Lee Child, the Jack Reacher author, just signed on with a brand-new publishing house as an executive committee member. What he said about it is worth a minute of your time.
The house is called High Line. It was started last month by Neil Blair, the agent who represents J.K. Rowling. It has offices in London and New York. The books will be sold the usual way, through regular bookstores, with Hachette handling distribution. So this is not a self-publishing platform. It is a small new publisher inside the regular system.
They are starting with two labels. One, Odessa Editions, is for Jewish and Israeli fiction and nonfiction. The other, Antidote Books, is for nonfiction that looks at hard questions from more than one side. Their first books are planned for next fall.
Here is Lee Child, from their website:
“The world is in a ridiculous mess, and we won’t fix it by silencing people, ignoring ideas, or sticking to what we think we know. High Line aims to give a voice to those who need one… This is exactly what publishing should be doing.”
The person running the company put it even more simply: we exist to serve the writer, not the other way around.
A few thoughts:
This is not Lee Child quitting traditional publishing. He built his career inside it. Years ago he even argued that self-publishing was not going to replace the big houses. So read this as someone on the inside saying the job could be done better, not as someone burning the place down.
The line that matters for us is the one about serving the writer. A lot of you have felt the opposite. You send the book in. Then you wait. Somewhere in there, the book stops feeling like yours and starts feeling like it belongs to a meeting you were not invited to. The editing gets light. The help getting it in front of readers gets lighter, unless your name is already famous. If a new house is willing to say out loud that the writer is the point, that is worth noticing. It is also worth waiting to see whether the actual deals match the nice sentence.
The other line, about not shutting people up, is also of note. Publishers have always had to choose. They cannot print everything. The real question is whether the choosing has gotten so narrow that whole kinds of books, and whole kinds of writers, cannot find a door. A house willing to publish something that might annoy somebody is at least admitting a basic truth: books that only comfort the people already in the room are not doing their job.
Whoever publishes you, big house or small, should be able to say without squirming that they are there to serve the work. Real editing. A real plan for finding readers. Honesty about what they will and will not do. You can ask for that. And you can also walk away from a deal that cannot offer it.
Regardless of this news, keep writing the book that might bother someone, including you. Ask yourself the hard questions and go deep. Real art has the capacity to make us nervous, Susan Sontag said.
New houses can open all they want. None of them can write the manuscript. That part is still up to you. I’m cheering you on.
-Brandy
Read the news here: https://www.highlinepublishing.com/about https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/publisher-news/article/101223-agent-neil-blair-launches-high-line-publishing-studio.html