When I talk to my coworkers in the acquisitions department at the Press, I notice a frequent disconnect: there are the ideas they are passionate about, and then there are the ideas in the books they acquire. Sometimes there is overlap — and, when there is, it’s exciting to hear the passion in their voice as they introduce the book to their colleagues in marketing and sales. But just as often there is either the approximation of passion or the frank admission that this is something they acquired because it will make the Press a great deal of money.

Now, as I mentioned in the first post, I’m proud of the fact that the Press has an ideological line in the sand. It’s different from my line, of course, but it’s one the Press has adhered to consistently throughout its long history — even when, beginning in the 1990s and early 2000s, most of the money to be made in religious publishing of the particularly Christian variety was to be found across that line.

But across the board my colleagues in editorial are either progressive or progressive-leaning moderates, and we regularly publish books that are religiously conservative and orthodox, especially in our biblical commentary series. I could get into the ethics of giving a platform to rigid and narrow — and therefore potentially damaging — interpretations of the Christian faith (I’m conflicted on this), but the point I want to reflect on in this post is that disconnect: what does it mean for a system that encourages people to produce what is profitable over what is valuable?

We’re not the only publishing company that is faced with this conundrum, and publishing isn’t the only industry faced with it. It seems to be endemic to a capitalist system. The ideal situation, of course, is when the profitable and the valuable overlap — but this doesn’t happen as often as we’d hope it would.

I know at least one of my colleagues sees this as a tradeoff: we publish what we need to in order to then publish what we want to. Fair enough. But means-to-an-end approaches like that are notoriously deceptive and counterproductive. 

If you take the system at face value, it seems that this is the best we can hope for. But I was inspired last week in essays by Corey Robin and Mark Greif and their idea of scholars creating the audiences they are speaking into. This challenges my preconceived idea of a publishing company like the Press having pre-existing groups of readers that will like or dislike a book based on what has already been published. But perhaps it doesn’t have to be that way.

It’s already true that a small publishing company like the Press has a following for its own sake. There is a specific kind of reader that seeks out our books — they have a little bit of overlap with readers of the New York Times, but they’re different too — both more institutional. I wonder sometimes if the Press ceased to exist what would happen to those readers: would they be drawn instead toward one or the other poles that exist on either side of the Press, or would they just withdraw? To some extent, the uncertainty in the question reflects the reality that we are already creating our audience. 

So why not do it intentionally? It can be hard as a publisher (or any other platform) because you only have secondary control over the content you’re creating — it’s the creation of curation. There are moral responsibilities in curation (as has become apparent in the Spotify/Joe Rogan debacle recently), but there are also artistic opportunities. Rather than having the Press be merely a gatekeeper, the brand and collection can become a kind of meta-text.

We’ve begun doing this with a series about the future of theological education, for which the acquisitions recruited a diverse roster of authors who have each cast their vision for what is next for seminaries and divinity schools. Through a series of conscious and coordinated decisions (editing, design, marketing, etc.), the series has transcended the role of container and become more than the sum of its parts. Rather than it being twelve books saying twelve different things, it becomes twelve voices in dialogue with one unified series.

What’s stopping a publisher like the Press from doing something similar? Why can’t we be honest about how the lines blurb between text and context, between author and editor, between voice and platform, between art and commodity? Transcending the entire system of capitalism is too pie-in-the-sky right now to be a meaningful idea. The capitalist system is what we have — but that doesn’t mean we need to be at its mercy.