Slaves of New York Publishing

Can an aspiring literary editor find professional fulfillment at $14,000 a year? Can that idealistic young college graduate even find a place to live in New York on that salary? Can the publishing industry expect to attract capable and qualified editorial employees when an entry-level position pays less than an elevator operator?

In remarks at a luncheon here not long ago, Radcliffe College President Matina Horner voiced these very concerns, and charged that publishing is fast on its way toward becoming an elitist industry. Only those with trust funds will be able to step into ground-level positions as long as salaries stay so low and the industry remains rooted to New York, Horner admonished. “People can’t live on $14,000 a year in New York,” she bemoaned.

To support her theory that the Big Apple’s usurious rents and publishing’s tiny starting salaries are driving away talented people, Horner cited declining applications to Radcliffe’s fabled publishing course, long a feeder for the book business. “It’s getting harder and harder to get students,” Horner complained.

At Radcliffe, Rachel O’Boyle, the assistant director of the publishing course, stressed that the drop in applications should be seen in the light of declining enrollment in liberal arts programs in general. Liberal arts majors are “way down” in recent years, O’Boyle said. Mirroring that decrease, she said, is a nearly 50% drop in applications to the Radcliffe Publishing course in the last eight years.

But executives at several top New York publishing houses disputed Horner’s claim that the business was losing its future leaders. Publishing has always been an “apprenticeship business,” they said. “You can’t go to school and learn how to do it,” one top editor who did not want his name used said. “Maybe they have MAs, maybe they know the complete works of Conrad, backwards. Maybe they’ve taken the Radcliffe publishing course, but so what,” another high-level editor said. “That’s like taking a driver’s education class. It doesn’t mean you’re going to be a good driver.” (Not surprisingly, this editor asked that his name not be used because he feared his remarks might sound callous.)

A senior book editor who has worked at his trade for eight to 10 years may pull in a salary of only $50,000, the head of one publishing house pointed out. Fledgling lawyers in New York use that figure as a base for their first out-of-school salaries, and may command twice as much when they hang up their first shingles on Wall Street. Bonds traders seem to take money home in wheelbarrows before they are 30, but publishing, said an editor who feels proud of a salary in the $50,000 range, “is just never going to be as attractive in terms of salaries as corporate finance.”

“It’s just not a high-paying business,” a literary agent-turned-editor said. “It’s not that we sit around in thread-bare tweeds with green eyeshades and ink pots. But you don’t go into publishing because you want to make a lot of money.”

In the tradition of medieval craftspeople, entry-level editorial assistants have always been viewed as journeymen, and paid accordingly. Until about five years ago, one medium-sized house saw nothing amiss at starting its young editors with four-figure salaries. They worked among books in a trendy, if dusty, downtown location and they earned about $8,000 a year. Pushing beginning salaries to $10,000 and $12,000 was seen as a stratospheric leap at this house.

But those young editors who do not end up homeless or die of starvation have a real chance of advancement, many publishing veterans noted. “Book publishing really does promote from within,” said Stuart Applebaum, a senior vice president at Bantam Doubleday Dell who took his own pitifully compensated first job in publishing 18 years ago. “By and large,” Applebaum said, referring to the top editors at Random House and Bantam, “the Joni Evanses and the Linda Grays were the young people of a decade or so ago. A lot of those people who are at the pinnacle now started out at ground level and worked their way up.” Low salaries, said Applebaum, are at once “part of the romance and part of the reality” of publishing.

Another part of the reality is that publishing remains very much a New York industry. Housing is as expensive as it is scarce. Living costs are frightening. “They have to quadruple up, four people in one little apartment, to live there,” O’Boyle said of the graduates of the Radcliffe Publishing Course who do migrate to Manhattan. “They tell us they hate it.”

From survivors of this pecuniary punishment, such problems evoke little sympathy. “Hey, there’s four other boroughs,” Applebaum said.

“New York is where the action is,” he went on. “If we’re not necessarily attracting the same kind of individual who wants to get into investment banking,” so be it.

For some aspiring publishing mavens there are also other cities. Houghton Mifflin and Little Brown in Boston are popular targets for the resumes of Radcliffe publishing course graduates, O’Boyle said. Some branch out to smaller presses around the country. Some head to California, targetting houses like Ten Speed or North Point in the northern part of the state, or Capra, Tarcher or Harcourt Brace Jovanovich in the south.

“We get letters and resumes from anywhere where it’s cold,” Rubin Pfeffer, the editor-in-chief at HBJ in San Diego, said. Still, Pfeffer added, the majority of his applicants for jobs in HBJ’s California headquarters are Californians, not Easterners who are lured by the prospect of an apprenticeship with lower rents and more sunshine. “The sort of person who is going to earn $14,000 (as a starting editor) in New York is not the sort of person who is going to go to San Diego” to do the same thing.

Among major publishers, HBJ remains the “odd duck,” as Pfeffer called it, in having moved a substantial portion of its operations out of New York. Most other houses, Pfeffer said, “haven’t even gone over the bridge to New Jersey.”

“It’s something I’ve thought a lot about,” an editor for Houghton Mifflin in Boston said. “It’s a problem, and I would love to see it change. But boy, there are no easy solutions.”

PUBLISHING FOR THE NEWLY LITERATE. A sharecropper’s son who could not read or write until he was 38, Calvin Miles, 46, has now joined the ranks of published authors. His literary debut, as a contributor to an anthology called “Speaking Out on Health,” puts him among such creative companions as Maya Angelou, Louise Erdrich, Carol Burnett and Bill Cosby, all of whom--like Miles--have provided selections for a new publishing effort from the Literacy Volunteers of New York City.

Troubled by the dearth of “interesting” material for adults who are learning to read, the LVNYC launched two imprints this spring. An initial six titles have been published in the “Writers’ Voices” series, offering fiction and nonfiction by well-known American authors. In the “New Writers’ Voices” series, writers such as Miles share their experiences and knowledge to help motivate other students to read. Some books are written at the most basic level, grade one. Others contain a range of levels.

“We kept hearing all of our students, tutors and staff saying there was a lack of good reading material,” LVNYC publishing director Nancy McCord said. “A lot of the stuff, people who were just starting to read were embarrassed to read in public. It instantly stigmatized them.”

The 16-year-old New York literacy group, one of several hundred similar organizations around the country, decided to fill the gap by publishing its own books. LVNYC board member McCord, formerly vice president of new markets at Warner Books, began looking for someone to manage the operation. The more she described the position to others, the more certain she became that she wanted it herself.

A series of foundation grants provided the seed money for the “Writers’ Voices” and “New Writers’ Voices” imprints. The $2.95 paperback books present an unusual distribution challenge because many people who have trouble reading are uncomfortable in conventional bookstores. As a result, McCord said, the books are finding their way to a “primarily institutional” marketplace.

Miles, at work on his second book for the “New Writers” series, uses himself as an example now when he lectures around the country or works directly with adults who are learning to read through LVNYC. In Gaston, N.C., where he grew up, “school was not the thing that you needed to do,” Miles said. “You needed to work the farm.” It wasn’t a handicap to be unable to read or write, Miles said, “it was a way of life.” His own aspiration had always been to continue working the cotton fields he had tilled since boyhood. But when the landowner sold the farm his father worked on out from under them, Miles moved north, where he figured the job opportunities would be better.

Working in a baby furniture manufacturing plant in Brooklyn for $42 a week, Miles still managed to send most of his paycheck back to his two sons in North Carolina, he said. He continued to work himself up into better-paying jobs until finally he “landed a job installing cable TVs.” It was 1981, Miles was 38 and as he handed contracts to his customers to sign, it became increasingly clear to him that he could no longer fake it as a reader.

Like many adults who want to learn to read, Miles was hesitant--and embarrassed--about enrolling in school. Through a friend, he found the LVNYC. And as he said with both a laugh and no small measure of pride, “I’ve been there ever since. I quit the cable TV job--I was making $35,000!--and came on board with the Literacy Volunteers. I wanted to do it full-time.”

Miles’ new passion about reading was fueled by a longstanding interest in the history of native American peoples. He began exploring the public library as he dug deeper and deeper into Indian history. In the process, he discovered that “reading is international knowledge. If you read, you can speak to a person you don’t even know. You get this feeling that the person is speaking to you.”

Miles’ newest story, about a childhood Christmas in North Carolina, will be among the next five “New Writers” titles the LVNYC will publish. They will be joined by an additional six titles in the “Writers’ Voices” imprint.