The Most Important Job in Publishing
Two Massive Firings, Knopf’s Legacy and Glass Chasms
Biggest News in Books: Penguin Random House Parts Ways with Publishers at Knopf and Pantheon
Today we drop the ironic scare quotes around “news” because we have book publishing news big enough that it received its very own New York Times push alert and subsequently New York Post Page Six treatment. That news is Random House, the largest book publisher, is parting ways with Knopf publisher Reagan Arthur and Pantheon (an imprint under Knopf) publisher Lisa Lucas. This is push-alert-worthy news because the publisher of Knopf is the most prestigious and important job in the entire book business.
There are publishers that are known for highbrow literature like Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, for serious political and presidential nonfiction like Simon & Schuster (full discloser: I work for a division of Simon & Schuster), historically for romance like Berkley and Avon, for splashy debut authors like Riverhead, and on and on. Publishers generally carve out some area that they gain an advantage in over other publishers. Writers and literary agents then favor these publishers because of prior success which turns into lasting success as the publisher develops an expertise and get the best books and writers in these categories, and so on. No publisher has the track record of total and sustained domination in terms of both critical and commercial success across categories like Knopf does. Reagan Arthur follows the legendary and maybe most successful publisher of all time Sonny Mehta whose Wikipedia page is worth visiting. Mehta led the company through a golden era in the 80s, 90s and early 2000s, tapping all kinds of literary talent that would go on to write classics that will be read for decades to come, and which are still a huge backbone of Knopf’s business—Ishiguro, Munro, Morrison.
Knopf has published everything from Pulitzer Prize winning novelists like Cormac McCarthy, to Julia Child’s iconic The Joy of Cooking, to commercial juggernauts Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with The Dragon Tattoo series and Fifty Shades of Grey. My favorite fact shows their true depth: they even published the classic YA series Philip Pullman’s Dark Materials. This history nets Knopf a significant advantage when attracting writers and talent of all backgrounds. This is paired with the fact that Knopf is owned by Penguin Random House, the largest publishing company with the most money. It’s not an exaggeration to say that Knopf gets to pick and choose any project and they will likely win over any other publisher in the business. By the end of Mehta’s run, Knopf may be the only publisher to have built a significant competitive advantage in the industry— writers of all stripes want to go there (literary, commercial, experimental); critics, reward committees, booksellers pay attention to their releases automatically; and they have the resources to fund it all. This makes being the publisher of Knopf the most highly coveted job in the book industry, the height of power and prestige.
From the outside, and in light of this week’s news, the biggest job in all of publishing also seems somewhat like a golden cage. Knopf had a typical Knopf publication just two years ago with Tomorrow, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, a kind of book with no prior antecedent that would go on to take over commercially and critically— loved by reviewers, writers, and average readers too. Great for almost any other publisher, but one mega success is not quite enough for a publisher that is expected to dominant in both critical and commercial spheres constantly. Knopf even won one Pulitzer during Arthur’s tenure (this year for Night Watch). But, to compare, in his time, Mehta published six Nobel laureates in Literature and Fifty Shades a series that is in the top 20 best-selling book series of all time. Success like that is hard to accomplish continually even when Knopf is head and shoulders in the best position of any publisher to do so.
It strikes me that in the end these kinds of jobs might be asking the impossible. Reagan Arthur is about as successful and highly regarded publishing person there is, which is the reason she was elevated to the position in the first place. Who really knows, she might be just as brilliant as Sonny Mehta, but the reality is that Knopf’s publisher has to operate in different times than Mehta did. For as good as an editor or publisher can be, I’m sure the very best of them would agree that we are not the main or even primary determiners of a book’s or publisher’s success— that would be the writers and the culture they are published into. Mehta was around at Knopf when there was a plurality of talent that he was able to identify and maximize—there’s no Mehta without Morrison and McCarthy. Yet the days of any one publisher, even theoretically, being at the center of culture and maintaining the plurality of success that Knopf had in the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s may be over. The weight of history verses the actual operating conditions of today may make keeping Knopf at the top of the literary and commercial heap in the 2020s and 2030s an endeavor that’s designed to be failed no matter who is in charge.
Glass Chasm
One of my authors turned me onto this phrase, which is a riff on glass ceiling: the glass chasm. It describes high level jobs that are given to people, like the one at Knopf described above, that anyone would be a fool not to take (great pay and prestige) and yet are a fool’s errand to think that they are likely to go well. If Random House calls you tomorrow and offers you the Knopf publisher job, a position that has only been held by four people in 100 years, you have to take the money, roll the dice, and risk falling flat on your face. Think Marissa Mayer at Yahoo! (Mayer made nearly $250 million to helm Yahoo!’s implosion). Picture that glass floor shattering beneath someone who is invited to step onto it.
Lisa Lucas was the first Black publisher at Pantheon in its 80-year history, a subdivision of Knopf known for similar prestigious quality but on a smaller and edgier side of things. It was also Lucas’ first ever job at a book publisher, acquiring and editing books. To those outside of book publishing, it’s difficult to fully explain what an impossible task it is to come in with no prior book publishing experience and run an entire division. It would be like at a bank if the person heading the mortgage and loan division was one day hired to move to Tokyo and handle all of the foreign currency trading. The person may be smart and even have related knowledge, but to expect there to be no learning curve is wildly optimistic. Lucas worked in media and at the National Book Foundation, but editing and publishing the books themselves is a very clandestine, slow, specific, and specialized process. To use an analogy even closer to home, it’s kind of like how some editors read books all day and think that this can suddenly translate to writing their own. It can and does work out, but rarely are the skills 1:1 transferable.
Like Arthur had success at Knopf, Lisa Lucas also had one big breakout in her tenure at Pantheon, publishing Chain Gang All Stars, a book that readers loved, sold well, and won the National Book Award. Much like Arthur at Knopf with Tomorrow, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, this is a banner success but doesn’t constitute a plurality of hits over four years that a well-heeled publisher demands. With time, this could easily have gone differently for Lucas, but the cruel reality of publishing is that because books take so long to publish (1-3 years from acquisition), it’s really the first round of bets that get judged—the bets that Lucas made when she had the least amount of experience. Not to mention that publishing is a feast or famine kind of business (the huge bestsellers pay for the 90% of books that don’t make money). The combination of a short timeline in book years and being asked to immediately do the job at the highest possible level in a new industry makes odds of success slim. Going forward the top jobs in the land remain a beautifully alluring plateau but a deceptively fragile one when you put your weight on them.
Soooogoodsooootrueonsomanylevelsofthechasmicceiling😉!!!!