(Jeffery Renard Allen, Brigid Hughes, Ethan Nosowsky, Elisabeth Schmitz, Margaret Wrinkle) Every writer has to start somewhere, but the world of literary journals and publishing houses can often seem opaque. This panel brings together a diverse group of editors and writers to discuss the publication process and the editor-author dynamic. Speakers include award-winning authors and their editors from Grove Atlantic and Graywolf Press.

Published Date: February 24, 2016

Transcription

Speaker 1 (00:00:03):

Welcome to the A W P Podcast series. This event was recorded at the 2015 A W P conference in Minneapolis. The recording features Jeffrey Renard Allen, Bridget Hughes, Ethan Naski, Elizabeth Schmitz, and Margaret Wrinkle. You will now hear Bridgett Hughes provide introductions.

Speaker 2 (00:00:32):

Thank you all for joining us. My name is Bridgett Hughes. I'm the editor of the Literary magazine, a Public Space, and I am delighted to have with us today for a conversation about editing. Two fabulous authors and two fabulous editors. From two of my favorite houses to my far left is Elizabeth Schmitz. She's the vice president and editorial Director of Grove Atlantic, where the first book she acquired was Charles Frazier's debut novel Cool Mountain. She has also edited such authors as Tom Drury, Robbie Alameddine, Michael Thomas, Christine Scott, and Jamie Quattro, among many others, including Margaret Wrinkle, whose debut novel Wash won the center for Fiction's Flaherty done in first novel prize and was a runner up for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, as well as one of the Wall Street Journal's Top 10 novels of the year.

Speaker 2 (00:01:23):

To my right is Ethan Naski, the editorial director at Grey Wolf Press. He began his career at Ferra Strauss and Guru and was most recently editorial director at McSweeney's. He's edited books by Hilton Owls, Jeff Dyer, Sarah Manguso, Maggie Nelson, Jenny Awful, as well as Jeffrey Renard Allen, who is to his right. Jeff Allen is the author of Two Collections of Poetry, a short story collection and two novels including Song of the Shank, which last year received rave reviews coast to coast from the LA Times to the New York Times, where it was also one of their notable books of the year. And as of about three days ago, I think he is a Guggenheim fellow.

Speaker 2 (00:02:08):

So I thought to start with, I would read just to set the tone, three quotes about what an editor does. For as many years as I've been working as an editor, I feel like I still don't entirely know what that job description is or means. It means something different for every author and every book that you work on. And then I thought we'd ask Elizabeth and Ethan to talk a little bit about the process of acquiring and working with these two authors, and then we'd like to bring you in as soon as possible, or I imagine that you all have some questions. So we'll try to do that sort of in the middle of the conversation. And then I might reserve the right to sneak back in and ask a few follow-up questions. So here's Eeb White on the role of the editor. An editor is a person who knows more about writing than writers do, but he has escaped the terrible desire to write an editor's job. It has been said is to read a book more seriously and carefully than any sane person ever would, and to note anything and everything that doesn't seem to live up to the book's own highest standards.

Speaker 2 (00:03:08):

And here's NCO In an interview, the interview asks him about the function of the editor, and he replies, by editor, I suppose you mean proofreader. And among these, I have known limpid creatures of limitless tact and tenderness who would discuss with me a semi as if it were a point of honor, which indeed a point of art often is. But I have also come across a few pompous of Ular brutes who would attempt to make suggestions, which I have encountered with a thunderous stat. So Elizabeth, maybe I can ask you to talk about the process of acquiring and working with Margaret on Wash.

Speaker 3 (00:03:49):

Sure, happy to. Okay, so where do we start? This is a really interesting story actually, because Margaret's book Wash, which was called something else when it first came in, true for sure, it was called in the beginning, was submitted by her agent Marley Rusof, I can't remember now, how many years ago? For a while ago. And I had never worked with Marley before. I had admired her from a distance and I read Wash and fell in love with it. And I turned out to be the only bidder on the book, and it was something I could not understand, but because I mean, who knows why Margaret is her book Wash is told from two points of view, and one of them is a black slave and the other is his white owner. And this scared people. It really scared people off. And I thought it was extraordinary and amazing and not a risk, although maybe it was.

Speaker 3 (00:04:58):

That's kind of what Grove does and certainly what I do. And I loved it. So I acquired it and it was an amazing thing. So I read the book first, fell in love with it, bought it quite straightforward. And then this is sort of an interesting author editor relationship because the year I bought it, our publisher Morgan Rakin went to France for a year, and I'm the editorial director at Grove and I really needed to step up and start traveling a lot and going to all kinds of conferences and meetings. And I was on the road more than I usually am. And Margaret, I really wanted to edit Margaret and we really wanted to work together. And she was very patiently waited for months and months and months. And eventually we decided that the best thing to do would be for me to work with a senior editor on Wash.

Speaker 3 (00:05:49):

And I had just hired Corina Barson from the other press, and she also fell in love with the book. And so what happened was that after the initial read, Karina did the next steps and then the book came back to me for the final edit. And I have been working a little bit more in that way since this very good experience with Wash. What Margaret will talk about a little bit more is how she really has two editors at Grove. She has the acquisition editor and the one who is out there on the road presenting the book and pitching the book and writing handwritten notes to reviewers and booksellers and traveling and talking about her. And then she, while I was doing this pre-publication, Karina was back in the office editing her book. And then when I came back, I did the final round, final suggestions and edits, and then we all went out into the world together with it. The book was a big success, had a huge major review in the New York Times book review by Major Jackson. She won the Flaherty Dunn Award for best fiction of the year from the Center for Fiction. She did an amazing tour and the book has done very, very well for us. So that's our story in a nutshell.

Speaker 2 (00:07:02):

Margaret, could you talk a little bit about how different the manuscript that you sold was and how different the book is? Yes. Well, as I said earlier, a lot of the editing and the structural edits, I did multiple drafts before it even got to Grove. And it's not very traditional, it's not very linear. It's got these multiple perspectives. It's mixed first person and third person. So I actually, that whole time the year that I was waiting to hear back from Elizabeth, and then when I was waiting to hear back from Karina, I was thinking that they might say what people had said in the past, which is I love it, I love it, but the whole thing needs to be in third person or I love it, but can you just make it purple? And I did in the past have an editor who was very interested and who offered a contract on a very small number of pages, but who said her first editorial suggestion was that Wash was too smart to be illiterate.

Speaker 2 (00:08:01):

And I was thinking, those two things don't have anything to do with each other. And if you don't know that, I don't know how well we're going to get along with this. And as much as I wanted the contract, obviously I couldn't do it. I couldn't go down that road. And so resonating finding someone who really resonates with it and who is not scared of it. So I was waiting to hear that it needed to be, I was thinking I might hear that it needed to be completely different. And I was overjoyed to hear that, no, this is the book you wrote and this is what we're going to publish, but let's it let's do some things to make that more, to strengthen that weird way that it is. So all the butcher paper and taking it apart and putting it together, all that happened before. Yeah, and I think the situation with Jeff's novel was slightly different. And I know Ethan, you'd worked with Jeff before this book, right?

Speaker 4 (00:09:04):

Actually, the path of Grey Wolff acquiring and my even working at Gray Wolff and then working with Jeff in a couple of different versions was about a Securus and complex and riches story as the book itself. But I had first read Jeff's work when I was an editor at F S G, and actually I was not Jeff's editor at Ferris Strauss. First editor for his first novel was Elizabeth Sifton, really legendary, wonderful editor. But I knew his work. And I was consulting, this is more than 10 years ago now, for a grant at the Creative Capital Foundation. And Jeff ended up being one of the grantees at that organization. I was happy about it. And he applied, the project was for this novel song of the Shank. At that time, I wasn't working at SG anymore. I was teaching, I was helping with this grant I was doing helping on a literary magazine.

Speaker 4 (00:09:51):

I was doing a bunch of things. And as part of this grant, there is a retreat for the artists and where we invite up consultants and public for it's multidisciplinary and performing arts and video and all these things. So there are all these curators and editors and all this stuff. And I had invited the publisher of Gray Wolf, Fiona McCray, to come up and be one of the literature consultants. And she met Jeff at this retreat and thought, oh, this guy's a great writer. And Fiona ended up signing Gray Wolf up for both a short story collection that Jeff had just about finished, well, not quite finished, and then he had a chunk of this novel. It was not finished, which is actually pretty unusual for Gray Wolf to acquire a novel that's not been completed yet. It's very rare for us. But in this case, Fiona was very excited about the work and getting Jeff under contract and giving him some space and confidence with which to complete this very, very ambitious novel.

Speaker 4 (00:10:47):

Not so long after that, I think Fiona thought, oh, that was sort of nice, and that he sent this writer my way and maybe I should just hire that guy. So she ended up hiring me, and when I walked in the door, she said, oh, Jeff just delivered his short stories. Do you want to edit those? And I said, sure. Great, that sounds great. So Jeff and I worked on his story collection and in the meantime he was working on this very big ambitious novel that was taking him a long time to write, and we will talk more about that. So then it took a few years really of editing, of our editing this book, not just of writing. And I went through a few different drafts with Jeff of the manuscript of Song of the Shank, and then I was sorry to make this partly about my weird publishing trajectory, but I got hired by McSweeney's for a while and I left as we were still in the editing process. Fiona, our publisher, who's a great editor, picked up the ball and had Jeff mix him further cuts. And then Fiona hired me back again. And when I walked in the door, she's like, guess what? This is done. And I read it last time, I think we went through about four drafts, I think, not including Fiona's Draft. So actually it was a long editorial process and I think we can go into the specifics later.

Speaker 2 (00:12:05):

And Jeff, can you talk a little bit, I know that the novel not only went through several different drafts, but radically different drafts, and to what extent it was useful to have an editor there to bounce ideas off of or what Ethan's sort of role was as you were figuring out what the right structure was for the novel?

Speaker 5 (00:12:22):

Yes, Ethan was saying the whole process of the editing was an epic in the way that the novel is. Where should I start with that? So first, as Ethan was explaining, the novel wasn't finished. I had this chunk of material and I kind of knew the overall thing I was trying to do in the book, but hadn't worked out a lot of kinks. So I can't remember what year that was, but just to show how unfinished the book was and how early it was and when it was under contract. I mean, I was supposed to deliver the book in 2009, and actually I think I finally delivered the book in 2013. So I was four years past the actual due date that was on the contract, and I didn't even know that. I mean, I think month away. Yeah, my agent I think sort of pointed it out.

Speaker 5 (00:13:14):

I mean, I hadn't even looked, but so in any case, what happened is first I worked with Ethan and he was explaining and how should I say, yeah, I worked with Ethan and the book had, it was kind of unhappily and things of this sort. But I have to say that a lot of the editing process had to do with my own reluctance really to be edited. So for example, when I was at F S G with Elizabeth Sifton, she didn't really do much editing on my first novel. We did some stuff. Most of what I got from her was just a lot of really interesting conversation about various writers. And she introduced me to writers and all kinds of things like that. And I later learned through her assistant, the editorial assistant who I became friends with that Elizabeth wasn't really interested all that much in fiction anymore.

Speaker 5 (00:14:15):

So most of the books she was acquiring then were nonfiction from what this editorial assistant told me. She spent a lot of her time rewriting a lot of the sentences and then nonfiction book and those nonfiction books. So any case, the point being that I hadn't really been edited on the first novel, and then Ethan and I worked a little bit on the short stories, but they had all been previously published. And so most of the editorial process around the stories had to do with deciding which stories would actually go in the book and that kind of thing. And so then I come to Ethan, he's got all these suggestions, and I was really kind of like, who is this guy to tell me and what is this? And I had this really just to make a long story. Sure. I had this really bizarre thing where I contract a malaria, and this is not a lie actually, this is all true. I contracted malaria and almost died. I was in the hospital for six weeks and in the hospital I was thinking, boy, I really should have finished this novel by now.

Speaker 5 (00:15:26):

And so I get out of the hospital in January of 2009, and then I finished the book in three months and my thought was, okay, it's done now, so I'll give it to Ethan and let's get it out in a year. And Ethan's response was, well, this book needs a lot of work. And I'm thinking like, okay, so I did some work on it for a month or something and gave it back to Ethan. And he was actually kind of angry. He's like, I'm willing to read this one more time, but you have to take the editing seriously. And then I started to take it seriously. So anyway, that's kind of where it was. And really the point being that I actually finished the book in 2009, early in 2009, and then I spent the next, I guess it was four years or so mostly revising and editing. I mean, that's actually how long it took. And as I think Ethan and I went through three drafts and then he went away to Macs Sweeney's, and then I worked with Fiona and then he came back and we finished, as you would say. Yeah,

Speaker 2 (00:16:30):

Could Elizabeth and Ethan, I'm sort of curious. We were at a festival the other week and there was a question from the audience about how does an author maintain ownership of the manuscript in the editorial process, which seemed to me such an odd way to think about the editorial role. I think of it as the editor's role is to give you more ownership of the book that you were trying to write. And I'm wondering how often there's an element of tension in the editorial process if you have to get sort of the past the polite phase, and if so, how that process works.

Speaker 3 (00:17:05):

There's this sort of big mystery around editors from first time writers in particular, and even when an author is switching houses and switching editors about how the new editor will be, I have found that I diffuse it pretty quickly. First and foremost, it's the author's book. It will always be the author's book and their choice, but the way I edit is there are usually a couple of drafts, sometimes three is in pencil on the manuscript, and they're largely, when Jeff was talking about conversation with Elizabeth, I thought that was interesting. I have comments all over the pages in the margins and a lot of them are questions. So I will never draw a line through a passage or a page or anything, but I will put it in gentle brackets and ask a question in the margin. If I don't think it's working, I'll say, this is how I felt when I read this.

Speaker 3 (00:18:04):

Is that what you intended? So that the first draft is largely conversational and questioning. I do a lot of squiggly lines under sentences that aren't working or passages that are awkward. I put smiley faces in the margins. I'm sorry for things that I love, tons of check marks by everything that I love. The first round is more suggestive, I would say. And then that kind of puts them at ease and they realize that it's not coming back with red pen everywhere and slashing and moving around, and then they work on the book and then it comes back. If they haven't taken a lot of the suggestions, then the second edit becomes a little bit more prescriptive. And I still won't draw lines through anything, but I will, the brackets will go in pen this time and I just get more direct about it. But I will say that I've really never, every relationship is different, but you win each other's trust and it usually, I mean it always happens actually because if the editor falls in love with the book, they're more than likely really going to get along with the author. And many times I never meet the author. Sometimes I speak with them on the phone beforehand, particularly if there seems to be a lot of work needed and you want to make sure that they agree or that they think you're reading it the same way they are, but you form a connection with them and you work with them in the way that works for them. And it's generally diffused the anxiety and the mystery around it pretty quickly. I think so my

Speaker 2 (00:19:41):

And is that more or less how you work? How does the shift from polite to

Speaker 4 (00:19:46):

Honest, I should say that? So to the extent that there was some frustration towards the end of the process that Jeff hadn't taken so of the edits that it was because I thought the book was so brilliant and had so much potential, but it is really ambitious both at the level of the sentence and at the level of the structure, which are both very complicated and make certain demands of the reader. Jeff writes in a way that wants the reader to do work, which is fine with me actually. I'm happy I'm a reader who likes to do work. So what was always about that because was you met a lot of issues of complexity about the book, just again, both on the level of sentence point of view, shifts in time, characters narration. There are a lot of moving pieces in a very long book.

Speaker 4 (00:20:32):

And so what I usually tell a writer is all an editor does is read slowly and tell you how the book was hitting them. It's not that complicated. And actually Elizabeth talks about falling in love with a book. And so an editor's reaction to a book is no more sophisticated than when you were eight years old and fell in love with a book. It's a fairly emotional response. It's not a particularly intellectual one. You either like a book or you don't. And I don't think that changes across your life very much, but what the professional part of the job of editing is to learn how to articulate that response back to the writer so that they can make use of how their book might be affecting a reader. Does that make sense? I don't know if that makes sense, but so in a way, I actually often don't start line editing write off.

Speaker 4 (00:21:31):

I try to, especially books that have kind of complicated structures, I often will send a sort of a long letter that more or less explains what I think I read. And I hope that me and the writer are talking about the same book. And I should say it has been very rare in my career where we're not talking about the same book because usually we have conversations with writers when we acquire the book. And you try to establish that because what is important to realize is that you get a stack of manuscript pages or a file that we print out, and it can be any number of books. It can go in a lot of different ways. And you want to make sure that if you have ideas about where the book should go, they're shared with the writer. Sorry, there's a long way to say that.

Speaker 4 (00:22:13):

Jeff and I were having a lot of conversations about which book this should be in a way, and it had changed a lot actually from a chronological account to a non chronological account. So it had changed a lot in the process. So there were a lot of possibilities floating in the air, and I was trying to make sure that he was keeping the reader engaged. I was just starting saying, if I'm really reading really slowly and I'm not totally following this, you might have to address this. And I'm never attached to my solutions what I'm saying if I say, cut this paragraph or, oh, I thought it was moving slow here. So there are a million ways to resolve it. It's the writer's job to cut it is the writer's book. And the times where it gets, where it's sort of like we really start pushing can, I think obviously be frustrating for a writer, but I think we're all trying to do the same thing, which is to make a book its best possible version of itself.

Speaker 4 (00:23:06):

And I remember when I was very young, when I was an editorial assistant and I got to work, he was mostly retired, but for Robert Rou who was one of the founders of fsg, and he is this amazing guy who worked with Flannery O'Connor and Jack Kerouac and Robert Lowell and just sort of everybody. And he, I'll not name the writer, but there was a very frustrating editorial process where the writer who he'd been working with for decades wrote back and said, I've done everything you wanted me to do. The author wrote to Robert Guru, and he kind of wrote back and he said, no, you've done everything the book wanted you to do. So it is this thing of the book tells you what it needs, and hopefully the editor can tune into it. That's a really important thing

Speaker 2 (00:23:44):

That the editor needs to tune into the book. Maybe we'll see if there are any questions in the audience before

Speaker 6 (00:23:56):

Margaret. Did Marley suggest that edit before Elizabeth?

Speaker 2 (00:24:01):

So the question was about Margaret's agent, and did the agent offer any editorial suggestions before submitting the manuscript? Yes, at one point it was 700 pages. So again, it was a letter and it wasn't specifics. It was just sort of, this is how I felt and you need to deal with these feelings that I had, not specifically how to deal with them. And a lot of times when an editor says there's a problem and you try this and you think, oh no, their solution is not the solution, but you say, oh, it's not that, it's this. So when you hear another solution, then that's when the true solution comes up because you say, oh, it's not that, but it's this. And then that takes you to a new clarity. So I had never published anything ever, and the market was really bad. It was early 2010, and so she kept saying, the market is so hard, it has to be perfect.

Speaker 2 (00:25:05):

And so I did pretty much a rewrite during which 200 pages, I mean blood ran in the streets, but it was up to me how to fix the problems that she had. And then she pushed, and I'm actually, I was very unhappy at the time, but I'm very happy now because pushed me into going places with it that I am really glad I went, being more clear about the ancestral angle and all of that. And then of course we deemed it perfect and sent it out and two days later, borders went bankrupt and everything went kalu. And as Elizabeth said, a lot of, there was other editors who were interested, but the subject matter was so volatile because not only is it a white descendant of slave holders writing in the voice of an enslaved black man, but about slave breeding. And so at one point Marley said, the cowardice is epidemic, and that's where Grove, they are independent and they can take those chances.

Speaker 2 (00:26:14):

But yeah, I had gone through edits with Marley. I had gone through edits with a freelance editor as well, wrestling before that. So there was a lot of wrestling the beast. There were many times I thought I was finished. So at what point did you, did you hire a freelance editor? And is there a point when you think it would've been too soon to work with an editor? At what point? It was, yes. I mean for someone like me, because for me, I was sort of overeducated and so I didn't get an M f A, I just had a little writing group. I didn't know anything. And that sort of is the way I work best because my allegiance is sort of to the world of the story. And I worked in this Pat Schneider method of accessing your subconscious and being self-conscious or analytical really inhibits that. For someone who writes, like I do, an editor is really important because I write very associatively and intuitive and I don't always know where I'm going. And then I have a lot of underbrush to clear up.

Speaker 5 (00:27:24):

So

Speaker 7 (00:27:24):

You took care of a lot of the underbrush before Elizabeth,

Speaker 2 (00:27:29):

But there was still more. And I think it's tricky too because with a book like this where so much of it is first person and the characters are coming from an oral culture that there's a certain amount of repetition in the way that a person speaks, and there's a certain level of the way that repetition can create an incantation. So I wanted to capture that, but the fact of the matter it is has to work on the page and repetition is really dicey with that. But at the same time, nobody who edited me was Southern. And so with some of the line edits, you really have to be very discerning about what resonates and what doesn't and protecting the things that are, especially rhythms of speech and things like that. For me, hiring the freelance editor, it would've been very easy to do that too soon to make me, I would've been self-conscious about what I was trying to do. I had to kind of get the whole scope of the thing out before I was really aware of what I was actually doing because it would be too scary. And Jeff, how do you work when you're starting a project? Are there readers that you show your work to you discuss ideas with or you really isolate yourself until you have things figured out to a certain point?

Speaker 5 (00:28:51):

Yeah, I mean, I'm pretty isolated. I suppose I was actually going to say this anyway. I suppose my agents become my first reader. And I would say in many ways the agent is the first line of defense against the publishers, if I can put it that way. Or what I mean by that is obviously the agent's job is to sort of know what they can sell and what they can't sell. And so they can give you some honest feedback about what you're doing. They don't always couch it in those terms. In other words, they won't say, well, this is a book I can't sell, but they'll say something else, which means the same thing. But they also will tell you certain things need to happen with this manuscript before I'm ready to show it. So for example, my first novel, my agent told me that she thought the first chapter was too complicated. So I rewrote the first chapter before it ended being sent around. And then at a certain stage I was working on another novel, and the agent, my agent basically said something like, she didn't say it was boring, but that's essentially what she said.

Speaker 5 (00:30:02):

And so then I started seriously working on the book about Blind Tom Song of the Shank. But I think at this stage now, it's become a process of when I'm thinking about anything I'm writing, I'm actually more in communication now with Ethan than I am even with my agent since we have that kind of relationship as writer and editor. So

Speaker 4 (00:30:26):

That actually also, that gets back to the kind of trust thing that Elizabeth was talking about, I think is crucial. I mean, you forged a dialogue over time and hopefully when it's working, the editor understands what it is the writer is trying to do, not just in any one particular book, but generally in terms of their thematic, formal stylistic ambitions.

Speaker 5 (00:30:50):

Yeah, I wanted to just say one thing about what it is, in my opinion, what is it that an editor can do? And I feel like what the editor does really is to see things that the writer can't see. Sometimes as writers, as conscious as we are of craft, sometimes there we do have an inability to step outside of ourselves and to look objectively at the manuscript. So for example, I just remember my novel. I had some characters who were sort of secondary characters and Ethan said, oh, you don't need these characters. And I had no idea of that. And then there are other kinds of things like that in terms of Ethan would say there's something wrong with the way the flashbacks are working in the book, but he didn't necessarily tell me how to solve the problem with that, but it was something that he drew my attention to.

Speaker 5 (00:31:44):

So I had to spend some time. And then importantly also what you were sent earlier about how you basically suggesting how a reader would be perceiving this manuscript. So that happened in the case with my book as well, when Ethan was saying, well, essentially was saying, look, I'm a really smart guy and I've read a lot and I don't understand the heck what you're doing. And so if I'm going to get confused, then everyone else is too. So those kinds of things were really crucial in terms of just figuring out, as we call it, the road signs that would allow a reader to understand what the book is really trying to get to. And again, I think those are the kinds of things that writers often don't recognize in their own work.

Speaker 2 (00:32:28):

Can I just ask a practical question? How frequently are you in contact over those four years? If you were working on a certain chapter that you were struggling with, would you email Ethan a question or you would simply submit a full revision?

Speaker 5 (00:32:44):

Well, as I recall the way it worked, Ethan was very thorough. He would give me four pages of notes and comments and about sometimes specific pages and different things like that. So usually was a process that involved a long period of us actually meeting, particularly since he was often in the west, and we would meet when he came to New York, but usually there was a considerable amount of time. But later, well, when I started to work with Fiona, who's not here, but we had a sort of different kind of thing happening. One of the great things about Graywolf is that the press made certain demands on my manuscript, but they were not commercial demands. So for example, Fiona would say something like, oh, well this manuscript is 900 pages. It would be great if it were 700 pages. And I was thinking, what does that mean exactly?

Speaker 5 (00:33:45):

Does that mean I'm supposed to just cut 200 pages, but which 200? And then it got down to 700 pages or whatever it was. And she said, oh, this would be great if we were actually 450 or something like that. And it was a way of saying that the book felt long, but she wasn't telling me to cut the book just for the purpose of cutting the book to make it more commercially viable. But there was also a time when, so she would say, the book needs to be cut. And so I would cut, and then when I gave her the next draft, it would be longer. Again, I would get new ideas about things and she was okay with that. But there was also one of the new ideas I got had to do with the fact that I thought I needed to use images in the book to kind of bring it all together. And I remember writing her email about that, my efforts to use images, and she just responded by saying, you've totally lost me. So normally I try to work things out a little more on my own before I begin to present questions to my editor

Speaker 2 (00:34:49):

All the way in the back.

Speaker 8 (00:34:51):

I actually want to know what the process.

Speaker 2 (00:34:56):

So I think the question was about the financial component of acquiring a manuscript, which is such a big question. I'm not sure how easy it is to answer, but maybe you could just talk generally about,

Speaker 3 (00:35:11):

This one always makes me laugh because what I gather happens at the big houses, they often do these things called p and ls, and I didn't even know what that was for the longest time, but it means profit and loss statement, and it's actually a formula and you plug in the numbers that you think you'll sell and you just statistically figure out how many copies you'll sell and what the advance should be. I've never done one of those in my life, and I don't think Grove has either. It's not a science, it really is. There's just no science. It depends on so many things. And the ideal scenario is that you want the book and you're the one who wants it most, and so you negotiate with the agent and the author to just get the deal that everybody wants. That's the best way. But if there are other people who want the book, then the agents might have an auction.

Speaker 3 (00:36:12):

They call it an auction, and that's where everybody puts in their bid and they go with the highest bidder or they do rounds of bids and it goes up and up. Auctions are not something that Grove Atlantic gets involved with very often. We never win them, we just don't have the kind of deep pockets that the big corporate houses have. But sometimes we end up winning a book for less money because the author wants to come and work with us, really have a great editorial conversation on the phone. They think we understand the book. They might just be on the telephone. They might come into the office and meet everybody and see that they really want to work with us. It depends on what the author needs, what the agent's expectations are and what we think we can do. There's so many different rights that you can buy.

Speaker 3 (00:37:06):

You can buy just North American rights at a certain level, but if you want to buy world rights, which is something that Grove Atlantic does a lot of so that we can sell our books around the world on your behalf of translation rights. And we go, actually, I'm getting on a plane tonight to go to the London Book Fair, which is a big rights fair where we meet every half an hour meetings with different international editors and we talk about our books and we try to place them abroad for translation and distribution around the world for world rights. We would pay a little more for just North American less, but there really is no science. It's about the editor's passion for the book and what the house thinks they can do with it. Yeah, I don't know what else I can

Speaker 2 (00:37:54):

Say. There was Marilo ov short story writer who, he was on a panel yesterday and he was talking about this part of his career and when he was selling his first collection, he had two offers, one for significantly more money from an editor, said, I love the collection. I think it's ready to be published. And another from an editor at F S G actually who was offering significantly less money and said, I think these stories need work and I want to work on them with you. And he found Fsgs editorial letter and editorial commitment to that collection much more valuable than the advance. And he said it was scary to make that decision, but you only get one chance to publish a first book, and it's really, you hope at the beginning of a long-term partnership with a publisher. One of the reasons I'll just say that we wanted editors from Graywolf and Grove on a panel about editing is because that commitment, that editorial commitment is really what defines them. I think authors make a decision to go with smaller houses for smaller advances because they value that editorial relationship. And those decisions, I think are sort of separate from the financial decisions.

Speaker 4 (00:39:01):

Yeah, exactly. I mean, the advance is a kind of a bet mean we to, I guess one thing I should say too, GR Wolf is a nonprofit press. So we don't make all of our money through book sales. We get grants, we get donations from individuals and foundations, and a lot of people think, oh, that means that you guys don't have to worry about the business side. But actually that's not true. I mean, it's just that our business model is different from the corporate publishers, but every time we acquire a book, we have to make a decision about the market and about how many copies we think we can sell of a book. And we try to base our advances on that. And you think about books that might be comparable, and our advances are within a certain range. And I'm always fascinated when a corporate publisher says, oh, that one's worth $800,000, and where did they get that number from? It seems completely made up, but you do have to at some point think about how many copies you can sell and you base your advance on more or less what you think you'll sell in the first year or two.

Speaker 2 (00:40:02):

Maybe I can just sort of sneak in a question about the editor's role in introducing the book to the wider world, the booksellers, the reviewers, especially in the case of Grove and Grey Wolf, because you are sort of taking risks on books that other people have found too difficult. I imagine that that's a big part of what you do, sort of shaping how people will read that book, and I'm just wondering how you think about that part of your role.

Speaker 4 (00:40:30):

Well, that's kind of a really fun part of the job. I mean, the really great fun part of the job is you read something on submission and you think, oh my God, I can't wait to tell other people about this book. And as an editor, you have the ability to have this megaphone where you actually distribute and print the book and tell lots of other people you've never even met before about this book. But it starts quite early. I mean, we don't have big marketing budgets, and so we have a very long process of basically trying to tell people about the book because the only thing that makes books sell is really is word of people have to the book and recommend it to their friends. That's what makes any book work. No amount of marketing dollars can really get around that process. So we take a long time by, well first actually, it starts with kind of getting my own colleagues excited about it.

Speaker 4 (00:41:18):

If I'm the first one to read a manuscript and I email it around to the other editors at the Gray Wolf staff and say, what do you guys think about this? And we all get excited about it, and that's the first step. And we acquire the book, then we get our marketing and publicity people excited about it, and then they get booksellers and reviewers excited about it. So it's sort of a chain that's going to moves in stepwise fashion. But we work very early on to send even manuscripts sometimes out to booksellers who will start talking about a book very early to reviewers. And part of the job of our marketing and publicity people is to know which reviewer will like which book. And actually it's a process that takes longer than the production of the book itself. So I think some writers are sort of dismayed of Why is this taking so long? I finished this book a year ago, but actually in order for us to publish, well, we have to do a lot of things to start talking about it, but that's a fun thing to do. It takes a lot of work, but it's a fun thing to do.

Speaker 3 (00:42:17):

Yeah, everything that Ethan said is correct. I mean, I think when I'm acquiring a book in order to sort of gauge my passion for it, I imagine myself presenting the book to my colleagues to the Salesforce at sales conference presenting the book over and over and over again for probably a couple of years. It really is a long process. Ideally, we have a year between finished book and publication. Often it's not that way, but for a first novel, it really is good to have that. An editor's job now is really twofold. There's getting the manuscript into shape and then there's the presenting it to the world. And I always imagine, how am I going to present this book and get people excited about it? And if I know exactly how to do that, and I just know that I'm charged up and know how to do it and just feel so convinced and passionate that I can do this, not just tomorrow when I tell people that I bought it, but the next day and the next day and the next day, and to an ever-growing audience.

Speaker 3 (00:43:20):

So it starts with your colleagues and then your editorial board, and then you start talking about it to your reps and then booksellers, and then critics and reviewers. You also need to, for first novel in particular, garnering blurbs is something that we all do with the author's help and the agent's help. But this takes time. You're asking a favor of people to read a manuscript, and if they like it to offer a few words of praise and support of the author. That's a huge part of our job now is presenting the book out into the world and knowing that you're going to be doing that on a daily basis for a couple of years, the lead up to the publication, and then the year that it's being published, and then hopefully forever. I mean, that's what when you buy a book, you want it to live on the shelves forever. And that's one thing I do talk to my authors a lot. One thing I'm famous for is sort of trying to avoid really kind of pop daily references, because who knows if someone will know what that is in a year's time, much less 10 years or 50 years from now. But yeah, does that answer the question? Basically,

Speaker 9 (00:44:33):

It's a question about agents, again, I'd like to ask was Ethan particular about how do you feel about

Speaker 2 (00:44:40):

A question for Elizabeth and Ethan about agents taking on more and more of an editorial role, and is that the case? And if so, how do you feel about

Speaker 3 (00:44:49):

It? I think every agent is different. Some agents are known for that and others don't. I think that the agents probably have a lot more input if it's a first novel, as someone was saying, to get a first manuscript into the best shape that it can possibly be for that first sale is really important. So I think that book groups and the second readers and agents probably have a lot more input on the first book. And then as Ethan said, after you work with the author, the editor, author relationship grows, and then by the next book, often the agent will send the manuscript directly to the editor without sometimes reading it at the same time even, because now that you have a relationship, there's no reason to have someone else in the middle. And I will say that you should interview an agent the same way you would an editor. Make sure that they understand the book as you do, and then be careful, because I will say occasionally when I start the editing process, I will have an author say, but the agent told me to do this, and there's an unwinding thing that sometimes has to happen. So it's a sensitive issue and you just need to really, really trust your readers and all the work that you're doing beforehand. And Margaret obviously did. And

Speaker 2 (00:46:09):

Yeah, I was just going to say about the, it's almost like my business is with the world of the story and the editor's business is with the world of the reader. I have to focus all my attention on the world of the story and trust that they're plugged into the world of the reader, and they know what you don't know and what you can't afford to be paying attention to right then. And listening to them, and actually I was very lucky, I was a documentary filmmaker before this and really got a sense of what role the editor plays because you get this footage that's just this incredible experience and this incredible interview, and you were there and you're so attached to the experience of getting the footage. And then when the editor is the first person who wasn't there and doesn't have that sort of halo of excitement of getting the footage to tell you whether it works or not. So their objective opinion is very valuable. And you obviously sometimes resist it because you want it to work so badly, but you disregard that at your peril. Their detachment is really a strength for you. And so when you build that trust, then you can let them play their natural role and it's critical. So I don't know whether that was on the point, but that was, and Ethan, what about you in terms of agents?

Speaker 4 (00:47:34):

Yeah, I don't have a whole lot to Elizabeth. I think she answered the question. I mean, I think it tends not to be, I mean, for the huge majority of them, I think they give some incredibly valuable feedback that can get a manuscript ready for submission. And as Jeff said, there can be a time where it's too early to show it to an editor because it can really affect your impression. And you don't want the author to go on the spiral, oh my God, it's a mess. So the agent can, I think, kind of get it to maybe an intermediate stage, let's say before, but as the relationship goes on, I mean, we're in dialogue about new work all the time now. So it varies. Yeah. Anyway, I don't have a whole lot to add to Elizabeth, actually. Sorry,

Speaker 2 (00:48:18):

Over here.

Speaker 9 (00:48:20):

Yeah. So I'm asking this from the perspective of just finishing a novel and to start showing it so you get it to the point where you feel like it's totally perfect, but you also know that there's down line, there's going to be this time gap, and you're going to be a little bit of a different person when that comes. I just you trying to keep it and keep going and editing forever and

Speaker 2 (00:48:44):

Talk

Speaker 4 (00:48:44):

About that. If you know there's something wrong with the book that you're not satisfied with and you have some idea how to fix it, then do that before even showing it to an agent. There's no point in sending something to anybody and saying, yeah, I know this section has a problem and I'm going to fix it. Just fix it and then send it the next extra month or week or whatever. It's not going to be a big deal. But if you've gotten a point where you're like, I know there are still some issues and I have no idea how to resolve them, then that might be a point to show it to an agent at least. What

Speaker 9 (00:49:16):

About that sort of sense of perfection, but also attached

Speaker 2 (00:49:23):

Of those

Speaker 4 (00:49:23):

Dynamics let go?

Speaker 2 (00:49:26):

Well, and also it's a living being and stories are beings, and so it's going to keep moving and changing and evolving, and you're going to get clear about it with this, I could have gone another 10 years and it would've been a lot, but you have to sort of put a flag on the play and say, this is what it's going to be now. It's a living being, and then it's fixed in this very one iteration. And those two things are sort of contradictory, but that's the nature of the thing. So can I just, I just want to ask Jeff one quick question. Having spent so many years working on the novel, was it difficult to say this is it to let go and stop working on it? No, no. A relief

Speaker 4 (00:50:16):

If you were doing the map, this book took Jeff a solid 10 years to write. So

Speaker 2 (00:50:23):

Over here,

Speaker 9 (00:50:24):

How often

Speaker 10 (00:50:26):

Editorial companies like your, which really go deep into how often do you ever,

Speaker 2 (00:50:33):

So the question was how often do houses like Grove and Gray Wolf look at manuscripts that aren't represented by an agent?

Speaker 4 (00:50:40):

I'm afraid we don't take an agent at prose manuscripts anymore. That was a policy we had to institute a couple of years ago. We were just getting too overwhelmed. We couldn't do our jobs and read all of the manuscripts that were coming in. And I have throughout my career liked the idea of an open door policy. And a