Photo by L. Carper |
Donald Lamm Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
Photo by L. Carper |
Page 6 of 10
A publisher has a love of books and that means working with authors. On the one hand there is the care and feeding of authors, and, on the other, the excitement of finding somebody who's not yet published and who becomes very well known because of his work.
There's no question that we all have our favorite authors. Some of them start very well known. If I were to put someone at or near the head of my list, it would be Dean Acheson, the great Secretary of State in the immediate postwar period. Mr. Acheson was simply one of those great public figures who also happened to be a fine writer. The best authors still, even at my advanced age, are writers who teach you something, and that is precisely what Mr. Acheson did. I think I learned more about how history could be presented by a participant through working with him than I could have known or discovered by reading books about this. And I think the same pertains to many of your authors, with whom you spend a lot of emotional time as well as a lot of clock time.
You must have to have the patience of a god and nerves of steel.
Well, the patience of a god -- yes. Nerves of steel -- I might challenge that. If you look at the prefaces of most books these days, there is the obligatory bow to one's editor by the author. And the attribute most commonly given to the editor is patience. Now, that says something about the limited contribution many editors make. In other words, they are paymasters and they have been patient, doling out this money and waiting for the manuscript to arrive. But I think that sometimes it does go deeper. I worked with a psychologist and I can honestly say that I became an amateur analyst or psychoanalyst in the process. Once a week I would allow 45 minutes for a phone conversation with this man, because I discovered that was how long an analyst's session lasted. It took 15 years but we pulled out one of the most successful psychology textbooks ever written, and it was mainly this kind of verbal hand-holding, if you will, that worked because the author was caught in these tremendous mood swings. He also had many other things to do besides write the book, but he never knew for sure whether his reputation as a great teacher of psychology would translate into print.
So in a way you're saying that this ideal, which is the ideal of a Maxwell Perkins and the writers that he worked with, is still in some ways a reality at firms like Norton.
It is alive, it's not always well. Mr. Perkins' perhaps best known, pithiest, remark was "the book belongs to the author." And I think those of us who still believe that there is a craft of editing follow that precept. In the end, the notion that an editor has played on the same playing field as an author is true only in the case of very artificial books, books that are essentially concocted rather than written.
You wrote in one of the pieces that I read that you once figured the odds of a manuscript coming through the transom to a mainstream publisher and getting published is one in 6,000. Is it still that difficult? Is it even more difficult these days?
That, of course, is a rough figure but I would stand by that. In some publishing houses a manuscript, as we say, "over the transom" doesn't even get looked at. It is returned with a note that simply says, "Please, if you are interested in our considering this, resubmit as a letter not more than a page and a half in length." So many authors are thoroughly discouraged at that moment. The selection process more and more has depended on authors being represented by agents. To give you a very concrete and numerical statement on this, when I became president of the firm in 1976 I started keeping what I called a "fever chart," and that was the percentage of books in a Norton trade catalog, our general catalog, that came to us from agents. The percentage in 1976 was 35 percent. Perhaps I can ask you to guess what it is today?
I'm afraid to guess, but 70 percent?
That's very close, a little on the low side: 75 - 76 percent. Now that means that there has been a filter ahead of the publisher. You had mentioned the gatekeeping function, and I do talk about this and write about it, but in a sense agents proceed us as gatekeepers. And if you are an author and you can find your work taken on by a leading agent, of whom there are perhaps 50, not more, you could place a pretty good bet on that manuscript becoming a book.
Are there negative consequences of this emergence of an intermediary between authors and publishers?
Yes. I think the nurturing roles which you raised often goes from the publisher to the agent. The agent becomes, in many cases, the true mentor, the healer of wounds, the person who prods the publisher to do well by the author's book. Now there are some agents, I would say, who simply take the money and run. The authors sign up with them knowing that once the contract is arranged the agent will be off finding some other big deal. But there are also agents, and neither time nor discretion will permit me to name them of course, agents who are really editors playing a slightly different role.
So what is your advice to budding authors who have to navigate this maze to make it? Does this new environment offer any recipe for survival and success?
It really depends on the degree the author counts on her writing sustaining her through life. The truth of the matter is that the average full-time writer, or would-be full-time writer, earns only $6,000 a year. So you can't really give a recipe here. Clearly if you have an academic author, the first thing that person should look for is his or her academic standing -- will this book enhance my reputation, enhance my scholarly appeal if you will, in the immediate marketplace of the university?
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