Word: cerfs
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Hard to Turn Down. "Every publisher," says Bennett Cerf, "thinks of himself as an idealist, although the idealism is in the back of his head." Cerf tries to fulfill his idealistic responsibility "by publishing poetry, belles-lettres, and first novels you know won't sell a copy. We do two or three of those a year." Nevertheless, Cerf concedes that "it's awfully hard to turn down a book that's going to make money. If I thought nobody else was going to publish it, it wouldn't matter. But the thought that...
...William Morris, orange from Curtis Brown. It is here that the vagaries of book publishing can get stickier than a freshly glued spine at a book bindery. Established authors are apt to be stubborn, demanding, supersensitive, uneven in their production, and extremely difficult to hold on to. For example, Cerf did not want to publish Author Robert Crichton's second book, Rascal and the Road; he was convinced that it would not sell. Crichton insisted. Cerf published it, and sure enough, the book failed. Convinced that Random House had not done right by him-every author chronically suspects that...
...other hand, Cerf was so positive that Stanley Wolpert's Nine Hours to Rama, a novel based on the assassination of Gandhi, would be a 1962 winner that he boosted the ad budget from $10,000 to nearly $30,000. It sold a disappointing 12,000 copies...
Adjust the Buttons. One of Cerf's big assets is a group
Both Erskine and Epstein, as well as most of the 22-man editorial staff, get complete freedom from Cerf in the choice of titles that Random House buys and in their dealings with authors. Cerf takes charge of important advertising campaigns-he even writes a few ads himself-and usually directs all important financial negotiations for his top authors. "In one month," he said recently, "I sold the paperback rights on three books for $1.7 million-Michen-er's The Source for $700,000, Capote's In Cold Blood for $500,000, and Kathleen Winsor's Wanderers...