As a matter of policy, weekly editorial meetings concerned with acquisitions and works in progress are held. These meetings are attended by the editor-in-chief, senior and executive editors, and assistants. A procurement, or acquisitions, editor who wishes to pitch a submission or an idea for a book, will generally circulate the proposal in advance of the meeting. If she or he has the support of two or three editors, it will make the selling job easier.
At the meeting itself, a book proposal is accompanied by an editorial evaluation of the manuscript summarizing its theme, the author's previous work, his or her background, and the book's promotional possibilities. Other key matters discussed are marketability, how many books have been written on the same subject, and how they have fared.
If the group present at the editorial meeting judges a book proposal worthy of further consideration, the publisher and editor-in-chief may request a detailed outline from the author, especially if the book is nonfiction. If it is a piece of fiction, they may wish to read the author's previous work, and either a few chapters or the entire manuscript of the proposed work.
At the same time, the senior or acquisitions editor will prepare a cost analysis for the book and determine the number of pages it is expected to be and the estimated number of copies to be printed. These numbers are weighed against the book's projected sales to arrive at a break-even point.
After all the editorial and financial criteria have been met, and the editorial board gives the green light to the project, the acquiring editor begins negotiations with the author or his/her agent concerning the size of the cash advance against future royalties, when the advance is payable, the delivery date, the royalty percentage, and the sharing of subsidiary rights.
Once there is agreement on these terms, a contract is prepared by the editor with the aid of the publisher's legal staff. When this stage is completed, the acquisitions editor often brings the author in to meet the firm's publisher, top editors, and marketing, public relations, and promotion people. These meetings are extremely important, particularly for the author, who then begins to feel that he or she is a part of the publishing family.
What is the acquisition editor's role during the writing and editing stage? Often, the editor who buys a book will also edit it, at least in the developmental and line editing phase; that is, everything but copyediting and proofreading. The editor is also involved in the design of the cover and inside pages, works with the company's marketing and promotion staff, and may even write catalog copy and plan an author's tour.
When a book is completed, its editor has performed a Sisyphean task. It is a job she will repeat more than a dozen times a year in the high-anxiety atmosphere of acquiring and editing books.
In writing about the selection process and how a publisher puts together its lists of new books, I am reminded of a comment attributed to Barry Diller, former C.E.O. of Paramount and 20th Century-Fox Pictures. Diller is supposed to have said, "If I made every picture I turned down, and turned down every picture I made, over a three- or four-year period, I would be in the same place."
Roger Straus, long-time head of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, is widely known in book circles as a man of taste and intuition. Under his aegis, since its founding in 1946, Farrar, Straus has published such literary giants as T. S. Eliot, Bernard Malamud, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, and, more recently, Susan Sontag, Philip Roth, Joseph Brodsky, and Carlos Fuentes.
But even the sagacious Straus has had his share of misjudgments. Offered a chance to be the first American publisher of the novelist Umberto Eco, he chose instead another obscure Italian author. Eco's
The Name of the Rose went on to sell more than three hundred thousand copies in hardcover for another publisher, and his later work Foucault's Pendulum enjoyed similar success.
Which books to publish is a publisher's most significant decision. Yet much of this process is merely intellectual guesswork. The problem is also magnified when the publisher is committed to a list of as many as 100 to 150 books a year. In this article, we focus on the members of the selection team and their considerations in structuring a list.
