Page 11 of Falling for the CEO

Chapter Five

Spencer

"Spencer, I know youlike to have it your way, but we won't be able to pull this off.”

“I call the shots," I said in a measured voice, “and I say we will.” Ever since I took over Whitley Publishing, I’d worked tirelessly not only to live up to the legacy but also to improve it. I'd never given up, no matter how difficult the task, but right now, I was pissed at my own team.

“Publishing is changing, and we have to adapt.”

"Don't patronize me, Steven," I said. He was the chief sales officer and was starting to annoy me to no end.

"That's not what I was doing. You’re simply not willing to listen to reason when it comes to the biography section."

My jaw ticked. He was right. I wasn't. It was personal. But that didn't mean I was wrong.

"Thereisa market for it," I said.

"Yes, it's just not a terribly big market," he went on. "Certainly not enough to warrant us wasting our time talking about it during a general meeting when we have other issues on the agenda."

"We have spoken about all the other points."

I'd combed through the agenda personally, leaving this at the end. "I’m going to do everything it takes to get the biography section back up and running."

He shook his head. "We really don’t have time—"

“It's my company. I decide what's a waste of time and what's a priority or not."

He paled.

Good. I was usually laid-back, but I wanted people to know that I meant business. I could be ruthless too. "This meeting's over, then," I determined, standing up from the chair. There was a shuffle of papers around the room. I headed straight to my office, closing the door so no one bothered me. I massaged my temples. I could feel a migraine coming. I went straight to the window, looking up and down Pearl Street. Whitley Publishing had been housed here for decades. It had survived the transition from print to online. And that was mostly because of me.

We had plenty of divisions that made money. Whitley Publishing had several branches: some in book publishing but most in magazines and newspapers. The biography section ofThe Vulture,our flagship magazine, wasn't generating the interest it used to. Not in the age of Wikipedia where you could find out the highlights of everyone's life with one click. But that was what was different about us. We didn't just touch the surface, spouting general facts. Our writers dug deep. At least the writers we had. Our last writer in the biography section had just quit. The competition stole him from us for a completely different area in publishing. I was pissed off.

My team insisted we could just let the biography section die. I said otherwise. My mother had spearheaded the biography section right up until she passed away. I remembered even as a kid asking her once why she didn't do something else, choose another genre. Back then, I thought it was totally boring.

"We can learn so many things from other people's lives, Spencer, from their triumphs and mistakes, from their joys and regrets. And how will we ever know about them if no one wrote it down?" That wasn't something you found on Wikipedia.

Then again, not many writers had my mother's gift to tell a story. No one on the team had ever matched her abilities. She'd been passionate about the subject. I remember her staying up late in the office she had at the house. She was raising five boys and continued to write in the evening. She'd given a lot of sweat and effort to this section, and I refused to let it die.

There was a knock at my door.

"Come in."

Jonathan, my VP of Marketing, stepped in. "Do you have a few minutes?"

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