Morsels From New York Magazine's Publishing Article

Dohle has been popping into editorial marketing meetings, something [his predecessor, Peter] Olson almost never did. At the end of July, Mehta brought Dohle as a surprise guest to a Knopf meeting. Looking over a sales spreadsheet, he muttered to Mehta, “This isn’t how the other imprints do it.” Editors who were called in during the meeting hadn’t all been told Dohle would be there. One such editor, herself a former executive, said of a book with disappointing sales, “It’s dead in the water. Don’t worry about it.” Another person in attendance says, “You could see Dohle’s eyebrows going, ‘Oh boy, that was candid.’ ” What was his take on the proceedings? Where would these little observations lead, and how would they affect the people in this room? No one yet knows.

Richard Ford left Knopf’s star editor, Gary Fisketjon, for Dan Halpern at Ecco (Binky Urban, the agent who handled Frazier’s deal, did this one, too). And, after 42 years at FSG, Tom Wolfe left for Little, Brown.

Fisketjon, renowned for his close friendships and even closer edits (Raymond Carver, Cormac McCarthy, et al.), was more than Ford’s editor—he and the novelist “would kill furry animals in the woods together,” as one colleague puts it. But doing business together had become tricky. Ford’s literary reputation and popularity had fallen out of alignment; his last book, The Lay of the Land, sold less than 100,000 copies, per BookScan. Slow-and-steady Knopf didn’t seem fazed, but the author himself was. He thought house enthusiasm had waned, and “he never felt the money was commensurate with the work that was produced,” says the colleague. It couldn’t have been easy when the Lauren Weisbergers of the world were getting better deals than he was. “He’s 64, looking for that one last score in the literary world.” Knopf offered Ford roughly $750,000 per book, at which point Mehta capped the money, according to the source; Ecco offered $3 million for three books.

Others say that Ford had simply grown unhappy with Fisketjon’s editing. Cormac McCarthy left Fisketjon, too, but he stayed with Knopf and had Mehta edit him. When Ford decided to leave, says the source, he left Fisketjon a phone message explaining his move. It was never returned. He sent a follow-up e-mail, which Fisketjon answered with a surly note. Only Ford and Fisketjon know what exact words were exchanged (and both refuse to comment on their relationship after the move), but Ford later told someone that “Gary has to learn he’s no longer in high school.” This was business, after all.