(2013-10-21) The New King Of Trash Publishing Meet The Man Who Revolutionized Lowbrow

The New King of Trash Publishing: Meet the Man Who Revolutionized Lowbrow. Jeremie Ruby-Strauss, an editor at Simon & Schuster...The title that made his career was Tucker Max’s I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell.

“Tucker Max is offensive because he broke though,” Leavell said, spooning out an impressive homemade pasta primavera while his baby slept in the other room. “It’s like the Snooki haters, too,” said Ruby-Strauss. “I got my MFA from wherever ...”

The higher-minded members of the publishing business keep their distance from the precincts Ruby-Strauss trawls

And yet, as much as they bemoan the coarsening of their industry, those editors and executives benefit from having the likes of Ruby-Strauss around to help pay for their loftier projects

Publishing has always depended on having smart people willing to do its down-market work

Today, the public has already indicated what interests it, via the Internet, and the editor just has to be savvy enough and shameless enough to give the rabble what it wants. Ruby-Strauss is very good at this new approach to making bad books

In the standard book-editing M.O., an editor deems a piece of writing worthy, then tries to facilitate its embrace by the world. Ruby-Strauss views that approach as “sort of a fool’s errand,” he says. “I go around life looking for tribes, groups of people who like something, whatever it may be, and then I try to figure out if a book product could make sense for that group.”

As Leavell points out, it doesn’t particularly matter if the research identifies a group of philistines as a target market. “If you can get an audience where they read one book a year,” he told me, “that book’s gonna be so successful, because that’s all that person is going to talk about!”

Publishing is filled with rumors about what Amazon’s algorithm contains. One rumor for which there is strong evidence: The tech behemoth decides how many copies of a book it will purchase for its own warehouses based on presale orders. That in turn influences “discoverability,” i.e., how much the title is thrown in front of shoppers on the site

preorders depend on customers feeling a strong connection to the author or the book’s subject

data-driven editors like Ruby-Strauss so often find their talent and their tribes online, already talking to each other.