the desire to be known

In March, we learned that a handful of book publishing veterans, including Madeline McIntosh, the former chief executive of Penguin Random House, and Robin Desser, previously editor-in-chief of Random House and editorial director at Knopf, were launching their own publisher, called Authors Equity.

Authors Equity intends to keep a low overhead, by using freelance editors, and share more of their profits with their authors, which sounds awesome, except the authors they’ve chosen for their new venture are those who have already built massive audiences: James Clear, Louise Penny, and Tim Ferriss.

It’s a winners-take-all approach and one thing I haven’t heard anyone talking about is what happens to the midlist authors downstream, who are left behind at the imprints that could formerly count on the revenue from those bestselling authors?

On Substack, Madeline McIntosh admitted that what worked fifteen years ago doesn’t work today:

We publishers work harder than ever to impact sales. We’ve invested and innovated. We’ve embraced digital and been driven by data. But despite these efforts, we’ve lost the power to uniquely influence the consumer.

In a world without mass media, there’s no longer a set formula for making a book successful. That’s not a bad thing, but it’s understandably unsettling for everyone looking for order in our universe. Some might feel like success is entirely random, and that’s unsettling.

…in the old market, degrees of success came down to what the publisher did or didn’t do. In the new market, it’s about the author. What they put on the page, and how they break through the noise to capture reader attention: that’s what makes the difference. (emphasis mine)

Or, as a friend of mine who works in the industry put it to me recently, “They don’t build authors anymore.”

As hard as I try to adapt quickly to changes in media and publishing (the title of this newsletter you’re reading is “Attention Economy”), without complaining about the way things used to be, of course there’s a part of me that’s nostalgic for what once was, and a part of me that’s sour over what we’ve lost.

I spent this week reading Sloane Crosley’s new memoir Grief Is for People, about losing her best friend, Russell Perreault, the executive director of publicity at Vintage, to suicide.

Sloane worked as a publicist at Vintage, the paperback sister of Knopf, from 2002 to 2010, and her wry, poignant memoir is filled with charming anecdotes like this one:

I’d spent my last day at Vintage escorting Alice Munro around town and, during a lull in the conversation, I asked her if people ever recognized her on the street. She thought for a moment and said: “On my better days, I think they do. On my worse days, I think they’re thinking, ‘What a sweet little old lady, I hope she doesn’t die in front of me.’”

Vintage paperbacks

Russell was a complicated figure and Sloane doesn’t reduce him to a saint, the way we do so often with our lost beloveds. A flawed human being, he was undoubtedly an incredible publicist. I’m so used to hearing accounts of the publishing industry from authors, who position themselves as unrecognized geniuses banging at the gates to be let in, and I loved Sloane’s insider perspective:

Book editors are credited with being amateur therapists but a great book publicist will do the same for a dozen personalities at once, all the while bearing witness to what a book editor never sees: these people at their worst. After the art is done, all that’s left is ego. Russell thrived in this pond of bitter children and problematic geniuses. He gravitated toward underdogs. He would never put it in such sentimental terms, but he understood that real literature, like love, comes from a desire to be known.

By the end of her tenure at Vintage, “book publicity had become about colonizing other planets now that ours was dying,” she writes.

Around this time, I was an assistant at the New Yorker. After the stock market crashed in 2008, I was first in line to be laid off, as the most recent hire. My boss went to the managing editor and begged for my job, promising I could take on work in two additional departments. One of my new tasks was writing for the new “blog,” as things seemed to be going in a digital direction…

I’ve spent the last sixteen years basically doing this on repeat, like an animal: oh, X is irrelevant now? I’ll learn Y! Nobody is interested in Y anymore? I’ll teach myself Z!

I know how easy it is to get frustrated at your agent or your book editor or your publicist or your marketing team for not doing more to make you known, but reading Sloane’s memoir made me more grateful and appreciative for all the behind-the-scenes work that happens in publishing, so that I can hold a book like Sloane’s in my hands.

In case you missed it

Tavi Gevinson shared my Fan Fiction piece!!

The Bright Side

A few weeks ago, I hinted that I’d gotten a special opportunity because of the success of my viral Instagram prank.

I was invited as one of the first guests on Reese Witherspoon’s new podcast The Bright Side, hosted by Danielle Robay and Simone Boyce, to talk about the girlboss.

Work with me

I have availability for two manuscript critiques this summer. I specialize in literary and upmarket fiction and memoir+. I love working on books that make me laugh and cry. Find out more about what I’m looking for, what you can expect from working with me, and my rate, by clicking here.

“Leigh Stein lay her hands over mine and helped me shape this story into something that was ready to sell, sort of like the pottery scene in Ghost, but with a book.”

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Gila Pfeffer

, author of Nearly Departed, forthcoming from The Experiment