Merchants of Culture: A Conversation With S&S Editor Yahdon Israel

We’re talking about what it means to be in an industry where we’re not allowed to discuss the very thing that makes us professionals, which is money.

Barkley Leonnard Hendricks, “Sir Charles, Alias Willie Harris”

I wanted to chat with Simon and Schuster editor Yahdon Israel after reading his refreshingly frank interview with Merve Emre for her excellent (and I’m not just saying that because she’s a client) series “The Art of Editing.” I particularly loved how Yahdon reframes how we should think about book industry workers:

As many critiques as there are about capitalism, I don’t think there’s enough critique of the ways we commodify other people’s jobs when they’re not ours. We talk about publicity because we’re not in publicity, as opposed to thinking, “That’s another human being doing a job.” Capitalism turns that person into a function in my life. Their job is to make a cover; it’s not like a human being who, when they clock out, has a life. The way that I went into my job is that I met with every key person in every department that I knew I would have to work with, and I asked them, “How do I make your job easier?” Every answer that came back was, “No one ever asked me that before.”

Reader, same. While I didn’t come to our talk with this as the focus, we very quickly got into how the material conditions of our own lives and jobs affect how we approach our work and interact with our authors. I think it’s worth being said that while Yahdon and I are both acutely aware of market realities—in large part because we’ve always had to pay our own bills—-we’re also not professionally focused on super commercial books. Instead, we’re tasked (and have tasked ourselves) with the challenge of publishing primarily literary fiction and nonfiction while knowing the marketplace for such work is limited. And we are doing well at it! Although Yahdon has been at S&S for less than five years, his literary bonafides are considerable. TEMPLE FOLK by Aaliyah Bilal, the first book he acquired, was shortlisted for the National Book Award for Fiction. He recently published LOCA by Alejando Heredia (repped by my own beloved Meredith); it was just longlisted for The Center for Fiction First Novel Prize.

Another reason I wanted to chat with Yahdon, and why I think his perspective is so fresh, is that he came to Big Five book publishing after many years of entrepreneurial work in the literary world at large as a magazine editor, creative writing teacher and lecturer, and founder of a popular book club but he didn’t come up through the ranks of starting his publishing career as an assistant.

Reflecting its subject, this week’s post doesn’t follow the typical path of a book editor interview—-there’s no “what do you look for in a submission?” or “how do you like to work with authors?” Instead, I wanted to give a portrait of a person and to let you listen in as two publishing folks talk candidly with each other about ourselves and our work. (There’s way more of me here than usual; sorry?). My aim, both with this interview and with “Delivery & Acceptance” more broadly, is in the spirit of the quote I pulled above. I believe getting a feel for agents and editors and publicists etc as individualized people, rather than as job functions or stepping stones on your career path, will actually make that career path much more navigable and humane.

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Let’s start with how you came to work at S&S as an editor.

It was 2021, and my oldest daughter was about to turn two. I was using my creative skills to make a life for myself in New York—teaching, giving talks, hobbling together a career made from odds and ends, and waiting net-thirty to ninety days for payments.

I was about to turn thirty-one and I thought to myself, “How many more years do I have before I end up bitter, broke and burnt out?” I picked up the phone and called my friend Kathy Belden at Scribner. Because at that time, I was told I was too overqualified to get hired as an editorial assistant, or associate editor, yet I did not have the traditional publishing experience to get hired as an editor either.

I told Kathy, “I need a job. I’ll start over. I’ll delete stuff off my resume if it means that I can start over.” I explained I needed health insurance and a steady paycheck. Kathy was very clear that this was just informational and not to expect anything. She sent an email to Jon Karp on Thursday. He emailed me on a Sunday night. I met with him and Dana Canedy, who was the publisher then, on a Wednesday. Two days later, Joy Bertan, who’s Director of Talent Acquisitions offered me the position of senior editor.

I came into the industry from a position of being worried about crossing the street and turning my ankle because I was the primary breadwinner in my family. Being the person bringing in money started to harm my ability to think creatively, to think outside of the strictures of, “How do I pay my rent?”

In our industry, there’s a hesitancy to talk about money in specific and explicit terms. One of the reasons agents exist is so publishers don’t have to talk directly to authors about money. A lot of publishers don’t want to face their author’s material reality, and so much of my time is spent chasing down payments without the publisher realizing that this person thought the money would come in at this time and they’re making decisions based on that. We want to pretend that we do it all for the love, and, of course, we do it for the love. But if you are worried about breaking your ankle, or you are worried about paying for your child’s daycare, you’re not going to produce good work.

And you’re not going to produce it for very long.

I remember when Dana asked how soon I could start, I said, “What’s the soonest I can start that my health insurance activates?” I’ve seen people who announce they’re leaving a job and that they’ll be starting a new job in six months, and I think, “Who’s paying for that? Who’s paying for their health insurance?” People at a certain socioeconomic level have the leverage, presumably because of their resources, to negotiate time on their terms.

I was coming in without any leverage. So, if I could have started that Friday, I would have started just so I get the health insurance activated.

I have a story that encapsulates some of the assumed class norms of publishing. I ran into a publishing friend at Rockaway Beach, and they said they were surprised to see me at a public beach. This was a person I like a lot, and she said with genuine warmth, “I thought you were too much of a jetsetter for Jacon Riis.” And I laughed when I told her that I don’t have a beach house—my beach house is a tent from REI. Also, this person was also at Rockaway Beach. In a way, we’d both been assuming the wrong things about each other.

There was a time where I felt like I couldn’t admit that I needed the money that I got paid, but I very much need the money, and even though I have been successful by publishing standards, that will probably be the case for the rest of my life. But I actually think that my being honest about it is a strength. It’s a beacon to a certain type of artist or author that I want to work with. I want to break the norm, because I was once one of those people running around pretending I didn’t need the money, and that encouraged other people to run around pretending they didn’t need the money. But now that I’m in a position of some power, I’m not going to dissemble. I want to make it a little easier for the people who don’t feel comfortable saying they need the money,if they see me as an established agent being frank about these things.

It’s also about financial accountability in more ways than one. What we’re talking about is what it means to be in an industry where we’re not allowed–if we want to be regarded as insiders–to admit that the very thing that makes us professionals is the thing that we cannot admit we need, which is money.

The thing that separates a professional from an amateur is the ability to get paid for our services. We function in this perpetual gray area where it’s a profession until it’s a passion, and it’s a calling, up until we have to file taxes, and it’s personal until it’s business. And being from an economic background where I grew up counting every dollar because there was a finite amount of them, this creates a different kind of alienation. It has nothing to do with creativity.

How much did you know about what trade publishing would be like? What did you expect and how did it surprise you, if at all?

The difference between who I am as an editor now and who I would have been as an editor is thanks to John B Thompson’s MERCHANTS OF CULTURE.

I got that book because I could imagine there were people who had been working at S&S who I thought that I’d filled somebody else’s position when I got hired. I know there are going to be some people reading this who are going to think, “He didn’t even have a traditional publishing background, and he got a job in publishing,” and there is absolutely some truth to that. I had to earn for myself the ability to display that I was not coming in completely from scratch. MERCHANTS OF CULTURE was the most comprehensive macro understanding of how publishing functions as a business logic. It showed me where I, as an editor, fit into that logic. That book has enabled me to bring my own plate to the table.

I think it actually says a lot about you that you had the resourcefulness to find that book and understand your own role through it.

Here is where the MFA of it all comes in. I’m a graduate of the MFA program at the New School. I love the program as it pertains to craft. There are a lot of professional opportunities I would not have otherwise gotten if I hadn’t gone to the New School. It’s important for me to say that because the things that I’m about to say can make it seem like the New School did not do me a service.

My framework for understanding my MFA came from another book, THE PROGRAM ERA by Mark McGurl. It’s about the ideology and the philosophy of what we call the industrial complex, of how it came to be. Unfortunately, I didn’t read it before I started my MFA. I went into the MFA program as a writer, not an author. I want to make a distinction between the literary world and the publishing industry. What I did not understand fully and had no way of understanding was that once I decided to invest capital, whether it be student loans or whatever, and invest time and money into my being a writer, I was effectively becoming a professional author.

The MFA industrial complex perpetuates this notion that we operate the industry as a meritocracy, and if you just write the best thing, your career will somehow emerge from you being artistic and creative and inventive on a page. And what that meritocracy narrative doesn’t contend with is an industry that is publishing a million titles a year from trade and indie and university presses, and then another two million from self-publishing. You’re not contending with the reality that with every year there are an unprecedented amount of books being self and traditionally published, while we do not have a growing reader-consumer base. We are in an industry where there is an unprecedented amount of supply and the demand is not equivalent. And so when those parts of the conversation came into play for me, I realized it’s not that talent does not matter. Talent is the floor; it is no longer the ceiling.

Some MFA programs encourage their students not to think about the market, not to think about publishing, because they’re going to have to think about that for the rest of their careers. The MFA is thus seen as this siloed time. Yet, as you quite astutely say, the moment you step into an MFA, whether you like it or not, you are stepping into a publishing system. You are stepping into a business relationship by paying money, or if you are funded, you are paying time. I’m wondering, then, knowing that many MFAs still discourage, or at least don’t encourage, their students thinking about these questions, what advice would you give now, having gone through the system and now having worked in publishing, to these students?

From an administrative level, I think that there needs to be a complete overhaul of understanding what role an MFAs play in the professionalization of writers. In many ways it is the first legitimizer.

If you have an MFA, it is often the first sentence in your bio. That says there is something of value there. What no one asks out loud is, “What are we doing that is equipping the writers who are coming to us for a career?” What I’ve learned by being an editor, is that most writers fear the ownership of being an author. This is what Toni Morrison says in the documentary THE PIECES I AM.

It’s not about the act of being a writer. It’s about occupational respect, like when you say you’re a doctor or a dentist. And so often when people talk about not feeling like a real writer, even when they’re talking about from a creative standpoint, it’s usually associated with not having the external validators they think they need. In having conversations with authors over years now, I make it a point to call them authors, because once I use that language of the professional world, it gets them to reimagine their position within it—-that they’re not on the outside looking in. You’re on the inside. You have said you wanted this to be to some degree an occupation.

How does your materialist understanding of writing affect how you interact with authors as an editor? How might it differentiate you?

Ninety-five percent of my list has been first time authors. Most debut authors are operating from a place of lack. Every debut author I’ve worked with, with the exception of celebrity authors, have all tried to write every kind of book that they could imagine writing in the first book that they’re about to get published. The emotional logic is that I might not get another opportunity to do this, and so I need to show everything I need to do, and hope that one of these things lands, and then I’m able to get a career.

These authors imagine their careers as a passive response to their talent. If they write well enough, getting another book deal is them being told, “You’re a good writer.”

The watershed moment was with one author who was writing like three different books in one book. And I said, “Listen, this is your first book. All you have to do is do one thing well for your first book, and you’ll get to do another thing well with your next book.”

The editorial relationship between editor and writer is sometimes about aesthetic differences, but in others, it’s what you can produce within a set amount of time given with certain resources. So if we give a certain level of an advance, a book has to go into production by a certain time in order for this book to be out by a certain date. What I share with writers is the difference between a writer and an author is the difference between talent and skill. Talent can’t perform on deadlines, skill can. Because so many of the authors I’ve worked with have been debuts, they don’t even know yet what they can produce on deadline.

There’s an art to it, and at the same time, as a professional, you have to be able to tell a customer, a client, how much time you need to deliver a certain level of quality. And what I’ve learned in dealing with a lot of writers is that they have never written a book with the intention to be published, and have not yet gone through that cycle.

And for a lot of first time authors, they don’t conceive of another book. They don’t conceive of themselves as having a follow up. For many authors, they’re thinking about all that can be done with that one book.

I also see many authors who want their first book to be a theory of everything. They want it to be an exhibition of all of their skills, to have everything in it. And I always think of my dad, who sold counterfeit purses out of his car. He would open up the trunk, and he’d be like, we have Gucci, we have Chanel, we have Louis Vuitton. But it’s better to make one really great, real purse.

But the other thing is it shows the lack of moral imagination in our country that the term “artist’s career” is an oxymoron. What would it have looked like if there was an MFA class that said, “That book that you got into the program, is that your first book, or is that maybe your third?” Because there are authors who believe that the first thing that has their imagination is the first thing to go to market with.

Even if you might not know of the other titles, there is no author who has built a career with one title. Where it impacts the craft is that I’ve had writers who were resistant to certain edits, but when we had the larger conversation, that they would get another chance to do that in the next book, they became professionals. I can see it on the page, but also in their body language, a different kind of disposition, because now they’re not worried if they’ll get another chance. Now they’re beginning to operate proactively, to look for what that next chance is.

(Some questions from Gabe Sherman, my trusty assistant) Do young authors have this luxury? What qualities make a book a debut vs. better suited to mid-career etc.? How do you get authors to believe they have three or five or ten good ideas when they feel they only have one?

I think framing this as a “luxury” reflects the current logic that dominates the industry: the assumption that an author has to reach a certain level of “success” (which in this case means winning a number of awards, or having a certain number of books published) before they give themselves permission to think about their profession as such.

So on the subject of how a debut author may regard which book you go to market with requires authors to ask other questions of themselves that go beyond the singular concerns of the book they’re working on. So it means learning to respect the industry they’re in.

To answer your second question, the premise of that question is, in my experience, rooted in the way that the current discourse around how we talk to writers occurs. So for example, when an unpublished author shares with me what they’re currently working on something, I listen to them, but then I immediately ask them if this is the first book they plan to go to market with. And even that question knocks them off balance, because the question assumes more than one--and there’s no education where authors are challenged to make that assumption of themselves.

An author can have a hard time selling Book 2 if Book 1 only sells 5,000 copies, or even 10,000 copies, is there a way to address this?

I can only answer this question within the intimate dynamic that exists between me and the authors I work with. Transparently, there are no guarantees. The irony of my position, that I’m aware of, is that in an industry as volatile as any, I don’t have the guarantee that I’ll have a job to support the careers that I’ve helped launch. So it’s important to properly make it clear that my position as an editor is as equally precarious as the authors I publish.

These conversations around publishing can often frame the author as the only person who’s vulnerable and it’s important to understand that as editors, we are equally anxious about our own professional futures. Some editors lose their jobs championing an author who, by the time that author breaks through, may not even have a job. So I am transparent with authors I work with that this entire project of publishing is rooted in cautious optimism.

Did you come into your job at S&S thinking in terms of multiple books, or has that evolved as now, because you acquired all these debuts, and some of these people are now thinking about their second books?

So much of it has to do with calculating profit and loss. You begin to look at how I guarantee that I, as an editor, am able to take chances on authors over time. If I want to be an editor and be an instrumental part of shaping a writer’s career, I have to make sure I keep my job. So much of my software as a writer was “That sounds like he doesn’t want to pay for art.” I want to frame instead as you get to take a certain amount of chances in a given year, and for each one of those chances, you are trying to increase the chances for profitability.

The data that everyone needs to know is that 96% of debut authors will sell less than 5,000 copies. That’s just data that has been proven for 50 years. When Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye came out in 1970 she sold 2,500 copies. That is what happens when a new artist, a new brand, enters the market. We as an industry are acquiring in hopes of that 4% chance that we’ll hit the list and be profitable.The data also shows that the best seller, or that breakthrough book, comes between the third title and the fifth. On average, when an author breaks out, it’s between their third title and their fifth book.

If I am publishing debut novelists year over year, and I’m not hedging that bet by creating a buffer where I’m getting closer to where authors show profitability or show stability in their career, I’m just launching a bunch of rocket ships, but I’m not stabilizing them through the different stratospheres. Nothing ever hits the moon. So when I look at if I’m really serious about cultivating longevity with the authors I work with, then I have to think about what enables an editor to stay in this industry long enough to where they can see an author’s third book, an author’s fourth book, an author’s fifth book.

I am wondering how we could retrofit this as advice for authors, knowing this kind of cliff that happens after an author debuts. Many authors write a debut and never write a second book precisely because debuts don’t do so well, and because of the challenges of publishing debuts and they don’t get that second chance. So if you’re an author and you want to get to book three to four, what can you do in terms of mindset and approach when the even bigger challenge may be the sophomore book.

I would push you beyond sophomore. t I’ve been saying to people: I don’t publish books. I publish authors. Toni Morrison is not one of her titles. I would highly suggest reading Dana Williams’ TONI AT RANDOM about Toni’s career as an editor.What needs to be studied as much as the writing is that by her working at Random House for twenty years, she knew how to be published. And her first breakthrough book was her fourth.

Now, as a reader, you might have only encountered one of her books, but that does not negate the reality. You have to understand that to not think about a career is, in many ways, a dishonoring of all the labor you’ve given to your craft at this point.

Percival Everett has written over twenty novels, and it’s only in the last two year stretch where a book that he wrote in the 90s got adapted and won an Oscar for its screenplay, and then he wins the Pulitzer for JAMES. And JAMES might have been your first introduction to him. “American Fiction” might have been your first introduction, but he could not base a career on those happenstance moments. Even if Percival Everett is not a person who went into this thinking of a career, he has one.

When we talk about the happenstance of a career, we still rely as a culture on the meritocracy myth, where, if you just make it big up front, everything else will sort itself out, rather than intentionally building a career, which requires sustained effort, and budgeting of time and money. And I’m like, No one gets into a MFA program without figuring out how to pay for that MFA program. If you don’t pay by a certain date, you cannot take those classes. You have to treat it as concrete, as a real thing.

Time and money are the two things for which, as a professional author, it’s crucial to learn how to appreciate, learn how to appraise. It’s crucial to existing over time and space.

I also think that when you talk about a writer’s career over time and space, it’s a way to actually believe in your own future. And I don’t mean in a woo-woo sense. I mean if you’re thirty now, there will someday be a sixty-year-old you who hopefully will still be writing. It could actually be quite generative creatively to think about your career as thinking about the thirty-year-old you and the sixty-year-old you and all those beautiful years in between.

Yep. And it actually creates excitement when you can see, “Okay, this is my first step. What’s my next?”

The first step is so hard, and we also have such a cultural obsession with young artists that I understand why we focus so much on it. But you’re only going to be a young artist for a very short amount of time.

Maybe the first step doesn’t feel as scary if you can see or imagine where you’re going.