Profits & Passions Publisher has a tail to tell By BOB CHUVALA

Profits & Passions
Publisher has a tail to tell
By BOB CHUVALA

Deborah Hastings readily admits with a happy chuckle that her passion doggie dancing “is sort of silly, but fun.” And when Hastings and her poodle, Scout, aren’t dancing, Scout acts as the “vice president of Federal Street Press and receptionist,” she said. “The Fed Ex man knows her well.”

Hastings is publisher of the small division of Merriam-Webster Inc., with a two-person office three, if you count Scout working out of her Norwalk home. Federal Street Press, named after Merriam-Webster’s street address in Springfield, Mass., was her idea back in the summer of 1997 after the company where she had been publisher was “sort of in its death throes.”

“We were middlemen in a way,” she said of Smithmark Publishing. The Penguin division distributed full-color bargain books on gardening or cooking to the major bookseller chains such as Barnes & Noble. She joined the Manhattan company in 1990, and “by the end of my time there, the chains had gotten big enough to put their own imprint on the books,” eliminating the need for middlemen like Smithmark.

“Venture capitalists bought it from Penguin at the worst possible moment, just as the whole business was about to disappear,” she said of Smithmark. But while she was there, she had licensed some Merriam-Webster dictionaries that Smithmark distributed to the chains.

“I went to Merriam and said the dictionaries we licensed really worked,” Hastings said. “I said this was a great opportunity for them to start a division to do that and make all the profit, rather than licensing them. They asked me to do a business plan, which I did in the summer of 1997. They hired me the next January and our first publication came out in January of 1999.”

Her idea for Federal Street Press was that Merriam could open a new market with value-priced dictionaries, thesauruses and other reference books. “Merriam reached a certain audience, but there was another audience such as schools with budget restrictions or individuals who don’t want to spend $20 for a dictionary, but will spend $10,” she said.

Limited opportunities

When Hastings graduated from the State University of New York at Albany in 1970, her English degree could open two doors for her “either a teacher or a secretary,” she said. “Kids today can’t even imagine what it was like,” she said of the limited career opportunities for women.

“I was only 19 but I looked younger than most high school students,” so the teaching door closed pretty tightly. But she didn’t really particularly want to be a secretary, either. “I was in love with books and was a passionate reader,” she said. “My thought was that I’d like to be in the middle of books, that being where books are is what life is about.”

Her compromise was being a secretary in the book-publishing industry, joining Holt’s book production operations as a secretary. “We had electric typewriters, and everything was done with carbon paper, so you couldn’t make mistakes,” she said. “I turned out not to be a good enough typist to last as a secretary,” but her boss “thought I had other potential,” she said. “Most of the women my age got their start in publishing as secretaries.”

Hastings was promoted to paper buyer, responsible for purchasing all the paper for all the public school, college and trade books published by the house. She lasted two years at Holt, then began shuffling through Manhattan publishers, to McGraw Hill for two years, then to Macmillan Publishing in 1974. “Paper buying was such a big job I reported to the president of the company.” She had an inside office and, “very politely, asked if I could please have an office with a window.” It was a request that changed the direction of her career.

“My desk was in the middle of the editorial department, and I was sitting next to the managing editor,” Hastings said. “We befriended each other, and I discovered she wanted to be an acquiring editor. They told her if she could replace herself, the move would be possible, so we cooked up this plan.”

The result was that Hastings “left the world of paper and manufacturing and entered the world of editing.” She became a major editor at Macmillan, overseeing the entire process from manuscript to shipping for the more than 200 books the company published each year. “When I started, even the production people were very well read and articulate and interested in ideas,” she said. “Publishing was a wonderful world; it was what I hoped it would be. It’s a little less so now.”

Exciting opportunity

Hastings was managing editor of Macmillan’s trade division until 1983, when she “decided to take a bold step” and go to Oregon to be vice president of publishing with Dilithium Press, an early publisher of computer books for consumers. “I guess I was just looking for a change and this was a very exciting opportunity,” she said. But two years later, Dilithium was bankrupt, Oregon offered few publishing job opportunities, and she moved back east to join Arcadia in Norwalk, then one of the largest book-printing companies in the country.

“I took the job and shortly after that they hired a new president, who decided to move the company to Baltimore and lay off 85 of the 90 employees,” including Hastings. She joined Holt, Rinehart and Winston’s school division that created free software, books and materials for teachers in schools that had purchased math or reading programs, and was there for six months before a new president shut the division down because it wasn’t profitable. She joined Walden Books’ Longmeadow Press publishing division in Norwalk in 1986, working there until 1990, when she joined Smithmark Publishing.

“My career tracks the changes in the industry,” she said. “I don’t think a single company I worked at is in the same form as it was when I was there.”

Doggie speak

As for doggie dancing, Hastings learned about it from a woman in yoga class who told her that “if you like dog tricks, you’ll love doggie dancing.” Scout is a standard poodle,

“and they’re very intelligent and amenable to training,” Hastings said, so she decided to give doggie dancing a try. “It’s where you and your dog move to music, hopefully coordinating your fancy footwork to the music.”

And while Hastings enjoys the training and performance, she doesn’t take it as seriously as many doggie dancers. “It’s a competitive sport and many people belong to national organizations and compete in national competitions,” she said. “People take it very seriously.”

Hastings took Scout to some classes, then to a recital to which friends and family were invited. “It’s like a dance recital for little kids,” she said. “Aside from being amusing, it’s sort of obedience training and socialization in terms of other dogs being around.”

Hastings and Scout have “done several recitals and some odd events, although members of my class have gone on to competition and one lady appeared on ‘Good Morning, America,’” she said, and even tried to have coordinated outfits red, white and blue scarves, that type of thing. But “it’s really an opportunity to work with the dog.”

Scout, by the way, started out with Federal Street Press. “The good news is that she does bark less now,” Hastings said. “I never had a poodle, and the ad for her read, ‘Great watchdog.’ Little did I know that that’s doggie speak for ‘barks all the time.’ But she’s good company.”

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