The most-disliked people in the publishing industry

89 pointsposted 4 days ago
by Caiero
(woman-of-letters.com)

58 Comments

tptacek

9 hours ago

Bertelsmann (the owner of Random House) is a for-profit corporation just like Palantir (a defense contractor), but the employees of Random House don’t need to be paid as much as the employees at Palantir, because Random House is perceived (by its employees) as fundamentally good

No? The employees of Random House don't need to be paid as much because the supply of qualified candidates for those roles greatly exceeds the demand. There are lots of causes of that imbalance and most of them have nothing to do with the perceived righteousness of publishing. It's also hard to get a job in the abusive video game development industry!

dxdm

9 hours ago

Where does the supply come from? You could still argue that people choose this as a career when they have the choice of better-paid ones, increasing the supply of people with the smarts and training needed by the publishers.

I don't know if that's what's happening, but it might work towards TFA's point.

chromacity

5 hours ago

It probably has to do with the fact that we condition children and adolescents to consider white-collar jobs as more noble than blue-collar jobs, then we tell them that to get a good white-collar job, they need a degree... and then we make STEM degrees hard by subjecting students to more math than most people realistically need. So we have a lot of frontend developers who know calculus and an oversupply of people with humanities degrees.

With that degree, you're generally pushed toward jobs in journalism, publishing, graphic design, teaching, administrative functions, and so on. Most of these pay relatively little.

com2kid

3 hours ago

Calculus is required for English degrees in other countries. Heck a lot of countries require some amount of calculus just to graduate high school.

Same goes for the basics of statistics. A basic understanding of statistics is a requirement for any college degree in many countries, and for good reasons. Stats comes up all the damn time. From proper A/B testing, to marketing, to understanding public health emergencies, to making informed medical decisions.

tptacek

5 hours ago

Publishing : standard English major career track :: Gaming : standard CS major career track.

It's not much more complicated than that.

rcxdude

2 hours ago

I don't think it's a matter of more 'noble', simply a more comfortable option if it's available to you. It has historically paid better and taken a lower toll on your body. The former is now less true, but the latter is still a big issue.

x3n0ph3n3

4 hours ago

It's a shame that calculus isn't required by every college degree. Just because I'm not integrating functions during my normal work, doesn't mean I don't benefit from understanding the fundamental principles.

chromacity

4 hours ago

Yes, totally. I was about to undero surgery but found out the doctor didn't even know about Laplace transforms. He small-mindedly spent his formative years learning anatomy, never benefitting from the knowledge of frequency-domain derivatives. I dodged that bullet by storming out.

com2kid

3 hours ago

You joke, but if you talked to a doctor of radiology odds are they at least took a class covering Fourier Transforms.

robocat

3 hours ago

Would you say the same about learning Christianity: maybe not directly useful for your job, however it is rather foundational to much of English society.

x3n0ph3n3

2 hours ago

Yeah! I've found that learning the foundations of religions is a great way to inoculate people from worst aspects of those ideas.

bpt3

2 hours ago

The number of people with humanities degrees who also could successfully obtain a rigorous CS or engineering degree is not very large.

I suggest you revisit your hypothesis with a little less bias.

bpt3

2 hours ago

Most people don't have the "choice" of being an engineer or software developer currently.

To be blunt, it's much easier for the majority of the population to get an English degree or some other generic liberal arts degree and therefore be qualified for an entry level job in the publishing industry.

I'm sure someone somewhere is giving up a highly lucrative job to roll the dice on the next great American novel, but it's not a meaningful number.

abetusk

8 hours ago

The specific analogy doesn't hold but the sentiment does.

Instead of using Palantir, working at the FSF, the Linux Foundation, etc. It's not that they don't make good money, it's that it's often a fraction of what could be made at a comparable for profit company.

I think the video game industry is an apt comparison. The pay is often not very good with the motivation being, for many people, prestige based, in some form or another. I suspect there are analogies in the game industry and publishing 50-100 years ago.

claw-el

8 hours ago

Wouldn’t the supply of labor for a role or company increase if what the company do, books or video games, is associated to what most people see as good, therefore, they are more willing to build their long term skill sets in?

That perceived associated goodness is what caused the increase in qualified candidates in the first place?

Nasrudith

3 hours ago

Technically yes, but it isn't just goodness. There are plenty of dirty jobs that do good and thus few people want it. The logical extreme is being a martyr - no pay and death but regarded as ultimate good.

Ekaros

2 hours ago

Being a farmhand is arguably one of the most goodness jobs. You are feeding everyone else with your labour... Somehow it is not very well paid or very popular job.

jfengel

9 hours ago

Some of it has to do with the perceived righteousness of publishing. A lot of those jobs involve holding people's hands, "emotional labor", like nursing and teaching. These jobs are seen as something people (women, mostly) should do because they like being carers, rather than for the money. These jobs end up being paid less than they are really worth, especially since they often involve many hours without compensation.

That's hardly the only factor here. In the end it's really about the fact that we appear to have an infinite appetite for blowing people up. ($1.5 trillion, next year, a full 50% increase at a time when we're supposedly needing to cut back.)

But don't discount the thumb on the scale against jobs like these. It's a persistent problem in many industries -- so pervasive that it just looks natural.

tptacek

8 hours ago

Nursing and teaching are surprisingly well-compensated fields with lots of job security and relatively straightforward entrance requirements. It's also true that both fields are valorized, but plumbing isn't and has the same dynamics. These arguments are all overdetermined.

decimalenough

an hour ago

This depends wildly on the country, but in many, public school teachers are criminally underpaid.

Nursing is also a hard job where the paycheck is nowhere near what doctors can earn.

beedeebeedee

8 hours ago

That may be true elsewhere, but not in the US

wisty

an hour ago

Not hugely so. Teaching isn't paid megabucks but that's partly because it's a market for lemons - it's hard to tell a good one from a bad one (and people don't even agree in what it means to be educated, are facts or "critical thinking" more important, how about discipline vs temporary comfort) so there's no high paid super stars.

There is a stereotype that teachers are low paid. Somewhat .... but there's a slight premium on doing meaningful work.

The whole premise that women are paid far less is kind of wrong anyway (or at best another outdated stereotype).

Childless men and women make about the same amount.

Women with children work fewer hours and share finances with men who work more hours, and apparently this is an injustice.

tptacek

20 minutes ago

Outside of low-population rural school districts, the idea that teachers are poorly paid --- at least for the last 30 years or so --- comes from people not understanding the value of a defined-benefit pension plan (and, if you want to go that far, that people don't understand the interplay between an annual salary and a huge number of days off work).

tptacek

7 hours ago

Could you be more specific? I don't know what you're referring to.

mold_aid

5 hours ago

Almost certain OP is referring to the fact that nurses and teachers are not well-paid or respected in the US, which I'd like to note as well. Despite this, Public Health as a pseudo-STEM major nearly ranks with STEM fields in general for majors seen as "workplace-ready."

Maybe there are too many English majors (I honestly think the supply of careers is too low). But I think the "supply is greater than the demand" is possibly now more an explanatory argument for unemployment rates for Engineering and PT and other such quiescent majors. Certainly there are plenty of Ed majors for a field whose workers fled at pace earlier this decade.

Let's assume I'm teaching 25 or so Engl majors right now in a class with publishing as its central focus (hypothetically) at a state school. The students would neither be able to define "small press" nor name the big 5 - even the ones who just came back from AWP. The linked piece, I think, correctly names the romanticized vision of publishing that is divorced from understandings of the cost of living in NYC. I don't also think that college majors are actually all that itchy to get into editorial, whether or not they're all and every single one applying for the same pool of jobs.

tptacek

5 hours ago

If the claim is "nurses and teachers are poorly paid in the US", that claim is broadly false. K-12 teachers in major metro areas in the US have surprisingly generous comp packages: well above area median take-home salary with predictable ladders, very good benefits, and defined-benefit pension plans.

There are school districts where teachers are poorly compensated, but they aren't the norm over the population as a whole. Teachers are generally well-compensated.

Nursing, I don't know where to start.

djoldman

5 hours ago

Folks may talk past each other on this.

Some people may say that nurses and teachers ARE NOT well-paid because those workers deserve to be paid more than they are.

Some people may say that nurses and teachers ARE well-paid because they are generally paid more than median wage.

As for some dry facts, median wages:

  Registered Nurse $93,600

  Public School Teacher $64,000

  Private School Teacher $57,600

  All U.S. Occupations $49,500
https://www.bls.gov/ooh/occupation-finder.htm

tptacek

5 hours ago

Complexifiers for teaching: K12 cash comp in major population centers (CPS, SFUSD, Philly, MSP, &c) is sharply higher than that median, and, more importantly, teachers get a huge amount of non-cash comp. Can't say enough how valuable a defined-benefit pension is. All-in comp for a lot of rank-and-file K12 teachers in major metros is competitive with software development (in those regions; obviously excluding SFUSD).

djoldman

4 hours ago

Oh for sure. Many people are surprised to learn how much more public teachers make than private teachers :)

A ton of details that medians aren't showing.

I was just mentioning why folks may be on different sides here. We should at least be talking about the same thing.

If it's a "they deserve" conversation, that's very different than others.

tptacek

4 hours ago

I think people can reasonably go back and forth about whether they should be more compensated, but I don't think there's a reasonable conversation to have about teaching not being a well-compensated career path. I know this surprises a lot of people.

(My mom is a retired CPS teacher.)

djoldman

4 hours ago

I assume the CTU came up a lot at the dinner table, haha.

Shrug clearly teachers are paid more than the median wage. There isn't much to argue there.

Modeling wage/salary is pretty straightforward for the majority of jobs (weighted by number of people working the job). There really aren't too many surprises.

Monopoly/Oligopoly union power, licensing, labor supply, regulatory/compliance restrictions/barriers, and product/service output value are pretty much most of it?

tptacek

3 hours ago

Hell if I know. This thread is based on a claim that people go into nursing and teaching out of altruism, and not for compensation. I'm pretty sure that's not true. Both are well-compensated, safe paths to a comfortable lifestyle and, especially for teaching, to a secure retirement.

No teacher is going to tell you they're not altruistic, and that they're in it for the money. They see themselves as doing good, and I agree that they are. But that's not what drives entrance into those fields.

hoppyhoppy2

4 hours ago

Many teachers need a masters degree, which is much less true of the average worker.

tptacek

3 hours ago

Nah, that argument isn't going to get us anywhere: big school districts actually have incentive plans to get teachers masters degrees. New teachers don't need them, the district will reimburse some amount of tuition, and set you up with tuition discounts at partner universities. Once you have the masters, you get a significant pay bump. The masters situation with K12 education is a benefit more than it is a cost.

gopher_space

3 hours ago

> well above area median take-home salary

For someone with masters-level education and years of experience?

delichon

10 hours ago

I hope The Martian becomes the template of a new publishing world. Andy Weir couldn't get any publisher's attention until he self published and achieved 35,000 sales in three months without their help. He succeeded by word of mouth and not publisher's marketing.

Almost all of the fiction I read comes by personal recommendations. Including from social media like Hacker News. I haven't stood in a bookstore browsing shelves and reading blurbs in many years but I read more than ever.

A publisher provides marketing, editing and distribution. Literary marketing is becoming better in the peer-to-peer form than the old business-to-consumer form. Distribution has become unbundled via self-publishing. Editing is no less important than ever, but it would be so much better if the value from such an individual art can be captured by those talented individuals rather than by corporate.

Long live literature, but may Big Publishing fade away into obsolescence.

jfengel

9 hours ago

The Martian was published in 2011. There are vanishingly few like it since then.

Sometimes a book gets picked up purely on its merits. (It helps to appeal to a wealthy target audience.) But on average you'd get richer by getting a minimum wage job and spending it all on lottery tickets.

jeremymcanally

8 hours ago

That's because publishers these days basically require you to have that magnitude of social media presence or they generally won't touch you. If they do, they will do next to nothing to help actually sell your book after it's printed. Very rarely will you see someone who hasn't built a platform already be given any sort of extra marketing or distribution for their work. You'll effectively give them 90% of the sale price for printing and possibly some limited distribution. Publishers used to be tastemakers and make picks and bets based on book merit, but now it's basically like they're just looking for things that would already succeed on their own and injecting themselves into the process.

They've basically figured out how to take half of their job and shove it off on the author while they still take their oversized cut. It's pretty egregious in my opinion.

I've seen this with all types of publishers, btw, from children's books to technical books. Heck, most technical publishers these days are mostly print on demand, so you're barely getting any unique product from the publisher at all.

ggreer

6 hours ago

The Martian is an outlier in its success, but it's far from the only instance of successful self-published sci-fi. Recent examples I've read include The Powers of Earth[1] by Travis Corcoran and Theft of Fire by Devon Eriksen. In both cases, the authors quit their day jobs (I think both worked in software) and are now full time writers.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Powers_of_the_Earth

dyauspitr

4 hours ago

Completely disagree. That model means all you’re going to get are pop fiction and the five books trending that month. It leaves very little room for dense publications with more niche audiences.

legitster

10 hours ago

This kind of reminds me of the book Get Shorty and the subsequent movie. About a mafia loan shark moving to hollywood and becoming a producer.

Elmore Leonard was very familiar with movie producers by that point in his career, and clearly saw a a funny similarly between what a mob does and how Hollywood operates.

At the same time, the book is almost a tender mark of appreciation towards the role a producer plays. It's one of the few stories that spotlights what a producer actually does and shows it's importance in greasing the wheels enough to actually make a movie.

TinyBig

2 hours ago

There are many hyper-credentialized, gatekept systems but most of them don't share the feature of producing structurally worse outcomes as literary fiction. I believe this system is already selling the seeds of its own demise.

A small group of agents hold most of the power, and the system has confused power for taste. This has also, in my experience, led to the outlets that hold the most power using that power to push agendas instead of seeking out the best literature. I do not believe this can persist indefinitely.

djoldman

5 hours ago

> ...the employees of Random House don’t need to be paid as much as the employees at Palantir, because Random House is perceived (by its employees) as fundamentally good, something that serves humanity, while Palantir designs software that the government uses to find targets for drone strikes. Jobs at Random House are much harder to get than jobs at Palantir, even though jobs at Random House are paid much more poorly.

An interesting take, particularly the assertion that "jobs at Random House are much harder to get than jobs at Palantir." I'd be absolutely 100% shocked if that were true.

Generally, the more a job pays, the harder it is to get hired. These are generally correlated with job-obtaining-difficulty:

* high pay

* required certifications / licenses (law, medical, etc.)

* (low) supply of workers with desirable experience

Given the above, it seems that Palantir jobs would be much more difficult to obtain.

tclancy

13 hours ago

That was a fantastic read, thanks for the link!

paleotrope

11 hours ago

That was worth the read. I did get a bit lost when the writer was talking about the different areas, prestige fiction, commercial fiction, nonprofit fiction.

christkv

13 hours ago

Most books are loss leaders for publishing houses very few are profitable and even fewer are massively profitable. They keep publishing books that barely anybody reads because they have to have a diverse catalog.

BigTTYGothGF

11 hours ago

> they have to have a diverse catalog.

They have to have a diverse catalog because they don't know in advance which books will be the big sellers.

bombcar

11 hours ago

Tolkien and Rowling probably combine to be the majority of British publishing revenues ...

hoppyhoppy2

4 hours ago

That wouldn't be the case (if, in fact, it is true) if publishers hadn't cast their nets wide enough to include weird stories about hobbits and magic schools.

conception

9 hours ago

Dav Pilkey is basically western comic books right now. One of his books outsells all traditional publishers - Marvel, DC, IDW, etc.

didgetmaster

9 hours ago

It mirrors the venture capital business. Invest in 100 projects. Know that 90 of them will likely fail, 7 or 8 will break even, and just 2 or 3 will succeed. Hope that the successful ones are big enough to cover all the losses of the others plus some.

mistrial9

9 hours ago

no - capital intensive business has very different patterns than popular media business. The visibility of the VCs and the visibility of publishing houses has some small overlap. Day-to-day and implementation details, timelines for success.. audience, partners.. so many things are starkly different IMHO

bombcar

11 hours ago

It's the shotgun approach. Lots and lots of attempts and ride the successes as far as they can.

everdrive

9 hours ago

>because they have to have a diverse catalog.

Why must they have a diverse catalog?

bryanrasmussen

6 hours ago

there are two reasons, one has already been noted elsewhere - that you don't know what will succeed so you cast your net wide and hope you got one of the few winners in your catch.

The second reason is that your diverse catalog exists also as advertising for that subset of readers who will become your next authors, they might be dreaming for years about the day they can be published by Random House, just like their hero, obscure writer X from some years ago who did not earn out, but ended up inspiring the next generation's big thing.

TheOtherHobbes

2 hours ago

Publishers have a good idea who will succeed. Being able to estimate that is part of the job, and they've become far less diverse and adventurous over time because they've become far more corporate and profit=focused.

Most published books either have a track record as self-published break outs, and/or they're trend chasers, and/or - as the article noted, but didn't say enough about - they have authors who fit a known demographic with known tastes and can be marketed on the strength of the author's story.

The real reason so many books are published is because it's a volume game. Most books are actually profitable - barely - so they need to keep churning them out to make adequate aggregate profits.

It's true that most of the money is made by a few tens of authors, but that doesn't mean no money is coming from the rest.

The tiny number of high prestige titles are cultural loss leaders which give publishers a cover story that they're really about Serious Literature and aren't just content mills.

This used to be a credible excuse when Serious Authors were still a thing, but it's looking more and more threadbare these days.

Serious Authors used to be household names, but hardly anyone can name a Recent Serious Author now. Critics still criticise, competitions still award prizes, and review editors still review, but most of the money and most of the interest is elsewhere.

bryanrasmussen

13 hours ago

> I am giving a huge corporation a product to sell, but I am doing it for a fraction of what it cost me to produce that product.

well, relatively huge by the article's own admission.

on edit: changed but to by