January's Local Author Blog - a Q & A with Carol Cartaino

You're one of our "local authors" (a resident of Seaman, Ohio and a participant in MidPointe Library's "ReadLocal Author Fair") who's spent "a lifetime working on books" -- as a prolific writer,  editor-in-chief of  Writer's Digest Books for ten years, an editor in the Trade Division of Prentice-Hall, Inc.,  and as a "writer's collaborator."  Please tell us how your incredible career evolved, beginning with childhood if applicable, and your educational background.  

 I graduated from Rutgers University in New Jersey with an English major, since that was an easy subject for me and I liked too many other subjects to settle on just one. I was the first person in my immediate family to get a college degree, and somewhat idealistic. Like many people in those days (this was the sixties), I didn’t think in terms of going to college to get a high-paying job, but simply to get educated. However when I finally did emerge with a degree, I realized that now I needed to find some kind of educated job. (Though I had a full scholarship, I worked all through college to help my family, making very good money as a waitress.) After going to a few employment agencies, who proposed various jobs that sounded so awful to me that on some I fled before the interview, someone said, “Well, the world’s largest publisher is only a few miles away. Why don’t you try there?” So I did.  

I started as a production editor, which is being one of the people who bring books from finished, edited manuscripts to finished, printed books. This is interesting to a degree, and what I learned here served me very well in later years, but it was not “real editing.” I was just sort of marking time with this until I could think of something better. But there was occasionally a little job in this position that involved traveling, and I always volunteered for these assignments. (Such as, “We need someone to take these proofs of a gardening book to the authors in upstate New York. Would you like to go?”) One day the boss said “We need a proofreader in New York City for a few days.” I jumped on it.  

When I got to the Big Apple, I found that the Associated Press had put about 30 of its best feature writers up in the New York Hilton, and they were team-writing an instant book (a book written and printed within a very short time) on the Six-Day War. They looked at me and said,  “Get a suitcase and move in!” I dashed home and did just that, and discovered that these highly talented but incredibly zany fellows needed not just a proofer, but a copyeditor (a person who fixes punctuation and grammar other small things). So I stayed with them for two weeks, working hard during the day and going out every night to dinners and drinks with famous columnists and the like. After we got the book done we flew to Maryland to watch it roll off the press.  

By this time I had realized there this publishing business might be more interesting than I had realized, so I decided to stay with it. The head of the Associated Press said some nice things about me to the Editor-in-Chief of Prentice-Hall, so I was promoted to a “real editor.” 

I have been a “real editor” ever since, and have never regretted it. You meet an amazing range of interesting people, some of them famous or semi-famous, you have a big and satisfying part in shaping ideas and books for the world, and you never stop learning. There are always new subjects, and you are always learning not a little but a LOT about them.  

 

Please describe your work as an editor in the "Trade Division" of Prentice-Hall Inc.  What is meant by “Trade Division"?   Where was your office located during this period? What was the size of your staff, approximately how many books would come across your desk, and what features/qualities did you expect a book to have in order to be published? What are a few of the titles published while you were in this position?   

 Prentice-Hall was predominately a publisher of textbooks and business services, but the “Trade Division,” the part I worked in, produced books for the general public, the kinds of books usually sold in bookstores. Those of us in the Trade book business think of this as the truly interesting part of publishing. My office was in the huge Prentice-Hall building in Englewood Cliffs, overlooking the Hudson River. At least 5,000 people worked in this giant office. The average trade book editor, of which I was one, does not have a staff. In those days they just had a secretary, or one that they shared with another editor. Today they probably just do all their own typing.  

One of the first jobs of a new editor then was to sort and sift through the “slush pile”—all of the unsolicited manuscripts that were sent in, and try to find a gem amongst the chaff. Lot of surprising things in that slush! The majority of publishers today will not even consider unsolicited manuscripts. To be published, a book needed to be well written, and on a subject that a fair number of people were likely to be interested in.  

In my years at P-H I worked on books on every imaginable subject, from cookbooks to books on crafts, photography, and sports, books on the history of moonshining or wetlands of the U.S. or the California condor. Oddly, I worked on several books then that had to do with Ohio, which I never imagined would be my future home. I edited three very charming and strong-selling books by Patricia Penton Leimbach, which were collections of her essays about being an Ohio farm wife. The first of these was titled A Thread of Blue Denim, and the last A Harvest of Bittersweet.  I also edited Not Just a Sound, a book about station WLW, and even a book called Goodbye, Coney Island, Goodbye, which was, beyond belief to me at the time, a book about the glories of the Cincinnati amusement park Old Coney Island, which was being replaced by King’s Island. This was primarily a photo book, and when the photos to the book were mysteriously lost before the book went to press, I was sent to Ohio to try and smooth things over, since Taft Broadcasting had agreed to buy a large quantity of this book. I ended up tripping through the ruins of Old Coney, even as it was being demolished, with the author, whom everyone called “the Prince” (he was supposed to be the heir of the Romanoffs), as he took new pictures of whatever he could, even as the bulldozers rolled around us. I even got a tour of King’s Island before it ever opened, from the head of Taft Broadcasting, and a dinner at a 5-star restaurant. This was quite an introduction to Cincinnati! 

P.S. The original pictures were eventually found, thrown down an elevator shaft by disgruntled mailboys.  

  

Your 2010 book, It Happened In Ohio...Remarkable Events That Shaped History, illustrates your fondness for the Buckeye State. On the last page you wrote that you've "been an Ohioan for more than thirty years..." and that you live and work in Seaman. What about Ohio appealed to you to the extent that you chose to live here?  

 Actually, I originally came to Ohio to take a job. As the years passed, Prentice-Hall was clearly going to phase out its Trade Division, so I needed to look for a new job. I went to an agency that specialized in publishing jobs, and this time I was determined to really look at different publishing jobs, since I had sort of fallen into my first one. I looked into everything from being an editor for Consumer Reports (they really wanted me!), to business book publishers, and companies that staff-wrote books for nurses. The best possibility of all seemed to be in Cincinnati. Writer’s Digest Books, publisher of Writer’s Market and Writer’s Digest, and for decades the fountainhead of information for aspiring writers, was looking for a book publishing expert to found a department that would produce a steady stream of books on writing, since they intended to found a writer’s book club. This was a much bigger job than I had ever aspired to, but I was ready for a change. I somehow managed to get through a huge number of interviews and even an industrial psychologist, and get hired for this. It was a terrific, expanding experience! Whatever I didn’t know how to do, I learned! 

 

It's not very often we get to interview the former editor-in-chief of the venerable Writer's Digest Books, of which we have many in our catalog. Were you located in New York City? What was a  "typical day" for you as editor-in-chief or was there no such thing as a "typical day" in that profession? What was the size of your staff? How many books would come across your desk in a day, week, year? As editor-in-chief, what features/qualities were you seeking in a book before giving it the green light for publishing? Please name a few of titles that were published while you were editor-in-chief.   

 My office was in the same building as a large printing plant, S. Rosenthal, in a suburb of Cincinnati, Blue Ash, Ohio. I also spent a fair amount of time traveling to New York City, however, in an effort to raise the visibility of this initially little-known publishing company in Ohio. I also traveled often to writer’s conferences in other states to give speeches and presentations on writing. 

As for a typical day, most editors-in-chief have a combination of meetings with staff over problems with books in progress, meetings with other parts of the company (including meetings to decide whether or not to publish particular books and to look at roughs of possible book cover designs), time spent reviewing manuscripts, time spent looking for (and wooing) new authors, time spent editing books important enough to be edited by the editor-on-chief, and time spent trying to smooth the path of books through other departments. I had three assistant editors and a secretary.  

Essentially the same criteria applied here for publishability. Well-written projects by people knowledgeable in what they were writing about, and subjects likely to appeal to a sizable number of aspiring writers or photographers or whoever the intended audience was. Many aspiring writers don’t realize that in nonfiction, what the proposed subject is may be more important than the polish of your writing style. In fiction, of course, plot, characters, and style are all. 

While at Writer’s Digest I edited and produced a great number of books on all aspects of writing for publication, in fiction and nonfiction, plus a number of best-selling books by different authors on domestic subjects such as cleaning, homemaking, and decluttering. All of the books Don Aslett did for Writer’s Digest are an example, and the books done by media personality Beverly Nye.  

 

You've co-authored several titles with cleaning/organization/simplification expert Don Aslett. Please tell us how you became acquainted with the man many think of as the "King of Clean." 

 One day the administrative head of the Book Division of Writer’s Digest asked me to look at a self-published book he had come across—Is There Life After Housework?, by Don Aslett. I looked it over and thought, “This is in pretty rough form, but there are some truly different ideas here.” I recommended that we publish it, and we did, and it became a bigtime best seller. It took a great deal of editorial work to bring the book up to national publication standards, but this was the first time anyone had brought the methods of the pros to home cleaning. (Aslett was a professional cleaner.)  

Don, who lived in Idaho, came to Cincinnati to work on the revisions, and I persuaded him to write another book of answers to common questions about cleaning. This ended up being Do I Dust or Vacuum First?, another bestseller. By this time Don and I had forged a partnership whereby he did the rough draft, and I polished and added to it, and asked him for more to add to it. 

 We ended up working on 40 more books together, even after I left Writer’s Digest Books, and I got well acquainted with Don and all of his operations as well as his home of Pocatello, Idaho. He was, and still is, a very extraordinary man in the world of book authors, just about all of whom are unusual in some way. He was a little rough-edged by big-city standards, but he always made things fun.  

 

Please describe your work as a "writer's collaborator." Does that mean co-author?  

 This essentially does mean coauthor, although it can take many different forms. In the case of Don Aslett, he gives me a crude draft, plus many additional “flying splinters” of related thoughts and I put it all together and add to it (and ask him to add to it) and then edit it until I have a satisfying final draft. In other cases it might mean interviewing an author on the phone, or transcribing material the author has dictated, and then editing and arranging this into a manuscript, plus getting more from the author on subjects that seem to need more fleshing out. Or some other way of going about it. In general it means doing a lot more than just editing what the author has drafted.  

 

As editor for two of the world's publishing giants, you no doubt saw the need for revisions, deletions, enhancements, etc. in the work presented to you.  What were the most common mistakes and omissions made by authors? What advice would you give today to a writer with "best-seller" in his/her sights? 

 One of the most common mistakes, when writing nonfiction, is forgetting to tell the reader some rather basic things about your subject that you may not think of because they are second nature, taken for granted by you. Overlong and overcomplicated sentences are another common error, as is overusing the same word or words.  

As for advice for writers with “best-seller” in their sights, one thing I would say is to not just try to copy or emulate best-sellers you are aware of, but to write what you really know about, what is a passionate interest for you. If you do that, your book has a better chance of selling, and selling well.  

 

How long did it take you to write It Happened in Ohio, and how did you go about getting it published?  

Getting this book published was no problem, because I was doing an editing job for a large Eastern publisher, and the editor of that book, noting that I lived in Ohio, asked me if I would like to write a book on the history of Ohio. It took me more than six months to write the book, because I had to do a tremendous amount of research, this being a subject I had no previous knowledge of. I also enlisted the aid of a professor who taught Ohio history at Wilmington College. In nonfiction, I would never just want to bluff my way through—I want to really know what I am writing about.  

 

Of all the events you featured in "It Happened In Ohio..." which one captivates you the most? 

I’m afraid I must mention more than one. 1) “Raccoons Build a Bookshelf,” a story that shows how education and books have meant a great deal to Ohioans from the earliest times (and how the terrific Ohio library system developed from there); 2)” Bicentennial Barnstorm”—the very charming story of how those Bicentennial barns came about, and all that happened along the way; 3) ”Little Sure Shot Gets Started”—the amazing story of Annie Oakley, one of America’s favorite folk heroines. I was delighted to discover she was an Ohioan.  

 

What did you find interesting about our neck of the woods, Southwest Ohio? 

 I have truly enjoyed living in Southwest Ohio for the following reasons: The people are genuinely friendly and helpful. There is a strong tinge of “Southerness” here, in the language and people’s ways of doing things, which I find very interesting. It is also very civilized (compared to some states I can think of), yet somewhat rural still, and for the most part very wholesome.  

 

As a writer/editor, what is your theory about the popularity of the simplifying-one's-life/decluttering genre? It seems to be extremely popular around the first of any year.  

Having edited and half-written more than six books on decluttering, I am pretty well versed in this subject. I think the popularity of this subject is due to the fact that for the most part, Americans buy and otherwise accumulate too much “stuff”—more than they can actually use or even store conveniently. So they end up with closets, garages, attics, outbuildings, and storage compartments crammed with things they rarely or never use, and probably don’t need. Freeing yourself from this mass of stuff can become a powerful urge.  

As a packrat myself, with nine buildings here on my little farm filled with stuff, I understand all of this all too well, and it made me a good writing partner for Don Aslett on this subject, since he is a “tosser” and I am a “keeper.” 

 

Please describe your titles listed below and what motivated you to write them. If there are more, please list them: 

 Keeping Work Simple: 500 Tips, Rules, and Tools. I wanted to do a book with Don Aslett for a different publisher than Writer’s Digest or New American Library. So I approached Storey Publishing and suggested this book. It sold well and was published in several other countries. I looked at the Japanese and Chinese editions and tried to imagine men and women in these far-away countries applying these maxims of how to do things faster and better learned in American businesses and offices.  

 Myths and Truths About Coyotes: What You Need To Know About America's Most Misunderstood Predator. This is a book that tells you all you need and want to know about an animal that we all live with now (coyotes are in every state except Hawaii, and every city, town, suburb, and county in Ohio). I live on a small farm in Adams County, and when I first realized that coyotes had moved into my part of Ohio—I heard them howling at night while out working in my pole barn office— wanted to find out if they were a danger to my animals. (I have always loved animals and have many cats, rabbits, ducks, and chickens.) As my vet said humorously one day, pointing at me: “Some people handle their fears by researching them!” I learned a great deal working on this book, and am pleased to say that the experts have said it is entirely accurate. USA Today said, “Pet owners need to read this book!” Coyotes are amazing animals, whether or not you have anything you need to protect from them.  

 Get Organized, Get Published!  Writer’s Digest Books asked Don and I to write this book because they felt it was needed. Writing is one of the world’s most procrastinated pastimes, and this book is meant to help people stop talking about it and dreaming about it and DO IT. It also explains how to organize your writing materials and efforts for maximum advantage.    

 

In closing, would you like to add anything else to this Q-and-A?   

I enjoy dealing with the magnificent libraries of Ohio, including yours, and appreciate the chance to “speak” to some of your patrons.