September/October 2015
Michael Szczerban
State:
New York
Dawn Davis—vice president and publisher of 37 INK, an imprint of Simon & Schuster’s Atria Publishing Group—talks about editing Edward P. Jones, the lack of diversity in publishing, and what some of the most successful authors have in common.
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The business of books is full of puzzles, and this is one of them: How do you reduce an entire lifetime of interests into a single sound bite? Editors are often asked what kind of books we are looking for by writers we meet at conferences, agents we’re seeing for lunch, distant relatives over the holidays. It’s a simple question that deserves a straightforward response, but I always have trouble answering in a quick sentence or two. As far as I can tell, the books I love best might have only one thing in common: me.
Some editors readily commit to a single genre, such as business or crime fiction or food, but I am most curious about those who hopscotch across the world of books to find readers of all kinds.
Editor and publisher Dawn Davis has that kind of roving interest and range. After attending Stanford University, she worked at an investment bank and won a scholarship to study in Nigeria. A chance meeting at a party upon her return led to a job assisting André Schiffrin at the New Press, followed by stints at Vintage Books and HarperCollins, where she became the publisher of Amistad. While at HarperCollins, Davis edited Edward P. Jones’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Known World; Steve Harvey’s best-selling Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man; Chris Gardner’s The Pursuit of Happyness; and Southern Cross the Dog by Bill Cheng, as well as a wide variety of other books.
In 2013, when Davis started a new imprint at Atria, a division of Simon & Schuster, she had to decide what to call it. In other words, she had to reduce her entire lifetime of interests into just one name. She settled on 37 INK, drawing inspiration from the line of latitude that connects California, Italy, and Africa.
Before our interview began in earnest, our small talk meandered to a shared interest in food and cooking, and Davis showed me a copy of a book she had written for Penguin fifteen years ago: If You Can Stand the Heat: Tales From Chefs and Restaurateurs.
I was going to ask you about this book!
There’s a story. While I was researching it, my friend Webb Stone said, “If you’re going to write about food, you have to meet this guy named Anthony Bourdain.” This was pre-Kitchen Confidential, so he was not yet famous. I interviewed him, and he said, “You can’t just write about it. You have to do it.” So I worked in his kitchen. Friday nights I would leave work around five o’clock. I’d work with him from five-thirty to ten, and hang out with his crew of crazy people afterward, and I had the time of my life.
I read somewhere that you once thought about becoming a chef. I once thought about it too. How serious were you?
At the time, I had left Wall Street, where I had worked for two years, and gone to work at the New Press, which was a nonprofit. I was making no money, and I couldn’t afford the things I used to be able to afford on an expense account. I had to figure out a lot on my own. I was always interested in food, and had friends who were too. After work we would talk about it, but it was a fleeting notion. The idea of turning a hobby into a career—I was already doing that with publishing.
I thought we might be romanticizing the notion of opening a restaurant—that it had to be a lot harder than we thought. So I talked to people to see what was really involved, and those conversations turned into a book.
Tell me about the name of your imprint, 37 INK.
I’m from Southern California, and I went to school in Northern California, so I claim the whole state from the desert to the wine country. My maternal grandmother is from Italy, and I’ve been many times and I love it—as of course most people do. And I’m African American, so I have Africa in my family heritage as well. The 37th parallel of latitude connects all three of these places that are near and dear to my heart, and mapped who I was without using my name.
Why not call your imprint Dawn Davis Books?
I’ll always want it to be about the authors, and I just wasn’t comfortable with that. But I understand why other people use their names; it’s easier. Once the lawyer tells you for the fifth time, “No, that name is taken,” you think, “Okay, I’ll use my own name.” I initially thought of Studio 37, but that was taken. It’s hard to come up with something original.
Where in southern California did you grow up, and what was it like?
I grew up in Los Angeles. Not Malibu, not the ’hood, not the Valley. Just real Los Angeles. It was a great place to grow up. I have friends now who say they’d never raise children there, because of the pressure to look or act a certain way. But I had a fantastic, almost idyllic childhood. I went to an all-girl high school and loved it.
What did your parents do?
My mom was a hospital administrator and my father managed a store. They were working class parents, but I didn’t know that. I just knew I had great friends and a great family, and went on lots of trips to the library every week with my mother. It was a normal American childhood. But I didn’t have a lot of exposure to people who were in publishing.
What were your aspirations growing up, and how did you make your way to Stanford?
When you’re from California, you’re told to apply to one Cal State school and one UC school, and depending on your GPA, to apply elsewhere. I didn’t want to stay in Los Angeles. I’m an only child, and my mom would’ve loved nothing better, but I was ready to spread my wings. Junior year of high school, I came to New York with three friends. We got rained on at a Diana Ross concert in Central Park, we were pickpocketed, and I left saying, “I can’t wait to move here!” I loved it.
I got into Stanford and UC Berkeley, but also Columbia. I wanted to come to New York, but my mom said, “Do me a favor. Stay in California. If you still love New York it’ll be waiting for you when you finish college.” And I did. I say I graduated on Saturday and had an apartment in New York by Tuesday.
My aspiration was about place, not profession. I didn’t know in college what I wanted to do. I studied international relations; Condoleezza Rice became a bigwig in the department. But to satisfy the requirements, I would take courses like The Russian Novel, because they dealt with something outside of America. I’d take economics, and then Literature of the Caribbean. Later, on Wall Street, I worked in the international division.
This was at Credit Suisse?
It was actually Credit Suisse First Boston—and just First Boston when I started, before they merged. During my two-year program there, I met someone who encouraged me to apply for a Rotary scholarship to study abroad. I wanted to study in Nigeria, where Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, and so many of the greats had lived. Three years after college I was living in Nigeria. It was extraordinary, but it wasn’t easy.
What was hard about that time?
I had romanticized Africa. In many ways Nigeria is fantastic. They’ve created some of the most beautiful art, theater, literature. But to be twenty-two or twenty-three there, having arrived without knowing a soul? It was tough. My mom said the most freeing thing: “If you come back, it doesn’t mean you’re a failure.” With that, I could take each day as it came and started enjoying myself.
Were you able to make excursions, or were you just studying all the time?
It was a lot of independent study. I would go to the library and assign myself books, and read them. There were often strikes, which is very much part of the African way of protest. There were strikes because the teachers weren’t making enough money, because there was no paper or books. Oftentimes there weren’t even classes. The real education was self-imposed, and being with the friends I made, seeing how they lived, how they often made something out of nothing. I met Soyinka’s brother, which was fascinating.
Not to be grandiose, but did you go to Nigeria and find yourself?
I think that’s right. And I met a publisher on the plane there, who published the African Writers Series with Heinemann. I said, “You get paid to read?” I could not believe it. That meeting triggered the notion that I could aspire to this profession.
When I got back from Africa, I was invited to a party where I met someone who knew André Schiffrin—who had just left Random House to start the New Press. I kept talking and talking to this person about publishing until I was introduced to André. I interviewed with him, and he hired me on the spot. Two editors had come with him from Pantheon: Diane Wachtell and David Sternbach. I was the first non-Pantheon hire, and I was to be his assistant.
What was it like?
It was fantastic, because he would create books on the fly. He would walk through Central Park dictating letters to people like Noam Chomsky, saying, “I know that you want to do X and Y, but I was thinking that we should also think about this other idea.” I would transcribe it all using that old machine, the Dictaphone with the foot pedal. I worked there for about five years. For two to three of those years I was his assistant. He let me acquire early on, so I received a 360-degree education.
What was one of those first books?
The first book I acquired was right after the Korean riots in Los Angeles, when there was tension in the Korean American community and the black community. I went to a discussion about it, and everybody was given exactly six minutes to talk before being cut off by the moderator. But there was one woman who was so spectacularly interesting that if the moderator had cut her off I think he would’ve been attacked. I told André about her, and he said, “You’ll find that there are very few people who can command a room like that, and who have something to say. You should reach out to her.”
That’s the best advice a young editor could have received.
The absolute best. Her name was Elaine Kim, and she was a professor and dean at Berkeley. I went out there, and she picked me up from the airport. She threw a Bob Marley box set into the backseat as I jumped in, and I thought, “I’m going to like her!” Her book was called East to America: Korean American Life Stories, and it was a book of oral histories about the immigration experiences of Korean Americans. They had been portrayed in a uniform way in the media but in fact their stories are very complex, nuanced, and different.
At the New Press I also worked with our freelance production person, so I got to know about that side of the business: paper weight and photos and the cost of adding various bells and whistles to a book. I was also the liaison with our freelance publicist, and learned a little bit about putting a press release together. It was an education that is hard to get in a big publishing house, working in just one department.
Why did you leave the New Press?
Ultimately, I was doing a lot of things. When I became an editor I also started selling our subsidiary rights. I had a lot on my plate, but I was young, and it was fun. I was working with a small, committed group of intellectuals. It felt a little bit like graduate school crossed with a start-up: Every day brought something different and interesting.
I got to know some of the other editors who were buying our paperback rights. One of them was Robin Desser, who suggested that I meet Marty Asher at Vintage when she was promoted to Knopf. One thing led to another, and I got an offer from Vintage. Marty took a chance on me and became a mentor.
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What did you learn at Vintage?
I learned reprint publishing. There is less of that now because of e-books, but back in the day I watched Cold Mountain go from a well-reviewed, successful hardcover to a blowout paperback success, and learned how it was done. I learned to trust my instincts, because we read so broadly, and also because we would read things in submission and watch them go from submission to hardcover to paperback. Sometimes there were lots of oohs and aahs, with people saying a book was going to be the next best thing, and you could watch, as you planned the paperback publication, what did or didn’t happen. I learned how many books are published each year, versus how many of them have the tools for a successful paperback launch. I learned how to recognize good writing and good publication.
Tell me about that time in publishing, when books that sold decently in hardcover could explode in paperback. How did that work?
Back when I was a paperback editor, and we’re talking in 1996 or ’97, there was a certain number that the hardcover had to sell before we could do anything with it. We couldn’t make a huge success out of 10,000 hardcover sales. But if a book had sold 40,000 to 50,000 copies, and it had great reviews and bookseller enthusiasm, we could work with it. You work from that base of readers in hardcover; they are like foot soldiers spreading the word. We could rejacket it, make great use of the quotes, maybe even solicit new quotes. You could just act as if the hardcover publication was one thing, and that you were going to go in a new direction.
Publishing a book in paperback reveals a lot about what every editor does—which is not just laboring over sentences, but figuring out how to make people pay attention to them.
Right. It all starts with the book. The book does have to deliver. Then, with Vintage, the track record was such that if we said, “This is our next Cold Mountain,” the machine was primed to listen. You have to do that selectively, but with a book where there is demonstrable interest already, with a nice base of readers and great review attention, you can get people to feel that they’re hearing about the book everywhere. Some prize attention always helps, but it wasn’t necessary. The big ones at the time were The Perfect Storm, A Civil Action, Cold Mountain.
You learned the mechanics of publishing at the New Press, and how to make a book a big commercial success at Vintage.
I also learned from André how to be entrepreneurial about creating books. I have to give him credit for that, because he did so much of that himself. From East to America and others, I learned how not to just sit and wait. With a small budget, we weren’t going to have all the agents calling, and I learned how to come up with book ideas of my own. That serves me well now—being entrepreneurial with my books, such as Steve Harvey or The Butler.
Another example is that when I had a sense that Obama was going to win the 2008 campaign, before it was obvious, I thought it was going to be historic for a community. Maybe for all Americans, but certainly for black Americans. I wanted to do a book called The Historic Campaign in Photographs. Initially the sales department said, “No, we don’t think so.” But the minute it became obvious that he was going to win, they suddenly wanted to. I learned that from André—to come up with your own books and not always wait for them to arrive in your inbox.
Ideas have to come from somewhere, so why not from you?
Right. The truth is, we spend so much of our time advocating internally for our books, making sure we have the right cover, the right subtitle, filling out forms and so forth, that we often don’t have time to be entrepreneurial. But when a moment of clarity comes, it’s fun to pursue it or to brainstorm with an agent about a client whose writing you really like.
Were you able to do that at Vintage?
I was primarily doing reprints and a few hardcovers at Pantheon, which were fun, but I didn’t come up with my own books there.
Was there a moment when you knew that you had found the right profession?
I’ve never really looked back since typing André’s letters. We get to do what we love, we get paid to do it, we get to champion works that we believe in, and even our worst days are, I’m sure, better than 95 percent of the working world’s.
Someone asked me the other day, “Do you still love it?” We were away for a weekend and I was working. I do. There are days when you want to pull your hair out. But I’ve always known how lucky I am to have this as a profession, and it’s something I don’t take for granted.
Would you tell me more about the challenging parts of your job? I ask on behalf of young people getting into the business. It’s not always easy.
Well, I hate to say it, but I’ve been riding a magic carpet. But sure, there are hard parts. Relative to peers who take jobs in tech or finance or law, you don’t make that much money. That’s romantic in the beginning, but it’s harder as you get older. It’s also hard if you want an outside life, because this work does encroach on your weekends, and on your vacations. And then working on books you’ve inherited and aren’t passionate about is really tough. Passion is what makes fighting for a book worthwhile, and frankly what makes it seem less like a fight.
You can feel caught in the weeds when you have to let people know you can read and advocate outside of your own background. To have people only think of you for African American projects—or, if you’re Latino, to only be thought of for Latino culture–based projects—that can be disappointing and exhausting. I feel that’s something I’ll always have to navigate. Some agents get it right away and have always gotten it, and others—well, maybe they do, maybe they don’t.
Then there are the books that you’re convinced are worthy of more attention than they received—and other books that have not been written with a golden pen, but do go on to be huge successes. You think, “Why didn’t my book get a fraction of that? It’s just as beautiful and just as moving, and the author is just as worthy!” We all go through that.
Having been the editorial director and publisher of Amistad for twelve years, I can say it’s tough watching where some books get shelved, or how a universal story can be bought only for African American accounts. When I published The Pursuit of Happyness, I begged for the Harper sales team—which was very receptive—to see it as a rags-to-riches story that is at the cornerstone of what Americans want to believe about ourselves, that you can pull yourself up by your own bootstraps. I wanted to publish it like that, and not like some book that you have to go to the basement to find in a dusty corner in the African American section. That’s been a constant challenge.
How did you land at Amistad?
I got the call when I was an executive editor at Vintage, and at first I said no. I was working on all kinds of books and didn’t want to be pigeonholed into doing exclusively African American content. I always advocated for it, I always published it, but I didn’t want to be limited to it. And they said, “Well, you can also be executive editor at HarperCollins, and you can do whatever you want to do there.” And I said, “But I really like paperback publishing, too.” They said, “You can also be our reprint manager.” I was so happy and so comfortable at Vintage, and I liked my colleagues and loved my authors. But I had run out of excuses. I thought, “They’re giving you everything you say you want, so you should say yes.”
It sounds like you accepted three jobs at once. How did that sort out?
At Amistad I inherited a bit of a mess and I had a lot of work to do. By the end of the first two years, I’d let the reprint piece go. I hung on to the executive editor piece, which was great, because I got to see all kinds of proposals and to work with my colleagues at Harper, but I spent most of my energy making Amistad a destination for authors and their books.
How did you set about achieving that goal?
I tried to take everything I learned from watching the people at Knopf and Vintage publish, and apply it to books about the black diaspora. I had authors from the Caribbean, black Americans, white authors writing about the black experience. I wanted to publish quality literature in a fine and, if applicable, commercial way. I wanted to bring prestige to the list.
People kept telling me, “You’re going to do street fiction, because it’s so commercial,” and I thought, “Nope.” Harper gave me freedom to publish books that I loved and that interested me. It helped that the first couple books that I signed up had some success. One of them, Austin Clarke’s The Polished Hoe, won the Giller Prize in Canada and became a Pennie’s Pick, which was strange but lovely.
You’re referring to Pennie Clark Ianniciello, the book buyer at Costco?
Yes. And then I published this young writer named William Henry Lewis, whose book I Got Somebody in Staunton was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway award. Early on we had books that people were paying attention to. I wanted review attention. I wanted agents to see us as a destination. And we were able to do that. Then, of course, there was The Known World. I got there in late 2001 and then we published that book in 2003.
What was it like working with Edward P. Jones?
It was a dream. The manuscript came in and it was nearly fully formed. He’s a beautiful writer and he knows his craft. He’s receptive to discussion around small points, but he’s very much in command of what he does. It was a privilege.
I remember when I first read The Known World. I was at a friend’s weekend house sitting outside, and I knew within the first five sentences that I was in the hands of a master. I thought it was my responsibility to take care of it, and that it would be an honor to be able to take care of it. And that’s basically what I did.
It’s inspiring when the quality of a book begins to pave its own way.
Yes, it is. It’s the vision of publishing that we all stay in the business for—that the work will speak for itself, and all you have to do is put it in as many hands as possible, so that it can go as far as it’s meant to go. Even the copyeditor said to me, “Thank you for letting us work with this material. I know this will be here long after I’m gone.” How often do you get a note of thanks from the copyeditors, who are overworked and underappreciated? I had support early on, and I had support all the way through.
I didn’t know that I wasn’t supposed to do this, so I went to booksellers I had been friends with for a long time and asked them to give me an early quote about the book. Then I went into a sales conference with those quotes, and told the reps, “This is what your own community has said about this book. I don’t want to hear that it’s a black book. This is a book of the world, for the world. Let’s publish it that way.” That was a real aha moment.
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Did you often find it necessary to have that kind of conversation?
My associate publisher and I felt it was important to help the sales reps frame the discussion for their customers—to talk to them about what was more universal and what was more specific to the community. Some books were for a black audience, like one called The Mocha Manual to a Fabulous Pregnancy, for black women who have different health risks in pregnancy. But my sweet spot was publishing black stories that were also universal stories.
I saw a Pew study about reading habits, from 2013, that touched on race. Sixty-seven percent of the Hispanic people surveyed had read a book in the past year, as compared to 76 percent of the white people and 81 percent of the African Americans surveyed. Do you have an opinion about why that diversity of readers isn’t reflected inside publishing houses?
Why are there not more people like me on the other side?
Right: Why might there be a dozen bearded white editors named Michael, and only one black editor named Dawn?
I cannot for the life of me figure that out. I don’t really know what else to say.
There is limited economic and geographic diversity in the industry as well, of course, and there are people who feel alienated just because they didn’t grow up in New York or come from wealth. But racial diversity? There’s even less.
I agree, and of course I might’ve felt some of that isolation you’re describing—even solely in terms of cultural references. If everyone else comes to the table reading the New Yorker, and you’re from L.A. skateboard culture, went to school in Hollywood, and didn’t grow up reading the New Yorker—there can be moments of “Do I belong at the table?” that may keep some people away.
Why aren’t there more people who look like me? Many black women have left and are no longer at a mainstream house. I can think of half a dozen in the past six years. Yes, I felt isolation, but just kind of powered through it. I’ve also had amazing mentors like André, who went out of his way because he thought my perspective would add value, and Marty, and I pay homage to them.
At Amistad I took great pride in knowing that the publisher, the associate publisher, and the publicist were three black women empowering our authors. We loved that.
I’m embarrassed to say it, but I don’t think I know any African American literary agents.
There are not many. Marie Brown has been doing it for a long time. She used to be an editor and she knows both sides. Faith Childs is a former attorney who’s been doing it for decades; she’s outstanding. There’s a young woman named Regina Brooks, who has her own agency called Serendipity. And the late Manie Barron went from sales to editorial to working as an agent. So there have been some, but it’s pathetic.
Sometimes I’ll go out to lunch with an agent and talk about, I don’t know, skiing in Italy. And then the agent will go out with some World War II story where a guy saves the day by skiing across Italy, and say, “Oh, I didn’t think of you.” But that agent will send me a black thing that has nothing to do with anything, except that it’s black. I find that frustrating.
We all get stereotyped, of course. I’m probably more generous about it than not, because otherwise you can let it define you.
What else happened at Amistad?
I was having my two children. I had the affiliation with HarperCollins, but didn’t buy that much for them; the Amistad list and my kids were my full-time thing. Later I moved to Ecco when there was some restructuring at Harper, and I wanted to be aligned with a smaller imprint. I think that with smaller imprints, you have more flexibility to support your authors. If one of the books is a mega-success, you can use that to get other authors in the door, whether it’s co-op spending with bookstores, or publicity or marketing dollars. I felt that it was easier to have those conversations within the context of a smaller imprint. That was in effect for almost two years.
How did you come to start 37 INK?
I’ve always had these great mentors. I started with André, then it was Marty, and then the early team at HarperCollins, where Jane Friedman and Cathy Hemming were very empowering. At Amistad they told me, “This is your ship now. What are you going to do with it?”
Then an opportunity came to work with Judith Curr at Atria. I felt that there were so many changes in the marketplace that I could stay and continue doing what I was doing, or I could go work with someone like Judith, who’s fearless and willing to innovate. I could ride her coattails into this brave new world where people are discovering books through Twitter and other things we don’t know about yet. I could stay put and become rooted in doing things the old way, or I could get excited about new ways to reach readers.
Take Twelve Years a Slave, for instance. I had read that Brad Pitt had wrapped that movie. I’d read about it two years before it finally came out, and I tried to get the official cover for our edition, but they had gone with Penguin. I said to Judith, “We’re not going to get the official one, but I can’t help but feel that this film is going to establish this book as the classic that it should be. I’ve read the book, it’s beautiful, it’s fantastic, it’s eye-opening.” Without blinking an eye, Judith said, “Do an e-book. Don’t charge anything for it, and have a note that says, ‘Learn more about 37 Ink’ in the back.”
We ended up charging 99 cents; if people really want it, they’ll pay, and maybe there’s even a psychological effect that you value things more if you pay for them. We put a beautiful cover on it and got an introduction from one of my Amistad authors, Dolen Perkins-Valdez—and we sold over 200,000 copies. We spread the word about the book—it sheds light on slavery in America, which I find to be important—but it was Judith who said, “Let’s do this.” Even if it were a failure, in Judith’s eye it would still have some value. That’s why I moved.
What else are you excited about?
I published Dear Leader, which points to the breadth I hope to establish for the list. It’s about a North Korean spy who, once he found out the truth about what was happening there, fled to South Korea via China. It’s a story about the North Korean regime, but also a daring escape story and a great way into this puzzling country.
In the pipeline I am particularly excited about Gathering Blossoms Under Fire, the edited journals of Alice Walker. I was thrilled to be able to work with Jan-Philipp Sendker, who wrote a book called The Art of Racing Heartbeats. I’m publishing his new books, which are set in the new China and explore the hidden costs, psychological and otherwise, of all the progress there.
And I love the author updates I get from the journalist Josh Levin, who is working on a book called The Queen. It’s about a divisive, mythic political figure: the “welfare queen” who dominated so much of the discussion around race and class in the politics of the ’80s.
She was mythic, but not in the way one might predict. She’s proof that truth is stranger than fiction and is one of the most singular and strangely compelling female figures I’ve read about in ages. It’s very dramatic. The author sends me updates from whatever archive he’s buried in and I love it. Did you see it when it was on submission?
I did.
It’s fantastic. I’m so interested by that particular story, because it reads like Devil in the White City meets Destiny of the Republic. It’s true crime with a pulsating narrative—there’s a serial killer in it—as well as a meditation on race and how it’s all a construct.
Another book I am excited about is Never Caught. It’s the story of Ona Judge, a slave in the household of George Washington. When she ran away from the Washingtons, she chose freedom over an elevated kind of servitude, and though the president knew where she was, and even petitioned the governor of New Hampshire to return her, he was never able to recapture her. People are fascinated by the founding fathers. This doesn’t disappoint.
What are you doing at 37 INK that’s different from what you did at Amistad?
What I’m doing as an editor and publisher is the same. I am trying to buy stories that I am drawn to and passionate about, because I have to advocate for them from the moment they’re acquired until a year after they’re on the bookshelf. The only thing that has changed is how I interface with the people who are more on the marketing side, being open to their ideas about social media and how we find our readers. But most of my work is the same: editing and making a book the best it can be, and then advocating for it.
What have you learned over the last couple years of running this imprint that you wish you knew earlier? About yourself, your authors, the role of being an editor or publisher?
I’ve learned that despite all the new bells and whistles, there’s no substitute for giving the bookselling community time enough to read a book and get behind it. I was lucky the first book out, with The Butler. I arrived here in April. By July, Wil Haygood and I had a bestseller. It helped that the book was short—under 100 pages of text. People could read it. But for a novel or a grand work of narrative nonfiction, people still need time.
Is there a set of traits common to the most successful people you’ve worked with?
Edward P. Jones is just a beautiful writer, and his success is all about the quality of the writing. Steve Harvey’s one of the hardest-working authors I have ever met, very shrewd, and surrounds himself with shrewd people. He was willing to travel far and work hard to make his books a success. Dolen Perkins-Valdez is very hardworking. She communicated with her audience; no book club was too small. She went to writing programs, conferences, met aspiring writers. She put herself out there and did what we ask authors to do, which is find an audience, communicate with them directly, make them feel like they’re part of your team, and then they help spread the word for you.
Despite all the things that we tell authors to do, there has to be a book that you want to recommend to five other people after you put it down. It starts with the book no matter what. Without that it doesn’t matter how much you tweet. You’ll get one wave of publicity and then it’s over.
The first successes at 37 Ink had a film component to them. Is that something you think about explicitly?
I just got lucky. I had read 12 Years a Slave years before the film came out, so I knew the story. A friend in the film industry saw an early cut and said, “I’s going to win everything.” It was in the public domain and the timing was right. I acted on my instincts.
The Butler was a little bit more of a risk because I signed it up before I’d seen the movie, though I had read the script. I thought the cast was great, and also I saw it as a small metaphorical story about a bigger kind of American journey. One thing that Judith has taught me is that it’s okay to take risks. I’ve really been kind of cautious, and that’s a piece of my education that was missing. Particularly in this environment, you have to try new things.
I used to take everything so personally. If something didn’t work I would be so upset on behalf of my author and on behalf of the imprint. But the old ways will not work anymore.
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When you started out, did you ever envision doing diet or self-help books?
Never. But I’ve done the Steve Harvey self-help book, and J. J. Smith’s diet books came to me through him.
I met J. J. last year and thought she was impressive. I wonder what authors of any kind can learn from her success, first as a self-published author and then working with you.
Her story’s interesting. Steve brought her to my attention years ago. She was sick, and traditional medicine wasn’t healing her, so she got credentialed in nutrition. She also trained herself in media—she spent money on herself—which is a good example of an author investing in and believing in herself. I liked her hustle.
I’d had a conversation three or four years ago about her coming in, when she was self-publishing, and she said, “I’m having so much fun on my own. It’s working for me. Why would I give a publisher a share?” And then she got so big that she realized there’s so much that a publisher can do for her, and that she didn’t want to do it all on her own. We could get her into new outlets, and give her the kind of publicity she couldn’t get on her own.
That story reminds me of something else. Every once in awhile I’ll get a letter from someone who will have photocopied a letter that I sent to them, saying, “You reached out to me after I wrote this short story and said, ‘If you ever have something, please be in touch.’ Well, here I am!” Seeing your own letter is like being introduced to your former self. It does pay to be entrepreneurial. Sometimes as editors we are so overwhelmed that we want to reach out to the person who’s written a short story, or want to send a note to someone at a reading we were moved by, but we just never have the time, or we think, “Oh, I could do that, but I’ll never hear from them again.” It’s nice when it comes full circle.
Let’s talk about editing the books you publish, because you’ve done such a range. How do you conceive of your role?
My job as an editor is to help you fully express yourself as you intend to express yourself—to have your work be its full expression. Sometimes you, a writer, can get in your own way, and I can gently nudge you one way or the other, and say, “I think you intended to say this,” or “I don’t know if you know your character is coming across in this way.”
I remember a novel I worked on in which the lead character became less sympathetic with each chapter. It’s okay not to like the character always, but ultimately the main character has to be sympathetic for readers to stay with the book. Sometimes it’s pointing out those things to a writer. Sometimes it’s helping writers clear a path, or helping them find their way back to the voice they have 80 percent of the time when they have gone astray. Making suggestions, and being truthful—particularly so with memoir. To say, “This will be of interest only to you,” or “There’s something universal here—expand.” Or “I like this riff. It takes us out of the central story, so let’s stay with it for a couple more pages, and when we come back, we’ll feel gratitude toward the central story,” or “We want to be reimmersed in the central story.”
I have to channel the author. That is always the same, whether it’s narrative nonfiction, even a piece of journalism—though the work there is often more organizational—or fiction. What would you say we do?
One thing is that we help writers see what individual decisions mean in terms of their overall ambitions for the work. That process has value not because I’m a better writer, but because I’m a different human being. Receiving a book and then repeating its message back to the author usually clarifies what they send out into the world.
Absolutely.
I love a true collaboration, when the writer invites you to help make the book with him or her. That’s when the job stops feeling like a job to me. To go in that deep can be dangerous, though, because you need some distance to be effective. You’re a therapist, you’re a parent, you’re an employee, you’re an employer—and you’re all of these things at once.
You’re sounding like Anthony Bourdain talking about being a chef! Yes. There is that dance where a writer has to let you in and trust you. They all say they do, but they really have to mean it. But I do find that most writers are waiting for that feedback. They know when something’s not working, but it’s almost like they want to be told. They need someone to gently nudge them out of their own way. Ultimately, a writer might say, “I took 97 percent of your suggestions. There was this one part where I disagreed.” Great. It’s your book, and that’s absolutely your choice. I did get an affirmation the other day that was so nice. We all need it, whatever your industry is.
Where a writer said, “Thank you for spending three weekends in a row working on my book?”
Right. I had one memoir where the author took about 80 percent of my comments, and then there was the remaining 20 percent she wasn’t going to budge on. I said, “This is your story. I can’t make you. I feel very strongly about this, but I can’t make you.” And she was great. She said, “Wait a minute. I didn’t decide to work with you to not listen to you, and you didn’t get where you are by not listening to your own instincts. So let me sit with this.” That was a great moment, because we were both following our instincts, and it worked out. Still, there’s no right answer. It’s not like you get to flip to the end of the magazine and check if you’re right. But we do get to see if readers respond, and that is the key.
How connected are you to the marketing and promotion of a book?
I do find myself crafting pitches. I find myself organizing events for my authors. I find myself reaching out to people at magazines, in conjunction with the publicists I work with. We are increasingly called upon as editors to help with the pitch, to follow the author’s social media so we can come up with ideas of how we can use their platform to sell their book. Sometimes the only thing we’re not doing is taking the author photograph.
I was on the road with Dolen Perkins-Valdez after her novel Wench. I was going to all-white book clubs—you know, eighty people strong in suburban Connecticut. And then I watched her on academic panels related to African-American studies, and saw her Skype into African-American book clubs. I thought, “This book is really crossing cultures, and playing to different kinds of households. There’s a story to that.” And we pitched it. We got far with the New York Times, who kept saying they were interested, then nothing—and then tried the Post, which did a similar story.
Let’s put it this way: Nobody’s ever going to stop an editor from wearing an additional hat. No one’s going to tell you not to come up with an event where you can sell two hundred copies. So I do an event on Martha’s Vineyard called the 37 INK Literary Brunch.
Tell me about it.
I found a sponsor, and we bring three authors to the Vineyard, and we work with the independent Bunch of Grapes bookstore—it’s an opportunity to put books in front of readers. With bookstores closing, it’s harder and harder to get on their calendar unless you have a big blockbuster. That’s something I’m really proud of, because it was kind of scrappy—it was almost a challenge from an author, like, “Why don’t you do an event here?”
I always have one of my authors, but we now reach out to other authors as I’m building my list. We’ve had Junot Díaz, Nikki Giovanni, and Bill Cheng, who I worked with when I at Amistad.
What was it like to work with Bill Cheng on Southern Cross the Dog? I loved that book.
Bill is a very talented and confident writer, and the book was sprawling. He came in, and I remember saying, “You’ve got a little magical realism, you’re writing across gender, you’re writing across race, you’re writing across geography. You have a non-linear layout to the book. But just because you can do everything doesn’t mean you have to. Our job is to figure where to pull back. Ultimately, it’s your book, and I believe in your voice, I love these characters, I love this story—the bigness, the richness of it—but it needs some pruning.” I think that when Bill went around to see editors, everyone told him how much they loved the book. I felt a compulsion to be a little bit honest, and to find out how open he was to editing. He said, “I don’t want my ego stroked, I want real feedback.” I loved working with him. He is great; so young, so naturally gifted. I loved seeing what he could do with his craft.
He aimed high, and wrote outside of his experiences. He would say that the book is an homage to a type of music, the blues, that at some point in his life was significant to him. I don’t know that he would say that the blues “saved him,” but he wanted to pay homage to it with this story that came out of his imagination. I love it like I love The Known World. I love these books with these big acts of imagination. I wish there were more books like them. If that were the case I’d publish more fiction.
Who in the book business do you most admire?
I think the world of Robin Desser at Knopf. Fantastic instincts, great on the page, beautiful person. Anne Messitte at Vintage, supersmart. Reagan Arthur, working mom extraordinaire, great list, great instincts. I could go on with others.
Reagan is amazing. I’m sure you know that already, since you’re at Little, Brown, but I’ve known her for a long time and I will add this to what we said about diversity: There are very few working moms at her level. It is a job that demands that you are always available, always working, and, if you’re on a baseball field from eight to eleven every Saturday and Sunday, that’s a big chunk of your time. I admire her for that.
I love hearing about who knew whom before I got into the business.
Jonathan Karp, Edward Kastenmeier, Amy Einhorn, Molly Stern, Judy Clain, and I used to be part of something called the Young Editors Group. We would meet once a quarter at a restaurant on the East Side in a back room. I’m sure there were others there; these are the ones I remember. It’s interesting to see where we’ve landed, those of us who are still standing.
How did you remain standing?
One of the things I tried to do at Amistad was to always have something working commercially so I could publish my “smaller” books. I published a lot of story collections when I was at Amistad, but I would always buy them when something was working in a big way. I think that would be what my publishing model is—to have something big enough that allows you to take more risks on books you publish because of the review potential, or because you believe the author’s going to have a big or important book one day, or is saying something from a perspective that no one else is coming from. But you have to bring the publishing house something. Great reviews, great numbers, new audiences.
Michael Szczerban is an executive editor at Little, Brown.