Dilettante's
Dilemma
As Editors
Keep Specializing, Are Generalists Going Extinct?
FROM
PUBLISHING TRENDS (OCTOBER 2002)
Call
it a healthy dose of editorial realism, or call it the
Dilbert-ization of publishing. However you spin it,
over the last few decades, it seems, that formerly abundant
creature of the book-business veld — the free-ranging
generalist editor, dismissive of pigeonholes and crossing
categories at will — has been heading for extinction.
Endangered by a rising per-title sales bar at many large
houses, and pushed aside by a growing appreciation of
the power of niche publishing, the old-school generalist
is ceding ground as a new breed of category-focused
editors grows more prominent, and perhaps more profitable,
than ever. “A great publisher should have a vast curiosity
and want to know something about a great many subjects,”
says Richard Pine, President of Arthur Pine
Associates. “An editor’s job is increasingly to
know a lot about certain specific subject areas. I think
that in the best of all circumstances the editorial
team feeds the curiosity of the publisher.”
Yet in today’s world even publishers are finding themselves
defending a narrowing patch of turf. “As a publisher,
one can no longer be all things to all people,” explains
Bill Shinker, Senior VP and Publisher at Gotham
Books, the new Penguin Putnam imprint. “For
a startup, it’s important to articulate to literary
agents, authors, and one’s own sales force what you’re
setting out to do.” Having created two lists from scratch
(first at Broadway, now at Gotham), Shinker
has been a pioneer of the custom-built imprint, and
his first Gotham list lays down a carefully conceived
program: “a very focused commercial list of general
nonfiction in a number of categories.” Dilettantism
clearly isn’t on the menu, and Shinker has brought in
editors with complementary expertise. Executive Editor
Lauren Marino focuses on health, fitness, and
spirituality, while Brendan Cahill handles current
affairs, history, and narrative nonfiction. “In almost
any category, it helps to be an editor who understands
that category and is conversant with the literature
in that field,” Shinker adds. “If you’re editing a new
book on affirmative action, you better know damn well
what you’re doing.”
In a larger sense, specialization has been a response
to a more niche-oriented marketplace. “It’s increasingly
relevant for the editor to be connected to the community”
of both authors and their target audience, says Kitt
Allan, Publisher of General Books for Wiley.
Allan believes that the move toward targeted publishing
— “trying to find the right book for a specific set
of people” — is crucial for a fragmented marketplace.
Wiley’s trade program has grown out of the organizing
principles of its professional and education groups,
which tend to cluster more tightly around topic areas.
Some editors focus on one or more categories (in the
bookstore-defined sense of the word). Others target
particular niches, which are more attuned to a certain
kind of reader or demographic, such as the educational
market, targeted to teachers and motivated parents.
Niches such as education, children’s, and religion/spirituality
are also organized into category teams that go across
imprints, sharing market intelligence as they collect
it.
Typecasting
the Editor
Perhaps
nowhere in the general trade has specialization taken
root more firmly than in the world of cookbooks, whose
jigsaw-puzzle-like production requirements call for
both illustrated book savvy and recipe-writing chops.
Wiley, for instance, has a whole cookbook division that
publishes books for professional cooks, as well as general
titles from brands such as Betty Crocker and
Weight Watchers. “It’s a whole world unto itself,”
adds Jennifer Josephy, Executive Editor for Cookbooks
at Broadway. “It’s a question of going deep instead
of broad.” Josephy had done cookbooks as a sideline
for years at houses such as Holt and Little,
Brown. But two-and-a-half years ago, the full-time
cookbook slot at Broadway was too good to pass up. She
now works with a half dozen Broadway editors, most of
whom specialize in one or two areas. Still, reluctant
to stay too narrowly focused, Josephy keeps the door
open for other projects, which have included John
P. Cooke’s The Cardiovascular Cure and several
parenting titles. “But once you make this leap, you
are typecast,” she says with a laugh. “I try and tell
agents to send me some things that aren’t cookbook related.”
Of course, some publishers have always played up their
category role. Storey, for instance, specializes
in gardening (it actually owns the trademark “America’s
Gardening Publisher”), while also holding a strong presence
in horses, building, crafts, and cooking, plus a new
juvenile imprint that publishes into the same categories.
“Our editors live the Storey lifestyle, and it comes
through in the books’ editorial content,” says Janet
Harris, Storey’s Publisher. Editor Gwen Steege,
who acquires both gardening and crafts books, is a master
gardener and weaver, and pulls writers and photographers
to Storey because of her connections and expertise.
And category focus doesn’t hurt the bottom line, either.
Harriet Pierce, Director of Sales and Marketing
for the Harper Design International program at HarperCollins,
says a strong specialty focus can only help keep the
ship afloat during rough economic weather. “Whether
it’s an economic downturn or not depends on what your
list is these days,” she says. “Certainly, if you’ve
got the right list, right now you’re not experiencing
a downturn at all.”
As others are quick to note, the closing of the wide-angle
editorial lens can also be chalked up to consolidation.
“Because of the size of houses now, many editors have
less and less hands-on connection with the mechanics
of how books are sold,” says Dan Green, President
of the Pom agency. “Since they’re no longer cheek-by-jowl
with the people who sell books or market books, many
of them will stay with only that kind of book that they
know about.” Others agree that consolidation has taken
a toll on the generalist ranks. “In the past, you might
have eight or ten editors in a department who all worked
on a variety of projects,” says Zack Schisgal,
who was recently named Senior Editor at Ballantine.
“Today, you’ve got 80 or 150 editors in a dozen imprints
in a publishing house. Having some of them specialize
might be the best way to make sure people aren’t stepping
all over each other for the same kinds of things.”
Bumping up sales expectations at the major houses has
also forced some editors to more closely heed the bottom
line. “I think the main limiting factor for what editors
acquire and publish has to do with what their publishing
house can publish well and how that house defines ‘well,’”
says Keith Kahla, Senior Editor at St. Martin’s.
“A number of the majors aren’t interested in publishing
anything of which they are likely to sell less than
50,000 hardcover copies.” At St. Martin’s, editors can
publish books that sell in quantities of 6,000 on up,
as long as the advance and other expenses are kept in
line with the expectations of the book. “A broader range
of types of books are immediately available to an editor,”
Kahla says, adding that eclecticism has plenty of virtues.
“From a publisher’s point of few, the advantage is sheer
agility — a staff that is both eclectic and generalist
allows them to shift away from certain kinds of publishing
when the market for that type of book begins to recede,
and move on to another area that might be on the rise
without major disruptive shifts in the staff.”
‘No
Limits Whatsoever’
The
specter of specialization is not too welcome over at
Bloomsbury, either. “We certainly don’t fit that paradigm,”
says Karen Rinaldi, Editorial Director at Bloomsbury
USA. “I always think that it provides a false sense
of security when one tries too hard to control the way
publishing should happen.” That philosophy is helping
drive aggressive plans to broaden the program at Bloomsbury’s
US operation, where the current catalog now spans memoir,
cultural history, first fiction, and gift books. A gregarious
editorial outlook can help reel in off-the-beaten-path
projects, while outfoxing larger publishing houses.
“The two editors we have do both fiction and nonfiction,”
says Alan Wherry, Director of Bloomsbury USA.
“There are no limits on them whatsoever. Our mandate
is to make profits by building a successful publishing
house where editorial drives the ship with strong marketing
backup, and where editors are encouraged to pursue their
passions and to follow their instincts.”
In the end, what may be new isn’t specialization per
se, but how one balances the sometimes conflicting demands
of modern publishing. “Editors have always developed
specialties of one kind or another,” says Peter Ginna,
Editorial Director for the trade division at Oxford
University Press. “You snowball-like develop a list
in areas where you have a certain expertise.” Ginna
has gravitated toward American History, partly due to
the fact that within the larger history category, the
American market is vastly larger than, say, the market
for works on medieval France. His colleagues on the
academic side, he notes, are even more prone to specialize,
as most OUP titles need to have surefire backlist appeal
as textbooks. The problem is that too much specialization
can “cause you to be too conservative or to think in
pigeonholes.” But that drawback is not enough, he argues,
to counter the benefits of knowing precisely what one
is publishing. Chasing after wayward enthusiasms can
mean failing the ultimate litmus test of a good editor:
the ability to read a manuscript and know instantly
what kind of reader will get excited about that book
and why. Says Ginna, “That’s the danger of dilettantism.”
©2002
Publishing Trends
