I picked up a book at the bookstore the other day: On Animals by Susan Orlean. I had read The Library Book by Orlean and loved it, so I thought, why not check out her new book?

But I was tricked.

It was not a new book. I mean, yes, it was published in the last year, but everything in it was a previously published essay. Apparently, Susan had written about animals a lot, especially for The New Yorker, and a publisher had decided that it would be lucrative to assemble this writing and repackage it together with a sharp new cover.

I had been sold a dreaded collection. Well done, publisher.

In my days as a copywriter, the greatest challenge was always writing copy for essay collections. Most normal people do not want these. Your attainable audience is mostly either academics (a multi-author scholarly collection on a certain topic) or superfans of the particular author of the essays in the collection. The chance of picking up any other customers relied mostly on the marketing: the title, the cover image, and the copy.

I’ll shamefully admit that the copy had a hand in my purchase of On Animals. The copywriter had skillfully avoided any essay collection signals and had convinced me Susan had spent the last three years since the publication of The Library Book writing about animals — a plausible (but apparently false) surmise!

I have mixed feelings on the ethics of this sort of copywriting, where you represent the book not necessarily as it actually is but as it would be in its most ideal, appealing form. But, as I’d implicate myself in any negative pronouncement on the matter, I’ll withhold my condemnation.

I also have mixed feelings on the results: I really did enjoy many of Susan’s essays about animals. And I almost certainly wouldn’t have read them if it wasn’t for the copywriter’s sleight of hand.

Herein lies what I believe to be the truth that I’ve mentioned before a few times, but which I’d like to return to in ending my blog: publishing doesn’t just mean doing the commercial work of book production. It is in fact the co-creation of books. I’m grateful that I’ve had the perspective now of taking part in that so I can be aware of how that’s happening (even if I still forget to look behind the curtain now and then).

But I’d like to go a step further: I think the reality that a publisher (and all workers within that publishing apparatus) can co-create a book with an author, it probably means that that’s not where the limits of co-creation end. For example, if we learn about books from the cover and the copy, don’t we also learn about them from friends and loved ones? Do we ever completely move beyond the way they first described the book? Isn’t that essentially the same thing?

Or, if we see a book reviewed in The New York Times, doesn’t that shape the way we see a book, including as we read it? Even if we read while underlining and taking notes versus simply turning pages, won’t that be a different experience — and therefore a different book? And if we end by rating it out of five stars on Goodreads, won’t that be a different way of conceptualizing the book then if we opted instead to write a page-long review?

All I mean to say is that for all the ways I feel like I’m forever a copywriter, I think all of us should feel like we have some equally empowered relationship to everything we read. We are not passive receptacles for the content of a book; we are catalysts that make something happen to the words on the page. Every chemical reaction will be different.

I’m realizing now this was a big reason my time as a nonreligious copywriter for a religious publishing house felt meaningful; I wasn’t being co-opted into one or even multiple streams of discourse. I was in dialogue with this discourse and imprinted myself onto it — as a copywriter, yes, but first as a reader.

There is a pithy saying about books that should be articles, articles that should be sentences, and sentences that shouldn’t exist. On one hand, I empathize with this. But that’s mainly when I’m in an assigned-reading mindset and feel semi-resentful that I have to read anything at all. When I’m in free-will-reading mindset, I find myself feeling the opposite way: wishing a good book would be multiple volumes that I could spend months with. 

I think another way to put this is that the former approach is about means-to-an-end (absorbing information, enhancing knowledge) whereas the latter is about reading as an end in itself. It’s unsettling how often the first approach seeps into situations where it doesn’t seem to apply — especially for a student of English like myself who has been so deeply conditioned to read for credit. But I do think there’s a larger cultural assumption driving this: that everything should have a “larger purpose,” whatever that might be — nevermind the fact that we often fail to ever arrive at that larger purpose.

I was always surprised in publishing to see how this matched the sales performance of books. It seems, from that perspective, a book couldn’t be too short. Less than 150 pages? No problem. All the better. Anything over 300 pages was usually considered a liability, and I often heard the phrase “feather in our cap” being thrown around as rationale for why the Press was publishing it. 

I’m torn on this: on one hand, I don’t doubt there are some monographs that are pure ego trips on the parts of their authors. And there are issues of accessibility at play here: people who have the time and energy to read an 800-page book tend to be people of a certain level of privilege.

So I’m not blaming individual readers, but suggesting that something’s wrong that people are forced to structure their lives in such a way where they don’t have the capacity to read long books. I think there’s a larger issue lurking beneath this one: that we have rendered ourselves mostly incapable of doing things like reading as an end in itself. Many of us are chasing some elusive “purpose” and ending up deeply unhappy as a result of not being able to exist in the present. 

There’s something satisfying about completing several short books in a few weeks. It feels productive. But there’s something far more gratifying about working through one extensive, complex book in that same amount of time. These are the books that have stuck with me for much longer: like the summer of 2021 when I read In Search of Lost Time. I felt immersed in it. It structured that whole time period in a way a shorter book couldn’t have. I will always think of that summer as the Summer of Proust. 

May others be given the space in their lives to have time periods in their lives shaped by what they read. We all deserve the opportunity to evolve over the course of a long reading commitment. This is a much larger issue than just one the publishing industry can take on — let alone any individual publishing company. But I hope that a few stubborn editors remain who continue to sneak as many long books into the pipeline as they can in the face of the continuing pressure to make books shorter and shorter.

I remember hearing a study once that showed that if someone has a business like, say, a jam stand, that person is more likely to sell jam if they have a limited choice in flavors: like eight varieties rather than twenty-four. 

I’m also reckoning with the annual slew of articles published at the beginning of April about the decline of professional baseball. The reasons given are many, ranging from the overdone observation that baseball is “boring” to some other more nuanced critiques. My theory, though, is that there are just too many damn baseball games each season, so that even a moderately interested fan such as myself feels like following the sport is just about impossible.

I bring up these two seemingly unrelated observations to segue into a third: that there are probably too many books being published each year. At the Press, we published about 70-80 books per year — not that many compared to the big publishing houses and their armies of imprints, but still quite a few, considering that’s more books than most people read in a year. 

The larger picture seems to confirm this idea: more books than ever being published with fewer being sold — and publishers’ response to this new reality feels pretty business-cynical. A big part of this seems to be coming from an explosion of self-publishing, but publishing companies are publishing more too. 

I doubt the inverse correlation is perfect causation, but it makes me wonder. Using myself as an anecdote, I can say for sure that there are many times where I feel like shutting down in the face of all the reading choices out there. It’s certainly exciting on one hand to have so many books being released that sound interesting, but this also naturally is followed by the feeling of disappointment when a book doesn’t meet expectations — all the more so because I feel resentful that I had all these choices and I happened to choose the wrong one.

This is a scarcity-oriented mindset on my part, but it’s the product of the implicit message that books are being published so rapidly because they’re all needed to fill some sort of widening gap. What if we did it differently? Published slowly, carefully, methodically, so that each book was a momentous event and not just another in a series of nearly infinite blips. Maybe this would foster a willingness among readers to dedicate the time to get to know a book as a work of art rather than evaluating it as a commercial product.

I have a friend who I worked with at the Press who jumped ship right about the same time as me. He has gone on to work in the marketing department of an imprint for one of the Big Five publishers. In chatting with him about his first few days there, he told me about the incredible capabilities of the Marketing Ops team he worked with, and how they could utilize trends on social media to predict what would be popular within a year or two, so that the publisher could acquire books accordingly.

My friend’s conclusion was that the Press had no idea what it was doing by comparison — that it was going off the intuition of a few experts in their respective fields in the editorial department, while meanwhile the Big Five had it down to a science. I admitted that I was amazed to hear the extent of how a big publishing house had established a sort of automated process for sensing the direction the wind was blowing, but I was skeptical. Not of the commercial success of the books published with this method, necessarily — I’m sure they do it because it’s proven that it works. Skeptical, though, of its value. My argument isn’t groundbreaking, so I won’t belabor it: I basically have an idealistic view of the book publishing industry that it ought to be a vehicle for new directions in thought and expression, not just a money-making scheme.

Our main point of contrast, though — the Press’s method of expert intuition — didn’t seem satisfying either. Not only was it unpredictable in terms of commercial success, but it also tended to produce a procession of books that resembled one another quite closely. Even across fields, you could sense a sameness that pointed to some overarching vision. In one sense, I appreciated that. It felt coherent and dependable and like there was a sense of integrity. And I still believe all that’s true. But it’s unsettling how much of it can be traced back to the influence of one or a few people. This isn’t quite in line with my hope for what a publishing company can be either.

I think the commonality between these two approaches to publishing — the dehumanized algorithmic approach and the opaque intuitional approach — is a non-generative energy that looks backward instead of forward. And I think the only way to truly publish in that forward direction is to allow for the alchemy that happens in collaboration — among a diverse group within the publishing organization, between the publisher and the author, and also between the publisher, the author, and the potential audiences. I think there’s an immense amount of growth potential that can happen when there is play in the power dynamics between these entities, so that the initiative alternates between them. I’ve mentioned this before regarding the ideal relationship between author and editor. I’d venture here that the same principle should apply to publishing writ large.