BESTSELLERS & BEST FRIENDS
My book publishing blog, with murder mysteries woven through it.
If this is your first visit, be sure to start with “1. Let’s do it!”
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I know, I know. This stretch of this blog seems to be all about old white guys. But hey, they were big back then!
One of the old white guy authors went seriously off the tracks. Although James Doyle wasn’t that old back in those days. Which was all part of the tragedy.
Doyle was a rising star. Handsome, talented, charming, worldly, and refreshingly spiritual. The full package! His first book, Like a Prayer (1976), was widely reviewed and a wonderfully unexpected commercial success. The reviews were terrific:
“A superb political executioner sets his sights on D.C.”
“One of my favorite thrillers, simply great.”
“Very clever set up, deftly told.“
Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.
Then his next book, Deadly Enemies (1978), jumped to the bestseller list and stayed here for nearly a year. Wow!
And in Spring, 1982, we were ready to publish his third book, Under the Rose. Expectations were high. We slotted it for a spring publication. It would hit the bestseller list and stay there all the way to the end of the year. In a New York Times piece entitled “The Books of Spring ’82,” the influential Herbert Mitgang called out the most eagerly awaited books: Prizzi’s Honor by Richard Condon, Southern Discomfort by Rita Mae Brown, Pinball by Jerzy Kosinski, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler, and Doyle’s Under the Rose. Woo-hoo! We had a sure winner!
We purposely published it in the Spring when, surely, it would quickly hit the bestseller lists. And stay there for month after month of income! Better yet, it didn’t look like there were going to be big books that Fall which could push Under the Rose off the list once it got on there.
Under the Rose meant everything to the 1982 budget. Without it, we’d have a huge gap in our numbers that couldn’t be closed. Staff lay-offs, suspending all T&E, and stripping the marketing from every other title, would only blunt the damage if Under the Rose missed its pub date.
Yet when Doyle delivered the manuscript, it wasn’t in good shape. It needed a LOT more work. Uh-oh.
Doyle and his editor (I hated his editor—he called Bloom County “childish and silly” then took full credit after it became a huge bestseller) wanted to push its publication back a year. Doyle needed the time to get it right.
Holy shit! That would be the end of our 1982 budget. The sales director, the publisher, the editor-in-chief, and the head of subsidiary rights argued to hold the pub date. Little Brown needed the income. I got on a high horse of some sort and with great passion argued that a good and enduring publisher puts out its authors’ best work, the hell with budgets, we’ll take the hit.
I lost. Little Brown published it in the Spring. And the book got slammed. It didn’t sell at all. After all, it did sort of suck. Huge disappointment. Doyle was devastated. The failure miserably threw him off course in every way. He drank, he got messy, he wore his anger loudly.
One day I ran into him outside the front door of Little Brown. He looked crazed and hopeless. He jammed his finger into my chest, “Fuck you Brallier! Bill [his editor] told me you’re the one who made me publish too soon. You marketing whores! You and your Mailers and Wouks and Shirers—I’m better than all those bastards!” Doyle caught his breath. “You’ll fucking get yours! Some day!” He stormed away.
That damn Bill, what a jerk, to lie and blame it on me, the one executive who had argued for Doyle to get his manuscript right.
My assistant, Jackie, was with me. We watched Doyle rant his way down Beacon Street. It was Jackie’s first day on the job. I was taking her out to lunch. She was shaking, her eyes wet, then she started sobbing. Great, just great. So I introduced her to the industry’s tradition of a liquid lunch (The Parker House bar). We both needed it.
I soon left Little Brown in search of riches in the technology industry. Jackie took over my marketing slot and was a lot better at it than me. And Doyle went from teaching writing at Ivy League schools to teaching at state universities (never getting tenure) to teaching at community colleges. He never published another book. Rumors over the years were that he was working on his final draft of Under the Rose, the manuscript that should have been published.
Tomorrow: I shift careers. To technology.