Agents & Editors: David Gernert

How did you wind back up on the editorial side of the house?
Eventually, Doubleday hired a new editor in chief, Herman Gollob, and I screwed up my nerve and went into his office one day and told him, “I want to be an editor, and I think I should be an editor.” He said, “Why?”

I had wanted to do this for so long that I talked for twenty minutes without taking a breath. I literally went into a rant. It included things like “I play basketball in a league with John Sayles” and other crazy stuff about why I would be a good editor. [Laughs.] I went on and on and on. When I finished, Herman looked at me and said, “Shit, kid, I think you should have my job!” We became very good friends, and I remain close with Herman, who I represented when he wrote a book.

So he brings you over as an editor.
I was an associate editor, yes. I went around to the literary agencies and begged for them to send me things. Then there was a funny turn of events. I might not have this completely straight in my memory, but I believe Doubleday hired Nancy Evans, the woman who ran the Book-of-the-Month Club, to be the publisher, and then I was offered the job of running the Book-of-the-Month Club. I was still an associate editor, but they remembered me from when I had been selling rights. When I told Doubleday that I was going to leave to go to the Book-of-the-Month Club, Nancy said she wanted me to stay. So they gave me a big promotion to stay and I leaped up the career ladder. I think she made me the associate publisher. [Laughs.] I had a crazy job title.

How old were you then?
Thirty? In my career, I’ve had the good fortune of people believing in me and giving me opportunities even though I was young. I try to remember that now that I’m an old fart, because you must give people who are young an opportunity. No matter how much talent or skill or ability they might have, without the opportunity it’s not going to do them much good.

Then Steve Rubin became the publisher of Doubleday. He remains one of my closest friends. He asked me what I might want to do. I was now an editor, and the company had been restructured. Susan Moldow was the editor in chief, and I was having a great time. I said I thought I was a good leader, and someday I’d like to have a few people working for me. When Susan left, Rubin offered me the job of editor in chief.

Some people say that the way to move up in publishing is to move around a lot, but you stuck around.
I really, really liked Doubleday. “Liked” is not strong enough a word. I was pretty devoted to the place.

Still, you must have demonstrated some aptitude for the job.
It probably had something to do with the fact that I had brought in John Grisham.

Tell me how that happened.
I got a call from a friend who was a scout for film producers and she told me there was a manuscript being shown to producers that had not been submitted to publishers. The agent thought if he could make a movie deal first, he would have better luck selling the book to publishers. That’s an interesting idea—it’s not done very often, but occasionally.

She said she had just read it and that it was fantastic, that it was going to be a great movie, and that I would love it. She told me the name of the agent, Jay Garon, and I called him up and asked if I could read it. And he said yes, I'm sending it to any editor who calls and asks. I read it and loved it, and I acquired it. That was The Firm, which did of course get made into a movie.

What was publishing The Firm like?
It was great fun. It was not one of those books where the publisher announces a 250,000-copy first printing and a huge marketing budget. The first printing was fairly modest—30,000 copies—but we did really nice advance reading copies, and the reading responses were terrific, particularly from Waldenbooks. They were a huge player at that time, and the buyer for paperbacks loved it, the buyer for hardcover fiction loved it, the merchandise manager loved it. They said, “We think this book could be a best-seller.”

The day it went on sale, there had been no publicity other than a couple of advance reviews and some buzz because people had heard it was bought by the movies. I went out to lunch, and when I came back there was a message from the sales rep for Walden. The book was flying out of their stores.

Then John came to New York and we went out for a walk. Doubleday was at 666 Fifth Avenue then, and there were three major bookstores within a few blocks. In each store, we saw The Firm on the front table, and while we were there, a couple of people picked it up and took it to the cash register. John said to me, “People are buying my book. Is this normal?” And I said, “No! This is freaky!”

The Firm had an interesting sales history. It never was number one on the best-seller list, but it stayed on the list for something like a year.

What did you love about the novel? Simply the fact that it is a page-turner?
That was part of it. But The Firm is a novel that was really of its time. It wasn’t successful just because of the plot or because it was about lawyers. The book captures a feeling of being on the corporate treadmill that really struck a nerve at the time.

I also went out and got a copy of John’s first novel, because The Firm was his second. The first was A Time to Kill, which had been published by Wynwood, a very small press. It was very different from The Firm, and that made me think this guy could write a bunch of novels. And lo and behold, he did.

Did you think The Firm need editorial work when it came in?
A little, yes.

Tell me about that.
It was easy. Luckily, John and I hit it off and I gave him my thoughts. There was only one aspect of it that I thought really needed work. He completely agreed—in fact, he said that what I wanted him to take out was stuff he had put in at other people’s suggestion.

It was simple: I thought that the violence should be offstage. In the book’s original form, you saw each of the lawyers get killed. I said, “Put that offstage, because it’s somehow more chilling if Mitch goes to work in the morning and finds out that this lawyer died over the weekend, instead of showing it all.” And John said, “Great, that’s easy.”

You work on his next book, and the next. And the success grows.
When an author of fiction writes a book a year, as John did, the paperback helps build the new hardcover, but when you get a couple movies thrown into the mix, it snowballs the whole thing. There was a moment when John had a new hardcover at number one, a paperback at number one, and a movie that was out.

All those early novels were made into movies, and they were very good and very successful. In that regard, John was lucky, because Lord knows, someone could have made an awful movie, but they didn’t.

How did John decide to write a book a year?
I believe he was at a lunch or a dinner early in his career with some wholesale sales reps, and one of them said, “All of the really successful bestselling novelists publish a book a year. That’s important.” John thought that was really good advice, and he took it.

At that time, the way many fiction authors were built was that you would publish the hardcover, then you’d publish the paperback, and that paperback would help the next hardcover, and the paperback would grow. Over four novels, the paperback might go from 40,000 to 80,000 to 150,000 to 250,000 copies, and that would grow the audience for the hardcovers, too. This was a long time ago. It’s less true today because the mass-market paperback business is not quite what it used to be.

How does a publisher grow a novelist’s audience today?
That’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question. How do you grow a novelist? Boy, I wish I knew. [Laughs.] Fiction publishing today is as difficult as it’s ever been. Publishers are working hard to identify new ways to promote and sell fiction. A lot of those new ways are in the realm of what might be called digital marketing. But it’s really hard.

I have a theory that a lot of fiction over the years has been bought by people going to a bookstore because maybe they read a review in the New York Times, and it’s a new thriller by Lee Child, and the Times says it’s great. So you run to the bookstore to buy Lee Child, and while you’re there, you happen to see a book that looks really cool on the front table next to it, and you see another one, and you end up buying several books. A lot of fiction was helped by that kind of buying. All those really good-looking trade paperback novels on the front table—you’d go in, look at them, and pick a few.

People don’t buy books that way online, and it’s hurt fiction. Novelists don’t have the same kind of visibility. And there aren’t nearly as many places to be reviewed, which is crucial to novelists who are not well known. The buzzword for publishers is discoverability—how do people discover new writers?

Are there publishers who are enabling discovery particularly well?
I think there are several. I will tell you, without going into specific titles, that we at the agency watch the books we represent, and we’re involved in their publications pretty closely. If you look back at those publications, a lot of times the performance of a novel is not directly tied to how well it was published. I’m talking only about fiction now. We have had a couple novels in the last year that were published really well and didn’t work terribly well. We’ve also had a couple novels that were published less well, but which sold really well.

There’s a big element of luck involved. In a world where Amazon can anoint a novel “the novel of the month,” that really matters. The publishers influence that stuff, but they don’t control it. I wish there were more review outlets. The number of them online is growing.

Were there risks you took at Doubleday that didn’t work out?
Oh, yeah. [Laughs.] There were. Although I don’t remember them so much as the ones that got away. There were a few books I really, really wish I had published—that I had a chance to publish and didn’t.

Now you have to tell me what those were.
When I had been an associate editor for a little while, an agent called and said that her agency had just read a first novel that they all had all loved. They wanted to send it to five or six young editors because they thought it was a young person’s novel, and they sent it to me. I read it overnight and loved it.

The next day, I said to Herman Gollob, “At the risk of sounding crazy, I think this might be the best first novel we get the chance to publish this year. It’s really, really good.” And he went and closed the door to his office—Herman was like this—and read it on the spot. He came back into my office and dropped the manuscript on my desk and said, “Kid, you might be right.” He always called me kid, and still does.

We participated in the auction, and I ended up being the underbidder. It went for what at the time was the largest amount of money ever paid for a first novel, which wasn’t that much by today’s standards at all. I think that I went to $150,000 and it was sold for a little more than that. It was The Mysteries of Pittsburgh by Michael Chabon.

That’s an auspicious near miss.
Those are the ones you never forget. In that case, the good thing was that Doug Stumpf bought it for Morrow, and they published it better than I would have.

Walk me through what a great publication would have been like. Did Morrow do something you never would have thought of?
It wasn’t a specific individual thing. They just did a really good job all the way around. It was a combination of a great jacket, a lot of advance buzz, great reviews, and terrific author promotion. They made that book the talk of the town. It was the novel everybody had to read. That can be done—but it’s very difficult.

What needs to line up for that to happen?
You need to build within the publishing company a little team of your allies, who all believe in the book as much as you do. Ideally, you would have a publicist who loves the book, and a marketing person who loves the book, and maybe you get lucky and the art director loves the book. When you get the collective effort and influence of the company behind the book it has a good chance.