The Publishing World Post # 10: "Drama, Drama, Drama."

I’ll never again assume that the publishing industry can’t keep up with Hollywood’s sex, scandals, and gossip. If it working in the field wasn’t enough to convince me that no office will be free of its fair share of sordid tales, the Judith Regan scandal certainly is. The New York Observer published a large feature on Regan’s history—with News Corp, inside the publishing industry, and in life in general—and by doing so offered a better perspective on her decisions and the current lawsuit. Not that my opinion of her has changed for the better. The article unabashedly revealed more intimate details of her love affair with Bernard Kerik, implied a sexually-charged—love-hate-power triangle between Regan, Rupert Murcoch and Jane Friedman, and offered defenders and critics of both sides of the story. In the end, I still believe that this drama is not the possible “smoking gun” that the article briefly speculates on and is certainly “ther next sensational, headline-grabbing project.” Another one of my least favorite people, Ann Coulter, just succeeded in pulling her records from Palm Beach County’s information logs in order to keep her critics from stalking her. The New York Daily News appropriately put that clip in its Gossip column. For some reason, I feel compelled to feel no sympathy for a woman who “called 9/11 widows ‘witches.’” The saying, “if you can’t take the heat, get out of the kitchen,” certainly applies. On a better note, professional reader and translator Esther Allen republished an article in the Guardian last week (it also recently appeared on American PEN’s Web site) about the powerful place of the reader’s report in publishing: “The lowly minion who authors it can do something no after-the-fact reviewer, however powerful and unkind, can accomplish: stop the book from being published in the first place.” Her experiences offer insight into a few of her decisions and their effects on specific books. The article, though not groundbreaking, is certainly a great resource for students of the trade who have not seen the same effects first hand. I very much enjoyed Allen’s personal account and her willingness to offer logic behind her decisions and her ability to pull back and admit that she could truly have been wrong. That admission is something all Americans—and maybe all people in general—seem to have a hard time doing, and from what I’ve heard about today’s fiction market, the blind curves in the road lead to trouble often enough that such honesty is a valuable key to staying afloat.

Happy Post #101!!!!