The ballad of Molly McGhee

I’ve complained often enough in these emails about the shabby treatment experienced by too many writers at the hands of agents and publishers. And I’m right to complain.

If an agency allows writers to submit via the slushpile, as they nearly all do, that agency has an obligation to treat those writers with some basic courtesy. If a publisher takes on a book, they have a duty of basic professionalism in the way they handle it and the author.

But this email has a different theme.

The fact is that publishing is a tough trade. Hours are very long. Pay is modest. Advancement is slow. Bright graduates entering the profession will find themselves falling behind their peers in countless other fields. You get the kudos of working in a cultural industry. You also get the flipside, the crappy pay and conditions.

All this is widely known. It’s the theme tune playing gently behind every other discussion you hear in publishing.

Why, authors ask, are publishers not more active in marketing their books? The sotto voce answer: everyone works too hard as it is; most books don’t repay any real marketing effort; no one has time or money or energy.

Why, authors ask, are advances mingy and possibly falling? Why has the option of self-publishing not forced publishers towards a more equitable share of e-book royalties? The sotto voce answer: everyone works too hard as it is; there’s not enough money to go round; we can’t pay authors more because we don’t even pay ourselves enough.

Why, authors ask, do big publishers feel so conservative, so safe in their selections? Where’s the radical, risk-taking creativity that ought to be the lifeblood of the industry? The sotto voce answer: everyone works too hard as it is; most novels don’t make money anyway; small print runs are loss-making; everyone wants to be risk-taking, but we’ve got to look after the profit and loss.

Every now and then, however, these sotto voce conversations burst into the open. They did so recently where, as it happened, four American editors announced their resignations more or less simultaneously. The four were Hillary Sames and Angeline Rodriguez at Little Brown/Orbit, Erin Siu at Macmillan Children’s, and Molly McGhee at Macmillan/Tor.

The match that lit the fire was McGhee’s commentary around her resignation, which she posted on Twitter. She wrote:

Today is my last day at Tor Books. My promotion request was denied and as such I am leaving as my first acquisition … debuts at number three on the NYT Bestsellers list … this should be a “great beginning” not a heartbreaking end.

But it has been made clear to me that I would need more “training” before being promoted from an assistant position and that it would be unrealistic for me to leave the admin duties of assisting any time in the next five years. After eight years of experience working in the publishing industry, I decided ten years of assisting would be my limit, let alone fifteen.

She went on to identify the technophobia of more senior staff as a big part of the problem – so assistants were expected to handle the tech cores that their seniors couldn’t handle.

Neither McGhee nor the others criticised their firms or their imprints in particular. On the contrary, the wider discussion around the issue recognised that these issues were industry-wide.

I’m on McGhee’s side here. Fifteen years as an assistant? Ten even? I’d never have done that, not in any industry, and not for any money. At Jericho Writers, we wouldn’t dream of imposing that kind of eternal serfdom on our juniors. People want a sense of flourishing, of expanding, of creative possibility. And so they should; you only live once.

It’s common for more senior publishers to sigh wisely and admit, yes, theirs is an industry where money is always tight and margins low. But that’s not actually true. Publishers have been boasting record profits. Penguin Random House has an operating margin approaching 20%. That’s an astonishingly fat margin for a mature industry with no meaningful barriers to entry. Truth is, that margin is suggestive of oligopoly, not competition. Walmart has a margin of under 5%. Amazon Retail has a margin of around 2%, and its international retail business, until recently, was lossmaking.

So in a way, those sotto voce conversations are missing the truth. Here’s a slightly more accurate version of one of them:

Why, authors ask, are publishers not more active in marketing their books? The sotto voce answer: We make a lot of money; we want to go on making a lot of money; our business model is to recruit smart people, pay them badly, work them hard, and keep them in junior roles too long; along the way that forces a lot of compromises – on marketing and lord knows what else – but we’re going to continue to operate like that, because our shareholders really, really like their dividends and we’d absolutely hate to disappoint them.

So yes, Molly McGhee, good for you. The only way pay and conditions will change in publishing is if enough people protest or quit or insist on change. I don’t actually see that happening, but sometimes you just have to take a stand, no matter what.

And for authors: is there a takeaway in this? Is there some actually useful purpose to this email?

Well, yes, I think there is. When you deal with the industry, you need to know that pretty much everyone you deal with is overworked and underpaid.

So reduce their burden, don’t add to it.

Make sure the draft manuscript you submit is in spanking good shape. If you have thoughts on cover design, put those together in a professional one-pager that your editor could simply forward to their cover designer. If you have an important meeting, send out an email summary of points from that meeting, because no one else is likely to do so. If you don’t like the way your ebook is being set up, then offer your thoughts in the kind of email that can just be approved and actioned. If you meet a bunch of people at some industry conference, then take notes on who you’ve met and send nice-to-meet-you emails to anyone significant.

Honestly, there’s a limit to how much difference you can make by being a hyper-businesslike author, but it’s still better to be that than the opposite. Quite apart from anything else, it creates goodwill amongst your publishing team and that goodwill is always valuable.

That’s it from me. I will find a merrier subject next week, you just see if I don’t.