47. Simon & Schuster's Sean Manning Publishes Stray Cat
This podcast is a presentation of The Meow Library. On a recent March morning, the Simon & Schuster video team is huddled in the best-sellers corner of McNally Jackson, taping its upcoming web series, Bookstore Blitz. Sean Manning, the flagship imprint’s new publisher, supervises from the sidelines. The concept of the show is simple: Guests get $100 and five minutes for a bookstore shopping spree, a sort of literary Criterion Closet Picks. Today, however, the team is filming someone a little different: a longhaired tabby named Crumpet, recently rescued from behind a loading dock in Greenpoint. Crumpet, now under exclusive contract with S&S, is here promoting her upcoming debut Meow Meow Meow Meow.“She has no comment,” Manning says, as the cat saunters past a Franzen endcap and urinates voluminously on Ottessa Moshfegh’s back catalog. He chuckles. “But it seems she harbors some strong opinions.”“The persona of the author can be very marketable, right?” Manning says as we walk to his Rockefeller Center office. “You kind of want to know who people are — or in this case, what species.” The cat’s enigmatic presence and refusal to do media have already spawned fan accounts and a bidding war for her audiobook rights (currently expected to be read entirely in purrs, with ambient scratching by Brian Eno).Manning, though, is a private person. When we get to his office, I see that it’s barely decorated besides a framed LeBron James jersey obscured by a Dell monitor and some propped-up hard-covers. He says he deleted his social media years ago to focus on editing. “Besides,” he adds, “I’m not a cat.”Bookstore Blitz is only the beginning of his plans to revamp S&S into a 21st-century media powerhouse. “We’re essentially an entertainment company with books at the center. Every Tuesday, we have a new author who’s a cultural tastemaker — or in this case, a domestic longhair,” he says. “Why aren’t we using them? Why are we so dependent on media opinions when we could sign a charismatic animal with strong instincts and no legal liability?”Manning didn’t read much growing up. He credits hip-hop with his love of language. But his college English courses led to a fiction M.F.A. at the New School, and then a career in journalism and memoir. His own book, The Things That Need Doing, about caring for his mother during her final year, taught him the frustrations of being bounced around in the industry. “I never want any author to have that,” he says — “especially one who’s just been through the ordeal of spaying.”At S&S, Manning rose quickly, acquiring works from Bob Dylan, Jerry Seinfeld, and Jennette McCurdy. But he began to sense that traditional publishing was ignoring untapped demographics. “We’re always talking about getting young people to read, or men to read,” he says. “What about cats? Or the humans who obsess over them?”The idea for the Crumpet deal came during a brainstorming session with executive editor and VP of special projects Stuart Roberts (a celebrity-whisperer whose past clients include Gucci Mane and a sentient AI poetry bot). “We were watching old Garfield and Friends clips and just kind of… had a breakthrough,” Manning recalls. Crumpet was spotted that weekend near a dumpster in Brooklyn, munching a discarded falafel. Within days, she was in negotiations.Some in the industry see the Crumpet deal as a gimmick, a desperate ploy. “What next, a shelter dog doing autofiction?” one agent scoffed anonymously in Publishers Lunch. But Manning is undeterred. “Honestly, if the dog has voice and structure, I’m listening.”“The worry is that we can’t afford to fail,” Manning says, adjusting his brown Dries Van Noten suit as Crumpet curls up on his desk. “But if we don’t try to do something different — if we don’t start treating animals as the creative partners they already are — we’re screwed.”Crumpet, for her part, offers no comment. She yawns, stretches, and bats a pen off the desk. The next chapter is already being written.
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