That 1983 Labor Day weekend was a little drama … announcing the next era of publishing.* I was to be one of many authors caught in the tumult while it thrashed about in search of a new business model.
Of course publishing had begun to change when I was admitted to its inner sanctum in 1970. Publishing as a family business, as a literate, gentlemanly occupation, had already taken on the sepia hues of nostalgia, but the new publishing, whatever that creature would turn out to be, hadn’t reared its head yet. In the meantime, “the industry,” as John Hawkins [her agent] referred to it in his acerbic moods, went through some ungainly and ruthless stages. It still hasn’t finished deciding what kind of creature it is supposed to be, and is now circling its wagons to fend off its monster predator, the Internet. Not one of the seven houses that wanted to publish A Mother and Two Daughters [her best-selling book to that date]—eight, counting Knopf, who reserved the right to match the final bidder—stands by itself today. Six of those bidders are now subsumed into two of the “big five” publishing corporations.
[She returns to dance as a metaphor for publishing.] Let’s say there has been an intermission, and when we publishing partners (authors, editors, and publishers) return to the dance we notice things are different. A proliferation of nondancers has taken to the floor, wearing in their lapels tiny logos that have nothing to do with publishing. They don’t dance but just monitor our movements, like bodyguards with earpieces and dark glasses, only it isn’t our bodies they are protecting, it is an unseen corporate body. A mood of foreboding has blighted the air of camaraderie and grace. We sense we are expected to dance faster or more gainfully, and our uncertainty makes us tense. Any one of us could trip, or fall behind, and be tapped on the shoulder by one of the corporate nondancers and asked to leave the floor. Even the floor feels wobbly beneath our feet, and the traditional old building that has supported us has sprung holes in its roof, through which we glimpse patches of an indefinite space in which communications zip back and forth in ways not entirely imaginable to the most far-seeing among us.
Ever since that Labor Day lunch when [a friend at the gathering] confided to me that Peter had not yet had his Penguin contract renewed, I’ve been uncomfortably aware of what a large role the fear element plays in current publishing. Unless you own your own publishing company, however far up you are on the ladder, there’s always going to be someone further up who can make you clean out your desk by the end of the workday and sign an agreement not to bad-mouth your evictors if you want to receive your severance package. …
It’s hard to maintain your equilibrium when your dance partners keep getting dragged off the floor.
—Gail Godwin, in Publishing: A Writer’s Memoir
*This follows a description of what Godwin calls a bloodbath at Viking (what today would be called … a reorganization).
Transcribed by me from my hardback copy (Bloomsbury, 2015), pages 73–75.
Tweet: What Godwin calls a bloodbath would today be called … a reorganization.
Tweet: And you thought the current publishing climate was a new thing? Oh no. 🙂
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