BESTSELLERS & BEST FRIENDS
My book publishing blog, with murder mysteries woven through it.
If this is your first visit, be sure to start with “1. Let’s do it!”
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It sucks to be the marketing guy at a publishing house.
I could never do enough, always being yelled at about books published two years ago, a week ago, next week and six months out. Editors, sales reps, agents, authors, the mailroom, always yelling at me. “These plans are embarrassing! I worked a lifetime on this book! You used the wrong label!”
At Little Brown I was truly burned out.
We had just published Tracy Kidder’s huge bestseller, The Soul of a New Machine. Clearly, technology was the future. And I lived and worked within Route 128 – “American’s Technology Highway.”
So I quit my job, got a headhunter, and chased after my digital dream.
My first interview was with a tech company headquartered in one of those one-story office park buildings with a big parking lot and lots of grass.
The company had a timecards technology.
Back in the day, workers punched in and punched out. Payroll staff then collected the cards weekly, and manually entered the information. But instead, this company had the technology to make the timecards information directly feed (by some digital miracle) to payroll. They needed somebody to market that product. I might be that guy!
I wore a suit, carried a brand-new briefcase, and interviewed in the most boring office with the most boring guy in the world. It was awful. I was sweating, feeling claustrophobic, and thinking, “What the hell have I done?!”
The guy went to check if his boss wanted to meet with me. “Hold on,” he slipped out of his office.
I looked out the open window—it was just two feet off the ground—across the grass to the parking lot, where I could see my car.
I went out the window.
At first, I casually walked toward my car. Just in case anybody was watching and saw me in my suit with my briefcase climb out of a window, they’d know it was a perfectly normal thing to do. Then I started to walk more quickly. What if that guy was back in his office? What if his boss was with him? Then I walked even faster. Were they looking for me under his desk or in his closet? What if they saw me rushing across the grass?
An hour later the headhunter called me at home. He was pissed. Really pissed. He screamed at me, using the F-word in all sorts of ways. It was like being back at Little Brown.
Tomorrow: Back to Ligonier