Wish Fulfillment Every Day: A Conversation with Rachel Kahan, Executive Editor at William Morrow

An editor should be the type of person who’s very aware of what people are talking about and what’s going on in the world.

Jean Honoré Fragonard, “Young Girl Reading”

Today’s post is brought to you by Costco. On Halloween morning last year, I had breakfast with Rachel Kahan, an executive editor at Morrow, a HarperCollins imprint. Editors and agents regularly have meals together, and not just for our own amusement. One of my job responsibilities is knowing what editors are looking for—and what they are actually like—beyond what I can find out through Google or Publishers’ Marketplace. This sort of intimate knowledge is key to the matchmaking component of agenting. It also means that lunch conversations are purposely wide-ranging, which is how we got to talking about Rachel’s Costco run for her kids’ Halloween bake sale, and how Costco pulling back on books has affected her job and what she can acquire. Not incidentally, I also filed away intel like “Rachel Kahan is the type of person to drive to Costco for her kids’ bake sale and also to get kosher chicken for a grieving neighbor, even though she herself does not keep kosher.” None of these proclivities will surprise you when you read the below. For what it’s worth, part of my project here at D&A is giving you the kind of humanizing detail I get at a publishers’ lunch. Now you know about the chicken!

One of the themes of this week’s interview is how readers’ tastes change over time. We discuss this on both the market level and the personal one, and quite unexpectedly, these two strands intersected in a serendipitous way in Rachel’s early career. I’ll leave it to you to discover how—enjoy!

Now for Alia’s Self-Promotional corner! My book is out next Tuesday. If you’re not sick of me yet, you can hear me chat about the book with Dan Kois and friends on Slate’s Culture Gabfest and with Emily Gould in New York Magazine’s Book Gossip. Of course I hope you’ll support me by preordering TAKE IT FROM ME, and if you really want to make me happy, you’ll preorder it from my local indie, Community Bookstore, and I’ll sign it! Note that when you click on the link, you’ll get a pop-up asking you to choose a bookstore location. This doesn’t mean you need to go pick up the book. They deliver—I promise.

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We’re going to start a little differently today. As the theme is how reading habits and markets change over time, I want to hear about Baby Rachel’s reading habits.

I learned to read when I was about three years old. My mother sent me to this preschool that taught phonics at a very early age. I cracked the code early and that was it. When I went to kindergarten, we discovered that at age five, I was reading at a fourth grade level. It’s just the one thing in my life that I’ve always been very good at. The school pulled me out of kindergarten and put me into first grade— which meant that I was always at least a year younger than my peers.

Was that hard for you socially?

The worst was when I hit middle school. I was eleven when I started seventh grade, and you know what middle school girls are like. I wound up doubling down on books because at lunchtime if I didn’t want to sit with the girls in my class because they were kind of dreadful, I would just pull out a book. Books were a refuge. There are probably a lot of editors who have this same kind of origin story—books are where you find your people, if your social peer group is not your people.

Do you remember what you were reading at the lunch table?

I was lucky that my parents, and my mother in particular, said, “You can read whatever you want.” I loved a lot of books that I have probably had no business reading, like Sidney Sheldon and Jackie Collins and Judith Krantz.

I think this is generational. Those were the books on my mother’s night table, and my mom had a similar attitude. As long as I was reading, she didn’t care what I read. And I’m not sure if that exists for thirteen and fourteen year olds now. They probably have better books to read than I had available to me, but what I had was Judith Krantz and Sidney Sheldon.

It’s hard to find a better novel than Scruples if you want delicious commercial reading. The YA books that were available to me as a kid in the 80s are nothing like what’s available to young readers now, so I just read what was on the adult night stand instead.

I also liked the classics. My mother gave me a copy of Jane Eyre when I was in elementary school. Even if I didn’t always fully understand or appreciate everything that was going on in the classics, when I got a degree in English and had to reread all those books, I was able to more deeply appreciate something that was already familiar.

I had similar experiences in middle school, both socially and in terms of my reading habits. YA was so different then. I didn’t want to live in the world of high school when I read—I wanted to escape it. And I hadn’t really thought about this until we started talking, but I think I liked reading a lot of the kind of books you’re talking about, because in, say, a Judith Krantz novel, there were going to be interesting women. And that’s when I saw myself being when I grew up, and I wanted to live in the world of adult women. And at that age, I couldn’t distinguish between literary and commercial fiction. I loved Wuthering Heights, but I also loved The Thorn Birds. Very different books, but both had dark and complex female characters.

I was definitely always the “old soul” kid, and I think that informed why I was so in love with those books. I got to experience the world through an adult perspective and that was just a lot more interesting to me than being a teenager. And the high school stuff was like “Sweet Valley High,” and that was nothing at all like my life experience.

Same. That’s not where I found myself as a reader. Talking to you, I see the way your reading choices back then seem to shape what you now acquire as an editor.

100%. I was always a reader who wanted to read women’s voices, and then I became an editor who has devoted her career to amplifying women’s voices and women’s experiences. If you want a really concrete example of how the two things intersect, one of the authors who I loved when I was a tween and teenager was a British historical novelist called Jean Plaidy.

Oh, I read the entire Jean Plaidy section of the library.

Me too! I can still picture in my mind the corner of Arlington Public Library where the Jean Plaidy books were. She had an extensive backlist, so there were several shelves of her books.

When I was working at Crown—and this would have been from around 2000 to 2005—I was buying some historical fiction for their list. I found out that the Jean Plaidy backlist was largely out of print in the U.S. market. The agent for her estate was Liz Winick at McIntosh & Otis. I called her to see if the backlist rights were available. And they were ! I think the first deal was for five books. And then I bought another 10 books off the back list and now I think Crown has a couple dozen of those Jean Plaidy historicals still in print.

This is the fantasy of a teenage reader getting to be an editor.

It was such wish fulfillment! I was doing it right in the era that was just post-Anita Diamant’s huge bestseller, THE RED TENT. And Phillipa Gregory was also huge with THE OTHER BOLEYN GIRL. All of a sudden, the historical fiction market, which had been a bit dormant, came roaring back. So when I said, “There’s this great historical novelist whose stuff has been out of print—let me bring it back”---well, those books became incredibly profitable. And you could draw a direct line from thirteen-year-old Rachel reading those books in the public library to twenty-seven-year old Rachel scoring a really big, career-making goal.

But it was also a moment where my particular tastes dovetailed really well with the market. I have a colleague at Morrow and romantasy is her thing. I sat down with her last year to talk about her career, and said, “You’re at that special moment I experienced at your age, where the market has risen to meet your unique passions and abilities. Just ride it as far as you can, because the trends go away. But you can really make your career by hitching your wagon to it now.”

Could you talk a bit more about what your early career looked like?

I had a rocky entry. I went to the Radcliffe Publishing Course right out of college. I lasted six months at my first job. I had high hopes for it because it was a prestigious imprint and I loved the books they published. It was also probably the most toxic workplace I have seen in the entire thirty years as an editor–and it was my very first job. I was 21.

There was a bathroom that was referred to as the crying room, where the assistants would go to cry in peace. I have more compassion now for my then-boss, because I think that she was going through a lot in her personal life. But she was very unkind to me and to everyone around her. This particular imprint had a female publisher, a female editorial director, and the senior staff was mostly female. I went in there thinking, “I’m going to find women who will mentor me.” And that was not the case at all. But I befriended other editorial assistants and we trauma-bonded our asses off. Some of them are still my closest friends to this day.

I knew that it did not make sense to stay at that place. I was not only going to be miserable on a day to day basis—I probably wasn’t going to be promoted in the long run either. This was 1996; it was still a time when, especially at this particular house, there was a Northeastern elitist sensibility and the boss preferred Ivy Leaguers. I was from the South and went to a public university plus I also knew that with my commercial sensibilities I was not destined to rise there.

A literary agent who knew how unhappy I was tipped me off that there was an editor for a different part of the company who was leaving to go to Crown and would be hiring a new assistant there. I printed out my little resume and walked it two floors up to where this editor, who I’d never met before, was sitting. And I just said, “This agent told me that you’re looking for a new assistant so maybe you would like to see my resume?” And God bless her—she hired me.

It’s amazing that you didn’t think, “This industry isn’t for me.” You had the wisdom to know that perhaps it was a local problem.

I really loved a lot of things about what I could see of the industry, even from the bottom run of the ladder. I loved reading the manuscripts, I loved talking about books and being in that world. And I knew I didn’t want to give that up.

Zooming out, what are some of the big picture changes you’ve seen in the marketplace over the course of your career?

I’m definitely someone with a commercial sensibility—which isn’t to say I don’t read literary fiction! I do, and I published some very successful literary fiction! What I’m primarily interested in are books that speak to a broad swath of people and reflect our culture. I do think that you can read the tea leaves of a culture by looking at what’s popular in fiction. When I started out, there was that first big rise of historical fiction like THE RED TENT and Philippa Gregory’s books. Then came the big vampire trend.

Yes, that was Romantasy 1.0

That was also a Gothic moment. But I don’t think Gothic is ever over. I love a Gothic novel.

Same. It never dies.

No, it never goes away, it just gets changed up according to what’s going on in the culture..

And then after TWILIGHT, we get 50 SHADES OF GRAY, which began as a fanfic spin-off of TWILIGHT and was also super trope-y Gothic. It has the dark and distant, powerful man and the young ingénue. For a while you could walk into any bookstore and there would be a wall of those BDSM-inspired dark romances. If you look at where we were as a culture when those books were popular, it was the start of the Obama era, when women’s empowerment was front and center, as was third-wave feminism, with hugely popular platforms like Jezebel or Feministing. Feminist voices were really flourishing. The BDSM romances were a counterpoint to that—you could safely explore that anti-feminist fantasy in some ways, because actually, women were doing pretty well.

With the rise of romantasy, there’s been a great deal of pearl-clutching about what it all means, but I feel that those books are appealing to women now because the heroines in them are empowered. And you know, the heroes don’t even have to be human, but the gender politics have a lot going on. Those heroines can even have multiple heroes if you get into the “Why choose?” trope that’s in some of these books. The women in romantasy are much more powerful than romance heroines used to be, at a time when in our culture, women are being degraded and diminished more than ever in politics and on-line culture.

I think as we’re living in a moment of political retrenchment and repression, there’s something about reading wild fantasies. It allows your brain to think anything is possible. It’s a way of saying, “The world doesn’t have to look this way.”

Even if you have to build a whole fantasy world to show it, as some of these writers do, that offers an alternative vision of what gender relationships can and should be like. Sometimes it’s subversive but honestly, I think it’s pretty overt a lot of the time.

Another example is the recent trend in World War II fiction, which was driven by a nostalgia for the last good war. The Nazis were clearly very bad and everybody else was very good. And there was a kind of comfort in it too: you knew the good guys were going to win. Those books were wildly popular for many years just before and during the pandemic. But now we are in a time where people in power are following a lot of the fascist playbook that from the rise of the Third Reich. I always want to shake those readers of WWII fiction and say, “Hey guys, did you pay attention to what you read?”

We’ve spoken about how readers shape trends, and how cultural forces do, but what changes have you seen in how books are sold to readers, and in how they find their books? And how does that, in turn, affect what you’re able to publish and able to buy?

The way that readers discover books has completely changed in my lifetime as a reader and an editor. It used to be that you found out about books through just walking into a bookshop and seeing what they had. And it used to be that every newspaper and magazine had book reviews. They either had a complete book review section or they ran weekly reviews. Books were talked about frequently in weekly and monthly magazines, which had circulations in the millions.

You wanted People to cover your books, but you also sent your author on tour, because they could go to Dayton and get covered by the Dayton local paper.

And Dayton had independent booksellers who supported them. That’s just completely changed, starting with the big chains in the 90s. If you got your book into Barnes & Noble or Borders, you were assured that all the malls of America would be featuring your book back when people went to malls and bought books there. Then Amazon came along and disrupted that by creating this alternate universe where you could buy your book online and have it delivered to your house, so then people became much more dependent on the Amazon algorithm for serving up what they might want.

But you also had big box retailers like Costco and Target come into the game, who were very interested in appealing to a certain type of consumer. Twenty years ago, or even ten years ago, Costco had a big footprint in the business. You could go into Costco and there would be a couple of beautiful tables stacked high with books—a lot of them trade paperbacks. I’d get a monthly spreadsheet that showed Costco doing, say, a WWII fiction assortment, and so they’ve come in for these five titles, maybe two of which were mine. They’d be taking 3500 copies apiece—-that that was really big. If you got the Costco full roll, which we all dreamed of, it—that was 25,000 hard covers! Costco also had a feature called Penny’s Pick, which was named after their main book buyer. Many of those picks were books I edited, and they absolutely launched authors careers.

But now Costco has moved out of selling books. They still sell a little bit, but only very little. You lose all the discoverability of a big retailer curating a display for their consumer. And if you look at the typical Costco member—-someone with a higher income and a higher level of education than the overall population— they’re ideal book buyers, but they’re not getting served books at Costco anymore.

Where you get discoverability now is in a much more small d democratic way because now word of mouth is so amplified. You might be hearing it from big celebrity influencers like Reese and Jenna or from booktokkers and bookstagrammers. All of a sudden, with the rise of social media and the internet more broadly, there’s this huge platform for people who would never meet in real life to just chat about books with each other. I love to see it because talking about books with other readers is still my favorite thing to do.

How do these changes in the market change how you think about your acquisitions? Discoverability is even harder to crack. When you see a book come in and you think, “Oh, my god, how am I going to publish this? I need to get X number of readers to this book!”---how do you think about getting to those readers?

For me it goes back to reading the cultural tea leaves. An editor should be the type of person who’s very aware of what people are talking about and what’s going on in the world. What kind of stories might people like to hear? What kind of stories are popular and getting traction in the culture?. You always also have to be prepared to be taken by surprise, because there are always outliers that blow up, but I think the majority of successful books rarely come out of nowhere.

With books like THE CORRESPONDENT or THEO OF GOLDEN or even Catherine Newman’s book SANDWICH, we’re seeing books that are a little bit softer, but that are really profound meditations about human connection. There’s also been a big trend for “healing lit” from Asia like BEFORE THE COFFEE GETS COLD or WE’LL PRESCRIBE YOU A CAT. I think that we live in such a hostile, fragmented world and people want to escape from it into books. So I think we’ll, we’ll see more of that kind of fiction because those books offer a balm to the spirit. Books are wonderful for that and always have been.