A Conversation About Publishing -
[Cached Version]
Published on: 1/28/2006
Last Visited: 6/5/2008
A Conversation with William Strachan | A Conversation with William Strachan,
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A Conversation with William Strachan | A Conversation with William Strachan,
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In this third conversation with notable literary publishers, I talked with William Strachan, director of Columbia University Press, formerly editor-in-chief at Henry Holt, who had taken the rare step of crossing over from trade to academic publishing, and who thought in an interesting way about those two not wholly compatible domains: about what they had in common and what they did not.
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William Strachan, Director, Columbia University Press
William Strachan said of himself, with the self-effacement of a certain sort of editor, that he had joined "the accidental profession"; an amateur in the good, old sense?No, a generalist educated in the liberal arts, characteristic of a good part of a generation for whom schooling was not job-training.He graduated from Carleton College, an excellent small college in Minnesota, then took the Radcliffe Publishing Course, from which he emerged, in 1970, as an editorial secretary at Anchor Books.Having discovered what kind of books he wanted to publish, he moved on to various houses, was editor-in-chief at Henry Holt, and joined Columbia in mid-1998.He is tall and looks fit, though his once-lanky frame (you feel) is filling out with middle age, and dresses in not-too-new, tweedy-casual clothes.The offices of Columbia University Press, where he is director, are located in utilitarian rooms in a college building undergoing renovations, on W. 113th Street in Morningside Heights.The receptionist reports a visitor and, when she hears footsteps pounding lightly downstairs from the second floor, says, not wholly approving, "That's Bill: never takes the formal way" (i.e., the elevator) "when he can run."Seated behind his desk, his back to the distractions of Broadway below the window, he is cordial, discreetly gossiping (has recently returned from the Frankfurt Book Fair), very much the director (still testing his way) of a very respectable publishing company.His speech evokes distant seminar rooms and is without personal reference, respectful of its elders, perceptive, aware of what it now also knows, sounding with a modesty that is never false.
Several themes recurred during our two conversations in New York, last October and November: writerly non-fiction, its importance and nourishment; how one tried to make sense of the great shifts in the culture; e-publishing (novelty for a former trade publisher); and, unexpected pleasure, the tastes of generations, ours-in-common in particular."Writerly non-fiction" is Strachan's admirable phrase, neatly leaping over reams of self-involved "creative" genres; privately, I thought it worth stealing.Aloud, I wondered how the transition from trade to university press impressed him and asked if he would begin by describing the differences between those two kinds of institutions.
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WILLIAM STRACHAN: Well, I think you run a publishing company.
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WILLIAM STRACHAN: So I came over here, and here we are.
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WILLIAM STRACHAN: Yes, I went from seeing this as not so different, to seeing this as a completely different world, to saying, No, this is different and this isn't.
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WILLIAM STRACHAN: Sure.
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KATHERINE McNAMARA: Will you say more about the kind of publishing you're interested in?
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WILLIAM STRACHAN: I was raised up in non-fiction, basically.
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WILLIAM STRACHAN: Witold Rybczynski, whom I first published at Anchor Books, in a paperback original, and then brought over to Viking, where I did his next several books.
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WILLIAM STRACHAN: So.
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WILLIAM STRACHAN: Yes, and probably once I settle into this job a little bit more , I came over to Columbia in June 1997 , I might have some more time to do it, rather than to figure out where everything lies in the hierarchy.
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WILLIAM STRACHAN: Holt has gone through some changes, and continues to go through some changes, yes.
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WILLIAM STRACHAN: Well, I've seen this time and time again with my colleagues in publishing, where you sign on to do a certain kind of publishing, and the house is going in a certain direction, and over the years the changes haven't come at the bottom, they've come at the top.
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WILLIAM STRACHAN: If they still care about that.
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WILLIAM STRACHAN: No, the business has changed a lot: but so has the culture, and that's what's hard to figure out in publishing today.
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WILLIAM STRACHAN: Yes, and increasingly these things are blurred.There's plenty of book stuff on TV.
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WILLIAM STRACHAN: The middle falls away.
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WILLIAM STRACHAN: Yes, it was, and is, a standard of good writing.It's also the kind of proving ground, or developing ground, for many writers.
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WILLIAM STRACHAN: Publishers don't.
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WILLIAM STRACHAN: We do P&Ls at Columbia.
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WILLIAM STRACHAN: Yes, which is a very different structure and with different constraints.
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WILLIAM STRACHAN: Yes; yes, it is.Very much.
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WILLIAM STRACHAN: I think there was enough of it that we just didn't have to worry, because certain automatic mechanisms could take over.
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WILLIAM STRACHAN: Product, if you will?No, yeah, I guess.Yeah.
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WILLIAM STRACHAN: But someone's books are someone else's product; and vice versa, I guess.
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WILLIAM STRACHAN: I don't think it is, but when you turn a corner and you just say, "Product is book-selling; I know how to sell this book regardless of what's in it," or, you could sell it because it's a genre, or because it's a 'brand name', that sounds like a "product" to me.
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WILLIAM STRACHAN: Sure.
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WILLIAM STRACHAN: No.
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WILLIAM STRACHAN: Not what I once paid in the trade, clearly; but that removes a certain amount of pressure or expectation from the publication of the book.
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WILLIAM STRACHAN: Right, the advances are earning out, which is another side of the world it's nice to see.
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WILLIAM STRACHAN: I think the advances probably always rose.
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WILLIAM STRACHAN: Yes, but you're capable of selling in excess of a million copies.
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WILLIAM STRACHAN: No, we don't.
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WILLIAM STRACHAN: One of the big differences is, the writing; and the fact that we don't publish fiction.
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WILLIAM STRACHAN: Yes; and that's great.
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WILLIAM STRACHAN: Yes, it's an editorially-inclined committee.
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