"I'm Not a Book Person"

(Say what?)

That’s actually what my new book editor said to me when I was still reviewing for ———.

But she did know what a best seller was and she urged me to review them in my column. The previous editor had felt similar pressure from higher up and quit, as she put it, because she was “tired of doing features about Stephen King.”

I resisted my new boss calmly: with facts. This was back in the days when brick-and-mortar book stores were everywhere. I explained to her that best sellers were prominently displayed in those stores: in the windows, by the cash registers, in special sections and on “end caps”—and sometimes across a whole wall.

It was very easy to find them. My goal in the column had been to review books that weren’t in-your-face but just as good or even better. To inform readers who might not otherwise hear about them.

So I liked to review trade paperback originals as well as hardcovers because my colleagues tended to ignore the former, and I also featured books in translation. That was well before Scandinavian Noir became popular and Americans were reading very few books that weren’t originally written in English.

The editor compromised when I explained my method and suggested—strongly—that I end each column with three to five books “Also Out This Month” where I could mention celebrity writers like, well, Stephen King.

It worked, but I discovered that as an editor, my new boss had no interest at all in content, just length, and so she’d cut the wrong graf just because she needed the space, even though it skewed the review’s tone or focus.

This was the first time I had to write defensively, so to speak, and construct edit-proof reviews. It was more work than usual and eventually I quit when I had a big birthday coming up, as a present to myself. What a relief!

Image by Sammy-Sander from Pixabay