- Books have always seemed like self-contained worlds to me.

Pick up a book and you can transport yourself to any time in history, or the future for that matter, delve into the mystical or the romantic.

Books help us to open our minds and our hearts, and over the last 30 years, today's guest has put more of those books into hands than just about anyone else.

He's Jonathan Karp, this week on "Story in the Public Square."

(uplifting music) Hello and welcome to the "Story in the Public Square," where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes, from the Pell Center at Salve Regina University.

Joining me from his home in Rhode Island is my friend and cohost G. Wayne Miller of "The Providence Journal."

Each week, we talk about big issues with great guests, authors, journalists, artists, and more, to make sense of the big stories that shape public life in the United States today.

This week we're joined by Jonathan Karp.

A longtime veteran of the publishing industry, he is currently the president and CEO of Simon & Schuster, one of America's great publishing houses.

Jon, thank you so much for being with us.

- Thanks for inviting me.

- You've had, really, a storied career in the publishing industry.

I'm curious though, how has the industry changed over the 30 years that you've been working in it?

- Obviously, digital distribution has been a big change, moving from hard covers to e-books and digital audio.

Probably about 30% of our books now are in the digital format, so that's a change.

I think that also the way people find out about books is a lot different.

It used to be that you would read about them in your local newspaper, and obviously that's changed, and people are hearing a lot more about them online.

- Does that lack of local validators of it, how does that relate to online?

There are virtual book clubs all over the place, there are podcasts about books, how have those new digital innovations changed the way people talk about books, think about books, hear about books?

- At first, I was concerned, because I remember when I got into publishing, they would circulate a clip file, and it would be so thick with all of the things that people all over America had written about our authors, and through the '90s and then the 2000s, that file would get thinner, and thinner, and thinner, and there'd be less book coverage.

But now I realize that if you look at everything that influencers are saying about our books, and online reviewers, the file is just as thick, we just don't print it out anymore, and people really have become very influential online, and booksellers are talking about books through their websites.

If you actually added up all the booksellers, their websites, and all of their followers, it would probably be bigger than the following of all the major book reviews.

- Let's get into publishing during the pandemic, 'cause obviously that has had a dramatic effect on businesses, people, and lives, and maybe we can go category by category, start with print books, what has been happening in the last year with print?

Obviously soft cover and hard cover, things that you can actually hold and turn pages with.

- Book sales are up, it's one of the strange ironies of the pandemic.

Obviously it's been a time of great hardship and suffering for a lot of people.

A lot of those people have been home, a lot of them are looking for comfort, or guidance, or escape, and they're buying books, they're buying a lot of books, and they're buying them online, they're buying them at big-box retailers like Target and Walmart, and they're also ordering them from independent bookstores online, or they're picking them up kerbside pickup.

Book sales have been up, our back-list sales are up, and the reason why our back-list sales are up is because readers are going to what is familiar to them, what they already know about, so a lot of our best-known titles are selling better than ever.

So the book business is actually very healthy right now.

- Are you bringing some titles back into print, or into e-editions or audio, or are you just going with things that are already published and that you have ready access to?

- Simon & Schuster publishes 2,000 new books a year, so we're definitely not just going with the tried and true, but the consumers are going to what they recognize, so we're reprinting a lot of books that are older, but they've never gone out of print, they've always stayed in print.

For example, this is a strange story, but there's a romance novel that we published in 2016 by a writer named Colleen Hoover, and it started to sell in huge quantities, and we couldn't figure out why.

And it turned out that a bunch of young women had discovered it, and they were posting videos of themselves on TikTok crying, and a video of this one young woman crying on TikTok compelled us to print another 50,000 copies of Colleen Hoover's novel, so things like that happen that are just hard to understand, but it's real.

- I'll tell you a funny story, there was a "New York Times" story two weeks ago about this very phenomenon, of TikTok, and people crying, mostly young women crying to sell books, so as an author, I joined TikTok thinking that it might help sell my books.

I did not cry, and it has not moved my sales at all, so I think it's for a certain clientele, or a certain niche.

- That's classic.

Jon, what gets published?

You mentioned 2,000 titles a year from Simon & Schuster, what gets published?

- It has to do with what the editors fall in love with, or what they think is really interesting or intriguing.

We have probably over 100 people acquiring books for us, children's books, books for adults, and every day, they come into work, and they get email, and they read it, and whatever appeals to them, they live with it for a little while, they talk to their colleagues about it, and then we try to buy it if we think it's compelling.

- For those in the audience who may not know what the president and CEO of a big publishing house does, give us just a quick overview of what your responsibilities are, and what your job entails?

- Obviously, the decision about what to acquire, if it's at a high level, it comes to me, I supervise all of the publishers, and all of the operations of the company, ultimately, distribution of the books, the marketing of the books, any legal issues that arise.

Obviously, we have a full executive team, and I'm not singularly responsible for any of these categories.

Sales, the digital distribution, basically everything that gets a book produced and into the hands of readers, if you're the CEO of the publishing company, you are asking questions of your colleagues, and you're trying to help them do the very best for our authors.

As I mentioned, there are about 2,000 books a year that are coming out from Simon & Schuster, so our ultimate responsibility is to make sure that each of those books finds its audience.

- You came up through the industry, as it were, as an editor.

I'm curious, how does that process work, what's the day-in-the-life like for an editor?

Again, for those in our audience who might be uninitiated about the workings of the publishing industry.

- I guess I can answer that question with a story, with the story of the very first book I signed up, which, amazingly, was written by Mr. G. Wayne Miller.

I'd met him when we were both reporters at "The Providence Journal," and when I got to Random House in 1989, he was one of the very first people I wrote to, because he was the best writer at "The Providence Journal," all the reporters knew that.

He only wrote a few stories a year, he was that good, and when they were published, they were really great.

So I wrote to him, and he did eventually come up with an idea for a book, and I took it to my colleagues after I'd been at Random House for 2 1/2 years, it was the very first project I'd asked them to sign up.

It was a book about a children's hospital in Massachusetts, and about a remarkable pediatric surgeon there named Hardy Hendren, and it was called "The Work of Human Hands," and my colleagues let me sign it up.

I was probably about 28 years old at the time, they had no reason to think that I knew how to edit a book.

They liked Wayne's proposal, they thought that it would sell to Book of the Month Club, that's how long ago this was, Book of the Month Club was a huge force in publishing, and they thought that medical stories had real appeal to that readership.

So they let us pay in advance, and Wayne accepted it, and we did that book together.

So that was the very first book I actually got to edit, it's a remarkable coincidence.

- It is remarkable, and it's also a remarkable book, we should note.

I was intrigued reading your account of working with Senator Ted Kennedy on his autobiography, because I had this mental image in my mind of the editor with the red pen in their hand, dripping blood from their fingertips, and the carcasses of manuscripts lying at their feet, as well as the darker side of editing, but the portrayal that you gave us in that "New York Times Magazine" essay about working with Senator Kennedy, is you were really present at the creation.

How usual is that, to work with an author quite that closely?

- Each book is different, and in that case, Senator Kennedy, he'd been diagnosed with the glioblastoma, so he knew that he had limited time, so I was more involved in some of the interviews with him, getting it all down on paper, and talking to him and trying to help him tell the story.

But there were other people involved, and obviously his wife, Vicki Kennedy, an extraordinary women, she was integral to the project as well, and Ron Powers, the collaborator, also helped out a lot, so there were a lot of people.

And my role was, mostly, just to ask all the questions I could think of that readers would want to know.

I feel like an editor can edit what's in the book, but sometimes, what's more important is what is not on the pages, and what's between the lines, and so I was very interested in that, and I had a lot of questions for him.

- We wanted to get into many more, or at least as many as we can, of your other books, but before we do, can you say anything about the proposed merger of Simon & Schuster and Penguin Random?

- Sure, I think it's a great thing, and Penguin Random House is, obviously, one of the most respected publishing companies in the world.

We're still owned by ViacomCBS, which is interested in pursuing more of a strategy in streaming and broadcast, and so we're going to get to be owned by a publishing company now, a publishing company that has been publishing books going back to the 1600s in Germany.

So it's a good thing for Simon & Schuster, and right now, the sale is being reviewed by the Department of Justice, and so I can't really speak about it with any kind of specifics, but we're hoping that it will go through smoothly.

When the deal was done, the lawyers expected that it would take most of this year, so that's still where we are on it.

- Let's get into some of the books that you've published in your career.

One of the titles that leapt to my mind was "Born to Run," the Bruce Springsteen autobiography.

What was it like working with the Boss?

- It was one of the most inspiring experiences of my life, actually, because I saw how a true artist works.

Bruce spent six or seven years writing the manuscript himself.

Obviously, there was a writer who did not need a book advance from a publisher, he was able to support himself without needing any of our money, so he wrote it on his own terms, in his own way.

And one day, when I was actually sitting in my apartment, reading, I had taken a week off, I was on vacation in my apartment, I got a call from his manager, Jon Landau, who said, "Would you like to read Bruce's memoir?"

And I said yes, so I immediately headed over to their lawyer's office, which was conveniently a few blocks away, and I spent the next two days in his lawyer's office, reading the manuscript, I was the only person in New York who got to read it.

And we made a preemptive offer, and wound up as the publisher.

But the work itself was meticulously crafted then.

What was really amazing is that, then, Bruce decided he wanted to spend a year on the editing.

So I gave him my notes, we met, we had conversations, and over the course of a year, he revised, he cut it.

Unlike a lot of writers, he was really very clear-eyed about cutting stuff, he had that dispassion about his work, which is rare, so there were no arguments at all, he just made it better and better, he honed it.

I remember, after the book came out, he invited me to his Broadway show, which was based on the book, and he kept cutting, actually, to the extent that, on opening night, some of the same stories that were in the book were told even better.

And then he invited me again to closing night, and closing night was different from opening night, because he was just relentless about shaping the material, and having it achieve its maximum impact.

So I got to see his relentlessness, his focus.

He spent a year just writing the song "Born to Run," and that's only three minutes.

Actually, it's a little longer than that, it's probably more like five.

So he's a great artist and I loved working with him.

- [Wayne] Talk about "Fear," and Bob Woodward, another one of your major titles.

- Bob Woodward had been championed for many, many decades by Alice Mayhew, who was one of Simon & Schuster's great editors, and worked with so many of our authors, including Walter Isaacson, she edited a Pulitzer Prize-winning series by Taylor Branch on Martin Luther King.

Anyway, Alice had been Bob Woodward's editor for a long time.

We worked on "Fear" together, and then I was the editor of "Rage."

Obviously, these were Bob Woodward's books on the Trump administration.

He's covered every president since Richard Nixon, and he is a walking encyclopedia of the ways of Washington, and presidential power, and he has the context and the repertorial chops to figure out how to tell any story he decides is worth telling.

And what's so amazing about Bob is that it's just pure integrity and trust there.

His sources trust him, and he tells the story in a way that allows him to get what he needs, in order to give the readers an idea of what was really happening in the room, and somehow, he manages to do that without burning his sources, which is hard to do, and I think that really speaks to his probity and his own dedication to getting the facts right.

- How about "What Happened," Hilary Clinton's book, another major title that you worked very closely on?

- Yes, I have had the pleasure to work on several books by Hilary Clinton.

She wrote "What Happened" after she lost the election in 2016, and the title was an attempt to answer that question, and to also explain what happened.

I worked on that with Priscilla Painton, one of our best editors, and again, that was a case of getting to ask her all the questions we had about what it was like to be the first woman to have the nomination of a major political party, and come so close to the presidency, and to then see it all end the way it did.

I think it's a book that people are gonna be reading for a very long time because it really does take you inside the experience of running for president, it also explains the continuing challenges that women face, and the sexism and misogyny that really remains endemic to our political process.

- Jon, we've already mentioned the autobiography of Senator Ted Kennedy, but you also worked with Senator John McCain, and I'm curious, talk about "Lions of the Senate," do they have as much in common as they differed with on policy issues?

- They really did have a lot in common, and I have to say, I loved working with both of them.

I remember, with Senator Kennedy, we were having lunch one afternoon while we were working on the manuscript, and he started talking about some cuts that President Reagan had made, aid to working families, and this was decades ago in the past that this had happened, and Senator Kennedy was still upset about it.

I could see that there was real passion there, and that was also true for John McCain.

He was somebody who just loved to be in the arena, he was absolutely committed to doing what he thought was right, there was no self-interest there.

When we had lunch, he would pay, he didn't want any conflicts of interest, and he never actually called me about small things.

In fact, he hardly ever called me at all.

I remember once he called me because he thought there was a dissident in the former Soviet Union who he thought we should be publishing, and I thought it was so interesting that, out of all the times that he wanted to talk to me, that was what he wanted to talk to me about.

Another time, he wanted to make sure that we gave enough credit to his collaborator, Mark Salter.

I did seven books with John McCain, and he was the personification of character, he was a great American.

- That brings to mind, and I didn't know this until we were corresponding before this show, that you edited a couple of books many years ago by Donald Trump.

Now there's a contrast between the people we've been talking about.

Talk about that.

- Yes, in the 1990s, so a long, long time ago, Random House had published "The Art of the Deal," and so when it was time, he wanted to write "The Art of the Comeback," and I was a young editor, and so I was given the opportunity to work on that.

And then when "The Apprentice" was first coming out, the first season, we did a book with Donald.

He actually had a sign on his desk that said, "The buck starts here," and I thought that would actually be a good title, and he said, "No, no, no, no, no, "I wanna call it 'How to Get Rich.'"

"How to Get Rich," it's very direct, he always knew what he wanted.

I've got to say, working with him was a lot of fun, he would go to book signings, he'd autograph dollar bills for people online, people really liked him, he liked people.

I had no idea he had those kinds of presidential aspirations at the time, it was purely about the carnival of working with Donald Trump, and I was very surprised by the turn of events that his life took.

I have to say, at the same time I was working with Donald Trump, I was also doing a memoir by Donna Summer, the Queen of Disco, and if you had asked me at the time which of them would become president of the United States was more likely, I would have probably said it was more likely that Donna Summer would have been president of the United States, because she was at least queen of disco.

(they laugh) - [Wayne] That's hilarious.

- The whole thing just took me by surprise.

- Very quickly, you've started a book recommendation series called "The Word According to Karp", love the pun.

Tell us quickly about that, and then in the minute or two we have left, maybe you can talk about some upcoming titles from Simon and Schuster.

But anyway, "The Word According to Karp".

- [Jim] Four minutes, but who's counting?

- [Wayne] Who's counting?

- Thank you for asking.

I decided that I have such passion for these books, and I'm reading them, that it would just be fun for me to talk about them for just two or three minutes.

They're on YouTube, The Word According to Karp", and you can find them there, and it's just my favorite Simon and Schuster books.

I'm doing probably a few every month, and it's just a chance for me to enthuse about them.

We've got a book by Sebastian Junger coming out in May, called "Freedom," and a book by Brad Stone called "Amazon Unbound," which is inside Jeff Bezos' world, which is absolutely fascinating.

So each week, I'm trying to find a book that I think is worthy of being enthused about, and just letting readers know about them.

- "The Other Black Girl" is a title coming in June, and you describe it as one the most talked about first novels of the year.

Give us a little bit of detail on that one.

- Normally, there are articles written in advance of publication, and this is definitely one, everybody from the BBC to "Time" magazine have said this is one of the most anticipated books of the year.

It's by a first-time writer named Zakiya Harris, "The Other Black Girl," and it's about being black and working in an office, and the other black girl is the second black woman to come and work in this pretty white environment.

And so it's about race, and paranoia, and social justice, and it's set in the professional world, and I think that it's just the right book at the right time.

For all of us who are having these very sober and serious conversations about how to talk about race, this is a novel that explodes those conversations in the most suspenseful and entertaining way.

It's very funny too.

Some people are comparing it to "The Devil Wears Prada," some people are comparing it to "The Firm," but it's just, I think, a book that a lot of people are going to be reading, it's gonna be coming out in June.

- Sounds like somebody we should have on our show, Jim.

- [Jim] I would agree.

- She's brilliant, she's a brilliant woman, I think you would like her.

Remember her name, Zakiya Harris.

- [Wayne] We will, for sure.

- Jon, we've got literally about a minute left here, when did you fall in love with books?

- Oh gosh.

Well actually, probably when I was in high school, I read "The World According to Garp," John Irving.

(they laugh) - Of course you did.

- It rendered me into tears, I remember exactly which couch I was sitting on when I finished it, it was late at night.

I come from a family, both of my parents are big readers, so there were always books around the house, and I've just always loved to read.

Philip Roth's "Goodbye, Columbus" was another one, Bernard Malamud, "The Assistant," there were a bunch of novels that I read, and then I really got interested in journalism, and people like David Halberstam, and Robert Carroll, Bob Woodward.

All of Bob Woodward's books were on my shelf as a kid, and I remember I read "The Brethren" in college, and that was a transformative reading experience for me, explained the politics of the legal system in a way that even the college course I was taking didn't.

So it was just a great time to be coming of age and reading, and so when I left newspaper journalism, I decided that I wanted to work in books.

- We're all the better for it.

- [Wayne] No kidding.

- Jonathan Karp, that is all the time we have this week, but thank you so much for being with us.

If you want to know more about "Story in the Public Square," you can find us on Facebook and Twitter, or visit pellcenter.org, where you can always catch up on previous episodes.

For G. Wayne Miller, I'm Jim Ludes, asking you to joins us again next time for more "Story in the Public Square."

(uplifting music) (light acoustic music)