The Book Deal: Territorial Rights

The Book Deal: Territorial Rights

Most people think of book deals as just that: a author gets paid by a publisher to publish his/her book. But it is a little more complicated than that. The book deal is a  negotiation that includes, not just how much the author will get paid, but  also what “subsidiary rights” will be granted to the publisher for exploitation. There are numerous revenue generating opportunities when you write a book. They include: right to license in the English Language in the UK and other English speaking countries, translation rights, audio rights, e-book rights, sale of abridgements, magazine excerpts,  movie/tv/performance rights, merchandise spin-off rights, and many more. All book deals include negotiations of  which of these sub-rights are being granted to the publisher and what will be the revenue split between publisher and author.

Today we will talk about territory rights. These are important deal points and are always negotiated along with advances and royalties. These rights are typically the right to sell a license to a foreign publisher to publish  in another country or another language. Sometimes publishers merely export the existing book and have it distributed in foreign markets. No licensing rights are involved in this situation, but there is still an opportunity to negotiate the royalty on books for export.

In a book deal, territorial rights are always split into at least 3 categories.  These are:

  1) North American English (which includes US, Canada, and usually The Philippines). I’m not sure why the Philippines usually gets thrown in, but it almost always does.

2) English language rights in the remainder of the world, which includes UK, Commonwealth countries or former Commonwealth Countries (Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, sometimes India, etc).

3) Translation rights. Obviously all languages other than English. One of my clients has books translated into 29 languages, some of them he has never heard of.

Publishers usually try to negotiate “world rights”. This is the right to publish or license the publication of books throughout the world. Publishers will usually offer the author 50% split on the income from these rights. That is a good deal for the publisher, but not such a good deal for authors. The work involved in selling these rights is minimal. The income is substantial. If I am negotiating with the publisher, and we have determined to sell them world rights, I try to get the percentages up to 75-80% for the author.

Usually it is more advantageous to reserve as many world rights as possible for the author and have the author (or his agent)  sell them himself.  In this situation, the author gives the right to the publisher only to publish in North America. The remainder of the  rights are retained and sold by the author  throughout the world  with no split going to the US publisher.

As in all aspects of the book deal, the ability to hang on to the foreign rights is dependent on how much leverage you have in negotiation. If you have multiple suitors or are conducting an auction, you can simply make the rule that the only rights being offered are for North America. If you only have a single offer, you may not have a strong say in the matter. Also a publisher may make an offer so generous that it is worth giving them world rights in exchange. And frequently, because of the subject of the book, world rights might be insignificant, and should not play a critical factor in the book deal.

Let’s try to calculate the value of retaining the territorial rights versus selling them to a publisher. In this example, let’s say we have an offer from a UK publisher for $10,000. If your publisher controls the rights to the book, and your contract calls for 50-50 split on the revenue, here is how it breaks out:

UK advance $10,000

 Publisher’s agent commission: $1500

Less publisher’s 50% cut on the right $4250

Author’s Revenue $4250

Less commission to author’s agent $ 637

Net to author $ 3613

This isn’t such a great deal. The author ends up with 36% of the income gained from the sale of the rights. And there will also be a substantial amount withheld for taxes from the foreign government. Another disadvantage is that the income that is due the author by the US publisher will not be paid upon receipt but will be deducted from your advance. You will not see this income (if ever) until far down the road.

Now let’s look at the same situation when you retain your rights.  As an agent, when I negotiate retention of these rights, I receive a slightly higher commission of 20%. The reason for that is that I will have to split my commission with a foreign agent. Most agents do the same, although the amount varies.

.

UK advance                                           $10,000

Revenue due author                             $10,000

Less author agent commission           $2,000

Net to author                                         $8,000

Definitely a much sweeter deal for the author. Don’t forget, you still have the tax withholding to a foreign government. But these tax payments will be credits against your US taxes. So it should be a wash. The other advantage in this situation is that the money will come to you up-front and not be deducted from advances. As we said in a previous blog entry, it is always better to get money sooner rather than later.

There are some other advantages and disadvantages to these respective deals. The advantage of selling world rights to the publisher is simplicity. But also it is possible that the publisher has resources and connections that are not available to you. Perhaps you can make an effort to sell the rights yourself. If unsuccessful, you can always turn them over to the publisher.

But the opposite is also true. It is possible that a small publisher doesn’t have resources to sell the book. And won’t devote the resources that they have to aggressively sell the rights. With a large publisher that has offices world-wide, they might make an inside deal with one of their own subsidiaries with an advance below what the market would offer.

Regardless of who controls the territorial rights, this is an important part of the book deal and potentially a very lucrative source of income for the author.

The Book Deal: Royalties

.Almost all publisher contracts pay authors through a system of royalties, a certain defined percentage of revenue based upon sales of the contracted book. The concept is simple, but it can get quite complicated in practice. Let’s talk about the different formulas that publishers use in calculating royalties and how these translate in income for the author.

At the outset, it is worth noting that for the majority of authors who get published by trade publishers, royalties don’t really matter. Most books never earn out their advance, and authors never receive a royalty check.  Big time celebrity agents often like to brag that if a book “earns out” the advance, they haven’t been doing their job. And there is certainly something to be said for this argument. It means that the agent negotiated a sweet deal, and the author ended up with more money than she would have otherwise earned.

We discussed advances last week. We mentioned that advances are just that: advances against royalties. An author will never see a royalty check until the net earnings from royalties exceeds the advances paid. We also had a little fun trying to estimate he total advance on Sarah Palin’s book some hypothetical assumptions.

The royalty rate is negotiated in the “deal points” phase of contract negotiations, before the contract language is worked out.  A typical royalty arrangement for cloth bound books from a major publisher is: 10% (of retail price) on the first 5,000 sold; 12.5% on the next 5000; 15% thereafter. More important authors might be able to sweeten this deal some. But it is unusual. Royalties on trade paperbacks are less and usually start at around 7.5%. They can increase on volume sales.  Remember that these percentages are based on “list price” or “retail price” or “cover price”. All of these terms refer to the price marked on the cover of the book. Thus, if  retailers discount the price of the book to the consumer (as they frequently do), it has no impact on the author’s earned royalty. The recent price wars amongst Amazon, Walmart and Target, in which books are being sold far below their cost as loss leaders, have no impact on the royalties being paid to the authors. 

Some publishers, mostly smaller publishers,  calculate the royalty as a percentage of  the publisher’s net revenue. This is quite a different accounting method than one based on  the retail price. Net revenue will vary from publisher to publisher. But in general, publishers sell books to vendors for 50% less than retail. If your contract calls for royalties based on “net”, then you should be seeing royalty percentages that are double those of those based on retail price.” If you aren’t seeing that, than it is not a very good book deal.

The calculations can get murkier when you consider that almost all publishers have provisions in the contract to reduce author royalties on sales where the publisher has offered unusually large discounts to the retailer. Typical deep discounting language in a contract might be the following:  “When the publisher grants discounts in excess of 50%, author’s royalties shall be half of the royalties otherwise due.”

Hmm. Interesting. So this means that if a publisher sells a book for 51% discount, and receives 1% less than otherwise, the author will have his royalty reduced by 5%. This  doesn’t seem fair—at least, not fair to authors.

A lot of these deep discount deals are for bulk sales to big box stores or special sales to corporations and institutions. The discounts can be as high as 55-60%. So it is probably fair that the author should make some kind of sacrifice.  But wait!  Maybe not. Consider that these high volume sales are shipped to a single location,  packed on skids,  a single invoice to account for, no returns permitted. The publisher is making considerable profit on these bulk sales.

In my humble opinion, these deep discount provisions are entirely one-sided and have the effect of reducing author royalties on transactions that are actually more profitable to publishers. Unfortunately, these provisions are frequently difficult to change in negotiation. I try to define exactly what classes of vendors they apply to and put into the contract that the provision will only apply to sales outside of normal book trade distribution channels. Otherwise, one could find that most of one’s royalties are going to be based on rates offered in the deep discount provisions, not on the negotiated standard royalty rates.

If you ask anyone in publishing, they will tell you that all thought about the future is centered around the role of e-books. The royalty on e-books has moved to the fore and is now an element of the deal point negotiation. As of now, there is not a firm rule of thumb for e-book royalties. I have seen royalties offered anywhere between 15% – 50% of publisher revenue. Random House, the largest trade publisher, has been offering 25%. I suppose that is as good an indicator as anything else of a prevailing practice.

At the moment, e-books account for less than 2% of book sales. But this could change dramatically and quickly in the coming years. Thus a bad royalty on e-books might not mean much money now. But could be substantial as the e-book takes hold of the marketplace.

It seems to me that an author should be entitled to a much larger portion of an e-book sale than of a physical book. After all, publishers have considerably lower costs in manufacturing, distribution, and returns. But the royalties   being offered to authors on e-book sales don’t seem to account for these savings by the publisher.  

 

What Was Sarah Palin’s Advance?

Everyone in America is asking today what was Sarah Palin’s advance for her book, Going Rogue. We can’t say for sure, but we can calculate a range by applying some reasonable assumptions. Alaska reported that during the final six months of Palin’s governorship she received a “retainer” of $1,250,000 for her book from Harper Collins, her publisher. Let us assume that this was simply the first payment of an advance to be paid in several parts. Typically an advance is determined by the projected royalties on the first printing of a book. In the case of Palin’s, the print run was 1,500,000. Royalties on hardback books vary from 10-15% of list price. They can be even higher for some blockbusters. Let’s assume that her per book royalty is 15% or $4.35 per book. This would give us an expected advance of $6,525,000.

Another metric that we could use is the estimated number of equal payments that are made for any advance. Typically an advance is divided into a number of equal payments which are made at certain benchmark times. Smaller advances are usually in two parts. Larger ones can be in three. Very large advances can  be made in four parts. Since Palin’s advance is clearly very large, we assume that the reported advance was the first of four payments. This would give us an estimated advance of $5,000,000, similar to the previous estimate.

Of course, the normal economics of publishing don’t really apply to deals of this size. So my calculations would have considerable uncertainty.  The rumored amount on the street when the deal came down was $7,000,000.

Publisher Advances

I’ve been speaking to a lot of authors lately, successful ones who make their living writing. Some of them make a pretty good living. I’m finding that a lot of them don’t really understand the economic fundamentals of publishing. They don’t even understand the meaning of “the book deal” a subject that authors  talk about a lot and even obsess about. Most writers  define a good book deal as a good advance. I’m going to talk about the typical elements in a book deal and try to explain them a little bit to writers.

It is important to understand that any book deal has two sets of negotiations. The first is for “deal points”. This involves issues associated with money and is usually the primary concern of authors (and everybody else involved). After these points are decided, we move on to negotiating the remaining terms of the contract. This is often referred to dismissively  as “boiler plate”. It is really a lot more critical than that  and the interests of the author need to be well represented in this phase as well.

Today I want to talk about the first element in the deal points, the advance. We will try to cover some of the other deal points next week.

A lot of authors expect that an agent has at her disposal certain alchemical powers to get windfall advances from publishers for any project. I wish this were true. I won’t make estimates of how large an advance is likely to be offered on a project. Most of the agents I respect  will be pretty circumspect about that as well. But what can be said is that the bargaining power of the author is really dependent on how many suitors are interested in the project. Having three or four interested publishers creates a seller’s market for the book.  Similarly, if after trying for some months to sell a project, one has a single offer from a smallish publisher, there are only limited opportunities to improve this  through bargaining.

The advance  is always the big enchilada for authors and for agents. It is a convenient shorthand for how big a deal is. As in: “This was a very significant deal. High six figures.” It is certainly a good thing to get money sooner rather than later. And authors who are making a living writing books need money in advance to let them live while the book is being written.

Publishers go to some length in contract negotiations to spread out payments of advances as much as possible. If getting money sooner rather than later is good for authors, dragging out advance payments as long as possible serves the interests of  publishers.  Publishers usually will be quite insistent that advances be paid in 2, 3 or even 4 parts. Smaller advances are usually divided into two equal parts. The first paid on signing; The second on delivery and acceptance of the manuscript. Larger advances may have a third payment upon publication. Recently some publishers have added a fourth payment upon publication of the paperback edition. Calling this an advance is doublespeak. The fourth payment could easily be made 3 years after the contract has been signed.

Publishers and publishing gurus will be quick to tell you that advances are “out of control” or indicative of a “flawed business model” and that 75% of all advances never “earn out”. (More on earning out later). As you might expect, authors and agents see things quite differently. There is a story going around that one big-time agent always says “if an advance ever earns out, I haven’t been doing my job”. I prefer to tell my clients that money is money. Although a big advance is nice, there is also money after advances in the form of royalties. But those royalty checks are going to start rolling in, if at all, down the road a spell.

Sometimes, when an author has a lot of publishing suitors for a particular book, the agent conducts an auction. After a few rounds of bidding, the result may be that the offer of the largest advance gets the book. This might not be so advantageous to the writer. It may very well be that  the best home for the book is a publisher who has offered a smaller advance. Most agents understand this and try to structure an auction in such a way that the advance is not the only determinant  of the best offer.

One often hears stories by authors who believe, probably correctly, that they got an advance that was so disproportionate to the sale of their book, that it has jeopardized their ability to get contracts for future works.

A lot of authors don’t understand that the word “advance” means advance against royalties. What this means is that royalties for actual sale of books will offset the advance. No royalty checks will be paid out to the author  until the total amount of royalties and other income generated from sales exceeds the amount of the advance. This is called earning out. In other words, if you have a $10,000 advance, and your royalty statement shows that you have sold enough books to create royalties of $8500, then you won’t get any royalty payments until you have earned an additional $1500 to offset the advance.

Some publishers are now not giving an advance. Frequently they say that this is a new “business model”, or that they are “sharing the risk with the writer.” I suppose this is a little like calling a used car a “pre-owned car.”  The idea is that writers will agree not to take an advance in exchange for a higher royalty rate, with the hope of getting better revenue down the road if the book is successful. Authors beware to make sure that in this arrangement there really is a significantly better royalty rate that accounts for your own sacrifices and risks  in agreeing to forswear  the advance.

It is conventional wisdom that big advances are desirable for another reason as well. A big investment by a publisher in an advance will insure a big commitment  in marketing and promotion to protect their investment. There is probably truth in this. Although there are many stories of the folly of publishers for paying exorbitant advances and then not following up with commensurate efforts at selling the book.

Next week we are going to talk about some of the other elements of the book deal including: royalties, territorial rights, e-books, and other subsidiary rights.

Reading Narnia to My Daughter

A couple of months ago, I decided to read The Chronicles of Narnia to my seven year old daughter, Hayley. It was a test to see whether  she or I had the patience to read a book that was a masterpiece of children’s literature and probably a little advanced for a girl of her age.. Actually we were inspired by seeing the  two wonderful Andrew Adamson films of the epic story. She and her friends were play acting the characters after seeing the film. Hayley liked to play Susan. So she was excited about listening to the whole story.

Well, 1500 pages later we finished reading the sixth book, The Silver Chair. Hayley’s patience started to flag as had C.S. Lewis’s inventiveness (in my humble opinion). I still couldn’t give it up, so I read the final volume: The Last Battle by myself. It was an annoying and entirely unsatisfactory ending. More on that later.

Several years ago, the publisher had changed the order of the books. For most of the time, the books were numbered sequentially as they were written by Lewis, beginning with The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe. For some reason, and probably an error in judgment and in marketing, the publisher changed the sequence to coincide with the order of   internal time in which the stories took place in Narnia. The result was that instead of reading The Lion… first, we read The Magician’s Nephew, a prequel that tells how Narnia began. It is an inferior book.   I recommend starting with The Lion. It is certainly the best of the stories and a good way to get hooked on the series.

What struck me about the books, particularly in comparison to the films,  but also in comparison to popular young adult books being written today, was their slow moving plot. I suppose this was to be expected. Films have their own dynamic. Action needs to be compressed. And commercial considerations require the story to move along at a good clip. I wonder, though, whether Lewis’s leisurely pace was a result of the fact that he was writing in another time when life was a little slower and narratives could be more drawn out.

What raises Narnia to the level of literature is neither  plot nor  character. It is Lewis’ majestic conception of the story. When the movie came out, there was a lot of talk amongst a highly opinionated segment of the population that I happen to hang around with, that the books and the movies were didactic stalking horses for Christian dogma (a very bad thing).

I felt otherwise. Without the character of Aslan, unarguably a metaphor of Christ, the story would have been, well, just another story. Aslan  gave Narnia  a sort of larger than life universality, an epic dimension that raised  it  from  being simply  a wonderful story into an enduring masterpiece. At least until the final volume,  Aslan can be appreciated as an character representing  the quest in all religions and in all cultures  for something greater than our life on earth. In the final book, The Last Battle, Lewis does succumb to the temptation of reducing  the story into what is simply a Christian parable.  And the story suffers as a result. Additionally the return of the Pevensie children to Narnia, which could have been a dramatic  and moving experience even as a Christian story, was undermined by the author’s  flawed decision (from a dramatic perspective)  to have one of the children, Susan,  not return. How sad that was. She was always the most interesting  of the Pevensie children, anyway. I finished the book by throwing down The Last Battle in  rage and disgust. Shame on you, C.S. Lewis!

Narnia has had a huge impact on readers and writers over the years.  Most recently and most successfully, Philip Pullman created a fantasy trilogy: His Dark Materials. I heartily recommend it to anyone reading in the fantasy genre. The story is complex, the characters deeply drawn, and the plot  ingenious. Pullman was highly critical of Narnia and of Lewis’ Christianity.  Indeed, it struck me that one could call Pullman’s trilogy the Anti-Narnia. At the end, Pullman pointedly rejected the “kingdom of Heaven” for a “republic of heaven” here on Earth.

But all of this is of no consequence to Hayley. For her it was a beautiful and breathless story. She loved Aslan, particularly as he would come bounding into the story in the nick of time to insure that good triumphed over evil. And even though Susan was banished by Lewis from Narnia heaven, Hayley still plays her in school yard pretend.

Leah Komaiko on Creating a “Platform”

Leah Komaiko is a marketing consultant who specializes in building platform. Her client list includes huge iconic corporations like Disney, Dreamworks, and Saks Fifth Avenue. But she also works with writers who need to develop a platform in these times when platform is usually what is needed to get books published. Check out her website at: http://www.leahkomaiko.com/index.html.

Leah knows about issues associated with writers. She was the author of 20 children’s books by major major publishers. Several were bought by Hollywood. I suspect that she still harbors a soft spot in her heart of writers and for books.

Andy: Leah, we hear a lot about platform in the publishing business. As in: ‘This is a brilliant book, a groundbreaking concept likely to change the world. It creates a genuine paradigm shift in consciousness. That said, we feel that the author’s platform is weak and not likely to reach a large enough audience. Good luck somewhere else.” Why can’t publishers just make decisions on the merits of the book?

Leah: Good question, Andy.  I think it’s because it seems the good old days of publishing, like the good old days of so many things, are behind us.  The editor who discovers great material for a book no longer has the biggest decision-making voice at a publishing house.  Most often it’s the marketing team.  First you need the good material. Then if there’s no market, the marketing department sees no merit regardless of the material because they’re afraid they won’t make any money.  Most publishers are struggling to stay afloat.  It used to be a business that prided itself on taking big chances.    Now they’re trying and needing to change their ways.  And they’re not doing it flawlessly. 

Andy: When writers ask me to define platform, I generally say: “it means that publishers are too stupid, lazy and cheap to promote  your book. So you will have to do it yourself.”  Ok. That is pretty glib. You tell us exactly what they mean by platform.

Leah: Glib, yet eloquently put!  And I’d add to that that publishers up until a decade or so ago were not focused on being marketers.  They knew how to publish a book but not how to sell them.  The outlets for selling were easier – the venues for getting material, entertainment, information, were not like they are today. Between blogs, social networks, self publishing, all the webcasts, podcasts, information and entertainment you can get on your cell phone, hundreds of cable TV stations, books on tape, books published on demand, e-books, on-line publishers who sell only into corporations and make millions doing it, magazines (although they’re crumbling), newspapers (although they are dying), and so much more,  book  have a lot more competition for buying dollars and they’re counting on you to help them catch up and get them into the marketing business before it is too late.  What’s a platform?  As I see it, an existing audience.   Whether that’s on TV, radio, you have a heavily visited blog (I’ve heard now publishers will be interested if you have 3,000 regular visitors at your site..), a police record, etc.   You are known to people who’d be interested in reading your book.  That is, in addition to your family.

Andy: Hmm. I’m  starting to get close to 3000 hits on this blog. And I used to steal hubcaps for my police record. Maybe there is big money for me. But lets keep on subject. I believe that publishers are anxious to look at worthy books where authors have a weak platform. But getting them a contract is an unbelievably difficult challenge. What exactly can a writer do to build a platform. Drug-addled Hollywood starlets with a cellulite problem  don’t need to work on platform. Scholars with endowed chairs at Harvard already have platform. But the rest of us are platform challenged. What can we do?

 Leah: Oh yeah, and you would know better than anyone.  Editors have got to be frustrated as hell because they crave worthy books and they need a platform to sell them.  Not everybody is a starlet but plenty of them don’t have platforms that can sell a book.  Remember Vanna White?  What did she get for an advance for her memoir – I think it was $3 million plus somebody’s head after it was chopped off and they lost their job..  I think to build a platform we can start by looking and seeing what we already have.  I have worked with people who had an audience that they didn’t even know they hadTheir audience looked too small for it to make a difference to them, but small can build to big pretty quickly.  I start with authors suggesting they think of themselves as a marketer.  Most authors think of themselves as writers, not as marketers. But I try to get authors to ask a basic question, a question that needs to be answered compellingly in any book proposal “Why am I the person to Write this Book?”  And the next question which is just as important:”What’s the story of my book.”  I mean that differently than what actually happens in it – I mean what does it offer to people?  Who do you want it to be offered to?  Why did you put your heart and soul and time and hopes into doing this?  Why should a reader be emotionally, intellectually or psychically connected to you?   Looking at those questions, for starts, can lead us to who and how to reach people that can be our audience. 

Andy: Leah, you are a consultant. You work with some of the biggest names in American business: Disney, Dreamworks, Mattel. It seems to me that these companies have platform up the wazoo. Why do they hire you?

Leah: They hire me to help them figure out the story of their brand.  I believe they hire me because I understand  that the “voice” of writing and the voice of a business idea to be the same.  I have seen over and over the best, most successful brands are based on someone’s simple story/vision/reason for being and ability to connect with an audience unseen.  As writers, we have the leg up here.  This is what we do naturally.  This is why I love to work with authors. 

Andy:  And what can you do for my clients, brilliant writers who have made a difference in the world, but don’t have the big platforms that will get them a book contract?

 Leah: If your clients have great books, which I know they do in order to be your clients, I can help them shift into a marketing frame of mind and still be authors.  I can help them discover the story of their brand and build their book as a brand just like a company.  (without all the expenses and employees).  I help them pull from their material chapters, aspects, ideas that could resonate with audiences they may not have thought of.  This starts to build their platform.  I  help them design worthwhile strategies from Facebook to corporate partnerships and sponsorships to public relations  strategies to leading them to excellent on-camera coaches who can help them with media appearances,  to non-profit affiliations, journalists  and more.  You have to be willing to see your book as a small business.   That is the way too that many of the most successful authors have made real money and ancillary product from their books for years.  Knowing your audience and keeping it relevant is far more important than having a zillion “tweets”.   When you know your story, I truly believe your message is unique.  And who doesn’t want to say they know someone unique – who is not uniquely a criminal?  And even then… fast way to build a platform.  But I think you can’t earn money in prison. 

Andy: Ok, Leah, I’m off to prison. And here is the $64,000 question? What are you reading right now? Do you have anything good to recommend to readers?

Leah: Right now I’m reading Julia Child’s My Life in France. I can’t cook but I can read and it’s inspired.  I’m also reading In Search of  the Common Good, by Paul Newman about building his business (I like business books) from a sane and humane “platform”.  Also on my table is Two Lives a memoir by Vikram Seth, and a wonderful new middle grade reader book called Matisse on the Loose by Georgia Bragg.  For writers I think Paul Newman’s book about how he marketed his business is encouraging because he shows that even though he was selling salad dressing he was first and foremost selling a vision “flying by the seat of his pants” which in truth, most publishers and businesses seem to be. Nobody knows ultimately what will sell or not.  So we can have some fun with the mystery of it all.

Ann Lamott (and Albert Camus) on Writing

I just finished reading Anne Lamott’s remarkable book about the process of writing,  Bird By Bird. What a revelation!. I don’t know why I have never read it before. It was written in 1995. I must have sold 5000 copies at Cody’s over the years. I know a lot of writers who have said that this book changed their life.

I suppose the reason I never  read it is that I just didn’t think  very deeply about the process of writing during my 35 years in retail. I read a lot and knew a lot about what was going on in the book business. But  by the time a book arrived  at  the store, the process was over.  

So now I’m at the other end of the publishing food chain. I’m not exactly the midwife to the book;  more like the Lamaze teacher. I see a lot of “shitty first drafts”. That is Anne Lamott’s  luminous term of art. More on that later. Now most of my work  has to do with the process of writing. Well, this is not exactly true, but the other things I do are for another blog and another time.

 Anyway, back to Anne Lamott.  Bird By Bird.  It is at times hysterically funny, wise, tough-minded but encouraging. She is secure  enough as a writer to share with you her own experiences   of her all-too-human insecurities about life in general and writing  in particular.

 Look at her 3^rd chapter entitled: “Shitty First Drafts”. When I see these by writers  in the course of  my work (which is all the time), I want to give up on the author.  Sometimes I want to give up on being an agent. Lamott says that these “shitty first drafts”  are an inherent part of the writing process, even a necessary part, even an admirable part. It allows the writer to get the material, shitty though it may be,  onto the page. And the work of the accomplished  author is finding the one sentence in the two shitty pages sitting in front of her  that she will want to remember and use.

Lamott  had a wonderful chapter on writing dialogue. I read it at about three o’clock  in the morning and emailed my client  immediately about some changes that needed to be made in her book proposal.  You can’t just write down a conversation between two people. You have to make sure that the voices of the characters are differentiated in the dialogue. You can’t just use dialogue to further the plot. It also has to deepen the character.  Otherwise it becomes flat and confusing. But this makes writing dialogue devilishly hard.

One of the most amusing, but spot-on,  chapters is about thoughts that get in the way of your writing. She calls it tuning into radio station KFKD, or K-Fucked. She says: “station KFKD will play in your head twenty-four hours a day, nonstop, in stereo. Out of the right speaker…will come the endless stream of self-aggrandizement…Out of the left speaker will be the rap songs of self-loathing.”  (God, I’m feeling that right now).

She also has a lot to say about getting published. This was especially poignant for me, since my job is actually to get my clients published. Lamott said something very wise. She said: “Writing can give you what having a baby can give you: it can get you to start paying attention, can help you soften, can wake you up. But publishing won’t do any of those things….”

 I think about this a lot in my own work as an agent. I  go to a lot of writers’ conferences. I talk to a lot  of writers at these. They send me their book proposals and writing samples. Then we have a meeting about it that lasts for 15-30 minutes. I also participate in a lot of agents’ panels. And I have started giving some workshops on writing book proposals. (Don’t tell anyone my dirty little secret. Two years ago, when I was still a bookseller, I didn’t know what a book proposal was).

I  found a couple of clients at these conferences. One of them just got a publishing contract. But mostly I talk to people who are  not going to get published. A lot of them have written personal memoirs,  a genre much out of fashion with publishers right now.  They call them “me-moirs”. ‘Nuff said.

The writers at the conferences have poured their hearts and souls into these projects. And I have no doubt that they have learned so much about themselves and the world in the process. Anne Lamott tells these writers that this is the real value of writing.  Publication is overrated.

 Frequently I get graded by the participants after I give a workshop or presentation. Although I try to  be realistic and emphasize the dismal reality of getting published,  I take a lot of criticism for being unnecessarily discouraging to writers. After reading Anne Lamott, I think I would have to accept this criticism as valid.

When you really think about it, everyone is a hero in their own life story. Every memoir of a life is an epic. Paradoxically every person’s life is larger than life. But this is quite different from  the mundane and commercial considerations that publishers consider in their decision to acquire a book.

What I have started telling writers, what I would like them to hear from me, and what Anne Lamott has said so much better than I ever could,  is that writing is an incredibly courageous undertaking. It is an activity that begins in the dark  without any real knowledge of where the journey is destined to end.  Or to use another metaphor of a race.   Sometimes  you will cross the finish line, receive the silver jug  and go off into the sunset. But more often  you will slip on a banana peel and break your leg 20 yards before  the end of the race. But what an adventure it has been!

 Which brings us to Camus. Albert Camus wrote his masterpiece, The Myth of Sisyphus.  in 1942. A lot of you probably read it in your freshman humanities course. Camus always took on the big themes, in this case, the meaning of life.  Sisyphus is condemned  by the gods for all eternity to roll a boulder up a mountain, whence it will then roll down of its own weight. For Camus this was a metaphor of  human life, a ceaseless striving in a universe without meaning.

It strikes me that this is also a metaphor for the work of the writer. For Camus,  Sisyphus’s effort is heroic and filled with grandeur. In the final, unforgettable lines of his book, Camus says: ” Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

What’s Wrong With Standardized Testing?

Todd Farley is the author of Making the Grades: My Misadventures in the Standardized Testing Industry, published this week by PoliPoint Press. http://p3books.com/ Todd’s book is a remarkable memoir of his 15-year involvement with the tests, first as a scorer of 4^th grade essays, later as a manager. Full disclosure: I’m Todd’s literary agent.

Todd’s book is an eloquent and withering attack on the methodology and practice of the tests. It is the first book by an insider. It also is one of the funniest books ever written., I mean side-splittingly funny, fall out of the bed funny. As in Catch 22  (an apt comparison), Todd shows that humor and inspired ridicule are the best weapons against pretense. 

I give a lot of talks to writers. In this publishing climate it is pretty hard to offer words of inspiration for the unpublished author. I always tell Todd’s story to them. Todd contacted me over the transom through a query letter. I was curious about the subject, so I asked him to send more.  We struggled to get the book published over objections that the author lacked “platform” or that the book  had a limited audience. (33 rejections, to be precise).  We found a publisher who believed in him. This week Todd has written the Op-ed essay in The New York Times and has been read by over  1,000,000 people worldwide. Limited audience, indeed!

 Andy: Todd, you are a smart guy. How did you end up in the boiler room of a test scoring company?

Todd:   I ended up in the business because I was a slacker in my 20’s, living the good life in Iowa City as a reader and drinker, and I stumbled upon a job scoring student responses to standardized tests.  I don’t know that I was in any way qualified to do that job, and I certainly had no interest in it, but the pay was decent so I took the job.  Then fifteen years of me working in testing just to pay the bills crept by and now here we are….

Andy: And when did you realize things were terribly wrong with the theory and practice of testing? Did you have a “Eureka” moment?

Todd:   I thought it was a screwed up process pretty much the first day I started. Kids answer dozens of questions in some far-distant state and then their tests get chopped up into all these pieces—multiple-choice answers go this way, fill in the blank questions go that way, essays questions somewhere else—and are then read and scored by a temporary employee counting the minutes till quitting time?  It took no time at all to see what a bad idea that was. And all those doubts I had about testing were confirmed over the next 15 years. 

 Andy: Your book is full of stories that are as hilarious as they are disturbing. Can you relate a story that epitomizes the failings of standardized testing? 

Todd: I have more anecdotes about the foolishness of the business than there is space on the Internet.  I think about the very first essay-scoring project I worked on, when all us temporary employees were told we would have to qualify to be able to keep the job scoring high school writing—we’d have to do a good enough job during a training session to prove we could assess essays in a “standardized” way.  Then, when nearly half the hundred people applying for the job failed the “qualifying tests” and were fired, you know what happened?  The for-profit testing company in charge of the project simply lowered the qualifying score to make us (yes, “us’) all eligible to work.  The point is the scoring company had these high standards about employee qualifications, at least until they realized firing us all would leave them short on personnel.  Once they realized that, all us “flunkies” were immediately un-fired and given jobs reading and scoring all those tests.

 Andy: Standardized testing has been the mantra of efforts to reform the education system. It has been embraced by politicians  of both parties, most recently by President Obama. From your own experience, what is the flaw in the reasoning? What is the essential fallacy of the concept? 

 Todd: For me the fallacy is the utter inefficacy of a system that trusts for-profit companies and for-profit people (like me) to make decisions about American education, something that is supposed to be separate from the bottom line.  Because there are so many tests to be scored each year, every imaginable shortcut has to be taken to meet deadlines, with the end result being that scores are returned to students that I don’t necessarily believe are the right scores.  As far as I’m concerned, they are just scores, random numbers that vary as much due to the vagaries of the testing business as to the quality of student work. 

Andy: And while we are at it, how is the application of the theory in the actual grading of tests at odds with the espoused objectives?

Todd:  Andy, that seems like a very complex question for someone of my limited intelligence, but I can see why people believe there needs to be accountability in schools.  On the other hand, the fifteen years I just spent in the K-12 testing business convinced me that for-profit testing companies can’t provide that accountability.  Imagine, the theory of standardized testing is in effect that the best way to see what’s going on in American education is to ask the opinion of a bunch of massive corporations situated hundred, if not thousands, of miles away from the classrooms.  That is simply illogical, as my book explains in great—albeit hilarious—detail.

Andy: You say in your book that when the statistical results of the grading of the groups are at variance with the predicted results, then the results are fudged. That is a pretty damning critique. Can you elaborate?

 Todd:  Look, in my time in testing, I was witness to (and party to) a near constant manipulation of statistics.  The testing companies (and I) changed reliability statistics, validity statistics, qualification stats, etc etc.  Our job in the testing industry was to score tests, and within a limited time frame, and while certainly attempts were done to make the scoring legitimate, the sheer volume of tests was always so overwhelming each year that the only way to get through the process was to cheat, cheat, cheat. The companies took shortcuts to get things done and we temporary employees took shortcuts to get things done.  Many of us employees were working to keep our jobs, get raises and promotions, get plum assignments in college towns around the country, and hence we fudged the numbers all the time to make things look good.  Am I proud of that fact?  No.  On the other hand, the problems with the testing industry are so many that I didn’t think a little cheating on top of a lot of insanity was that bad a thing. 

 Andy: Todd, this blog is primarily about writing and publishing – not about education policy. I am particularly proud of this book, because you wrote it in relative obscurity. Now you are writing the op-ed essay in the New York Times. How did you begin the process of getting this book published? Can you give some inspirational words to the struggling writer?

 Todd:  I’m not sure if I have much advice for the struggling writer, because my situation was a little unusual.  I wasn’t one of ten-thousand (or fifty-thousand) people writing novels last year—I was pretty much the only one who had written an expose of the standardized testing industry.  That means I didn’t have to write the best of thousands of books, I just had to find someone to publish my one, unique book.   I realized there was a huge hue and cry in this country against standardized testing, and I knew I had lots of information that all the people against testing would love to hear, and I figured I’d get someone to publish it. Frankly, I always thought this book would sell, because an insider’s account about an important industry like testing just seemed to make sense.  Although I did have my doubts during the long process of writing the book and getting rejections, I had little doubt it would eventually sell—I was really just worried one of my colleagues in testing would write a book like this before I got to it.

 Andy: When I got your query letter, I had never heard of you. I assume you sent it out to other agents. How many? 10, 100, 1000? Was anyone else curious about the project? 

Todd: I sent query letters both to agents and publishers, maybe fifty or sixty total over the course of 8-10 months, and I did get enough interest to convince me I was on the right path—so while there was rejection, I also got considerable interest, enough to keep me at it.  I got lots of initial rejections, yes, but I also probably got 20 or so bites from agents and publishers.  Most of them thought I had written something good, but all said it might be hard to place.  I’d written a book about standardized testing, but a cheeky memoir and not an academic treatise, so no one knew where it would go.  Academic publishers (like Harvard University Press, NYU Press) were intrigued, but when they read my book they said it was too… personal, funny, not serious… for them to publish.  The same was true of agents.  Some would ask to see it and then, after telling me how funny it was, would say they couldn’t imagine where to publish it or who would buy it.  Those poor, ignorant fools… I could have made them all rich, as I did with you, Andy Ross!

 Andy: Ah, yes. Excuse me a moment while I ask my butler to call for the car.  Anyway, Todd. Thanks for being interviewed, and thanks for writing the book.  I think you have done your part in making the world a little better.

Thinking About Cody’s

I suppose it is time to say something about Cody’s. I haven’t said very much about it, except to my wife, Leslie. And it seems to make her uneasy when I do.

 

Cody’s closed its doors on June 20, 2008. I wasn’t there that day. I hadn’t been working there since December of the previous year. I had sold Cody’s to Hiroshi Kagawa of Tokyo in 2006. Hiroshi was head of  Yohan, Inc. It was the largest distributor of English language books in Japan. We wouldn’t have been able to stay open otherwise. We had run out of money. Anyway, I liked Hiroshi. And he made a pretty good stab at  putting Cody’s back on its feet again.

 

I kept running the store for another year. But financial concerns crept back  to plague the company. The store was unraveling. And I just couldn’t put it back together again. So I left  and with relief. I didn’t know exactly what I would do next. Given my experience of being a bookseller my whole adult life, I believed my future lay in something like sacking groceries at Safeway.

 

One night in January, I woke up and realized that I might be good  literary agent. You know, try my hand at the other end of the publishing food chain. I jumped into it. I managed not to think of how audacious that decision was and how little I knew about what I intended to do. It’s hard starting out again when you are 60. Particularly if you had done the same work at the same company for 30 years.  I know a lot more now, and I think I might even be good at this job. I certainly enjoy doing it every day. I only wish I had started my agency sooner. And I still have a lot to learn. I’m very grateful to the other agents who have been so generous with their time and wisdom.

 

About the time Cody’s closed, Alex Beckstead began showing his documentary: Paperback Dreams  .   The movie was  aired last fall in multiple national markets on PBS television.  Alex spent 2 years filming Paperback Dreams. It was about the struggles of Cody’s and Kepler’s to stay alive in hard times. He wasn’t expecting to document the demise of my store. But that was exactly what he did. It was hard for me to watch this movie. Alex kept dragging me out to public showings. Once I cried. Then I stopped going. I felt that the movie managed to document every mistake I made for several years. Leslie told me that I was being hard on myself and  that no one else saw it that way. Alex agreed. But it didn’t make it easier to watch the movie.

 

Even though I wasn’t working at the store when Cody’s closed, I really went into a tail spin after it happened. I developed classic symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. The weirdest thing that happened is that I began to feel like the last 30 years of my life didn’t really happen. It wasn’t quite amnesia. It was more like it had been a dream. No, actually,  more like a dream of a dream.

 

I found  that when I drove to Berkeley, I always tried to avoid  going up Telegraph Avenue. And to this day, I can’t go to Union Square.

 

But recently, I have found that I’m okay  thinking  about all those years again. After all, here I am writing about it.  There were a lot of things that caused the store to close. Things that probably had very little to do with me.  But more than that, I’m starting to realize that we did some pretty good things over the years. And I have a lot to be proud of. And so does everyone who worked there.

 

People stop me on the street all the time and tell me how much Cody’s meant to them and how important it was in their lives or even how it changed their lives. That makes me feel pretty good.

 

When Cody’s closed its doors for the last time, they put up a sign that said: “Cody’s is closed. Thank you”. It wasn’t a very eloquent farewell. But to be fair to the folks who worked there, I doubt there was much  time to think about being eloquent. These closings are usually pretty messy affairs.

 

I wanted to say something though. I wanted to say what Cody’s really meant to me and  what it meant to so many other people. I wanted to summarize 50 years in just a few words. So I wrote this:

 

 

On June 20 Cody’s Books  closed its doors forever. People will argue the causes of Cody’s closing. But I have no doubts on this matter. Cody’s was the victim of history.

 

But it is less significant how one dies than how one lives. In this respect, Cody’s acquitted itself with honor and dignity.  At the end of the day,  when the record is written; it will be remembered that Cody’s added immeasurably to the life of the mind; that it  profoundly enriched people’s lives; that it gave back more than it took; and that it was obedient to its own ideals.

 

The doors close. The lights go out. The steadfast and courageous employees move on to new lives. Other book  stores will come to serve Cody’s customers. But there will always be a place in our hearts for Cody’s. And it will  serve as an inspiration for those who seek a better world.

 

Good bye, Cody’s and good night. You have earned your rest.

Copy Editing at The New Yorker with Mary Norris

Mary Norris started working at The New Yorker  thirty-one years ago, in the editorial library, moving on to the collating department and the copy desk. Since 1993, she has been a page O.K.’er, or query proofreader.  She has written for The Talk of the Town and contributes to the New Yorker books blog.  She is working on a memoir about having a transsexual sibling, the legendary Baby Dee.  You can read Mary’s fabulously entertaining blog : “The Alternate Side Parking Reader.”

 By the way, if you want to learn more about copy editing from those who are the best in the business,  check out: The New Yorker Festival (October 16-18). This year  there is  a master class in copy editing, on Sunday, October 18th, at 2 P.M., with Ann Goldstein, the head of the copy department; Elizabeth Pearson-Griffiths; and Mary Norris. A program guide to the festival is in the issue of September 21, 2009, and online.

I want to talk to Mary about what really goes on at America’s most prestigious literary magazine.
 
 Andy: Mary, I understand that you often write  some extremely well-received books under the pseudonym: “Malcolm Gladwell.” Is this true?
 
Mary: Hah! Are you trying to get me in trouble?  Malcolm Gladwell is an incredible phenomenon. He is not a made-up composite of a writer but a real person, and though he must be a millionaire by now, amazingly, he continues to write.
  
Andy: Can you describe for us what a typical day is for you at The New Yorker?
 
Mary: The hours at The New Yorker are from ten to six, and I try to be on time, as it is embarrassing to be chronically late when you don’t have to be at the office till ten. We have a weekly schedule for closing the contents of an issue in an orderly fashion: fiction closes early in the week, critics at midweek, and the longer, more demanding pieces near the end of the week; Talk of the Town and Comment go to press last, on Friday. The head of the copy department, Ann Goldstein, parcels out the week’s tasks, matching up who is available with what needs to be done. If the lineup changes, we readjust.
 
There are four full-time O.K.’ers, as well as a team of about six proofreaders, some of whom act as O.K.’ers when we need them. Basically, on the day a piece closes, you read it, and give the editor your query proof, which will also contain the queries of a second proofreader, and after the editor has entered all the acceptable changes and sent the new version to the Makeup Department, you read that new version. There will sometimes be a “closing meeting,” when the editor, the writer, the fact checker, and the O.K.’er sit down together over the page proof and discuss final changes. The O.K.’er then copies these changes onto a pristine proof called the Reader’s (to keep the paper trail) and enters them into the electronic file, and sends the revised piece back to Makeup. The next version is read against the Reader’s proof by another layer of proofreaders, the night foundry readers. The system is full of redundancy and safety nets.
 
 Andy: Wow! That is even more proofreading than I do on this blog.  You do copy editing there. What is a copy editor? How is it different from a line editor?
 
Mary: The job descriptions at The New Yorker are different from those at book publishing houses and other magazines. We have a copy desk, and the job of the copy editor is to do the first pass on a piece, when the manuscript is “set up,” that is, set in type for general distribution. At this stage, the copy editor makes minimal changes, in spelling and punctuation, to conform to New Yorker style. You may have noticed that we spell “theatre” the British way, reversing the “er” to “re,” and double consonants before suffixes (“travelled,” rather than “traveled”); we use the diaeresis in words like “coöperate” and “reëlect”; we prefer the serial comma; we spell out round numbers, even big ones. The copy editor does not make any interpretive changes.
 
Next (and you won’t find this job anyplace else) a piece is “Goulded.” This used to be the domain of the legendary Eleanor Gould Packard, a grammarian and a genius whose old office I now occupy, though I am neither a grammarian nor a genius (except for real estate: the office has a great view). One of the query proofreaders, on a day when she is not O.K.’ing a piece, reads the galleys of a piece that is scheduled for a future issue, fixing spelling and punctuation, of course, but also making more subtle suggestions.  Query proofreaders at The New Yorker are probably more like line editors at other publications. We go over the piece twice. We fix danglers. We try to improve the sentences, making sure that the author is saying what he or she intends to say. Eleanor Gould was big on clarity, and I have absorbed some of that. Basically, you’re giving the piece a really close reading.
 
When a piece is scheduled to run in the magazine, we read it again, twice. As I said above, in addition to the O.K.’er, each piece has a second reader, to back up the O.K.’er. The O.K.’er then has the duty of reading the piece yet again, to make sure no mistakes have been introduced, and also to smooth things out. Sometimes a fact checker’s language does not blend in with the writer’s voice, although the checkers work closely with the writers. Any material added by the writer or the checker has to be copy-edited. This takes as long as it takes, and we don’t rush out at 6 P.M.
  
Andy: I have always heard that The New Yorker had extremely rigorous standards for copy editing and fact checking.  (Or perhaps I should say: “cöpy ёditing”)  Can you talk about that? How is your job copy editing different from, say, that of a copy editor at the National Enquirer?
 
Mary: I don’t know what it’s like to be a copy editor at the  National Enquirer. The main thing here is to respect the writer. The writers don’t have to do everything we want them to—we make suggestions. The ideal would be to give an editor a proof and have all your suggestions meet with approval. Sometimes you notice that your suggestions have not been taken, so if something bothers you, you try again. Sometimes you wear them down, sometimes you cave.
 
I have been on both sides of the process, as a writer and as a query proofreader. Being edited sometimes felt like having my bones reset on a torture rack. I don’t ever want to do that to a writer, but I probably have from time to time. “What is this, the adverb police?” a writer who shall remain nameless once said in my earshot. “You betcha,” I wanted to say. I don’t remove every word ending in “ly,” but I like economy and concision.  
 
  Andy: The New Yorker has such an iconic status in the literary world. When Vicky Raab quoted me in the New Yorker blog, I went around for weeks telling my friends I had become a “New Yorker writer.”  Does the office reflect this kind of exalted status? Or is the workplace like everywhere else? You know, people complaining about the bad plumbing, that sort of thing.
 
Mary: Bad plumbing! How did you know? There is someone who trashes the ladies’ room regularly, and we can’t figure out who it is.
 
When you have worked at a place for a while, it is bound to lose its mystique. But as someone who has occasionally been published in The New Yorker, I cannot deny that it is always a thrill to have a piece accepted. You belong to the same tradition as some great, great writers. And although sometimes you are just churning your way through the week, other times you’re getting paid to read something great. We are probably all in this business because we like to read, right? So what could be better?
 
 Andy: I have always imagined that most of the real workers at the magazine, the guys who don’t do the featured stories, are writers in their other lives. Probably pretty good writers. Is that true? Is TNY a good gig for a writer? Connections and all that stuff? Entrée to parties at the Hamptons?
 
Mary: You’re right there. Many of the people on the editorial staff have the will to write: they’re poets, essayists, novelists, playwrights,  journalists. I have a novel in my bottom drawer, if you’d like to take a look at it. I guess what we have is access: I can e-mail the editor-in-chief, or talk to an editor if I have an idea. But, obviously, the staff writers are given preference, and you are competing with them just like anyone else. Sometimes people leave The New Yorker to take writing jobs elsewhere.
 
I have never been invited to a party in the Hamptons, but maybe I’m just not working the connections assiduously enough. One of the perks is grabbing books off the book bench—review copies that get sent to the magazine (there’s no way we can review all the books that get sent here). Recently I asked Roger Angell to sign a copy of his 2008 Christmas poem for my second cousin Dennis Kucinich (rhymes with “spinach”), whom I met at a family reunion. Another perk is getting to hobnob with the cartoonists. When a copy of the magazine lands on my desk on Monday morning, the first thing I do is still to flip through it looking at the cartoons.
 
 Andy: You have worked under William Shawn, Robert Gottlieb, Tina Brown, and David Remnick. Do you have a sense that there was a “golden age” of TNY or are we living in it now?
 
Mary: Hmmm. Sometimes when I have occasion to look back at an issue from the Shawn days, I am moved by the beauty of those vintage magazines: the lines of type were fitted character by character, the hot type is very alive, the black-and-white columns of print have a classic purity. Bob Gottlieb was careful to maintain that, though he introduced some changes. Tina Brown brought in color and photography, and shortened the length of pieces (and probably the attention span of the general reader). I think that what David Remnick has done is bring his newsman’s nose to the job. Remnick has succeeded in making The New Yorker a vital part of the national conversation. We seem to have found our voice after 9/11.
 
On the other hand, you find fewer quirky pieces that may not be particularly newsworthy but that readers love. For instance, “Uncle Tungsten,” by Oliver Sacks. (I still regret making him spell “sulfur” our way, with the “f,” when he wanted to spell it the old-fashioned British way, “sulphur,” which he’d grown up with.) Ian Frazier’s two-part piece on his travels in Siberia is a good recent example of a beautiful, funny, interesting, old-fashioned piece of writing. A good writer can make you care about anything.
 
Andy: Is your job satisfying?
 
Mary: The thing I like most about my job is that it draws on my entire background. I know a little Italian and Greek that sometimes come in handy. I once caught a mistake in Middle English (in a piece by Andrew Porter yet)—the only time my graduate degree has ever had a practical use. I know the name of the airport in Cleveland, and that can be useful when you’re reading a piece of fiction by a Southern writer who is making things up about northern Ohio. It’s redemptive to have a practical use for the arcana of Roman Catholicism.  
 
  Andy: What qualities make a person a good candidate for copy editing?
 
 Mary: Self-doubt. It’s always good, before changing something, to stop and wonder if this is a mistake or if the writer did this for a reason. When you’ve read a piece five or more times, it is tempting to believe that it must be perfect, but you have to stay alert for anything you might have missed. Eternal vigilance! It also helps to have read widely (and well), and to have noticed, while you’re at it, how words are spelled. Of course you have to be attentive to details—you have to be a bit of a nitpicker yet be constructive in your nit-picking. You have to love language. And not be too proud to run spell-check.

 Andy: I hope this isn’t too naughty to ask, but can you tell me the three  biggest style errors that you have gotten from New Yorker writers?

 Mary:   When I first got into the copy-editing game, I wondered why writers persisted in the error of their ways when they must have seen the changes that the editors made. Finally I figured out that it isn’t the writers’ job to style their own copy. For writers, having to think about those things is constricting. Plus, if they did, it would put us out of a job.

 But here are a few things that have irked or puzzled me.

1. There was a writer who spelled “annihilate” with just one “n.” And he used it in every other sentence. This was back in the days before word processors, when I was in the collating department and had to prepare handwritten Reader’s proofs for the printer. I must have written the word “annihilate” four hundred times. The writer never did notice that it had two “n”s.
2. One stubborn editor refused to believe that “arrhythmia” was spelled with two “r”s. This doesn’t come up often,  but it is odd to have someone simply refuse to spell a word right because he thinks it looks funny. It’s almost admirable.
3. The difference between “lie” and “lay” in the past tense continues to confound. It is “lie, lay, lain” (intransitive verb, meaning “to recline”) and “lay, laid, laid” (transitive verb, meaning “to set [something] down”). “Laid” is so often used incorrectly as the past tense of “lie” (as in “She laid down for a nap” [ding, ding, ding: wrong!]) that people are afraid to use it even when it’s right, so you’ll get a sentence like “She lay the stones on the grave.” It doesn’t set off so many bells, but it’s a mistake, in this case attributable to overcorrectness.

  Andy: Mary, this has been fascinating. You expand this into a 50,000 word piece, and I can sell it to Knopf.

Final note: After completing this interview, I sent the text to Mary. She sent it back, hurling me into copy edit hell. I spent 3 hours correcting her edits that included caps to  lower case, lower case to caps, spaces between periods and colons, assorted italics and the list goes on.  This exercise was a powerful lesson, in itself, in the work of a copy editor. I’m exhausted from the experience.