You'd Better Believe People Everywhere Are Having a Hard Time

My daughter has been making and selling bookmarks. They cost fifty cents each, and she does custom work.

I put in an order for two (2) bookmarks, and when Moriah asked what I’d like them to be, I said she should base them on a middle-grade novel I wrote last year called Creature Street. It’s a good book that I doubt will ever get published—because that’s the way it goes!—but she read the novel soon after I wrote it—she insisted on reading it—and she liked it. She thought it was funny.

Maybe that’s enough to justify having written it.

It’s enough for me. It may never get published, but at least my daughter got to read something I wrote with her, or someone her age, in mind. At least I could make her laugh.

Anyway, when she came back with the bookmarks it felt really good to see a vision I’d had, a narrative I’d written, get processed by the complicated mind of a child, my own daughter, and given the form of a drawing on a homemade bookmark that reflects so well what I was after in the book when I wrote it.

And then yesterday, as I unloaded firewood from the back of my car onto my back porch, I listened to the podcast Print Run, hosted by Laura Zats and Erik Hane, a pair of literary agents. I’d heard the podcast before, but this installment stood out, as the hosts spent it describing in detail what’s happened to editorial work at publishing houses.

There is, I guess, a “Great Resignation” underway in book publishing, as there is in other fields of work. People are leaving their editor jobs, because—say the podcasters—they are undercompensated, they’re being asked to do the work of several people, their jobs are taking over their lives, and what they’re told is a glorious occupation—a career spent bringing books into the world; a life devoted to literature—turns out to be just another way to be ground into dust by capital. They don’t even make much money for all the hours they put into it. And they’re expected to be grateful for the work they have, because it means so much.

This was a big revelation for me, in part because it sounds so much like what my trajectory through the academic world was like.

I was, for a while, an assistant professor on the east coast. I worked very hard to get that job—it’s extremely hard to get a tenure-track job in any field—and the career became more of identity for me, really, than a way of earning an income. But then a series of things happened in my personal life, which I won’t get into, because they’re not interesting, and I watched a lot of my new colleagues retire. And I came to realize that what I thought was a way of life, an elevated way of being, or something like that—I’m embarrassed to put it that way, but that’s how big it came to seem—was really just a job. I had thought I’d figured out a way to earn money while also doing something meaningful. But there wasn’t much meaning in it, I soon learned, and as I came to realize that I saw how I was getting shafted.

And so I quit. I handed in my grand resignation several years before anyone was talking about the Great Resignation.

It was awfully clarifying for me, to hear on Print Run that things are bad for folks in publishing in the same way they were bad for me.

I want to explain why, in case it’s not obvious, but I’m worried that it might sound like I’m using this to make or reinforce the Grand Excuse, the thing I tell myself in order to explain—in a way that is charitable only to me—why I’m not more successful than I am.

I am not exactly unsuccessful. I’ve published three books since 2017. They’ve come out with small presses; I’m still not a commercial success of any kind; people in the big old book industry would not say that I’ve gotten very far, and this is something I remind myself of, every morning, as soon as I wake up.

Before I open my eyes, every day, I remind myself that I am nothing. I am nobody. It’s like a form of prayer.

But this is not about that at all.

What it’s really about is this: I do participate, in some remote way, in publishing. I am working on a novel and hope to get it into the world before too long, before my morning self-condemnations get even harsher and I give up on writing, too, and become a monk, or something.

I write query letters to agents. I do what I can to make myself relevant to the big publishing world.

Thanks to the Print Run podcast, I understand better than ever that when I do that I am marching to the foothills of a mountain that’s got lots of years of many lives buried in its layers upon layers of metamorphic rock. When I seek to publish my work with a bigger press, and make some real money, I am venturing forth to participate in an industry—an industry—that, like other industries, does not prioritize the well-being of the people who make it function.

What does that understanding add up to? I don’t know.

I don’t know what it changes, if it changes anything.

I mean, I have one more reason to feel glad that I’ve published my books with small presses (Sundress Publications, Pleiades, SEMO Press), which I know aren’t easy to run, and which aren’t necessarily anticapitalist, but which at least—I hope, I presume—are a little more merciful toward the people who work on them than I hear the massive houses are.

I’d still like to see Creature Street get published. I’d like to publish the novel for grownups I’m working on. And I’m working on a nonfiction book—yes, I have too much going on; it’s weird; I’m embarrassed by it—and I’d like a lot of people to read that one, too.

But I don’t know. I’m a little more informed about what that’s all about, now. I get what’s going on, out there in New York City, where the biggest decisions get made.

I understand that we’re all—writer, editor, agent, em-dash manufacturer—locked in the same room where the walls are closing in.

And I guess that helps.