What was the biggest surprise from making that jump to corporate publishing?
Fortunately I don’t think there have been that many surprises because I went into this with my eyes wide open about what I was getting myself into. And I also have an awareness of the way the publishing business operates; even though we were out there doing our own thing in Brooklyn, we were able to have big successes. I think selling a book as a corporate publisher is just as difficult as it is as an indie publisher. So that hasn’t changed.
Ibrahim Ahmad of Viking. (Credit: Andres Hernandez, photo assistant Kuan Hsieh)
One big difference has been—and I would love to carry this spirit of publishing into Viking—at Akashic, by necessity, we had to be nimble and entrepreneurial as well, because it’s not like we were getting all the big submissions from agents. This would change over time, but in the early days, most of our acquisitions were directly with authors. That dynamic did gradually evolve, but there were still plenty of agents who I did not have a relationship with until I started at Viking. Developing those relationships has been a significant part of the responsibilities of the job. But also, given the type of publishing that we were doing at Akashic, we could sell, with our low overhead and the nature of our business model, ten thousand or fifteen thousand copies of a book and have it be a big success financially...and we would rightly celebrate that achievement.
Whereas the scale is much different now, and the financial stakes are much larger. On the one hand, there is no feeling in the world like paying an author who you admire and who is so deserving a large advance. I mean, it is really gratifying, and I feel really privileged in a lot of ways, but especially to be able to be in a position where I can change people’s lives in a meaningful way, that’s significant.
But I think at a more essential level, this is really the first time in my publishing career, despite being the editorial director at Akashic for many years, that I can be a book editor. Because most of my time at Akashic was spent with the nuts and bolts of keeping a small business running every day, publicizing our books, and marketing our books. And I would be the one marching into the New York Times to pitch our list. I would be helping craft our strategy and selling foreign rights and dealing with our distributor and booking author tours and going to Winter Institute and cultivating bookseller relationships—the whole business of publishing.
I was wearing so many hats. In fact I’m grateful to be able to bring that experience to bear at this new position because I had my hand in all these different areas. Having that type of experience and insight, I think it’s an incredible asset, and it also allows me to ask the right questions and help set my books up for success.
What you have brought is those relationships you built over the twenty years you’ve been nurturing these books. It’s on a larger scale now, but those people are still there. It’s just a different shell.
And this is a small world we operate in. It was exciting to me on one Zoom call early in the pandemic when I was new on the job—it might’ve been a division-wide meeting—I was scrolling through the list of participants and saw at least half a dozen former Akashic interns who worked with me. And just seeing people go out into the world as well, that type of movement, it was really heartening. People who I’ve also mentored over the years finding homes in corporate publishing, it’s a sign...it’s a very positive development.
That touches on something you mentioned, that sometimes Akashic was not afraid to publish things that bigger publishers wouldn’t because they might be too risky or there’s a small audience for them, etcetera. So what do you hope to see as the future of, not necessarily Viking, but corporate publishing? What do you hope acquisition, that pipeline, looks like, or even what the vision should look like?
I think it’s important to recognize the real tangible changes that have been wrought in the past three, four years. The very fact that you and I are having this conversation today I think is a testament to that. Beyond that, I think, and this is sort of maybe a microcosm about how I feel about the world at large, is that the discourse has shifted in a way that can only be healthy. And so the types of concerns that are being raised, I’d say especially among people who are just getting into the business, the younger generation, are finally attuned to questions of equity and representation and so forth.
Also, walking into a bookstore and seeing the front table look more like the world around me—that is a very different thing from when I started out in those early days. That’s enormous, and I don’t want to understate it. At the same time, it does feel like some of the momentum that we saw in 2020, I think the jury is out on where things will settle. On the one hand I think there has been a real recognition of corporate publishing’s historical myopia in certain areas, and it has resulted in a real net positive, especially for writers of color who are seeing book deals and larger advances at an unprecedented clip.
I do bring a degree of wariness to this question, given the sort of cyclical nature of this business. And it all comes down to the understanding that when the pendulum swings in one direction, inevitably it has to swing back the other way. If these books do not perform to expectations and recoup their advances, what does that look like for publishing moving forward? Does it mean that we’re not going to be investing in writers of color in the same way? Does it mean that publishers are going to be less inclined toward publishing a certain type of literature?
Again, in its totality, I feel like there’s never been a better time to be in this business, and I am so excited about the future. I think you have to bring a degree of optimism or even belief that you’re able to create the reality that you want to experience in the world. And that’s been a guiding principle for me from the outset. I do believe it, and it has played out. So that’s encouraging. But I don’t mean to suggest that there is no shortage of issues that we need to address in this business. I’m especially worried about young people in particular burning out, not sticking around—
The retention.
Seeing it through. Right, retention is a huge issue. And as the parent of young kids, I see other working parents in this business balancing and juggling responsibilities, and I want to make sure that people feel like they have a support system or just some type of sustainable future where we can make a real go of this. That’s my aspiration for the business.
And it feels like it is an evolution of where you came from, too. I think it’s community-oriented. It is an optimistic way of looking at life, that things are always going to get better, but we have to work toward it.
Yeah, I think that’s exactly right. I think for people breaking into the business today, the very fact that these types of conversations are being had out in the open is an enormous shift, and that’s important and heartening as well.
At Akashic, you were working directly with authors and then starting to pick up agents, and now you’re meeting new agents. Are most of the books you’re publishing agented, or are you still trying to find authors directly?
It’s both. I think that spirit of wanting to go out and find things, it’s just kind of embedded in the way I think about publishing. And there’s a big difference between sort of passively sitting around and waiting for something great to land in your lap and being out there in the world looking for writers and looking for stories and looking for interesting people operating in interesting spaces. That’s a big part of what I do.
I’m fortunate to have overseen the publication of more than five hundred books. So I have a strong network of writers who also refer other writers my way. And there are different communities that I am an active, engaged participant in. That’s also a great way to be, not just relying on the hope that you might get the next hot book that everybody else in New York City is excited about. As great as that is, and as much as I want to be in those conversations, I’m also looking at this enterprise as an expression of my own editorial vision. And my tastes, again, they’re particular enough that oftentimes I feel like I have to go out there in the world.
Can you give me an example?
I cochaired the Brooklyn Book Festival’s fiction committee for many years with Ben Samuel from Bomb magazine, and Ben published a short story by a young writer named Jenzo DuQue in Bomb. I remember reading that story and thinking, “Holy shit, this guy is absolutely incredible and has such promise.” And I happened to notice that he was represented by Julie Barer, so I reached out to Julie, and sure enough he was working on something, and I ended up making a two-book offer on his debut collection and a novel that he’s working on. So you have to be out there, and I’m grateful to be at the intersection of so many different communities and constituencies—that has given me the ability to publish the types of writing that I’m interested in.
I always have a lot of writers ask, “Do I have to be published widely before I find an agent?” Is that important to you?
No, not especially. It really comes back to what we were talking about before, which is that clarity of vision—you know it when you see electricity in the writing. It’s something that you can’t help but want to get up on the rooftop and shout about. And when that strikes you, it doesn’t matter where somebody has been published before or if they’ve been published before. It elicits that same sensation where you can’t help but want to be the most passionate advocate for this person. And that’s the aspiration. Certainly in my nonfiction publishing there’s a different type of calibration that unfolds. But my very first book on the Viking list, it was just such a fortunate, fortuitous, unusual experience.
His Name Is George Floyd: One Man’s Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice is a project that we did with the Washington Post. Both Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa are reporters there, and their book is unlike anything I’ve ever worked on in my life, in terms of the degree to which it was speaking to the moment so directly but also so timelessly. And this was the first book from both authors, and we crushed it. I remember the first day that I met with them; it was the day after Derek Chauvin’s conviction. From that moment to publication, the timeline was twelve months for a 150,000-word book that hadn’t been written. And the reporting that they did on this, I mean, they absolutely knocked it out of the park. They interviewed over four hundred people, from Floyd’s childhood friends in the Third Ward of Houston, where he grew up, to the president of the United States and everyone in between. They covered a lot of ground.
I think in part because this was my first book on the list, I was able to devote maybe a disproportionate amount of my focus to shepherding it through in that first year. And it was really vindicating to see it win a Pulitzer, to be a finalist for a National Book Award, to get all these accolades. But also as a testament: This is a book I think people [will turn to if they] want to understand what happened in 2020, in the culture, in our politics, and also in understanding the life of someone who is so widely misunderstood and who is sort of mythologized in certain ways. The book is ultimately an examination of how our different systems and institutions in American life operated on one man—from housing to education, from health care to the carceral system and far beyond.
This book speaks to why I made the move to Viking in the first place, to publish books that help shape the culture, shape the conversation, that are keenly engaging with the issues of the day with a degree of moral clarity.
What are you excited about in the next year or two?
It’s such an exciting moment at Viking. As I mentioned there has been a lot of change across the publishing industry, and I’m fortunate now to be in a position where I am working with writers I have long admired and whose work has meant the world to me. People like Ruth Ozeki and Nathaniel Philbrick and Nancy Eisenberg and others. I have some great stuff in the pipeline. On the fiction front, there’s a writer named Carson Faust who is writing what we’re calling Native American Southern Gothic. He writes a sort of literary horror. His debut novel follows five generations of a Native American family as they investigate the disappearance of a young girl in the present day and then trace that lineage back through these generations of hauntings. He is an absolute force to be reckoned with. That book will be coming out probably next summer; we’re just putting the finishing touches on the edit now.
I remember reading that on submission. Amazing.
It’s going to be incredible. This spring I’m publishing Brave New Words by Salman Khan, the founder of Khan Academy, which is a free online educational platform that aspires to provide a free world-class education to everyone in the world. Sal has been at the forefront of incorporating ChatGPT technology into their educational platforms. We’re living in a moment when, I think rightly so, there is a lot of concern about the way AI will affect every aspect of our society, and whether we like it or not, generative AI is here to stay, and what I really appreciate about this book is that Sal’s argument is that we need to harness it and rise to the occasion and use these tools as a force for good in the world, rather than waiting around for bad actors.
I have another nonfiction book on the history of immigrant detention in the U.S. by a Stanford historian. I think a lot of people believe that something like family separation is an aberration from the Trump era, when in fact it has a long history dating back to the period of the Chinese Exclusion Act in the 1880s, and this book is a narrative history of how immigrant detention has grown alongside the myth of the U.S. being a nation of immigrants and sort of following four narrative threads from the 1880s to today. It’s an incredible book.
I’d love to hear more about your tastes.
The way things had been shaking out, Akashic was really a fiction-heavy list almost by necessity. We simply couldn’t compete in the nonfiction realm, and certainly we published across categories as well. We had a strong pop culture focus. We did some political, nonfiction, current affairs. And the fact of the matter is that I’m the same person I was before I made the move, and my tastes have not changed appreciably. All that has changed is the canvas upon which I can bring these books to fruition.
I am interested in writers who ultimately have something to say. I mean that specifically, that they have a clarity of mind about what it is they want to say: a strong voice. I’d say my list is now leaning a little bit more nonfiction-heavy, maybe 60-40 nonfiction to fiction.
But story is the heart of every book for me, whether it’s a work of narrative history or a novel. I’m very much interested in storytelling. And being able to have that kind of canvas is such a gift.
When you open a query, what are the kind of things that pop for you?
I tend to work closely with my authors, and we go deep into the trenches together. So I am very cognizant about who I’m doing business with. I think my ideal author is someone who has a generosity of spirit about the way in which they operate in the world. And I’m not making a political statement here, but it’s more about the sort of essential humanity of the people who I’m working with. This is as true, I think, for the historians I’m working with as it is for the novelists. Beyond that there are, of course, editorial affinities as well.
I do think authors are always considering what those other affinities are too.
Right. So I think a lot of my authors share similar preoccupations. At heart they are approaching the world around them with a degree of, I don’t know, almost like moral clarity. That is maybe the through-line. How this reflects in their publishing, it depends on the type of book. A lot of the works I publish deal with or interrogate the systems and structures of the world. And I mean that in the most expansive sense, where they’re asking questions about why the world is the way that it is. That type of intellectual curiosity really resonates with me because that’s also how I think about the world.
Again my interests are wide, and I bring a level of curiosity. I want to know! I don’t pretend to be an expert in every field, but I bring an openness and a curiosity to every book that I publish. And I love learning alongside my authors through their work and being able to engage them where they are. It just so happens that I also, given my background, bring a global perspective to my publishing.
Oftentimes the people who have the greatest insight into what makes a given place tick are outsiders, or people who are perhaps at the intersection of different cultures. And that is reflected in the stable of authors I’ve managed to amass over the years, because they’re bringing that lens to bear on everything, and they’re questioning assumptions that I think we might otherwise be inclined to take for granted as just being the way the world works.
Vivian Lee is a writer and a senior editor at Little, Brown.
