Magazine vets seek brave new world in books
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And these days, more and more magazine editors want to be book editors.
Last week, former Outside and Men's Journal editor Mark Bryant announced he was joining HarperCollins as executive editor.
HarperCollins has a stable of refugees from the magazine and tabloid universe: Judith Regan, who has her own imprint and TV talk show, is a former reporter at the National Enquirer; erstwhile New Yorker editor Daniel Menaker is an executive editor; so is David Hirshey, who had a long stint at Esquire and a short stint at the New Yorker.
Simon & Schuster publisher David Rosenthal was managing editor at Rolling Stone and executive editor at New York magazine. And Knopf's new poetry editor, Deborah Garrison, comes from the New Yorker.
Harry Evans, who has been editor of the Sunday Times and Conde Nast Traveler, and publisher of Random House, is now editing a business book for Little, Brown.
There's a tendency in showbiz to think, if you're talented in one area, it's easy to make the leap to another. But such transitions tend to be rocky.
As one book editor put it, "A magazine editor worries about the big idea. They're worried about the magazine as a whole. A book editor has to invent it from scratch for every single book."
Sarah Crichton, an editor at Newsweek before becoming publisher of Little, Brown, is one of several magazine editors to dip their toe in book publishing and come scurrying back. She's now co-writing the memoirs of Sen. Joe and Hadassah Lieberman.
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Even seasoned magazine editors may find it daunting to sustain a reader's interest over 200 pages or more. At Esquire, Hirshey said, he was editing stories that were 5,000 to 10,000 words. "Multiply that by 20 and you realize you have to build up some new editing muscles."
Then there's the glacial pace of book production. "At a magazine," Hirshey said, "you can turn a piece around in a few hours. In book publishing, when you say, 'This one's a quickie,' you generally mean a year."
But the magazine industry downturn has made publishing more appealing for magazine editors bounced from their jobs. As magazines grow more reliant on photo-friendly, soundbyte-driven news coverage, book publishing has also become one of the few outlets for editors interested in detailed, high-caliber reportage.
As Bryant told the Web news service, Publishers Lunch, "This is really an opportunity to work with long-form journalism again. You don't see that being practiced – or being practiced well – at a lot of magazines."
Book editors have long turned to magazines for ideas and talent, and lately there's been a rash of sales of books by magazine editors.
Outgoing New Yorker fiction editor Bill Buford just sold three books to Knopf; frequent Vanity Fair and GQ contributor David Kamp sold "Sun-Dried, Cold-Pressed, Dark-Roasted and Extra Virgin" to Broadway Books; David Rothbart, editor of Found magazine and subject of a Talk of the Town piece in the current New Yorker, sold "Found: The Best Lost, Tossed and Forgotten Items From Around the World" to Touchstone Fireside. Simon & Schuster will soon publish "The Deed," a novel by Maxim editor-in-chief Keith Blanchard.
And Simon & Schuster editor at large Rob Weisbach just acquired a book from Esquire editor A.J. Jacobs called "The Know It All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Guy In the World."
Jacobs' book, which will chronicle his experience reading the Encyclopedia Brittanica front to back, will be peppered with trivia, but the author was careful to point out that the finished product will far more complex than a magazine article.
"You need a long narrative arc," he said. Jacobs plans a number of detours from his close readings of the Encyclopedia. He'll also try out for "Jeopardy" and interview the woman with the highest IQ in the world.
Jacobs, who's also written for TV, said his jobs in different media have been instructive. "Magazines teach you to think as commercially as possible and to be punchy and keep the energy up," he said.
But no editor is quite as freewheeling as former Kiss frontman Gene Simmons. Several months after launching a new magazine, Gene Simmons' Tongue, the former Yeshiva student from Brooklyn is set to unveil his own publishing imprint, Simmons Books.
Early next year, he'll self-publish a book called "Buy This" and an audio version of "Kiss and Make-Up," a memoir that Crown issued in hardcover in December.
