Celebrating a Third of a Century

(An earlier version of this article was posted on March 21, 2019)

In June 1988, I graduated from Iona College with a B.A. in Advertising, but I had no idea I was going to spend the next third of a century in Publishing. An internship with the City of New York Office of Payroll Administration led to a full-time job offer. City budget cuts in August cost me that job, but I landed on my feet with a Big Eight accounting firm thanks to contacts I made while working for the City. In November, I found myself unemployed when the accounting firm also had to cut staff, and as the last hire in, I was the first person let go.

The ad agencies weren't interested in my portfolio, so I started to look into my backup plan - book publishing. I accepted the first publishing job I was offered, even though it was in Contracts, not Editorial, and meant an $24,000 reduction from my previous salary. On March 21, 1989, I started work at E.P. Dutton, in a world of publishing that no longer exists.

The company had just started using computers in the office. We were still typing in the margins of pre-printed contract forms, and there was paper everywhere. Rooms full of file cabinets. Desks piled with file folders. Telex slips in overflowing inboxes. Stacks of thermal paper faxes on the desk. And, of course, shelves and shelves full of books.

I didn't know if I was cut out for this job, but my great mentors, Judy Morse and Alan Kaufman, made me realize that my skills and mindset were perfectly suited to the task of finding solutions for closing deals. I'm not naturally a person who holds to extreme views. I like to find the middle ground that gets things done. Compromise is the key to progress. Being a contracts professional fit the bill nicely.

I moved up to Manager quickly at Penguin (with which Dutton had merged), and then became a Contracts Director at Simon & Schuster in 1994. S&S was a tough two years of 12-hour workdays, 6-days per week, but I learned a lot about new media and audiobooks there that I wouldn't have learned at Penguin. My colleagues in the contracts department and children's editorial made my time there pleasant, despite the workload.

Then I went back to the Penguin fold, via their science fiction affiliate, DAW Books. It was there that I took the lessons learned at S&S, and threw myself into a three-hat job: Director of Subsidiary Rights, Contracts and Electronic Publishing. While I'd known people who were Directors of New Media, I'd never encountered a Director of Electronic Publishing at that point in my career.

The e-book role was added to my other titles because of a meeting I took in 1999 with a team from Peanut Press. They demonstrated the HandSpring Visor for us on the morning the device was officially launched, and it was clear that sci-fi readers were the perfect market for such gadgets. We jumped into e-books, releasing frontlist titles in print and e-book formats simultaneously before anyone else. We set the bar for paying authors a greater share of e-book income, and printing anti-e-piracy notices in our books; a practice that other publishers soon adopted (and still print to this day). With the inspiration of one of our authors, Julie Czerneda, we worked with Palm to develop autographable e-books, which were debuted at the BookExpo America trade show in 2001.

After seven successful years there, I became a literary agent, and a published author of fiction and non-fiction. I was a member of the team that worked to create the Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy. I taught courses on copyrights and contracts. I gave seminars, and spoke on conference panels. Then, seeking a more stable income and benefits for my family, I moved to Holtzbrinck (which became Macmillan), where I continue to bring my unique perspective to the table whenever it is needed.

Over 16 years at Macmillan, over half of my career, I helped build the best contracts team I have encountered. I modernized their systems and forms, and watched my staff excel at their work. It gave me great pride to work with such talented people so closely for so long.

Macmillan had become unchallenging, so in June 2021, I set off on a new adventure at HarperCollins. There's so much more for me to learn about how other companies do business in this industry, and new people with whom I can collaborate to solve new problems.

I sit here, on my 33rd anniversary in the business, at a desk with no papers on it, in an office space where we have no paper files (or so it seems - I've only been physically in the Harper offices one time since I took this new job). MS Word, Adobe PDFs and Adobesign have done away with paper contracts and file cabinets. Email killed the fax machines and Telex. E-books haven't killed print books - in fact, they became an industry saver during the COVID pandemic. While there are shelves of books in our new office, most of the ones I read that we publish come from our digital library.

And if we don't publish a particular title, damn near any book I could ever want to read is just a click or a tap away on my computer or phone. I was there when that wasn't remotely possible, and I was there to make it possible and commonplace, and I'm still here enjoying it. I love a good book, but it doesn't matter how you read it, as ink-on-paper or pixels on a screen. A book is a book. Publishing is still the best industry I know.

A few acknowledgements to people who have made my publishing life such a wonderful experience.

• Amy?- who has worked with me at 5 different companies, married me, and been my rock in the hardest of times.
• Christina and Austin?- inspirations for all those unpublished children's manuscripts cluttering up our home computer.
• Mom and Dad?- the people who "edited" me into the person I am today.
• My friends, co-workers and creatives at E.P. Dutton/Penguin USA, Simon & Schuster, DAW Books, Fodera Rights Agency, Bloomsbury USA, Macmillan and HarperCollins.
• My classmates and professors at NYU School of Continuing Education Publishing Program
• The convention committees, The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, the Illinois Bar Association, the late, great Deborah Brodie, The New School, the City College of New York Publishing Program, The Children's Book Council and Professor Leigh Grossman of UConn, who all gave me the opportunity to appear on their panels, do readings and book signings, and generally share my knowledge.

And if we don't publish a particular title, damn near any book I could ever want to read is just a click or a tap away on my computer or phone. I was there when that wasn't remotely possible, and I was there to make it possible and commonplace, and I'm still here enjoying it. I love a good book, but it doesn't matter how you read it, as ink-on-paper or pixels on a screen. A book is a book. Publishing is still the best industry I know.