I'm sure many people have seen the Publisher's Weekly article about my editor, Sean McDonald, leaving Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and his imprint, MCD Books, being shuttered. I have a lot of feelings about this, including gratitude for ten years of stability with one editor. Before Sean, I had a trilogy where each novel was taken by a different publishing company. It sold well enough that I was still in the game, but I never had anything approaching a settled situation. I never had any assurance from book to book that I could relax or get comfortable or feel settled. Sean's offer for Annihilation and the rest of the Southern Reach trilogy was extraordinary. It fused a deep love of the literary with a savvy understanding of the world beyond the words in the novel. He had the vision to put the three Southern Reach novels out in the same year, creating a PR sensation to go along with a startlement of mostly rave reviews--a positive feedback loop that landed Authority and Acceptance on the bestseller lists in trade paperback. {Ultimately, the series has gone on to sell well over a million copies in the US alone, and been translated into over 37 languages.) He further had the vision to slap an X on an omnibus hardcover just before the holidays, as a perfect gift book. It was as immaculate a synergy of the storytelling and the marketing and PR expression of that storytelling as I have ever seen or had ever experienced as the author in question. He also slipped the manuscript of Annihilation to a producer at a lunch, which led to the Annihilation movie and eventually led to Annihilation making the NYT bestseller list for the first time.
When he got his own imprint at FSG, MCD Books, my novel Borne was the first published as an MCD book. It didn't make the bestseller list in hardcover, but got rare trifecta of rave reviews in the NY Times, LA Times, and Washington Post in the same weekend. The trade paperback edition is in a fourteenth printing. After the Annihilation movie came out, I strove to write the least commercial idea I had, first, to kind of wash away the Hollywood experience. That novel was Dead Astronauts, accompanied by The Strange Bird. I sent Dead Astronauts to Sean with an email note that I knew the novel was unexpected and very strange and I appreciated him reading it, but I did not expect him to publish it. I absolved him any obligation. But within a couple of months, He replied that he liked it very much and he did want to publish it, and he saw a clear path to publishing it. The trade paperback is still in print and Dead Astronauts earned out the advance, despite being formally experimental. When Hummingbird Salamander tanked at the beginning of the pandemic (only to rise again in trade paperback), Sean didn't bat an eye about it, just moved on and endeavored to reprint my entire backlist at FSG. As of this writing, City of Saints & Madmen is in an eighth printing, and the others, Shriek, Finch, and Veniss Underground, are all in print and selling steadily.
FSG itself--from the art department to the PR and marketing teams, the other editorial staff, and the foreign language rights division--has always felt like a place where everyone passionately loved books and while no company is perfect, I certainly have felt it was and is an oasis in an increasingly inconsistent publishing world. I'm very sad that Sean is leaving FSG. I know he will land on his feet, as they say, and do more great things elsewhere. I really owe him a lot and FSG a lot. I'm very fortunate, very blessed, and I also know from 45 years of a book life that everything has its place and has it season. It's good to celebrate what you had and how wonderful it was to have it, rather than to dwell on the fact that it has ended. Eleven books in eleven years, with a twelfth on the way is a thing to treasure. Sean changed the trajectory of my career, and we fought many a long, arduous campaign during book launches often quixotic and against the grain of the popular in the moment. I have a lot of joy and love in my heart for all of those times and all of those opportunities. It's been a great run. I've learned a lot and had such adventures. My career isn't over and my association with FSG isn't over, either--among other things, I have a novel under contract with them--but it does feel like the end of an era, for me. Honor the past but don't live there, the saying goes. But, you'll forgive me, I hope, if I live there for just a bit longer. Thanks for reading.
Many of you have heard that my editor Sean McDonald will no longer be working at Farrar, Straus and Giroux. I wrote a little bit about my feelings at the end of an era.
