The Bad, the Good, and the Eternally Relevant

In many years in the book business, I’ve heard it all: so-called “literary” fiction can’t make money. Novels are dead, killed off by high-quality streaming and cable. Independent bookstores will never survive Amazon’s dominance.

Oh, and remember the e-book “revolution?” It came—and then it went.

Yes, we work in a notoriously low-margin, fear-filled business; but negative thinking, in a pandemic or not, can create a self-reinforcing sinkhole. And sometimes so-called common wisdom is just plain wrong.

I pondered all of this after a recent lunch with one of my first bosses in publishing, Kathryn Court, who just retired after over forty years at Penguin, where she greatly boosted the marketplace visibility of the little orange bird, and did it in style, with a keen sense of packaging and a firm commitment to quality writing.

Given her innate British reserve and an aversion to self-promotion, she may not have achieved the same “profile” as more flamboyant leaders in the book trade; but she published a slew of good writers over the years, notably Nobel Laureate JM Coetzee, and more recently in 2019, Rebecca Makkai’s The Great Believers, an epic of the AIDs epidemic, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for fiction. And she steered Penguin with invention and agility through changing corporate ownership.

I began as Kathryn’s assistant, answering the phone and performing what were in truth secretarial duties. At the time, Penguin U.S. simply imported titles from England; editorial meetings consisted of tallying orders from all over the globe so our British cohorts could achieve feasible print runs. Slowly but surely, first under Richard Seaver and then Kathryn, Penguin began to publish original material as well as reprint American hardcover titles, especially after the company merged with the Viking Press.

In eight years working with Kathryn, I learned all I needed to know about the book business. First, it is a business, albeit with tight margins: ignore that at your peril, namely any chance to move up and earn a slightly better salary. But second, it also a calling: no one is in the book trade primarily for the money. Because books and reading are what you love, you power through the difficulties and the challenges—which are many.

Once I’d learned the ropes, my first editorial assignment at Penguin was to “Americanize” the measurements in a British cookbook in comic book form called Suzy Cookstrip. I was, and am, a lousy cook; but I pitched in eagerly, hoping to move eventually to fiction, my true literary love.

For decades, paperback publishing on both sides of the pond had been dominated by
the mass market, the same market that inspired Sir Allen Lane to inaugurate the
line of low-cost classics still so important to the worldwide Penguin imprint. Often
adopted for school use, the classics were, and still are, the backbone of the
imprint’s income.

I used to tell friends and family members that James Joyce and John Steinbeck
were paying the light bills. Third lesson: quality books stay in print, and
help subsidize the “front list,” new titles that rarely make money upfront—if
at all. Our young Penguin staff under Kathryn’s direction was eager to update Sir Allen’s
original vision by introducing excellent new writers in handsome trade paperback volumes, at price points accessible to those who couldn’t afford hardcovers.

At the time, trade paperbacks were positioned in the marketplace halfway between hardcovers and “airport books,” genre reads for the most part. The vast majority of trade paperback titles were backlist staples in nonfiction and self-help.

Publishing original fiction in this format, with its larger trim, better quality-paper, and a higher price point was a gamble. Trade paper originals never get reviewed, said the publicity and marketing staff. And they’re hard to sell because they’re more expensive and can’t be pulped, like mass market books.

We took the gamble. Kathryn’s inaugural selection for our new fiction series was a
slim novel by an unknown South African academic named J.M. Coetzee, set in a frontier outpost of an unnamed empire, narrated by an imperial magistrate fearful of the encroaching enemy—also unnamed. It was bleak, fable-like in its lack of specificity—and utterly compelling.

Now considered a classic, Waiting for the Barbarians was reviewed on the front page of the Washington Post’s book review section, much to the surprise of some of our Viking colleagues who’d wondered about the editorial chops of “the paperback people.” 

The Post also gave the front page to a later book in the series, The Broom of the System, by a twenty-four-year old, highly inventive new talent named David Foster Wallace, sponsored by our colleague Gerry Howard.

A few years back, I saw a new edition of Broom at a book festival, with the title and the author’s name spelled out in tattoo-like flourishes. The imprint had a new hipper look, and an obvious appeal to younger readers who hadn’t necessarily been raised on Penguin Classics in school. 

Though most of the titles I sponsored in our fiction series were reprints like Dog Soldiers by Robert Stone, Ray by Barry Hannah, and The Women of Brewster Place by Gloria Naylor, I’d learned enough about the paperback fiction market by then to move on to a new position editing a competitive series at Random House’s Vintage.

Now after over four decades at Penguin, Kathryn had decided to move on, too. Few publishing executives dedicate that many years to one company. For a catch-up lunch, she offered to come to my neighborhood in Queens: “It’s time to broaden my horizons,” she joked.

After a delicious Indian meal at a local restaurant, we repaired to my apartment, where I found myself reporting on life as an indie editor for the past couple of decades—as if demonstrating to my former mentor that I was still honoring what I’d learned at Penguin about a lasting commitment to quality, as well as ways to innovate in the book trade. . 

But I was really struck, I told her, by the numbers I’ve seen for even popular and prize-winning fiction in the past few years. How could the business keep going, especially with demanding corporate owners?

“Well,” she pointed out, “it’s never been easy to sell books. But with the data now available to the sales and marketing people, you can actually sell a lot more of a certain kind of book.”

It was typical Kathryn: practical in acknowledging the difficulties of the business yet injecting an optimistic note. As the conversation veered off in more personal directions about post-retirement life, I didn’t press her for more specifics. 

I recalled her comment when I opened the New York Times this week. “An Ever-Expanding Understanding of the Canon” detailed robust sales for recent reissues of overlooked books, some by formerly marginalized writers. And I remembered the way Kathryn spoke with respect and admiration for Elda Rotor, the current Penguin Classics editor frequently cited in the Times piece.   

Elda Rotor is trying to expand what’s considered a classic, incorporating horror, science fiction, and fantasy, as well as unearthing overlooked works by Asian-American, Caribbean, and African writers. The little orange bird now adorns new series like Penguin Vitae, which just reissued a new edition of the feminist classic The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.

William Maxwell, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis, edited one of Rotor’s
reissued classics, Claude McKay’s Romance in Marseille. He observes: “Canons don’t come down from God. They’re shaped by sociology.”

And the way publishers expand the meaning of the canon—the way they present books to readers in general—requires not only ever more innovation, and but also open-mindedness to what constitutes a meaningful reading experience.

As layoffs hit the publishing industry in the midst of the pandemic, the doom and gloom that has always assailed the book trade is dialed up exponentially by panic about a recession already well underway. Many independent bookstores that just gained their footing as real community cultural centers, have been forced to shut their doors.

But just as writers will find ways to lead us through this downturn, and help shape the new world we’ll face after it abates, some and perhaps many indies will make it through the current collapse relying on a loyal customer base and a deeper and wider investment in online selling. The new platform www.bookshop.org linking readers with local independent stores, was established just a few weeks before the pandemic hit—just in time to extend a lifeline.

Will virtual author events and online discussion groups and other of-the-moment innovations remain an ongoing feature of bookselling? No one knows; but being nimble and proactive is the only way to respond to difficult circumstances. The head of Barnes and Noble just announced that the company will use this retail “respite” to upgrade the stores physically—long overdue.

Both book publishing and selling have always posed challenges: those who meet them
in the current chaos will reap rewards in the future.  

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