My parents were in the book business, my brothers still run the Dutton bookstores in Los Angeles, and I've been interested in editing books and journals all of my life.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
After a while, if you're a writer, you want to start appearing in the bookstores of the place you're living in.
I realized very young that I loved reading and wanted to do something related to books/reading for a living. I didn't think of publishing, really, until I was out of college.
I was a book editor for nine years. I'm familiar with the opposite experience, bracing myself for the likelihood that no one would want to publish my book.
I publish my own books, so there isn't a certain editor I owe the book to at a publishing house.
I'm very privy to the way bookstores work, and I think a lot about the ecosystem that my books have been published in. I think it's great to be aware of how publishing works.
When I was growing up, my house was filled with books. My mother was an educator, and my father was a history buff, so our home was a virtual library, covering every author from Beverly Cleary to James Michener.
My mum was a librarian, and she brought home a lot of interesting books, and we just read and read. I suppose I didn't really think I could be a writer myself until I was working in editing in my 20s and discovered that actually, the books that came in were not very much like published books.
I like to be surrounded by books. My wife Evelyn has a Ph.D. in comparative literature, so we have a lot of her Spanish and German literature books which are wasted on me, plus a lot of novels and books on art and architecture shared by us both. Evelyn used to edit an art magazine called 'FMR,' so we have a common interest in design.
I had a hard time publishing my books in the beginning of my career, because editors were afraid what people would think of THEM, personally, if their name was associated with me.
When I was growing up the publishing world seemed so far away. When my mother wrote a book, she would look up the address of publishers on the backs of the books she owned and send off her manuscript.