A longtime publishing industry leader, John Sargent is known for his frank straight-talking style, even when engaged in a highly public confrontation with the world’s largest retailer, or a formidable legal challenge from a sitting president over the right to publish a White House exposé.

This is the Open Book podcast, A behind the scenes look at the world of books and publishing through conversations with leaders in the field, hosted by David Steinberger, the CEO of Open Road Integrated Media, and chairman of the National Book Foundation. And now your host, David Steinberger.

Hi, and welcome to the Open Book Podcast. Today we're speaking with John Sargent, one of the book industry's most visible leaders as the former CEO of McMillan. John has been in the middle of some really important moments in book publishing, including a major public confrontation with Amazon during the early days of eBooks, as well as a showdown with a sitting president over a publisher's right to publish an expose. John has long been known for being extremely open and straightforward in expressing his views, and I think you'll agree that comes across very clearly in this episode. I hope you enjoy today's conversation with John.

Okay, so want to welcome John Sargent. It's great to have you here. John is one of the giant figures in this industry. Some of the biggest things that happened in the industry in the last 20 or 30 years. You were right in the middle of sometimes, unfortunately, right? They weren't always the most fun things to do, but John's a very admired figure for having dealt with some of the biggest and most significant challenges the industry had to deal with. But I always start with where you came from and where you started, and it's kind of interesting as a Brooklyn Heights, New York flat iron building guy, but you actually grew up out west.

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Yeah, I was born in New York City and my family was in publishing in New York, but my mom moved to a ranch outside of Sheridan, Wyoming. So I grew up on a cattle ranch all the way up until, went away to school.

I still go back all the time, and it's interesting, I'm one of the few people in New York publishing who actually experiences both sides of the political spectrum. There's a perception that rural America are uneducated and unintelligent, and that's why they vote for Donald Trump, but it's not. They are intelligent. They see the world through a completely different lens. Now, do you talk about books when you're out there with people? Sure, yeah. Interestingly, ranchers, this time of year, you spend an enormous amount of time in a tractor either cutting hay or baling hay or stacking hay, and they all get bored as hell because you drive around literally 16 hours a day sitting in a seat, driving a tractor. And so now they all listen to books. They do? Yeah, they listen to audio books. That is great. Yeah, we love that. So growing up, you had family members from the book industry.

Did you think you were going to be in the book industry? No, no, no. I decided to go into the book industry when I couldn't get a job. Graduated from college in 1979, recession bombed out on 11 job interviews in a row, and then went to a publishing course just because I thought, well, I'll see what the old family business looks like. I got a job as a salesman. So your first job is in sales? Yeah. And what were you selling? College textbook. Nobody wants to sell college textbook. You think about when you graduate from college, what's the last thing you want to do? You want to sell college textbook? No. Right? No. So you were like a college traveler. Is that traveler? That's what they used to call. I had a territory that was Washington, Oregon, part of Northern California and Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, Colorado, and Utah all by car.

So I'd leave home and I'd get back three months later, pre-internet, pre-phone banks, but it's cold calls because if you're going to that many universities or junior colleges, different one every day. And the assignment was talked to 20 professors to get an A on the report card, you had to talk to 20 professors, so you never talked to the same professor twice. Basically the loop takes three months to go around. You might see the same person twice, but mostly it was coal cost. So how did you make the move to selling books for consumers? I went to business school and then I went into finance. And so then from finance, you started working where you were at sns or you were double double day back when Doubleday was a big separate company. I did Doubleday for four years. Right. So double day now is part of payment.

Random Mets, right? It's part of Knopf Doubleday Group. Back in the days when I was there, Doubleday was big media company owned, among other things. The New York Mets, right? WA a p Radio. So you were in finance, finance, financial. And is that where you figured out, this is an amazing industry, we can be so profitable, or Yeah. Why isn't everyone investing in this industry? Yeah, it's terrible, terrible business. The trade publishing operation was always the one that made no money whatsoever. Book clubs made money. The manufacturing companies made money. The Mets lost a lot of money, Mets lost a lot of money from there. Where did you end up? I did a brief stint at the old McMullan before they sold the company. Then I did six years running kids books at Simon Schuster. Now, Simon Schuster at that time, I asked you this before, Dick Snyder was, Dick Snyder was.

So Dick Snyder is like this legendary CEO in this industry. He was famous for a lot of reasons in terms of his publishing, his personality. He seemed to be a bad guy, right? There was a listing that came out in those days with the top 10 toughest bosses in America, and Dick was on it every year. Is that right? He like, oh man, he fired people Like, you're fired. You're fired. You're fired. She's endlessly fired. Well, I've heard that you weren't allowed to ride up in the elevator with him. Here's the elevator story as I experienced it. So what Dick had was a system set up by Nancy Cardini, his assistant. He would leave his townhouse to go to his driver. The lady who looked after the townhouse would call the driver and tell him what Dick's mood was. Dick's mood was bad. The driver would call the office and say, Dick's coming in hot.

Nancy would call down where the elevator bank is and say, hold the elevator for deck. And on those days, they would hold the elevator for deck to protect the employees from being in the elevator with deck. I know some of this because it was legend across the entire industry, of course. And when Dick was coming in hot, the guy with the Rockefeller Center had the white gloves on. He'd go, he'd stop you from getting on the elevator, and the elevator would be on hold sitting there open, and nobody was allowed into it. And then Dick would come in, bustling the elevator, and I close it and then never going to go back to normal. And one day I came in and I wasn't paying any attention. The guard had turned and I walked into the elevator because it was open. So I was in Dick's elevator on the day.

He didn't want anyone in the elevator. How was that? What happened? He couldn't have been more friendly. About two weeks before, I had sat at his table at one of these black tie fundraising things. How'd you get to sample? He thought I was a good social guy, good guy to have at your table. And so we get on the elevator, Dick looks at me, he says, have you ever wondered why I hired you? Why I have you here? And I said, soon, because I reasonably good job. And he goes, I keep you here. I like the way you dance.

I said, seriously? He said, yeah, all these other people, they don't know how to have a good time at one of these things. You're up there dancing and you dance very well. Okay, whatever it takes. So you were there with Dick. You were dancing away, dancing with Dick. I like that. That could have been the title of your book. John has got a book that's going to be published when? This fall. This fall, right. And what's the title of the book? It's Turning Pages. Turning Pages. And it's about your life. It was supposed to be a sequence of the best stories of 40 years in publishing. Does he have the Dick Snyder story in there, or no? Yeah. Dick went to one of these dinners. It was a big political thing. He sat next to the Duchess of York and he did a deal to buy kids' books by the Duchess of New York.

The Mor Jano just said, we'll do it. And so it's done deal. And then he called me into his office and said, well, kid, I was 29 when I was the publisher of children's books, so I was not an experienced guy. He called me and he said, well, now you're going to earn your money. When the Duchess of York first became the Duchess of York, she was warmly embraced, and that lasted a few months, and then the palace turned on her. And so when she did the book, she promised that she was going to give a portion of the proceeds to charity, but they're the royalty family. They're not allowed to make money on the stuff they do. They're paid not to. So the press just coordinated her. I mean, oh my God. And so when we passed the book, the palace said, we can't make it to the brief press. We can't make any comments on this, but if you want to know anything about it, call John Sergeant and here's his phone number.

So it was a very interesting publishing process. I had to go to Buckingham Palace and meet with the Queen's press secretary and all that. It was an amazing time. So that was Simon Schuster. So how'd you get to McMillan? I went to DK first Sterling Kindersley, the white books with the photographic backgrounds with DK for three years, ran DK in the United States, and that was when it was independent. That was when it was independent, and it was also now part Pen, random House, and then McMillan from there. Then McMillan 24 years. So eventually ended up running the place, basically, right? Yeah. For what that was. I did all the trade stuff around the world, the German trade, all English language trade around the world and all the higher ed publishing. So you're going to tell us some of the great stories from McMillan, but I got to go to one story immediately, which is one of the famous moments in the time I've been in the industry, which is the big fight with Amazon.

What I remember, I mean the key thing, Amazon wants publishers to handle eBooks in a certain way. Amazon wanted to price them their own way and make them very, very cheap. 9 99. And big publishers were like, the industry's going to go away. If you make brand new books by all the best author, $9 and 99 cents, whole infrastructure will collapse. So there was a moment. What I remember about it is that Amazon decided to be very aggressive. They're not really used to people not listening to them at the time. They pulled your books, books, all books. They took the buy buttons off of all McMillan books. It it's a high stress day. And then I remember a full page ad in the New York Times, which had all these McMillan titles. No, it was just Twan. It had a Twan new book, new book, you the full page ad they used to do in the New York Times full page, published today.

And it said, available in bookstores everywhere. And they changed it available in bookstores everywhere except Amazon on this full page thing. And a tool agreed to do it. Steve Rubin was the guy who now Simon Schuster was the guy that he comes into my office and says, God, you're going to love this. He said, look at this. And he shows me the proof of this ad. And I am three days in, literally from 9:00 AM till nine at night, 12 hours a day, one-on-one negotiations with Amazon to settle this thing. It is in a very contentious moment. And I looking at it, and I said, really? That's going into times tomorrow? And he said, yeah, isn't it great? And then I thought, okay, well, I've got it now. It's company morale thing. Everybody's in this fight. So I said, yeah, it's great. I got to make a phone call, Steve.

So he leaves my office and I call the guy in Amazon. I call Russ Grant, and I say, Russ gives me an ad tomorrow in the New York Times, and it's going to say this. And I told him what the ad was, and Russ said, are you fucking kidding? And I said, no. And he said, any idea of the emotion level of the people out here in Seattle at this moment in time Now Amazon stock had dropped 25%. There's a front page news everywhere. He said, you want to fix this? That paper is not going to run with that. You've got to stop. Oh shit. Marshall de forces called the New York Times, and it was on press. I had to call him back and say, I couldn't stop it at school. So on press, oh, it was a bad moment. Everybody thought the ad was great.

Yeah, yeah, it was great. That was an intense moment. There was a moment on Thursday where Russ said, okay, we're not going to give in on this and this. And I said, well, I'm not going forward without, we had left the two toughest things to the end. And he said, can't do it. They had already said the buy buttons would come down at some point. And he said that if you won't agree to these two, the buy buttons are going to stay down. And I said, how long? And he said, forever. I said, so be it. And then as you can imagine after that, I thought, okay, we're going to be out of business entirely. And I know they were our largest customer by far at the time. We're be out of business in six months. People support us for a while, but six months will be out of business.

God, it was a desperate feeling. Well, you must've resolved it somehow. It's in the book. But I'm walking around in these little circles thinking It's all over. It's all over it. The phone rang. It was ru, and they had figured out a solution that worked, and we did the deal. One day later, we negotiated an entire agency contract, start to finish complete in five days. And normally just to do an update on an Amazon contract takes three, four months. So it was pretty intense time. There's a lot I'm learning here, though. So how about when Trump tried to get you to not publish a book? Yeah, yeah, that was fantastic. Trump gets elected. Michael Wolf is under contract to write a book with us. Michael Wolf comes and says, how about if we put that book on hold? I can get access into the Trump White House first hundred days.

So we finally say, okay, good. We'll give it a try. He goes into the White House, and at the end of the day we discover it's Steve Bannon who put it in. He gets into the White House and nobody knows who gave him access because it's such chaos. I dunno if you remember at the beginning of Trump administration, it's chaos, right? Nobody knows he's doing what? Or in factions, they lose track of Michael Wolfe. He's the one in every day. She's hanging out in the West Wing, and people are all in these cliques, and they're fighting with each other. So they're coming to rat out the other guys. They're coming and saying, you won't believe what? So-and-so said today. And so they're coming to him and he's got a tape record. So he's recording most of the shit they're saying. So he would call, Michael would call Steve Rubin and say, you won't believe what happened today.

And he would report Day eight of the Trump presidency in the White House. Wolf had called all agitated because the night before, 10 o'clock at night, Donald, Donald Trump personally had called him and talked to him for like a half hour. And what Wolf reported, he said, is nothing he said was something he should have said to adjourn. He just ran it. We're looking at each other like, this is going to be a book. This is going to be something when it comes out. So we kept them in for about a hundred days. But then he had an office and a place they set up for. He never asked him to sign papers, nothing. He's just hanging out and everybody's coming. So we kept him in, I think, for 200 days. And when Bannon got fired, we all agreed. Now's the time, pulled him out. He wrote the book really fast.

We embargoed it so no one saw it. The embargo fell apart. Trump started tweeting like bad. So the book is now going to launch. I'm in a hotel room at Phoenix at the college textbook, sales conference at, I dunno, four in the morning. I'm in the gym. I used to work out early and the lights are on, but just the little lights, the sort of running lights. Somebody comes in and throws a switch, eight 10 TV screens all around the road, TVs come on. And every single TV has a picture either the book of Trump in the book, the line underneath is about the book. Michael Wolf's picture. Every single channel, every tv. Oh crap. So I jump off the elliptical trainer, I run up to my room, couldn't get anybody to the office. Finally, they were having a big meeting. I get put into the meeting.

Don says on the phone, are you sitting down? I said, yeah. I said, things are going. He said, we just received a cease and desist letter from the President of the United States, which is if you're a student at all of First Amendment, Juris Prudence free speech, the single worst thing that there is in government action against freedom of speech is something called prior restraint. And there's a lot of law about it says, I'm going to stop that before it's published. I'm going to try to stop it from being published. So it is a extraordinarily flagrant violation of what the government is allowed to do. Now, he carefully sued as Donald J. Trump didn't sue his president, Trump treated as Donald J. Trump. It was a moment. At first I had a publisher's instinct, which was Yahoo, we are going to have to chop down some trees. We're going to sell so many copies of this book because president of the United States trying to stop us.

And then I started thinking, it's actually what happens in dictatorships, right? It's what actually happens. It's the first thing that happens. The president comes into power. The second thing that happens is they try to control the press. And the third thing is they stop the press. Then you have censorship. And that's what allows a dictatorship. And so I suddenly thought, this is actually pretty curious stuff. This is not about selling books. This is a problem right now. You ultimately published the book. We moved the copies, Don made the decision not made. It's a complicated thing. If you have a book that's out in the marketplace and you want to move up the release state, it's very difficult to do because some accounts have it, but don't people get furious at you? It's complicated. So I said, Don, you make the decision what to do. Don decided to move it up.

And there was one very prominent blogger that said, in moving up the pub date, McMillan has given the middle finger to the president of the United States, which I thought, how cool is that? So we moved the pub date up and the book sold incredibly well. And the legal battle was short and completely uneventful. I mean, there was a lot of pressure, but trying to get a million books printed in three days is a colossal effort. How do you get a million books printed off press in the stores? Three days? And we didn't make three days, but we made five. So I got to thank you, John, especially for just the complete openness and honesty about all these experiences really resonates. Thank you for everything you've done for the industry. Pleasure. Thanks for coming to listen to me, Yammer away.

I hope you enjoyed listening to today's conversation. Just one thought we wrap up. In today's episode, we hear legendary publisher Dick Snyder saying to a young John, Sergeant, I like the way you dance. This strikes me as a good metaphor for what it means to be a book publisher. While books go all the way back to Gutenberg, which is now about a thousand years ago, publishers are always dealing with change, changes in technology, changes in the way books are sold, as retailers come and go, changes in the way books are marketed, changes in the culture, and to deal with all that change, it helps to be nimble, to move, to be a good dancer. And that has certainly been the case with John sart. So thanks for listening and keep reading.

Thanks for listening to Open book with David Steinberger. This episode was produced by Rick Joyce, directed by Hannah Mosley, and engineered by Bren Russell. Our theme music is written and performed by Eric Friedlander. And I'm Emma Chapnick. For more episodes and links to the books mentioned, visit our website at open road integrated media.com/podcast.