Like anyone, I'm a sucker for a good underdog story. In a world where the bad guys always seem to come out on top, give me Gary Cooper in High Noon or Fred Exley in A Fan's Notes or even, I'm sorry to admit, Meg Ryan in You've Got Mail. Who doesn't appreciate a life-affirming tale of triumph and redemption in the face of adversity?

Not long ago, I went down to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, to seek out the protagonist of one such story: Chuck Adams of Algonquin Books. A native of Virginia who was educated at Duke, Adams moved to New York City in 1967 and found an entry-level job at Holt, Rinehart and Winston. He moved on to Macmillan, then Dell, where he built a reputation as a brilliant line editor, and was eventually recruited by Simon & Schuster to work alongside celebrated editor Michael Korda. In the years that followed, Adams edited and acquired an extraordinary range of best-selling and award-winning books by authors such as Sandra Brown, James Lee Burke, Susan Cheever, Mary Higgins Clark, Kinky Friedman, Ellen Gilchrist, Joseph Heller, Ronald Reagan, and Elizabeth Taylor. In all, nearly one hundred of the books he's edited have gone on to become best-sellers.

In the winter of 2004, however, like many editors of a certain age (and pay grade), Adams was rewarded for his years of service with a pink slip. The news hit him hard. Believing that his career was essentially over, he moved back to North Carolina, where he had gone to school and still owned a house. Not long afterward he got a call from a literary agent and friend who told him that Algonquin Books, the small literary publisher in Chapel Hill, was looking for an editor. He landed the job and soon acquired a book by a little-known novelist named Sara Gruen that her previous publisher had rejected. Anyone who's walked into a bookstore in the past year probably knows the rest: Water for Elephants has gone on to become a publishing phenomenon, spending a year and counting on the New York Times best-seller list with sales of more than two million copies to date.

But the redemption story is only part of why I wanted to talk with Adams. I heard a rumor that he was a straight shooter, and I had a hunch that his experience at publishing houses both large and small, and his extensive background with commercial authors, would yield some unique insights that writers of all stripes might find useful. In our wide-ranging conversation, Adams spoke with rare candor about everything from how to craft a compelling narrative to what the best agents do for their clients to the intricacies of working with an editor. We talked in his office, one wall of which is dominated by a thank-you gift from Gruen: a large, wildly colorful abstract painting that was made by—you guessed it—an elephant.

I've read conflicting things about your background. Where are you from?
I was born in Virginia, but just over the border. I think it was Publishers Weekly that said I was from North Carolina. I went to school at Duke—I did undergrad and then law school and spent seven years here. So coming back to Chapel Hill and Durham is coming home for me. I studied English as an undergrad and then went to law school because my father wanted me to go to law school, and Vietnam was happening and I didn't want to go there. The irony is that when I finally finished law school and had to go for my physical I didn't pass it because of a hereditary skin disorder—psoriasis, the heartbreak of psoriasis—and I had thrown away three years for nothing, I thought at the time, because I knew I didn't want to be a lawyer. But I did know that I wanted to go to New York. So I took a job as a lawyer with a bank in New York just to get there. I kept not taking the bar, and they finally said, "You don't really want to practice, do you?" I said, "No, I really don't." By then I had become acclimated to the city and basically just took the law degree off my resumé and went out and found a job at Holt. It was an entry-level job in production. I spent about three or four years there and worked my way up pretty quickly. Then I went to Macmillan and was hired as a managing editor. I think I was hired because they had been fighting for so long over who to hire that they basically said, "We're hiring the next person who walks through the door." I was the next person who walked through the door. I had to learn the job, and I was terrible at it.

How did you make the transition to becoming an acquisitions editor?
I made a couple other moves and eventually wound up at Dell. By then I knew what I was doing. I was good. Dell was very much into movie tie-ins. As managing editor, I oversaw a lot of stuff, but there was an editor who did the acquiring of all the tie-ins. At some point they decided they weren't going to do that anymore. They fired that editor and said, "Chuck, you take over the tie-ins. It's basically just getting the artwork from the movie companies anyway." I said, "But if something comes my way, can I acquire it?" They said, "Sure." The first think I bought was a tie-in to a miniseries called The Blue and the Gray. It was a complicated situation, and the author and I didn't get along. He had come up with the idea for the miniseries and somebody else had written the screenplay. But he retained the rights to novelize the thing. So he wrote the novel but he didn't have the approval of the edit—the producer had that. I read the novel and called the producer and said, "This is terrible. I can't accept it like this, or, if I do, it has to be rewritten, and I will rewrite it because I want to make it a success." He said, "Do whatever you want." So I completely rewrote it. The author was really upset. You know, I had destroyed his career and everything. We published it that way, as a paperback original, and it went on the New York Times best-seller list. We sold it to something like fifty foreign countries. It was a huge success. We made a fortune off it. So I'd taken my first book and turned it into a big success, and after that they encouraged me to acquire more. Eventually, Susan Moldow made me just an editor. But my reputation thereafter was based primarily not on my successes but on the books I didn't buy.

What do you mean by that?
I got a reputation for wanting to buy certain tie-ins and being told, "That's a terrible idea." For example, I was desperate to buy the tie-in to Cocoon. When I told them the plot, they practically laughed me out of the editorial meeting. Another was V. Another was The Last Starfighter. They all went on to be huge best-sellers. I was a big I-told-you-so person. When it came my turn in the editorial meetings, and they'd ask if I had anything that week, I would stand up and read the New York Times best-seller list to them. So I had this reputation for knowing what I was doing but never getting to do it. Eventually it became apparent to them that I did have talent as an editor. I'm good at it. I had done it a lot more than I had realized. I could type, which was rare back then before computers. I'd taken a typing class in high school, and in college I was the only guy on my floor who could type. I'd be typing guys' papers for them all the time, and I'd say, "This isn't very good. Do you mind if I change a few things?" They'd say, "Sure, go ahead. I don't know what I'm doing." So I'd rewrite their papers, and sure enough they would get much better grades. So I knew a long time ago that I actually did know how to write.

So you basically taught yourself how to edit?
Yes. Completely. Nobody mentored me, nothing like that. I got a reputation for being a really strong line editor, and eventually I heard that Michael Korda was looking for somebody to come work with him. That's how I got hired at Simon & Schuster.

Did you know Michael before you went to work with him?
No, I'd never met him. What happened is that a headhunter, Bert Davis, called me and said, "I've got a job for you. You've just got to promise me that you aren't an alcoholic or a drug addict." I said, "Okay, I'm not." He said, "Don't ask." It turned out they had hired somebody for the job and it became clear very quickly that he had a real problem—I don't know if it was drugs or alcohol or what—and it didn't work out. I guess they figured that was the one question they forgot to ask. So I went over and had an interview with HR. I was really pissed about that. I thought, "They called me. I'm not applying for this job, am I? Why am I having to go to human resources?" I remember the question that cinched the job for me. The HR woman said, "Rate yourself on a scale of one to ten." I said, "Ten!" She said, "Good, that's good." I realized that was what they wanted—belief in yourself and arrogance. Because it was more in my nature to say, "Oh, you know, like a seven and a half." I think I was just irritated with her.

When I met Michael I immediately loved him, of course. At one point in the interview he said, "What do you think is your greatest talent?" I said, "I grovel well." That may be the thing I said that got me the job. I didn't mention this earlier, but one of the other things that happened at Dell was that I started being assigned to a lot of problem authors. I've always been a placater or a mediator—my shrink tells me it's because I grew up in an abusive environment with a lot of drunks, not my parents necessarily, but I was around a lot of that—and it became clear to the people at Dell that I could get along with anyone. They would just throw people at me and say, "Let Chuck handle this one." So when I told Michael I groveled well, I think he liked that. I was basically hired the day I met him.

Tell me how your relationship developed.
On a personal level, we liked each other and still do. We just became friends, and we still talk on a regular basis. On a professional level, Michael is probably the most talented editor I have ever known. There were sessions with him and writers—I'm thinking of times when a writer was having trouble with an idea—and on a day when Michael completely focused, he was brilliant beyond belief. I remember one day in particular with an author who was stymied on this one plot problem. I had thought about it and hadn't come up with anything either. We went in and sat down with Michael and he just started to talk. He talked for about half an hour—talking through the story—and he resolved the problem and went on from there. It was a hair-raising experience. I was so moved by it. It was so exciting. I thought, "This man is brilliant."

Michael could do anything—I'm sure he's a great line editor—but he was more than happy to let me do the line editing. So, for the most part, I did the heavy line work on books and he did the more developmental side. That's especially true with Mary Higgins Clark. Mary is a dream to work with, one of the nicest people in the world, and I think an extremely talented writer, because she's a great storyteller, and I put storytelling ability above fine writing. When she was starting on a book, she and Michael and I would meet, usually for dinner. She would say what the idea was, and then Michael would spin this whole thing. She'd take that and run with it and do her own thing, but Michael helped her come up with the direction. Then I would go in and line edit the book.

Michael and I had a great working relationship, and we had that relationship with most of the authors we shared. Every now and then there would be somebody who I didn't work with. For example, Michael took on Philip Roth, who I got to know ever so slightly, but Philip Roth is Philip Roth and you basically leave it alone. I didn't work with Larry McMurtry at all. Larry is not the easiest person in the world to get along with, and he and Michael had a great relationship, so I was happy to stay out of that.

How did it work, technically? Would you both acquire your own books and then acquire some of them together?
I acquired books on my own, but usually, if an agent sent me something that I really liked, I would go to Michael and say, "I really like this and I want to try and buy it." And 90 percent of the time Michael would say, "I like it, too. Let's buy it together." So that's what we would do, and he would do the same thing with me. Every now and then he would get something—he was in the RAF and knew about planes—where there was no reason to involve me. We didn't do every book together, but we did the majority of them together. Usually agents would send the big authors to him. But Sandra Brown and James Lee Burke were submitted to me.

When you look back, what did those years working with Michael teach you?
Well, I learned an awful lot about the business from Michael, of course, because Michael is incredibly savvy. I also learned the limits of ego.

What does that mean?
I believe it's never, never, never about the editor. That was the only thing with Michael that I sometimes disagreed about. The most important thing is to have a really strong relationship with the writer and have them be confident in you and the house. As the editor, I'm not important in that equation. I genuinely believe that. I mean, I have an ego, but it's not important. Michael would occasionally let his ego get in the way of things. There was one celebrity—we did a lot of celebrity books—and they had a fight, the likes of which.... I had seen it coming. I knew it was going to happen. And it ended up that I was the only one she would talk to. His ego could occasionally get in the way. I have come close to losing my temper with authors, but I've only actually done it twice, once here and once, famously, at Dell.

Famously?
Well, it was famous there, not anywhere else. Again, it was me trying to prove myself when I was young and trying to prove myself. I bought a work of nonfiction about an FBI guy who went undercover and got so deeply undercover that he became a criminal himself. A journalist had written a proposal to write this story. Susan bought it, and when it came in she gave it to me to edit. It was terrible. The guy was a good reporter—he dug and dug and dug—but he hadn't a clue about writing or putting a book together. I looked back at his credits and realized that he had been with People magazine, and his articles always said they were "reported by" him but written by somebody else. So I thought, "Okay, we're going to make this work."

I started rewriting it. When I was done with the first chapter I sent it to him. He said, "Oh, I see." I said, "Can you do this now? Can you look at what I've done to this chapter and redo the rest of the book?" He sent it back and it was still terrible. No better. I thought, "Either I reject it or I rewrite the whole book." So I started rewriting the whole book. At some point he started pestering me about when I was going to be done. I sent him the first half. He called me and said, "Forgive me. This is brilliant. I love what you're doing. Keep going." So I kept working on it and got about another hundred pages done—it's like four hundred pages long—but then he called me again. Now, I'll admit, it had been three or four months by this point. But he called me again and said, "Where's the rest of it?" I kept putting him off, but eventually he started calling me every day. One day he called me and said, "I'm really getting upset about how long you're taking with this."

I have a terrible temper, but I don't lose it very often. I'm usually able to keep myself from going off the handle. But that day I was just in a bad mood or something, and I said, "You know what? I hate you and I hate your book." And I slammed down the phone. I was sitting there, kind of hyperventilating, and then I heard Susan's phone ring, and about thirty seconds later I heard her walking down the hallway to me. She yelled at me, of course, but she was nice about it. She said, "You should have rejected this. You should have come to me and said, ‘This is terrible.'" I said that I just didn't want to give up on it.

Tell me about some of your more memorable celebrity experiences at S&S.
There were so many. Going to Cher's house and sitting in her strange living room and just talking with her—that was pretty awesome. I liked her. I can't say I ever got to know her. I think she's very afraid of exposing herself. So she limits her world to people who are right around her and she trusts, and we were never going to be part of that. But it was fun to work with her anyway. Esther Williams was memorable and probably one of my proudest publishing experiences, because everyone laughed at me when I bought the book. They said, "What a joke. Nobody cares." But thanks to two other people I worked with—one in subrights, one in publicity—who also loved Esther and loved the book, it became a big best-seller. It probably sold 120,000 copies, which was great for a book that everyone said I was stupid to buy. And I loved working with Esther.

Two of my more memorable experiences involved celebrities I never actually did books with. One was having lunch with Diana Ross with Michael at the Four Seasons when her memoir was being shopped around. She wanted Michael to be her editor and I think it had been requested that we have lunch with her. I was immediately besotted with her. I just thought she was the most exciting person I had ever met. It may have all been a performance—it probably was—but when I walked out of that restaurant I was ten feet off the ground. I was just in love with her. The other one was dinner with Sidney Poitier when his book was being shopped, and he was wonderful and brilliant and charming.

Working with Charlton Heston was great. I loved him. We never talked politics or gun control, and he was just a genuinely sweet man. I even said to him at one point, "I've worked with a lot of celebrities and they are many things but they are usually not nice. How can you be so nice and be a household name?" He said, "Good thing you didn't know me thirty years ago." He was really well grounded. Meeting Elizabeth Taylor was exciting. There were a few people I worked with who I got to know pretty well. Neil Simon and I became pretty friendly when we were working together. Paul Mazursky, the director, was another. Maureen Stapleton was a sweetheart.

You mentioned Diana Ross coming to Michael. There is obviously a cult of personality with some editors...
Michael, having been a child of Hollywood himself, made a lot of these people feel comfortable. The drawback was that sometimes I think they felt he was also competing with them.

As you were coming up were there any other people who had an important influence on you?
Susan Moldow was a huge influence, just because she gave me a chance and encouraged me. Carole Baron was one of the greatest people I've ever worked with. I just loved her. Ray Roberts at Macmillan was a huge influence on me. I love him. He and I were incredibly close friends. He gave me confidence in myself about what I could do.

Is that because your personality type was similar? You didn't have to be an oversized personality?
Exactly. There was an editor at Macmillan at the time who just died this week, Eleanor Friede, and she was an oversized personality. She was kind of daunting. I liked her a lot but, you know, it was like, "Now that's an editor." I could never be like that. I could never be like Michael; I could never be like Nan Talese. I just don't have that in me. I was always happiest just being in my office and working and not necessarily being out there.

Why were you were ultimately pushed out at S&S?
It's a complicated story, and I'm not sure I know the whole story. I was told that they had to cut back and that Michael had declined to retire. They wanted him to retire. And because he wouldn't retire, they were going to fire me. They wanted me to continue editing [on a freelance basis], but they told me I should just retire.

You were making too much money?
I guess. It didn't seem like it to me, but I don't know what everybody else made. I was certainly well paid. But, mind you, when David Rosenthal came to Simon & Schuster he immediately gave me a raise. He said, "You're not making enough." I was never one who went and lobbied for big raises. So I think it was a combination of things.

How did the Algonquin job come about?
When I was fired from Simon & Schuster, I was given something like four months notice, mainly because they wanted me to finish editing the new Mary Higgins Clark, which had to go to press in March. So I had until the end of March to clear out. An agent, Cynthia Manson, who is a friend and a wonderful person, called me and said that Peter Workman was looking to hire somebody. She knew Peter and asked if I would be interested in talking to him. I said that would be serendipity because Algonquin was in North Carolina, where I already had a house and spent a lot of time.

But, to be honest, I had little hope for it because...Mary Higgins Clark? Jackie Collins? Those weren't exactly the kind of authors I thought of when I thought of Algonquin. But Peter could not have been nicer or more inviting. He basically said, "I don't what you to learn to do Algonquin books. I want them to learn how to do the books that you're comfortable with." So that gave me some hope that this actually might work. No one else offered me a job, and I could've done freelance and probably made more money than I'm making here, but I didn't want to do that.

The thing that I love about what we do as editors is, first of all, working with the authors. But I also love this excitement when a new manuscript comes in and you think, "Okay, I'm ready to fall in love again." It doesn't happen very often, but when it does it's just unbeatable. I didn't want to give that up. I could have kept editing on a freelance basis, but I would have missed that love experience. So we worked out everything and I was very happy to take the job down here, and it has been, I think, the most exciting thing that has ever happened in my career. I mean, who would have thought? I got a third act here.

I read somewhere that Water for Elephants is the biggest seller in Algonquin's history. Tell me about the acquisition.
The acquisition process was simple. Emma Sweeney e-mailed the book to me and told me that it had been under contract to Morrow—I believe this is right—and they had rejected it because they wanted another romantic contemporary book like Sara's first book. I had been the underbidder on Sara's first book [Riding Lessons] at Simon & Schuster, and I had met her when she came around to meet people. So that was the reason the new book came to me. I started reading it and immediately just loved it. I gave a copy to Ina Stern, our associate publisher, on a Friday. We both came in on Monday and went, "Oh my God! We have to have this book." It was the first and, with the exception of one other book I've brought in, the only time that every editor here and the publisher said, "We have to have this book." Usually there's one naysayer, and sometimes several, but in this case everyone agreed. I remember saying at the editorial meeting, "I don't know that this book will be a best-seller. But I think this author will be a best-seller because she's an animal person and will continue to write about animals." Her first book had involved horses. I said, "You've got the opportunity for off-the-book-page publicity because you have an author you can promote," which is infinitely easier than just promoting the book. So we took it on with great enthusiasm.

Was it a competitive situation or did you have it exclusively?
It was out with a number of other houses. I told Emma, "Look, I really just want to take this off the table." I think I offered her fifty thousand for world rights. She asked me if I could go up, so I went up a little bit, and we got it. A few months later, after the book had been edited and everything—it didn't take much editing because it was really clean—our publicity and marketing people had a meeting to talk about the next season. They meet every season and choose one or two books—we promote all of our books a lot—but they choose one or two that they hope can be especially big. They chose another novel as the big book for that season. But it turned out that our marketing director, Craig Popelars, hadn't read the novel yet. So, after that meeting, he read it. Afterward, I remember, he walked in here with the manuscript and said, "Best-seller. We can make this a best-seller. I can give this to my mother, I can give this to my father, I can give this to my wife, I can give this to my old college roommate. This book is universal." I was a little jaded by that point, so I said, "Sure, you go ahead and make it a best-seller." And damned if he didn't. Craig along with Michael Taeckens, the publicity director, and Ina Stern, the associate publisher, got behind this book and just made it happen.

In the lead-up to publication, what are some of the key things that you and your colleagues did?
Craig got on the phone or emailed thirty or forty key independent bookstore people around the country. He said, "I want to send you a manuscript that I think is going to be huge. If you like it as much as I think you will, I want you to give me a quote that I can use to put together an ad." He sent out the manuscript and the comments that came back were universal. There wasn't one negative response. The independent booksellers got behind the book in a huge way. He took those quotes to sales conference in New York, and the sales reps had started reading the book and agreed that it could be a best seller. Michael started putting together a thirty-city tour. We had started out thinking the first printing would be fifteen thousand copies, but by the time we actually went to press it was fifty thousand.

Did the author do any key things in terms of promotion?
Well, Sara's got a great personality, but I don't think she'd mind me saying that she's not a natural in front of crowds. She actually can have a little stage fright. But once she's there, her charm and her warmth come through, and she did an amazing job on the road selling the book. That was a huge thing. But ultimately, I think, it's about the book. People love it. We just went back to press, this week, and printed our two-millionth paperback copy. It's been an amazing ride.

What was the most exciting moment for you?
The first time it got on the New York Times list. And the millionth paperback copy. That was fun—the entire office went out to dinner. We had champagne here and then went out to dinner.

Tell me about trying to keep her.
We tried very hard.

I imagine that you put together some kind of creative offer.
Yes. I don't want to talk about the amounts, but we put together a very creative offer. It was a reasonable amount of money up front and guarantees of more if certain things happened. It was a shared risk situation. Financially, we just can't afford to pay millions of dollars and have a failure. Other companies can. We can't. We just can't take the risk. So it was a shared risk—more money if this happens, more money if this happens. I would have loved to have kept her.

You're on record as saying you understand her decision.
I do. I do, completely.

But it must also be frustrating.
It is. It's particularly frustrating for the others here who worked so hard to create the book's success. I mean, it hurt. I can't say that our feelings weren't hurt a little bit. But I put myself in her shoes and I think, "x dollars here versus x-x-x-x-x dollars there?"

Tell me about the major changes you've seen in the industry over the course of your career.
Things have changed a lot. I started at Holt in 1969, but because I was in production I can't say I had a great feel for the industry because the industry, let's face it, revolves around editorial and publicity and so forth. By the time I got to Dell, which is where my career really began, I did understand what I was getting into. Dell was a big mass market house, and the mass market kind of ruled. I remember when Nancy Friday's My Mother / My Self reached one hundred thousand hardcover copies and everyone went, "Oh, God! That's amazing!" Now one hundred thousand is nothing—you may not get on the best-seller list with that. There's been a shift away from the mass market side.

Now things have just become big business. Advances have gotten kind of out of control. I'm not saying I liked it better the old way, it's just that I've never been one who liked to pay big advances. I'm not tight with money—God knows I waste a lot of it—I just hate risking things. I want to see the company make money. I've seen too may authors' careers go down the toilet because of big advances. I had an author at Simon & Schuster who I just loved. He was a great writer and he was great to work with. I had done a nonfiction book with him, and I encouraged him to do novels. So I bought two novels from him for something like fifty thousand dollars. The first one was great and got terrific reviews—a daily New York Times review, the cover of the Los Angeles Times Book Review—and sold moderately well, fifteen or twenty thousand copies. That was good for a first novel. It launched his career. The second book was just okay—it wasn't great—and it did okay but not great. When it came time to negotiate for the next novel, his agent wanted three hundred thousand dollars. We tried to get to a reasonable amount, but the truth was there was another editor who wanted him and I think had already put the money down. So he left for the money, and the third book sold like the second book and the first book. And the fourth book sold like that. And now he's not writing anymore, to the best of my knowledge. He could have built a career if he'd just been patient and hadn't become greedy and gone for the money.

But it's hard to resist that kind of money.
I know it is. I just get frustrated when agents and authors go for the money like that and don't think about building careers. I think sometimes we all just get carried away with this need to buy these things without any thought of what we're really going to do with them. But here, fortunately, we only do twenty books a year and we can't do that. We have to think carefully about everything we buy. But in a culture like at Simon & Schuster, and before that at Delacorte, to some extent, you would just buy things because you needed to fill up a list. You know, every month you had to have your three or four big books, but you also needed to have another fifteen or twenty down at the bottom. You would just buy stuff and fill them in. Too often, books that are acquired for hundreds of thousands of dollars get put in the midlist because they decide they aren't going to sell. "We can't make it into a big book, so we'll just put it there." I've had books like that. I've been guilty of this. I guess there's no way we cannot pay big advances because that's the culture we're in, but I think it's bad for so many careers.

I just took on a book this week where I was one of the bidders when it was sold a year or more ago. The author interviewed all the editors and went with another house that offered a lot more money than I offered—almost three times what I offered. But he called me out of the blue a few weeks ago and said, "I made a mistake. I really wanted to come with you but the money was just irresistible." So he's buying himself out of the contract and coming here. He just felt like he wasn't getting the guidance he wanted. I don't know if we'll have a great success or not. I think he's really talented. But the money is almost impossible to resist, I think.

It seems to me that publishers are responsible for a lot of these problems, especially the problem of the midlist writer whose career has stalled. What should publishers be doing better?
I think they should be publishing fewer books, or publishing more carefully. At Algonquin, because of the kind of house we are, doing twenty books a year, every book has to work for us. We can't afford to just throw something out there. We have to work like crazy. We'll say, "Okay, we think there may be fifty thousand people out there who will buy this book. So let's go find those fifty thousand people." That's what marketing and publicity do here. They dig for those readers. They don't always succeed, but they always try.

How are they doing that?
A lot of it is on the Internet. A lot of it is contact with booksellers. Take this book by Roland Merullo, American Savior. It's a satirical novel about Jesus coming back and running for president. We're taking a big position on this book in the way we're positioning it with bookstores. But we've also been in touch with all sorts of religious organizations, especially liberal religious organizations, trying to get them interested and supportive. We just go after all these different things that the larger companies don't have time to do because they're publishing so many books, and they're going to put their effort behind the ones they paid the millions of dollars for. So, here, because we only do ten books a season, we work those ten books to death. We're not afraid to take somebody who has languished in the midlist. If we feel like they're capable of rising above that.

Do you think the industry is healthier now than it was when you first started?
Well, it's much bigger, so I suspect it's less healthy. Originally it was small operations that weren't publicly owned. You didn't have corporations demanding that you meet certain budgets. I saw this at Simon & Schuster. We had one year when Judith Regan, who I like a lot, had Howard Stern and I believe Rush Limbaugh in one year, and another editor had The Book of Virtues, and there were a lot of other books that worked. So let's say the year before we had made ten million dollars and our budget for that year was eleven million. But it was such a great year that instead of making 11 million, we made more like 111 million. So next year, does Paramount or Viacom say, "Your budget this year is twelve million"? No. They say we're supposed to make 112 million. So all of a sudden the bar has been raised that much higher. If you make the budget, keep in mind, you get not only a pat on the back—you get a bonus. So everybody wants to make the budget. When May or June comes around and you start looking at the numbers, you think, "We're not going to make our budget. What can we do?" What you do is start taking books that were supposed to be published later on and moving them up, throwing them into November and December just to get the numbers out. A lot of books and authors get sacrificed that way.

What does all of that mean for the future? Are the large corporations ever going to realize that the industry doesn't have the kind of growth they want and give up?
I don't know. Going back to the beginning of my career, when I was at Holt and we were owned by CBS, I remember the people at Holt laughing at the people at CBS. The powers that be at CBS had called the people at Holt and said, "You're doing something wrong here. If we put a dollar into our broadcast operations, we usually get back $1.75. You're only giving us back a $1.02. You're doing something wrong." They just didn't have any idea. They hadn't even researched what they were doing. In our business, $1.02 on the dollar is not bad. Any profit is good. But these corporations expect big growth. It's creating mega hits, and that's fine. Simon & Schuster is one of the best at that—they're amazing at event publishing. But so many little books, so many promising little books and talented authors, get sacrificed.

But what do you see on the horizon—do you think it's going to keep going the way it's going?
I have no idea. Seeing Warner get out of the business is probably a good thing. Viacom will probably ultimately get out of the business—it's actually CBS now, I don't know how they'll figure that out. Bertelsmann is probably pretty solid. They seem to know what they're doing. I don't know what kind of pressures are on people in-house on a bunch of things. I don't know what it's like. I bet it's not too dissimilar, but at least it's not publicly owned, so you don't have the Wall Street pressure. I think that's probably one of the biggest problems: the pressures from the stockholders and so forth. It's not a business that's ever going to function like a normal manufacturing operation or a normal big business. It's just not. So much depends on the personalities and quirks. There are so many ways to go wrong in this business, and it's so difficult to get it right.

Did you read Jon Karp's recent essay in the Washington Post?
No, I didn't see it, but somebody was telling me about it.

He was basically arguing that the future of books is quality stuff and not the sort of quickie schlock that a lot of publishers make a lot of money from.
I haven't read the article, but I don't necessarily agree. Look at Judith Regan. She's a good example. I think she's brilliant. I think she showed us something we all kind of know but don't like to admit, and it's that we're in fucking show business. She showed us that if you give people what they want, they will buy it. You can call it schlock if you want to. Books on wrestling, and books by porno stars, are not things that I necessarily want to read. But that doesn't mean they shouldn't be published. There are people who want to read them, and she gave that market what they wanted. And, okay, it's schlock, but it got people into bookstores, and they bought books. I've always thought, "Give me more Harlequin romances." Get people reading! You just want people to read. I don't put down any form of publishing if there's a market for it. For too long, in New York, we've been in this culture of publishing what we like and not what readers want. Hopefully, we'll come around to trying to understand what people really want to read so we can interest them in reading in the first place.

When I was at Simon & Schuster, they started this thing on diversity in publishing, and we were all supposed to go through diversity training. To my knowledge, I'm the only person who was not summoned to go through diversity training. I think it was because I wrote them such a scathing reply to their initial query of "How do you feel about diversity in publishing?" I said, "There is no diversity in publishing and we're not likely to get it as long as you just pay lip service to it." There are virtually no African Americans in this business, there are virtually no Hispanics, virtually no Asian Americans. It's because we don't pay competitive salaries, we don't make an effort to recruit them, and, frankly, if they came in and really had a sense of their area of publishing, the bosses wouldn't know what to do with them and probably wouldn't give them a chance to do anything anyway. They expect you to be white like all the rest of us. There's too much of the elitist school culture in New York. The only people who can afford to take jobs in publishing are those who come from enough money and whose parents will help support them. We don't encourage a diversity of people in the business. We don't. We just want more of the same because they're the ones who can afford to work in it. And I don't see that changing. I know that profits are a problem and you can't afford to pay huge salaries. I know the argument. But it's a problem. And when somebody like Judith comes along and really tries something different and gets pilloried for it? Okay, she overstepped the bounds. I'll give you that. But she showed us that there is a readership out there if you're not too proud to go there.

Let's talk about agents. There are a lot of them, and I'm curious about the factors that you would look at if you were a writer, knowing what you know, and had your pick of a few.
I would want them to ask certain questions. "Who do you think the audience for my book will be?" "How do you think my career should progress?" I think writers should be asking about career, not just about selling this particular book. "What do you think I should be working on now to follow-up this book?" I would want a very careful reading of the book in order to make sure that they did read it and really understood it and weren't just hyping me up. I would do as much research as I could. I'd want to know who their other clients are and how their careers are advancing. I'd want to talk to some of their authors, if possible. I'd look at how well the books that this agent has sold are being published.

You want an agent who is both incredibly easy to get along with and incredibly determined to get the best they can for their authors. The best agents are the ones who keep after me and don't leave me alone. You know, "What are you doing? What's going to happen next?" They want to keep on top of things. The ones I'm leery of are the ones I hear from only once or twice a year. Marly Rusoff, for example, is a great agent. She works so hard for her writers. Well, she was an editor, too. I think some of the best agents used to be editors—because they know the business. And so many editors are now agents, of course, because you can make more money.

What do agents do that drives you crazy?
Oh, there are so many things. The worst thing an agent has ever done to me involved a novel by a Hollywood-based person who had been in show business. This person had written a memoir before, and he was a pretty good writer, but the novel was a mess. The writing was pretty good and the background was interesting—the material was all there—but it just wasn't well done. So I passed. But when I passed, I said, "I do like this. I think there's potential here, but it's not ready. If you don't sell it, and the author wants to talk to me about reworking it, I'd be glad to have a conversation with him." They didn't sell it. The author called me and we went back and forth—calling, e-mailing—and he started to rework it. He said, "I think I've got a great idea now, so thank you." A couple of months later, my assistant drops the revision on my desk. It has a letter from the agent on top—multiple submission. I called up and said, "What are you doing?" The agent said, "You didn't really expect to get this exclusively, did you?" I said, "Well, I'm passing. Thank you." She said, "You're not going to read it?" I said, "No." I couldn't believe that.

Here, I have actually taken options on two books in that situation. I'm working with the authors now, trying to get the books right, and if we get them right we have an agreed upon purchase price. It's a formalized way of doing what I did in that case, and it protects us, obviously. When you read a book and you see something there, and it's a good writer, I'm loath to give up on it.

Are there any younger or less well-known agents out there who are really good but who maybe writers aren't aware of yet?
There are two agents in particular, right now, who I send people to when I'm asked for help in finding an agent. I think of them first and I go to them first: Doug Stewart at Sterling Lord and Daniel Lazar at Writers House. Both have sent me really, really good things. I have not bought anything yet from Doug—actually I did because I sent him an author and then I bought the book. I've bought a couple of things from Daniel, who has consistently amazed me with the stuff he sends. It's off the wall sometimes, but I just love it.

What are you looking for in a piece of writing?
The first thing is the voice. If it's got a strong voice, I'm going to keep reading. And if a story sneaks in there, I'm going to keep reading. To me, those are the two most important things. I want a voice and I want to be hooked into a story. I believe very strongly that books are not about writers, and they're definitely not about editors—they're about readers. You've got to grab the reader right away with your voice and with the story you're telling. You can't just write down words that sound pretty. It's all about the reader. You've got to bring the reader into it right away. If the writing is poetic and so forth, that's nice. I'm reading something right now that has an amazing voice, and I'm only fifty-six pages into it, but I'm already getting a little tired because it's so nice, if you know what I mean. It's so pretty. It's like every page is a bon bon, and I want a little break somewhere. It's become self-conscious, in a way. I want the author to surprise me and excite me, and so far he hasn't. He's just made me think, "Oh, that's nice." I even called somebody and read them half a page because I thought it was so nice. I don't know. I'll give it another fifty pages and see.

How long does it take you to know?
You can usually tell after a paragraph—a page, certainly—whether or not you're going to get hooked. Every now and then, something will surprise you. I remember one novel at Simon & Schuster that I was reading, more as a favor than anything else. The writing wasn't great, and the story was a little on the predictable side—it was okay, but a little boring—but then I got to the end and it surprised the hell out of me. I went back and thought, "Fuck, this is really something. I would have given up after fifty pages if I hadn't promised somebody that I would read it." I ended up buying it and it did really well.

Are there any specific elements of craft that beginning writers tend to neglect?
I think beginning writers tend to not think about a reader. They tend to think about themselves. They think about making themselves sound smart and good, and they forget that this is really all about telling stories. I used to joke that I was going to put a big sign over my desk that said, "Quit writing and tell me a story." The problem is that they just write. They fall in love with their own voice. They write and write and write, and they lose sight of the fact that they're trying to entertain somebody. You have to reel them in.

Do you have any pet peeves about mistakes that you see writers making again and again?
Oh, there are little things. "‘I like you,' she smiled." [Laughter.] And you see that kind of thing from fairly good writers sometimes. You know, if you want to get the smile in there, it's "‘I like you,' she said with a smile." It's just little things like that. But if I'm reading something and I'm on the fence and I see too many of those, it goes against the book. I don't see it a lot, but every now and then, I read a novel that someone has obviously written with a thesaurus beside him. I'm not a stupid person. But I don't know every word. When I have to get up from my desk and look up words to understand what I'm reading, that's another thing that sends me to the other side of the fence.

You have said that you work very closely with the writer, with the reader in mind, to make every book as commercial as possible. Why is that important to you?
It's very difficult to make a living in this business. I'm told that there are something like two hundred writers who actually make a living at writing. Or maybe fewer. The others have to supplement their incomes in order to make a living. If a writer really wants to make a living as a writer, they need to sell copies. I want them to be successful. If they're successful, we're successful. To some extent, it comes down to money.

But I don't believe in just going after stories to make money, obviously. There are some books I've been able to publish here—one example is An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England—that have been a fight. So many people here hated that book. It's interesting. I haven't done this in six months or a year, but it used to be that if you looked at the Amazon page for that book, the reviews were split fifty-fifty between five stars and one star. Half the reviews were like, "This is the greatest book I've ever read," and the other half were like, "I would give this book zero stars if I could." It gets that kind of reaction. It makes people angry. I love that kind of book. It inspires people to really talk about it. Some people despise it and start to sputter because they hate it so much, and other people go crazy over it.

Go back to this notion of working very closely with an author—with the reader in mind—to make something as commercial as possible. What are the nuts and bolts of that process? What does the page look like?
Physically, it's a mess. I write all over it. I'm not a shy editor. I edit in ink, and I just sit down as a reader. I start reading, and when I come to a word or whatever that makes me stop, then I think, "Okay, there's a problem." Because any time a reader stops—whether it's because they didn't understand something, or the word is an odd choice and it throws them off, or a character does something slightly out of character—then you have to stop and say, "This is a problem. How do we fix it?" Usually I will have a fix that I just go ahead and write in. I always tell the authors, of course, that my fixes are suggestions. I say, "You don't have to do it this way, but you've got to do something here. Whenever I find a problem, you've got to address it. You can't ignore it. You can find your own solution, but you have to do something."

I go through the whole manuscript that way. Sometimes I just write in the margins, sometimes I write pages of notes and type them up and send them to the author. Sometimes it's just a matter of cutting and connecting and writing little one- or two-word transitions. But it's always a matter of taking the reader with me. I want them to be able to follow everything that's going on and not have to stop and puzzle anything out.

What's the most satisfying big edit you've ever done?
It was probably Kitty Dukakis's memoir. It was one of the first manuscripts I was given to edit at Simon & Schuster. It was an unusual situation: It had been bought jointly by Alice Mayhew and Michael Korda, who are two radically different editors. The manuscript was huge, about five hundred pages. Alice called me into her office and said, "Chuck, there's way too much in here about politics. People want to know the personal story. You need to cut out a lot of this political stuff." Michael called me into his office and said, "Chuck, there's way too much personal stuff in here. People want to know about the politics. You've got to get rid of a lot of this personal stuff."

I sat down and thought, "Okay, who are you going to please?" I decided to just please the reader. I went through it and did what I wanted to do as a reader. The cowriter on the book was wonderful, but she had not controlled Kitty in any way. Kitty had just rambled and the cowriter had organized everything but hadn't cut it at all. For example, every time Kitty had gone to a different town and had a different hairdresser, she'd spend a paragraph thanking that hairdresser for doing such a great job. I said, "Kitty, there's an acknowledgments page. That's where all of this has got to go." I went through the book and just carved. It was almost like carving a block of marble or granite or whatever to try and get the statue that was beneath. I painstakingly went through the thing a couple of times and carved away and connected things. When I was done, I thought it was great. And both Alice and Michael did, too. I was really proud of that. I knew I had done a good job, and they were really proud of it too. It went on to be a big best-seller for us.

This is the magazine's MFA issue. Do you have anything to say about them?
Obviously a lot of good writers have come out of MFA programs—you see it in their bios—so I know there's a lot of good work being done. I will confess that many of the MFA novels I see are better written than they are good books, if you know what I mean. There's a lot of good writing, but that doesn't necessarily add up to a good book. I feel like perhaps in those programs too much emphasis is being put on style and word choices rather than actually thinking about how to communicate with people. It's too much about—to make it sound terrible—but it's too much about showing off and not enough about trying to please a reader.

Again, I go back to the whole thing about storytelling. I'm old enough to have started reading back when it really was primarily about stories. I guess there were a lot of quality literary books being published then, but my mother didn't buy them. I read what was around the house: Edna Ferber and Daphne du Maurier and Mary Renault and Thomas B. Costain. These are writers you don't hear anything about anymore, but they were brilliant storytellers. They were also good writers, mind you, but they were brilliant storytellers. They would grab the reader right away and just not let go.

Today, I'm seeing better writing than the writing in those books, but I'm not seeing better storytelling. That was why Water for Elephants excited me. Sara is a really good writer. She's not a great stylist or anything—you're not going to sit down and read her sentences just for the beauty of them—but she tells such a great story. She knows how to pace a story. She knows how to make it work for the reader. When I read the book, I said, "This is like Edna Ferber. She's taken an intimate story and played it out against a very large backdrop." And it works beautifully. Look at Michael Chabon. He's had success from the beginning, but it wasn't until he wrote The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, where he took his formula of two guys and a girl and put it against this big panorama—the Holocaust, the Depression, World War II—that he turned the intimate little stories he'd been writing into a big story. It's not that difficult to do. It's not easy to do, either. But when you really look at what he did, you just have to come up with the right backdrop and put the story in front of it and make the story one that people really relate to and care about.

I'm trying to get Susan Cheever to write a novel for me here. I love her. I think she's a brilliant writer, and I don't think she's ever gotten the attention she should have because people unfortunately review her name and not her books. They resent her name, for whatever reason. I think she's capable of writing a really great novel. We keep talking about what it should be. I keep saying, "Look, write Romeo and Juliet or write Jane Eyre or whatever. But put it against a big backdrop. Steal somebody's else idea, but just make it your own."