reading between the lines of the publishing business

If this follow-up in USA Today is to be believed, there are very few ramifications for the publishing industry in the James Frey scandal, which grabbed and held our collective attention for a week or more (the very definition of “infotainment”).

Most of the editors interviewed for the piece indicate they will be more cautious and more skeptical about their authors after the recent scandals involving Frey, JT Leroy, and Nasdijj (the three were lumped together by most of the reporters who covered the story, although the latter two were outright frauds whereas Frey–and his editor–merely lacked scruples. I’ve written about this here and here.)
The “gentleman’s trade” notion of book publishing inherent in this argument (”we trust people”) is, of course, outdated by about forty years. The best account of the demise of the book business was written by retired publishing “mandarin” Jason Epstein, these days best-known as the husband of disgraced (and, shamefully, railroaded by her powerful enemies) New York Times reporter Judy Miller.

Epstein started out in publishing as the “boy wonder” who devised the trade-paperback format (inspired by the standard format for all books published in France) and went on to become a premier sponsor of two generations of public intellectuals, whom he published in The New York Review of Books (which he founded with his then-wife, Barbara Epstein, among others) and at Random House, where he was an editorial director until retiring in 1999. Epstein also founded the Library of America.

Today, he is a partner in a company which is trying to establish high-end print-on-demand publishing (Epstein envisions a future in which the digital files of all books are uploadable to the hard drive of a machine the size of a commercial photocopier, which then prints out paperbound copies).

Back to USA Today’s conclusions: publishers have decided that they will have to continue to rely on trust, because fact-checking every book is neither realistic nor affordable. It is also not foolproof against someone who sets out to manipulate ordeceive.

But publshing veteran Peter Osnos, also quoted by USA Today, takes a hard line against his colleagues, whom he holds responsible for the Frey mess. There was professional failure at every stage of the production process, Osnos points out: there were at least three close readers of the manuscript who had the opportunity–and, according to him, the obligation– to scrutinize Frey’s work before it went into print.

“The whole notion of fact-checkers is as antiquated as the Model T,” Osnos says. “You don’t need fact-checkers. What you need is reliable writers and skeptical editors….

“When you’re making certain assertions having to do with facts, it really is the obligation, to the extent that (the editor) can, to challenge the writer. … Our job is to make the book as strong as it can be. That means knowing everything about it.”…

[The] process, Osnos says, broke down in the Frey fiasco. “There was an editor, a copy editor and a lawyer — three stages in which certain kinds of questions in the Frey book could and should have been addressed, and they weren’t.”

Osnos is not well-known outside the publishing business. His best days are behind him inside the business, although he’s well respected for having established Public Affairs (a publishing house devoted to “serious” non-fiction) after leaving Random House.

He indicts his colleagues–up and down the line–for sloppiness and for lack of professionalism. Close familiarity with an author’s work was once the minimum obligation for an editor but is no longer the case, Osnos implies.

Osnos’s rare, hard-hitting insider criticism of his publishing colleagues is unlikely to get much play in the media. For one thing, so many journalists are wannabe book authors that they are reluctant to cast a critical eye on the business that might one day make them famous (books are still good for that–sometimes). Newspaper assigning editors may also be reluctant to kick fellow members of the cohort (”my people,” as the journalist Michael Wolff has referred to them) when they’re down.

Long gone are the days when a broadside against two pillars of the publishing establishment (by Jacob Weisberg, now editor of Slate but at the time a young pup, in The New Republic in) is followed by an enraged howl from the media elite along the New York-Washington, D.C. corridor. When Michael Wolff administered a post-death blow to the “losers” in publishing in general and at Random House in particular in 2003, it evinced barely a whimper.

No one cares about books, and certainly no one cares about “book people,” the wormiest of the “media insiders” who are now so despised and reviled a species. Tina Brown–who created and massaged and Zeitgeist of the 1990s by perfecting the convergence of the Three Pillars of Celebrity: Buzz, Sizzle, and Media Heat–had her TV show canceled and is now on book leave from her occasional column for The Washington Post (her subject: Princess Diana [!]).

Really, no one cares. But for those who want to know how why the sausage tastes so bad, sausage-maker Peter Osnos offers a clue.