INTERVIEW BY WENDY HEILBUT, PARTNER
Managing partner, Wendy Heilbut, met acclaimed book publishers Julie Grau and Cindy Spiegel in the spring of 2020 during a time that felt precarious at best. Living in their confidence—and with tenacity and determination—they navigated the year’s journey and brought to life their new eponymous publishing house, grounded in its promise of an inspired future. Recently, Wendy caught up with the duo to discuss how they got their start, what makes them tick, and how they are using their house to provide a holistic platform for contemporary writers.
WH
For some who may not know, Spiegel & Grau is more than a publishing house; it’s really a 25-year relationship at its core. Can you give our readers a brief history of how you both found one another professionally, navigated the different structures of your partnership through the years, and how your friendship has helped you steer your business and creative interests to where they are today?
JG
Cindy and I were two of four editors hired to found Riverhead Books in the mid-90s. I didn’t know Cindy before–and we were quite different. Cindy was married, lived on the Upper West Side, had a little girl and would soon have a baby boy; I was single and lived in Greenwich Village. But a few years in, we were promoted to editorial directors and then publishers of the imprint, and our lives began to become more similar than different. From the start we had a mutual respect for each other’s work ethic and values. We spoke the same language. By 2005, I was married, had a young son, and had moved to the Upper West Side. In that same year, we were wooed away to start a new imprint within Random House–the original Spiegel & Grau. Through the fire of that decision–leaving a company we’d built, making the leap together, doubling down on our partnership–we grew even closer. And the intense work of starting a company from scratch means you spend a lot of time in each other’s head. If you don’t share the same vision and standards, it’s going to be a rocky road. Then, in 2019, when our imprint was shut down in a corporate re-org, we decided to found an independent publisher–we both saw opportunity in the moment, at this stage of our professional lives, and in the landscape of publishing. Starting Spiegel & Grau, a multi-platform publisher that seeks to enlarge and remake the publishing model, creating a business plan, raising capital, and everything that comes with start-up living, has been a thrilling (and ongoing) adventure. We have learned and grown so much in these past few years. We’ve faced the challenges and reaped the rewards together. We have similar and complementary traits–another must for a partnership (of any kind!). The relationship has been so defining of our path. After all these years, we’ve earned the right to call it exceptional.
WH
What would you say has been the most rewarding and the most challenging as the publishing world has shifted so dramatically from when you began?
CS
Most rewarding has been the freedom to envision the kind of company we want to create–and then to work on creating it. But there are so many rewards that come with that: our re-connection with booksellers and the direct relationship with the sales teams who put our books into the world–something we took for granted in earlier days of publishing when companies weren’t as big as they are now; the ability to put our resources where we believe they should go, without competing against the hundreds of books being published by other imprints within the same corporate house; and learning about the podcast and film and TV worlds, since our publishing now has reach into those media. And the challenges are often connected to the rewards. We’ve had to learn so much, from big things like how to raise capital to smaller ones, like how to run a board meeting. Overcoming the challenges is perhaps the biggest reward of all.
WH
Spiegel & Grau has a long, storied reputation within the publishing community (and beyond) as an imprint known for its foresight and intuition, launching the careers of many writers and publishing pivotal works by writers cherished around the world. You must receive hundreds of manuscripts, both solicited and unsolicited. How do you weigh and prioritize what’s important to publish? How do you navigate what may be commercially viable or successful versus perhaps something wildly exciting to you by a newer, lesser-known artist?
CS
That’s the million-dollar question! The big houses hedge their bets by publishing so many books in the reasonable expectation that some will hit big. But for a small house, every book counts. We receive thousands of submissions a year, and it’s very difficult to sort through them, especially when the job also requires editing and publishing the books you’ve acquired–which is the part that deserves most of your time. With most proposals, it takes only a few pages to know if they’re not for us–and if you miss one or two in the process, that’s the price for getting the job done. Then there are the ones that stand out right away–the agent might have made a great pitch, or the subject aligns with your interests, or it’s a story that intrigues you, or you glance at the first page and are immediately drawn in by the writing. But most solid proposals just take up a lot of your time. Julie and I are both slow readers and proposals are often long; and with novels you have to read the entire book if you’re interested in it. After doing the job for so many years, I tend to rely a lot on intuition–I just go where I’m drawn to go, which is often to subjects that intrigue me, that I don’t know much about, that I haven’t read before, subjects and voices that feel original and exciting. Whereas a lot of publishers like to publish within categories they know are successful, I believe that a lot of our books do well because they forge new paths and give readers a new way of thinking that intrigues them. The trick is to not be too ahead of the curve–and you definitely don’t want to be behind it. You want to define the curve.
WH
The first book you published, the critically acclaimed Fox and I: An Uncommon Friendship by Catherine Raven, has reached so many readers and bridges so many genres. When you first read the manuscript did you know how you saw it playing out with its audience or did it take time to develop its own voice?
CS
From the first pages I read of Fox and I, I knew it was something special. The voice was unique, and so was its subject–the idea of a woman alone in Montana reading The Little Prince to a fox was so appealing and wild. I was given twenty pages to read when I was on the staff of the Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Society’s writers’ workshop in New Orleans in September of 2019, and when I met with Catherine Raven to discuss her work, I could see how unusual a person she was, but also how authentic. When she asked if I’d be willing to read the entire manuscript, I was cautiously excited–though I wasn’t sure why she was asking someone without a job to read her book. Julie and I hadn’t yet spoken publicly about our new venture, but I knew what a great book this would be to launch with. And when Cathy agreed to wait for us–without any assurance that we’d succeed in relaunching as an independent publisher—it felt like a kind of sign, as if it was meant to be. Stories that help us deepen our relationship with the natural world feel important now, so I sensed that others would feel the same way I did. But, of course, I couldn’t anticipate that the book would feel even more relevant when Covid would send everyone into isolation, which in many cases meant reexamining their relationship to nature, or that wildfires would be raging when the book was published. It was such a blessing to have a book to publish when we announced the new company, so we didn’t have to talk just about ourselves and our dreams! And the fact that it was a book of the moment felt so fortuitous that we chose to incorporate a fox into our logo.
WH
Only a few years ago, the Spiegel & Grau imprint was an arm of publishing behemoth Penguin Random House. What has it been like striking out on your own, kind of “re-founding” what was already yours in spirit? What were some of the unexpected twists, or perhaps even expected challenges that have helped shaped the DNA of the organization today?
JG
We both grew up in and were shaped by corporate publishing, and in many ways our experience reflects the changes in the industry over the past twenty years; but fundamentally, it’s where we learned our craft. I always feel so fortunate that when I started in publishing, as an editorial assistant at Random House (when it was owned by the Newhouse family, pre-Bertelsmann), I had the benefit of being mentored by these legendary editors. It was a golden age–when decisions were made by editors and publishers and then the entire house would support those decisions. Cindy had a similar experience at Ticknor and Fields, a literary imprint of Houghton Mifflin.
When Cindy and I started Riverhead, it was within Putnam, which was then a very successful, well-run company that was powered by commercial fiction. Despite the fact that it had a corporate owner (MCA/Universal), it felt like an independent, because the visionary woman who ran it, Phyllis Grann, was personally involved in every aspect; it felt like her company. Even as young editors, we were able to forge a close relationship with the sales team. We were publishing literary fiction and nonfiction and had a mandate to create a backlist–the brass ring of publishing–so we were doing something different than the rest of the company and we didn’t face much in-house competition. In the late 90s, Putnam was sold to Penguin.
When we left to join Random House, now owned by Bertelsman and merged with Bantam Doubleday Dell, our imprint was a part of the Doubleday Group, which, in the first of several re-orgs, was disbanded. Our imprint was then housed at the Random House Group. The next seismic change came in 2014 when Random House merged with Penguin. A 21-year-old young woman from Boston reached out to empowerHER’s LEGACY group, after her mother died three years ago, and her father had taken his life just 18 months later. Through LEGACY, a unique program that bridges the gap between high-school and the next chapter of life for young women ages 19-24, we matched her with a mentor who experienced similar losses in her young adult life. She told us: “I’d be lost without my mentor, who not only supports me in pursing my education, but also understands the depth of pain I have no words to describe.”
We’ve seen a lot of corporate growth and consolidation in the course of our careers, and we’ve also had the chance to see what’s gained and what’s lost in the process, including the primacy of the editor-author relationship and that close, collaborative relationship with sales. When we conceived of our new house, we wanted to take what was great about our corporate publishing experience, wed it to a more old-fashioned model that was editorially-driven, that focused on a small number of books that we would publish vigorously, that restored the primacy of the author-editor relationship–and that was nimble as a young company can be. One unexpected twist–though perhaps it shouldn’t have been a surprise–is that we’re working with a number of people we’d worked with earlier in our careers, which means we have similar touchstones and speak the same language, but at the same time we’re always trying to learn new languages!
WH
Did you have any specific legal challenges or business matters which you navigated while becoming founders once again?
JG
Every business matter and legal issue was a new challenge for us! Building a business model; raising capital; presenting to investors; creating infrastructure–everything from creating a contract boilerplate to choosing benefit plans for our employees. Learning how to produce a podcast–and the economics of that business. Learning how film/tv deals are structured… It’s an endless list, to be honest.
WH
Speaking of diversified media platforms, you recently co-produced a serial podcast with Lemonada Media, an award-winning, women-run podcast turning a lens to unfiltered human experiences, in this case a story of a domestic and sexual abuse survivor. Tell us how the project came about; your role and experience with it. Was a podcast platform chosen for a strategic reason?
CS
We’d worked with Justine van der Leun on her book We Are Not Such Things at the old S&G and I was having lunch with her as Julie and I were working on forming the new company. She was obsessed with a story she was reporting about Nikki Addimando, a young mother who was incarcerated at Bedford Correctional Facility for shooting her partner and the father of her children in self-defense after years of domestic abuse. There were so many twists and turns in the story, and I loved listening to the way Justine described it–it sounded like a podcast! So, I asked her if she had audio and she told me she had 100 hours. We approached a number of well-known podcast companies that turned us down because they felt that social justice podcasts were limited in their appeal. But Lemonada, another women-led, mission-driven company like us, understood the urgency of the subject, and also shared our vision for how to tell the story in a compelling way that brought to light the unjust treatment of victims who choose to live by defending themselves. The experience was a tremendous learning experience for us, and was also a great success–and it’s been recognized as forging new ground in the podcast space, turning the true crime genre upside down. We recently optioned the film rights to the project to another women-led company, Madison Wells, who will be real partners in the project.
WH
We’re always interested in how creatives are innovating within their own industries. Tell us more about how your practice is going beyond books and pushing the boundaries of how writing translates across different platforms you are working within.
CS
Our primary job as editors is to help writers and creators tell their stories, and when the two of us sat down to write our mission statement for our new company, we recognized that stories come in many forms, and that creating a “publishing” house in 2020 would be unlike starting one in 1850. We didn’t want to be restrictive in our definition of publishing and wanted to create something that was of its time. In fact, our first project was Believe Her, a podcast. The process has felt very integrated and organic, and that’s the model we’re aiming to create. We’ve also optioned film/tv rights to Fox and I to the Gotham Group, and have started a number of conversations on other projects. Over the course of our career we’ve had many books adapted for film and television, including Orange Is the New Black, Just Mercy, The Kite Runner, The Beach, High Fidelity, and Fresh Off the Boat, but now it’s interesting to think about the different ways that content can be expressed from the very beginning of the process. Liza Wachter, who sold her boutique book-to-screen agency in 2016 to WME, is in-house with us and a tremendous asset. She’s also the president of the company, and she’s involved in the process from day one.
WH
Your latest release, Imaginable by Jane McGonigal, which came out in March, is about future-thinking and how we can all learn to think creatively about the future. What are some of your predictions about the media space for the future?
CS
In March, Jane was the keynote speaker at Winter Institute, the yearly convention of independent booksellers, and she addressed the question of what bookselling will look like in ten years. The majority of booksellers believed that it will look very different. Jane tells us that in order to predict the future, you have to look for signals of change, unusual practices that are already happening in the world but on a small scale. For example, in creating a new independent house that is platform agnostic, we ourselves are a signal of change! And we can predict that more companies will become more integrated in their dissemination of stories. As the big companies become bigger, we believe more smaller entities will arise that will be appealing to writers who want more agency in the publication process. It’s why Jane McGonigal chose Spiegel & Grau over big, established houses as the publisher for Imaginable.
JG
Covid taught us that people still love to read–the publishing industry had its strongest sales ever during the pandemic–and that they like physical books. The disruptions in the supply chain and the rising costs of manufacturing might make physical books even more precious–and might make other formats more accessible. The good news is that we predict books in our future!
WH
And of course, we have to ask, what are you reading now?
CS
I’m reading Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. I watched the TV series but hadn’t read the book, and I picked it up in a used book van in Montana when I went out for the publication of Fox and I. I finally started reading it and try to dip into it whenever I have a moment when I’m not going through submissions or editing.
JG
During the pandemic, I began listening to audiobooks while I run (when I couldn’t stand listening to the news anymore). Just as I do with physical books, I have a few books going at the same time and I go back and forth, depending on my mood that day. Currently I’m listening to The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison (who narrates the audiobook–such a moving and powerful experience to hear her read it), and Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam. I just finished Hope Jahren’s Lab Girl, which I absolutely loved. I highly recommend it.
Images courtesy of Spiegel & Grau