(Roughly) Daily

Gill Paul on two pioneering women who revolutionized the book world…

During the Sixties, book publishing, like the rest of the country, was undergoing an upheaval. That venerable industry was at the beginning of a dramatic changing of the guard that would affect the staff they hired, the authors they published, and the way books were marketed to the reading public. And at the heart of it there were two trailblazing women, Jacqueline Susann and Jackie Collins.

In previous decades, publishing had been a refined gentleman’s business, peopled by well-educated men of independent means—figures such as Bennett Cerf, Horace Liveright, and Alfred A. Knopf who cared about Literature with a capital L. Knopf famously declared that he intended to publish “the best literature, whether it sold or not.” They acted on hunches, made deals over long lunches, and worked with authors to develop their long-term careers, even if their earliest books flopped.

Then, in 1959, the money men of Wall Street, sniffing around for the next bonanza, alighted on books. When Alfred A. Knopf’s company was absorbed into Random House in 1960, it was only the first of a series of mergers and acquisitions that would transform publishing from a career for literary gentlemen into a corporate money-making machine.

As an immediate result of the M&As, publishers had more cash to wave around, so they could offer big advances to authors whom they guessed (and it was largely guesswork) would be capable of delivering big sales. To find them, they began to rely on agents, who pushed the prices even higher. The corporate honchos wanted fast returns on their big bucks, so the books had to be what became known as ‘blockbusters’—incidentally, a term that originated during the war for bombs capable of destroying entire blocks.

Enter Jacqueline Susann. She knew exactly what she was doing when she wrote Valley of the Dolls, a thick, gossipy novel, which contained scenes of drug abuse and ‘kinky’ sex, and had leading characters said to have been based on famous actresses of the day (Judy Garland, Ethel Merman, and Carole Landis). Her sex is pretty tame compared to later bestsellers like Fifty Shades, but it was radical for its time. Legal judgements on previously banned books Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1959) and Tropic of Cancer (1964) had established that the courts did not have the right to suppress a book so long as it had literary merit.

Jacqueline Susann and, a couple of years later, Jackie Collins, were inspired by the sexy soap opera-style novels being produced by Harold Robbins, to great sales if not great reviews. “My only criticism of his books,” Collins said, “Was that his women were either in the kitchen or the bedroom.” Both Susann and Collins wrote about strong women with their own careers, who took control in the boardroom as in the bedroom, and demanded athletic performances from their men. Their subjects weren’t ladylike; they were raw and honest and sometimes the stories ended in tears, reflecting the way women’s real lives were being transformed but adding a splash of aspirational glamour…

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… It was partly due to the two Jackies that publishers finally clocked there was a vast female audience for novels—and that they didn’t want challenging literary works from pompous white men. They wanted to be entertained by stories about women who faced similar life crises to them, and the best people to write those stories were other women.

Back in 1960, only 18 per cent of all books published in the US were written by women but, as publishers cottoned onto their female audience, strategies began to change: by 1970, a third of all books were by women and by 2021 that had risen to 50.45%. The divide is even starker in fiction: today, roughly three-quarters of published novels are written by women and roughly 80 per cent of fiction readers are women. There’s still a long way to go in terms of diversity, but novels by people of different social and ethnic backgrounds and sexual orientation are increasingly being championed by publishers.

While they were looking for female authors for a female readership, publishers were forced to reflect on the fact that their in-house decision-makers were almost exclusively male. If women were employed at all, it was in low-paid secretarial posts where they could use their home-maker skills to bring tea for the boys. Gradually, a few women managed to maneuver themselves from clerical to editorial positions but they were still excluded from the upper echelons of management, and equal pay was a distant pipe dream. The transformation took decades but now, women form the majority of the workforce in publishing: 78 per cent of editorial staff are female and 92% of publicists, according to a 2021 UK Publishers’ Association diversity study—though most of them are still white and cisgender. And on average they are paid less than employees in other communication industries.

Publishing is constantly evolving and seems likely to become more diverse in future; it’s unthinkable that it would ever revert to an exclusive gentleman’s club. And among the people responsible for this change were Jacqueline Susann and Jackie Collins….

Credit where credit is due: “How Jacqueline Susann and Jackie Collins Changed the Face of Publishing,” from @GillPaulAUTHOR in @lithub.

* Jacqueline Susann

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As we turn the page, we might recall that it was on this date in 1922 that a woman who had her own massive impact on publishing tied the knot: Margaret Mitchell– the author of Gone With the Wind, of which over 30 million copies have been sold– married Berrien (“Red”) Kinnard Upshaw… in a union that may have contributed to Mitchell’s portrayal of the Scarlett-Rhett union.

Upshaw was an Annapolis drop out who supported himself bootlegging out of the Georgia mountains. By December the marriage to Upshaw had dissolved and he left. Mitchell suffered physical and emotional abuse, the result of Upshaw’s alcoholism and violent temper. Upshaw agreed to an uncontested divorce after the best man at their wedding, John Marsh, gave him a loan and Mitchell agreed not to press assault charges against him.  Upshaw and Mitchell were divorced on October 16, 1924. Then (in a Susann/Collins-worthy twist), Mitchell and Marsh were married the following year.