Hey Publishing? We Just Wanna Talk.
When we place an industry in our scope, it’s with love. It’s because we KNOW there is a better way for artists to make art and receive a living wage from doing so.
But some industries need a little more tough love than others. While folks are steadily more vocal about movie studios burying writers and the theatre industry making performative moves, the book publishing industry has been imploding in front of us.
Well, imploding at the speed of falling in love: “Slowly, and then all at once.”
WHAT HAPPENED?
Let’s go back to March 2022, to one of the latest major installments in The Great Resignation. On March 11th, agents, editors, and other employees of the publishing world watched as more and more people in their industry posted very public statements saying it was their last day on the job. Some left the Big Names for indie presses. Others left to spend time in a quieter, more nature-filled environment — and not because Thoreau’s lifestyle started trending.
No offense to trees.
Many reached a boiling point at their positions from which there was no coming back. One particularly egregious example comes from Molly McGhee, a former assistant editor whose author made it to the NYT Bestseller list. Molly wasn’t green - she’d already worked almost a decade in publishing - but she was young. Instead of getting a promotion that would allow her to spend more time pulling diamonds from the rough, she remained saddled with administrative work. Calendar invites, spreadsheets of book tracking, e-mails.
You know. The dream.
Why, though? Business is booming, thanks to a global pandemic and the advent of Tiktok’s #booktok community.
One odd reason is ageism. As Molly notes in her resignation rationale, Millennials grew up with computers, and many members of the older generation didn’t. If the latter enjoyed success without having to learn computer skills, they’re more resistant to picking them up. They keep their younger staff members busy with it instead of letting them grow.
There is also a great sense of disillusionment. A new book-selling tracker makes consistent mid-list authors with a small but dedicated following look bad. Query submissions pile up, unread, when senior editors resign and bequeath their stack of manuscripts to lower-level employees who were hoping to find fresh voices of their own. And then there’s the bizarre case of the “Spine Stealer,” an Italian man who would trick up-and-coming writers into handing over their manuscripts under the guise of their editors.
Are we living in an absurdist reality?
Emily Roller, one of MOC’s founding members, has tried traditional publishing, independent publishing, and self-publishing, which means she knows firsthand about the pervasive issues. She says,
“The structure of the publishing industry is doomed to repeat itself. They can’t adapt to the way we’re consuming content today. I think it’s an industry that’s just trying to hold on to what it used to be.”
She also brought up another major issue: because so much of publishing exists physically in New York, there is a strong “New York bias,” not just favoring East Coast authors but content that features East Coast locales. Maybe this occurs subconsciously, but it also means that the NYC-based publishing houses, which have immense power over the books we consume, are consistently promoting a homogenous perspective. Emily cited one stomach-turning example: Karen Russell’s Florida-based novel Swamplandia! was up for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize, but it ended up going to …no one.
Why not pursue independent publishers instead? Well, Emily’s tried that route, too. She says, “You want something that’s both big enough and small enough. A lot of independent publishers are 2 or 3 people working together.” Which means the onus of promotion often falls on the author. “I think that self-promotion is one of the most difficult things to ask authors to do.”
SO WHAT CAN WE DO ABOUT ALL THIS?
Emily has mused that perhaps applying a cooperative model to Publishing could create a more productive and equitable industry. So why has no one tried a publishing cooperative before?
BookTrope did. Kind of. BookTrope came out of famed accelerator Y Combinator and described itself as “Team Publishing, which addresses the way books are actually developed, not just the way they are distributed and read. A typical Publishing Team consists of an author, editor, designer and business/marketing manager for the book. You don’t get assigned projects in our system; you choose the people you work with.”
BookTrope didn’t take off or go bankrupt. It landed in the middle, consistently, and closed — because ‘always breaking even’ wasn’t their goal.
Emily said that BookTrope’s idea, although noble, still came out of a “desire to shortcut the creative process.” She notes that if one were to try a publishing cooperative, the emphasis would have to be on thoroughness — not speed.
Because, as Emily likes to say, “Creating together is rising together.”
This article is adapted from Midnight Oil Collective’s newsletter, “The Wick.” The original newsletter was published on March 23, 2022. You can sign up for future newsletters here.
Photos from this article provided by Freddy Kearney, Lukasz Szmigiel, and Austin Distel on Unsplash.
