Over the past month or so, as I’ve been learning about the publishing business, one of the things I’ve been looking for is a good writer/reporter who covers the industry. I know where to get wire-service rewrites of industry press releases: what I want is someone who knows the business inside and out.
Today, while digging through some dusty old search results, I came across the name Marion Maneker attached to two different stories from late spring concerning Amazon and its Kindle e-reader. Both were written by Maneker for a site I’ve never heard of — The Big Money — which seems to be a sub-section of Slate.
At the bottom of both stories I found this:
Marion Maneker is the former publisher of HarperCollins’s business imprint.
I don’t know anything about HarperCollins’ business imprint, or even about Marion Maneker. But the Amazon/Kindle stories seemed to be written from the point of view of someone who knew the lay of the publishing land.
So I hit the Google and came up with a raft of stories written by Maneker for New York Magazine, including one called Just Business, which begins as follows:
If you want to understand book publishing, you need to think less Bloomsbury and more Gambino: The five big companies are like the five families. Imprints are crews with plenty of ambitious upstarts looking to make their bones. And every once in a while even a good earner has to get whacked to send a message.
What’s not to love? I particularly liked the analogy here:
But the dirty secret of the book business is that publishers have issued advances –- a guarantee against future royalties that is like a bond –- the way banks pumped out mortgage-backed securities and CDOs. They did it recklessly and with abandon, hardly doing any meaningful research. Author advances are the original no-doc mortgages. They base their lending decision on nothing more than a feeling that the author is good for the money.
Is that right? I have no idea, but it sounds right, and at the very least it’s worth noodling.
If you have a favorite voice working this beat, let me know.
Update: A day after putting up this post, while doing more reading about the publishing industry, I ran across another dirt-dishing voice with a similar (but different) last name: Daniel Menaker, who is a “a former Executive Editor-in-Chief of Random House” and “fiction editor for The New Yorker.”
In fact, I’d bookmarked a link to one of his pieces several weeks ago, but been unable to get back to it. So consider this a two-fer: Marion Maneker and Daniel Menaker, both former employees at corporate publishing firms, both now writing about the publishing industry, and both apparently completely unrelated to each other. Weird.
— Mark Barrett
Comment Policy: Ditchwalk is a wild place, but not without tending. On-topic comments are welcomed, appreciated and preserved. Off-topic or noxious comments are, like invasive species, weeded out.