In January the media and publishing world was, in its endearingly self-absorbed way, abuzz over the firing of Ann Godoff as head of the Random House Trade Group—a story that The New York Times decided warranted not one, not two, but ten articles. The real reasons for the dismissal of Godoff, who is widely regarded as a highbrow publisher of prestigious books (if not entirely justifiably—last year she spent $3 million for the second book by the authors of The Nanny Diaries), are complex and ultimately unascertainable. But the literary community seized on the event as an occasion to further bewail the decline of what it calls "serious" publishing. Verlyn Klinkenborg's hysteria on the Times editorial page—"Publishing is now driven wholly by the search for blockbuster books and blockbuster profits"—was seconded by the hyperbole of Samuel Freedman, the associate dean of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism: "When a decades-long career like Godoff's can be terminated ... the chill runs through the corridors of all large publishing houses and into the home offices of thousands of serious writers." Well, that chill didn't extend to "all" publishers—Godoff soon accepted Penguin Putnam's offer to become the president and publisher of a new imprint created for her, specializing in "serious" (that word again) nonfiction.
More important, though, it is simply untrue that the number of worthwhile titles published has diminished with the consolidation of publishing houses, the popularity of the Oprah and Today Show Book Clubs, and the proliferation of such chain bookstores as Borders, Barnes & Noble, and Books-A-Million. As the editor of this section, I spend several days every month combing through thousands of titles; I'm astonished that so much literary fiction and what can only be described as decidedly noncommercial nonfiction issues from an industry supposedly obsessed with the bottom line—and that publishing houses pay such large advances for so many of these books. Indeed, although the Authors Guild, the Authors Guild Foundation, and the Open Society Institute commissioned a report that seemed designed to expose the supposed crisis in "midlist" publishing (the book-business term for literary fiction and serious nonfiction), the report in fact concluded in 2000 that midlist sales continue to grow (although not quite as fast as best-seller sales). "More midlist titles than ever before are available," it found, "from both large commercial publishers and small presses. More and more shelf space is devoted to selling them." This is of course obvious to anyone who browses in those loathed chain bookstores—which devote far more shelf and display space to literary than to pulp fiction, and which make special efforts to promote obscure titles and unknown authors. And don't forget that the distinction between "best-selling" and "midlist" is fluid. In the last two years, for example, two of the biggest fiction best sellers were Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections and Ian McEwan's Atonement, both indisputably literary. Surely publishers should not be faulted because of the good taste of the reading public.