In 1992 Doug Seibold, the executive editor of Noble Press, opened a manuscript by a writer from New York named Jill Nelson. The incendiary but often very funny memoir abut her life as a black upper-middle-class woman, especially her grueling experience working for the Washington Post Sunday Magazine, had been rejected by over 30 publishers. Reading it, Seibold could see why they would be reluctant to touch it. “Jill’s book was what I came to learn was very characteristic for Jill. It was extremely forthright, in your face, willing to say things that most people are not willing to say, and to say them in ways that most people are not willing to say them,” he says.
Seibold took a job editing the magazine of the national PTA, Our Children, but his interest in book publishing remained strong, and he soon found himself contemplating starting his own press. “After having had something collapse on you that way, you start thinking, Well, how could I try to have more control over this?” he says. “I was really bitten by my experience at Noble. I really felt like, This is something I really enjoy doing, and I felt like I was good at it. I felt like I had a significant measure of success in a relatively brief period of time. And I was proud of what I had done.”
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Seibold had been knocking around the literary landscape long enough to feel like he knew what he was doing. Since bailing out of the graduate program in English and creative writing at Washington University in 1986 to be with a girlfriend in Chicago, he’d done a lot of magazine work, including a stint at the age of 25 as the editor in chief of the Highland Park-based recreational magazine Lakeland Boating. On the side he wrote book reviews for the Chicago Tribune. He’d also served as fiction editor of the Chicago Review, manuscript editor for the Nelson Algren Awards, and head judge of the Carl Sandburg Awards.
Seibold ended up joining the dot-com economy himself, going to work in 1999 for UNext, a Deerfield-based concern offering accredited business courses and degrees on-line (where I am employed and met Seibold). As the company’s editorial director, he was responsible for developing the editorial protocols of the company’s courses. “I went there and essentially sublimated all of my entrepreneurial energies into UNext and into helping to build their organization,” Seibold says.
Nelson, he says, often contrasted her experience at Putnam with the rapport she and Seibold had enjoyed while working on Volunteer Slavery. “She’d say, ‘Oh, I miss working with you so much. I just don’t feel the same kind of attention with these people,’” Seibold says. “I almost felt like I was complicating her ability to work better with Putnam, because it’s almost like a psychologist–the transference has to go to the new psychologist.”
Seibold allows that Nelson’s advance wasn’t anywhere near the amounts she’s previously received from larger publishers, but says she has a nice deal. Nelson isn’t complaining. “Mainstream publishing is just boring, as far as African-American literature–just really canned. I’m so tired of the kind of ditto-girlfriend-sister-girl novels,” she says. “It really isn’t about the money anymore. It’s about the work. I want an editor who can push me to write the best book possible and stretch my writing out.” She also says she trusts Seibold to keep her best interests at heart even as he negotiates the demands of Agate’s bottom line. “My name–someone other than Doug would use it as an exploitation thing. I knew that Doug wouldn’t do that. From his first reading of the first 100 pages of the manuscript, talking about how characters were going to develop, it was clear he wasn’t looking for just a quick hit.” Most important, Nelson has had the chance to work with her favorite editor again. “I knew that he would get it and that it wouldn’t be, ‘Aren’t you being a little hard? Can’t you talk less about race, be a little less pornographic? Don’t you know any nice white people?,’” she says. “It’s my truth. I’m not an emissary from the NAACP or the interracial council on love and friendship. I knew Doug wouldn’t be into that, he’s not that kind of person.”
