February 3, 2008
Essay
Waiting for It
By RACHEL DONADIO

For writers, few steps in the publishing process are as strange as the
state of suspended animation between submitting a manuscript and
seeing the book appear in stores. The sudden change in cabin pressure
from writing to waiting can be jarring — and can last a very long
time. "It comes as a huge shock when it happens the first time," said
the Irish writer Colm Toibin, whose first novel, "The South," appeared
in 1990, a year and a half after he turned it in. "It was all slow and
strange."

Technology may be speeding up the news cycle, but in publishing,
things actually seem to be slowing down. Although publishers can turn
an electronic file into a printed book in a matter of weeks — as they
often do for hot political titles, name-brand authors or embargoed
celebrity biographies likely to be leaked to the press — they usually
take a year before releasing a book. Why so long? In a word, marketing.

"It's not the technology that's the problem; it's the humans that are
the problem," said Jonathan Karp, the publisher of Twelve, which
releases one title a month.

The three-martini lunch and the primacy of the Book-of-the-Month Club
may be things of the past, but publishing still relies on a
time-honored, time-consuming sales strategy: word of mouth.

"It's not only buzz, it's a product introduction — but with nothing
like the advertising or marketing budget that a piece of soap would
have," said David Rosenthal, the publisher of Simon & Schuster. With
the Internet and blogs, word of mouth travels more quickly today, but
there's a glut of information. To help a book break through the
static, publishers have to plan months in advance.

"We live in an impatient society and have a throwaway Kleenex culture,
so it takes time to get over the noise barrier," said Nan Talese, the
publisher of Nan A. Talese/Doubleday. With an established author whose
work is known and sales patterns reliable, "less time is necessary,"
Talese said, citing her authors Ian McEwan, Margaret Atwood and Peter
Ackroyd.

Karp added, "If it's a book by someone who people aren't familiar
with, on a subject that people don't necessarily need to have, it will
take nine months to a year for people to figure it out."

As soon as a literary agent has sold a publisher a book, and even
before it's edited, copy-edited, proofread and indexed, the publicity
wheels start turning. While writers bite their nails, the book editor
tries to persuade the in-house sales representatives to get excited
about the book, the sales representatives try to persuade retail
buyers to get excited, and the retail buyers decide how many copies to
buy and whether to feature the book in a prominent front-of-the-store
display, for which publishers pay dearly. In the meantime, the
publisher's publicity department tries to persuade magazine editors
and television producers to feature the book or its author around the
publication date, often giving elaborate lunches and parties months in
advance to drum up interest.

Chain stores like Barnes & Noble and Borders generally buy books at
least six months before the publication date and know about particular
titles even farther in advance. Much to the anxiety of midlist writers
clamoring for attention, chain stores determine how many copies of a
title to buy based on the expected media attention and the author's
previous sales record. Which is why publishers say it's easier to sell
an untested but often hyped first-time author than a second or a third
novel. "It's one of the anomalies of our business that you have to
reinvent the wheel with every title, virtually," said Laurence
Kirshbaum, a literary agent and former chairman of the Time Warner
Book Group.

Although digitization has made the printing and typesetting process
much faster, distribution still takes time, especially in a country as
big as America. (In Britain, with its smaller size and more insular
literary culture, things move faster.) But once a book hits the
market, the product has to move. "For all the weeks and months that go
into the gestation of the book, we're up against the so-called lettuce
test once we get into the stores," Kirshbaum said. "If we don't get
sales fast, the book wilts."

Some stores like Target and Wal-Mart reserve room in advance for
mass-market paperbacks by authors like Janet Evanovich or Nora
Roberts. If an author is late with a deadline and misses the target
publication date, the stores won't have room on the shelf, since
they're expecting next month's crop of projected best sellers. "Unless
you have a major author, you probably have to wait another four to six
months to publish that book," said Matthew Shear, the publisher of St.
Martin's Press, which puts out Evanovich's Stephanie Plum mysteries.

Like movie studios jockeying over opening dates to score huge
first-weekend box office numbers, publishers often change publication
dates to avoid competition for reader attention and marketing buzz.
The publishers of Stephen King, John Grisham and James Patterson don't
want their books appearing at the same time, since all three hope to
make No. 1 on the best-seller list.

Last year, Little, Brown & Company moved up the publication date of
"Her Way," a biography of Hillary Rodham Clinton by Don Van Natta Jr.,
a New York Times reporter, and Jeff Gerth, a former Times reporter, so
it would appear around the same time as "A Woman in Charge," by Carl
Bernstein, published by Knopf. The Bernstein book sold more copies,
though perhaps not as many as it would have without a rival book on
the market. "You're competing for retail space, you're competing for
bandwidth, you're competing for column inches," said Paul Bogaards,
the director of publicity at Knopf. "Both books wind up suffering
because readers have to make a choice."

The same thing happened last year when two books on sushi — "The Sushi
Economy," by Sasha Issenberg (Gotham), and "The Zen of Fish," by
Trevor Corson (HarperCollins) — appeared nearly simultaneously. "You
never want to get in a horse race with another book on the same
subject," said William Shinker, the president and publisher of Gotham.

Real-world events — the 9/11 attacks, the death of the pope, Hurricane
Katrina — can either distract from books or provide a hook. This year,
publishers are scheduling a range of titles to coincide with the
Beijing Olympics, including "The Last Days of Old Beijing," by Michael
Meyer (Walker), about the destruction of old neighborhoods to make way
for the Olympics, and "Wolf Totem" (Penguin Press), a novel by Jiang
Rong that just won the Man Asia Literary Prize.

The presidential election in November should help move political
books, but other titles may suffer. Nan Graham, the editor in chief of
Scribner, said she was releasing very little fiction from July to
January. "I'm never publishing a novel in the fall of an election
year," she said. "I feel bad about every single person whose novel I
published in the fall of '04 because they absolutely got no attention
or no sales." Other publishers worry that in election season it's hard
to get coverage for nonpolitical titles in book pages and on radio and
television, especially "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart" and "The
Colbert Report," which have become central to publishers' publicity
strategies.

Whether it's Comedy Central or the Internet, the same media that can
call attention to a book are also drawing attention away from readers.
So word of mouth is still the name of the game. "If you're trying to
explain this to someone from Mars or the Harvard Business School,
they'd kind of scratch their head and say, `There must be a better
way,'" Kirshbaum, the former Time Warner Book Group chairman, said.
"But so far neither Martians nor H.B.S.-ers have solved this riddle."

Rachel Donadio is a writer and editor at the Book