Their best shot at it would be to work closely on the revisions in a focused way without interruption.

Morrison had just moved into her new home on the Hudson, and Bambara joined her there for three days as they went back and forth with edits and revisions to ready the book for publication. “She’d write and I’d edit some,” Morrison recalled

She would go upstairs and work, then she’d run down the stairs and say, “What about this?” Then I would sit down and go over that, then she’d run back up the stairs. It was the most amazing— but certainly extremely efficient, for us— way to do it, because she was so clear. She could focus immediately. I would just have to grunt and point and she knew exactly what I was suggesting.

Morrison’s experience working with Chase-Riboud was instructive. Morrison knew that having a publicity and promotion plan was an important aspect of how well a book sold. But never again would she assume an author would cooperate with her plans without explicitly saying so. She also sharpened her thinking around identifying a primary and secondary market for books she would acquire. Chase-Riboud’s social capital among white cultural and artistic aficionados did not translate into a book buying public. And alternative paths to the book’s success were unavailable for different reasons. Authors needed champions beyond their editors and publishers. If they were not lucky enough to enlist influential supporters, they certainly had to avoid making powerful enemies. The same politics that yielded enthusiastic endorsements could result in quiet condemnation, which could be worse than loud and damning disapproval. The latter might at least get the book some attention.

Author by author, book by book, Morrison was determined to build an editorial identity that mirrored her belief that the cultural terrain was best traversed when every kind of author was given meaningful opportunities for storytelling. While Black women writers were being published in record numbers, Morrison looked beyond the trend and acquired novels by Black male writers as well. No doubt she was interested and invested in celebrating the success women writers were experiencing. She was among these writers, after all. But her ability to edit all kinds of fiction challenged the simplistic notion that affinity with one group had to come at the expense of another. There was more than enough room across the rich literary landscape for all. Publishing Gayle Jones’s fiction would certainly prove this.

Importantly, The Greatest was financially successful. In addition to the Literary Guild serial sale, the firm also sold serial rights to several major outlets, including Book Digest, Newsweek, The New York Times, Playboy, and Rolling Stone. Disappointingly though, it did not make the American bestseller lists. While it was on the large chain bookstore B. Dalton’s list for several weeks, the bookseller’s list was different from a general readers’ list. That list was made up of sales at places like Scribner’s, Brentano’s, or Double-day, the stores that reported to the bestseller list. The Greatest sold more than ninety-four thousand copies from its first printing but largely at places where Black people bought books, none of which were among the standard booksellers whose sales were counted. In this sense, the disconnect between the actual number of books sold and the way reporting declared books bestsellers helped Random House see how inherent biases made it impossible to rely on reported information to determine non-white groups’ interests and book-buying tendencies. Morrison’s point that well-done so-called “Black books” that received the right kind of marketing and promotion could sell as well as any other books had been made yet again. She did not need the validation of a bestseller list to prove it.

Morrison was attentive to every detail. She approved the back ad layout for the jacket, which was to have “a hairline of white around each halftone and a black border around that white hairline,” and she requested oval frames for the four snapshots above. While she was pleased with the manufacturing in general, she appealed to Silberman to help ensure she had some input in these matters in the future. She was similarly hard on the publicity team. She complained: “The Angela postcard 1) has no space for a message (on the left) 2) places the Geis credit improperly 3) needs a vertical line to separate the address are from the quote/message area— as a normal postcard. In the future, she told Selma Shapiro, she would like to see the layout and copy for publicity items.

Morrison sent galleys to all the major news outlets and to a range of writers asking them for comments. When she secured a quote from Jessica Mitford, the leftist author of the prison reform book Kind and Usual Punishment, she added an excerpt of it to the book’s back cover and to the appeal letter.