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An interview with Jean Feiwel.

Article Excerpt
Jean Feiwel is senior vice president and publisher of Feiwel and Friends and Square Fish Books, both imprints of Macmillan. In more than thirty eventful years as a savvy innovator at the front lines of children's book publishing, Feiwel has had ample time to reflect on the trouble with publishing, as well as its rewards, and to consider what might be next for the industry.

LEONARD S. MARCUS: YOU began your career in 1976 at Avon Books. Did you set out to work in paperback publishing?

JEAN FEIWEL: No, it was totally random. Throughout high school and while I was an undergraduate at Sarah Lawrence, where I majored in women's history, I worked at the Whitney Museum and thought I wanted to be an art curator. Then in my senior year I realized I wanted to try something else. A friend in my writing class had all sorts of publishing contacts, among them the managing editor at Avon. I had an interview, failed the typing test, and was hired anyway. The editor, now my new boss, said: "You better learn to type."

LSM: Did you see yourself as a business person?

JF: No! My college friend had always given me her writing assignments to critique, and when she saw that I was good at it she said, "You should be an editor." For me the initial appeal of publishing had more to do with the fact that I liked books and reading. After a year of working for the managing editor, I knew I wanted to get into editorial, and the first job opening was in children's books. My mother had been a teacher and I had worked with children in various ways, but I hadn't identified children's books as an area of special interest. I simply applied for the children's editorial assistant's job. The editor above me was fired after three months, and I was promoted.

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LSM: Avon was a glamour house, wasn't it--a far cry, certainly, from, way, Viking Junior Books.

JF: I had no idea what I was walking into at Avon. Because Avon was essentially a reprint house--though one that was also known for its paperback originals--I was introduced to many hardcover publishing people. It was a great company, led by editor in chief Bob Wyatt and by Nancy Coffey--passionate entrepreneurial publishers who were totally devoted to whatever they did, whether it was the reprinting of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude or of Colleen McCullough's The Thorn Birds.

Avon was new to children's books. The company didn't know what it wanted to do in that area and was willing to take a chance on me. Every conversation was about how much money we were going to spend to acquire rights, and there were lots of auctions, and we always looked at a P&L [profit and loss statement]. Even so, the business side of it was not the main focus of my upbringing there. I met some of the great writers from my vantage point at Avon--Katherine Paterson, for instance. While Joanna Cotler was working for me at Avon we acquired Louis Sachar, Ellen Emerson White, Joyce Carol Thomas--many of the authors we continued to publish over the years. Because business was good, there wasn't a whole lot of accountability.

LSM: What were your first impressions of the more traditional side of children's book publishing?

JF: When I started, there was still a big gulf between paperback and hardcover publishing. Houses generally did one or the other. The paperback world was about selling books, whereas the hardcover publishers I met were much more about building authors. At Avon we did do original paperback publishing, too, because as I mentioned original paperbacks were a hallmark of the Avon adult list. It was possible by then to get review attention for a paperback original and for such a book to be seen as worthy. I published Joyce Carol Thomas's Marked by Fire as a paperback original, and George Woods at the New York Times Book Review reviewed it. Woods was an iconoclast and could be very supportive.

Paperbacks by then were well established in children's book publishing and for schools and libraries. The battle had been won. Schools and libraries wanted them because they were cheaper and because quality authors were being published in quality paperback format.

LSM: Were schools and libraries your primary market?

JF: No. It was B. Dalton, which had recently emerged as a force to contend with. Early on in my time at Avon, I started going out to Minneapolis and meeting the children's buyers at Dalton, who bought for the entire national chain. We would talk about Christmas...

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