Reader's almanac; Saul Stein

It's time for the reader's Aman act with Warren Bauer. Originally broadcast over station WNYC New York and distributed by national educational radio the readers all men act as America's oldest continuous book program. Here now is Mr. Bauer. In all my years of doing this show I can't recall ever having had a publisher as a guest. If one is going to do a book show it seems as if asking a publisher to come and talk about his side of the business would be a natural thing to do but it didn't occur to me. I consider the shows an author interview a no change of policy seem proper. But having a publisher here to talk over books from his point of view is no change of policy I see now it's an extension of it. And then lately I learned it's always Stine senior partner and president of Stein and day a small. Well that's merely a comparative term by comparison with Doubleday Let's say I learned of Mr. Stein would be available. I was pleased to have him except by invitation partly because at one stroke I am getting to man a publisher and an editor

Dan Stein and they have lately grown in stature in the eyes of the reading public through the publication of a novel that has risen with great rapidity to the top of the bestseller list. I mean of course because arms the arrangement. This is a distinctly elongated feather in the cap of a small but getting bigger publishing house. I know I would like to hear the inside story of how that came about as well as many other matters that I trust we will get a chance to talk about. And so would you listeners I'm sure some of whom surely have been reading the arrangement. So welcome to the readers Allman Agnes's dine and talk about books that goes on here every week. Thank you Professor but let's not jump directly into the get range meant however interesting a topic it may be. I'd like to know how or by what route you came into the publishing a books you're too young altogether to have grown up in a in the business at the knee of Horus liver right. As did many of the likes of us. So it must have been some other way that you took

one. Well curiously the very first full time job I ever had in publishing was as president of Stein and around five years ago starting at the top the high course have been involved in publishing for some time I was a consultant to Harcourt Brace and to a number of other publishing companies and I founded the first line of what I now call the library sized paperbacks that is the paperbacks that are not pocket size but the size of ordinary books. But I had never worked for a publishing company. It's not seems to me that the one indispensable necessity would seem to be a love of books. And this could show up quite early in college or maybe work in a bookstore as either of these experiences in your background as I'm sure books have to be of course. Books certainly are. I think that the largest contributing factor was my very early interest in writing. I started writing quite a

young age began publishing at an early age and really continued aware that had that as as a writer as well as I do that a publisher and editor and I think that in a sense my additional interest in the business of publishing the marketing aspects the financial aspects of promotion publicity and so on led me into a position where I might be able to do all of these things. You know I think we're ready to hear of the establishment of Stern I day. How did that come about. And when I understand today your partner today is closely related to you in quite another way than as your business associate. That's very true. Patricia day is my wife. That's a nice handy arrangement it seems to me. Well she's a vice president I assume he's vice president of the company. In the trade sometimes there are humorous comments made about the fact that we're sort of a younger version of Alfred and Blanche not from

the heart of this comes about by the fact that Patricia lived in France for seven years and specializes in PART IN OUR of the books of French origin I was blanched mounted for a long time. And that firm. Well now I'd be interested to hear about your first year or possibly two in publishing. What do you do to get started and call attention to yourself you find books of course that you think you can publish satisfactorily profitably and get going. But one of the must be some details in there somewhere. Well of course the hardest part is to raise the money for this. The second hardest part is to come in strong. That is you. Publishing is an enterprise which is not very business like ordinarily in order to make it quickly a thriving business one has to have strong books to begin with not build toward them. Fortunately the very first adult book that we published in this is back in October of 1962

was because America America yes that's starting at the top to me in a way yes the book was quite successful and was a book club selection here and sold quite well and certainly helped get attention to the new firm in our very first children's book was Shari Lois's folding paper toys which became a children's bestseller of sorts so we were very lucky indeed. Now what were some of the other books that supported. Well not supported no they. Those two books supported the others I suspect. Quite possibly. We've we've had our misses as well as our heads in these five years. We published the lies canaries auto de fe which was received almost uniformly as one of the great novels of the 20th century and which sold a grand total of two thousand copies. And I've met every one of the those 2000 people at some point or other. It was a very unsuccessful book fortunately.

I would say about 80 percent of the books that we published have either broken even or made money and that has put us into the black. That doesn't mean that you're willing to expunge that from your records earlier in your memory either I suppose. No I think it's very important that any publisher or editor remember his failures and remind himself. Not taking any blame certainly for the failure. Are you well in some measure some books. We now with hindsight can see how something might have been done to help them along in the marketplace. I am absolutely certain that one cannot just publish a book and naively expect it to stand as it were on its own feet because no book that I know of has become very important in the marketplace without the help of the publisher in terms of promotion and advertising and all kinds of support.

Yes you're altogether right there of course no doubt about it. Now you have I suspect tried to give your publishing house a distinctive character one that when people who know something about publishing at any rate know something about books would recognize probably as a stein and day book now. How far have you been able to go along that line do you think. I would say we are general publishers with the exception that the House will inevitably have some of my own prejudices as part of its tome. I happen to have been very deeply involved in the theatre at one point and so we have a style and a place Aries I write for motion pictures and so we have a style and a screenplay series. In general we will publish almost every type of book from a very serious educational book to a light hearted humor book and I suppose the ultimate thing that binds them together is that I think its a good book. Yes. Now how far can you go in the direction of

gaining a distinctive character How far is it desirable. I think Grove for example seems to have overdone it. No one will ever think of them as a general publishing as I would guess. Well I think you're right and I would not want to be so characterized all of the pressure in the field is very greatly to try to narrow down each publisher in terms of what people believe to be his inclinations for example. Now having published his hands the arrangement having been a tremendous success. The agents are besieging me with formidable novels some of them by very well-known people that need work and I but this happens periodically whenever a book is successful. We we had occasion a few months ago to publish a book called How to raise children at home in your spare time. It's a book or it's sort of a sophisticated anti Spock book of child care.

I think that's a stein but not nearly as well Stein and day. Well actually it was Dave edited that however. But in that case we immediately began to on its success receive submissions of other similar books none of them as good or none of which we've elected to publish. You know let's get on to this big story that's been just on the verge of being talked about directing your biggest success the arrangement. How did cause then come to you. Originally that's a back with America in America was it with a background of experience with another publisher I don't know I happen to know America America was his first book. I had heard. Reports that he had written this book which was essentially a screenplay and intended as the basis for a motion picture. And that three very large firms were interested in the rights. At that point I sent Mr Khazan what I believed to be the longest telegram I have ever sent in my life. I had an interview with him as a result. We talked for I would

say four or five hours and at the end of it we shook hands and I became his publisher which I've been since. That's a fine job of salesmanship I must say. And unusual. Well that's going on now directly to a day arranged by one of the roots of that book because Ann's mind if you can tell me that I would say the roots are not only in his mind but in his heart and all of his experience because what he has dealt with is in a way a very central issue of our life today in America which is the arrangements that we have in our sexual lives in our business lives and the public service that we give to them and how they differ. The arrangement is the story of a man who is extremely successful in the advertising business who has a wife. Splendid house a swimming pool a mistress

and suddenly decides to cut out as Artie Shaw once said to pull the plug and to change radically and curiously This book seems to have seized many people in that same way Eleanor Perry who reviewed it for life. She's the author David and Lisa you may know closed her review by saying it's a book to change one's life by. I myself have noted that after six months of exposure to the daily editing of this book I'm working with Mr. Khazan that I said things to people I never would have said before that I did things that I wouldn't have done had I not been so immersed in this book. And we're getting it all the time Mr. Khazan is being stopped in the street by people who recognize him and who tell him not. They enjoyed his book they tell him that also but how it has affected them or even to the extent of the other week a woman stopped him very belligerently

and said her husband and ran off with another woman and she blamed it all on her reading of it right now. It didn't take any responsibility for that I'm sure. I'm sure not you know go back just a little bit. How much did he have down on paper when you two began to talk about it. When I first received in January of last year was a twelve hundred page manuscript. It was it took me a week and a half to read I read slowly and I generally make notes about my first impression which helped me later on if I'm working on a book. During that week and a half was a week I may never recapture it was full of very exciting scenes a some brutal some hilarious. I was caught up in the thematic structure of the book. And yet. One could see a vast amount that needed to be done as Mr. Kazam knew. And so what then began was the process of

editor writer writer editor and it was day in day out seven days a week for half a year in which we gradually found ways of executing his intentions. Perhaps we ought to stop right here and briefly and tell our listeners something of what you just mentioned that author editor relationship they'll understand I'm sure that the publishing house has to be involved in the later steps of getting a book ready for publication probably quite intimately but they might like to know our listeners in some detail what this really means in a workaday sort of way. I would say that it's the most seminal relationship in publishing that is you start not with a large publicly owned corporation or with many departments you start with two people. The man who's written the book and the man who's going to work with him on it. There are very very few

important books that have come into a publisher as if they might have come into a printer that is which have needed some work. And this of course requires an enormous rapport and a very difficult kind of rapport. The best of these relationships are like the best of friendships. You come through not a lot of hell together and when you're through nothing can break you apart. And you've achieved something that is second best only to parenthood in which you had two people who produced something that in a sense will live after they're gone. It's based of an utter trust in each other I assume it's based on a kind of confidence which doesn't come easily and doesn't come early because it's an intellectual one. Ready. Not so much emotion was intellectual. I think it's both. I think in Mr. Khazan case he was writing things that are so deeply personal to him that.

My job in a sense was to wrest him away from it to give him the distance to the north or will often get himself but only years later so that he could see his work so that he could disconnect himself emotionally from it see it more intellectually see where its strengths and weaknesses were and to reinforce the strengths. How much did you have to cut between you course. Did you have to cut out of this manuscript. Sounds like an enormous amount. Well the bestseller that's out there in the bookstores now is one hundred forty thousand words shorter than the original manuscript. And yet and I think this is very significant. Not a single scene was cut it was all internal cutting within scenes that is the the architecture of the book was beautiful and so it it needed no huge cutting of the kind that Maxwell Perkins once got an enormous reputation for. You mean that Mr. Gibbs and overwrote although I know that

has connotations something means something more probably than just writing too much. Well curiously the fullness of this book originally is in sharp contrast to America America which is a very lean very tight book. In this one. What Mr. Khazan did was when he had a good idea a marvelous scene he would work it out and then later on in his story he would think of a better way of doing the same thing and he would do it again and possibly again. Well at some point he realized that what he needed was the perspective to be able to find the way he had done it best and to leave that rather than the the other ways. You know this is a perhaps in general but I suppose these two individuals are not necessarily a mystic as Ann and yours are yourself. I suppose they're both stiff necked men and you bring in an impartial

arbitrator or you quoted out to exhaustion in getting in on both sides. Three people is a committee in the committee system does not work in the editorial relationship. You either thrash it out or you get a divorce. Yes that's the answer I expected you to make I know that an impartial arbiter is absolutely impossible. Now let's say that you were at the stage where all of the questions have been settled uneasily perhaps or tucked under the bed or a working arrangement no pun intended and worked out. Now this is a vision version and you're going to press with us. What are you. The publisher concerned with it this time. Their promotion long range variety probably must be starting along about here somewhere. Yes it actually starts rumbling around in my head a bit earlier. The first big job of course is to have the best book that you can to publish That's the editorial process then begins the marketing process which really starts with promotion. The

thing that launched because on book onto the bestseller list so very early and got it right to the top fast is that I think that February 6 party that everybody talked about. There was a reunion aboard the USS France of mystic. And many of the actors and actresses he had directed in Hollywood in the yard and his men and many of the writers like Budd Schulberg and Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller whom he had worked with during the course of his career career and these people of course especially when they're all together are very photogenic as a result. There were television shows recording the events. We got a great deal of newspaper space across the country and people became interested in the book even before it was available for publication. That leads me to another question when do you first begin to get a fairly definite idea of how the book is going to do in the marketplace what tips you off. And this is a

general I think as well as applying directly to a sense book. Well. The first clue that I had on the Khazan was a negative one and one that gave me pause. I was still working with Mr Khazan on the book when I allowed a woman who was a very intelligent editor of a national women's magazine to come to my home and to read a number of chapters. She was very startled by the book very taken by it and said we couldn't possibly print us and our magazine. I was taken aback by that and I began to be worried. But the next thing that happened is the literary guild took it as a main selection and that was back in October you know nearly half a year before publication. And that means a minimum of two hundred thousand copies and a great deal of publicity. And of course by that time we knew we we had at least half a winner on our hands. I would say by two or three weeks before publication. We knew we had the

fastest selling novel of the last 10 years in the arrangement. Now let's say that we're at the point of publication in this case the last of February 1967. What was the next few weeks like in the offices of Stein and day. Well Professor Valerie they were very hectic but I didn't see them at first hand because one week before publication I went to London and I returned one week after. But I kept getting out twice daily cables and two frequent telephone calls about all of the excitement actually before I left. Most of the important things had already happened. We already knew the book was going to be on the bestseller lists. We already knew of the phenomenal sales were rushing through tens of thousands of more copies and the advertising was all placed Mr. Kazam was set for his national tour. All of this was pretty much in hand. What's been happening since. What's going on right now. This morning maybe orders reorders. I see.

This morning a news of how this book is affecting people in other countries it's about to be published next week in Great Britain. It seems to be a phenomenal success there. The German publication will be soon followed by the French publication that's being translated into a host of exotic languages. And the thing that's so difficult to understand is he wrote a particularly American story about a man and his wife and his mistress here. It's very Hollywood and New York and yet it seems to be deeply affecting to people who've never been here. Here's a question I want to ask you what's happening to the other books that the house is publishing are they getting short shrift now. No. If any of the books got short shrift it would have been a year ago when I was so immersed in the Khazan manuscript and then added other editors in the firm of course took over. What's happening now is that as a result of the success of the Khazan book there is a great deal of talk among the bookstores about some

of our other books and the result is that the entire list is doing better than it might otherwise. And I think most publishers would tell you the same thing happens if you have a very very big head a book that everybody's reading your other books benefit by the backwash. And that's sad never heard that remark before. I have talked to a few publishers not across this microphone it's true that I never before heard a thing of that sort but I'm not surprised really. Raymond Harwood the president of Harper's whom I saw at a party some weeks ago told me that the same thing was happening at Harper's with the Manchester book. Mr. Stein I thoroughly enjoyed this talk with you about the business and the cares and the romance and the fascination of publishing. Thank you most heartily for taking time off from book selling though I hope we've done a little bit of it here ourselves to come down and let me and our listeners into some of the not so secrets of the business. I think there's a little play we talk today that might well be called success story.

It's an experiment to be sure but this particular experiment of bringing a publisher and an editor to the Almanac has turned out extraordinarily well. You've heard Warren Bauer and publisher Saul Stein as they discuss the book the arrangement. This was another program in the series the reader's omen I think on our next program Mr. Bauer's guest will be Mary Lee subtle author of all the brave promises the reader's almanac is produced by Warren Barr and is originally broadcast by station WNYC in New York. The programs are made available to this station by national educational radio. This is the national educational radio network.