In response to Emily's post yesterday about the environmental consequences of our no-returns business model, which raised the possibility that "people don't buy more books because they see big luxuriant stacks of books on offer," Wiley marketer Andrew Wheeler offered a mild rebuke:

"If there are three books on a shelf, and two customers come looking for it, two sales will result. If there is one book on a shelf, and two customers come, one of them is out of luck—and so is the bookseller. You end up with returns because it's impossible to always have precisely one book for every purchaser in the right place at the right time."

Wheeler describes bookselling as a Scylla and Charybdis setup, where retailers try to steer a path between the "false negative" of being out of stock when customers come calling and the "false positive" of having lots of books nobody's looking for. "You can manage a business to minimize one of those, but doing that, either way, is dangerous," Wheeler cautions. "The smart way is to keep an eye on both measures, and balance them out across a publishing line."

(I'll leave the fine points of that argument for those of you with better business sense to tease out, but I just want to make one small correction to Wheeler's argument, which begins, "GalleyCat doesn't have comments..." We do, we really do!)

Literary agent Ted Weinstein passes along some pictures from "Books and Booze," a semi-annual gathering of the San Francisco Bay Area's publishing community. Among those who came to 111 Minna Gallery for the most recent bash were the Wiley editorial triumvirate of Lesley Iura, Sheryl Fullerton and Jesse Wiley, along with independent consultant (and party organizer) Ani Chamichian, joined by agent Rob Preskill.

That reminds me: We haven't had a party in a while... and with two new bloggers, we've got plenty of reason to celebrate... Hmmm.

After Random House bought Sony Readers for its entire sales team, an agent who would rather not tell you his name wrote me to comment on the number of publishers who are using the e-book readers to distribute galleys and manuscripts without all that cumbersome paper. "Electronic is better for everyone, and I bet much more than half of submissions (at least for non-fiction proposals) are already being submitted by agents electronically now," he says, "[but] Sony Readers don't handle PDF files, which means we have less control of formatting when we are forced to send an RTF."

"[Fake editors] are most definitely not an urban legend," a freelance editor emailed me yesterday. "A company that I worked at in the '90s not only sent out rejection letters under a fake editor's name, but this fake editor also had a voicemail box and an e-mail address. I would bet this still happens. Most rejected authors are gracious, but those that aren't can be horrifying."

And how: The pseudonmyous "Moonrat," an editor here in New York, writes on her blog that an aspiring author has turned into a stalker. The guy shows up unannounced at her company and drops off his unsolicited manuscript after waiting more than half an hour for her, then calls her assistant the next day wondering if there was any feedback yet. "Now he has somehow learned my direct line," she reports. "I have had 3 (three) long phone messages from him today about his book and how it's going to change the world." (Via Maud.)

This morning's item about rejection letters sent out under false names sparked another recollection about the way things used to work in publishing. Colleen Lindsay, an agent with Fine Print Literary Management, recalls an episode from her years on the other side of the fence:

"Long ago, when Lester and Judy Lynn Del Rey were still heading up Del Rey Books, they had several small ceramic bulls that were named after various popes. One of the ceramic bulls was named Urban. Urban Del Rey. Now, frequently, when Lester and Judy's staff and assistants rejected manuscripts or queries, they used the name Urban Del Rey as a signature. In several of the leading writers guides of the time, Urban del Rey was actually listed as an acquiring editor. And even when I was still working there a couple of years ago, we would occasionally receive slush addressed to Mr. Urban Del Rey. It always made us smile."

Oh, wait: papal bulls. Now I get it! Lindsay adds that, as far as she knows, "the bulls have gone off to live with various and sundry long-time Ballantine employees." And, no, they probably didn't much look like the picture above, but I work with what I've got!

Here's an interesting take on Borders's new face-out program, from Dave Marx of PassPorter Travel Press:

"Can an advertising venue with surplus display space fill that space at a profitable rate?" Marx asks. "Surplusses tend to drive rates down, which could help publishers. Most likely, then, Borders won't dump the added co-op onto the market at once. In the meantime, that space will go at no charge to titles the retailer favors."

Which could mean a lucky break for small publishers . (On that note, when it comes to face-out, a former Borders employee who for obvious reasons wishes to remain anonymous says, "The people that are really making those decisions are the inventory processing teams in the stores. There are required face-outs but those are generally ignored by employees if the book they are asked to bring attention to stinks.") Marx goes on to explain that the ultimate point of facing more books out isn't the increased opportunity to rake in co-op money, but the ability to generate faster turnover: "With or without co-op support, the goal is fewer slow-selling titles."

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"I'm a critic who was assigned to review Love and Consequences," says a reader who chose to email me anonymously for fairly obvious reasons. "I had my doubts about the book, but they were smoothed over by the requisite note that names had been changed, experiences conflated, etc... I ignored my instincts, though, because I don't think it's a critic's job to vet memoirs, and the story was compelling and well-written." (As an occasional book reviewer myself, I'm not entirely unsympathetic; very few publications pay non-staff reviewers enough to make it financially worthwhile for them to do anything more than have an opinion unless they can spot something blatantly inaccurate.)

Anyway, the hoopla of the last few days, once Peggy Seltzer's phoniness was exposed, has that anonymous reviewer thinking wistfully of One Small Boat, "a great memoir by a foster parent [Kathy Harrison] about the work she does and the people she's met that got very little attention when published a couple years ago." (S/he might actually be thinking of Harrison's first memoir, Another Place at the Table, but no matter—and, of course, she's not to be confused with Kathryn Harrison.)

"That's the truly shameful thing here," this reviewer reflects, "that we react to the scandal, but not to a story of someone doing honest and earnest work. That's how the 'Margaret B. Joneses' of the world are made."

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Maureen O'Neal, who spent twenty years editing books at major publishing houses like Ballantine and Regan Books, isn't even remotely satisfied by the explanations ("excuses" is the word she used) Riverhead's editorial team gave for how Peggy Seltzer was able to trick them into believing Love and Consequences was a real memoir. "The majority of my books were legally vetted prior to publication," she recalls in an email sent yesterday afternoon, "and the in-house lawyers were unyielding (sometimes overly) about checking facts, mostly out of fear of being sued for slander or libel. I even had an exercise book cancelled because the copyeditor, using the internet, found that parts of the book had been plagiarized. These days, with the internet, it is very easy to check facts, and is not all that costly. I think the editor and publisher were so blinded by the drama of this story that they let go of their objectivity." But she doesn't think Sarah McGrath should be held up as the scapegoat: "Her job is to edit and publish great stories, and this book had to have been signed off on at every level."

And by that standard, it bears repeating, McGrath can be said to have done her job perfectly—picking up a story that was apparently so compelling that it also fooled a Pulitzer-grade book critic like Michiko Kakutani, who said "[Margaret B. Jones has done an amazing job of conjuring up her old neighborhood," thanks to "a novelist's eye for the psychological detail and an anthropologist's eye for social rituals and routines." It also fooled LA Times reviewer Susan Salter Reynolds, who winds up feeling sorry for Seltzer, and fellow Angeleno Yxta Maya Murray, who praised the book for Truthdig and then declared she's proud she bought into Seltzer's story and vows "to maintain my faith in women's witness" the next time she's handed a similar book to write about.

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This morning, I asked whether non-white editors and agents might have spotted Peggy Seltzer's fraud earlier, which led one GalleyCat reader to respond, "I would be willing to bet that there's at least one copy editor, at least one lawyer, and a whole flock of underlings who didn't buy that Margaret B. Jones' 'memoir' was real. I'd like to believe that many of us, regardless of race, would have spotted this book as a fake, but in the long run, unless we're high up on the ladder, it would likely not have mattered."

But another reader, taking note of Seltzer's false claims to Native American heritage, spotted what could have been another red flag in Love and Consequences: Sherman Alexie's Reservation Blues, which Seltzer is sure to have read while pursuing that ethnic studies degree she never quite picked up from the University of Oregon, also features a wise maternal character named "Big Mom." If anybody out there still has a copy of Seltzer's fantasy and can tell me if the similarities run deeper, drop me a line!

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Last week's video clip with Story Prize director Larry Dark apparently touched a nerve with one or more frustrated writers—it's hard to tell just how many because all the bitter, bitter emails came through the anonymous tipline. Anyway, all the messages ran roughly the same, culminating in this assertion:

"Maybe artistically, it's still ok, but commerically the short story is DEAD. That's D-E-A-D. Who ever heard of a short story writer as a valid career? Sorry, not in THIS time period."

Quick, somebody tell Alice Munro she doesn't have a valid career. She's up in Canada; you can swing by George Saunders's house on the way and break the news to him as well. I'll stay here in New York and let Amy Hempel and Deborah Eisenberg know it's time for them to move on.

I can see the whiny, no-doubt-anonymous objection now: "Yeah, but if those last four weren't creative writing professors..." But if we started saying you couldn't be "successful" as a writer unless all you did to make money was write—well, let's just say the ranks of successful writers would be a lot less interesting.

(UPDATE: Yep, that very complaint came in barely 75 minutes after this post went live, adding, "If you do not have an MFA and therefore pander to academia, you are an OUTSIDER. Just FYI." Note to anonymous outsiders: Perhaps the reason your stories aren't getting published isn't that the literary world is artistically bankrupt. Just FYI.)