Stephen Rubin, a longtime publishing government with a watch for bestsellers and a ardour for music and public life who helped launched the profession of John Grisham, amongst others, and launched such blockbusters as “The Da Vinci Code” and “Fireplace and Fury,” has died. He was 81.
Rubin died Friday at a hospital in Manhattan after “a short and sudden sickness,” based on his nephew, David Rotter.
E-book publishing is difficult to think about with out the raspy-voiced Rubin, a strong and colourful presence for many years along with his tortoiseshell glasses, fashionable fits and big selection of associates and colleagues, from Jacqueline Kennedy to Beverly Sills. He hosted memorable events at his spacious West Facet condominium and was a chief supply of gossip and alternately profane and loving assessments of associates, colleagues and the higher world.
“He would enter a room and instantly fill it,” shut good friend Jane Friedman, the previous CEO of HarperCollins Publishers, informed The Related Press through e-mail. “He had very sturdy likes and dislikes and he NEVER modified his thoughts.”
Rubin was a former New York Instances journalist who broke into publishing within the Nineteen Eighties and rose to high positions at Doubleday, the place Kennedy labored for a time as an editor, and Henry Holt and Firm. Most just lately he was a publishing marketing consultant for Simon & Schuster.
Rubin’s many notable initiatives included the million-selling “Killing” historical past sequence by Invoice O’Reilly and Martin Dugard, Laura Esquivel’s “Like Water for Chocolate,” Mitch Albom’s “Tuesdays With Morrie,” Hilary Mantel’s “Convey Up the Our bodies” and former President George W. Bush’s “Resolution Factors,” 1,000,000 vendor which Rubin helped signal at a time Bush was broadly unpopular within the publishing world and past.
E-book executives dream of overseeing even one phenomenon: Rubin scored not less than 3 times.
Within the early Nineteen Nineties, he was simply beginning out at Doubleday when the writer was set to launch a thriller by a little-known writer, John Grisham’s “The Agency.” The novel helped make Grisham synonymous with courtroom drama and marked the start of an extended friendship between him and Rubin, who would acknowledge profiting from the writer’s attractiveness and that includes them in promotional adverts (Grisham would insurgent for a time by showing at photograph shoots unshaven).
“Steve Rubin was an ideal writer,” Grisham stated in an announcement. “He liked books, particularly these on the bestseller lists, and he knew methods to get them there. He was a author’s dream — loyal, beneficiant, and by no means shy along with his opinions. He was seldom incorrect, however by no means unsure.”
A decade later, Doubleday took on a then-obscure writer who had bought few copies for Simon & Schuster however now had a promising manuscript for a non secular/artwork thriller set in Europe. With a relentless promotional marketing campaign, together with hundreds of advance copies despatched to booksellers and others within the enterprise, Dan Brown’s “The Da Vinci Code” was an instantaneous and lasting sensation. Gross sales topped 70 million copies, at the same time as some critics and fellow authors despised it and a few spiritual officers thought it blasphemous.
The e-book was so profitable that Brown’s earlier novels, “Angels & Demons” and “Digital Fortress,” additionally change into high sellers.
“Steve’s infectious enthusiasm for my work was each writer’s dream,” Brown stated in an announcement. “A world class oenophile, Steve used to ship me instances of lavish Italian wines — a secret plot, he joked, to saddle me with a refined palate so I may by no means afford to cease writing. I’m eternally grateful for his perception, his encouragement, and, above all, his friendship.”
In 2018, when Rubin was in his mid-70s, he had yet another extraordinary trip. He was the writer of Holt and overseer of a signature e-book of the Trump presidency, Michael Wolff’s “Fireplace and Fury,” which Rubin agreed to tackle after assembly for cocktails two years earlier with the veteran and infrequently controversial journalist.
“Fireplace and Fury” was the primary work to vividly seize the continued chaos of the administration and proved so unflattering that Trump threatened to dam its publication and fired a high aide, Steve Bannon, who had spoken with Wolff. Rubin would name the e-book “the wildest expertise” of his profession.
“For greater than a month, it was humanly unimaginable to overlook ‘Fireplace and Fury,’” Rubin wrote in his memoir “Phrases and Music,” revealed earlier this 12 months. “It was a triumph for Michael and for Holt. It was additionally exhilarating and enjoyable.”
Rubin was a New York Metropolis native whose preliminary and enduring ardour was music, particularly the opera. After graduating from New York College, he obtained a grasp’s in journalism from Boston College. (A waste of cash, he later wrote). He began out at UPI and Vainness Honest and ultimately wrote profiles of Luciano Pavarotti and Sills, amongst others, for The New York Instances Journal.
Rubin joined Bantam Books, a venerable paperback writer, within the mid-Nineteen Eighties, and remained there for six years earlier than leaving for Doubleday. All through, he retained his affinity for opera and classical music and, alongside along with his spouse Cynthia, who died in 2010, helped run the Rubin Institute for Music Criticism on the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, an ideal supply of delight.
However he knew that books would outline his legacy, particularly the one which bought essentially the most copies. In his memoir, he provided a succinct, if incomplete prediction: “I suppose the headline of my obit will learn ‘Writer of ”The Da Vinci Code” dies’.”
