ARCHIVE
Excerpt: David Rosenthal
Highlights from Issue 22: The Downfall of American Publishing
David Rosenthal in his office at Simon & Schuster
Photograph by Warren Darius Aftahi
Wednesday, July 20, 2005
The Length and Arc: Simon & Schuster's David Rosenthal
What follows is an excerpt from Issue 22: The Downfall of American Publishing, available for pre-order now on this site.
David Rosenthal, like many great magazine and book editors before him, began his career as an entry-level newspaperman. Starting at the pre-Murdoch New York Post, he spent his first four years as a reporter. In 1977, he left the newspaper business for New York magazine, where he spent another four years, before leaving again for Rolling Stone, in the early '80s.
In September 1997, Rosenthal became publisher of Simon & Schuster, where he's edited the likes of Nicholson Baker, Hillary Rodham Clinton and Bob Dylan. Born in New York, he currently lives in the city with his wife and two children.
Stop Smiling: Was it easy for you to make the transition from journalist to editor-in-chief of a book publishing company?
David Rosenthal: The skills have been useful. I worked as a journalist both at the newspaper and also did a lot of freelance magazine work. One is kind of aware of what it takes to put a story together. You understand some of the problems you're going to run into. You understand some of the people who will stand in your way. So, yeah, that turned into greater empathy with a lot of writers I work with. The biggest thing you teach yourself in going from a newspaper job to a magazine job to a book job is length and arc and also how you get your jollies. I remember Jane Amsterdam, who is a wonderful magazine editor. She ran Manhattan, Inc. She was at Random House and Knopf and she went to be a book editor after being a magazine editor for so long. I knew her and she said to me, ?How do you take it? How do you stand the fact that there's such a hiatus between when you commission a book and when you see it. What do you do? How do you get off on that?? I said, ?You have to learn to start getting off on just the fact that you've acquired the book.? The deal has to become exciting. There's a long hiatus between the time you convince somebody or they convince you to do a book and the damn thing actually comes out. Newspapers and magazines are a rush because you get instant gratification.
SS: Do you have one tactful way of dealing with each writer?
DR: An editor has to be flexible and adapt to the author. Just the way you don't necessarily act the same way around two or three different friends. You know what interests them, what pisses them off. I think you have to do that with authors. Some react well to pressure. Some react to flattery, some to cajoling. Some people want to be left alone when they're writing. Others want their hands held all the time. It's simply taking the measure of someone. Editing is ultimately being a very good valet to somebody with a lot of talent. The more you can do that and be unobtrusive, except when absolutely necessary, the better you're doing.
SS: In a traditional sense, do you think that book publishing, as far as literature is concerned, is over?
DR: No, because I think somebody can write a great book and can get it published. Is that book going to have the same effect societally and become the talk of cultureas it would have decades ago? I don't know. Certainly, a popular commercial book can capture a whole imagination ? be it a Da Vinci Code or a Jon Stewart. In terms of something becoming a literary cultural sensation in a serious sense, that's a little harder. Maybe because books don't capture the media's preoccupation as they once did. They compete with movies, with DVDs. They compete with what's on the web. But to me and to a lot of people I know, they are still the single most important force in culture.