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Geoff Shandler

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Posted Wednesday, Feb. 14, 2001, at 9:00 PM ET

At Little, Brown, Monday is for catch-up and Tuesday is when the week really kicks into gear. Tuesday morning we have the weekly meeting of the publishing board. The pub board (as it is called) consists of top people from a variety of departments—sales, publicity, production—and all the senior members of the editorial staff. We have each been given a copy of the proposals or manuscripts on the agenda, which we were supposed to have read over the weekend. The business manager has prepared profit and loss statements based on our best guessing about sales and how much money we'll need to produce and market the proposed book. At Little, Brown I've been lucky: I almost always get approval to go after the books I bring up in pub board. But you have to accept the fact that sometimes you're going to be the only one in the room who thinks a book is a good idea. I once worked with an editor who, sans a pub board, was consistently able to convince the boss to let him buy whatever he wanted. Then, once it had been acquired, the editor would instantly turn against it. He'd realize it would never earn back the whopping advance he had just paid and for the rest of the process he would ignore the author and the text, finding joy only in chasing down new projects in a truly vicious cycle. Once he was discovered curled up in the Random House stairwell, momentarily catatonic. Five minutes earlier he had sealed a huge deal for a book that would turn out to be so bad that it was eventually canceled and never published. He could have used a pub board.

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Today we were looking at only one project, a health book published some years ago that probably could use a little updating. The most interesting bit of information that came out of the meeting was that we were only allowed to advertise the book as "revised" if a minimum of 30 percent of the text had changed. We could use the word "updated" with a minimum of 10 percent. It's good to know these rules.

Almost all the books we consider buying come from agents. We're probably missing some gold amongst the sludge that arrives unsolicited from unagented strangers, but what can you do? I might buy one out of every hundred books agents send me, but in eight years I have never bought an unsolicited manuscript. Not that they aren't inspired. Autobiographies are popular, many of them proving that while life is amazing, most life stories are not. There are a lot of fantasy novels and romances. People rip off current best sellers and try to combine as many "commercial" elements as they can. I once got a novel titled The Gym about a band of environmentalist personal trainers who also happened to be werewolves. When they weren't eating people and dodging silver bullets, they were helping communities develop solar heating systems and better abs. Lots of people try to milk the fame of others with memoirs about sitting in the same seventh-grade algebra class as Robin Williams or about stalking Ally Sheedy. Other writers promise to reveal how the government has been spiking our water with catnip or that the residents of Uruguay are actually androids. I just don't have the time to even look at these things.

A lot of people go into book publishing because they think they'll get to read all day. What they don't realize is that so much of what you read is junk or simply not your thing. They don't appreciate that when you have to go through a manuscript four or five times during the editing process, well, that's four of five different books you could have read instead of the same book over and over and over. You learn to read a different way, too. I got hung up for a good day and a half on one word on the first page of Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient: "destroyed." ("Every four days she washes his black body, beginning at the destroyed feet.") Actually, years later, I'm still hung up on it. Sometimes I sit in my office and think about that word, how absolutely perfect it is, wondering how Ondaatje knew to use it and not another. Sports fans dream of scoring the winning goal in the World Cup final or hitting a game-winning grand slam in the World Series. My dream is simply to help publish a book with a sentence like that.

On the phone this afternoon, an editor at another house asked me if I was still excited about publishing. Absolutely, I replied, my enthusiasm is still there. Updated, maybe, but still there.