The Publishing Contrarian

The hiring of George L. Jones amazes me. What a smart move to bring in someone with such an action-packed, diverse background. Unless he’s been blowing his entire paycheck on clothes at Saks Fifth Avenue every Saturday, I know he didn’t take the job just for the money. (According to Salary.com, his total package last year alone from Saks Department Store Group was, gasp, $2,286,695!) So he’s accepted the challenge of trying to turn Borders Group around. Is it possible he is not afraid of new ideas that involve the pain of doing things d.i.f.f.e.r.e.n.t.l.y? I’m thinking he might just be riding into Borders and Walden Books on a white horse, six-guns holstered right now, but capable of making a lot of people “start dancin’.”

He’s from Arkansas, which for a girl from Connecticut, is impossible to find on the map (yet another state somewhere on the other side of the Delaware), but he has made his friends and enemies as President of Worldwide Licensing and Retail for Warner Bros. and by overseeing Warner Bros. Worldwide Publishing, Kids WB Music, Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment, WB Sports and Warner Bros. Studio Stores. He was also Executive VP-Store Operations and Sr. VP-Merchandising at Target.

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There was a slightly different cast of characters in the multiplex Chelsea Cinema in New York City this weekend when I plopped down in a leg-stretching aisle seat to see The Devil Wears Prada. Usually the seats are 95% empty at the 11:30 a.m. show, but yesterday there was a clutch of girly men and the fashion-conscious and moi all sharing the theater with my early bird buddies—the snoring, wind-breaking, mumbling senior citizens escaping the stifling heat of their unair-conditioned, rent controlled apartments. I, too, just love the blast of icy air that blows my hair straight back when I wrench open the doors to the entrance of the movie theater. Nothing I like better than seeing my breath in the frosty air of a movie theatre and having ice particles form on the tips of my eyelashes in July. Pass the coke, popcorn and forbidden candy bars!

The Devil Wears Prada was the first novel written by 26-year-old Lauren Weisberger. Whew! What a stir that book and now the movie have caused. The movie is such a hoot because it caricatures Anna Wintour, Editor-in-Chief of Vogue. Miranda Priestly, the character Meryl Streep plays, is so awful, she’s wonderful. Weisberger’s brief (though it may have seemed quite LONG at the time!) employment as an “insider” fetching lattes for Wintour (sometime from 1999 to 2000) gave Weisberger a one-way, do-not-pass-go, ticket to a literary agent and book contract with Doubleday. So quickly did Weisberger pound out The Devil Wears Prada that Doubleday got it edited, printed and distributed to bookstores in 2003. You’ve just got to know Weisberger wrote in a fury and probably an indignant rage from the moment her “clacker”-self hit the pavement, either ceremoniously or unceremoniously. (Was she fired or marginalized until she quit? I don’t know.)

What does Weisberger’s experience placing a book tell you about how to get published quickly and smoothly?

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