Kristin Sevick is an associate editor at Tor/Forge. In her five years with the company, she's developed an expertise in crime, historical and women's fiction, but ever since the success of A Dog's Purpose, she's been getting a steady enough stream of canine-themed submissions that she jokingly worries about being typecast as "the dog editor." (If the story's good enough, though, she'll pick it up without hesitation.) She wasn't familiar with W. Bruce Cameron's work when she first saw his manuscript--although she'd seen the sitcom 8 Simple Rules, she hadn't connected him to the show--but she's an unabashed fan now: "He's got a wonderful gift for storytelling," she said, "and it's easy to let him go and let his voice come though."
Let's talk about how the novel wound up in your hands.
First it was submitted to one of my coworkers, who had a good read on it, but isn't a dog person. So he asked if any other editors were interested, which I was--I have a dog--so I took it. It was 5:15 on a Friday, and in lieu of doing anything on my to-do list I started to read it and I kept reading it, and it was 5:30, then it was 5:45, then it was coming on 6:00. So I thought I should go home, but I decided to take it with me on the train. I hadn't read the cover letter well enough to know the dog was going to die and be reborn. So the dog just died on me in the middle of the train. I was crying on the N train. I don't cry on public transportation!
Of course, I turned the page and saw he was reborn.... I read the whole thing that night. My husband was like, "What do you want for dinner?" "I don't know. I'm busy reading this book...." I think that's the only manuscript I've read in one full shot like that. It was heartbreaking and heartwarming at the same time, and it had made me cry in public. I knew I had something special if it could provoke that kind of emotional response. I came back to work the next week, and started talking to people here about it. Our associate publisher, Linda Quinton, also loves animals, especially dogs. I asked her to read it, and she loved the book as well. So we went from there to acquiring the project, and we just got so much in-house support for this book. It was amazing.
What were some of the ways people showed their enthusiasm early on?
I think the early enthusiasm was key to the book's success. When I was going out for endorsements, I'd get an email back from an author where they'd blurb the book, and then say things like, "I gave it to my husband and he loved it!" or "I gave it to my mother and she loved it!" That, for me, was when I really realized we had something here, when authors were passing the advanced bound manuscript on to their loved ones.
At the sales conference, marketing asked our reps who have dogs to send pictures of them with their pets, and they interspersed those on slides during the conference. So that was a fun way to get the reps involved from the start, too.
Was the manuscript you got pretty much how the story ended up?
There were subtle changes. One of the things that we worked on was the timeline; we had some discussion about how the dog moves in a linear fashion, but it's not as though he dies and is reborn the next day. So we took the iPods out of the earlier sections of the book, when they wouldn't have existed in the timeline. And we worked a little bit more on having the personalities of the people come through, which is hard to do with a canine narrator. But for the most part it was already there.
What did you think of the dog as a narrator?
It was a deliberate choice on Bruce's part that the dog was on the level of what you would assume a real dog would be. Obviously, we don't know what dogs think, but I can tell you that while my dog is probably not thinking about philosophy, I'm pretty sure she's excited about car rides and dog biscuits. So I felt when I was reading the book that I was really connecting with my dog on a personal level as well.
Sometimes simple can be really complex. The dog's vocabulary is somewhat basic, but it can be hard to use that limited perspective and still tell a really engaging story, and Bruce really pulled it off.
What can you tell us about the sequel?
I don't have the manuscript yet, so I can't speak too much about it, but it's in the pipeline. It's the same soul, going through more lives, alongside a person in particular need of a guardian. I'm very anxiously waiting for it, because it's going to be... he's going to make me cry on the subway again.--Ron Hogan