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.