The other was a blowup of the cover of Arundhati Roy’s first novel, The God of Small Things-a pink water lily floating above a green leaf, very possibly the most beautifully balanced book jacket of all time.
One was a photograph of Audrey Hepburn in a black cocktail dress, talking to Humphrey Bogart backstage on the set of Sabrina. Jane Beirn had two poster-sized pictures propped up on the windowsill of her office at HarperCollins, this back when Harper was still on East 53rd Street.
I’ve had a truly great publicist for 22 years, and last week she announced her retirement. In the publishing business, you’re going to need a great publicist, or you’re sunk. Without a publicist, no one will ever know you wrote a book, and if no one knows you wrote it, no one is going to buy it and no one is going to read it. So it isn’t until your agent has sold your finished novel to an editor that it dawns on you that the whole business actually hangs on the publicist. As thrilled as you are when an agent agrees to sign you, you then understand that the agent has to find an editor who wants to buy it.
But if you do finish, you realize you need an agent who can sell it for you. When you start writing a novel, you think that everything will be fine if only you can finish writing it.
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