Flowers and birds and greening trees may be the sure signs of spring in the world at large; but in the world of my profession-in the world of book publishing and book publishers-the surest sign is the “Sales Conference.” The words are always said capitalized and with all the verbal emphasis that quote marks can give to written words.
The “Sales Conference,” psychologically speaking, falls somewhere in that range of emotion that stretches between a child’s pent-up joy on Christmas Eve and his or her mother’s exhaustion on the same eve. The problem is that while Christmas has two or more characters feeling distinct sets of emotions, the Sales Conference has all the whole range of possibilities roaming around in each individual involved.
The things are exhausting. There is no question in anybody’s mind about that. All the reps who will take the house’s new line out and try to sell it to wholesale buyers, to distributors’ buyers, to chain store buyers, to retailers and even, in some cases, to book clubs are brought in from their various territories around the country and assembled for two intense days. And it is no exaggeration to say that, to a large extent, whether or not a book will make it in the marketplace is determined in those two exhilarating, draining days. The whole next six months, in fact, pivots here, and everybody present knows it.
The house’s publicity department has to present elaborate and convincing evidence that a forthcoming title is going to absolutely and positively be written up in The New York Times and featured on Oprah…or barring that unlikely pipedream, at least featured in something impressive. And, of course, endorsed by a bevy of well-known experts or fellow-authors. Marketing has to present its almost-surgical pitch about what is the size of the press-run and why, who the primary anticipated audience is, what has been the track record of similar titles and to whom in what part of the culture, etc., etc. The reps, sitting there, computers open, frantically make notes and, as a rule, ask disconcertingly direct questions. They even have been known to make side-remarks like ,”You’ve gotta be kidding,” which is commonly regarded as not a good omen. But then, the rep is not only making a comment, he or she is also already building a defense against possible failure on s book that doesn’t look all that saleable in his or her territory. Everybody has something on the line in Sales Conference, in other words.
Except that nobody in that room-including the author, believe it or not-nobody has as much on the line as a book’s editor. An editor, depending on the size of the publishing house, has either acquired a forthcoming title in the first place or, in larger houses, has been assigned the care and feeding of it from first draft on. A book, by the time it makes it to Sales Conference, is very much like a child whom one has either conceived and borne or adopted in earliest infancy. It is like the child of one’s heart whom the editor has taken as raw material and shaped and dressed and nurtured and consoled and educated and then-dreadful moment-sent forth into the world to make its own way, but carrying all the angst and hope and ego of its parent with it. For editors, Sales Conference is, in essence, the last time-the very last time-the book will be his or hers. After Sales Conference, it will belong to the world. This is the last parental opportunity, the last chance to shape in any way the presentation of the beloved child. For that reason, I always listen to editors closely in the two or three weeks before their spring Sales Conference.
They call or e-mail, sometimes to chat in general, sometimes simply for a little collegial empathizing with an old hand who’s no longer directly in the production part of the industry, and sometimes to ask a specific question. The specific questions usually begin with, “Am I crazy, or is such and such actually true?” I love those conversations, because I always learn more than I ever add to them; and I got an especially delicious such call a couple of weeks ago.
Sandra DeGroot is a project developer/editor at Eerdmans Publishing, one of the oldest and most respected houses in the field of religion publishing. This season, Eerdmans is publishing a book-one which, by the way, I think is magnificent-entitled The Eighth Day of Creation. Written by Clifton Black, it is a lover’s guide to the contents of the Bible. Not a précis, but a presentation of them arranged in the same way that a really fine guide to the works of Shakespeare arranges his works. The effect is somewhere between so beautiful one wants to cry and so monumental one wants to walk away for a while in order to breathe.
I had seen the book in galley some several weeks before, but I had no idea that Sandra was its developer, much less that Bill Eerdmans himself had discovered and acquired it. When Sandra called, then, I was unprepared for her question. “Am I crazy,” she said, “or is what Clif Black has done part and parcel of the same kind of thing that The Words of Jesus is doing? That is, can I say in Sales Conference next week that they represent a kind of mini-trend toward greater intimacy with scripture?”
Sandra DeGroot was never crazy in her life, I suspect. And she is certainly not crazy on this one. “Of course,” I said. “Both are a push toward not only intimacy, but also toward the immediacy that precedes intimacy.”
“I thought so, but I wanted to hear you say it before I did. Going out on a limb is not my style.”
“OK,” I said “I’ll go you one better. About three weeks before The Words of Jesus was released, the International Bible Society released The Books of the Bible, and it will knock your socks off. They have removed all the verse and chapter and volume markers, so to read it, you just have to read it. Talk about dramatic intimacy and immediacy, it’s really there when you see scripture this way.”
There was a silence at her end, and then she said the thing that every old hand (and every young hand) in publishing knows. She said, “Three in one spring.”
“Yes,” I said.
“Oh,” she said; because what the old and young hands both know is that when three different house, unbeknownst to each other and in one short time-frame, publish within more or less the same new window, there is an uncanny validity to the concept or approach they are pursuing. Whether by intuition or serious analysis of the culture or something in between, three new, but similar, works from different houses is confirmation…not that a particular book will itself succeed, but that the idea behind that book is a vibrant and worthy one.
“Immediacy and intimacy,” she said again.
“Yes,” I said, “because in all three instances the content moves from the perspective of proscenium to that of participant, or at least I know that is true with using the Sayings format for the words of Jesus. Reading the gospels, one is watching a story in the same way that one sits in front and watches a play. Reading the Sayings, though, moves one from a row in front of the stage up onto the stage itself.”
“That’s it!” she said. “That’s exactly what happens. Proscenium. That’s all I need,” and she was gone. But after she had hung up, I sat in my office and was stunned by the fact that together we had just arrived at analyses that I had been half-aware of, but had not previously given full articulation to….which, of course, is at least half the reason for having Sales Conferences in the first place.
Phyllis Tickle
