The second novel by Erin Morgenstern, The Starless Sea, is a book I fell in love with upon my first reading. The copy I have a has an extra special place in my heart. It was gifted to me by my childhood best friend as I was about to leave for the airport to start my first year of college. Though, I have my own appreciation for the stories within the book, I will also forever associate it with my friend.
Financial Structure
Who invested in the creation of this publication? Was it an investment of money or labor? If labor, what kind of labor? (physical typesetting, digital programming/encoding, creation of ideas/story to be published, etc.). How were each of these investors compensated?
-Prompt for Assignment One
The first, and possibly most significant, investment into The Starless Sea was the labor Erin Morgenstern put into the writing process.
From the acknowledgements page, I was able to find the names of Erin Morgenstern’s literary agent and the people she worked with at her publishing house. Though all I had was a list if names, I was able to do some deep diving to figure out the influence each person would have had on The Starless Sea.
The first name Morgenstern mentions is Richard Pine from InkWell Management. According to Morgenstern’s page on the InkWell Management website, Pine also represented her first book The Night Circus, and has remained her literary agent since then.
Morgenstern worked with Penguin Random House’s Knopf Doubleday across the publication of her first two novels. While I have not been able to find information yet on the specific structure of Morgenstern’s deal with Doubleday, if I had to guess, I would say she likely received a multi-book deal so the primary investment and gamble would have been put into The Night Circus and not The Starless Sea. I intend to keep looking for information about Erin Morgenstern’s specific book deal, but I am not sure if I’ll be able to find anything find about the finances behind The Starless Sea.
The copyright page for my edition of The Starless Sea credits Dan Funderburgh for art and John Fontana for putting in the labor of creating the cover, dust jacket, and end pages. Though not explicitly stated, I must assume they were compensated monetarily for their work.
Editorial Structure
How was this publication edited? Who were the editors and how did they interact with the author/s?
-Prompt for Assignment One
From the beginning of her process with The Starless Sea, Erin Morgenstern likely knew she would be publishing with Doubleday. It’s likely that Richard Pine would be present for discussions between Morgenstern and her team at Doubleday though he would not have needed to play as large of a role as would be necessary for her agent while working on her first novel.
From the acknowledgements page, I found the names of Morgenstern’s team at Doubleday. Jenny Jackson, according to Doubleday’s website, is the executive editor who worked on The Starless Sea. Also gathered from the website, deputy publisher Todd Doughty and executive director of publishing Suzanne Herz were also working on The Starless Sea. According to one editor at Doubleday, Bill Thomas, the publisher and editor in chief, made the conversations between himself and editors about which books to buy a romantic process rather than a cynical one.
In an interview with Morgenstern, she describes how she was stubborn through the editing process with what she knew she wanted to include in The Starless Sea. She was clearly comfortable pushing back against her editor if she knew something needed to be included in the final draft.
Production Structure
How was this publication made? Is it print, digital, or both? Are these technologies still around today?
-Prompt for Assignment One
By looking through the Goodreads page for editions of The Starless Sea, I was able to find out it was published on November 5th of 2019. My copy of the book’s copyright page says it is a first edition hardcover. Alongside the hardcover’s release, I found on Goodreads that e-book and audiobook editions were also released. In August of 2020, a paperback edition of the book was released. I also found several translations of The Starless Sea available in a variety of languages, including Italian, German, Polish, Hungarian, Portuguese, and many more.
Marketing Structure
How was this publication marketed to its audience? Who likely read it? Did those readers pay for access? If not, who paid to make it available to them for free?
-Prompt for Assignment One
Erin Morgenstern’s literary agency, InkWell Management prides themselves on having “a considerable international reputation as a significant and innovative player in the industry” which I believe is reflected in how broadly the book is published. Thanks to its international releases, The Starless Sea is able to reach a broader audience than it otherwise might have.
Knopf Doubleday, as an imprint of Penguin Random House, publishes “commercial fiction, literary fiction and serious nonfiction.” In my opinion, The Starless Sea fits in somewhere between the commercial and literary fiction published by Doubleday. From the acknowledgements page and then Doubleday’s website, I discovered the primary marketer working on The Starless Sea was Lauren Weber who was promoted to director of marketing a year after the book’s release.
Based on scrolling both through Erin Morgenstern and Doubleday‘s Instagrams, it’s easy to assume the book would have been marketed heavily through those pages. To this day, Erin Morgenstern continues to post about The Starless Sea as well as her other books, especially as special editions are released. I believe Doubleday was acquired by Penguin Random House in 2018, a year prior to the publication of The Starless Sea, but I have not found a source other than Wikipedia to support it. If true, I would like to look further into Doubleday’s marketing campaigns before and after becoming a division of Penguin Random House.
Most of the interviews with Erin Morgenstern to promote her books are written, though she has done a few video interviews. She gave talks at a handful of bookstores who recorded the presentation and audience questions, as seen above, where she provides some insight into the creation process for her novel. I would like to search more thoroughly through these to learn about her process and experiences with publishing The Starless Sea.
To access the book, readers would have to buy a copy or have their library pay to be able to access it.
Works Cited
About | InkWell Management Literary Agency. https://inkwellmanagement.com/about/. Accessed 31 Jan. 2025.
Doubleday Books | Knopf Doubleday. https://knopfdoubleday.com/imprint/doubleday/. Accessed 30 Jan. 2025.
“Doubleday (publisher).” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doubleday_(publisher). Accessed 30 Jan. 2025
“Editions of The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern.” Goodreads, https://www.goodreads.com/work/editions/66444785. Accessed 30 Jan. 2025.
“Erin Morgenstern, ‘The Starless Sea.’” YouTube, Politics and Prose, 11 Dec. 2019, youtu.be/bBsUk47hJzw?si=wJ8mTYeRF2ffUHnI. Accessed 31 Jan. 2025.
Gebremedhin, Thomas. “My Path to Penguin Random House: Doubleday’s Thomas Gebremedhin.” Penguin Random House, global.penguinrandomhouse.com/announcements/my-path-to-penguin-random-house-doubledays-thomas-gebremedhin/. Accessed 31 Jan. 2025.
Morgenstern. The Starless Sea. Doubleday, 2019.
Knopf Doubleday Restructures Marketing Department, Publisher’s Weekly, 15 Dec. 2020, www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/publisher-news/article/85131-knopf-doubleday-restructures-marketing-department.html. Accessed 31 Jan. 2025.
The Starless Sea – Erin Morgenstern. https://erinmorgenstern.com/the-starless-sea/. Accessed 30 Jan. 2025.
Featured Image
Cover of The Starless Sea created by Dan Funderburgh and John Fontana
