Between The Lines

DEFECTION DAYS
There's a brain drain in publishing, where talented young editors are leaving the big conglomerates almost more quickly than they can be replaced. The past few weeks saw not one but two prominent defections from Random House, Inc., where Karen Rinaldi left Crown to become editorial director of Bloomsbury USA, a brand-new offshoot of the London-based independent literary house, and Betsy Lerner, executive editor at Doubleday, left to become an agent at the Gernert Company. Why are so many editors forsaking the business? ''As an editor in this deeply competitive environment, it's harder to keep an author for the long term,'' Lerner says. Ira Silverberg, a literary agent who was formerly editor in chief of Grove, concurs: ''Working as an editor, you're answering to a publisher first, and your relationship to the house is more primary than your relationship to the writer.''

INTERN-AL DOCUMENT
The book jacket is printed and ready to go, all 500,000 copies of it. Now all St. Martin's needs to publish Monica's Story by late February is for the Senate to make up its mind. ''Things are very much up in the air,'' says St. Martin's publicity director John Murphy. Meanwhile, the company has also signed up The Hunting of the President: The Ten Year Campaign to Destroy Bill and Hillary Clinton, by Joe Conason and Gene Lyons. Says Lyons, an EW contributor: ''It's about how the trap that Clinton jumped into was built.''