March/April 2014
Michael Szczerban
State:
New York
The publisher of her eponymous imprint at Penguin Random House, Amy Einhorn discusses her early days as an assistant at FSG, the importance of titles, and how she pushes her authors to make their books the best they can be.
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There was a time, decades ago, when the mark on the spine of a book told a reader something real about the publisher. That was back when you could look up Simon & Schuster’s address, for instance, and send a letter to Dick Simon or to Max Schuster. Today, most of the venerable names one associates with a publisher’s logo have nothing to do with the person who edited or published the book. Both Simon and Schuster are long dead, as are Charles Little and James Brown, James and John Harper and William Collins, Charles Scribner (and his sons), Alfred A. Knopf, and Messrs. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.
It’s different for editor and publisher Amy Einhorn, who is alive and well as the head of Amy Einhorn Books, an imprint of the Penguin Random House division G. P. Putnam’s Sons (also deceased). She started her eponymous imprint in 2007 and published its first title, Kathryn Stockett’s No. 1 best-seller The Help, in 2009. Since then, the novel has gone on to sell millions of copies.
Still, what difference does the name of an imprint make? I’ve never chosen to buy a book solely based on the logo on its spine. As a reader, my loyalty is never to the publisher but rather to authors and their books. But many readers do seek out the books published under Einhorn’s imprint specifically because they want to read what she publishes. In fact, I’ve wanted to speak with Einhorn ever since I came across an Internet phenomenon called the Amy Einhorn Books Perpetual Challenge—in which readers who noticed that they liked several of Einhorn’s books decided to read everything she publishes—which upends the conventional wisdom about the importance of an imprint’s brand.
Einhorn is known as a demanding editor who seeks out diamonds in the rough and puts her authors through the time-consuming and difficult work of turning a stone into a jewel. After graduating from Stanford with a degree in creative writing, she began her career as an assistant at FSG in 1990, and worked at Villard, Poseidon Press, and Pocket Books before becoming the editorial director of Washington Square Press, and then the hardcover editor in chief at Grand Central Publishing. In addition to Stockett, the authors published by Amy Einhorn Books include Sarah Blake, Eleanor Brown, Harry Dolan, Lyndsay Faye, Siobhan Fallon, Alex George, Jenny Lawson, Liane Moriarty, Neil Pasricha, and M. O. Walsh.
Let’s begin from an oblique angle. I’ve read that you watched a lot of television growing up.
It’s true. [Laughs.] My husband says that he’s never met someone who likes television as much as I do.
So how did you form a love for books?
I was a socially awkward kid, and in books I found my tribe. One great thing about reading is that though it is a very solitary activity, you keep coming back to it because you find a connection there. I didn’t feel like I fit in, and books provided a place where I wasn’t alone.
Which books influenced you?
It’s funny. My seven-year-old had that light switch turned on in the last couple weeks. It’s so neat to see. Before then, we could not get her to read.
I brought her to the Scholastic book fair at her school. There were all these biographies of Amelia Earhart and Michelle Obama, and I told her that I remembered being in second grade and reading the biographies of Chris Evert and Billie Jean King. When I was really little, I loved James and the Giant Peach.
I was probably one of the worst-read, in terms of classic literature as a kid. I did not go to a great school system or anything like that. I do remember being in my early twenties and loving this book by Norman Rush, Mating. I remember thinking, “This is life’s truth right here.”
The insights you could find nowhere except inside a book.
Where you’re just like, “Oh my gosh, that’s it. Someone articulated what I’ve been thinking, but I didn’t even know I was thinking it.” But I didn’t have a single “The Catcher in the Rye changed my life” kind of book at an early age.
Where did you grow up?
In Rockaway, New Jersey, where no one you’ve ever known lives. It was not one of the New York commuter towns; it was not a very cosmopolitan place. Not everyone in the high school went to college.
In high school, I did have an amazing English teacher in whose class I found my world.
And then you went to Stanford?
My undergraduate degree was creative writing, which was completely useless. I was very much the liberal arts student who never thought that she had to get a job. I never thought of what I was going to do after college.
What gave you the idea to work in publishing?
It was the classic reason: “Oh, I like to read.” Sorry. I’m shaking my head at that twenty-two-year-old.
What would’ve been a more appropriate reason to get into publishing? It’s usually not “I want a stable life and to make a lot of money.”
I was just naive. If you’re not in publishing and you don’t know anything about the publishing world, you think that you’re just going to sit in your office and you’re going to read all day. That’s different from a lot of what I do, which is selling.
When I moved to New York, I thought I wanted to work in magazines, but I realized that the only job I was qualified for was at a women’s magazine. I thought I would have a midlife crisis by the time I was twenty-six, because I didn’t really care about this year’s hemline. Then I met with an actual editor at Harper & Row. He told me what he did, and I thought, “That’s what I want to do!” He told me that he knew of a job opening at FSG, and he said, “I’m sure the salary I heard is incorrect.” It wasn’t.
I went for the interview, and I got there early, with my little interview suit on, and I went to the bathroom. At this point, FSG was at 19 Union Square West, and in the bathroom there was no toilet paper. I honestly thought, “I guess everyone brings their own?” I was so young. They had just published The Bonfire of the Vanities, and as only a twenty-two-year-old could do, I said with full hubris that I didn’t like the ending and that it was just too long. Somehow I got the job.
Who was the editor at Harper & Row?
I wish I remembered who he was. But here’s a fun story: I was put in touch with him by the only person I knew in publishing at the time. My sister had gone to college with this woman, a young literary agent. I spoke to her for five minutes on the phone. She gave me the name of this guy, and then I never spoke to her again—until eighteen years later, when she sent me The Help. Isn’t that wild? That’s how I met Susan Ramer, Kathryn Stockett’s agent.
Tell me about those first days as an assistant at FSG.
I worked for Elisabeth Dyssegaard. It was a place like no other place. I once did an interview, I think it was with the Observer, and I mentioned Rose, the woman who was in charge of the supply closet. Rose was as tall as this table, and when you’d go and ask for a new pencil, she’d look at your old pencil and say, “There’s still an inch on it.” But they were publishing Philip Roth.
I was earning thirteen thousand dollars a year. My parents were mortified. They said, “You earned more working in college than you will here.” I remembering thinking that if I ever made twenty thousand dollars a year I would be set.
Some people would be intoxicated by all that literary mystique.
I can’t tell you how far removed I was from that world. I was one of the few younger people who did not have a trust fund—I was cleaning apartments on the weekend. But it was an incredible place.
At the time, Michael Cunningham was publishing A Home at the End of the World, and I remember going to his readings and thinking, “This is the most wonderful thing.” I loved that book.
He didn’t know me from a hole in the wall, but I learned that he had gone to Stanford. One day I was at a movie, Misery, which is based on a Stephen King novel. I didn’t know what the movie was about—of course it’s about a fan who kidnaps an author—but before we went in to see it, I accosted Michael Cunningham and told him that I worked at FSG and that I was a big fan. We had a whole conversation about Stanford. That was unbelievable.
Was there a moment when you thought, “This is my life now”?
I had my publishing existential crises. There were two different times when I applied to law school and got in, and then deferred. But to my parents’ credit, or actually to their detriment, I never thought that I had to have a job where I was making money. I always felt you should do what you love. To be able to work on something like a Michael Cunningham book—what could be better than that? I mean, I haven’t ever, but still.
A theme common to many of the books you publish is that they come from an outsider perspective. Did you feel like an outsider in publishing?
Yes, which is funny, because on paper it’s like, “Poor Amy, she only went to Stanford, she doesn’t have the pedigree.” But in coming to New York, I had no network. I don’t know how much of that had to do with going to school on the West Coast, or that I didn’t come from a New York City family. But it was so foreign. I guess I have always had that sense.
I remember going to my first and only Paris Review party with a bunch of young people my age. I was like, “What am I doing here in George Plimpton’s apartment?” We went to a diner afterward and they were all talking about it, and I thought, “I’m not going to last here.” The irony is that all of them have left the business.
What happens as an editor matures? Did your tastes evolve, or are you even more connected to who you were all along?
That’s a good question. I went from FSG to Villard—from literary to commercial—and then to Poseidon, which was Ann Patty’s literary and commercial imprint at Simon & Schuster. She published people like Steven Millhauser but also Olivia Goldsmith, The First Wives Club.
Then one day I came back from vacation and everyone had been fired except for me—they forgot I existed. So I went to Pocket, and then I was at Warner Books [now Grand Central Publishing], which were both very commercial. And now I’m here, which I hope is a mix.
I was thinking recently about some books I published when I was younger. If I had done them at this imprint, I think I could have made them work. That’s one thing I found frustrating as a young editor: You’re constrained by your house and what your house is good at. If you’re at Warner, which was a great commercial house, and you get in a very literary novel, you likely won’t do as well with it as if you were publishing it somewhere else. And on the flip side, Warner would do much better with a commercial novel than someone else would.
I think my taste has been my taste all along, but being older, I’m a better publisher, and I know how to work the system better.
Tell me about working the system. An editor orchestrates a whole landslide of actions that you hope will result in the book’s success.
My husband would think it’s funny that I'm about to use this metaphor, because he’s a sports reporter and I really don’t know much about sports, but the editor is like a quarterback. Actually, the editor is the quarterback and the coach, because you’re calling the plays. You have a whole team, but the editor has to mobilize everyone.
How do you turn the feeling you have about a book into motivation for the people who will sell it?
The most influential thing I ever did in my career was to go on a sales call with a rep when I was a young editor at Warner. I was told not to talk, not to sneeze, not to breathe. But I saw how sales reps have to sell your book, how little time they have to sell your book, and how they’re selling your book in the context of an entire list.
When you do your launch presentation and you say, “I love this book,” that’s almost completely meaningless to a sales rep. Every editor loves the books he or she bought. I know only a small portion of what the reps are up against, but related to the perception that everyone thinks that editors just read, a lot of what I do is sell. I have to sell the book to my reps, to publicity, to marketing, to booksellers, to reviewers.
Amy Einhorn
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Let’s break down the groups you sell to. First you have to sell yourself to an agent and an author. How do you do that?
Oh, I hate selling myself to authors.
Well, now you have a reputation that precedes you.
I’m a very good advocate for my authors. I could talk you to the moon about why my authors are great. It’s harder to do that about myself. I can sell myself to an author in terms of what I’ll bring to the table and what I’ll do for them. But to say why they should come with me versus someone else? That’s uncomfortable. I don’t love it.
I’d like to think that now agents are sending to me because of what I’ve wanted the imprint to stand for. I’ve kept this imprint very small because what I bring to the table is me. I’m the person who's editing the books. I’m the person who’s involved in everything from the cover design to the flap copy to the reader’s guide. To me, this imprint is the best of both worlds—the attention of being at a small independent publishing house with the backing of a big commercial powerhouse.
Someone once told me that my editorial letters are very direct. I wasn’t sure what that meant. I do have a reputation for being someone who edits and who is quite demanding. Some authors don’t want that, and that’s fine, but then they shouldn’t be with me. But if an author is looking for that experience, I hope that agents know that I would be a good person to send to.
You’re known for finding a diamond in the rough and kicking the manuscript back until it shines like the jewel you wanted it to become. That’s a lot of work.
As much as it’s great when it works, it’s a total pain in the ass! [Laughs.]
Do you have to sell yourself on a project in which you're going to invest so much energy?
Those books are actually the ones where you can't help yourself. My favorite example would be The Postmistress. Not only did I pass on that novel originally, everyone in town passed on it. Sarah Blake’s sales track was not great, and when I got to page 100 of this novel, I knew I was going to reject it. But I read the whole thing. I never do that.
Then I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I was at a Riverhead sales conference presentation, and one of the reps got up and talked about how one of the books made them feel. I had this visceral reaction. I thought, “Oh, I just felt that. What was I reading?” It was that book I passed on from Stephanie Cabot. I went back to her and said, “Did you ever sell that novel?” And I had a very long conversation with Sarah. My first editorial letter to her was seventeen pages long.
Single-spaced?
No, I don’t think it was single-spaced. [Laughs.] We went through four crazy edits where we really tore it apart and spit it back.
In one part, there was this scene on the beach, and I remember saying to Sarah, “This is really strange! I don't understand this subtext between these two women—it really doesn’t make sense.” The book had gone through so many versions at that point. She said, “Oh, at one point, they were lesbian lovers!”
I never would have been able to buy that book anywhere else. Because to say, “Look, I know the first hundred pages don't work, and I know her track isn't great, but I can fix it”—no one’s going to say, “Great!”
That’s kind of what a young editor needs to do, though—take a chance on a book that other people might not see the value in, and demonstrate that you have vision and can lead an author to success.
I agree. The problem is with the way that a lot of the industry is run. It’s very hard for a young person to get past who they need to get past to buy a book like that.
In your editorial letter, how do you convince a writer to do the work?
I will never buy a book that I think needs work before I have a conversation with the author. I make sure the author’s on board. You can’t buy something and then say, “Oh, by the way, I need you to change the last third.” You have to be up front with writers. There are some authors who really want editorial guidance and some who really don’t. If they don’t, it might not be a good match for us to be together. So almost all the time, my letter does not come as a big surprise. We’re already in agreement about what needs to be done.
How did you learn to edit?
Well, your boss taught me how to edit. Jon Karp did.
Wait, really?
I was working at Villard, and Jon was an associate editor at Random House. That doesn't sound like much now, but at the time, if you got to be an associate editor at Random House, that was like saying you were the next big thing. And he was.
I interviewed with Ann Patty at Poseidon, and she had asked me to edit a manuscript. Even though I’d already worked for two people, no one had taught me how to edit. I had no idea where to start.
Jon and I had met in the elevator at NYU, where we were both in grad school. He sat me down and said, “Here’s what you do.” I still edit exactly how he taught me—I start off with the good stuff, and then my structural edit, and then my line edit.
I remember when I started at FSG, one of their spiels for why I would be paid what I was paid was that there’s no graduate school for publishing, so you learn through mentorship. If you have someone who's going to explain to you what's going on, that’s a really valuable thing. And unfortunately there’s too little of that going on now.
Ann used to walk around and edit. She would pace back and forth with a Dictaphone, and then I would type her editorial notes. That was wonderful. I learned a lot.
Have you ever tried to do that kind of editing—in the open air?
No way. I’m not nearly as cool as Ann was in her day. She was a genius about how she did it, and her comments were amazing, but I need to write it down. I used to edit on hard copy, and then I was doing it electronically. Now I’ve gone back to editing by hand and having my assistant input my changes electronically. Then I go back page by page to make sure they’re right, and to make alterations.
There’s something about editing hard copy that helps me say, “Wait a minute, I’m seventy-five pages into this, and nothing’s happening.” I don’t get that sense when it’s just text on a screen in front of me, even though I can look at the page numbers.
That’s usually how I edit, too. It’s incredibly time-consuming.
It is very time-consuming. But that second pass is important. It makes you react differently, once you’ve read the whole thing in context. You see how one thing was foreshadowing another, or how one of your comments doesn’t hold up, or that not only did you think something, you really think it now.
I type very quickly, and that can be kind of problematic—if you can just whip something off. If you edit by hand, you have to think more about what you’re saying.
What feeling do you want to communicate to your authors at the end of your letter?
Encouragement. Editing an author’s work is so incredibly intimate. You’re probably reading it closer than anyone else is going to read it, and your author has now spent a year or two or sometimes four or five working on it.
Jenny Lawson was doing a reading and someone asked her about the editing experience, and she said, “It was great! It was like I spent ten months creating my baby, and I handed it to my editor, and she said, ‘Your baby is so cute, and we’re just going to cut off its arms and its legs, and it’s going to be so much cuter!’” [Laughs.]
Authors rightfully feel like their books are their babies, so you have to be respectful. If I haven’t worked with someone before, I usually start off by saying, “You should know how I view this process, which is as a collaboration. But your name is on the cover and you have to be 100 percent happy with whatever is inside. If you don’t agree with these changes, we should discuss them; nothing is written in stone. But I do think these changes would make the book much stronger.”
At the end of the letter I want an author to think, “I might have a lot of work to do, but this is going to make the book better, and I can do it.”
What gives you the confidence to assert that the book will be better one way over another?
This whole business is completely subjective, and you and I can read the same book and have completely different suggestions. But it comes down to this: The author decided, for better or for worse, that she wanted to come with me. This is my vision for the book, and hopefully our visions align. That’s why we have that conversation early on, because otherwise it’s not going to work.
How do you know when you’re done with an edit?
You just get a sense. Sarah Blake is both the best-case scenario and a great example. She did four versions [of The Postmistress], and each version was getting better, and when we got to that fourth revision, I thought, “This is it. We’re done. She’s fixed everything.”
But there are other times when you realize that you’ve gone as far as an author can go. The book is not perfect, or where you might want it to be, but the author’s not going to be able to take it any further.
How do you conceive of your first presentation to people in the company about the book?
I’m competing for time and attention with so many other books just internally—forget about outside with other companies—that when I go to launch a book, ideally I want to have one or two quotes for it already.
I will also seed the company so that by the time I go to launch, I’ve had other people in the company read the book. Ivan Held, my boss, always says that editors are paid to love a book. But if Leigh Butler, who’s in my subsidiary rights department, gets up and says she loved the book—she doesn’t have to say that.
For instance, when I did The Help—I feel like I’m going to be an old lady and keep talking about when I did The Help—I had given that manuscript to a couple of key people internally. When I went to discuss it, Leigh and her department rose like a Greek chorus and talked about how much they loved the book. It gives a presentation extra validation. A sales rep might think, “Leigh doesn’t really get excited by a lot of books. She's really tough, and if she's saying she loves it, I should take a look.”
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Are you thinking explicitly of the six things the rep is going to need to say to Sessalee Hensley, the fiction buyer at Barnes & Noble?
No, I want that rep to get out of that meeting and think, “I need to read this book.” For the kinds of books I do, if I had just six things that Sess needs to know, the rep doesn’t need to read the book. I wish I had those books, because that would be great! [Laughs.]
I’m very conscious of how much the reps have to read, and I never take for granted that they’re going to read my books, even though they do. I want them to want to read these books. I hear all the time from booksellers who say a rep they trust told them they had to read a book. A good rep doesn’t do that all the time. They do that for the books they’re passionate about, and you can only be passionate about a book if you’ve read it and loved it.
Once you’ve launched the book, then you make galleys?
First we do RBMs, reformatted bound manuscripts, to send out for blurbs. I don’t like to send a plain old manuscript to someone and ask them to read it. That gives them a good excuse for them to say, “Send it to me when it’s a galley.” So I get these RBMs made, which is halfway between a manuscript and a galley. There are so many excuses for why someone won't blurb something. Why give them another excuse?
What are you writing to somebody when you want them to blurb the book?
My favorite blurb story is from when I first got to Putnam. I was publishing a collection of essays that I wanted to go to Richard Ford for. My husband is a huge Richard Ford fan, and every year he re-reads Independence Day. I had to read it to be married to him. So I wrote this letter to Richard Ford that said, “You don’t know me, and you don’t know my author, and this is basically a shot in the dark, but I have to tell you that you’ve actually played a big role in my marriage.”
I remember coming into the office and seeing a message that Richard Ford had called. I called my husband and was like, “Holy Shit! Richard Ford called!” And then Richard Ford sent me this letter, which said something like, “Usually when I get these requests for blurbs, I feel good about myself, and then I throw out the letter, because if you liked me so much you should have written when you weren't asking for a favor. But your story was good, even if it was made up.”
He ended up really liking the book and gave us a quote. I wrote back and said, “It wasn’t made up! I can tell you how much I paid for a first signed edition of your book for an anniversary present!”
But usually I find the blurb process incredibly time consuming and frustrating. It's frustrating for everyone. I was emailing with Jodi Picoult, and she was telling me why she couldn't give me a quote. She’d gotten literally ten galleys in her mailbox that day. The whole process is just bad for everybody.
Why do we have to entertain this process, which can be so nepotistic and ridiculous? Because we believe it means something to readers?
That’s a thing I’m curious about—if it does mean anything to readers.
It’s interesting that I don’t know this, and I don’t know if anyone knows this: how much the average consumer puts stock in those quotes. It’s amazing how little market research we do. My understanding is that blurbs are not as big a deal in Europe as they are here.
I remember when I published Good Grief by Lolly Winston and we got a quote from Anne Rivers Siddons. One of the people in sales told me that their account’s buyer had read the book because they loved Anne Rivers Siddons.
I view the whole blurb game on the bookseller side as, “Look, we’re going out with galleys and you're going to be one of maybe thirty galleys that someone’s getting that day. What’s going to make them pick up your book and read it over someone else’s?”
A blurb is a stamp of validation—“Look what Elizabeth Gilbert said about this book, it’s really worthy of your attention.”
Do you have direct relationships with booksellers?
When I was at Warner and then Grand Central, I didn’t. But then when I got here, really with The Help, that’s when I reached out to a lot of booksellers directly. It was an interesting cultural shift—that the companies were run differently.
I have horrible handwriting, and I wrote probably a hundred handwritten notes. Now, I have relationships with certain booksellers who I know and they know me. I think that’s really important. Again, why are they going to read a certain book over another book? They can’t hand-sell a book if they haven’t read it.
On the publicity side, are you involved in selling your authors to the people who you want to cover or review them?
You have to be very selective when you do that, because if you do that all the time then you're the publicist. Publicists have an extremely hard job. As an editor, you have to be very selective when you go to someone and say, “You should read this.” But I do it.
While the book is being typeset and the promotional plans are firming up, you’re also working on the material that you’ll use to help sell a book to a consumer when they see it on a bookstore shelf or an online retail page. What you think about flap copy?
At Warner, we had a department that wrote the flap copy, which is vestigial from being a mass-market publisher. It’s a marketing tool. But here editors write the flap copy ourselves.
With The Help, we did French flaps on the galley, so we had written the flap copy early. Then the day before it was due for the real hardcover jacket, I realized that our pitch was all wrong. That sometimes happens—your pitch changes and you realize, “This is the way I should be selling this book.”
Have you heard of the Amy Einhorn Books Perpetual Challenge? It’s a challenge to read every book your imprint publishes, put together by people who noticed how many of your books they loved.
I have. My husband brought it up the other night and my girls were agog.
What that suggests to me is not just that you’re publishing great books but great books that appeal to a defined, established readership. That the same people will like your books over and over again.
Oh, I hear about it when they don’t!
Are you trying to reach a particular person—like someone who’s doing the perpetual challenge—with the copy you’re writing?
The difference between being an editor and a publisher is that as a publisher, I’m keenly aware of how I’m selling this book, how I’m marketing this book, how I’m planning to make this a successful publishing endeavor. As an editor, I’m thinking very much about how this book speaks to me, and the passion associated with that. Melding those two perspectives is interesting.
With The Postmistress, we heard feedback that some readers were upset about the title. They said, “The postmistress isn’t actually the main character. The main character is a journalist.” But if I had called the book “The Journalist,” would you have bought it? No, because it's just not elegant. The Postmistress is. That was very much a marketing decision.
It’s nice that there are people who like what I’m doing, but I’d like to think my list is fairly broad. Look, there are worse problems than being known as the person who published The Help and The Weird Sisters. I should be so lucky if that’s the worst thing that happens to me. But I’m publishing Lyndsay Faye, who’s doing historical thrillers, and Harry Dolan, who writes crime fiction. These books don’t always skew to the same audience.
To think that I need to reach the same audience with each book would be courting disaster. They’re not all going to like the same books. Someone who liked The Help might be really offended by Jenny Lawson—I mean, Jenny is brilliant, but she’s not for everybody.
Plus, flap copy is hard for the same reason that when you go to the movies, you sometimes see a trailer and think, ”I don't need to go see the movie. I know exactly what's going to happen.” I'm always aware of how much you say, and how much you don't say. I'm thinking in terms of how I will make you go from reading this flap copy to walking to the register and buying it.
What makes a good title?
I can’t overemphasize how important I think titles are. When I’m reading a submission and I forget the title, that’s a problem. But they’re hard. I want people to walk into the bookstore and know what the title they’re asking for is, or to know what they’re typing into the search box.
This is a gut-level thing that is hard to articulate, but titles also connote something about the book. Does that sound like a small literary novel? Does that sound quiet? Does that sound like I’ve heard it before?
Have you ever had a problematic difference of opinion about a title with an author?
That hasn't happened. [Knocks on wood.] But take Siobhan Fallon’s You Know When the Men Are Gone. I take pride in being a very hands-on editor, but the only thing I did to that book was change the title. But I brought that up before I bought the book.
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What was it called before?
I think it was called The Wave. When it was on submission, the agent kept calling and asking if I had read it. I thought it was about surfing and that I had no interest in reading it. But it wasn’t about that. When I read it, I said I really wanted a title that had a Raymond Carver feel to it, and I think we did that with “You Know When the Men Are Gone.”
The only other time was with City of Women. When I bought that it was called something else, and David Gillham really wanted to keep the original title. I didn't like it, and I don’t know why I agreed at the time. As we moved closer to publication, I went back and said, “I would be remiss not to bring this up again. I think it would be a mistake to go with this title and we should change it.”
The first time you’re talking to an author, they don’t know you. Why should they trust you? I would like to think that David decided to change the title because by that point I had earned his trust and he believed it was the right way to go.
We can talk all day about marketing, but it comes down to this: Is the book good? That’s what I need to focus on.
How did you learn the lesson to always be up front and direct with your authors?
I never had an issue with something that really came back and bit me in the ass, but I do remember buying a book when I was a young editor for Washington Square Press—a collection from a writing group of men in LA who were HIV positive.
The woman who ran the group wrote an introduction, and I edited it. I was really young, and I was intimidated, and I didn’t do a heavy edit. She noticed and told me she thought I would have done more.
I saw her fifteen years or twenty years later, and I apologized. Of course, she didn’t remember that. But I remembered that I chickened out. That was a good lesson. It doesn’t matter how old you are. You are the editor of the book, and this is what your job is.
Did you notice that you were approaching or publishing your books in a different way once you started this imprint?
Yes. When you’re publishing on a big list, in a way you are publishing anonymously. People in-house might know it’s your book, but I feel like having it be in your own imprint is a much bigger responsibility. I felt like people were going to associate this imprint with me, so I wasn’t going to put books on my list that I didn’t love—or that I knew could sell even though I didn't love them. I couldn’t do that. All we have is our names. This business is all about reputation.
For example, I might see a partial manuscript in translation and think, “I can’t buy this because I don't know how the whole book is.” I’ve bought some books where I might be the only one who sees it, and it’s great to take a flyer on that gut feeling. But even though it might just be my mother who’s watching, there’s more of a spotlight on what you're doing on it if it’s your imprint.
Has your relationship with your authors changed since you established your own imprint?
No, I think I’ve had the same relationship with my authors that I’ve always had. Susan Jane Gilman and I were extremely close when I was at Hachette, and I am still close with her. The interaction between an author and an editor is fundamentally the same regardless of where you are. At least, it's always been the same for me.
What was the last really, really great thing that you read?
I hate when they ask this in the New York Times Book Review because sometimes authors will only choose dead authors. I'm going to sound like I'm not giving props to anyone living, but the first thing that comes to mind is that I brought Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s last year—I had never read it—and while I liked Breakfast at Tiffany’s, there was also this short story, “A Christmas Memory,” that was so amazing. That was actually the last truly oh-my-gosh moment. And I loved Where’d You Go, Bernadette? I thought it was so much fun, and spot on, and terrific.
Do you feel competitive with other people who have their own eponymous imprints?
No, I guess because I’m friendly with all of them. I think we all have distinct tastes. Or rather, we’re all in competition with each other regardless of whether someone has an imprint or not. I mean, Lee Boudreaux at Ecco doesn’t have an imprint, and Jordan Pavlin at Knopf doesn’t have an imprint, and they’re amazing editors. I don’t think the imprint is the barometer of anything.
Any editor’s list is a reflection of her personality. You talked about being an outsider, but in what other ways do the books you publish describe who you are?
The irony is that I’ve had all these Southern novels and I’m a Jew from New Jersey. Maybe my list describes me in that the books are so different from my experience. Siobhan Fallon is writing books about families of the military, which is as far from my experience as possible. Eleanor Brown’s The Weird Sisters takes place in a small college town, and I grew up as far from academia as you possibly could.
Do you want the books you publish to be reflections of you?
I don’t. That may sound strange coming from someone who has an eponymous imprint. But this should not be about me—it should be about the authors. The reason why I have this imprint is that I believe it’s the most effective way to advocate for my authors. I don’t tweet, I don’t do any of that, and I was hesitant about doing this interview because I really don’t think it’s about me. It’s about my authors. I’m much more comfortable talking about them.
If anything, in terms of reflection, some of my books have a good sense of humor. That’s not say that I'm actually funny, but that I appreciate their humor.
As a reader or an editor, have any writers changed your life?
That’s a good question. I have such different relationships with my authors. I do meet most of them in person, though most of them do not live in New York. I might talk to them multiple times a day, but it’s through e-mail. In a way my authors’ books have all changed me, and I think that's why I'm publishing them. They are important.
My daughters were telling me that they heard people saying a quote from The Help, when Mae Mobley says, “You is kind. You is smart. You is important.” That’s neat, that those words have become part of the culture. The books I love tell a very particular story that may be far from my own experience, but there's something universal in them.
But that doesn’t quite answer your question. In a way, it’s like asking me to pick who's my favorite child—which, depending upon the day, I could tell you.
Have you learned anything about creativity from your writers?
Creativity is really hard. There’s a reason why I do what I do and why my writers do what they do. I can help them make their work better, and I can write well about what they’re doing in terms of flap copy and all that, but being the storyteller is extremely hard. It’s extraordinary to see people who can do it. That Liane Moriarty can write a book a year, and make each book better than the previous, is amazing to me.
What do you think about MFAs?
I’m on the record right now, right?
[Laughs.] You’ve said that your creative writing degree wasn’t very useful to you, and that most of your authors don’t live in New York. I would guess that most of your authors don’t have MFAs.
I think Siobhan Fallon does. M. O. Walsh, whose book I just bought is My Sunshine Away, has one from the University of Mississippi. They might be the only two.
Are you deliberately seeking out writers who don’t live in New York or have MFAs?
I’m not. I always look at the author’s bio last. If the author bio influences you one way or another, that’s a problem. It should be the work itself that speaks to you. For instance, I didn’t know anything about Kathryn Stockett until I finished reading The Help. I didn’t know if she was white or black; I knew nothing.
I don’t want to offend anyone in an MFA program, or graduates of them, because there are many wonderful writers with MFAs. But when I was at Poseidon, I saw a lot of precious, navel-gazing MFA-type writing with beautiful sentences but nothing happening in the stories. I had patience for that when I was younger, and now I don’t.
I do like the fact that my authors come from a variety of different experiences. Lyndsay Faye is a good example. She’s been nominated for an Edgar Award, she trained as an actress, she’s totally self-taught, and she’s an amazing writer. But she’s lived life. Before you go into an MFA program, live a little.
Do you go to writers conferences or retreats? Bread Loaf or places like that?
I don’t. Maybe this goes back to my “outsider” thing. I’ve never been invited to Bread Loaf.
You play a role in your authors’ financial lives simply by cutting their checks. Do you consider yourself a steward for their careers?
One day when I was an assistant at Poseidon, Ann Patty was out, and an agent called. A check was late and he was screaming at me, “Do I need to come down there and give you a fucking pen to sign the check?” As if I had any sort of power to write the check! When Ann came back, she said, “Did you tell him to fuck off?” I said, “No!” And she said, “That’s right, you can’t do that yet. You’re too young.”
So do I feel any responsibility for them fiscally?
When I kick a book back to an author, I sometimes do a little math. I paid the author X dollars as an advance, and the first draft took Y months to write, and the author has another job, or doesn’t….
My husband is writing a book for you guys at Simon & Schuster. I always knew my authors worked really hard, but being married to someone who’s writing a book while he has a full-time job gives me such profound respect and admiration for what they’re doing. I see how hard it is, and I see how what seemed like a lot of money really isn’t that much once you drag it out over how long it takes to write the book. If you break it down by the hour, writing a book is a horrible way to make a living. Therein lies madness, to look at it that way.
My job—in the big-picture, endgame view—is to push my authors to make a book the best it can be, because in the end, that will sell more copies. I remember being in a postmortem meeting once at another company. They had done a huge push with this book, and the book didn’t work, and they were going through it, asking why. They did TV advertising and all this stuff. Finally, someone said in a very small voice, “You know, the book wasn’t very good.” [Laughs.]
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Do you belong to a book club?
I don’t. My husband is in a book club, and I live vicariously through him. In my next life I want to join one. I wish I could—I just don’t have time. Vacation is when I can read for pleasure.
Many people describe your novels as great for book clubs.
I wonder sometimes if they’re saying it pejoratively.
Maybe. But those groups can get lots of people talking about a book. Is that something you think about?
Not really. We used to have this vision of book groups, that they’re made up of soccer moms in the suburbs. Now, my husband is in one, and it’s all men, and it’s not at all what most people think of when we talk about a book club. Publishers have realized that as much as we try to tell book groups what to read, those groups really pride themselves on discovering books on their own, and feeling that they’re the ones making decisions. But the flip side of that view comes when you see how a lot of book clubs are nonetheless reading the same book.
I don’t consciously think, “This is a book-club kind of book,” because I am sometimes wrong. I mean, I was surprised by What Alice Forgot, the first book by Liane Moriarty that we published. That became a big book-club book, and I wouldn’t have thought it would.
When do you find time to edit?
I usually edit on the weekends, because I can’t edit at night. I get really tired and find it very difficult. I have the best of intentions that I’m going to edit during the week, but that’s basically like saying, “I’m just going to go read in the office.” Uh, no.
My middle daughter once said, “Why do you have to go to work? You don’t actually do anything at work. You just sit there and do e-mail.” [Laughs.] She couldn’t understand why I was a little upset by that comment. The joke in our house became, “Well, Mommy doesn’t really do anything at work.”
So I’ll ask my husband to take the kids so I can edit. But it’s logistically hard when you have three kids to say, “I’m gone for the weekend.” Also, I’m a really slow editor. Last Friday I edited at home, and I got through a hundred pages, with a million e-mails in between. Then I eked out another seventy-five pages over the weekend.
What’s your reaction to the climate of change in book publishing today?
When I started at FSG in 1990—which, by the way, we would look at now and think, “Those were the really good old days”—everyone was saying the sky was falling. There’s a habit in our industry to say that everything’s always terrible.
Yes, there are challenges in our industry, and you’d have to have your head in the sand not to be aware of what’s going on. It’s definitely tougher—there are fewer media outlets, and so on. But there are more bloggers and more things happening on the Internet. It’s easy to get caught up in that noise. I just want to keep my head down and work with my authors and publish good books, and I know how to do that.
Maybe I’m naive, but I feel it always comes down to the book. Your job is to publish the best book you can possibly publish. And I’m not a believer that there are all these great American novels that are not finding their way to readers.
Have you made a decision over the last year or two that you wish you hadn’t made?
Goodness knows I make mistakes all the time. I think you’re not doing your job unless you make mistakes. Sometimes I’ll see a book on the bestseller list and regret that I passed on it. But the fact is I wouldn't have made it a bestseller. If I passed on it there was a reason.
Your gut matters. When I first started this imprint, I had a book in on submission and I remember thinking it was an incredibly hard sell. But I read it and I thought it was amazing. But I read it because I was paid to read it. Go with your first take on that.
So much of our business is based on relationships. You might get something in and think, “I love this agent, I really want to do business with this agent.” The danger is when that feeling colors your take on the project.
What skills are you working to develop?
I will always be striving to be a good presenter and to give the sales force and all the other departments what they need to sell a book. I wish that I had my final take on our copy earlier, because that ends up being a real process. It evolves, and I get there, but it would be so much more helpful if I was there from the start. And I'm always worried that I will miss the next Postmistress because it’s rare that I can read a whole novel despite wanting to cut the first hundred pages. That’s always the thing—am I missing that next great one?
Tell me about how you start working on a book’s jacket.
It starts with a conversation in which I'm telling the author that I’m going to meet with the art department. I say that I don’t like to tell them exactly what I think the cover should be, because if I have that skill, then I should be an art director, and we should let them do their jobs. That said, if you hate, I don’t know, feet, tell us that.
The only thing Kathryn Stockett said to us was that she hates the colors yellow and purple, and of course her cover is yellow and purple. But we did give her a choice, and she chose it. It's good to ask an author for the covers of books they think are for the same audience as their book. And I’ll also go to a bookstore or go online and look at covers.
Meanwhile, I’ll be trying to find someone who’s not the author that everyone else is going to for blurbs. I find that very time consuming. That’s why I’m not editing Sarah Blake’s last hundred pages!
How do you know that a jacket is the right one?
Sometimes the art department gives it to you, and you're like, “You’ve nailed it. That’s great.” But often it’s a process. With The Help, we did something like seventy-five covers. We had a different cover in the catalogue—and even for sales conference—we were going with this cover that I kept calling the dead baby cover. It was these hands, and they were holding a little baby shoe. I thought it looked hideous.
That was my first book here, and I remember going to Ivan and saying, “Look, I know we've done so many covers, but in my gut, I know that this is the wrong cover.” Ivan never gets mad, and he was very calm. But he said, “Amy, we’ve done more covers for this book than any other book I’ve seen in this company.” You have to choose your battles. You just know if it’s the right cover or not.
It’s really important to me that my authors like their covers—again, I feel like this is their baby. I love my art directors, Lisa Amoroso and Andrea Ho. We’ve been able to take our work out of a big committee meeting. It’s just the three of us working on the cover until we feel like we’ve gotten it to a good place.
I remember being at other companies where people would reveal the cover and either everyone would just ooh and ahh, or there would be a weird silence, when everyone’s trying to figure out how to nicely say that it’s not working. It’s hard to talk about covers. I can tell you what I don’t like, but it’s harder to say what is working.
You saw seventy-five covers for The Help. What did you show to Kathryn?
We showed some of them to Kitty. But as a first-time author, she was so great about saying, “You guys know what you're doing”—even if we didn’t at some points. [Laughs.] In the catalog, actually, the cover was a little girl’s dress on a clothesline. When we did the cover we ended up going with, we heard some feedback from booksellers that they liked the other cover better, and that they would take more copies if we went with that one. It's all so subjective. Who’s to say what’s a good cover and what’s not?
But someone has to decide.
Someone does have to decide. I remember talking to an art director once about one of his company's books that was a huge bestseller. He said, “It’s actually not a very good cover. But the book worked, so in retrospect, everyone thinks the cover was great.” There's some Monday-morning quarterbacking. If a book doesn't work, we blame the cover, and if the book does work, we say it’s a great cover.
Eleanor Brown’s The Weird Sisters is a good example. When that book went into paperback, there was a lot of pushback. People wanted three sisters on the cover. I really resisted, because I thought it would look not only like chick lit, but like every other chick lit book. The cover we used doesn’t have people or that human warmth, but it’s gorgeous and different and arresting. It’s not as if I can say definitively that this is the right cover. But in Eleanor’s case, it worked out well.
How involved do you get with your paperbacks?
I'm the editor of all my paperbacks, except for Harry Dolan. Tom Colgan is the editor for him at Berkley, because Tom is the master of that kind of book and he brings so much to the table. But I came from paperback publishing, so it was foreign for me not to be the editor of my paperbacks. In this day and age, I’m format-agnostic. I don’t really care what format you read the book in.
Every editor has had their heart broken at some point. What about you?
There are some great books that I look back on that didn’t work—not on the merits of the book, but as a result of where I was in my career, my ability to champion them effectively. In a way, every book is a heartbreak if it isn’t successful. You work on the books that aren’t successful as much as or more than the books that are successful.
Are there signals in the lead up to publication that indicate whether a book will be a success?
I don’t take anything for granted now. I’ve had books that were number one Indie Bound picks that didn’t work, and the first two booksellers who responded to The Help hated it with a passion.
I’ve been getting great feedback for this novel Troika, and the author, Adam Pelzman, asked me how much he should read into it. I said he should be cautiously optimistic. I wish you could say that if you get this one thing, it’ll turn into this other thing, but you never know. If we could make a book successful just by crossing off A through Z on a list, we’d all do it.
What distinguishes you as an editor?
I think the main reason I’m here is for my taste. I can sniff out books that might not be the most obvious, and for whatever reason, make them work. Liane Moriarty is an author whose first two books were published as trade paperback originals by HarperCollins, and her track wasn’t great. And I thought that she was terrific, and that she should be bigger—that we could publish her in hardcover. That’s not rocket science. But I feel as if I’m here because I have an eye for books that other people seem to respond to.
What’s the most important thing you do after you acquire a book?
I’m a complete pain in the ass to everybody. [Laughs.] Whether it’s the authors, or publicity, or the art department. If you ask my assistant, she would say that too. I worked really, really hard to get where I am, and I expect that level of effort from everybody involved in the book.
What does an agent do after you acquire a book that helps make its publication more successful?
I'm a big believer that we’re working together as a team. I copy my agents on pretty much everything I send to my authors. Frankly, I want them to know how hard I'm working on their books. I want them to send me more stuff, and I want them to know what's going on because they might say, “Oh, you’re sending this to so and so? I happen to know that person.”
Some agents sell you the book and that's the last you hear from them. They’re just happy to be kept in the loop, and they’re not doing much. There are others who really want to be involved. I have one agent who had really strong feelings about the trim size. Recently we had a lengthy conversation about the pub month within the season. And you know what? That’s great, because he brings a lot of experience to the table. I can learn from that. Why not use that wealth of collected experience in publishing a book, rather than just what I think?
I would never do a book without an agent. They’re so valuable. They’re very good at being a buffer, in terms of the financial conversations an editor shouldn’t be having with the author, but also in terms of having another voice explaining to the author, “You know what, Amy’s right”—or explaining to me that I’m wrong.
You’ve described your imprint as the sweet spot between literary and commercial storytelling. But I haven’t heard you mention voice.
Actually, I think I would choose voice over story, if I had to. That is not necessarily a good thing, but I’m a sucker for a really strong voice.
Is the writer’s voice what helps you see potential in a book that you might otherwise pass on? The thing that gets you past the first hundred pages of plot that you want to discard?
Eleanor Brown’s The Weird Sisters is a good example. When that came in, the story wasn’t as strong as it could be, but she had this amazing first-person-plural voice. We talked on the phone before we were working together, and she asked, “What do you think of that? I’ve spoken to another editor, who wants me to change that.” I said, “I don’t care who you end up going with, but just promise me you won’t change that, because that’s the book.” I can help somebody with the story, but I can’t create a voice. I can’t teach that, and I can’t fix that.
What’s your favorite part of working on a book?
It’s that trite “being the first person to discover it” thing. As much as I think of myself as an incredibly pessimistic person, editors are eternal optimists. You always think, as you read through submissions, that the next one could be it. In a way we’re all addicts. We’re all hoping for that next fix.
I started my imprint in the summertime, and the summer was dead. I wasn’t getting any submissions I liked. I thought maybe I was being too picky, but then I got The Help. It was the same thing as when I was dating: I’d think, “Maybe I’m just being too picky.” But then I met my husband, and I realized, “No, this is what it’s supposed to be like.” That’s kind of how being an editor is. You can read something and be concerned tha