Internal Illogical

Your correspondent was lucky enough to have an opportunity to attend a dinner with a visiting academic come to speak to our publishing students.  He's been doing research on publishing culture in New York and London, and in the process has done hundreds of interviews with people from all ranges of the industry - agents, booksellers, editors, publishers, and even lowly assistants.  Over the course of the meal, he was asked: Who was the best interview subject you've had?

Surprisingly, he answered: the assistants.  They were the people who had the least exposure to the internal logic of publishing and who would actually notice when someone's actions were incongruous with everyday common sense.  'Why would you do that?' they'd ask.  'In what world does that make sense?'

To someone who was still an assistant a very short few years ago, this was the best observation yet heard on my MA course.  It's a hard day when you're told, instead of sitting by the fireside with your red pen and a bunch of manuscripts, you will live your life by market share spreadsheets.  You will be running profit and loss statements.  You will be doing something called the 4 P's and analysing target markets.  In fact, the closest you'll get to a fireside is the flaming pile of garbage your author calls 'writing', which he will sometimes send you with the intention of publishing.  It's a tough thing for a 21-year-old to take in.

It does get better.  That was the other great part about this academic's speech: I felt that, eventually, everything starts to make sense.  You start to play the game, and someday you get good at it, and someday you can fight battles against online retailers and chain store discounts and the commoditization of books knowing that matters just as much as the misplaced commas on page 17.

That doesn't mean editors don't seem crazy to everybody else.  That's probably why we still let people believe that whole red pen and fireside business.  Maybe if we spread the rumor enough, it will start to become true . . . Or maybe that's just publisher's logic again.