Authors, if you ever feel that publishers are your last rocks and refuges in the Amazon Apocalypse; politicians, if you ever felt moved to listen to another copyright extension or DCMA lobbyist; booksellers, if you ever felt that the big guys had your back – read on below. Because Daniel Menaker bares all, in [easyazon-link asin=”0547794231″ locale=”us”]My Mistake: A Memoir[/easyazon-link], published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. It’s not a pretty sight, I warn you. But having committed the mortal sin of working in not just one publishing company, but several, he at least has, Dante-like, come back from Hell to walk us round its infernal circles.
Quoted at length in the Vulture section of New York Magazine– so appropriately placed for a work about publishing – Menaker’s memoir deals with his career at Random House and later HarperCollins in the late 1990s. “What Does the Book Business Look Like On The Inside?” his article asks, and it’s a proctologist’s view.
Menaker’s anecdotes give example afer example of, well, typical book business behavior. Take this extract about a medical author who he has spotted and nurtured to the point of signing a deal:
On the morning of the closing, Gawande calls me because he wants to work with me but has heard from his agent that the acquisition will go to someone else. “I don’t want this to happen,” he says. I tell him that I am trying to get more money. Five minutes later, the agent calls and says, “I understand that Atul called you about the situation with his book.”
“Yes, he did—his book which I have been encouraging him to do for a couple of years now, and which I don’t want to lose.”
“Well, he didn’t have the authority to call you,” she says.
“That’s funny—that word has the word author in it,” I say.
Or Menaker’s boss at Random House trying to persuade him not to leave for HarperCollins:
“And we gave you a bonus for Primary Colors.”
“Well, no, actually, I never got a bonus for that.”
“Really?”
“Really. I was so ignorant that I didn’t know that I might have gotten a bonus for that.”
“I was sure you got a bonus. I’ll have to look it up and see what happened.”
Anyone who has known the cut-throat world of investment banking will recognize the similarities. There’s the same competitive edge, the same disregard for other people’s rights, the same noisy, brittle arrogance. Investment bankers build their fat fortunes by playing with other people’s money; publishers play with other people’s works.
Sadly, no inside track here on the Apple price-fixing affair. Or Author Solutions.Or the other passages of glory that publishing’s more recent engagement with ebooks has brought. I guess we’ll have to wait for another generation to hear from those debacles, because clearly things haven’t changed a bit.
“When it comes to corporate life, especially at its higher altitudes, factors of all kinds tend to get tangled up with each other. And it’s impossible to untangle them, and pointless, and fruitless, to try,” Menaker. Corporate life. Higher altitudes. Doesn’t that sound all what the book business should be about?
