Perfect writer whose passion for the idea matches yours and thats one way that you can make a book have been. Another way is you make sure to talk to agents as much as possible to see what kind of projects they are enthusiastic about and then you raise your hand and hope that they will send you a good proposal. Sometimes you cultivate offers that you adore and plant ideas with them and hope that over time they come up with a project that they want to spend five, ten years with and make a great book out of. Have you ever read a newspaper article or Magazine Article and think that could be a book . I read an article ten years ago about how very shortly in the early 21st century more households in america will be supported by women and that that is a giant flop a giant change. And it made me want to explore what the implications of that might be for men and women, for marriages, for raising children, for love, for clerkships and i got a great book out of it. Its called the richer sex and that wasexy thatwas written by c Washington Post reporter called liza mundy who is out of washington and it generated and landed on the cover of Time Magazine and it generated a huge conversation about how do we all need to adjust our lives to this economic new reality and is this good for men and women and i think that we were on the camp that says yes anything that makes couples stronger and live up to their potential is a good thing. One of the authors that you worked with our nancy gibbs and Michael Duffy on the president s club, a book that booktv covered in the qanda program covered it as well. What was the process working on the president s club with antigibbs and Michael Duffy . I wish i could say that i came up with that idea because it is such a brilliant idea but i didnt. Nancy and michael have been working on it for quite some time, and the idea came to them after they had written a very great book on billy graham, and they realized the degree to which the president talked to the ex president s and how much the club helped shape the presidency itself and thats what gave them ideas to explore the president s club in a thorough way. Its a very moderate way of understanding the president s because obviously and we have to get to the 20th century for there to be enough longevity. And it practical what we found was the presidency is made stronger sometimes and challenged by people inside the club and what was interesting about it is that you had over a dozen characters all of whom had relationships with each other going towards the path and towards the future. So the big challenge in editing this book is how to structure it. We have an introduction to certain key partnerships all along the way because it helps the reader keep track of who the characters are and to help them move along, logically without while honoring history and the relationships as they actually happened. So they write the president s club and what was your role, what did you play enough books . My role is to help structure the book and gave it an architecture that makes it so accessible to the reader and easy to absorb that they forget there are all of these multiple characters at this stage at once and they can see it and not feel overwhelmed by it. If youre bored as an editor there is theres a good chance e readers will be, to back. My role was to make sure that some of the inside knowledge they had was made and completely transparent to the reader so that they knew where things came from and how you do things. But essentially when you have the authors of as talented as nancy and michael. What is your editing process and what did you do when you first got the manuscript . It came in a section. You cant do serious editing when you were in an office. You have to lock your self somewhere else and completely immerse yourself in the buck. There would be times i would leave the book and go out and get dinner and still be living in them in the middle of the Nixon Administration and want to run back into it. So you can see all of it beauty and occasionally make it to be more beautiful. Do you take a red pen or pencil to this . I come to my days as a newspaper and magazine reporter and editor and it allows me to move back and forth easily. It allows me to sort of get it back to them so they feel like they can look at those notes and absorb them as they would on their own terms. Another author that you have worked with and are working with our audience knows its karl rove. Did he choose you where did you choose him and how would that relationship began . Essentially i have to audition for it. I got a call from my publisher and he asked me to go down to washington. It was the first book i was asked to edit. I had been a journalist for 30 years and he had read up on me and what stories i covered. We have politics in common and i had covered him as an editor for many decades and basically my argument is you should hire me because this is my first job and i can scoop it up and it worked i cant screw it up and it worked. Is it different working with a personality like that stand means he gives in and Michael Duffy that are not as wellknown . I think every writer has to put themselves on the page so the process is a process by definition that makes the writers feel formidable, and i think the job of the editor is to essentially protect them and make them feel comfortable with what they are saying. One of the first conversations i had with carl is no you cant start the book at age 30 who have to start with a lot of the pain of your childhood including your mothers suicide, your father leaving the house, finding out later that your father wasnt your father and you are learning to meet your new father. All of those issues have to be on the page as difficult as they are to talk about because they are a part of what made you do and if this is going to be a biography than it needs to include that. He told me that oftentimes when he gets stopped they bring up the childhood stuff because they have had experiences like his and i think thats one way that you make a personality that seems to be on stage more accessible to people. Because of your background as a journalist, do you work on a lot of the nonfiction political books . Yes i do. I work only on nonfiction and some of the books are not so much political as they are works on journalism, a book on afghanistan or a book on veterans were for me track it, the industry of meat that has now become an oligarchy. A lot of books that involve generals spending many years of their live lives is taking a lon into some of the issues that we face and trying to make them readable. Something that someone would want to pay in the hardcover 25 for and spending a lot of time with. You can watch this and other programs on linux booktv. Org. Booktv takes a look at the New York Times list of nonfiction books. First on the list. On a recent trip to new york city, booktv visited the new