My last day at the Press was on Friday, and, while I’m naturally sad about the closing of another chapter in life, I find myself thinking about how inevitable this moment was. The marketing department at the Press had notoriously high turnover, to the extent that I’d estimate an average duration of about two to three years for each marketing team member. After two and a half years, I’m right on target for this average. 

The trick with a small company with a very specific mission is that there’s not a whole lot of room for individual evolution. The people integral to the mission of the organization are sort of professionally synonymous with the organization — meaning the tension, however nuanced, that I felt between myself and the work of the Press was bound to reach a breaking point at some point. Within larger organizations, this sort of thing can be mitigated through movement between departments, onto different projects, etc. But, at the Press, I was always going to have to be a role player with a particular role to play. 

The point here is probably less about the Press than about the nature of work more generally. I think room for evolution is pretty central to the concept of professional meaningfulness for a lot of people. It’s a tall ask for someone to spend forty hours a week, multiple years in a row, doing the same thing. Growth after a while in that situation slows to a crawl, and it becomes hard to stave off the bleak feeling of being a programmed human, who has been taught to execute particular tasks to perfection, or something close to it.

I think this is one reason academia is valued highly as a profession. While the title changes are mostly a question of what word(s) precede “professor,” the actual role being played by the person holding that title evolves immensely over time — and largely at the individual’s direction. Even within academia, though, there seems to be the tendency toward standardization. This seems to be the tendency everywhere: viewing individual identities and idiosyncrasies as a threat to productivity rather than a a dynamic source of creativity. 

People need to get paid more and have more security through benefits, yes — but even more than that, I think people need to be able to envision a future at their jobs, where they can explore new depths of themselves with every passing year. I know that was a big motivation for me in moving on to something new: the avoidance of stagnation and a step toward a version of me that doesn’t yet exist.

One of the truly strange things to reflect upon is the idea of how much location affects outcomes — and the ways this can be alternately interpreted as arbitrary, serendipitous, or just the vicissitudes of reality. Without getting too grandiose here, I’ll keep this reflection to the topic of religious publishing in west Michigan.

On the one hand, the idea that, if you are someone interested in publishing work who lives in or around Grand Rapids, you will likely find employment with one of the prominent religious publishing companies in the area, seems unremarkable enough. After all, an unusually high proportion of work in and around Washington DC involves the federal government. 

On the other hand, this seems different from that example. There is no reason there needs to be an overabundance of religious publishing and a dearth of other kinds of publishing in the region. Often, I delight in these regional quirks, but there is a potential issue of equity here. Despite the truly welcoming and inclusive spirit of a company like the Press, I can certainly imagine someone nonreligious or someone who practices a faith other than Christianity feeling like taking a job at a company that publishes almost exclusively Christian-centered (or at least Christian-rooted) work simply isn’t an option. This is borne out in the demographics of who works at the Press — the vast majority of my coworkers are either practicing Christians or formerly practicing Christians. 

In this respect, someone like me would have an opportunity to work in publishing that someone else wouldn’t — assuming they didn’t have the means to move to a new location. This seems problematic to me in a way that goes deeper than the issue of a certain region not having any publishing options. There’s a potential coercion and power dynamic at play, where a certain privileged group has a particular opportunity that another doesn’t.

I’m not sure what a solution is in this case. It’s an unfortunate outcome that probably can’t and shouldn’t be mitigated through law. But I do wonder about the possibility some sort of government-backed incentivization program in regions like west Michigan — where it’s shown that a publishing industry of at least one kind is sustainable, and so, presumably, a publishing industry of another kind might have at least the basic infrastructure to succeed (not least of which would be employees who transfer between the religious and nonreligious publishers as they’re able and interested in doing so). Since publishers barely sell their books in a local context anymore, the idea of a market would be moot. 

I’m not sure how far this concept could or should be extrapolated, but I know that it’s something I think about a lot when it comes to religiously based or religiously associated organizations. A similar example would be when a certain town or region only has a religious college — might there be a case to be made for government to incentivize a second option for the sake of equity? 

No matter how forward-thinking and inclusive a company, a college, or a church is, there are real limits to a religious organization’s accessibility. While the free market struggles to open the doors to those on the margins, government may be able to play a vital role.

In the last post, I discussed the book titling process as I’ve experienced it — and raised some critiques about what the publisher’s ownership of this part of the process means for the resulting book. I wanted to explore that idea a bit further here, taking some other parts of the publishing process into account.

When I think of a book, I usually think of the physical object: what you might take down from the shelf of a bookstore and hold in your hand and examine. By that definition, the cover and frontmatter are at least as important as the text that actually constituted the original manuscript — most of which is publisher-created. 

This was odd to me the first time I realized it: that, for example, that a foreword is not actually part of the book, per se, but more part of the product, which is only an adjacent concept to that of the book. At the Press, the conversations around forewords were almost always centered on the marketing of the book. Rather than a foreword writer paving the way for the impact of the author’s words, it functions almost as a separate piece of promotional writing that refers to the author’s work — and how could it be otherwise if it’s written after the fact, almost always in isolation from the author? 

Same, of course, with blurbs. And the cover design itself. The author has input in all this, but the publisher holds the power of final say. So it’s quite possible to pick up a final copy of a book from the Press, examine the cover, begin reading, and not reach anything the author actually created for several pages. 

I find this troubling, and I’m encouraged to see the rise of self-publishing as something that is able to transcend mere vanity publishing. This seems to work well enough for authors with existing platforms of some kind — meaning that, to some extent, it’s still a question of marketing. But, of course, it feels more integrated when it’s the creator of the book doing the marketing.

To some extent, it sounds unrealistic to separate a book from being a product. I don’t fully have a picture for what this might look like, mostly because I’m so immersed in the current way things are (as most of us are) that anything else is inconceivable. But my suspicion is that any way forward beyond this would require extremely limited scope — a local community of writers and readers that has their choices limited enough that they can truly evaluate books on their merits and not through the means of marketing. 

The closest I’ve experienced to this utopian vision is in the music scene. For a little while, there was a three-day festival in a neighborhood of Grand Rapids where only local artists played, and the venues were all houses (open to the public for the duration of the festival). Music sales of the performers’ music operated out of another local house — creating a hyperlocal scene of beneficially limited scope. I think something similar could work for the world of writing.

Of course, there are downsides to these kinds of limitations — most notably insularity and homogenization. But these are not necessarily inherent to the model and could be counteracted with deliberate diversity and inclusion initiatives in concert with intentional community building. Furthermore, the hyperlocal model need not be the totality of a reader’s experience — they could still supplement their reading with traditionally published material. But the portion of their reading experience that occurs in the hyperlocal model would be an eye-opening experience that begins to separate the conflated ideas of book and product that have distorted our assumptions about what a book is and who is its creator.

Something I’ve had the “privilege” of taking part in while working at the Press is the titling process. The quotation marks are there for a reason. While it’s definitely exciting to have a major hand in deciding what a book is called, it can also feel like the most nakedly destructive, commerce-over-art part of publishing.

Does that sound excessive? I would’ve thought so too, but it’s a pretty ugly feeling telling an author who has spent two years (or more) working on a book, “That name you’ve been calling your creation? We think, after reviewing the matter for fifteen minutes, that it should be called something else.”

I exaggerate a little bit. The editor who acquired the book is (usually) a bit more intimately familiar with the work and has spent some time thinking about it, but they’re one person in a room of five or six, the rest of whom are usually thinking about this book for the first time in their lives. 

From a marketing and sales standpoint, this is generally the best way to go about it: after all, the book is above all else a product that needs to be sold. So the experts in how to sell books should determine the first thing people will see and/or hear about the book. This is why all our book contracts state that the Press retains the right to final determination of the book’s title. (For the most part, the only reason we run proposed titles by the authors at all is to maintain good relationships with them.)

Then there’s the artistic, and dare I even say the moral, standpoint. From this perspective, having the publisher title the book is obviously an infringement, and an outrageous one at that.

This is case in point about how traditional publishing prioritizes commerce above all other considerations. On one level, this is obvious, but when you stop to think about it, it seems disturbing — all the more so for how much we take it for granted.

I’ve sat in several titling meetings where we decide the author’s proposed title is judged to be too esoteric. The titling committee then browses the introduction to the book, plucks out an especially poetic phrase, and decides that this is what the book ought to be called. A few days later, the author objects, but not strongly enough, and we move forward, slapping that more-or-less-random-but-pretty title onto the front cover.

I know certain online- and self-publishing avenues are beginning to provide ways around this distasteful part of the publishing process. But I think the most troubling part of all this is that there is in fact money to be made in the act of hijacking a title from the author of the book, and that it’s an accepted part of the process. This raises the question of how, when the title and other marketing-oriented parts of the book (foreword, endorsement, cover design) are the prerogative of the publisher, what does that mean for the book as work singularly attributed to the author(s)? How should that affect how we read books? I’ll reflect on these and related questions next week.