Things. Any book where there is a high advance i am involved in the acquisition and i look over what everyone is doing and offer suggestions but i am there really to make sure that the things the Company Provides the publishers help them do their job better and help them find those audiences and communicate to them. Guest i manage the editors, the publicity, the marketing, foreign rights and oversee the birthing of the books into the world. Host so you have some editorial duties and business side duties, correct . Guest absolutely. The idea is to publish the authors as successfully as possible. Host you publish about a hundred books a year . Guest we are the Flagship Division and publishing 130 this year. It is a range of authors. We have literary novelist and Major Writers like thomas, Hilary Clinton, james web, john mccain. We have got notable personalities and a lot of terrific general nonfiction with biographties from everybody from sally ride to john wane to literary memoirs. Host so why are there different imprints at simon and schuster. If someone goes online to a bookstore they will see a simon and schuster imprint but might see others owned by simon and schuster, correct . Guest right. The idea is you want to have people passionate about the books and advocating the book so Publishing Houses are broken into smaller groups often. Within each house there is numerous imprints and divisions and they are all putting their Energy Behind the project they are the most excited about. Host one of the big books for simon and schuster is Hilary Clintons book. What has been your role in that process . Guest Hilary Clinton has been a simon and schuster author for 18 years now. And the cceo acquired her first book many years ago and that was it takes a village. We are publishing hard choices with us. It is her fourth book with us. I was the editor and working closely with all of the people at the company. Host as the editor, is there a lot of emails back and forth between you and the author . Is that how it is done . Guest every case is different. I tried to give just as much attention to secretary clintons books to the other books. We are publishing james web who is a terrific United States senator. I dont want to favor one author over another. Host at what point do you as publisher get involved in acquiring a book . Is that your role as well . Guest the editors come to me and say they want to sign up a book and have a justification. If they want to do that and others are equally excited we usually make an offer. Host what is an advance . Guest an advance is the amount of money an author gets paid before pub allilishing the. Host and that is paid by the simon and Schuster Company . Guest yes, they pay that upfront. Host and recoops it . Guest we hope to recoop it but only a small percentage of books turn out to be profit. We advance the money and sometimes it comes back and sometimes it doesnt. Host overall how would you describe the health of the Publishing Industry . Guest the state of the union is strong. We are publishing successfully and publishers are doing well. Host why is that . Guest because people read and always have and always will. There are changes going on in the industry in terms of the Digital Publishing but it still seems to be a case people want to hear a story and are willing to pay for it. As long as there are good writers who can tell the story in a dramatic way the publishers are find. Host are the oysters and scribes and amazons helpful . Guest right now they are. I am trying to find ways to attract attention to the books. I am concerned about the video on demand everywhere because that is a serious form of competition. I hope people want to continue to read when they can absorb information and entertainment in graphical ways. Host you see video as a competition . Guest sure. If you are on a train or plane you will see people with tablet said and many maybe watching t netflix instead of reading a novel. Publishing has been a rare form of communication and i think that is still the case. The question is whether we can make books known and have them be discovered as effectively as we have in the past when bookstores are a diminished presence in the culture and people may not be aware of books in the past. The other thing that changed is when so much is available instantly very little seems to be rare or special anymore. It used to be that when someone wrote a new novel it was an event. It or a new album was a major occasion. And now everything is available. It definitely does make it harder to get people excited about things. The good thing is that of course books are much easier to get now. Distribution is omni presence. Host what is the normal timeframe of working on a book . You hear about, publication date is that six months or two years and that includes the writing part. Guest my opinion, which i would probably be challenged on, is that it is hard to write a great book in a year. I think you can write a really good book in a year or if you are writing with a reoccurring character it can be done because you know the characters and the settings. I think it takes about 18 months to write a book that has an authority to it and really, really outstanding books can take longer and many years. We published a book called big fat supplies and it is a about nutritional science flaws and that was about ten years in the work. Another book on america in the 1970s the invisible bridge and that was five years in the works. Host was it scheduled for five years . Guest absolutely. Host is on demand printing easier today . Guest that is another thing. It is true we can make books available on demand. Jason epistein, a colleague of mine, started a company with on demand printers in the independent book sellers. If you want to get a book you can get it within hours if you want. Publishers like simon and schuster are able to make paper backs on demand easily and you can have them in a couple days. Host what percentage of books are physical books as opposed to ebooks . Guest that is a great question. I can tell you that right now in terms of the percentage of books we sell the fiction can be 50 ebooks and 50 physical books of the same file. The book is available in the same formats. The nonfiction skews toward the printed physical book and 70 of those sold are actually print said. In terms of books only in the eformat that information isnt known widely because it is amazon who has a lot of that information and hasnt made it public. So i dont know how many ebooks they publish. Host how important is the International Markets . Guest it is growing. And that is an interesting area of opportunity for us because what is happening is people all over the world read in english. So they can buy our books digitally in english and we dont have to distribute them physically. There is an opportunity for growth in china and india where a lot read in english. Host can you give us an example of a suggestion you made to an author as the authors editor . Fiction or nonfiction. Guest it is probably obvious. One of the things you tell them is not to worry about having every detail in there. I realize something simple and profound. I have been in publishing for 25 years and i dont think anyone has ever complained to me about a book being too short. Host who owns simon and schuster and how many imprints do you have . Guest we are owned by cbs. The only publishing part of that corporation. We do a lot of work with them supporting of their Television Productions in term of tieins but we do a lot with local stations and radio and television stations in advertising and getting word of the authors out there. There is a lot of work we do with them. We have seven adult imprints. There is more than that. But some of them are in imprints. And we have seven childrens imprints, too. And the reason you have so many imprint is what an imprint is within simon and schuster is a group with its own publisher, publicity and editorial and marketing department. Publishing is a very people intensive business. You have to read the book and you have to know and define what that book is in order to define the audience that you want to find for it. You then have to everything about it. The design, the jacket, the publicity plan and whether the author will or wont go out and what kind of Online Marketing you can do those all need to be answered by people. They only have so many hours in a day so you have multiple imprints because some publishers have different strengths so the list form a personality of their own. The scribble imprint has different publishing than simon and schuster and more than gallery. The adult ones are those. And we have children ones that focus on young adults and some focus on picture books. They have the personality of the publisher and that means that publisher achoired that book acquired that book because they had a vision of how to publish it. It is as a hands on business. It is often said the assets of the Publishing House walk out the door. Other than the author contracts that is all you have. Host how do you aquer acquire a book . Guest there are millions of ways. One that is not talked about a lot is coming up with an idea and trying to find the perfect writer and the person whose passion for the idea matches yours. And that is one way you can make a book happen. Another way is you make sure to talk to agents as much as possible to see what kind of project they are excited about. And then you raise your hands and hope they will send you a good proposal. Sometimes you cultivate just authors you adore and plant ideas with them and hope that over time they come up with a project that they want to spend 510 years and make a great book out of. Host have you read a newspaper article or Magazine Article and said that could be a book . Guest yes. I read an article ten years ago about how in the future, in the early 21st century more households in america will be supported by women and that is a giant flop change. It made me want to explore the implications of that and men and woman, marriages, raising children, love, courtship and i got a great book out of it. Host what was the book . Guest it was called the richer sex. It was written by a washington journal reporter. It generated it landed on the cover of Time Magazine and generated a huge conversation about how do we all need to adjust our lives to this economic new reality and is this good for men and women . I think we were in the camp of yes, anything that makes a couple stronger and live up to their potential is a good thing. Host one of the authors or pair of authors you work with were nancy gibs and Michael Duffy. What was the process of working on the president s glub with gibbs and duffy. Guest i wish i could say i came up with that idea but i didnt. Nancy and michael had been working on that for quite shh some time. The idea came after they wrote a book on billy graham and realized the degree to which president s talk to the expresident s and how much that club helped shape the presidency itself. And that is what gave them ideas to explore the president s club in a thorough way. It was a modern idea of understanding the president s because we had to get to the 21st century for them to be enough longevity and for practical reasons for this to be possible. What they found was that precedencies were made stronger. Sometimes challenged by people inside this club. And what was interesting about it was that you had over a dozen characters all of whom who had ships with each other going toward the past and toward the future. So the challenge in editing this book was how to structure it. You have look at how the book is built we have an introduction to key partnerships along the way. It helps the reader keep tract of who the characters are and it helps them move along chronlogically while honoring history and the relationships as they happen. Host so give so they wrote it but what was your role . What part did you play . Guest my role was to structure the book and give it an architecture that makes it accessible and easy for the reader to absorb so they forget there are all these multiple characters on stage at once and they can see it and not feel overwhelmed by it. My role was to cut something that a big believer in and i think if you are born as an editor there is a chance your readers will be, too. My role was to make sure some of the inside knowledge they had was made transparent to the reader so they knew where things came from and how to read them. But when you have authors as talented as nancy and michael you get up in the morning and skip to work. Host what is your editing process . What did you do when you got the manuscript . Guest it came in sessions sections the first thing you do is heave the office. You have to lock yourself somewhere else and emerse yourself in the book. And there was times when i would leave the book and go out and get dinner. And i would want to run back and get back into it. That is watt what you want. You want to sneak into the story. We can give it back to them so they can look at the notes and absorb them as they would on their own terms. Host another author you work with is karl rove. Did he chose you . Did he chose you . Guest i had audition for it. I was a journalist for 30 years. And he asked about the stories i covered. It worked. Host is it different working with a personality like that than it is working maybe with nancy gibbs and Michael Duffy who are not as well known . Guest no, i think every writer has to put themselves on the page. So the process is a process by definition that makes writers feel vulnerable. And the job of the editor is to protect them and make them feel comfortable with what they are saying. One of the first conversations i had with karl was no, you cannot start the book at age 30. You have to start the book with a lot of the pain of your childhood including your mothers suicide, your father leaving the home, you finding out later your father wasnt your father, you learning to meet your real father. All of those issues have to be on the page as difficult as they are to talk about because they are part of what made you you and if this is going to be a o biography it needs to be there. And he said when he gets stopped by readers they bring up the childhood stuff because they had experiences like his and that is one way you make a personality that seems to be on stage more accessible to people. Host priscilla painton, do you work on the nonfiction political books because of your background . Guest yes, i work only nonfiction and some of the books not somuch political as they are works of journalism. A book on afghanistan, veterans, or the industry of meat that is now an al. And a lot of these people dig into the issues we face and try to make them readable and something someone would want to pay for and spend a lot of time with. Host how big is simon and schuster . Guest revenue of 800 Million Dollars approximately. Host how many books is that . Guest 8 billion books were sold and shipped out. Host watt are the largest retailers you work with . Guest barnes and noble is the biggest and books a million that is based in the south and Hastings Book and music is in the south based out of amarillo, texas. And i work with the independent book sellers across the country and they are doing fabiouloufab. Host what about costco and walmart . Guest the mass sellers fall into another group. Host do they read a book and say we want that many copies or how does that work . Guest we go in with a list of suggested reading and the sales reps are fabulous that in the account they note the book sellers at the account and the book sellers are great at getting the list. They read and the excitement build and they send quotes and it starts rolling from there. That is how we get them excited about it. Host with the advent of digital reading and costcos and other big boxes the significance of the book stores the same . Guest the independent bookstore has been making a point to address the community with Community Outreach that American Express does. Shop local movement has really taught their customer if you dont support us we will not be here anymore. So they are so creative in getting their customers into the their bookstore and the way they merchandise and they Read Everything so when they recommend a book to you they know what they are talking about. They have been doing well because of that. They are focusing on the community really hard. Host does the size of a retailer can barnes and noble affect the marketing of a book . Guest absolutely. They have 680 locations and their website has millions of customers so absolutely. Host how did you get into this business . Guest i started at random house as an assistant right out of college. Always in sales and the retail side of the business. Host does walter isaac or Hilary Clinton automatically get orders . Guest absolutely. Host what kind of Marketing Strategy knows into selling the book . Guest with isaacson he is his best supporter because he is a great story teller. He has come into the office to speak with some of the barner e and noble book sellers and he helps us. Host how do you sell a firsttime author to a book sell . Guest it is all in the read. We try to read it and the pa package plays a big part. The seller looks at it and if they think their customer will respond that plays a big part as well as the marketing and the reviews we have lined up. And it the author is touring that helps. Host what percentage of revenue is from digital as opposed guest it depends it is approximately 2830 percent but it can be as high as 70 . So the figures reported by the press dont give a true picture of the way certain types of writing have moved into the digital word and others havent. Host what are the 70 . Guest commercial fiction is largely digital. But it can be literary novel. Fictional is way more likely to be digital. You dont have to go anywhere or do anything to read it. We have found commercial and also memoir. I believe that is because it reads like fiction with linear and starting at the beginning and go to the end and not a lot of referring back. The ones that are least digital other than Childrens Book