Most people wait for New Year's to make their resolutions. But publishing people—let's face it, a bunch of overachievers—tend to jump the gun, timing- wise. In the past several weeks, at least four major book biz figures—I'm thinking Michael Korda, Joni Evans, John Glusman and Soho's Juris Jurjevics—have announced they're leaving their jobs, at least sort of—and their announcements come on the heels of earlier ones from Larry Kirshbaum and Peter Osnos.
What's going on here? If these were all young people, I'd expect the requisite breast-beating and brow-furrowing about how the business is such a mess (not to mention so low-paying, relatively speaking) that we can't keep young up-and-comers interested. But, of course, the people who are leaving their jobs lately aren't the kids, they're the grownups—and so the question becomes: Are they leaving because they know not too little, but too much?
In some cases, age is clearly a factor: even if Simon & Schuster dislikes characterizing the 72-year-old Korda's scaling back as a kind of retirement, it sure looks that way. (He'll continue to edit such authors as David McCullough and Mary Higgins Clark.) And for some, it's a question of focus: both Jurjevics (who was once married to the late, beloved author Laurie Colwin) and Glusman have recently published books, and they've either stated (Jurjevics) or implied (Glusman) that they want to concentrate on being authors.
But of the latest batch of defectors, Joni Evans's case is particularly interesting to me. You could argue, for example, that she started the publisher/editor—to—agent trend (of which Larry Kirshbaum is the latest practitioner, and, interestingly, whom Evans talked to six months ago about joining William Morris... he's not) when she moved to the agency 11 years ago. But now she's going to do something else new, something she says she hasn't quite figured out yet, except that it definitely won't be representing authors in the traditional sense. (What it will be: "my own company," something that will "allow me to work with the publishers, authors, agents and all the other people I love" and, probably, something that "takes advantage of technology and applies it to our elegantly right-brained industry.") Did she hate being an agent? Not at all. Was she successful at it? Clearly—even though she took plenty of flack from fellow publishing folk for, say, representing ultra-conservative Ann Coulter and JFK Jr.'s onetime pal Richard Blow. It's just that all this seems to the 60-year-old Evans to be old-think. "Clearly, we are the only media that's not moving ahead," she told me. Having been in it for almost 40 years, she would know that better than most.
So I actually take this as a positive sign about the business. So much has been written and said about how the "older generation" in publishing just doesn't "get it," new-mediawise, how they're all clinging to the old ways like infants to security blankets, and how it's only the young 'uns, if anyone, who even know what's going on. (I myself recently had a conversation with a prominent editor on the early side of middle age who, when told that Google's printing plans might be the biggest publishing issue of the decade, simply shrugged: "Maybe," he said, dubiously. "But I'm not thinking about it.")
At least Joni Evans is thinking about it. "There's a big revolution coming, and I want to be part of it," she said. How? Nobody knows—not even Joni.
But if history is any indicator of the future, chances are we'll hear about it. Evans is not exactly known for keeping to herself.
