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One Misfit Publisher’s Lament… or Waiting for my Publishing Godot

by Emerson John Probst

Imagine a boot camp for new eclectic publishers. I can picture it. We’d shuffle in all dreamy-eyed and idealistic, some sporting pony tails, others with shaved heads or tweed jackets under streaked purple hair. We’d be forced to turn in our Jack Kerouac, or in my case Walt Whitman, for Thomas Woll’s classic, Publishing for Profit. A stressed looking drill instructor in a grey suit would smash up against our faces, “All right you bunch of left leaning misfit hippies, tell me what we’re here for!” he’d scream. “Making money, sir,” we’d mumble, exactly as we were told. Now the instructor’s face would turn beet red, veins bursting at his neck. He’d pull his smooth Armani suit coat aside, placing his fists on his hips as a line of shiny pens blazed across his breast pocket. “I-can’t-hear-you!” he’d belt out. “Making money, sir!” we’d hurl back in unison. Our confident voices would unite while our faces, beaming ever towards the sun, would transform into the confident, bottom-lipped grimace of true capitalists!

Yes, I was once one of those untested publishing recruits…a dreamer of the worst kind. I studied Romantic lit in college. I told boring stories about the founding of Random House at dinner parties. Maxwell Perkins was more than just an editor, he was a god. So on a crisp fall day three years ago, while sitting at a convention in Las Vegas trying to lure in new authors for a publisher of financial books (There’s irony in that, I think?), I snapped. My mind drifted away with the thought of building my own publishing house. Within hours of my return, and still reeling from late-night vodka tonics and Vegas convention smorgasbords, I sat down with my wife and very convincingly, described the glories of our publishing empire. We’d be surrounded by brilliant people, I said. We’d be immersed in art; not the nine-to-five, traffic jam, child ignoring existence we’d been living for the last twenty years. It was a stunning display of oratory.

So after the bewildered, yet affirming, nod of my loving wife, I set out to make my dent in the publishing world. I was an acquisitions editor unleashed and out of control. During the day I made phone calls to former colleagues and at night the hammers roared as a humble 1920’s vintage shed in my backyard was converted into Simon & Schuster — the early days, complete with stained glass windows, glass doors, dark mahogany desks and book shelves glowing against the light of computer monitors. William Morris would be proud. We were modern and vintage — classically cutting edge. An artistic haven in the spirit of Bauhaus or Lettrist International. A magnificent and expensively embellished…garage.

It was the spring of 2008 and we launched with a book on jazz. This seemed perfectly suitable. Jazz is, after all, one of America’s truly unique forms of artistic expression. This was quickly followed by a beautiful book of fairy art. Fairies and jazz…there’s a connection there, right? This was followed by a book about a woman’s experiences in the London Blitz of World War II, and another about a woman growing up on a farm. The writing was great. The stories captured the American struggle. And the dollars drained away without sales to back them up. Suddenly my office became less a glamorous publishing garage and more like the bridge of the Titanic. We were sinking and all anyone could say was, “What happened?” We had everything we needed to be a great publisher except two very important things, a business plan and a marketing plan.

Enter the dark night of the soul. When things go bad they have a tendency to slide to the worse. I needed advice. I called an old friend and asked if we could meet for coffee. We sat at an outside cafe and took in the summer air. My friend brushed some crumbs off his dark grey suit as I noticed a pen mark on the knee of my frayed khakis. He had no idea I was broke. I waited for my opportunity to launch into my tale of woe just before the conversation turned to his absolute distain for publishing. He actually said he hated the people in publishing! I was stunned. The man across the table from me had reached the top of his career. He was the vice president of a growing, flourishing publishing house. How could he hate an occupation he had dedicated his entire career to?

And then, perhaps out of frustration or plain old middle-aged vindictiveness, he told me the last thing I wanted to hear. He said, “You know, Emerson, you’ll always survive. There’s a million guys like you with books piled up in their garage. You’ll struggle along and at the end of the week you’ll have a half-full box of wine and you’ll be perfectly gleeful (sarcasm?). You have a dream, my friend. Consider yourself lucky.”

His words echoed and banged around in my head all the way home. The way he characterized me as just one more dreamer with books in my garage hit hard. I realized that building books was easy, selling them and making a profit was quite different. My friend hated the drama behind publishing — the high-brow exchange of lofty thoughts and ideas, but he loved the business part of it. What he was really saying was that there’s a difference between the artist and the producer, and that a person who can be both is extremely rare. Artists can be all about the business too, but they’ll probably have to live off Tater Tots and cheap soy milk, or work eighty hours a week. I realized that my garage was just a garage, and that a publishing boot camp would have had as much chance of turning me into a good business man as the Marines would have had turning me into a Marine. Can a man march to the discordant strains of Debussy? I don’t think so. I was indeed, a left-leaning literary misfit.

So for the next few months I drifted along in a strange new land called reality. I pulled away from creating other people’s books and wrote for myself. I started a novel and a blog and luckily for me, I offered to write a book for a woman I had heard was an awesome business coach. She had also been the VP of a large international publisher. This relationship would change everything because she showed me the value of what I did best. She gave me honest encouragement, not reprimands, warnings or biased personal insights. Pretty soon my writing lead to new clients and I started to find out that companies were hungry for quality content. I focused on myself instead of the fantasy I had created around publishing. I became a content creator and a whole new world opened up before me.

In the end, I don’t regret living in a world of ideals, even with the potentially misdirected passion that’s put me on the brink of homelessness. And I don’t regret the books I‘ve helped create, or the wonderful life-long friends I’ve made over the past four years. I will always live by the words of Walt Whitman saying, “I exist as I am, that is enough.” To actually know yourself you need to be at peace with your limitations. Peace of mind is about focusing on what you do best and having a plan. Because having a plan — and not just a dream, is what being lucky is really all about.

And as for my friend who dislikes everyone in publishing, all I can say to him is thank you for helping the publishing world keep its lights on. I’ll agree; spreadsheets are more honest than acquisitions editors. I just hope he pays for the coffee next time!

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Emerson John Probst is a freelance writer and publisher in Baltimore, Maryland. He founded G.W. Zouck Publishing and his blog “Expressions from a pure stream” gives weekly inspiration to struggling artists. Emerson is currently writing a collection of humorous stories about creatives trying to survive in the real world titled “Stop Calling Me Dagwood!” He’s hoping to be picked up by any publisher other than himself!

Links – blog: http://gwzouck.com/blog4/
Website: http://gwzouck.com/
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/GW-Zouck-Publishing/116288088417637

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