Ithaca (11 page)

On the morning of the board meeting he still has nothing to show for his efforts of the past few days in terms of workable
ideas for big books. All the major agents in London that he has talked to tell him that there is nothing big in the UK and the Commonwealth that hasn’t already been snapped up. The scouts are reporting the same thing from the States.

The mood in the boardroom is somber. As Gabrijela takes them through every aspect of the crisis they are facing Zach realizes that the situation is graver than he had realized. Ever since he was appointed to the board, he has dutifully attended all the meetings but he has been guilty of not paying attention to anything that does not have to do with the editorial aspects of the business. This time he listens closely to his boss’s doom-laden review. During the company’s best years from 2005 to 2007 they paid off their debt to the bank, doubled the size of the domestic publishing program, bought the new office building in London, acquired a small company in the US that they hoped would form the nucleus of Litmus’s American business, and declared handsome dividends. In 2008, they started a tiny two-person operation in India, and this year they are intending to open an office in Singapore. The hardback of
Angels Falling
and the Seppi backlist and specials were expected to pay for all this; unfortunately it turns out they were too aggressive with their forecast for the company’s revenue and profits. Although
Angels Falling
exceeded its initial budget in terms of sales, they were left with too much stock (in hindsight their last reprint should have been 15,000 copies instead of the 85,000 copies they had ended up printing), the illustrated editions of the first three books flopped, and the mass market edition of
Angels Falling
sold less than expected. As
part of their effort to restore Litmus to good health, they sold a majority stake in their US company to Globish Inc., but that hadn’t generated enough revenue to make up the shortfall in Seppi sales.

They have missed their 2009 budget targets for two quarters in a row, and what they have on their autumn list is not enough to make their year-end number. As Gabrijela lays out the measures she intends to take to deal with the existing state of affairs the gloom in the room grows – there will be no bonus for employees this year, salaries will be frozen, and there will be more job cuts in line with the lowered 2009 numbers. She proposes that the board abstain from declaring a dividend. Also, if they do not have enough confidence in the list over 2010 and beyond, she intends to cut the publishing program, overhead, and other operating costs by half.

There is more. She recommends to the board that they sell the rest of their holdings in the US company to Globish and then she drops a bomb – Globish has made an offer to her and to the chairman for the UK company. God, Zach thinks, so that’s who is after them. When she first told him about the trouble the company was in, she had casually spoken about the threat of being taken over, but hadn’t given him a clue as to who had made the offer! They have no intention of selling, she says calmly; at this point Sir William Boyce, the majority shareholder in the company, and chairman of the board, takes over. He reminds them about the shareholding pattern of the company (he holds 39 per cent, and two of the investors he brought in, and who vote with him, hold a further 20 per cent; Gabrijela owns 18 per cent;
and the remaining 23 per cent is divided among three others) and says that he and some of the other directors who, between them, own a majority stake in the company are seriously concerned about Litmus’s future as an independent publishing company. They have agreed with Gabrijela that they will not sell to Globish but if Litmus does not grow over the next three years it could well mean the end; they cannot afford to have another year like this one. There are further investments to be made in digital; there are pressures on pricing; and in a market that isn’t growing, if they don’t find another Seppi, it might not be possible to hold out. As Olive, the finance director takes them through a PowerPoint presentation on the financial state of the company, and hands out spreadsheets on their current three-year plan, the tension grows within Zach. It is going to be his turn next and he has nothing that will lighten the mood in the boardroom.

In just a moment all eyes will turn to him. This is the part he hates the most about board meetings, trying to present to hardcore businessmen, in language that they will comprehend, why what they are asking of him is impossible. One part of him would like to say, “Look, I’m just an editor,” that it is too much to expect him to worry about profit and loss, spreadsheets, operating costs, cash, capital expenditure, depreciation, returns on investment, net present value and all the other eye-glazing stuff he had to learn about in the Finance for Non-financial Managers course he had had to take when was elevated to the position of publisher and to the board of directors. But he cannot duck his responsibility, he is just as much a part of this as the others present in the room – he could have always
turned down the promotion when it was offered to him.

When times were good, he looked forward to board meetings, and the praise of his fellow directors as the latest sales figures were announced and the quarterly forecast kept being revised upwards, but now he would much rather be any place but here, looking down at the orange shine of the boardroom table and wondering how he is going to conjure up something magical from the pitiful list of books he has in the bag.

He thinks wistfully of his years as an editor when his entire existence revolved around books and their creators. He misses the joy of being the first reader of an exquisite piece of fiction, the satisfaction that came with adopting the voice of the author and working within it to make something that was first-rate even better, and then the final thrill of propelling that beautiful work of art into the world. He remembers his enormous delight when he saw a scary-looking Goth kid on the Tube reading the first book he had ever worked on as an editorial assistant. It was impossible to reconcile the two, progress in his career and the purity of doing nothing but the precise manipulation of text that had filled his days and nights as an editor – he gets that. Moreover, he knows too that much of what he is hankering after is nothing but a sepia-tinted fantasy that exists only in his head. Little of his time as an editor had actually been spent editing manuscripts – nobody
edited
books anymore, you merely did some cursory tidying up of a text before hurrying it through the production process – and even less of his time had been spent editing masterpieces. Of the millions of new books published every year, how many were genuine masterpieces
or, opening the filter a little, books that had made a genuine impact on readers? Two? Ten? A couple of dozen? And of those how many had passed through his hands? Seppi, for sure, Ron Carruthers, Muhammad Khan, Emily Baines, Wu Chen, and Sandy Knowles maybe, and that wonderful series that highlighted just one outstanding feature in London’s greatest monuments for the casual visitor (with text and pictures provided by the country’s best-known writers and photographers) that had sold and sold to their delight – but that had been it more or less. Like most other London publishers, and publishers everywhere for that matter, he had spent his years as an editor, and then as publisher, chivvying on his troops to turn books that were second-rate into ones that would muster a B+ with a very lenient examiner marking the sheets, until it had become a self-fulfilling way of doing things. He was now exactly like every other publisher he had spent his formative years in the industry decrying – a cynical purveyor of mediocre texts that he and everyone else in the company hoped would sell enough to enable them to do it all over again the next year, and the year after that.

The eyes turn to him. He makes his presentation and it falls flat, as he and Gabrijela, with whom he had shared it beforehand, had known it would.

“Nothing from the Seppi estate?” the chairman booms. He is a chunky man with a jowly face, and he looks troubled.

Zach glares at him. He recognizes the need to be polite, but Sir William gets under his skin. He is not a book man, he is a wealthy investment banker who got out of the profession before bankers became the pariahs of the business
community; now he makes a nuisance of himself on the various boards he sits on, and spends the rest of the year relaxing on his country estate in Oxfordshire. Zach doubts he reads more than a book a year.

“The estate is in a mess,” he replies. “As his mother, the person he was closest to, died a few months before he did, Seppi left everything to a cousin in Toronto, with a small bequest to his translator. The translator complained about the will, but that went nowhere; the last I heard she was thinking of suing the cousin – unless a settlement is reached, of course.”

“And if a settlement is reached, and title to his work is established once and for all, do you think that there might be more unfinished work, unpublished stories from his early writing life that we can lay our hands on?” Gabrijela asks.

“Even if something existed, why would Seppi’s people give it to us?” Zach asks. “They are still upset with us for not giving up any of the rights in the quartet to them. They will merely sell it on to the highest bidder.”

“Can we help them reach a settlement? Lubricate the works, become the mediator?” Sir William says, looking grave. “If we don’t do something soon, we might not be able to hold off Globish.”

Zach shudders inwardly; Globish is the least well regarded among the Big Seven publishers and with good reason. The youngest and smallest of the publishing giants, Globish is also the fastest growing thanks to the ambitions of Greg Holmes, the Californian software billionaire who owns it, and Mortimer Weaver, the latest in a series of CEOs who have been charged with making it the largest and most
profitable English language trade publishing company in the world. There’s nothing wrong with the goals the Globish bosses have set for themselves, except that their strategy to achieve them has little to do with the quality and brilliance of the company’s publishing. Their method of growing the business is primarily through acquisition and cost cutting, with scant regard for editors and authors; if Litmus was swallowed by them Zach has no doubt he will be one of the first casualties of the takeover. He looks around the boardroom table at the chairman, at Gabrijela, at Olive, and at the two external directors present, and realizes they are not the enemy, they are as concerned about the future as he is and not just because of the looming threat of a takeover by Globish. It is because as the world of publishing spins on its axis, once, twice, three times, a hundred, they have no idea of what it will take to survive and thrive in a world that they do not recognize and do not have the skills to manage. Apple. Amazon. Google. Digital content. DRM. Ereaders. Pricing models. Royalty rates. Marketing to consumers. Readers who would like content for free. Writers who must produce a strange hybrid that is part text, part music, part moving pictures with multiple endings and enough carny tricks to satisfy the semi-literate reader … These are just some of the things they will need to take in their stride, see as opportunities rather than death blows, and given the publishing traditions that have shaped them it would be astonishing if they didn’t feel threatened. As they dance, dance on the knife-edge of survival, they know everything they do will only be pushing the day of reckoning a little further into the future. Is it any wonder that
the majority want to cut and run? For how long will Gabrijela be able to persuade them to remain on board?

He has managed to avoid Mandy for eight days now, but he has finally run out of excuses and agreed to meet her at Ronnie Scott’s on the weekend. On the appointed day, he turns up a little earlier than he had intended and heads to the upstairs bar.

Half an hour later, he sees her enter the room dressed all in black – black sleeveless top, black skirt, black boots – and festooned with about seven hundred chains around her neck. Her hair, which she dyes a different shade every three months, is now strawberry blonde with black highlights. He takes in her tattoos, an eagle on the left bicep and a vaguely Manichean figure on the right, and thinks it’s funny how everything you thrill to when you are in the first throes of an infatuation turns muddy when the fire is banked. As he gets up to kiss her he wonders whether this relationship would have stood a chance even if his need to get back with Julia had not been so compelling. He admires some things about her, especially the way she in which she has supported her two younger sisters after her father died and her mother remarried, but they have little in common, and he doubts that he would have gotten together with her if he hadn’t been so emotionally broken. He hopes their parting, whenever it happens, will not go badly. But that seems to be wishful thinking; in his experience relationships end badly if they aren’t snapped
off cleanly, or if they aren’t allowed to dribble naturally away into nothingness. Neither of these scenarios applies in this case. He remembers the worst breakup of his life in the days before he was married – an investment banker with smoky eyes and a fondness for literature he had been mad keen on had smeared Gentleman’s Relish on the crotches of the two suits he had owned at the time, and systematically smashed all the mirrors (she was obviously not superstitious) and crockery in his flat when he had suggested they go their separate ways. But Veronique had been spiky and vengeful, and although Mandy had her moments she was nothing like her. He is suddenly overcome by a wave of contrition – what if their positions were reversed, what if she had been the one trying to get out of the relationship and he the one left behind? Would he feel the same way? Of course not. Why did relationships have to be so damned difficult? – maybe he should have become a priest as his mother had once suggested to him!