If the economic Tilt-A-Whirl of the past few months has proven anything, it's that this carnival life of ours—writing, publishing, trying to find readers—isn't getting any easier. Booksellers and publishers are in turmoil, with scores of staffers having already lost their jobs to "restructuring," "integration," and all the other corporate euphemisms that are dreamed up to soften the harsh reality: It isn't pretty out there.

While it goes without saying that our problems are nothing compared with those of many industries, one's heart can't help but ache for the literary magazines and publishing houses that won't be around in a year; the unemployed editors, publicists, and marketing people with mortgages to pay; the authors whose first books are being published now, or a month from now, or anytime soon.

But difficult times don't have to be joyless times. As I listened to these four accomplished young book editors talk about what they do, I was reminded of a simple and enduring truth, trite as it may sound: We are all—writers, agents, publishers, booksellers, librarians, and readers—in this together. And there are concrete things we can do to connect with one another more effectively. These editors are full of insight about how to do just that.

It seems appropriate, at such a humbling moment, that we met over pizza and bottled water (okay, maybe not exclusively water) in the glamorously unglamorous offices of Open City [3], the independent press and literary magazine based in downtown Manhattan. Over the years its editors, Thomas Beller and Joanna Yas, have introduced readers to some of the most distinctive voices of our time, from Meghan Daum to Sam Lipsyte. Here are short biographies of the participants:

LEE BOUDREAUX was an editor at Random House for almost ten years before leaving to become the editorial director of Ecco in 2005. She has worked with Arthur Phillips, Dalia Sofer, and David Wroblewski.

ERIC CHINSKI worked at Oxford University Press and Houghton Mifflin before moving to Farrar, Straus and Giroux, where he is vice president and editor in chief. He has edited Chris Adrian, Rivka Galchen, and Alex Ross.

ALEXIS GARGAGLIANO worked at Simon & Schuster and Knopf before moving to Scribner, where she is an editor, in 2002. Her authors include Matt Bondurant, Adam Gollner, and Joanna Smith Rakoff.

RICHARD NASH worked as a performance artist and theater director before taking over Soft Skull Press, now an imprint of Counterpoint, in 2001. His authors include Lydia Millet, Matthew Sharpe, and Lynne Tillman. [UPDATE: Richard Nash has resigned as editorial director of Soft Skull Press and executive editor of Counterpoint, effective March 10, 2009.]

Every reader understands the feeling of falling in love with a book. You guys do that for a living. I'm curious if you've given any thought to the specific things that can trigger that experience.
GARGAGLIANO: I don't know if there's a specific thing, but you know it immediately. The minute I start it I know that it's the book I want to fall in love with. And that's the one I keep reading. I will read a hundred pages of something else, but I won't fall in love with it. You have this immediate sense of texture and place, and you're just inside it from the first sentence. I think the thing that everybody says about first sentences is true. Everyone should try to get that first sentence perfect. I make my authors do that all the time.
NASH: But if you make them do it, they didn't quite do it the first time, did they?
GARGAGLIANO: Well, it might be that you've had them totally rewrite the opening.
CHINSKI: Do you feel like it's different for fiction and nonfiction?
GARGAGLIANO: I do. I always hate that with nonfiction, when you read a proposal, you don't get the writing first. You get the pitch first. I always look to the writing.
CHINSKI: For me, with fiction, there's that funny moment when you feel like you actually want to meet the author. You want to know who the man or woman who's writing it is because there's a real sensibility in the writing. It's not just that the writing is good—there's a kind of intensity of imagination to it. You wonder, "Who is this person who's able to telescope all of these ideas into something that feels accessible?" I think that's one similarity between nonfiction and fiction, even though obviously they're different in many ways: It takes the ordinary and makes it extraordinary. You sort of recognize something but it allows you access to it in a totally different way. But I can't tell you how many times, thirty pages into a novel, I actually want to write the agent and say, "Who is this person?" You just wonder, "Who's coming up with this?"
BOUDREAUX: I think there's always a moment of surprise and delight. It comes in the form of a word. You get to the end of a sentence and go, "Wow, I didn't see that coming. That was perfect." The language just goes click and the whole thing has gone up a notch and you know at that point that you're committed to...a hundred pages? Two hundred? Or you're going the distance with it. The gears just click into place and you realize you're reading something that is an order of magnitude different than the seventy-five other things that have crossed your desk lately, many of which were perfectly good and perfectly competent.
CHINSKI: And doesn't it feel like it's not even just talent? It's the sensibility of the writer. I think about a writer whom I don't work with but whom I admire, Aleksandar Hemon. He does that funny thing where he doesn't use words in an ordinary way, and yet they work and they suggest a whole worldview. Or look at Chris Adrian, whom I do work with and adore. I mean, his writing is really difficult. It's about dying and suffering children—you can't imagine a more difficult subject. But again, there's a kind of intensity of imagination and a way of articulating things that goes beyond good writing. There is a force and energy to the writing. I think that's the hardest thing to find in fiction, at least for me, and that's what I find myself responding to again and again.
NASH: For me it's also when a work of fiction has the force of society behind it on some level. Which is not necessarily to say that it has to be political—I do far less political fiction than people think—but I do want to feel that the writer has access to something larger than himself. To me, the energy you're talking about is something that possesses social force and a concatenation of relationships and responses to the world lived in a certain kind of way. I try to forbid myself from using the word authenticity because I don't actually know what the hell it is, but that's one way of talking about it.
CHINSKI: I have a related question. What do you all think of the word voice? It's one of those words that we all overuse, but do we actually know what it is? I always find myself reaching for it when I want to describe why I like something and why I don't like other things that are perfectly well written. But when I really try to figure out exactly what I mean by it, I come back to what I was saying before. Is sensibility the same thing as a writer having a voice?
GARGAGLIANO: If it comes alive for you, and you can hear it in your head, and it sort of lives inside you, that's when I feel like a writer has a voice. That's when I'll keep going back to something again and again. One of my favorite writers when I was falling in love with literature was Jeanette Winterson. It was just about her voice. I kept loving her books even when the stories themselves started to fall apart. I just wanted to hear that voice in my head. For me, with her, it stopped being about the storytelling, which is unusual. I love story. I want plots in my books.
CHINSKI: And you can think about writers who don't actually tell stories. The Europeans, for example. We always have one: Thomas Bernhard; Sebald; now Bolaño. It feels like there's always one of these writers who isn't writing plot-driven fiction. The voice is so strong that that's what people are responding to. With Bolaño, I find it kind of amazing that you have this nine-hundred-page novel by a dead Spanish-language writer...I mean, I can't honestly believe that everybody who's buying it is reading the whole thing. But it goes back to what you were saying, Richard, about the voice having the force of history and almost being haunted by these bigger issues.
NASH: Haunted is totally the word. Beckett had it too, obviously.
CHINSKI: Or look at Philip Roth. Even in his lesser novels, you can always recognize that kind of force in his writing.
NASH: What you just said reminds me of an artist named Bruce Nauman. I went to see a retrospective of his before I was in publishing. There was this sense, as you went from room to room, that the guy just had access to something that he wasn't going to lose access to. You know what I mean? There was a certain frequency of the world to which he was tuned in. It could express itself in different ways, but he wasn't going to lose his capacity to listen to it, as a result of which the work was always going to be operating on a certain level. He might vary between, I don't know, brilliant and mind-blowing, but he wasn't going to fuck up. Those voices, and those Europeans you were mentioning, are probably at the very upper level.
CHINSKI: That's right. They always seem to have a certain set of questions that they're asking. Even if they're writing very different novels from book to book, they're haunted by one or two or three questions, and no matter what they write, they seem to circle around them. That may have something to do with the voice they bring to a book. I mean, even Sasha Hemon, who's only written three books—you can tell what his obsessions are. That's another thing: I like writers who are obsessed. Chris Adrian is obsessed too. That's what's exciting about reading certain fiction writers.

Aside from what's on the page, and somebody's skill as a writer or voice or obsessions, what other things influence your thinking and decision-making?
GARGAGLIANO: One of the things can be when a book taps into something that's happening in the moment. I'm editing a book right now that's set after World War II in a psychiatric hospital, and it's really a book about what happens to soldiers when they come back from war. I find myself obsessed with the news and weeping when I watch Channel Thirteen because I've been inside of this story for so long and I understand the psychology of these men coming back. I'm hoping that there will be a resonance when we publish it. You're always trying to process things in the world, and when you read a really good piece of fiction, it helps you process things.
CHINSKI: The word necessary always comes to mind for me. Beyond a good story, beyond good writing, does the novel feel necessary? A lot of good books are written, and I'm not saying that they shouldn't be published, but as an editor you can't work on everything, and the ones I tend to be drawn to are the ones that either feel personally necessary or globally necessary in some vague way that's hard to define. And that should be at the sentence level, too. People who can write really well sometimes get carried away by their own writing and forget what's actually necessary on the page. I would also raise the question of believability. A book can be surreal and fantastical and all that, so it's not believable in any straight sense, but it has to be believable in the sense that the author believes in what he or she is doing. Sometimes you feel like an author is just writing for the sake of writing, and that is a big turnoff. It's got to feel necessary at every level.
BOUDREAUX: As an editor, you know how difficult the in-house process is going to be—the process of getting a book out there. The necessary quotient comes up when you ask yourself, "Is this something that really fires me up? What's going to happen when I give it to these two reps to read? Are they going to have the same reaction to some pretty significant extent and feel the need to convey their enthusiasm down the line?" Because I think word of mouth remains the best thing we can ever do for a book. So is there that necessary thing? Is there that urgency? Is it in some significant way different from any number of other novels that purport to talk about the same topic? It's almost like an electrical pulse traveling down a wire. It starts with the author, then the agent, then the editor, and then there are a lot of telephone poles it's got to go through from there. If it's lacking in any way, you know that the electricity is going to peter out. Sometimes you can almost see it happen. You can watch it happen between one sales rep and another sales rep. You're like, "Oh, that just petered out between those two telephone poles." And the book is only going to do so much.

When a lot of us were starting out I think we may have felt like, "Oh, it's a little book, but it's my job to make it work, and I'm going to." I feel less like that now. Because you can't work on everything, and you can't do everything for every book. Even when you do do everything you can think of, so many good books get ignored. So many good books go by the wayside. You've got to be able to figure out if each one is necessary enough that you can really do something with it. Because it's not that rewarding as the editor, or as the author, to just have a book sit there—when it dies a quiet death and nobody even hears it sink. "We tried! We'll do better with the paperback!" The number of times you hear that! You know you're lying and they know you're lying and everyone's just going to pretend it will be totally different a year from now.

It's got to have enough juice in it to go somewhere. I feel like that juice can take any number of forms. It's an ineffable quality, but you kind of know it when you've got it in front of you. Everyone is not going to agree on fiction, either. I do pretty much all fiction. When I want to buy something, in most cases nobody else is going to read the whole thing. They're going to believe me when I say it's good all the way to the end. They just like the voice and then we run with it. You're never going to get a whole roomful of people to agree on fiction the way you sometimes can with nonfiction: "Is this the right book at the right time by the right person with the right platform to write the book on whatever?" With fiction it's all sort of amorphous, and you've just got to feel like you're picking the ones that are potent enough to go the distance.
NASH: We're all just proxies for the reader. But we're going to have different ideas about who the reader is and how we connect to that reader. Do we have commonality with this imaginary reader? But I certainly find that I am powerfully animated by the sense of having a duty to connect the writer with the reader. Is this a book that's going to get one person to tell another person that they've got to read it? Which is the closest thing, I think, at least in the land of fiction, that's going to pass for figuring out what the hell is meant by the word commercial. As you said, your own energy can always get one other person to read the book. But is that one other person going to get the next person to read the book?

Are there any other things, besides what's on the page, that you're looking at when a book is submitted?
GARGAGLIANO: This was one of the hardest lessons for me. Unlike what Eric was saying earlier, when I used to read fiction before I was in publishing, I never wanted to know who the author was. I didn't want to look at their pictures. I just wanted to exist in the worlds that they had created. That was it. When I got into the industry, I quickly learned that that was not acceptable. The first thing I get asked at our editorial meeting is, "Where have they published?" You want to know that somebody has been publishing their short stories, even if a total of a hundred people have read them. It's always the first question.
CHINSKI: One thing I'm looking for is experience in the world. I keep coming back to Chris Adrian, not for any particular reason. But he's somebody who has an MFA, he's a practicing doctor specializing in pediatric oncology, he's in divinity school, and you can feel all of that in his writing. There's an urgency, a sense of questioning, and an obsession. You can tell that all of that experience is getting distilled into his writing. He wants to understand something about loss and our relationship to transcendence. I feel like with the best writers, you recognize that in their work. It's exciting to me to feel like it's being drawn not just out of the desire to write an interesting story and find readers. It's a different form of necessity that they feel they need to wrestle with because of their own life experience.
BOUDREAUX: I've never been able to say what my books have in common. I'll make an argument for escapism. I want to be transported. I don't care where you take me, but I want to have that moment that we all had when we were reading as kids, when the real world ceases to exist and your mother tells you to come have dinner and it's like resurfacing from the bottom of a swimming pool. "Where am I? What am I doing?" That's what I want. I'm not looking for any particular kind of book, I'm just looking for the intensity of that experience. It doesn't matter what agent it comes from. It doesn't matter if it's long or short. It doesn't matter if it's a young voice or something that's more mature. I just feel like you sit there as a proxy for the reader, open to having a new experience. And if they can give it to you, great. I don't even need it to happen in the first sentence. I'll give it three or four pages sometimes. [Laughter.] I'm seven months pregnant so I'm feeling patient and maternal toward the world—I'll give them four or five pages to say something that I find interesting.

On the flip side of that, give me some things that you find beginning writers doing wrong.
NASH: Not listening. Not listening to the world around them.
GARGAGLIANO: Trying to sell stories that aren't really a book. They're not a cohesive whole. There's no vision to the whole thing that makes me feel like this person has a reason for writing a story collection other than that they had twelve stories.
NASH: Assuming that having an attitude equals...anything.
CHINSKI: Or assuming that good writing is enough. I'm sure we all see a lot of stuff where the writing is really good. It's well crafted and you can tell that the writer has talent. But, again, you don't really feel like the writer necessarily believes in his or her ability to open it up into a novel. I know the old adage "write what you know." I'd kind of rather somebody write what they don't know. And figure out, beyond their own personal experience, why what they're doing should matter to the reader.
BOUDREAUX: I've always wanted to give people that advice too. "Do you have to write what you know? If you know it, I might know it. Which means I've already read it. Which means that your book is the nineteenth novel about a mother-daughter relationship. And I. Don't. Care." The crudest way to put it is the "Who cares?" factor. Why, why, why do I need to read four hundred pages about this? The necessary thing, and the authentic thing, and the voice thing are all much better ways of saying it than the "Who cares?" factor, but it's basically the same thing. "What is the necessity of reading this? What are you doing that is different?"
CHINSKI: I'd rather somebody be ambitious and fail a little bit than read a perfectly crafted, tame novel.
NASH: I have published novels, especially first novels, that I knew failed on some level because of what they were trying to do. I felt that that was okay.
CHINSKI: That's more exciting.
NASH: But what would be the version of that that actually answered your question?
CHINSKI: "Have courage"?
NASH: Don't try to be perfect. Don't be boring.
CHINSKI: That's really what it is 99.9 percent of the time—good writing, but boring. And it's the hardest thing to turn down because you think, "This is good. But it doesn't do anything for me."
BOUDREAUX: That's the thing. You're like, "There's nothing wrong with this. I've got nothing to tell you to do to fix it. It's just...there."
CHINSKI: And that's a hard rejection letter to write, too. Because it's not like you can point to this, that, and the other thing that are wrong with it. It just doesn't move you in any way. It doesn't feel necessary.

Do you think it's too hard to get published today?
GARGAGLIANO: I think it's hard but not too hard. I don't know how many more books we could have out there.
BOUDREAUX: I think we all kind of know that too many books get published. You can listen to your own imprint's launch meeting, you can listen to all the other imprints' launch meetings, and multiply that by every other house, and you know that every book did not feel necessary to every editor. When you think about it that way, it doesn't seem all that hard to get published.
CHINSKI: But there are also a lot of people who can't get published.
NASH: There was a great little moment in an article in Wired about a year ago. It was an article about the million-dollar prize that Netflix is giving for anyone who can improve their algorithm—"If you liked this, you'll like that"—by 10 percent. One of the people in the article was quoted as saying that the twentieth century was a problem of supply, and the twenty-first century is a problem of demand. I think that describes a lot about the book publishing business right now. For a long time, racism, classism, and sexism prevented a whole array of talent from having access to a level of educational privilege that would allow them to write full-length books. That hasn't been completely solved, but it's been radically improved since the 1950s. Far more persons of color, women, and people below the upper class have access now. An entire agent community has arisen to represent them. But finding the audience is the big problem. I guess I'm imposing my own question on the question you asked—"Is it too hard to get published?"—and I think we all may have heard a slightly different version of that question. The version of it that I heard was, "Are there too many books?" I personally don't feel that way. And I get a lot of submissions at Soft Skull. I get about 150 a week. And it's hell having so much supply. But we didn't exist before 1993, and you guys all existed before that, so you are feeding off a different supply and we're enabling this new supply. I love the fact that Two Dollar Radio exists, and all the other new indie presses that have erupted. I think that's healthy. I don't think a solution to the problems we face as an industry is to say we're going to reduce consumer choice by publishing fewer books. Now, at the level of the individual publisher, I totally understand it as a rational decision that a given executive committee would make at a large company. My comment that there are not too many books published has to do with culture rather than a given economic enterprise. I think we could publish more books. You just have to recognize that they may be read by five hundred people. And that's perfectly legitimate. Blogs can be read by fifty people. You just have to think, "What's the economically and environmentally rational thing to do with this thing that has an audience—but that audience is just 150 or 250 people?" It may not be to print the book. It may be to publish it through a labor-of-love operation that is completely committed to a given set of aesthetic principles and will print it in a way that is environmentally sensitive—chapbook publishing, let's say. The poetry model could have a lot to say to fiction and nonfiction publishing.

I think about the midlist writer a lot and I feel like it's harder and harder to build a career the old-fashioned way—slowly, over several books that might not be perfect but allow you to develop as a writer. Part of that has to do with the electronic sales track. Put yourself in the shoes of a beginning writer and speak to that.
BOUDREAUX: When we published Serena by Ron Rash it was such a proud moment of doing that thing—of almost reinventing a writer. So I feel like it can still happen. The model of building somebody hasn't gone completely out the window. It gets hard with the "This is what we sold of the last book, this is all we're ordering this time." And you're stuck with it. But a lot of editors and a lot of publishers stick with people.
GARGAGLIANO: I feel like Scribner is really good about that. We can't do it with everyone, but there is definitely a stable of authors. I have writers for whom I haven't had to fight that hard to buy their second or third books. It's because everyone recognizes their talent.
NASH: It can be because the reps love selling them. The reps love reading that galley, even if they're going to get [orders of] ones and twos. But it makes them so happy to read that galley that they're not going to fight you when you present it to them.
CHINSKI: You have to think about the identity of the list as a whole, too. Sometimes it means paying an author less than what they've received before, but it doesn't mean we're giving up on those authors. I think, speaking for FSG, it's important to us to try to build writers. Roger Straus apparently said, and Jonathan always says, "We publish authors, not books." That's more difficult today, given the way of the world, but it's still the guiding principle. Think about Jonathan Franzen, who published two novels that got great reviews but didn't sell particularly well. Then The Corrections came along. There are tons of examples like that.

But aren't you guys and FSG the exception to that in a lot of ways?
CHINSKI: I wonder if it's really that new. Obviously the mechanics have changed, but there's always been a huge midlist. We remember the really important writers. We probably don't even remember the best-selling writers from twenty years ago. You remember the important ones—or the ones that have been canonized as important. The economics have changed and obviously the chain bookstores are a different part of the equation than they were fifty years ago, but I suspect there's always been a vast midlist.
GARGAGLIANO: I also don't think it's very constructive for authors to think about that too much. You're sort of fortunate if you get published at all. You're fortunate to find an editor who you have a great relationship with and a house that believes in you in which everybody works as hard as they can for you. There's only so much you can do.
NASH: If you're going to stress about something, be worrying about your reader. Don't stare at your Amazon ranking and don't stare at the number of galleys your publisher is printing. Get out into the world. And if you don't have the personality to get out into the world, then you have to ask yourself, "Why does everybody else have to have the personality to get out into the world, but I don't? What makes me so special that everybody else has to go out and bang the drum for me, but I don't?" I have a fairly limited tolerance for people who assume that it is everybody else's job to sell their books while they get to be pure and pristine. They don't have to get the book-publishing equivalent of dirt under their fingernails. Which involves whoring, to use a sexist term, but one that I use to describe myself. [Laughter.] Go out and find a reader. It's not about selling a reader a $14.95 book. If you have ten more books under your thumb, then that reader could be worth $150 to you, and it might actually be worth three minutes of your time to respond to their e-mail or chat with them for an extra two minutes after that reading at which it seemed like no one showed up. Those eight people might have some influence out in the world. None of us is in this for the money. It's sort of mind-boggling how many people think that we're sitting there behind our cushy desks. There's just no one in publishing who couldn't have made more money doing something else. At a certain point, yes, we may have become unemployable in any other industry. But there was a period of time in everyone's career when he or she could have gone in a different direction and made more money, and chose not to.
GARGAGLIANO: Can I add one more thing? We keep talking about self-promotion, and I think there's a stigma that it's a negative thing. It's really an extension of that deep involvement we were talking about earlier. It's about being really passionate about your book. It's a way to figure out how to make the world of your book bigger, and to give other people access to it. I think it's helpful if authors can wrap their heads around looking at it from a different perspective. I have a lot of authors who are afraid to go out there. They think it's about them. It's actually about the book. It's about the writing. It's not about you personally.
NASH: It's about being part of the world around you. One of the freelance publicists I know—I've never been able to afford to use her, but I'm friendly with her—does something that I think is brilliant in terms of dealing with a new author. Rather than trying to make an author blog, which is always hell, she says, "Here are twenty blogs that you should read." And by doing that, they get into it. They start commenting. All of the sudden they start getting that this act of communication is no different than a conversation between two people. It gets the author to start realizing that they're in a community, and that participating in that community is what we're talking about when we say "self-promotion." It isn't this tawdry, icky activity that will demean them. It will help make them feel more connected to the world, and happier.
GARGAGLIANO: I'll give you an example. I published this book about fruit—talk about obsessive people—called The Fruit Hunters. The author is this guy who was writing food stories for magazines and became obsessed with fruit and went on to discover this whole obsessive world of fruit lovers. The book came out and got a lot of attention, and the sales were okay, but it has fostered this whole community of people who are also obsessed. The other day they had an event in a community garden in the East Village. They call themselves the Fruit Hunters, after the book, and they're going to take trips together and everything. There are already a hundred of them. It's this amazing little story of obsession. It's exciting. The author is very involved online. He's happy to engage with anyone who wants to talk to him. He's just really present, and that makes all the difference.

I'm interested in how you guys view your jobs. It seems to me that things have changed quite a bit over time and I'm curious how you see what you do.
CHINSKI: Things have changed a lot. But in terms of the actual editing and acquiring, I don't feel like I'm thinking very differently about what I'm signing up, and in terms of the editing, I still have the same basic ideas of what my role is, which is to make the book more of what it already is—rather than coming in with some foreign idea and imposing it on the book. I try to understand what the writer is trying to do with the book and edit it along those lines. But when I first started in publishing, I had no idea that the role of the editor was to communicate to the marketing and sales departments. I had this very dark-and-stormy-night vision of the editor sitting in a room poring over manuscripts. But you very quickly realize that a natural part of being excited about a book is wanting to tell other people about it, in the same way we do as readers. That's what our job is in-house. And obviously it probably is different now, in terms of the chain stores and all these other things. But I think an editor's job is basically to fall in love with a book and then to help it be more of what it already is.
GARGAGLIANO: I feel very similarly. I'm the first reader, and I'm there to make the book what it wants to be, and then I'm its best advocate. I'm its advocate to people in the company because often they're not going to read it—they're only going to get my take on it—and then I'm its advocate to the rest of the world. I write handwritten notes to booksellers. I write to magazine people. I'm constantly promoting my authors. I feel like I'm the one who was responsible for getting them into the company, and I'm the one who's responsible for getting them into the world. I have to take care of them.
BOUDREAUX: The most fun part of being an editor is getting to actually edit—getting to sit and play puzzle with the book. God, that is so much fun! That's what we like to do. We need to do all of these other things...but sitting there with the paper, which you only get to do on the weekends? That's when you get excited. Like, "I'm a real editor!" But this myth that nobody edits anymore compared with a hundred years ago? I've never worked with an editor who doesn't edit all weekend long, every single night. That's the fun part.
CHINSKI: I think that's important to emphasize. I think we all hear that editors don't edit anymore.
BOUDREAUX: I just don't know who they're talking about. Having worked at two different houses, I literally do not know who they are talking about. Who just acquires and doesn't edit? I feel like everybody I've ever worked with sweats blood over manuscripts. And you reap the rewards of doing that.
NASH: I suspect that agents are doing more editorial work on books before they submit them in order to polish the apple. To some extent the process of acquisition has become more collegial, and it's helpful if a book is not a dog's dinner when you're showing it to people before you can start working on it yourself. That can create the perception that not much happened after it was acquired. And when you have the goal of helping to make a book as much like itself as it can be, that can involve a level of editing that doesn't look very intense on the surface but actually can be quite important. It doesn't have to involve a whole lot of red ink. But the right red ink in the right places, especially when it's subtractive rather than additive, can really make a book fluoresce.

Why did you all become editors instead of agents? And why do you stay editors when by all accounts you could make a lot more money being an agent?
CHINSKI: Has anybody here ever worked at an agency? My first job, for three months, was at an agency. That's why I'm an editor. But sometimes I do think that agents get a more global view of things. Dealing with film and foreign rights and so on.

But in other ways they get a more limited view because they don't have to do all the things to make a book work.
CHINSKI: I think that's true. Wouldn't that be more fun? [Laughter.] But seriously, when I was working there I didn't leave because I didn't like working at an agency. It just wasn't working as a job. I have a really hard time imagining myself as an agent. It's partly just the obvious stuff of doing the deal and so on. I think you have to have a certain personality to get really excited about that. I'd rather go home and really devote myself to doing the editing. I know that some agents do that. But it's not, kind of nominally, what they are there for.
BOUDREAUX: I literally didn't know there was such a thing as a literary agent. I didn't know anything. I was like, "I guess those people who get to work with books would be editors." I just didn't know any better. And I love to play with the words, which they also get to do, but they're not the final word on it. I also don't do enough nonfiction, which I feel like any editor who's got any sense learns to do. But I just don't have the antenna for it. As an agent it would be even scarier to have a list that is 95 percent fiction. You probably need a balanced portfolio in a way that an editor can still get away with being more fiction-heavy.

What are the hardest decisions you have to make as editors?
CHINSKI: Jackets. I find that the most harrowing part of the whole process. As an editor, you're in this funny position of both being an advocate for the house to the author and agent but also being an advocate for the author to everybody in-house. The editor is kind of betwixt and between. And for a lot of books, especially fiction, the jacket is the only marketing tool you have. It's really difficult. I also find that I know what I don't like, but I don't have the visual vocabulary to describe what I think might work.
BOUDREAUX: And the cover is so important. Even if it's not the only thing that's being done for a book, it's still got to be one of the most important things. You've got reviews and word-of-mouth, and then you've just got the effect it has when somebody walks into the store and sees it. I think it's so important to work somewhere where your art people will read the book and come up with something that you never would have come up with yourself. The idea of a jacket meeting where you have twelve people around a table and you bring it down to the lowest common denominator of "It's a book about this set there. We need a crab pot at sunset with a..." People do that! They think it's a marketing-savvy way to go about it. "We need a young person on the cover. But you shouldn't be able to see the person's face. It has to be from behind!"
GARGAGLIANO: The same thing happens when the author tries to deconstruct the cover.
CHINSKI: Exactly. That's one thing that's changed a lot. When I first started, we would send the author hard copies of the [proposed] jacket. Now we email it to them and they send it to everybody in their family. You can predict exactly what's going to happen.

What are the other hard decisions you have to make?
GARGAGLIANO: I have two, and they're related. One of them is when I love a book but I don't actually think that we're going to do the best job of publishing it. I anguish about that because I want the book for myself, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's the right thing for the author. The step beyond that is when you've already been publishing someone, and it's the question of what's best for their career. You offer a certain amount of money, and the agent wants to take the author somewhere else, and you have to ask yourself whether or not you go to bat for that person and get more money because you want to keep working with them despite whether the house might really support them. That's a hard thing to figure out.

I think part of what makes it hard is that editors serve different masters—the authors, the agents, the house. How do you guys navigate those allegiances and responsibilities?
NASH: I will confess that I came into this business not motivated to become an editor. I was a theater director and happened upon Soft Skull because the guy who founded it was a playwright whose plays I directed. The whole thing was going belly up in the middle of my friendship with this dude. He basically did a runner, and there were these two twenty-two-year-olds at the company, and no one else, and there were all these authors, and the whole thing was fucked. I had a messiah complex and came in and tried to be Mr. Messiah for six months. And in the middle of my messiah complex, I fell in love with the process of publishing. So in a weird way, I did not come in with the idea of working with writers. I came in as a problem solver, and that's all I've ever been in a certain sense. The problem I try to solve is, "How do you connect writers and readers?" Those are the two masters for me. Recently I've been trying to think, believe it or not, of the publishing business as a service industry in which we provide two services simultaneously, to the author and to the reader. We may pretend to offer a service to the agent, and we may pretend to offer a service to the company. But only to the extent that we fulfill those other two services—to the writer and to the reader—are we truly serving the agent or the company. And we have to use our own instincts on a minute-to-minute psychological basis. Obviously you're accountable to the bottom line and P&Ls etcetera, but you're being asked to use your own instincts, and that's what you have to use in order to bring writers and readers together.
GARGAGLIANO: There are moments when it's sticky. When you're dealing with a jacket, for example. But on the whole, everybody wants the same thing, and that makes it easy. The thing that I always have to remind myself is that the people who are on the sales end also love books, and they also love to read, and they could be making more money in some other industry too. When you remember that, it makes your job much easier.
CHINSKI: I agree that we do all want the same thing, but don't you find that sometimes people don't behave that way?
GARGAGLIANO: Sometimes. But sometimes they do.
CHINSKI: It just amazes me how combative the relationship can become. I mean, it doesn't happen that often, but it does become combative sometimes. When we were talking before about authors saying that editors don't edit...there's just this assumption that the publisher isn't doing enough. Sometimes agents don't quite understand how things actually work in the publishing house. I'm not saying that across the board. But it does happen. I find those situations really difficult, where you feel like you're being accused of somehow not caring enough about the author when we all know how many hurdles there are. I mean, we wouldn't be doing this if we didn't care.
GARGAGLIANO: I've been very lucky with my authors. I haven't had many bad ones. The relationship is all about trust, and once you start that relationship and you start that dialogue, they trust that you're taking care of them. But there is a point when it's out of the editor's hands. And if they've trusted you that far, most of the time they'll accept whatever happens, in my experience. Usually the call I get will be from the agent.
BOUDREAUX: It's like you can almost have two different conversations. In one of them the agent gets what's going on and is just being helpful and trying to get everyone on the same page. And in the other one somebody is making demands or accusations that aren't going to actually help anything. It's more just for show. You know, "Emboss this part of the jacket" for no good reason. You do get the feeling sometimes that they are fulfilling their service to the author in a way that actually doesn't have that much to do with the book.
GARGAGLIANO: But that's the agent. I'm more worried about my author's happiness.
CHINSKI: I agree with that. A combative relationship with an author is pretty rare. Obviously it happens sometimes, but I'm thinking more about the agent. I don't want to overstate it, but sometimes it does feel like we should all understand more that we do all actually want the same thing. No publisher or editor signs up a book in order to sink it. Who would do that? We're not getting paid enough to be in this business for any reason other than we actually love the books we're working on.

What do you wish writers knew about you that they sometimes don't?
GARGAGLIANO: I think most writers don't realize that every editor goes home and reads and edits for four hours—that they're not doing that in the office. That in the office they're advocating for all of the authors they already have.
NASH: I don't even get to read when I go home. When I go home, I'm continuing to advocate. I haven't been able to read at all recently. I've really just become a pure pimp.
CHINSKI: I thought you were a whore.
NASH: I'm both at once! It depends on the street I'm walking down.

What else?
GARGAGLIANO: I think it's important for writers to remember that we're not their enemy. We love books and we're looking for books that we love.
CHINSKI: And ads are not love.
GARGAGLIANO: And ads do not equal sales.
BOUDREAUX: If those two things appear in print—that we're working nights and weekends and ads don't sell books—we have all done a fine job here. We are martyrs to the cause and ads are ridiculous. But I think editors like ads too. It's like having your business card published in the New York Times.

Have you guys ever gotten any great advice about your jobs from a colleague or a mentor?
CHINSKI: I can quote somebody, Pat Strachan, who is one of the most elegant, serious, and lovely people in the business. She said to me, "Just remember, when you're all stressed out, that the lives of young children are not at stake." And I do think that's worth remembering. We all love what we do and we take it really seriously, but you have to keep things in perspective. I also have one from David Rosenthal. He used to say, "If you're going to overpay for a book, you should at least be able to imagine the things that have to happen for it to work at that level, even if it may not actually work at that level."
BOUDREAUX: It should be in the realm of possibility.
CHINSKI: Yeah, and you should be able to picture, very concretely, what would have to happen and how you might go about making those things happen. You don't want to just buy something blindly.

What have your authors taught you about how to do your job?
GARGAGLIANO: To be honest with them. I often have the impulse to protect my authors and treat them as if they are more fragile than they actually are. It's better if I can have an open conversation with them. If I start that early on, the better our relationship is going to be going forward, and the easier it will be to talk about tough things. That took me a while to figure out.
BOUDREAUX: They teach you over and over and over—and this is so obvious—but they will always have a better solution to an editing problem than anything you could come up with. If you just raise the question, they will solve it. The universe of their book is more real to them than it could ever be to anyone else. You trust them with the internal logic of what's going on. You just show them where the web is a little weak—where everything that was so fully imagined in their head has not quite made it down to the page. Not only, as you said, are they not that fragile, but the world they've created is not that fragile. You can poke at it endlessly, and you'll just get really good answers and really good solutions. When you bring something up, you never find that you will unravel the whole sleeve. I've never had that happen. Where it's like, "Oooooh, we'd better hope that nobody notices that."

How do you guys measure your success as an editor?
NASH: Survival.

Tell me more.
NASH: For me, for a long time, there was a very direct correspondence between the success of my books and my ability to eat pizza. Now, in the last year, it has become less direct, since I don't have to make payroll, least of all my own, anymore. Because in the past, in order to make payroll, I would do it by not making my own payroll.

But what about in a deeper sense?
NASH: I suppose I was answering as a publisher, which is what I was and in a sense what I am anterior to being an editor.

I think I just mean more internally, in a more internal way.
NASH: When the book becomes what you imagined it was going to be based on the fact that it was almost already there. And you helped it get there.
CHINSKI: But we all want more than that, too, don't we?

That's what I'm trying to get at.
CHINSKI: We all want our books to have an impact. Beyond sales in any kind of simple sense. You want people to talk about them. You want people to find each other because of them. I worked with a writer who very elegantly described a book as a table that everybody can sit around and start a conversation around. And I think, not to sound terribly cheesy about it, that's what we all want. We want our books to have an impact in the world. And that's really rare. Sometimes it has nothing to do with sales. So I think it's more than just feeling like you did your job on the page. It's feeling like you did your job in the world.
GARGAGLIANO: That it went beyond you.
CHINSKI: Yeah. Books should transcend themselves in some way, and I think that's what we all really want.
NASH: The reason I got excited about publishing, compared to theater, was that the theater I was doing had no fucking impact on the world whatsoever.
GARGAGLIANO: Do you feel like it's better in publishing?
NASH: It's immensely better. Now, it may be that the joy I get from publishing is relative to how hard it was in downtown, experimental, Richard Foreman-acolyte theater. I set the bar so low for myself! [Laughter.] But in publishing, even indie publishing, thousands of people who I will never meet, who don't want to act for me, will actually buy one of my books.
CHINSKI: That reminds me of another great quote that I'll probably get slightly wrong. I remember when Philip Roth came to sales conference at Houghton Mifflin. I think it was for The Human Stain. He gave a presentation to the sales force and basically talked about the death of the novel as a force in our culture. "That'll be a good way to get the sales reps really excited!" [Laughter.] But then he said the most extraordinary thing, which has always stayed with me and which I've said to a lot of writers. He said that if his books were to sell ten thousand copies, which doesn't sound like a whole lot, but if he were to sit in a room, and each one of those people were to walk by him, and he could see them face to face, it would break his heart. I can't believe I forgot that earlier. That's probably the best description of why we do what we do. Whether it's three thousand people buying a novel, or five hundred people buying a book of poetry, it does kind of break your heart if you actually imagine each of those individuals reading the book.
NASH: That's why it was not a value judgment when I said the audience for a book might only be 150 people, in this world of more books. It's about the intensity with which that connection might occur.
CHINSKI: Do you guys all remember one moment where you felt really content? Whether it was something specific that happened or just a moment in your career? Where you felt like, "Okay, this is it. Now I'm kind of happy. This is all I could ever want." Where you actually slept well for one night?

I like the question.
GARGAGLIANO: That is a good question. [Laughter]
CHINSKI: I mean, I'm just wondering, was it when a book hit the best-seller list? Was it when a book got a great review? I'm curious what those different feelings are.
BOUDREAUX: I'm trying to come up with something that won't sound like complete dorkiness. I mean, yeah, the best-seller list feels amazing. It feels amazing because of all the great books we watch not get read. When you see one that's actually getting read? Boy is that an amazing feeling. But that little moment of satisfaction? I was trying to think, "What was the first time as an editor that I really felt that way?" Maybe being promoted to editor was my greatest moment. You know, Ann Godoff was doing the benediction and it was kind of like, "You are now an editor. On your tombstone they can say you were an editor." I had this little glimmering moment of, "Yeah! I came here, I didn't even know what publishing was, barely, and now..." Thank God for the Radcliffe Publishing Course. I wouldn't have had any idea of how anybody moves to New York or gets a job had I not ended up doing that. I had been working at Longstreet Press in Atlanta, where we published Jeff Foxworthy's You Might Be a Redneck If... That's actually my proudest moment—what was I doing forgetting that? But seriously, I did that course because I didn't know anything about anything and I thought I'd go back to Longstreet and work there. But then I thought, "Well, gosh, maybe I'll try New York for one year. I'm sure I'll end up back down in Atlanta before long, hoping that somebody at Algonquin would die so that somebody from the South could get a job at a slightly bigger publisher whose books you actually occasionally heard about." You know, I think actually getting promoted to editor was sort of like, "Wow, here I am. This is really a job that I'm really going to get to do." I still sort of feel amazed at that.
GARGAGLIANO: Getting a good review is also amazing. It's so gratifying when you have loved this thing for so long and somebody in the public says that they love it too. It's a thrill.
BOUDREAUX: Getting a review in a place that's always been hard to crack. I'd bring up Ron Rash again. He was a regional author who had never been reviewed in the Times, never been reviewed in the Washington Post. He had this Southern fan base. The booksellers loved him. The San Francisco and L.A. papers had been good to him in the past. But everybody else ignored him. Getting him a daily review in the Times was such a bursting-buttons proud moment for him. I've never been happier about the work I've seen my company do on a book. Because we knew what he had felt like he'd been missing. And there it was, lining up—the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Yorker—when everybody had been ignoring him.
NASH: For me it was the summer of 2002, when there were two things that persuaded me that I should stay in the business. One was the first book I ever acquired, by a woman named Jenny Davidson, who I'd gone to college with. I was not even sure what one did at a publisher, and I thought, "I should acquire something." We had to find books because there was nothing in the pipeline. So I asked around and my old college friend had a novel that no one wanted to publish. I didn't know what galleys were at that point. But at one point our distributor asked us for some galleys, so we printed out manuscripts and tape-bound them and sent them some places. And the book ended up getting a full-page review in the Times. It ended up being pretty much the only review it got. It didn't get any prepubs because I probably didn't send it to the prepubs on time. But for whatever reason, some editor at the Times Book Review decided to review it. So I had this sense of not having fucked up—this absence of failure in a world where you're up against it.

The second thing that happened had to do with the second book I acquired, Get Your War On. I'd look at my distributor's website and see the sales and the backorders. And one order came in—I think it was the second order that the book got—and it was Harvard Bookstore, which ordered forty copies. That was more convincing than the Times Book Review. It was the first time a bookseller had ever trusted me, the first time a bookseller had ever said, "You're not an idiot." I don't think in either of those situations did I realize how hard it was. It was only later, when I tried to get the second Times review and the second forty-copy-order from an indie bookstore, that I realized how good it was.

But the second thing was bigger than the first thing because ultimately it's about survival. I wasn't being glib when I was talking about survival. There was a very direct, one-to-one translation between my ability to sell books and my ability to stay in business and pay everyone. There is a British publisher call Souvenir Press, apparently they've been around for a long time, and I got a catalog of theirs one time. It included a letter from the publisher, and in the letter he quoted some other august independent publisher, saying something to the effect of, "A publisher's first duty to his authors is to remain solvent." Which was instructive because if you don't, it's not some glorious failure. All of your authors go out of print. And one of the reasons I ended up selling the company—one of the reasons was that I fucking had to because PGW had gone tits up and there was just no way to avoid that—but there was also a sense that if I fucked up too badly, the whole thing would go kaput, and I had an accountability to the authors to not let it all go kaput because it was not going to be some cute little failure where everybody would be like, "All right, peace, Soft Skull. It was very nice but now we'll all move on." It was like, "Oh, there are a number of authors whose careers actually depend on this."

Let's talk about agents. Tell me about the difference between a good one and a bad one.
GARGAGLIANO: A good agent knows what to send you. They're playing matchmaker, and they do it well. Those are the happiest relationships—those authors are happiest with their agents and they're happiest with their editors.
CHINSKI: A good agent also understands the process inside the publishing house and the kinds of issues and questions that an editor has to deal with on a daily basis. But I think, most importantly, they know what they're sending and who they're sending it to.
BOUDREAUX: A good agent can be very helpful when you get to those sticky wickets, whether it's the cover, or an ending that still doesn't work, or something else. An agent who can honestly appraise the work along with you and add their voice to the chorus of why, for example, the author needs to change that title. You want it to be about the book and you want it to be about the author, but every now and then the sales force knows what the hell they're talking about with a "This is going to get lost because it is black and it has no title on the cover. It's not going to degrade the integrity of the book if you change it." An agent can either be helpful in that conversation or they can sit there and be a roadblock and let you be the bad cop. An agent who's willing to be the bad cop with you can save an author from impulses—and help them understand why it's the right thing to do in a world where two hundred thousand books get published every year.
GARGAGLIANO: The same thing is true on the publicity front, when you have an author who wants something and you have an agent who's able to make the additional phone call and work on the team with the publicist and the editor. It's much better than getting a phone call from an agent who's just yelling at you.
CHINSKI: Just to step back a little bit, obviously the agent's job is to be the advocate for the author. But, along the lines of what you were both saying, that doesn't always mean agreeing with everything the author says. I think sometimes the agent forgets that. That, actually, they can be most constructive for the author—not just for that book, but their career—by explaining some difficult things to their client.
GARGAGLIANO: And encouraging their author not to be difficult, which doesn't win any fans in the house. If the agent is able to step in and say something in a constructive fashion, that is often helpful.
CHINSKI: It's human nature. We don't like to admit it, but people like to work for somebody who's appreciative. That doesn't mean, in a saccharine way, just affirming everything that the editor and publisher are doing. Obviously, we all make mistakes. But the conversation has to be constructive. We've all seen it over and over and over again. If an author, even if they don't agree with you, is appreciative and trying to work constructively with the house, and so is the agent, it just changes the energy of the way people respond to that project—from the publicist to the designer to whoever. It goes back to what we were saying before: We all want the same thing, and if everybody can keep that in mind, it just makes everybody want to work all the harder on behalf of the book.
NASH: The squeaky wheel theory is bullshit in our business. It's just complete bullshit. It doesn't work.
CHINSKI: I have a sense that authors sometimes get that as concrete advice—to be a squeaky wheel—and for everyone out there, there's a way to express your convictions without being...
GARGAGLIANO: And that ties into being proactive for yourself. If you're out there doing a lot of work for yourself, that energy is—
NASH: So inspirational. When you have an author who shows up at a bookstore and then a week later the sales rep shows up at the store and the rep emails me and says, "Guess what? So-and-so just came by Third Place last week. The buyer was so excited to meet him." Then the rep emails everyone else on the sales force and says, "Look how hard this author is working." It's amazing how effective an engaged author is. But if the author is like, "Why aren't my books in Third Place?" it accomplishes nothing.

We all know that there are less than great agents out there. How are writers supposed to avoid ending up with one of them? Put yourself in their shoes.
CHINSKI: I think they need to do a lot of research, for one thing, even before they get an agent. It amazes me how many times we get query letters from agents who clearly haven't looked at our catalog. I think they need to ask a lot of questions of whatever agent they're thinking about signing up with and make sure the agent knows who they're submitting to and why and so on.

But what if the author doesn't know any of that stuff?
GARGAGLIANO: The author should know. It's their business.
CHINSKI: So much information is available online. There's no excuse now to not know what a house is doing and even what individual editors are doing.
GARGAGLIANO: Every time you read a book, the editor's name is in the acknowledgments. It's very simple.
NASH: The fact that agents don't charge money to read is so widely an established fact online that it's mind-boggling that you still get submissions from agents who are obviously functioning that way. The agenting equivalent of chop-shops.

I mean more the difference between a B+ agent and an A+ agent.
GARGAGLIANO: I think that goes back to what we were talking about with the author's relationship to their editor. It's a personal connection. You want someone who understands your work and is articulate about it and has the same vision for it and can talk to you about your whole career and not just the thing that's in front of them. And then that conversation extends to the editor and the editor's conversation extends to the house.
NASH: With regard to the so-called "A+" and "B+" agents, when I've seen authors switch agents to get somebody more high-powered it pretty much has always failed. So if that's what meant by the difference between a B+ agent and an A+ agent, there is no difference. If they met the criteria that Alexis just articulated, then the odds are that they're the right agent for you. I mean, there's not a whole lot of variance in the advances I pay—there's not a lot of variance in what I can accomplish and not accomplish. Maybe there is with you guys. I've always had this theory—I could be wrong—that who the agent is might make a 20 percent difference in the advance an editor is going to offer. But it's not going to make an order-of-magnitude difference. Probably. It's not going to be the difference between ten thousand and a hundred thousand, let's say.
GARGAGLIANO: I think that's true 90 percent of the time. I think there are a very select group of agents who people just pay attention to before they even know what the book is. And that sets expectations.

We may as well name them.
NASH: Nicole Aragi, presumably.
GARGAGLIANO: Tina Bennett. Lynn Nesbit. Jennifer Rudolph Walsh. Suzanne Gluck.
CHINSKI: Eric Simonoff. I mean, I know from friends at other houses that when a manuscript comes in from certain agents, they start circulating it before they even read it because they presume it's going to go really quickly and for a lot of money. And that's not true with other agents. It just changes the game entirely. I think an author has to understand what they want. They have to do some soul searching, for lack of a better phrase, and figure out if it's just the money they need or if they need something else. And it's hard to hold that against someone. I know that editors always bitch about having to pay too much, and obviously it can have big consequences in a house—if a book doesn't earn out and so on—but you can't really hold that against the author. We never know exactly what their circumstances are. Maybe they have five children who they need to send to college. But they need to figure out what their priorities are. I do think we've often stumbled up against this thing where, in the same way that people think advertising equals love, they think that the advance equals love. And that's just not always true. But people assume that the more you pay, the more you love a book—that if you offer fifty thousand dollars more than another house, then you love it more and will be more devoted to it—and that's not necessarily the case. I think a good agent will explain to the author what all the different variables are, and specifically within the context of what the author needs, whether it's financial or their career more generally, and that is the ideal way to make the decision.

How do you guys feel about auctions?
CHINSKI: We try to avoid them if we can.
BOUDREAUX: I don't mind an auction as much as I hate a best-bids [auction]. And I don't mind a best-bids as much as I hate a best-bids and then the top three get to do it again. What the hell? Everybody does that now. It's insane to me. And the other thing is, does everybody have to talk to the author now, or meet the author, before you get to make an offer? What happened to the arranged marriage? "Eric likes me, Eric likes you, how 'bout we do a book together." I mean—
CHINSKI: Have you gotten the one where you don't get to talk to the author unless you promise to make an offer in advance?
GARGAGLIANO: Oh, that's horrible.
BOUDREAUX: That happened recently. You weren't allowed to talk to the author unless you'd ponied up however many six figures.
CHINSKI: There's an admission price to even talk to the author. That drives me crazy. At FSG, we try to avoid auctions. We decide what we think a book is worth, make the offer, and the author either decides to come or not come, and we bow out if it doesn't happen.
NASH: I mean, any economist will tell you that the winner of an auction has overpaid. In a lot of worlds, outside the publishing one, certain auctions get structured so that the second highest bidder wins. Because the presumption is that the overbidder has overpaid in such a way that it could imperil the business.
BOUDREAUX: I love that! Second place wins—let's hear it for all the B-students!
CHINSKI: All you A-students are crazy.

I hear what you're saying, Richard, but what about with books like Everything Is Illuminated or Edgar Sawtelle? You're not the loser if you won those auctions.
NASH: But I mean in aggregate. Any of these things are statistical, so there are always outliers.
CHINSKI: Actually, I came in second on Everything Is Illuminated.
BOUDREAUX: Were you the underbidder?
CHINSKI: I was, actually.

Apparently I was wrong.
GARGAGLIANO: To be fair, there is a benefit to an auction, which is that, at least in my position, the whole house has to pay attention to the book. You end up getting more people reading it and talking about it, and that creates a certain excitement that isn't to be negated entirely. As long as you don't overpay too much, within that excitement, I think it can benefit the book.
CHINSKI: But what about the problem—this is rare, but we've all seen it happen—where the money becomes the story behind the book. That gives me a queasy feeling. Even if it doesn't happen in a negative way, which we've obviously seen happen. But if that's the driving momentum that gets a book attention? I guess, on one level, great. We'll take what we can get. But on another level it just makes me queasy.
GARGAGLIANO: There's a huge difference between an auction that ends at two hundred thousand and an auction that ends at a million. There's a huge spectrum there. But if you're in an auction with five different houses, your publishers are going to pay attention. Because everybody else is paying attention.

Do you guys think you feel the money you're spending in the same way that maybe Richard does?
BOUDREAUX: I don't know if you sweat the difference between 150 [$150,000] and 175 [$175,000]. But you definitely...One [$100,000] and five [$500,000] are different. And five [$500,000] and three million are different. I'll tell you what's easier: three million. Because then everybody did have to get on board. You are not out there on your own saying, "I believe!" But those middle, lot-of-money numbers when maybe nobody else read the whole thing and somebody is letting you do it? You do feel responsible for that in a "Boy do I need to make sure I don't make a single misstep the whole time. The manuscript has to be ready early. I've got to have blurbs early. We've got to get the cover right. I've got to write those hand-written notes to people." You feel the need to justify it. But at the same time, you don't have to lose sleep every night because you won the auction by going up ten or fifteen thousand dollars. I think auctions can be not horrible when you agree on the number beforehand. What I hate is feeling like the ego contest has begun and somebody thinks so-and-so across town has it and you're trying to guess who it is—or somebody inside the house, when there's a house bid situation. The bullshit competition drives me up the wall. Being in an auction and saying we think it's worth three hundred or we think it's worth eight hundred—I don't sweat that if we're making a decision beforehand. It's when you get into the middle of it and suddenly the book that you thought was a great two hundred thousand dollar book...You're paying four [$400,000]? Just because there are still four people in it? I mean, when an agent calls and says they have interest, that's fine and dandy. But it's not going to change my mind about whether I liked the book or not, and I don't want the publisher deciding because three other houses are in and "We should get in on that, too." So if you can make these decisions before the craziness starts, it's fine. It's when the craziness begins—
CHINSKI: The feeding frenzy.

But it seems like that's how it works now. You're getting that email from the agent right away.
GARGAGLIANO: Noooo.
CHINSKI: But don't you feel like you get that more and more?
GARGAGLIANO: I don't feel like it changes my mind, though.
CHINSKI: No, I just mean more as a strategy to get people to pay attention.
BOUDREAUX: I feel like, when you get a submission, you know that it's so easy to send that everybody on earth has it already. And it's twenty a day and there they are on your Sony Reader and the attention paid to things has diminished just by the ease with which everything gets slotted in and slotted out. And then the agent's like, "I've got interest! I've got interest!" Well, "I've got a ‘No!'" I can email fast, too! [Laughter.] Unfortunately, that's how it ends up working sometimes. "You've got to get back to me quickly!" "Okay, well I guess I won't be deliberating over this very long. I've read ten pages and we can be done, then." If everybody just wants to speed it up that much.
CHINSKI: But I've heard so many agents say that it's becoming more and more difficult to sell a literary first novel that it almost seems like this is compensation for that. There's so much resistance now—everybody's trying to find a reason why they shouldn't buy something because it is so difficult. It seems like we get more emails now that say "There's a lot of interest" just to kind of built up that intensity from their side.
NASH: What I get to do in those situations is say, "Congratulations. I'm thrilled for the author. Next time." I just can't play at that level. That makes my life a lot easier. It's a much less complicated thing than what you guys have to go through in terms of evaluating the difference between two hundred [$200,000] and four hundred [$400,000]. That's one thing I don't ever have to worry about. But I really learned a lot from what you were saying about how when the money gets really big, you aren't accountable anymore. Not that you aren't accountable—but there's a lot of shared responsibility and the buck isn't stopping entirely with you. Whereas there's an in-between spot where it's large enough that you're exposed but not so large that anybody else is going to be wearing the flak jacket with you.
BOUDREAUX: The first book I ever preempted, I hadn't finished reading it. It had come in to another editor who gave it to me. So I was starting it late and I hadn't finished it and I went in to tell the publisher, "We've heard that somebody else is going to preempt." The publisher said, "Okay, go offer" several hundred thousand dollars. "Okay!" So I did, and we got it—what do you know?—and the next day the publisher asked, "So what happens at the end?" I still hadn't finished it! I was like, "They all...leave...and go home." I didn't know what happened! [Laughter.] That was kind of scary, and I did feel like "This one is all on me"—because not only had nobody else read the thing, but I wasn't even certain it would hold up. As I was editing it I was like, "I hope that's what happens at the end...." Otherwise the author's going to be like, "Really? Why would you suggest that at the end?" I'd have to be like, "I just think it's important that everything works out that way."

When you look at the industry, what are the biggest problems we face right now?
CHINSKI: I think they're all so obvious. Returns. Blogs.
GARGAGLIANO: And just finding readers.
CHINSKI: The end of cultural authority. That's something we talk about a lot at FSG. Reviews don't have the same impact that they used to. The one thing that really horrifies me and that seems to have happened within the last few years is that you can get a first novel on the cover of the New York Times Book Review, a long review in The New Yorker, a big profile somewhere, and it still doesn't translate into sales. Whereas six years ago, or some mythical time not that long ago, that was the battle—to get all that attention—and if you got it, you didn't necessarily have a best-seller, but you knew that you would cross a certain threshold. Whereas now you can get all of that and still not see the sales. I think that phenomenon is about the loss of cultural authority. There's just so much information out there now that people don't know who to listen to, except their friends, to figure out what to read. And that's the question we wrestle with the most. I think publishers have to communicate more directly with readers—that's the big barrier we're all trying to figure out. How much to use our websites to sell directly and talk to our readers directly?

So what are you doing to try to do that? What are you experimenting with?
CHINSKI: I can think of one thing. I mean, it's a small thing, but we recently started the FSG Reading Series uptown at the Russian Samovar. It's amazing. It's actually turned into a kind of scene. The New York Observer and the New Yorker have written about it. And I mean "scene" in a good way. In all the ways that we were talking about before, what makes us most happy is when a book forges a community around itself. It's a small thing, but now if we can somehow bring that online, or expand it in some way, it will be a way for FSG as a name to mean something, which will mean that we have another way to bring our writers to readers. The names of publishers, notoriously, are not like "Sony" or other companies where the name means a whole lot to readers. It may mean something to reviewers or booksellers, but I think we all need to figure out ways to make our names mean something. That's another way to establish authority so that people become interested in the individual books. That's a big challenge, and there's no easy solution to it.

What else are you guys trying to do, beyond the hand-written notes and the bigmouth mailings? What are you lying awake at night thinking about doing for this novel you're publishing that doesn't seem to be going anywhere?
BOUDREAUX: I pray that the people in our new media department who are supposed to be figuring out this problem are staying up late at night. That's what I think about as I roll around at night. And they are always coming up with things that I hope will work.
CHINSKI: And now we have this amplification system, supposedly—the Internet—which is supposed to amplify our ability to create word-of-mouth. But I don't think anybody's quite figured out exactly how to do that—or at least how to make it translate directly into sales. We all can see, in certain cases, our books being talked about a lot online. But what does that mean in terms of sales?
NASH: In our case, we've never really relied much on cultural authority, although we've certainly used it here and there. But for the most part, to the extent that we've been successful, it's been through the things that you're asking about. I check our Web metrics several times a week, whether it's Quantcast, Alexa, or Compete. These are places for measuring traffic. I try to figure out what the traffic is and what the demographics are. So I'm doing a lot of stuff that would probably make you want to shoot yourself.
BOUDREAUX: I'm glad you're doing it, though, so I can read about it in this article. Then I can call somebody and say, "You should do that! That's brilliant!"
NASH: One of your new media people, Amy Baker, was briefly involved with Soft Skull back in the day. She played on our street hockey team that was known as the Soft Skull Sandernistas, which was named after my predecessor. [Laughter.] But seriously, as Eric says, the Internet is amplified word-of-mouth. The things that are happening online are amplifying a process that's already in place. I mean, the genius of Oprah has never been her ratings. Her ratings aren't that spectacular compared to a lot of other shows. It's that Oprah connects to her audience in an intimate way, as if she were one of eight women who have lunch together every Tuesday. And that intensity of relationship—plus the fact that it is able to occur on a reasonably broad scale—is her genius. So what you do is go looking around the world for people with a certain level of trust. Authority, in a certain sense, has been partially replaced by trust. Part of what you can call "trust" today is the remnants of authority. People "trust" the New York Times.
CHINSKI: And people trust their friends.
NASH: Exactly. People trust Liesl Schillinger. People trust Ed Champion. Or they hate them. And you're just trying to get your stuff to people who are trusted. In my case that involves doing it myself, in a lot of cases.
GARGAGLIANO: This is one of the things that I get most frustrated by, partly because I didn't care about book reviews when I wasn't in publishing. I would never read the New York Times Book Review. I just wanted to walk into a bookstore and find something. But people don't do that anymore. People aren't interested in the community of books. So it's finding the niche markets. I just published a book called The Wettest County in the World. It's a novel about the author's grandfather and granduncles, who ran a bootlegging ring during Prohibition. It's amazing. And we've gotten IndieBound, we've gotten lots of things for it, and it's gotten amazing reviews. But the sales aren't going to happen on that alone. So I've been mailing it to bloggers who have beer blogs and whiskey blogs, and bourbon drinkers, and distilleries. I'm trying to find the niche market. I think that's the way things are going. I think that kind of thinking is much more exciting—you're more likely to find the readers who are interested—but publishers aren't set up to find niche markets for every single book.
BOUDREAUX: That's the thing. Do you do the whiskey mailing and then the beer mailing and this mailing and that mailing? It seems like there aren't enough hours in the day and there isn't enough staff—the Amy Bakers of the world—to do that.
NASH: That's where the writer needs to come into it. And interns. That's one of the ways in which interns can be so valuable. That's great work for them to do—a Technorati blog search on whatever. It's not hugely difficult, and it's kind of interesting.
GARGAGLIANO: It can also be useful for books down the line.
CHINSKI: That raises an interesting thing for writers to consider. I mean, how many times have we all heard that a certain book is going to appeal to this audience, that audience, and everybody else in the world? You just know that it's not true. But if you can go really deep into one community, you might sell ten thousand copies of a first novel, which most first novels never sell—at least the ones that are supposedly going to appeal to everyone. I don't think novelists should spend too much time worrying about who their audience is, but it's something to consider. I just think that line—"This book is going to appeal to everybody because it's about love or family or whatever"—doesn't work. I think the author and the publisher need to think more specifically. If you could sell one book to everybody on two city blocks in New York, you'd probably be selling more copies of that book than we do of the ones we just send out into the world and hope are going to sell magically. But how do you reach everybody on those two city blocks in New York and get them to buy the book? That's the task, metaphorically, that so many of us are facing: how to get to them and make them believe us. Because at the end of the day we're companies, and all of those people online who are talking to each other aren't necessarily going to believe that we have their best interests at heart. They'll think we're advertising to them through other means. So we have to establish a certain amount of trust with readers, not just as companies but as people who also love books in the same way they do. Again, it's a small thing, but the idea behind the Samovar reading series—not that it's a totally new idea—is that the editors at FSG love books, and you guys love books, so let's get together. And it's not just about trying to sell our books to you.
NASH: One of the things that that accomplishes that may not be obvious from the get-go is transparency. You're putting yourself out in the world and exposing yourself in a way—making yourself vulnerable. I have never understood why the staffs of publishing houses are invisible to readers, who are ultimately the people who pay our salaries. I mean, my wife is a corporate lawyer, and her photo and bio are on her firm's website. Book publishers just refuse to allow their staff visibility to the world. If Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton and Whatever are willing to allow all the partners' and associates' photographs and bios to be seen by the world, what about publishing is so important that we can't be allowed to be seen? I know that part of it is that we don't want authors bugging us too much. But I think that's part of what the Samovar reading series accomplishes: a certain willingness to participate.

Just in the space of your careers so far, what has been the most destructive new thing that's come about in the industry?
NASH: It's technology. It's been both constructive and destructive at the same time.
CHINSKI: So do you think e-books have been both?
NASH: E-books are one of the last ways in which technology is playing itself out. One of the first ways was desktop publishing. Another way that's been more incremental is the ability of digital printing to be commensurate with offset printing and for various machines to flatten the economies of scale. But, yeah, the ability to satisfactorily download a book digitally is turning out to be one of the last things that technology is accomplishing. I guess the other thing is just the capacity of e-mail and the Web—the social Web, in particular—to flatten communication. And it's all simultaneously destructive and constructive. It's destroying cultural authority but it's enhancing one's ability to cost-effectively reach individuals who might have other kinds of cultural authority. It's lowering barriers to entry, which is constructive because new presses can come along. BookScan is based on technology and has constructive and destructive components. The kind of supply-chain inventory management that Baker & Taylor and Ingram are doing, where they can now say to us, "We only need two months' worth of inventory; we don't need four months of inventory," is destructive because my working capital needs go up by 20 percent on that one phenomenon alone, but it's good in that I can actually see Ingram's demand building and respond to it. If I see big Ingram demand in the month before I publish something, I can say to myself, "I'm going to print advance orders plus two thousand as opposed to advance orders plus five hundred." So it's fucking me and helping me at the same time.
CHINSKI: I agree with Richard. Obviously a lot of things are changing right now, and some of them make things a lot more difficult, but they also—and I don't mean to sound like a Pollyanna—offer some opportunities. I'm always really wary of the sky-is-falling thing, this idea that we're at the end right now.
GARGAGLIANO: We're just at a place where we have to reinvent ourselves, and we haven't figured out how to do that yet. People have started reading in this other way that I don't understand because I don't read that way. But it's our job to figure out how they're reading, and then to figure out how to deliver something they want to read.
CHINSKI: Are you reading on a Sony Reader?
GARGAGLIANO: Yes, and I love it. It's the best thing ever.
CHINSKI: I'm still adjusting to it. We just got them in the last few weeks. On one hand it's great. On the other hand, I still want to write in the margins and it's hard to go back and forth and figure out where you are in a manuscript. I actually physically find myself reaching to turn the page.
GARGAGLIANO: I do that all the time. It's really disturbing!
CHINSKI: Your brain gets tricked into thinking you're actually reading a page. But on the other hand, as I was saying, it's great, and we're seeing sales of books.... I mean, I saw something recently about the Kindle. People who have a Kindle are actually buying more books. So on one hand, it scares the shit out of me that people are reading on Kindles and Sony Readers. But on the other hand—
GARGAGLIANO: Why?
CHINSKI: For no reason other than that it's different.
GARGAGLIANO: I think it's so exciting.
CHINSKI: That's what I mean. It's also really exciting. It will bring a lot more people into reading. And this younger generation is so used to reading online that it doesn't really matter. It doesn't mean the death of literature.
BOUDREAUX: I was amazed at how quickly we all got used to the Sony Reader. It's still a little different from an actual book. But when I first got into publishing I remember reading a manuscript, instead of a finished book, and feeling like it seemed to lack a certain presentational authority. It took me a minute to take a manuscript seriously. It will be the same way with the Sony Reader. But, my God, we've all adapted in a period of months? Imagine the twenty-year-olds who are reading everything online all the time and switching back and forth among seven screens that are open all the time. The notion of not reading that way must seem odd to them.
GARGAGLIANO: I think that in several years the book object is going to be more beautiful and more precious.
BOUDREAUX: It's going to be like vinyl records.
GARGAGLIANO: Exactly.