The Client from Hell: And Other Publishing Satires
()
About this ebook
Richard Curtis
Richard Curtis, president and CEO of Richard Curtis Associates, Inc., is a leading New York literary agent and a well-known author advocate. He is also the author of numerous works of fiction and nonfiction, including several books about the publishing industry. A pioneer in the field of digital technology, he created and founded E‑Reads, the first independent ebook publisher. Please visit Publishing in the Twenty‑First Century, his popular blog on the book industry, at www.curtisagency.com/blog.
Read more from Richard Curtis
How To Be Your Own Literary Agent: An Insider's Guide to Getting Your Book Published Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Mastering the Business of Writing: A Leading Literary Agent Reveals the Secrets of Success Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This Business of Publishing Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5How to Prosper in the Coming Apocalypse Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsOdysseus II: The Journey Through Hell Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Odysseus: The Greatest Hero of Them All Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Theseus: The King Who Killed the Minotaur Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Related to The Client from Hell
Related ebooks
Stet: An Editor's Life Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Club of Queer Trades Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Journalist's Note-Book Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Tin Men Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Club of Queer Trades Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Spirit of the People by Ford Madox Ford - Delphi Classics (Illustrated) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsFloating Off the Page: The Best Stories from The Wall Street Journal's "M Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5About London Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Printer and The Strumpet: The Misadventures of Leeds Merriweather, #2 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAbominations: Selected Essays from a Career of Courting Self-Destruction Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Everything's Eventual: 14 Dark Tales Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Life & Other Passing Moments Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsJustice in the By-Ways, a Tale of Life Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsIf You Don't Write Fiction Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Struggles of Brown, Jones, and Robinson: By One of the Firm Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBig Deal: A Year as a Professional Poker Player Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5One Brown Girl and 1/4 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Circus, and Other Essays and Fugitive Pieces Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Candy Men: The Rollicking Life and Times of the Notorious Novel Candy Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Romany Rye a sequel to "Lavengro" Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Deputy Prime Minister Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSexually, I'm More of a Switzerland: More Personal Ads from the London Review of Books Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 99, July 5, 1890 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsJustice in the By-Ways: A Tale of Life Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsGrub Street: The Origins of the British Press Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHail to the Fraud: mposters and Cheats, Fakes and Hoaxes, Politicians and False Elections Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSingle & Single: A Novel Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5A History of Pendennis, Volume 1: His fortunes and misfortunes, his friends and his greatest enemy Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBook Deal Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5
Satire For You
Candy Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Heart of a Dog Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Utopia Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Captain is Out to Lunch Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Little Old Lady Who Broke All the Rules: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Dog's Heart Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Line to Kill: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Going Postal Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Bone Palace Ballet Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Faggots Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5House of Cards Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5As I Lay Dying Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Utterly Uninteresting and Unadventurous Tales of Fred, the Vampire Accountant Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Between the Bridge and the River: A Novel Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Lawyering By Dummies Student Expanded Edition Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Mash: A Novel About Three Army Doctors Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Crimson Petal and the White: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Out of Oz: The Final Volume in the Wicked Years Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Five People You Meet in Hell: An Unauthorized Parody Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Closing Time: The Sequel to Catch-22 Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Futurological Congress Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Black Buck: A Read with Jenna Pick Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2047 Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Clown Brigade Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Only Living Girl on Earth Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Bonfire of the Vanities: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Dice Man: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The White Boy Shuffle: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Life and Loves of a She Devil: A Novel Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/51900: Or; The Last President Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Reviews for The Client from Hell
0 ratings0 reviews
Book preview
The Client from Hell - Richard Curtis
For my wife Leslie,
the smartest publishing person I know
Preface
Writing is extremely hard work, and writing funny is one of the hardest kinds of writing there is. The world is such a tragic place that it does not, it seems to me, require great creativity to depict its misery; any good journalist can do it. But to show it as silly against all evidence to the contrary — oh, that is very hard to do. For that reason, of all the things I have had published I am proudest of my humor.
I produced a lot of it when I was a full-time professional writer, and I enjoyed some gratifying successes. Several humor pieces appeared in Playboy, garnering a couple of the magazine’s annual awards in the Best Satire category. As evidence I submit two foot-high lucite monoliths in which are embedded silver bunny medallions engraved with my name. They serve as bookends in my office.
The exigencies of starting my literary agency compelled me to stop writing, however, and that’s how it stood until I began writing a column for Charles Brown’s science fiction trade publication, Locus. The subject of my column was the publishing business.
Those of us who toil in that trade don’t always have either the opportunity or the objectivity to see the comical aspects of what we do. For one seeking a dark view of our industry there is much confirmation: publishers gobbling each other up, dedicated editors summarily released from long-held jobs, an antique and horrifyingly wasteful system of distribution, books orphaned and ruined by corporate indifference, cruel inequities between a pampered handful of best-selling authors and a host of desperately underpaid and unappreciated ones — well, I could go on and on. And I did, chronicling these and other harsh realities in my column for twelve years.
As time went by, however, I achieved a bit of perspective, and began to see the ridiculous side of our enterprises. The world is indeed a tragic place, and if you take for your measure of tragedy such horrors as the destruction of the World Trade Center in the United States, mass starvation in Ethiopia, chemical genocide in Iran, murderous warfare in Israel, and floods in Bangladesh, then the horrors of orphaned books, underpromoted authors, and bankrupt publishers do seem petty, pathetic, and preposterous by comparison.
Besides, even at their most earnest, authors and publishing people are very funny. Maybe that is because we consider ourselves descendants of Eighteenth Century wits, the bearers of the torch of reason that illuminates human folly. Or maybe it’s because the dispositions of writers and editors are, more often than not, sunny. And why should they not be? Compared to workers in most other fields, publishing people have it pretty easy. As for authors, though they are an oppressed class, you only have to hold their oppression up against that of South African miners or Mexican farm laborers to keep things in proportion.
Most of the lampoons in this book were originally published in Locus. I am grateful to Charles Brown for tolerating their appearance in its pages, as he told me on more than one occasion that he did not feel his publication is the appropriate forum for satire.
As for the poems, toward the end of 1986, the phenomenon of editorial job-hopping in the publishing industry reached such a frenzied state that I was compelled to pen a few score lines of good-humored Iambic tetrameter about it. These were accepted by Publishers Weekly, the magazine of the publishing trade — in large measure, I believe, because they included the only known rhyme with the name of the then-Bantam executive, Lou Aronica. After the first one, and for several years thereafter, PW editor John Baker called me every autumn requesting another. He seemed to be under the impression that poetic inspiration is seasonally guaranteed, like the running of maple sap. Luckily, the turbulence of the publishing world proved to be unending, and as long as publishers went on devouring each other or playing musical chairs or overpaying for dreadful books, I endeavored to rise to the challenge of setting it all forth in rhyme.
Fair reader, you are well advised not to linger over the specific names of the personalities who populate these poems. Instead, read them for the gist, as you might read a Milton poem laden with classical references. (Not that I would presume to compare myself to Milton, unless you mean the late television comedian Milton Berle.) In fact, the faster you read the poems, the more you will appreciate the frenetic madness of the last decade. I will, however, be happy to annotate the names for scholars sifting through the midden of that once-great civilization known as book publishing.
On the Decline of Western Literature
Why aren’t good books published anymore? Critics know when the last good book was published (1978) but they simply do not know why. Some say the answer lies in the eclipsing of creativity by television. Others say that the flower of our youth was decimated by war, drugs, and general messing around. Still others attribute the problem to the siphoning off of literary talent by the advertising business, and still others blame our teachers. None of this is true.
The answer is simply that editors no longer work.
Shocking though this statement may seem at first, it has been amply demonstrated in a recent exit survey undertaken by a literary agent outside the Grill Room of the Four Seasons, who offers the following data:
How Editors Spend Their Time Per Year
Total number of days in year: 365
From which are subtracted:
Weekend days: -104
Legal and religious holidays: -20
Thursdays, Fridays, and Mondays taken off for long holiday weekends: -18
Vacation days, not including weekends: -15
Fridays during summer, Memorial Day through Labor day: -14
Jury duty: -10
Preparation for Book Expo America Convention: -5
American Booksellers Association: -5
Recovery from American Booksellers Association: -5
Preparation for Frankfurt Book Fair: -5
Preparation for, attendance and recovery from Jerusalem, Canadian, Third World, Latin American, Moscow Copyright and other fairs and conventions: -50
Business trips to London, Milan, Paris, and the Coast: -30
Preparation for, attendance, and recovery from two semiannual sales conferences: -30
Illness: -10
Personal emergencies: -5
Funerals: -3
Total days out of office annually: 319
Leaving:
Total days actually at office: 46
We have demonstrated that editors actually spend only 46 days out of any given year (except Leap Year) working in their offices. But — do they really work there? A second survey, this one a poll of 487 former editors-in-chief of major publishing companies, taken at the Midtown branch of the New York State Unemployment Office and the