about the new Callard book?”
“Crap,” Pam Mantiss told Gerald Ochs Davis. “Midlist crap.”
“But we’ll have the Peet Trawley,” Gerald said to reassure himself. “That will fly. Especially with the movie coming up.”
“I hope we’ll have it. He’s really sick.”
“He’s been sick for thirty years. He likes to be sick. Münchhausen syndrome. It matters not. Just slap an omega on the cover. It will still sell.” Gerald thought of Dick Snyder’s directions years ago to the Simon & Schuster editor who was trying to cope with an impossible Jackie Susann manuscript: “Just turn it into a book somehow; that’s all I ask.” Gerald looked over the list in front of him. “When does Edmonds deliver the new one?”
Pam shook her head. She read his thoughts. “Forget it. Apparently her old house is still getting returns from her last book. She isn’t going to do it for us.”
Gerald stopped going over the printout before him. Pam had already accused him of buying Edmonds when she was past her peak, paying top dollar. “We’re not forgetting this one,” he told Pam. “I paid twenty million dollars. Her books are going to, sell no matter what we have to do to sell them.”
Pam shrugged. She was smart, but sometimes he wanted to murder her. He thought she actually enjoyed writing off authors. Like Tom Callard, the hot first-time novelist whom Pam had snagged (and probably shagged) before an auction could take place. The book sold two hundred thousand copies. Now his second was suddenly chopped liver? They must have had a lover’s quarrel.
“How about the Chad Weston book? I’ve heard it’s raw.”
“It’s graphic, violent sex. I like it.”
“I’m not surprised,” Gerald said dryly. “But will anyone else?”
“Well, the pussies around here are scandalized, but they don’t know the difference between fiction and politics,” Pam said. “I love the book. It’s a satire. He’s satirizing our disposable culture. Smart people will get it.” She paused and grinned. “It will raise a lot of eyebrows.”
Involuntarily, Gerald put his hand up to one of his own glued-on brows. Sometimes he hated them. “Will it raise our profits?” he snapped.
“Absolutely. It’s a book of our times, about how the nineties came out of the eighties. It’s about how man, without civilization’s restraint, fears and destroys that which created him. It’s about tit-biting boys, Gerald. It will move.”
Gerald winced at her crudity. Weston was another ninety-day wonder. His first book had hit—his second had not. “It better do more than move,” Gerald said. “It’s got to run. I want to see the manuscript. What’s the title?”
“SchizoBoy.”
Gerald barked out a laugh. “Clearly autobiographical.” Pam merely shrugged, her blond hair bouncing, as did her breasts. “There’s my book, of course.”
“Of course,” Pam said noncommittally.
“Have you read it?”
“Not yet,” she admitted.
“Any nonfiction?” he asked, trying to keep the annoyance out of his voice.
“Yeah. Oprah’s back and we got her,” Pam said caustically. When Oprah Winfrey had reneged on delivering her autobiography to Knopf, it had nearly ruined their bottom line. Pam and Gerald both knew the trouble with commercial nonfiction: Lots of people had one good story in them, but few had more. The nonfiction editors were like sharks; they had to keep moving or die. After all, how many autobiographies could Dolly Parton write?
“What else can we do?”
“I’ll call around,” Pam said. “I’ll see what’s being pushed. But it wouldn’t hurt you to get the lead out and circulate. Put your ear to the ground.”
“Is there a cliché you’ve left unspoken?” Gerald asked her as he rose; “I’m off to the Citron Press party. Maybe something will turn up.”
Gerald looked around at the party crowd and had to restrain a visible shudder. In the old days, even ten years ago, book parties were low-budget, dreary affairs held in offices or building lobbies. Now, with publishing turning into what Gerald scathingly called the “literary industrial complex,” parties were much fewer but often high-budget, flashy offerings. Gerald couldn’t decide which was worse. This one was one of the old school, celebrating the opening of a new small publishing house. Citron Press. Craig Stevens was hosting it, and Gerald hoped Stevens had deep pockets. He was joining the trend that Permanent Press and Four Walls Eight Windows had begun—boutique publishers. Good luck to him.
Gerald smiled, nodding at HarperCollins’s Larry Ash-mead, king of salt-and-pepper-shaker collections, and moved on. Fredi Friedman, the only soignée woman present, was as usual talking to someone about her latest discovery, telling him how it was certain to climb the lists.
Gerald sighed. One couldn’t start a literary house anymore. Things had changed. Look at Farrar, Straus. In the past, “quality literary fiction” was defined as Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Roger Straus and Robert Giroux had started right after the war with only twenty-five thousand dollars. Straus had a vision that informed and shaped his list into something beautiful. Even Gerald had to admit that. They had made canny domestic purchases and bought translation rights to the best European literature as well.
Just as Farrar, Straus had been known for the best fiction, Harper & Row had been known as the quality nonfiction house. Cass Canfield had liked history and biographies and so had shaped a dignified, cohesive list. At Doubleday it had been commercial fiction and non-fiction. For three decades, Doubleday ruled the bestseller list. That was what it did best.
But those days were over, Gerald reflected. Publishing had changed so much. Now all everyone wanted were bestsellers. Roger Straus had sold his firm. Harper was bought by Rupert Murdoch, and HarperCollins had expanded in half a dozen directions. Doubleday was now a part of the Bertelsmann empire. The tax laws had made it necessary: Even his father had sold out. The days when a personal influence held sway on a house, on a list, were over. Everyone had to scramble for bestsellers now just to keep in the business. Look at what had happened at Knopf—another house known for its great literary fiction: When Sonny Mehta had taken over that venerable firm, he acquired Dean Koontz! Gerald had to laugh, thinking of how all the snotty literary people at Knopf, so proud of their designer fiction, must have felt swallowing that.
Gerald was proud now to be able to say, “There is no such thing as a Davis & Dash book.” He wanted books that sold, that made a splash and that kept him afloat. Like the other sharks, Gerald had to keep moving forward, keep making visible progress, to satisfy CEO David Morton’s corporate lust for ever-increasing profits, a return on investment almost impossible to make considering the outrageous advances paid to authors and the quaint tradition of stores returning books.
Gerald surveyed the room. His eyes were attracted to the red hair of Joanna Coder, the head of the eponymously named Joanna Cotler Books, a bright face in the usual drab publishing party. Generally, Gerald avoided these affairs, but he knew Pam’s recommendation to “get his ear to the ground” was a good one. Still, did the women dress so badly because they were paid so little? Surely it was easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it was
