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Menaker Looks Book at Publishing's "Negative Culture"

September 14, 2009
By Michael Cader

Former Random House executive editor-in-chief (he admits to conjuring the odd title in a dream) Daniel Menaker writes in the Barnes & Noble Review a series of observations about modern publishing, concluding, “I have to say I’m glad to have left this all behind, except in the tranquility of recollection.”

Menaker starts by describing how “publishing is often an extremely negative culture” and the 12-point list primarily recounts negatives. “The sheer book-length nature of books combined with the seemingly inexorable reductions in editorial staffs and the number of submissions most editors receive, to say nothing of the welter of non-editorial tasks that most editors have to perform, including holding the hands of intensely self-absorbed and insecure writers, fielding frequently irate calls from agents, attending endless and vapid and ritualistic meetings, having one largely empty ceremonial lunch after another, supplementing publicity efforts, writing or revising flap copy, ditto catalog copy, refereeing jacket-design disputes, and so on — all these conditions taken together make the job of a trade-book acquisitions editor these days fundamentally impossible. The shrift given to actual close and considered editing almost has to be short and is growing shorter, another very old and evergreen publishing story but truer now than ever before.”

But he knows a few people who are having fun: “To be a very successful editor or publisher, to get to the top, hard work and intelligence and even a wide range of interests and enthusiasms are not enough. As with other media businesses, you have to have some kind of charisma and confidence (often bordering on arrogance and pushiness), even though the majority of your acquisitions will probably fail financially. Among about ten or fifteen others (full disclosure: a few of them friends): Sonny Mehta of Knopf, Morgan Entrekin of Grove Atlantic, Libby McGuire of Ballantine Books, Susan Kamil of Random House, Michael Morrison of HarperCollins, Nan Graham of Scribner, David Rosenthal of Simon & Schuster, Lee Boudreaux of Ecco Press, Michael Pietsch of Little, Brown, Tim Duggan of HarperCollins, and (even fuller disclosure: my own publisher) Jon Karp of 12, come to mind. And you have to understand that even though you are formally separated from the literal sales force, you are still above all fundamentally ‘in sales.'”
BN Review

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