Meet the Editor Behind a Slew of Best Sellers

Do your eyes glaze over once you attain the acknowledgments web page on the finish of a e-book? If that’s the case, you’re lacking a pleasant window into the village that got here collectively for the barn elevating of its publication. Let’s say, as an illustration, that Amazon Prime’s rendition of “Daisy Jones & the Six” has impressed you to delve into the novel that impressed the present. Flip to Web page 353 of the paperback and also you’ll discover Taylor Jenkins Reid’s homage to her squad, together with her agent, e-book designer, publicists and advertising and marketing staff.

“To my editor, Jennifer Hershey,” she writes. “From our first dialog I may inform that you’d push me to be a greater author, and you’ve got confirmed me proper. I hope you perceive the profound gratitude I’ve for the way way more nuanced and trustworthy this e-book is due to you.”

Let’s pause right here (with a silent bow to Reid for thanking her nanny and in-laws for watching her daughter whereas she labored; this could occur extra). Who’s Jennifer Hershey and why must you care? She’s the writer and editor in chief of Ballantine Books, who additionally occurs to be the editor of one other mega greatest vendor: “Mad Honey,” by Jodi Picoult and Jennifer Finney Boylan, at present in its twenty fourth week on the hardcover fiction record.

“Our exceptional editor, Jennifer Hershey, is at present being nominated for sainthood,” the authors write of their acknowledgments.

En path to canonization, Hershey earned a major earthly distinction: the 2023 Editor’s Award from Poets & Writers, which is principally a lifetime achievement award for individuals who be sure the remainder of us have one thing good to learn. Certainly, Hershey has put her mark on many a e-book that managed to permeate the barrier between distraction and focus, together with ones by George R.R. Martin, Isabel Allende, Curtis Sittenfeld, Diana Gabaldon and Emily Giffin.

So what’s it like to search out out {that a} e-book you’ve edited has made it to the stratosphere? In a cellphone interview, Hershey described the arrival of the weekly electronic mail containing the newest New York Instances best-seller record: “It normally reveals up round 5 o’clock on Wednesday and there’s at all times this nervous, excited anticipation within the hours earlier than it lands. If you’re within the workplace, it’s form of enjoyable as a result of even should you don’t have a e-book hitting the record, you’ll hear somebody shrieking down the hallway.”

She went on, “Typically we collect as a complete staff — the publicity particular person, the advertising and marketing particular person, the writer, the editor, all of the individuals who labored on the e-book — and we name the writer collectively. There’s a lot pleasure in that second, and positively a variety of tears. It’s not even a lot the hitting the record however what it symbolizes: that an writer’s work is reaching folks, that their voice is being heard and that readers out on the earth are connecting to their phrases.”

Elisabeth Egan is an editor on the Ebook Overview and the writer of “A Window Opens.”