Scribner senior editor Brant Rumble doesn't spend much time obsessing over the idea that men in their 20s and 30s are generally believed to be nonreaders. Which is surprising, since Rumble openly acknowledges this is his target demographic. “I could say I want to change that perception, but I think it would be pretty naïve and kind of hopeless,” he explains over a scattering of small plates at Boqueria in Manhattan. Instead, Rumble, who admits “there's a lot of truth” to the stereotype, has done something more productive: he's built his career on publishing books that stand as exceptions to the rule.
Despite that, it wasn't books that beckoned Rumble, who grew up in the South and went to college in the Midwest, back to New York. After a summer internship working for the downtown arts and culture magazine Bomb, Rumble assumed he would go into magazine publishing. But, after finishing the NYU Publishing Program, he stumbled into a job in the old publishing office at Simon & Schuster.
In 1999, after two and a half years as Nan Graham's assistant, the manuscript that changed Rumble's career fell into his lap: a punchy history of heavy metal by a then unknown columnist for the Akron Beacon Journal named Chuck Klosterman. Rumble, who says he spent his interview with Graham “talking about the Beatles and Don DeLillo,” was known around the office for his twin obsessions—music and sports. This is likely why, when Scribner publisher Susan Moldow was told about a “crazy heavy metal book” on submission, her immediate reaction, as Rumble recounts, was: “Oh, that sounds like something Brant would be interested in.”
That “crazy heavy metal book” was Fargo Rock City, and it became both Klosterman's first book and Rumble's first acquisition. While the hardcover was only a modest success, it laid the groundwork for Klosterman's breakout follow-up in 2003, Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs. (That book, according to Nielsen BookScan, has sold 257,000 copies in paperback to date; it remains Rumble's bestselling title.) Rumble likens the success Klosterman saw with that book, appropriately, to a rock adage. “Have you ever heard the old cliché about the Velvet Underground? It's basically that they only sold about 1,000 copies of their first album, but everyone who bought that album went out and formed bands. We didn't sell a ton of copies of [Fargo Rock City], but nearly everyone who bought that book became a huge fan of Chuck's.”
And, for the most part, Klosterman's books—humorous takes on music and pop culture—have provided a rough blueprint for much of what's followed on Rumble's lists. Although Rumble has published more varied nonfiction (and some fiction), he's known for doing a lot of music and pop culture—related books. Later titles have included the memoir from former Arrested Development bit player and Daily Show correspondent Stacey Grenrock Woods, I, California; the humorous unauthorized “autobiography” of George W. Bush, Destined for Destiny, by Onion editor-in-chief Scott Dikkers and Peter Hilleren; and Ask a Mexican! Gustavo Arellano's tongue-in-cheek compendium of Mexican-American stereotypes.
Niches aside, Rumble has also done sports books (ESPN.com's baseball writer Rob Neyer is one of his regular authors), more serious nonfiction (James D. Scurlock's Nickel and Dimed— like take on Americans' growing debt, Maxed Out) and literary fiction (MVP, the debut from one-time McSweeney's contributor James Boice). All of these books are, he says, reflective of his own personal tastes. It comes back, finally, to something he recalled hearing other editors at Scribner say before he acquired Fargo Rock City. “People always talked about... this idea of loving something. You love a project and that's why you acquire it: It's not that you like it—it's that you love it. When I read the proposal for [Fargo Rock City], I understood what that meant. I loved it in a way that I would love any book as a normal human being out in the world.”
This philosophy has remained Rumble's dominant one as an editor: he publishes what he would want to read. And he's finding an audience, one formerly reluctant reader at a time.
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