The World Is My Home by James A. Michener

Author:James A. Michener [Michener, James A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8041-5158-0
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2014-04-15T04:00:00+00:00

The point of these memories about my introduction to publishing at Macmillan is that because of my inside experiences in the industry I saw the writer’s life from a perspective that few of my fellow writers could have had. Since I knew how advertising budgets were apportioned, I never once asked about the advertising of my books, nor did I ever keep watch to see what was being done. Because I saw what futile things cocktail parties were for most writers, I never sought any. I preferred to write good manuscripts, turn them over to a professional publisher and allow him to publish, distribute and sell them as he deemed best. I still feel that way; it has been a tactic that has served me admirably and brought me great satisfaction and ease of mind.

There were two other valuable benefits resulting from my years at Macmillan. I, better than almost any other contemporary writer I know, understand what a book is. I learned how it is made, printed, stored, delivered, accounted for, advertised, remaindered. I came to understand the work of the man with the slide rule—now replaced by a computer—who mercilessly calculated the final days of a book. ‘Look,’ one of these men once told me, pointing to his figures. ‘We have a thousand copies of this title left over and are selling them at the rate of ten copies a year. If you add up the cost of warehousing, keeping the title in the catalog and shipping out the few copies we do sell, you can easily see that it will be cheaper for us to give away the remainder.’

I then watched the adroit ways in which he disposed of those costly, useless books. First he tried to sell them at fifty cents each to the remainder bookshops that sold them for $1.50, and if they refused to buy he unloaded them at a quarter each, to be retailed at ninety-nine cents each. The ultimate indignity was to sell them for ten cents apiece to the man who used a steel press to cut out the center of each book, glue the pages together and put on a new paper cover with the inviting title ‘Good Reading for a Cold Winter’s Evening’; he sold them for $4.50 each. When the purchaser opened his book he found nestled inside a small bottle of gin. Watching the operation, I hoped that none of my books would fall so low.

Another important learning experience at Macmillan involved the costing out of the books I myself had edited. On the left-hand side of the publishing order, which had to be signed by the president before a penny could be spent, would be my estimate of the inescapable fixed costs of getting the manuscript ready for printing and publishing. Here were the editorial costs, the research costs, the payments to illustrators, cartographers, experts and readers, the costs of typesetting and making the plates plus a dozen other fixed items the amateur might not anticipate. These were the great immutables that had to be amortized by income from future cash sales.

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