Veterans of Publishing Campaigns Speak, and a Good Listener Records

Jofie Ferrari-Adler, an editor with Grove Atlantic Publishers, has taken it upon himself to conduct, for Poets & Writers, a series of lengthy Q&A's with distinguished editors and literary agents whose careers exemplify values and virtues that are rapidly fading from the daily discourse of the publishing business. It is absolutely incumbent on every member of our community 40 years old or younger to listen to their voices and imbibe their experiences so that you can understand what publishing was like when men and women of charm, taste and integrity walked the earth.

Ferrari-Adler's most recent interview is with literary agent Georges Borchardt, who has represented and in some cases discovered such towering figures as Marguerite Duras, Eugène Ionesco, Jean-Paul Sartre, Michel Foucault, Samuel Beckett, Elie Wiesel, John Gardner, Charles Johnson, and even General de Gaulle.

A brief excerpt or two...

J F-A: Let's talk a little about the industry. You've been in it for several decades, over the course of which it's changed a lot, or at least that's what people seem to say. What's your take on that?

GB: It has changed. Mainly it's the shift from individual ownership to corporate ownership. The individuals who owned the firms were, for the most part, the sons of millionaires. They didn't need to take money out of the firm. They lived well before, they lived well during, and they had something very valuable afterward. Knopf became very valuable. Farrar, Straus became very valuable. So the heirs, I suppose, got a good amount of money. But the purpose [of founding those firms] wasn't really to make money. The purpose was the excitement of publishing. It's totally different now. Not so much at Grove/Atlantic or Norton—those are two firms for which what I'm saying doesn't apply—except that they are competing against these giants. So if Grove/Atlantic has a book that becomes a major best-seller, it can't hold on to the author, even if the author has made lots of protestations about how he will never leave the firm because he's in love with all the people who work there. Either he, or his agent, or both, will decide that rather than taking a million from little Grove/Atlantic, they're better off taking six million from somebody bigger. So they are affected by it too. The corporate thing has sort of poisoned the whole industry.

J F-A: What has that meant for writers?

GB: It's mainly meant that they've become products. And that their main relationship is more with their literary agent. In a way it has worked well for the agents. Their main relationship is much more seldom with the editor because the editor's position is very precarious. You've already changed jobs like four times. That was most unusual when I started in publishing. If you were an editor at Knopf, you stayed an editor at Knopf. There are still editors at Knopf who have been there forever: Judith Jones; Ash Green, who just retired; Bill Koshland, who was not an editor but more the business person. When Bill was chairman emeritus, well after Alfred had died and Bob Gottlieb had taken over, he would still take all the royalty statements home and look at them to be sure they were right. Now there's no one on the editorial side of a publishing house who even sees the royalty statements. They have no idea what's on them. They have no idea whether the reserve for returns is outrageous or justified. The person who decides on the reserve doesn't know either. The whole climate has changed.

Ferrari-Adler has also interviewed literary agents Molly Friedrich, Nat Sobel and Lynn Nesbit, editors Janet Silver, Pat Strachan and Chuck Adams, plus a host of young editors and agents. Each Q&A is a gem, and their cumulative effect is to transport us to a culture that is every bit as worth preserving and revering as the our rapidly dwindling glaciers and forests.

Richard Curtis

Editors: The New Disenfranchised

Many of the pieces published in this column originally appeared in the 1980s or 1990s but have undergone revision to make them timely for today's reader. When I selected this 23-year-old essay I considered updating it, but as I reread it I was struck by its relevance to today's conditions. I've therefore decided to present it as originally published.

Just one background note. Up until the mid-1980s, hardcover publishers usually sold reprint rights to outside paperback publishers. But when both hardcover and paperback houses realized the advantages of merging the two formats under one roof, there was a spate of mergers and acquisitions, laying the foundation for the "hard-soft" publication deal that is the backbone of almost all book acquisitions today.
RC

*********

I've always liked editors but I never used to feel sorry for them. That changed when the acquisition of Doubleday was announced.

Until then, whenever I heard that a publisher had been acquired by some sprawling conglomerate, or merged with another publisher, or had simply given up the ghost and shut its doors, my first thought had always been, This is bad for authors. The displacement, the disruption, the disarray caused by these corporate earthquakes have been nothing short of calamitous. The publishing landscape of the past thirty-five years is littered with ruined books beyond counting and haunted by the shades of authors whose careers have been maimed and prematurely terminated.

But in the tumultuous last week of September 1986, when deals were concluded for the acquisition of Doubleday and New American Library, my first thought was, How terrible this all must be for editors. I spoke to a great many of them after the deals were announced, and I can assure you that few were not anxious and disturbed, if not downright scared. It had finally dawned on editors everywhere that there was no longer any such thing as job security at a publishing company.

What happened to Doubleday was a harbinger of things to come, for, as long as most publishing people could remember, the firm had symbolized bedrock stability— - a fortress impervious to the corporate wars that left almost none of her sister-houses unaltered. If anything, Doubleday had bolstered its foundations some years before with the acquisition of Dell Publishing Company, a major paperback house. After the acquisition, the shadow of change darkened the desks of everyone who worked in publishing, and anxiety lurked in every corridor. "Every time my boss buzzes," one editor told me, "I say to myself, 'That's it. They're letting my department go.'" This constant knot in the stomach exists for workers in every area of publishing, including sales, marketing, accounting, publicity, and art.

That the deals were good for the buyers and sellers, few observers question, although there are some aspects that could tarnish the splendor of the prizes. Doubleday's book division had been losing money for some years, owing in good measure (in my opinion at least) to its failure to adjust to the revolutionary change in the nature of our business that made the so-called hard-soft publishers the predominant beasts in the jungle. Indeed, one of the few divisions of Doubleday that was operating in the black, other than the New York Mets baseball team (which they subsequently shed), was Delacorte Press, which had always acquired hardcover and paperback rights together. At the time of the acquisition, Doubleday seldom, if ever, acquired books for its Dell paperback line. Nor did it bend in its rigid refusal to give authors a greater share of paperback reprint revenue than the traditional fifty-fifty split, something that other hardcover houses had yielded to in order to gain competitive parity when bidding for properties against hard-soft houses.

Bertelsmann, the German publishing group that acquired Doubleday, also owns Bantam Books, which controls the largest share of the paperback market of any American publisher. The addition of Dell potentially eliminated one competitor from the already shrunken list of paperback firms, and swelled Bantam's market share to a size that some observers thought might attract the attention of Justice Department trustbusters. It didn't, however: monopoly in publishing doesn't yet seem to be very interesting to our government. But a lot of Dell editors braced for pink slips. "I've got my résumés out," one editor told me. "When the other shoe drops, I'll be ready."

If you stood back and simply admired the deal, Viking Penguin's acquisition of New American Library was an excellent one all around. A few years before, Viking had united with England's paperback giant Penguin in order to give both companies stronger hard-soft capability in the United States. But Penguin lacked entry into the critical wholesale paperback market. And so, New American Library, which had been bought by an investment group a few years earlier, was seen as a perfect place for Penguin to enter that market. And Viking would, it was thought, be able to play hard-soft ball in the major leagues.

Ten years later, Penguin's parent company, Pearson Ltd., acquired the Putnam and Berkley groups, and though (at this writing) the various imprints are functioning separately from one another, anyone who has worked in publishing in the last decades of the twentieth century has seen what happens when corporate executives look at their holdings and ask, "Why do we need four companies competing for the same books? Let's eliminate some of them." And poof! Another competitor gone, and more editors canned while the Justice Department sleeps.

Job anxiety had infected the thinking of editors throughout the history of postwar publishing. But because many of you may be too young to have lived through the turmoil of acquisitions, mergers, overhaulings, phaseouts, reorganizations, disassemblies, and absorptions, or for those in the publishing business who are too close to daily affairs to step back and see the carnage through a panoramic lens, let me recite a partial roll call of companies that are no more, or are now just divisions or imprints of the companies that consumed them.

Appleton-Century-Crofts (a division of Prentice-Hall)
Prentice-Hall (acquired by Simon & Schuster)
Simon & Schuster (acquired by Viacom Corporation)
Atheneum (acquired by Charles Scribner)
Charles Scribner (acquired by Macmillan)
Macmillan (acquired by Simon & Schuster)
Little, Brown (acquired by Time Inc.)
Warner Paperback (merged with Little, Brown)
Avon Books (acquired by the Hearst Corporation)
Arbor House (acquired by the Hearst Corporation)
Fawcett Books (acquired by Ballantine Books)
Ballantine Books (acquired by Random House)
Times Books (acquired by Random House)
Pantheon Press (acquired by Random House)
Alfred A. Knopf (acquired by Random House)
Random House (acquired from RCA by the Newhouse
organization)*
Bantam Books (acquired by the Bertelsmann Group)
Doubleday (acquired by the Bertelsmann Group)
Dell Books (acquired by the Bertelsmann Group)
Basic Books (acquired by Harper & Row, then deacquisitioned)
Crowell (acquired by Harper & Row)
Abelard-Schuman (acquired by Harper & Row)
Harper & Row (acquired by Rupert Murdoch's NewsAmerica
Corporation)
Playboy Press (acquired by Berkley Books)
Ace Books (acquired by Grosset & Dunlap)
Grosset & Dunlap (acquired by Berkley Books)
Berkley Books (acquired by G. P. Putnam's)
G. P. Putnam's (acquired by MCA, sold to Matsushita, then to
Seagram, then to Pearson Ltd.)
Pyramid Books (acquired by Harcourt Brace, renamed Jove)
Jove (acquired by Berkley)
Coward-McCann-Geoghegan (acquired by Putnam, then dissolved)
Dial Press (acquired by Dell, sold to Dutton)
Dutton (acquired by Elsevier, sold to JSD, sold to NAL)
NAL (sold by Times-Mirror to Odyssey Group, resold to Viking,
merged with Penguin)
Rawson, Wade (acquired by Macmillan)
Silhouette Books (acquired by Harlequin from Simon & Schuster)

This partial list is drawn from a thumb-through of Literary Market Place, the publishing industry's directory, and I could certainly go on and on. Taken as a whole, the list represents a pattern of seismic instability so severe that if I were an editor today I would strap myself into my chair just to get some work done.

Publishing is a social enterprise that calls for a large degree of organization, hierarchy, and interdependency, and so, by the very nature of what they do, editors are corporate creatures. It stands to reason, then, that the more attention an editor must devote to matters corporate instead of editorial, the weaker will be his or her attachment to books and authors. The emergence of the superpublisher in our century, a corporate entity whose goals only incidentally have anything to do with the quality of literature and the well-being of authors, has impinged to a greater and greater extent on the time, energy, thought, and care that editors are able to give over to books and those who write them, and as you will infer from the list above, the last couple of decades have raised the level of distraction to critical mass.

The most obvious, as well as detrimental, manifestation of this shift of editors' attention is job-hopping. As their love of books and authors is battered by all the firings and hirings, reorganizations, streamlinings, office politics, shuffling of responsibilities, and the buying and selling of the companies they work for, editors feel fewer compunctions about accepting job offers from other publishers. It's hard to feel company loyalty when corporate logos change with the frequency of automobile styles. Low wages have always prevailed in the editorial profession, but higher pay is not in itself a compelling lure for an editor contemplating a move to another company, unless it is coupled with a promise of greater job satisfaction. But if an editor is not getting such satisfaction, he's going to think a lot about his salary. It behooves us to think about how a $35,000 a year editor must feel when he listens to the complaints of authors making many times that amount. "Few of my authors make less money than I do," an editor told me, "and none makes less than my assistant."

The vicious cycle is accelerated as more and more editors, looking out for Number One, jump to other publishers or leave publishing altogether for more lucrative, satisfying, and stable jobs. Even those remaining in publishing find themselves burdened with corporate responsibilities that take them away from what they love most dearly to do - acquire and edit books. Thus, the industry eventually becomes bereft of dedicated editors, and the vacuum is too often filled by people who are more adept at playing corporate games than at developing writers.

In turn, such people place more and more emphasis on buying winners instead of breeding them: acquisition without cultivation. Less and less attention is paid to developing writers; instead, everyone asks how much it will cost to buy and sell them. The publisher that proves itself most capable of acquiring will become the most successful. But the price is dear: When authors are deprived of the time to grow, creativity will be snuffed out. It's as true of literature as it is of agriculture or forestry.

The cycle spins yet faster and higher as other publishers try to emulate the successful ones. Abandoning the philosophy, the tradition, the taste and judgment, and the people that got them where they were, these houses join the chase to try to capture frontlist hits. Even when they snag them, however, they lose a little bit more of their character if not their soul.

The soul of a publishing company is its editors, and when a publishing company alters its fundamental attitudes about books and authors, the sensibilities of its editors must, of necessity, change as well. With promotions and increased corporate responsibilities comes loss of contact with the intimate places in an author's heart where literature is born.

The rest of the editorial staff, as well as the staffs of the other departments that fuel publishing companies, carry on as best they can in the midst of this furious turbulence, but they do so in a constant state of apprehension. How difficult it must be to concentrate, to plan, to pay attention to the work at hand, when upheaval is only one announcement (or even one rumor) away.

Editors today have more in common with authors than they do with the publishing companies that employ them. Both are disenfranchised, and both have become fodder for the relentless march of the takeover.

Post-script: In 1998, as I was reviewing the proofs for the book in which this essay appeared, it was announced that Bertelsmann, owner of Bantam-Doubleday-Dell, had acquired Random House, a company that embraces Alfred A. Knopf, Ballantine Books, Crown Publishers, Del Rey Books, Fawcett Books, Pantheon Press, Schocken Books, Times Books, Villard House and several other publishers.

That was over ten years ago, and the list of mergers and acquisitions since then is easily as long as the one above. And so is the list of the disenfranchised.

- Richard Curtis

This article was originally written for Locus, The Newspaper of the Science Fiction Field. It's reprinted in This Business of Publishing: An Insider's View of Current Trends and Tactics Copyright © 1998 by Richard Curtis. All Rights Reserved.

Moral Rights: Love me, Love My Book

Today was one of the worst days of your writing career.

It began when the postman brought you an advance copy of your historical saga, an original paperback, and you started thumbing through it. To your dismay you discovered that over ten thousand words of text had been cut from your manuscript, and a number of sexy scenes modified if not downright bowdlerized. Your contract did give your publisher the right to make editorial changes, but you never dreamed they would go so far. You called your editor and were told the cuts were necessitated by pricing considerations, and the desexing had been performed to make the book more acceptable in certain markets.

No sooner had you recovered from that shock than you received a second in the form of galleys of a novel messengered to you by a packager you work for. The packager had engaged you as a writer-for-hire to write one of a series of novels it had created. Although the series is copyrighted in the packager's name, you'd insisted that your byline appear on your book. At the time you negotiated the contract, you thought that was a smart move. But when you started to review the galleys, you immediately realized that every sentence of your original text had been rewritten by the packager. Outraged, you phoned your packager, who informed you that as his company owns the copyright to your book, he could do anything he wanted to it.

As if these two horror stories weren't bad enough, you suffered the final insult when you attended a screening of the film made from a spy thriller you'd written several years earlier. You were, of course, not so naive as to believe the adaptation would be absolutely faithful to your story, but you were scarcely prepared for the monstrous perversion portrayed on the big screen that evening. Except for the basic premise, the producer had thrown out every idea, every tasteful scene, every line of dialogue in your book. Surrounded by friends and family, you slunk out of the screening room humiliated to the very core of your being. In a black rage, you phoned your lawyer. "Do you handle criminal cases?" you asked him.

"Some. Why?"

"Because I'm about to commit murder." You proceeded to describe in exquisitely graphic detail the butchery that had been perpetrated on your work.

"Okay," he finally said when you let him get a word in edgewise, "here's what I suggest you do. Go straight home, do not attempt to murder anybody. Take out the contracts on your books and examine them carefully. Then call me again and I'll tell you what I'm looking for. You may have a case on a variety of grounds, but I'd be especially interested in any references to something called 'Droit Moral'."

"Dwah wha'?"

"Droit moral. 'Moral right.' Bring your contracts to my office tomorrow. And don't forget your checkbook."

Tempting though it was to go on a killing spree, you took your attorney's advice and returned home, and after belting down a brandy straight you hauled out your contracts and pored over them, looking in particular for the phrase you had heard for the first time, droit moral. No luck in the contract for that historical, nor any in the one with your packager. But in the movie contract you struck pay dirt. Or so you thought at first. But as your finger traced the language your heart sank. You picked up the phone.

"No references to droit moral in my book contracts," you sighed to your attorney.

"I didn't expect any. And in the movie contract, you waived your moral right, yes?"

"Yes. So I guess that's the end of that."

"Not long ago I would have said yes," your attorney replies. "But there are signs that offer some encouragement. Whether or not the phrase appears in your contract, indeed even if you've waived your so-called moral rights, it may be that they are still recognized and enforced by the courts. I'll do a little research and have some thoughts for you when we meet tomorrow."

Your attorney is right, at least about the signs of change in the law, for an important event occurred on March 1, 1989, and it may presage some profound changes in the relationship between the buyers and sellers of literary and artistic works. On that date, the United States became a signatory of the Berne Convention, an international copyright treaty created to protect copyrighted works in the numerous countries that have signed it.

Included in the treaty is a provision giving artists the right to protect the integrity of their work even after it has been sold. That right is considered "perpetual, inalienable, and cannot be waived."

If your attorney didn't have time to research the Berne Convention and droit moral in great depth before you paid him a visit, he might have gotten an excellent summary out of The Rights of Authors, Artists and Other Creative People: The Basic ACLU Guide to Author and Artist Rights, an American Civil Liberties Union handbook written by Kenneth P. Norwick and Jerry Simon Chasen, and published in paperback by Southern Illinois University Press. He might even, as I did, phone Ken Norwick for a briefing. Mr. Norwick is legal counsel to the Association of Authors' Representatives.

Mr. Norwick and his book point out that moral rights are distinguished from the property rights - that is, the rights that you have under the copyright law - that you convey when you license your written work to publishers and producers. Droit moral is described as "non-property attributes of an intellectual and moral character which exist between a literary or artistic work and its author's personality; it is intended to protect his personality as well as his work."
In other words, the distortion or mutilation of a work of art or literature could be considered a slur on the character of that work's creator. If you are wondering whether Shootout at the Bensonhurst Riding Stables or Book #16 in the Galactic Humungoid science fiction series may accurately be defined as literature, you will be comforted to know that the law offers lots of leeway on that score.
Droit moral embraces three major components: the right of integrity of the work, the right of paternity, and the right of divulgation.

The right of integrity posits that a work is a direct expression of the creator's personality, and any harm done to that work reflects on the creator's identity itself. Unauthorized condensation of a literary work, expurgation of supposedly offensive passages, or rewriting of the text without permission are acts that might make it appear the author deliberatly designed the work that way, and subject him to unfounded criticism by his peers or condemnation by posterity. Even if critics feel the changes improve the work, those alterations misrepresent the author's original vision and are therefore a blot on his honor.

The right of paternity irrevocably associates the author's or artist's name with his work (or hers, though it's still called the right of paternity). Your byline cannot be taken off (or put on) without your express permission.

Finally, the right of divulgation gives artists and writers the right to decide at what point their work is finished and ready for exhibition or publication.

While principles of droit moral are widely accepted beyond our shores, they have generally been rejected, or at least not recognized, by the U.S. courts. Thus, because these rights are not usually accepted by the legal system, if you want the protection that they offer you must negotiate for them in your contracts. If, for instance, you wanted to reserve the option to withdraw your byline from a book, you would have to state that explicitly in your book contract.

There have been some promising legal developments in this area of the law in the U.S. in recent years. In 1983, New York State passed an Artists' Authorship Rights Act that, among other things, prohibited exhibition or publication of a work of fine art "in an altered, defaced, mutilated form" without the artist's consent. The law also gave artists the right to claim or disclaim authorship of their works of fine art. The artist who believes his rights under this law have been violated can sue for damages. Similar moral rights legislation has been enacted in California, too.
The New York State act is limited to "works of fine art," and there's the rub. As Ellen M. Kozak, a lawyer and author of Every Writer's Practical Guide to Copyright Law, quipped in a piece on the Berne Convention in the Science Fiction Writers of America Bulletin, "Writers need not apply." But that may no longer be the case if the droit moral provisions of Berne are liberally interpreted in future court challenges.

You can imagine that not everybody greeted the ratification of Berne by the United States with banquets and fireworks. In fact, many publishers and movie and television producers lobbied passionately against it, even though some aspects of it protected their own rights. This was because they feared that the recognition of moral rights in the Berne Convention would threaten the traditional ways in which they have been producing and publishing their works. In response to those fears, Congress declared that Berne neither expands nor limits authors' or artists' rights to object to unauthorized modification of their work. The current thinking, then, is that you must seek remedies in other legal areas.

This bleak view, however, may not necessarily prevail in the days and years ahead. In the first place, many courts have recognized rights remarkably similar to "moral rights" under the guise of traditional trademark and copyright (and even in some cases libel) law. In what may be the most important example, a court found that a television network's substantial, unauthorized editing for television of a Monty Python movie violated the group's rights under American trademark law. Second, many people believe that America's entry into the Berne Convention should provide the impetus for greater recognition of moral rights in this country, and it has already encouraged a movement to lobby Congress to enact specific moral rights protection for authors and artists.

Somewhere out there are authors who will one day suffer the indignities hypothesized at the beginning of this article, and they will seek the protection of the courts using the droit moral principles recognized in the Berne Convention. I'll be sitting in the gallery when it happens.
- Richard Curtis

This article was originally written for Locus, The Newspaper of the Science Fiction Field. It's reprinted in Mastering the Business of Writing. Copyright © 1990 by Richard Curtis. All Rights Reserved.