Phew.  What a month.  First galley copies of THE SUPERGIRLS and JAM TODAY, and they’re all off to the 28 Consortium sales reps, who today sent ‘round their various reports on the state of the book buying nation.  Fascinating.  And how sensible. Every body’s got their own voice, and they’re pretty much all voices bung full of common sense.   How amazingly comforting it feels to know there are all these competent people watching our back.

And the galleys went off to various to get quotes for the covers.  Now THAT is the reward for all the time spent laboriously combing the manuscripts for the niggling typos that everyone missed, no matter how many times we all went over them.  And for the hours spent compiling the indexes, nipping and tucking the text to make it fit properly on the allotted pages. You get a quote from somebody when you least expect it, my God, somebody you actually admire, and you sit back for a minute and think, “whew.”  That’s about it.  Just “whew.”

The first one we got for THE SUPERGIRLS was from Stan Lee.  You can imagine how that affected Mike.  I think it was probably the first thing he thought about every morning for days.  And that’s on days when he had quite a bit to think about.  Even without me calling up every five minutes to make some kind of change in his layouts of the books and of the really stellar catalog he’s designed for us (“I like it—it’s modest, yet grandiose…just like EAP.”)

Then there was JAM TODAY.  Yeah, yeah, so I wrote it too—see the JAM TODAY blog from which it sprang.  But let me tell you, being a publisher kind of trumps being a writer while you’re in the production phase, and I don’t think I thought about it one way or the other except as a piece of a project that had to be done as well as I could manage.  So when I sent it out, the first time I sent it, to one of my most admired cookbook writers, it was gone about two days when I suddenly realized.  Oh my God.  No one’s ever read that manuscript but me.  I mean, it was a little bit the overworked oldest daughter in the family, if you know what I mean—the other two books got more of my close attention; THIS one was just supposed to get on with it and help me with the rest of them.  I didn’t pay her any attention.  Oh my God, I thought.  Both Mike’s book, and Brian’s book—which comes out in November (Correcting Jesus, EAP’s Christmas book, nice touch that)—they’d both been edited and edited and discussed and discussed.  But not mine.  Oh my God.  What if it is an incredible piece of crap?  I never asked!

So when I got back the most generous, amazing quote from Deborah Madison,  I almost keeled over dead with relief.  And you know what?  As the publisher, not as the writer.  Because the publisher was thinking, dear God, what if I was about to launch a total lemon? But the writer said to the publisher:  Well.  Dear.  It can’t actually BE a lemon, not completely, not if Deborah Madison is willing to say nice things in public about it.  Now CAN it?

By the time I got an even more heartening quote from similarly admired John Thorne, I was back to being a writer—maybe because it was two in an insomniac morning, and the publisher was beaten to hell, leaving only the writer to moon over the emails.  And the pleasure I got from that quote…well.  I can’t say anymore.  Just…WELL.

And in other news…we may have an intern.  Yes, we may have found an intern. Yes, and she may turn out to be such a perfect fit that I cannot be blamed for originally thinking she was an April Fool’s joke perpetrated by my friends, until I noticed our introductory conversation was taking place on April 2.  She lives in Seattle.  I’m sending her your way, Bruce of Chin Music, and Rick Simonson at Elliott Bay Books.  Oh, please, Goddess, let her be as she appears.  Her name is Jessica and her works are good.  But more on that at a later time.

Next month:  our first sales conference.  New York City, just like I pictured it.

So I was talking to my friend and advisor, the Cult Novelist, and he, being of a cheerful doom and gloom type temperament (”Isn’t it a nice day?  Too bad it won’t last.”), enthusiastically described to me how the New York publishing industry is collapsing.  “Harcourt Brace just put a moratorium on acquisitions.  They’re not buying anything.  It’s getting awfully cold out there for writers.”  Then, on consideration.  “But that’s probably good for EAP.  You’re going to get flooded with submissions from writers who can’t get published where they’re used to.”

Without thinking, I said, “I don’t think I want to publish writers who send me stuff like that.”  And when the C.N. was obviously taken aback — “What?  What?  What do you mean?” –  I thought harder about what I meant.  And I tried to explain.

“Look.  This is a long term project I’m doing, and it’s an art project, too — not a business, not the way most people mean a business anyway.”

“Of course it’s a business.  You have to make money to publish more books.”

“Oh, yeah, of course that.  And I’m going to do that.  I’m certainly not going to fold.  But that’s part of that project itself.  That’s like selling your sculptures to make enough money for materials for the next one. Artists have always had to be canny about making enough dosh to go on, historically, if they weren’t going to starve.  Rembrandt was good at it; Van Gogh wasn’t.  Robert Graves was good at it; William Blake wasn’t.  But they were coming from the same place, essentially…from the same point.  The point is to make the art and get it out there, and then make some more.  The point isn’t to collect large amounts of capital.  

“So I guess what I’m saying [I went on meditatively] is I’m looking for a particular kind of writer — one who takes, maybe without even knowing it consciously, that position, too.  One who thinks of EAP not as something that’s supposed to facilitate their being famous in exchange for our making a profit off their books…but as a partner in creating, presenting, and refining, a certain point of view:  that the dominant story we take for granted, that the major media promotes in its sleep, needs to be changed, replaced, transcended.  I want to find writers who understand we’re all working together in a small corner of that particular vineyard.”

(Okay, so maybe I didn’t put it quite like that.  But that’s the beauty of being a writer — you get to rewrite.)

“Hmmmm,” my friend said.

“It takes me awhile to figure out if a writer IS that kind of writer.  When I just get stuff over the transom, sometimes I really like it.  But if I email the writer back and say I can’t plan to publish it now, but would they like to play with it on the website and see what develops?  And they don’t respond well to that answer.  Then I know what they’re doing is something other than what I’m likely to be interested in.  And we part quite easily at that point with no regrets on either side.  But when I find a writer who emails back and says something along the lines of, ‘Hot damn, when do we start?’, then I start to get interested.  Then I start to think long term and wonder where they might fit in EAP.”

I thought about that when I got off the phone, and thought about how I’ve gone in sideways to develop writers and relationships…slowly and cautiously…to fit what I want for the project.  I mean, I have to do that from a practical standpoint; EAP’s got a limited amount of capital and time, and both have to be spent for maximum advantage.  And my maximum advantage is not about making back maximum profit.  It’s about being engaged in a particularly fruitful way with ideas, and with the writers they come from.  

So EAP’s looking for a particular kind of writer.  The writer has to be a self starter.  He or she has to be someone who would write whatever it is without EAP being there, through compulsion, or just for fun, or (as so often happens) a weird hybrid combination of both.  The writer has to be someone who’s eager to engage with other people about their subject.  And who has a good, solid sense of reality.  A certain kind of reality, mind.  They don’t have to live permanently on this planet, is what I’m saying, but when their feet do touch ground on Earth, I expect them to understand that certain rules do apply.

In other words, the writers we’re looking for a.) wonder permanently why the world has to be the way it is, and, without lapsing into despair or destructiveness, constantly imagine other ways it might become,  b.) endlessly experiment, and on their own, in their chosen subject, with how and what these other ways might mean, and c.) are actual functioning human adults who don’t expect the world as it is to be much different than it is while we’re tinkering with ways to change it.

If that makes any sense.  I mean, it does to me.  But it’s a constant amazement to me, how many people take as their basic principle the idea that for any activity to be worthwhile it has to 1.) grow huge and 2.) make a lot of money.  Because it doesn’t seem to me that point of view has done much for Western civilization, not recently, anyway.