Right Business...Wrong Job?

All my life, I wanted to be in books; as Chip MacGregor so engagingly puts it, he wanted to be a “book guy,” and I was the female equivalent of that. I read a book about how books are put together when I was very young and thought, “Now, there’s the business to be in. How much better could it be than to be in the book business?” Deciding what aspect of “the book business” to be in was part of the fun, I suspect. Had I dreamed of a dusty little shop on a dusty little corner, I would probably have become an indie bookstore owner, happily peddling my latest finds…or I would have run a (decidedly cool) used bookstore somewhere in the hinterlands, like an acquaintance of ours did in Rogers Park. But I have no retail aspirations, in that sense—except to do my annual share to contribute to Barnes & Noble and Borders’ stock with a book-buying trip every few months. I did, and still do, want to write and sell novels; occasionally I actually do write one (!), and occasionally, I pitch some of those products to various Big Name Publishers Who Can Make My Day With One Phone Call…but so far, none of them has. (I may be one of the few authors you’ll ever know who actually got a phone call from a Harlequin editor to chat with me on why she wasn’t going to request more of my book, so I guess there’s a dubious claim to fame there. :-) But, I digress.) More than once, I have thought about (and still consider) becoming a formal, in-the-front-of-the-classroom writing teacher. I’ve taught writing workshops online, and I’ve done one-on-one coaching as well as tutoring English composition, so I do have a bit of an idea what that life might be like. A few things deter me from doing that right now…one of them being trying to write a resume that effectively sidesteps the “Master’s degree required” bit of the job description. I may be a master at many things written, but the degree I ain’t got. A bit of creativity, and I might be able to set that up yet. But when I got the chance to be a real, live Book Editor, I figured I had taken a giant step forward into nirvana. Didn’t even matter that I’d be editing nonfiction, rather than the novels I had dreamed of doing…because I’d made enough living off nonfiction in the ensuing years that I knew I could handle it competently, and I also knew it didn’t have to be the be-all and end-all of what I did with my writing talent. I’d have plenty of energy left “after hours” to be creative on my own…right? I’m here to tell you that that ain’t necessarily so. That issue, we’ve touched upon before, and my trying to get that aspect of things in order is a work in progress. But what I was muttering about yesterday, as I took my 3 PM laps in the warehouse, was something I find myself feeling frequently after we have one of our periodic meetings about The Publishing Business and Where It’s Going. We had another one of those yesterday, over lunch, when staff who had attended the O’Reilly “Tools of Change” conference reported back on what they’d heard, what they’d learned, and the directions publishing was going to go…whether we all liked it or not. I don’t mean for that to sound negative—after all, I’m on board with lots of elements of “Web 2.0.” I was one of the few people in the room (if not the only one) who had heard of Library Thing before that presentation yesterday; and I’m also one of the few people in the company who blogs with regularity. But what I found distressing was the concept that content isn’t king anymore…what people do with the content, how they get at it, how they manipulate it, paste it together, chunk it, and how much of it they can get for free, is. This is distressing not because people aren’t reading, in some cases a lot; they are. But because to me, these proclamations only emphasize the rapidly-degrading attitude of people toward the folks who create that content in the first place. Yes, the “free content” is almost always used to entice people to buy—putting aside for the moment the web-wise but morally-deficient kids who will gladly hack into any site so they can get everything possible for nothing. But apart from hackers and other crooks, in the context of how this “new approach to content” affects authors, the one thing I heard that disturbed me more than anything else was a comment along the lines of what new demands or expectations publishers might have of authors. Apparently, in a nutshell, word on the street is that it’s “ask for the moon” time when they sit down with authors or authors’ representatives to talk about “rights;” increasingly often, authors come to the table ready to effectively “give away the store” to have their content “out there.” (Sounds suspiciously like the self-publishing business, only worse.) Publishing’s days of producing great work, finishing it, and sending it on its way are fast coming to an end; today, it’s all about “sharing content” and “giving the consumer what he/she wants.” All good ideas—since that makes everybody happy, right? The only problem was, I heard nary a whisper about the artist’s compensation for all this new, exciting use of content. In some circles, the author/artist who asks about such things is even presented as a backward, ignorant bit player who “just doesn’t know how to adapt.” In this brave new publishing world, that’s a death knell for one’s career, because authors who aren’t as “fussy” are out there…and those authors, and what they produce, represent a “fabulous opportunity.” I heard a lot of talk about authors’ blogs, self-promotion, and being “willing” to “work with a publisher” to “optimize revenue streams.” What I didn’t hear was any equivalent enthusiasm about how the authors would share in said revenue streams. And that was chilling. It points up, yet again, the obvious—something I can forget about most of the time when we all seem to be “on the same page”—which is, as long as I sit on this side of the desk, in some ways I’m not part of the solution, I’m part of the problem. When I see what I do from an author’s point of view, something as inherent to me as breathing, I don’t always like what I see. It’s a depressing state of affairs to find yourself feeling like you’re in the right business, but wearing the wrong “hat.” It tends to make you mutter to yourself during an afternoon walk. Other than muttering, though, I’m not at all sure what I can do…and that’s a little disheartening, to say the least. Thoughts? Janny