Why I Love Publishing Scandals

Pay no attention to what you hear about how the publishing business is going to hell in the proverbial handbasket.  Yes, ok, book company profits are not up, in most cases – although a few houses, like Rodale, which published the surprise hit “An Inconvenient Truth,” did well – but in the words of some publishing wise-guys, “flat is the new up.”  And yes, there are more and more books published everywhere (nearly 200,000 by last official count) and fewer and fewer hit bestseller lists, make money, make noise.

But still, I remain bullish on the book business.  Why?  Because for the last year we’ve lived through a number of business scandals – and I think that’s great for the biz. 

First, of course, there was the early 2006 revelation that the so called memoirist James Frey had fabricated parts of his bestselling “A Million Little Pieces.”  In case you were buried under a globally warmed rock all last winter, he’s the guy who wrote about his alcoholism and drug dependency, the guy who dissed 12 step programs and got his book picked, and then disavowed by no greater publishing authority than Oprah Winfrey.  He was on Larry King, he was publicly excoriated on Oprah, he slunk away in disgrace. Through it all, of course, “Pieces” – and its sequel, “My Friend Leonard” – continued to sell hundreds of thousands of copies. 

Then there was Kaavya Viswanathan, the Harvard undergrad who got 500K for a novel called “How Opal Mehta Got Kissed,” etc, which also was quickly revealed as a fraud of another kind:  Viswanathan hadn’t just made up her story, she’d copied it, or parts of it anyway, from another young adult/chick lit novel.  The scandal here, to my mind, was less about the plagiarism than about the fact that the publisher had been touting this book as a literary breakthrough in the first place. 

And then, of course, there was Judith Regan, the editor everyone in publishing loves to hate, but many secretly admired for her nerve, her political incorrectness, and – not incidentally – for her publishing “nose;”  while most executives at Regan Books parenting company, Newscorp (owned by the scandal-free Rupert Murdoch?)  publicly disavowed her, some privately admitted that the 40+ million she brought in to the company will be sorely missed.

The party line was to decry these scandals, to beat our breasts and clean our closets and look closely in our mirrors.  We (the holy “we,” a/k/a everybody who hasn’t yet been caught in such scandals) are better than that, we cried.  We wouldn’t do something like a) publish a novel and call it a memoir b) commission a non-writer and look the other way when a book packager did some serious massaging or c) publish OJ Simpson’s hypothetical confession and be unapologetic about it.  And as Editor in Chief of Publishers Weekly, which some consider the bible of the industry, I weighed in on all of this.    Frey should be allowed to live, I said.  Viswanathan’s publisher, Little, Brown, should be ashamed of itself, I said.  And Judith Regan should be, and was, fired.

So how can I think these three scandals (and other, more minor ones) are good news for publishing?  It’s simple:  they gave us something to talk about – and by “us” in this case I mean more than the pundits with whom I travel in my narrow world.  All of these stories, particularly Frey and Regan, were front page (or at least front business page news);  for days, I – and others – were asked to put aside our day jobs and appear on television and radio and newspapers opining about what it all meant.   It got so that my showing up at a friend’s cocktail party was like a doctor paying a social call to a retirement home:   “What should we do about this?” people asked.  Suddenly, I was an expert.

And I liked that, of course, because I secretly have thought I’ve been an expert for a long time.  But even more important, I liked that publishing, with all its foibles, was suddenly in the news.  For a culture that spends a lot of time complaining that books are “over,” and that the upcoming generation will learn everything it needs to know online, it was comforting and uplifting to think that people still cared what went on in the arcane, old fashioned and sometimes backward world of book publishing. 

It said, in short, that people still care about books and how they get published.   Books are still a player in the culture.  Books still matter.

And I can’t see that as anything other than good news. 

Sara Nelson is Editor in Chief of Publishers Weekly: The International Voice for Book Publishing and Bookselling. You can read all of Sara's weekly Gather columns at saranelson.gather.com. And for more of Sara's columns click here.