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.

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.

After thinking about the idea of public-facing scholarship — the idea that the work done in the academy must be for the benefit of the broader public outside the academy — I find myself thinking about the same thing with regard to religion and the way the authors the Press publishes do or do not embody public-facing faith. 

What would it mean to have a public-facing faith? Considering what it means in the world of academic scholarship, I would think it would require the way someone shares their faith and faith-based insight to be for the benefit of those outside the particular religious community.

I’ll pause here for an important aside: many Christians, especially of the evangelical variety, might hear that and think of the idea of “witnessing,” also known as proselytizing. That is not what I mean here by public-facing faith. Despite the fact that writing done in the apologetic mode is indeed targeted toward an external audience, the purpose is still to serve the in-group — precisely because the goal of such writing is to lure and assimilate the external target audience into the in-group. The equivalent of this in public-facing scholarship would be a kind of discourse that invites/coerces people into academia. While there may be limited value in this mode of discourse, it would not be seen as an essential function of academic work; nor should it be in religion.

What I mean by public-facing faith, then, is not only faith-based discourse that speaks to an external audience but also faith-based discourse respects the divide, even while attempting to bridge it rhetorically in pursuit of the communication of truth that is relevant and valuable to both groups.

So the question is: does it happen? At the risk of copping out, I’ll say sort of. Well, maybe, barely. The reality is that, at least within the worlds of Christianity that I’m familiar with, most discourse is by and for Christians.

Market forces are a big factor here. The reality is that religious texts for non-religious people just don’t seem to be in very high demand. It makes sense: Christians accept some key premises that non-Christians don’t, so the writer would be starting in a different place than the reader — making for quite an odd reading experience.

There is one area especially that public-facing faith has started happening, especially just in the past few years: evangelical studies. When the forty-fifth president was elected, it happened largely because of the support of eighty-one percent of white evangelicals. Even though the connection between outwardly religious people and a blustering, incompetent demagogue was bewildering to many, even in spite of recent historical allegiances of white evangelicals to the Republican party. 

Journalistic analysis responded to the demand for understanding to an extent, but no one could respond to the demand as well as those who had emerged from within the evangelical world. The insight of these authors has been as cutting as it is empathetic, because they understand first-hand the allure and danger of white evangelicalism’s alliance with right-wing American political power. The Press has published several of these kinds of books, but the best-known have come from other publishers: books like Jesus and John Wayne by Kristin Kobes Du Mez and White Evangelical Racism by Anthea Butler. 

So, for now at least, those interested in having a public-facing faith have been able to help the nation process its collective trauma endured since 2016 (or, arguably, earlier). Are there other contributions a public-facing faith can make? One such attempt is being made by those who find essential connections between the Christian tradition and social justice movements. Those doing so find encouragement and legitimacy in the historical link between Christianity and abolitionism, for example. (Of course, in doing so, they have to contend with the contradictory historical link between Christianity and slavery.)

My overarching question is whether public-facing faith can provide anything into social justice discourse that isn’t already available from other sources — especially the lived experience of those at the receiving end of injustice (although of course there is a great deal of crossover here for Christians in marginalized groups — take, for example, Reading While Black by Esau McCaulley). 

I’m skeptical about the growth potential of public-facing faith, but I do think the attempt itself is valuable in making our world a less insular place, where people of different groups actually engage one another in dialogue. 

Something I’ve noticed during my time in publishing is that the editing process is not what I thought it was — and probably not what it should be. I’ll add the disclaimer that my perspective is obviously limited, but I’ve heard similar things anecdotally from around the publishing industry. I’ll also add that there are legitimate reasons that editing is not what it should be: namely, limited resources. I don’t claim to have any solutions to that significant obstacle. But I do have a manifesto for what editing would look like (and not look like) in an ideal world.

1. Your book is probably already brilliant.
   There’s a reason you’re so excited about your book: it really is brilliant. You provided form to your formless imagination, and it now has its own life in words that other people can read. You have done nothing less than immortalized a piece of your soul. No editor could ever do this for you.
   
   
2. People will probably not be able to tell that your book is brilliant without editing.
   It’s also true that people might read your book and not sense any of that because all of that brilliance is obscured through ineffective writing. A good editor will be someone who recognizes the brilliance of your book while also acting as a less-enlightened reader — and bridging that gap, guiding you in helping your book to convey its brilliance to a broader audience. Sorry: you are inherently able to do this for your own book.
   
   
3. Editing is not a one-time exchange.
   A common perception of editing is that it means the author handing the manuscript over to the editor, and the editor marks it up and returns it for the author. This “process” is about as likely to lead to entrenched conflict between the author and the editor as it to lead to any positive, meaningful change.
   
   
4. Editing is ongoing and relational.
   Editing only really works if it’s a conversation. Power should be equally distributed between author and editor, so every exchange should be give-and-take. The relationship between the two people involved should be at the center of the process.
   
   
5. Editing is not a quick, supplemental step in the writing process.
   Deadlines are realities in the world of book creation, but the power of editing will be severely limited if it’s forced into a formulaic length of time, as though it were a standardized segment of an assembly line. Editing is more than quality control or due diligence on the part of the publisher before the book goes to the printer.
   
   
6. Editing should take longer than writing.
   Longer lengths of time are intrinsically valuable with editing, just as they are with writing. Breaks in the process are where the best thinking happens. If the author needs these pauses in work while writing, the editor needs them too — the mind must work creatively in editing as it does in writing.
   

7. Editing is not narrow.
   Proofreaders are valuable people in the creation of a book. But editors are not proofreaders. The idea that editors catch “errors” is a bad stereotype. This reductionism seems part of a larger trend of deprofessionalization — the attempt to remove gray areas from expert-level work.
   
   
8. Editing is big-picture.
   Editors must be working positively toward an artistic vision that is subjective and non-formulaic. This vision will differ from the author’s, but the interaction between the two can provide the alchemy needed for editing to be truly transformational.
   
   
9. Editing is not destructive.
   When editors at their worst, they become the author’s worst nightmare: someone out to pick apart their work until a skeletal vestige remains. When editors serve only legalistic directives — like getting a book to a “readable” length — this is exactly the sort of dynamic established. The editor’s desk becomes a butcher’s block where entire chapters can end up discarded so that a book can become “marketable.”
   

10. Editing is generative.
    True editing should always be adding to a book, even when it is deleting words. The question should always be at the forefront of the editor’s mind: what would be created if this change were made? And if the relational aspect of editing is honored, the editor’s work may compel the author to create further, enacting a virtuous cycle of mutually inspired generativity. Thus, the editor becomes a co-creator without ever diminishing the author’s creative ownership.