Quick take: Innovation in publishing is usually about labor
And it's rarely good news
This week brings the splashy announcement of Authors Equity, a new publishing house focused on delivering a larger share of books’ profits to writers. Money always comes from somewhere, of course, and in this case like many others it’s a matter of reducing staffing costs. “The publishing team for each book, including editors, publicists and marketers, will be assembled from a growing pool of freelancers,” says the Times—which means there are none of the pesky expenditures associated with benefits (and no risk of needing to deal with labor unions). In another recurring motif, precarious labor is spun as a positive: “Many talented people have prioritized a better work-life balance with more flexibility, creating a robust world of freelancers.”
Earlier this year the Times introduced “the most powerful person in publishing,” Penguin Random House CEO Nihar Malaviya. Malaviya’s idea for innovation? Artificial intelligence, which will “[make] it easier to publish more titles without hiring ever more employees.” It’s the same idea, approached differently. Whether through freelancers or AI, somehow publishing’s people are going to be made less expensive.
I’ve been alert to publishing’s tendency to put a futuristic, techno-optimistic spin on the elimination of labor costs since attending a talk about Open Access several years ago. Consumers (whether individual readers or libraries) wouldn’t have to pay for books, the speaker said, if publishing shifted to a gift economy. No mention in this scheme of pay—and true enough, workers are the industry’s biggest cost. If you’re a thought-leader looking to blue-sky, the cost of labor is generally the game’s most prominent piece. That’s troublesome for workers (even those like me, I’d argue, who don’t have in-house positions), and I think it’s ultimately a problem for books and the people who write and read them. Whatever challenges publishing has will, I think, be solved by more people, not fewer—and people empowered by security rather than precarity.
More to come on these issues (the newsletter is, after all, called Book Work), including a guest post on labor organizing in publishing that I’m excited to share later this month. If you’ve got perspectives of your own you’d like to share, hit me up.
I fear the Age of the Robot is rapidly approaching. I am putting all my meagre savings into various motor oils used in helping severely overworked robots cure their aching joints (even the ones reduced to mere roaches as more and more robot owners and robot employers find themselves trying to draw a line on robot oppression and have even started ( among the liberal and labial companies) to offer various modaliies of temporary cures for their awfully overworked robots which which includes totally up-to-date therapy and other allegdy curative services.
Some of the most inventive robot companies now have robot spas ( also known as SPAZZ which is the sound a robot makes when entering the wonderful soothing waters. We also have robot bars, where the world's finest and most empathetic barTENDERS are creating beverages beyond any connoisuers wildest dreams. I recommend THE QUICK SHOT - rye, Motorola, and turpentine.
There are also robot diets for robots who grow too fat to fiit into certain space. The trick here is ,especialy, to find the right quick snack to boost the robot's work capacity if extended time in needed in a bullrun market. But many people are offended and insulte when you do not include rusting nails on the diet, a favorite snack of many robots.
Stay tune. Tomorrow I will talk about robot education, including homeschooling for inordinately shy robots.
Without the workers there are no books.Everything stops. Call me Karl or Mao or any slur from any captitalist apologizer or putrifying sociolillogical pundit or crepitational critic who be incapable of critiquing Philyaw's terrific collection of stories or appreciation the poetry revolution wrought by Cave Canem who has inspired Kaya and other vital identity champions to enter the world
In 1983 scores of writers gathered at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York City for the founding convention of The National Writers Union. All genres came including some not-labeled -yet ones.
But the brunt of the formation was hundreds of journalists and magazine writers wanting to improve such bread and butter issues as overall rights on magazine articles, including pay for travel and research, medical benefits, kill fees, and, in some cases, final shared decision making.
The convention had planned for three hundred attendees, five hundred showed up. We had to go out and gest more chairs.
There was a radical part of the convention, not organized by or with any particular group. I was in a fiction writers group; many of us had no medical pllan save for anything from social security from jobs we'd had previously. To give you an idea of the fiction group there was novelist Howard Rodman, son of blacklisted w