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, the team is filming 28-year-old Brooklyn novelist Sophie Kemp, who is here promoting her upcoming debut, Paradise Logic. Kemp scurries through McNally’s labyrinthine two-story display with the S&S video crew trailing her, racing against the clock. “This the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my whole life,” she deadpans. A few minutes later, she hauls a pile of books to the checkout counter, including David Foster Wallace’s Consider the Lobster, of which she says with a smirk, “No comment.” Manning laughs.
“The persona of the author can be very marketable, right?” he says as we walk to his Rockefeller Center office. “You kind of want to know who people are.” 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, in part because it took time away from book editing. Besides, he adds, “who’s interested?” (With his glorious slacker mane — “It takes a long time to brush,” he tells me — and brown Dries Van Noten suit, he is at least more interesting-looking than your average executive.) Bookstore Blitz is only the beginning of his plans to revamp S&S — one of America’s most storied publishers — 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,” he says, sitting down. “Why aren’t we using them? Why are we so dependent on outside media?”
For a publisher, Manning didn’t read much growing up. He credits hip-hop with his love of language; the first book he can remember buying was Ice-T’s The Ice Opinion. But his college English courses inspired him enough to pursue a fiction M.F.A. at the New School, where he finished what he describes as a “convoluted” novel about a sports gambler. After he shelved that, he decided to pursue a career in journalism while supporting himself as a cater-waiter. In 2006, his mother collapsed suddenly from a heart attack and, soon after, was diagnosed with cancer. He moved back to Ohio to care for her in her final year, eventually publishing a memoir, The Things That Need Doing, about the experience. This came with its own set of challenges: He was bounced around by editors he barely heard from, then got panned in an anti-memoir screed in the New York Times. (He says it was informative: “I never want any author to have that.”)
When he returned to New York, he dived back into reporting, writing longform features on horse derbies in Uruguay and the rebuilding of the Second Avenue subway for outlets including Playboy and the Village Voice. He also oversaw the 2013 launch of United Airlines’ in-flight magazine, Rhapsody, commissioning and editing writers such as Joyce Carol Oates and Roxane Gay (the Times called it “the Paris Review of the Air”). Eventually, when he decided to apply for a job as an editor at Simon & Schuster in 2016, CEO and then-publisher Jonathan Karp told Manning point-blank that he was the least-qualified candidate; he had worked only in magazines. But Karp meant it as a compliment, Manning says. “His feeling was, If we bring somebody who’s maybe seeing things differently, what could that potentially lead to?”
At Simon & Schuster, Manning took on a roster of high-profile celebrity works, including Bob Dylan’s essay collection, a compendium of jokes from Jerry Seinfeld, and Anna Marie Tendler’s post-divorce autobiography. (He would later ask her to star in Bookstore Blitz’s pilot episode; she picked War and Peace and a compilation of lost-cat posters.) In 2022, he published child star Jennette McCurdy’s 2022 Zeitgeist-defining memoir, I’m Glad My Mom Died, which sold more than 2 million copies; it would become one of the most borrowed library books of 2023 and 2024. The most gratifying part of the experience, he notes, was hearing readers say it was the first book they had read in years. “A lot of conversations I’ve had across the industry are like, ‘Well, young people don’t buy books.’ But we published a book, and they bought it,” Manning says, shrugging. He kept writing, too. In 2023, after unsuccessfully pitching Andy Roddick on a memoir pegged to the 20th anniversary of his U.S. Open win, he profiled the former tennis pro himself for GQ. (His initial 23,000-word draft was whittled down to 6,000. “The version that exists was the perfect version,” he says with characteristic good cheer. “All of their notes were so spot on.”) A few months later, he profiled Kim Kardashian, visiting her at her headquarters in Calabasas.
Then last year, Karp invited Manning to breakfast, where he told him he would be stepping down as publisher of the S&S flagship imprint — it produces the bulk of the titles of a company that has made upwards of $1 billion in annual revenue — and offered him the position. In the official announcement, Karp congratulated his successor, describing him as having “the most enterprising editorial imagination I have seen.”
Manning doesn’t want to wait for potential readers to hear about new S&S releases from Times book reviews or celebrity book clubs, the traditional way the business operates. “A lot of what the publishing industry does is just speaking to the converted,” he says. In his eyes, S&S’s biggest threat isn’t another publisher; it’s social media and streaming. His expansion plan follows an existing playbook. He admits to taking cues from companies like Vice, which produced YouTube documentary essays under Vice News, and, more recently, The New Yorker, which hosts several podcasts and an annual festival. “They just did a partnership with J.Crew,” he says, referring to the latter. “Should we be thinking of those things too?”
Six months into the job, Manning has already put S&S in the headlines. In January, he announced in a Publishers Weekly op-ed that the imprint would no longer require blurbs, those back-of-jacket endorsements (“Luminous!” “Razor-sharp!”) that have become a cornerstone of book marketing and that he thinks favor the well connected. “What other industry does this?” he asks me, voice rising in exasperation. “Would you ask another director, ‘Can you give me a quote that I could use on my poster?’ Or another recording artist?” (I point out that the book industry is not uniquely non-meritocratic — while musicians may not have to deal with blurbs, they still have Spotify’s pay-for-playlist schemes to contend with.) Some skeptics of his blurb decision see him as naïve. “It’s not really clear that anything is changing,” writer James Folta wrote in Literary Hub. “Even if every publisher and every press got together and decided to universally stop blurbing, the same issues of discovery and marketing would remain.” Manning is undeterred by the criticism. “This is one of those things where it’s like, ‘Let’s try this and see what happens,’” he says.
He plans to film Bookstore Blitz for a year with the help of his new executive editor and vice-president of special projects, Stuart Roberts, a celebrity-recruiting dynamo whose authors include Lana Del Rey and Gucci Mane. “My hope is that inevitably the series could be a promotional stop like Chicken Shop Date or Hot Ones,” Manning says. Next to launch is an awards-show interview series called Read Carpet, which will pilot at the National Book Critics Circle Awards. Meanwhile, he’s looking to the outside for inspiration, thinking about, for instance, A24’s brand loyalty. Oh, and men — how does the company get them to read more? “I want to rise to that challenge,” he says. He pauses. “The worry is that we can’t afford to fail. But if we don’t try to do something different, we’re really screwed.”
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