were relegated to the status of pieceworkers. If they provided a steady flow of profitable books, they were rewarded—very often with bonuses instead of salary increases, since a bonus can be withheld the next year whereas a salary increase is forever—if they did not, they were fired, and new ones brought in. Both the power and the prestige of their position were stripped from them, as the decisions they once made unilaterally were assigned to others, and as layers of management were created to supervise and quantify the editors’ work. The editors were no longer at the center of the company in a large publishing house, but on the periphery, at once part of a large and growing bureaucracy and the focus of its attention.
From the point of view of management, the editors are just about the hardest part of the publishing process to deal with, except of course for the authors themselves. It is hardly surprising that most publishing houses are now run by people who would just as soon climb Everest without oxygen as edit a book (or, in some cases, read one). If you want to know what’s happening in the other departments of a company, you can get numbers, printouts, bar graphs, charts, the kind of thing that appeals to business-minded persons and is thought to make sense, but the editors deal not in numbers, which hardly ever prove anything when it comes to books, but in ideas, hunches, style, most treacherous of all, words.
Most of the really big mistakes in book publishing come from ignoring the importance of words in favor of numbers or personalities. Of course, it’s easier to buy books by numbers, which explains why so many bad books by novelists at the tail ends of their careers still get bought for millions of dollars. It’s a lot easier (and quicker) to make decisions by digging up the previous sales figures, calculating the royalty earnings, adding on foreign sales, and so on than to actually read the book. Most of the big writers who regularly grace the best-seller list are bought and sold without anybody going to the trouble of reading the manuscript—indeed, such deals are usually made without a manuscript, purely on track record and numbers. A lot of publishers are far more comfortable dealing with a P&L than a manuscript anyway—the numbers can be crunched, studied, fine-tuned, but they’re real, as opposed to the author’s words, which, even if available, merely produce more words, in the form of subjective reports from the editors.
As for celebrities, they too represent a way of buying a book for a lot of money without having to read anything. By definition, the celebrity isn’t going to write the book—he or she is merely selling his celebrity. Here again, fame can be quantified: The number of people who have seen a star’s movies can be counted, the sales of a singer’s record albums are available, their worth as assets carefully assessed, which is a great comfort to people who would rather deal in numbers than in words, or have lunch with movie stars and politicians instead of writers.