Hey readers, I know its been a while and I promised you content, so here it is in spades. This is part 1 of 2 of an interview I conducted with Lee Boudreaux, editorial director for Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins. The edited Q&A was 5 pages long, and the actual interview went for probably twice that.
Now, I told you that story to tell you this one: I am published online again. This time it is an event coverage I wrote on the Westboro Baptist Protest at Virginia Tech in April. It is published on Planet Blacksburg. Feel free to check it out!
Now, for the interview:
Lee Boudreaux is a fiction editor in New York. In 15 years she has climbed the publishing ladder, from being an unpaid intern at Longstreet Press, to being an assistant editor, to being a senior director at Random House, one of the largest publishing houses in the world.
She currently works for the HarperCollins imprint Ecco Publishing as its editorial director. An imprint is a smaller division of a larger publishing firm. It is usually a smaller publishing house that is absorbed by a larger one.
Boudreaux has helped to publish novels by several noted authors such as Adriana Trigiani, Stephen King and David Wroblewski, author of the recent bestseller “The Story of Edgar Sawtelle”.
Here, Lee Boudreaux explains what got her into the publishing business, what that business consists of, and why you have to love the job in order to stay dedicated to it.
What follows is an edited selection of a Q&A with Lee Boudreaux.
Q: When you graduated from William and Mary in 1990, did you know you wanted to enter into the publishing world?
Boudreaux: It…No. I didn’t. I was an English and government double major, and I thought I was majoring in English because that’s just what I loved, and the government was somehow going to be the more practical of the two, I guess I thought I might end up in Washington doing something, sort of…I don’t know what I thought it would be, really (laughs). I mean, publishing would have been a dream but I didn’t know anything about it, I didn’t know how you got a job in New York, I didn’t know how you just packed your bags an move up here and found a place to live and found a job, I didn’t know anyone who worked in publishing, I didn’t know anyone who had ever lived in New York, probably.
My mother happened to be old college roommates with somebody who was an author, I think I did write her a letter at one point and just ask a bunch of totally stupid questions and she very sweetly wrote me this eight page response trying to fill in what she knew as an author, and then it took me a couple years to figure out how to get to New York. I actually did this thing called the Radcliffe Publishing Course, now it’s called the Columbia Publishing Course, which was this six week program in book and magazine publishing, but I was out of school for probably, gosh, three or four years before I even discovered that.
Q: So, after you took the Columbia Publishing Course, that’s when it clicked for you?
Boudreaux: It did. I was working as a paralegal in Richmond, Va, right out of college, and then I moved to Atlanta and worked for a very small publishing company called Longstreet Press and worked at a bookstore, thinking I was getting my feet wet, and I didn’t know what it was going to turn into. Then I heard about the Radcliffe course, and I applied and I went, and I thought, well, I’ll go back to Longstreet, and they’ll hire me full time instead of, I think I was like an unpaid intern for the year I was down there, and then worked at the bookstore. I think I worked at Longstreet at 9 in the morning until noon every day for free, and then I worked at the bookstore from 2 o’clock in the afternoon till 11 p.m., and then in my spare time actually, because book stores certainly don’t pay too much money and the Longstreet work was free, I summarized medical records and depositions for the law firm that I had worked for when I first got out of school. Everyone who worked anywhere in the south, their dream was to end up in Algonquin, which was a terrific small publisher. But, obviously, jobs were not going to be opening up there all the time, so we were all going to be sitting there in Georgia waiting for somebody at Algonquin to drop (chuckles), so we could get the job of our dreams.
So, I went to the Radcliffe Course, thinking I was going back to Georgia, went back, and about a month later I said “You know, I have got to take a stab at New York. I now know these 90 other people who went to the Radcliffe Course, they’ve all got entry level jobs in publishing, I know these three people who are living in a house in Brooklyn, they say they’ve got an extra room if I want to move up there and give it a try, I’ve got to go for at least a year”. And I honestly thought I’d be here [New York] for a year or two. I got on the train with two suitcases, and I slept on the floor in this house in Brooklyn for six months (laughs), and I got somebody to sell my car for me, back in Virginia, and I finally got a job. And again, I thought I would be an editorial assistant and go back to Georgia, or maybe my dream job at Algonquin would open up at some point. And then, I just loved my boss and loved my job, and I moved with her from one publishing house to another, and stuck around for a couple years, and got promoted a couple times, and here it is 15 years later.
Q: And now you’re the Editorial Director for Ecco Publishing. Can you describe what you do as an Editorial Director?
Boudreaux: Well, the imprint I work for, Ecco, does about, I’d say 45 new hard covers a year. I only do fiction; I’d say my list is about 90% fiction 10% non-fiction. So my job, in a managing capacity, it’s over a very small list. The imprint is still headed by the person who founded it 36 years ago, so I don’t do a great deal of managing. I would say my job here is like a highlighted collegial position, I will read other people’s submissions, be it fiction or nonfiction, and weigh in with my opinion but my opinion is no more than the opinion of somebody with 15 years experience. I would not put it on a higher pedestal than that. I don’t have veto power over anyone else’s acquisition, I don’t want to be voting with that strong of a voice, I like just weighing in on things. I will weigh in on cover designs, of other people’s books, I will weigh in on balancing a list…by being at a small publisher, which is what I like, there isn’t as much managing to do as just participating in the pool of about, six or eight of us that comprise the whole imprint.
Q: You had to work your way up to being the Editorial Director, all through the different levels of an editor, did you like any particular one better than the rest, or were they all different beasts.
Boudreaux: You mean the sort of ‘rungs on the ladder’? Well, yeah, it starts: editorial assistant, then you get to be an assistant editor, and then you’re an associate editor, and then you’re a full editor, and then they start adding things on like executive editor, senior editor or what have you. Every step up the ladder it gets more fun. I mean, you start out and you do a lot of Xeroxing, you answer phones, and you read along with your boss, and if you’re lucky you have similar tastes to your boss, and if you’re lucky there’s a lot you can learn from your boss even if you don’t have similar tastes. But, if you hated and knew nothing about science books, and you ended up working on science books, it could either be very educational experience for you or you could totally blow it. I probably would have been terrible if I ever had to work on sports books, for example, I don’t know if I ever would have gotten the knack, so I was very lucky that I worked for a fiction editor as my first job, and then got to be a fiction editor.
So you work your way up and you get to acquire your own books and that’s very exciting, but it’s also exciting when you’re a young pup when you inherit some book, and it’s yours to take care of for the first time. You know, if your boss gets busier and busier you take on a bigger share of managing the authors you have, that can be incredibly exciting, because you’re essentially doing the job, learning how to do it, and when you get to launch on your own as a full editor you have a lot of experience and you can handle anything that comes along. So, every step of the ladder, it’s like getting through college, your senior year is a lot better than your freshman year (laughs). And thus it is in the professional world also, it’s kind of fun being a senior editor instead of being an assistant, but there are things you learn at every step of the way
It’s a long…low paying apprenticeship, so there is a long period of time when you’re living in New York and you’re not making much money. The publishing industry is not the most robust right now. When I went to the Radcliffe Course, 90 kids graduated every summer; they all got jobs. Now it takes months and months and months of incredibly hard work on the director’s part to get people hooked up with jobs.
You have to be really committed to the job. We had an intern one summer at Random House who said to me at the end of the summer “It dawned on me; I could be making more money anywhere else”. And I said, “You are surrounded by people who would be making more money doing their job anywhere else”. Book publishing is not where you go to get rich, as an author, as an agent, as an editor, as a salesman, as a publicist, none of it. But that means it is staffed completely by people who are committed to the idea of books, and getting them out there in the world to be read, and making those books as good as they can be, and making them reach as many people as they can. So it’s a great world to be in, but it is not for somebody who would just as soon be a lawyer in Kansas City.
The next part will follow in a couple of days. enjoy the new content!
