Since 2016, Steve Wasserman has helmed independent publisher Heyday in his hometown of Berkeley, Calif. Before that, he zigged and zagged his way through the industry, often in the company of luminaries and friends such as Susan Sontag, David Rieff, and Christopher Hitchens. Along the way, he’s edited the Los Angeles Times Book Review; served as editorial director of New Republic Books, Hill and Wang, and Times Books; and agented at Kneerim & Williams. Yet until now, he hasn’t published a book of his own. In his debut, Tell Me Something, Tell Me Anything, Even If It’s a Lie: A Memoir in Essays (Heyday, Oct.), Wasserman collects 30 of his essays, spanning 45 years in journalism and publishing. We asked him for his takes on today’s book biz.
What’s it like to be the publisher of an indie press, after a history with commercial publishing houses?
This may be a kind of heresy, but there’s no significant difference except scale. All the people that I had the privilege of working with in so-called mainstream publishing, no matter where we found ourselves in the ecosystem, seek to answer a single question: “How do you cut through the noise of the culture and get attention for deserving work?”
What are your thoughts on how consolidation has changed publishing and bookselling?
Despite the commercial pressures on folks laboring in mainstream publishing, there are more book-like objects being published than ever before. One is tempted to say that no book, no matter how mediocre, goes unpublished, and the means of technology has democratized the process. Of course, the means of distribution have also consolidated. But in the last several years, despite the pressures imposed by the pandemic, independent bookstores have rebounded and independent presses are flourishing. I do not believe that mergers have, as a practical matter, led to an era of less diversity with respect to subject matter and even to authors. There’s a book and an author for almost every taste.
In terms of reading tastes, how have those changed over your career?
In 1949, Dwight Macdonald, one of the great contributors to the Partisan Review and to the journal he founded called Politics, said, somewhat tongue in cheek but not entirely, that there are only 5,000 serious readers in the whole country. Twenty years later he was part of a panel that was asked the same question, and he responded again that there are still 5,000, “and they’re getting longer in the tooth now.” The truth is, serious reading was always a minority taste. I don't mean to be snobbish at all—I mean, I read for entertainment. But growing a generation of serious readers is a prospect that’s pressing upon us, particularly if you think such a cohort is necessary for a thriving democratic polity.
Can we raise that critically literate generation under present conditions?
I have faith, and that faith is based on experience at Heyday. The last five years have been the best five years in the company’s five-decade history. We’re thriving, and any number of our books are meeting enough readers’ needs to make it possible for us to raise staff salaries, grow our annual sales, and position ourselves for success in the future. You’ve got to take the gamble that your publishing house represents, at least collectively, an ethos that strikes an echo of enthusiasm in enough readers to keep sustaining the enterprise. Our sister across the Bay, City Lights in San Francisco, seems to be doing that. Red Hen Press down in Los Angeles seems to be doing that. Akashic Books in Brooklyn seems to be doing that. It’s a golden age for independent presses.
Speaking of golden ages, your essays profile literary lions of the 20th and early 21st centuries. How does their mystique compare to those in today’s multimedia climate?
One of the things that I most admired about Robert Scheer, or the late Susan Sontag, or Christopher Hitchens, to whom I was particularly close, was an attribute of their individual and collective temperament. They were not hostage to a nostalgia for some golden age that lay in their own past. They were always inquiring, “What’s new? What have you read lately? What’s exciting?” They did not want to talk about the good old days. And there are lots of remarkable personalities who would qualify in a pantheon of literary lions today. Let’s take the incredible range and perfect-pitch sentences of Rachel Kushner, or let’s take a man who’s finally been getting the recognition he’s long deserved, Percival Everett.
You say in your introduction that you felt imposter syndrome growing up in Berkeley in the 1960s and '70s, among radical artists and authors. Did you aspire to be a writer in those early years?
I don’t really love writing. But I love reading good writing! I was both fortunate and unfortunate enough to meet writers who I believed had much more talent and original things to say than I could find in myself, certainly as a young man. I wouldn’t want to be in my early twenties again, because for me it was a time of vast uncertainty. I quickly tumbled to the notion that being a writer means being alone in a room with your thoughts. And I’m a talker.
Is that what got you into editorial work?
I could tell the real deal from the fool’s gold. I found myself having the fortune of editing other people and learning as I went along. There was very little glamour in it—the editor doesn’t go out on a book tour—but it also relieved me of the notion that I should somehow wake up in the morning with a burning desire to say something original that I had to commit to publication.
How has collecting the essays in Tell Me Something, Tell Me Anything given you insight on the book industry?
I regard myself as something of a bridge generation. I came into publishing just as revered and justly admired figures as Jason Epstein, Bob Loomis of Random House, and Star Lawrence at Norton were beginning to retire; you could visit the late Elisabeth Sifton and others. I admired these people because I was a very close reader of the acknowledgments sections, and I was fortunate to find a foothold in an industry that was beginning to suffer or enjoy, depending on your point of view, a generational shift. As with any shift of that kind, will something be lost—that institutional memory, the good habits, and bad habits. Some of the essays in my book are an homage to the contradictions and glories of people into whose galaxies I was able to swirl.
