By age 30, Rob Weisbach had accomplished what others take whole careers to achieve. He'd started in New York publishing as a 24-year-old editorial assistant at Bantam Books. Just a few bold moves later, the Stanford Class of '88 dropout was being hailed as a boy wonder: he was the impetus behind a string of books by celebrity comedians like Jerry Seinfeld, Ellen DeGeneres and Paul Reiser. Three of them -- Seinfeld's SeinLanguage, DeGeneres's My Point -- And I Do Have One, and Reiser's Couplehood -- reached No. 1 on the New York Times bestseller list.
In 1996, the year the Times wrote about his "enviable track record," William Morrow and Company lured Weisbach from Bantam with the offer of his own imprint. Over the next three years, he worked as a publisher, managing his own budget and staff. Dozens of titles appeared bearing his imprint, Rob Weisbach Books. He'd reached the top at an age almost unheard of in publishing.
The fall was even faster, though. In this frenzied era of mergers, acquisitions and downsizing within the publishing trade, Weisbach was knocked off his pinnacle last September when HarperCollins bought Morrow and eliminated eight imprints, his included. Unwilling to settle for the new position offered him, he quit.
Having won and lost so much so fast, Weisbach might well be bitter. Instead, he plans to build on his name by starting a full-fledged, independent house. Financing is "moving along nicely," he says, adding that when it is in place, a promising contingent of authors and distributors have told him they want to be part of RobWeisbach Books. "I have this rare opportunity now to be a start-up without having some of the difficulties of being an unknown entity," he says.
Behind the lightly freckled face and curly reddish hair that make him look like a small-town boy-made-good, Weisbach has the entrepreneur's love for risk. He comes across as casual and guileless: he took a chance and, hey, look what happened. But his run of bestsellers was precisely attuned to the cultural climate of the mid-1990s and its appetite for books by celebrities.
Arguably, the first big risk he took was dropping out of Stanford in 1987. When Weisbach was still a high school student at Andover Academy in Massachusetts, his father, who published academic books, taught him editing skills. Throughout his years at Stanford, he took copyediting jobs, repeatedly stopping out and returning until he left for good in his junior year. "I finally decided that I was spending a lot of money and time on something that didn't exactly make sense to me," he says.
Most publishing houses don't hire people without college degrees. But Weisbach's freelance editing experience got him a job as an editorial assistant at Bantam Books. There he worked on contemporary fiction and fiction reprint lines. But he soon realized that "in order to become an editor, you needed to develop your own projects and acquire your own books. All of the new fiction was going to older fiction editors."
Looking for a way to break in, he decided to try his luck where others had failed. He'd heard that other editors had approached the actress Whoopi Goldberg about writing a memoir, but apparently she wasn't interested. So he wrote to her, asking "Is there something else you might want to do?" Her manager called back, saying that Goldberg had always wanted to do a children's book. The resulting project, Alice, gave Weisbach his start. After his first success, he was able to get the attention of other celebrity prospects. Television comedians in particular struck him as a goldmine. "They were people who obviously were creative talents, but who had never really broken into this [print] medium," he explains.
Weisbach says he wasn't intimidated working with seasoned stars. As a former student of literature and poetry, he saw himself first as a reader, rather than a fan or a critic.
As such, he seems unfazed by what the New York Times in 1997 called "the dizzying tumble from grace" of celebrity books. For Weisbach, publishing famous funny people was just the beginning. Over time, his imprint wooed more literary writers, such as Dale Peck, Scott Lasser, A.M. Homes -- even Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky, MA '85, PhD '67 -- in addition to its stable of big sellers, which included Brad Meltzer, Betty DeGeneres (Ellen's mother) and Jon Stewart.
The young publisher says his father, in particular, instilled in him an aversion to snobbery that directly affects his professional decisions. "He taught me that there are a lot of different ways to enjoy books. I think that people slamming certain types of books is a very strange, parochial snobbery, because there are many different kinds of readers."
Weisbach says his literary sensibility is drawn to "a certain combination of originality and quality," he says. "A lot of the writers I've been working with, whether it's Tim Burton or A.M. Homes, come from completely different worlds, but they have an original perspective and a real brilliant quality to their work. It's a level of daring." Weisbach also has worked with prominent writers of gay-themed works, such as Peck, comedian Bob Smith and activist David Mixner. Weisbach says he wasn't "particularly open" about being gay himself until he met his longtime partner when he was 21.
While he was at Morrow, his imprint's showbiz authors gave ammunition to critics who said big publishing houses had abandoned literary quality. Now, Weisbach says, authors, agents and booksellers seem to want the literary cachet enjoyed by independent publishers, and he's ready to ride what he sees as the next publishing trend. "I like change," he insists.
Weisbach also values flexibility, one of the marks of a true entrepreneur. "The independent route will continue to be my approach until someone convinces me otherwise -- but it's always possible someone will offer me another situation I can't pass up."
Carly Berwick, '95, is a freelance writer in New York City.
