Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [52]
As things turned out, not even all these combined efforts could float The Caretakers onto the New York Times hardcover best-seller list (the Holy Grail of book publishing), but to everybody’s astonishment the mass-market paperback rights were bought before publication by Victor Weybright of New American Library for $90,000. It would be as if someone were to pay over a million dollars for the paperback rights of a first novel today, perhaps even more. Anybody might have thought that we had somehow upset the balance of nature by selling the book for such a lot of money. It was as if we had opened the gates and let the Vandals into Rome.
It was my first experience with being criticized for having succeeded. Within S&S, the general feeling was that selling a sexy first novel for this kind of money was somewhat disgraceful, even shameful. When Henry heard about it, he shook his head sorrowfully and wondered what the world was coming to. Max seemed too embarrassed to talk about it at all, while Leon Shimkin merely wondered why we hadn’t let Pocket Books have The Caretakers if it was so valuable. Inadvertently, we had changed the rules. All of a sudden, first novels seemed potentially valuable, the slush heap a potential gold mine.
More important, perhaps, the sale of The Caretakers ushered in the age of the high-stakes paperback auction. Up until then, mass-market paperback sales had represented a nice windfall for the hardcover publisher, but the sales of The Caretakers set off a long period in which popular fiction (and even some nonfiction) was sold to paperback publishers for ever larger amounts. We had not only hit the jackpot but raised the stakes for everyone else. Worse still, from the perspective of the old guard, we had drawn the attention of the media and of Wall Street. A business in which an unknown author’s first novel could sell for $90,000 overnight—before it was even available in the stores—sounded to many people more like the movies than their traditional idea of book publishing, and not everybody thanked us for what we’d done.
Dariel Telfer, far off in Pueblo, Colorado, was grateful, of course (unlike a good many authors, she remained graceful and kind under the pressure of success, although, to our regret, she never managed to write another book like The Caretakers, despite many tries), though slightly puzzled by the fuss. For Bob, this was another step on his way to confirming his reputation as a major publishing figure. He had proven he could publish groundbreaking literature successfully with Catch-22 and “commercial” women’s fiction with The Best of Everything; now he had turned an unpublishable first novel into a record-breaking paperback sale. He seemed to the publishing world like a miracle worker, though inside S&S this new triumph merely hardened the rivalry between himself and his elders. For myself, the paperback sale of The Caretakers had a whole host of consequences. For the first time, my salary was raised to a point where we could actually live on it—up until then, I had been making less money than my wife, who was still working as a secretary. I was moved out of the windowless cubbyhole in which I had been placed as Henry’s editorial assistant and given an office of my own, with a window, though I would continue to work on Henry’s books. Perhaps most important, it moved me firmly over into Bob’s camp and ushered in one of the happiest periods of my career. Bob was not only a natural