Harold Evans, the publisher of Random House, calls me at The New Yorker, where I work. “I’d like to have a word with you,” he says. “Can we have coffee sometime, perhaps?”

It is 1995, and Evans and I have met at parties given by his wife, who happens to be Tina Brown, who happens to be the editor of The New Yorker.

“How about today?”

“Let me check with my assistant,” ­Evans says. A minute or so later, he says, “Well, yes—can you come up right now?” The vowels, in his Beatles-esque accent, make the words sound a little like “coom oop.”

At the elevator bank of The New Yorker, I run into Nancy Franklin, later to become the TV critic for the magazine. We call each other “Nosy,” for “Nosy Parker”—the British slang term for a snoop. “Where are you going at this time of day, Nosy?” Nancy says.

“To see Harry Evans,” I say.

“Oh, no!” she says. And at this point, with a cold, sick feeling, I realize what’s going on: Tina now wants me out of the magazine and has persuaded her husband to offer me a job.

**********************

“You want to buy this book, Dan?” my boss, Ann Godoff, says, referring to the first work I’m trying to acquire at Random House, by George Saunders. “Well, do a P-and-L for it and we’ll see.”

“What’s a P-and-L?”

“I’ll walk you through it. What’s the advance?”

My only knowledge came from what I had been paid for my own books, so I thought surely I should offer more. “Fifty thousand dollars?”

“For a book of stories? But okay, what’s the payout?”

“Payout?”

“Start with how much of the advance the author will get on signing the contract.”

“Thirty thousand dollars?”

“Twenty-five—half on signing.”

“Okay, 25.”

“On delivery-and-acceptance?”

“Well, 25, I guess.”

“No—you have to have an on-pub payment.”

“Oh. Twenty for D-and-A? And five on-pub?”

“Nothing for paperback on-pub?”

“Oh. Ten for D-and-A, ten for on-pub, and five for the paperback?”

“Nah—it’s okay. You don’t really need a paperback payment. I just wanted to mention it. How many hardcovers are we going to print at the start?”

“Twenty thousand?”

“Too much. Ten.”

“Okay.”

“Second printing?”

“Five?”

“Good! Returns?”

“Returns?”

“How many unsold hardcovers will booksellers send back?”

“Five hundred?”

“Nah. Usually figure one third—in this case, 5,000.”

“Whoa!”

“It’s a shitty business, Dan. What’s the price?”

“Twenty-one ninety-five?” I say, using my own most recent book as a guide.

“Good. So how much will we earn against this advance?”

“____”

“We make about $3 for each hardcover sale, $1 for each paperback.”

“So if we sell 10,000 hardcovers, that’s $30,000.”

“Right.”

“And say 10,000 paperbacks. That’s $40,000.”

“Right—so the P-and-L probably won’t work. So we have to adjust the figures. But remember, you can’t change the returns percentage.”

“Increase the first printing to 15,000 and the second printing to 7,500?”

“That ought to do it. Isn’t this scientific?”

**********************

Now I have been senior literary editor at Random House for six months. I remain in many ways ignorant of the realities of book publishing. But it begins to dawn on me that if a company publishes a hundred original hardcover books a year, it publishes about two per week, on average. And given the limitations on budgets, personnel, and time, many of those books will receive a kind of “basic” publication. Every list—spring, summer, and fall—has its lead titles. Then there are three or four hopefuls trailing along just behind the books that the publisher is investing most heavily in. Then comes a field of also-rans, hoping for the surge of energy provided by an ecstatic front-page review in The New York Times Book Review or by being selected for Oprah’s Book Club. Approximately four out of every five books published lose money. Or five out of six, or six out of seven. Estimates vary, depending on how gloomy the CFO is the day you ask him and what kinds of shell games are being played in Accounting.

I am trying to acquire two novels, one completed and the second under way, by a British writer. Ann Godoff likes the finished book, or takes my word for it that it’s good, or she is in a good mood, and has authorized me to offer $100,000 for each book. On the phone to the agent in England, I say, with no guile, “We’re offering a hundred thousand dollars for both books.” He says, with acceptance detectable in his voice, “You mean $50,000 for each?”

I hesitate, but not too long. “Yes.”

“Done and done.”

**********************

Steven Pinker is in my office at Random House. I am trying to get him to consider writing a short, essayistic book in popular language on the question of Free Will.

Pinker decides that he can’t do this book, owing to contractual obligations to another publisher. He notices a book jacket on my desk for a collection of poems by Katha ­Pollitt. The title, fittingly enough, is The Mind-Body Problem. Pinker says, “Oh! You know, my friend Rebecca Goldstein wrote a novel with this same title. I’d like it if you could change the title of this book.”

“Well, you can’t copyright a title,” I say. “And wasn’t that novel published some years ago?”

“Yes, but I would appreciate it if this title could be changed.”

I tell myself that I choose to table this request, and that I will end up leaving Random House before Pollitt’s book comes out. As it happens, I do.

**********************

I am assigned to work with Michael ­Eisner on his autobiographical book, Work in Progress. I meet him a couple of times, and he is perfectly congenial. He tells me how foolish it was for anyone to call any movie anything like The Lemon Sisters—inviting, as it did, all kinds of review snidery. “On the other hand, we had a great success with a movie whose title had three words that each by itself should have spelled death at the box office,” he adds.

“What was it?” I say.

“Dead. Poets. Society.”

**********************

Atul Gawande has been writing ­wonderful pieces about medicine for The New Yorker. I have gotten in touch with him about the possibility of publishing these essays. His agent advises him not to do so, as collections of previously published essays generally don’t do well.

I see the agent at a party. I press my suit once again, in person. Either because I’m so persuasive (unlikely) or because Gawan­de doesn’t have the time to write an original work, they finally relent. The agent sends out a submission to a number of publishers.

On the morning of the closing, Gawan­de calls me because he wants to work with me but has heard from his agent that the acquisition will go to someone else. “I don’t want this to happen,” he says. I tell him that I am trying to get more money. Five minutes later, the agent calls and says, “I understand that Atul called you about the situation with his book.”

“Yes, he did—his book which I have been encouraging him to do for a couple of years now, and which I don’t want to lose.”

“Well, he didn’t have the authority to call you,” she says.

“That’s funny—that word has the word author in it,” I say.