Publishing by Gail Godwin

Author:Gail Godwin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2014-11-20T16:00:00+00:00

Nancy Miller had joined a growing list of Random House’s departures by the time I was in the very early stages of The Red Nun. I was assigned a new editor whose name I wasn’t familiar with. After I looked up the books on her list, I decided we wouldn’t suit each other. “Can you rescue me?” I asked John Hawkins.

“Let me ask around over there,” he said.

In doing so, he discovered that Jennifer Hershey, with whom I had worked on my nonfiction book Heart: A Personal Journey Through Its Myths and Meanings (2001) for Morrow, was now an editor at Random House. She read the chapters John sent her of The Red Nun and told him, “We can publish this quite well.” So we decided to finish out the contract with Random House since Jennifer would be chaperoning this remaining novel and volume two of The Making of a Writer.

After all, she had seen me through Heart after my editor for that book was fired.

Heart had been the brainchild of a young editor, Hamilton Cain, who had just been hired by Morrow. He pitched his idea after I had finished Evensong, and I thought it would be refreshing to try a book of nonfiction. I estimated the project would take me a year, but those turned out to be the final years of Robert’s illness and it took two years. Hamilton Cain was long gone by then, and Jennifer Hershey, who had taught him how to do a profit and loss statement for Heart, edited the book. It was published on Valentine’s Day, two months before Robert’s death. Jennifer came to Robert’s funeral in Woodstock with John Hawkins, and this thoughtful act also counted with me in deciding to stay with Random House.

My disappointments concerning the production of The Red Nun, aka Unfinished Desires, are told in the chapter ‘The Good Husband, the Sorrowful Mother, and the Red Nun,” but I will just add here what is obvious: that the books of authors who haven’t earned out their advances for previous books are published under a rain cloud. The publisher’s goal by then is to stop the spending, not to “throw more good money after bad,” and so there can be no ads, no marketing budget, no enthusiastic gymnastics performed by the publicity department. When I was under my rain cloud with Linda Grey and she said she could not spend any more money, John and I returned a part of my advance to be used for promotion and ads for Evensong; we also gave back the foreign rights. I hired Goldberg & McDuffie to take complete charge of the publicity for that book. I hired Camille McDuffie for Heart in 2001 and for a third time in 2006 for Random House’s publication of Queen of the Underworld and volume one of The Making of a Writer. For those two books, published simultaneously, I also paid for ads, designed by Random House, to run in the New York Times Book Review and the New Yorker.

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