And, as a publisher, you hope to have a band of editors who will complement each other in their tastes, who will not create a firm that is interested in only one kind of book. I confess that that is perhaps an arch way of phrasing the most common response when I interview a candidate to join the firm. Now it is changing, in this age of greed, a little bit. Well, I still believe that. I think that if you look at a publisher's catalog you certainly find the latter, experience.
Publishers tend to replicate good moments in their history.
So if a publisher has had a great deal of success publishing exciting war novels and there still is a demand for war novels, or for a Tom Clancy or a John Grisham, they tend to look for authors who in some way or another carry on in that spirit. So much for experience. Taste is harder, really, to factor out these days because the role of the individual publisher as taste-maker has been diminished. As you go from one publishing house to another, there is much more commonality between the selections on Publisher A's list and Publisher B's list and so on. Very few publishers have a very clear profile anymore.