Tom Mayer

Every book could eat all the time in the world because every book is a big, gigantic, bespoke intellectual project that you could spend years working on.

Authors do spend years writing them, and the editor could spend many, many, many hours editing every word and making sure everything was as strong as possible.

Yes, I have developed a toolkit of ways of encouraging authors to get them to write.

I have told authors to open up an email and to type their chapter in an email to me.

Because for some people, it's a lot easier to write a long email than it is to open up a blank Google Doc or a blank Word document and try to write there.

I have had authors speak their chapters aloud to voice recognition software.

Alexi, all of my deadlines are real.

I think the authors of America need to understand deterrence.

There are red lines you cannot cross.

You're playing game theory here.

You can't possibly devalue your own deadlines on the record.

No, all deadlines are real, and there's serious consequences for going past them.

You know that.

And then the author's like, actually, here's the book.

That's the knife at its sharpest.

That's the knife at its sharpest.

I mean, you never want to get there as a publisher.

But it wasn't even a ploy.

It was like, I'm sorry, you're not writing this book.

So what are we going to do?